"Huh," Evan said. "Well. You're sure you won't come?"
"No, truly. Bring me back something, if you want. And stay out of trouble," Joss said, not looking up, but smiling.
Evan snorted good-humoredly and went on out. Joss was usually a bit that way, a worrier about things he didn't need to worry about. Evan didn't mind it much. And there was an odd inversion to this behavior, for when things got really bad, Joss tended to stop worrying entirely, except as a logistical exercise. He was not incautious; he just stopped wasting time being concerned about what concern couldn't affect.
He headed out through the hangar dome and began to make his way through the corridors of the station. Joss was really right: the place was much dirtier than it needed to be. Going moribund, he thought. But Noel had promised him that there were parts of it that were better off than others, one of them being the bar he had recommended Evan and Joss should try. Evan was quite sure he had the directions correct, though they had been fairly complicated.
The people he met as he strode along looked at him as if he were from Mars, but most of them nodded in a friendly enough manner. Evan nodded back, and smiled. A lot of them were wearing skinsuits that were very much out of fashion—much patched, or combined with other
SPACE COPS 69
garments in a way that suggested new clothes were either hard to come by in this part of the world, or prohibitively expensive. It was hard to remember, sometimes, that the Asteroids, though not quite, as Noel had said, the end of the universe, were still far enough out that imports were surprisingly costly.
At least they don't have to import their booze, Evan thought, sniffing the air, or not much of it. There was definitely a still in the area. Potatoes, he thought as he came around the corner, and the smell of spuds in advanced ferment hit him like a hammer.
And where there's a still, there's a bar, he thought, seeing the open door of a small dome not too far away. There was a metal plate over the door, and painted on it the words LAST CHANCE SALOON. Someone had a sense of humor: the plate had been streaked with a base coat to look like old wood. There were only a few places where the paint had chipped to show the steel underneath, and these didn't really ruin the effect.
Evan walked in slowly, glancing around him to see where the bar was. This dome had lights hung from its small ceiling, and, whether accidentally or on purpose, looked like some antique bars Evan had been in on Earth: yellow metal railings (not real brass, of course) and leather-covered benches and chairs (plastic, of course). The bar itself was off to one side of the dome, done in some composite plastic, dyed brown, and carved into Georgian-looking swirls and acanthus leaves. If this was a saloon, it was more like the great old Victorian drinking salons of Belfast and Liverpool than anything else, and it was certainly an astonishing place to find halfway between Mars and Jupiter.
Evan stepped up to the carved bar and caught the eye of the barman, a tall, black-bearded man with cool eyes. "Beer?"
he said.
"Quarter-liter? Half?"
"Half, please."
The barman began to pull the pint. Evan leaned against
70 SPACE COPS
the bar and looked around at the patrons. They reminded him too much of those at the bar last night: hunched postures, nursed drinks, no conversation much above a whisper. And as he glanced around, the eyes that looked up at him were definitely unfriendly.
Again, he thought. No. I'm not going to leave, and I'm not going to have any trouble, either. A nice quiet drink, and then dinner—
Someone came up to stand beside him. Evan turned with a slight smile on his face. And didn't quite swallow.
"Well, Mr. 'Smith,' " he said. "And how are you tonight?"
"Smith" didn't say anything-for a few seconds, which hardly mattered, for Evan could see the answer to his question perfectly well. The man's face was swollen to about a third again the size it had been yesterday evening. He had been bruised by experts, and Evan knew who the experts were. It was very embarrassing.
"Well enough," "Smith" said. And something poked Evan in the ribs, hard. "Gonna be better in a moment, though."
There were other people rising from their seats in the bar. Evan cursed silently for letting himself be distracted by the work of the day and the pleasant look of the bar. It had been well-lighted and airy, not like a dive at all. He had let that fool him. That had been a mistake.
And there were more people in this bar than there had been last night, Joss was nowhere in sight, and there was no way to call him, not right this moment, not with the bad end of a blaster stuck into his side. Evan breathed deeply once, and the slight movement helped him feel the muzzle aperture. At least three-quarters of an inch. Oh, my maiden aunts, feel the flare on that. I'll have a hole in me you could install an Underground tube in. Unless something happens.
But at least it's not a knife—
He was being surrounded by those unfriendly faces, three deep. As far as he could tell, none of these people had guns, thank heaven, but all of them, looked like they
SPACE COPS 71
wished they did. Evan found himself staring at an assortment of gapped teeth, radiation-burnt, chewed-up noses and lips, and scabby, patchy, half-balding scalps such as he hadn't seen since the other side of the Belts, where there were also a lot of people who tended to be careless about their exposure to cosmic radiation. A lot of these people would come down with cancer within the decade, but he doubted they cared about that at the moment. His demise seemed to be a much more popular topic.
"Smith" was grinning at him. "You sops," he said. "You think mighty well of yourselves, insulting good hardworking people, starting fights in bars. But you're not so tough when you're alone, are you?" He went off into breathy laughter that smelled of cheap vodka and various food byproducts. "No, indeed. And we're gonna put a few nice little holes in you so you don't come bothering us a-"
The second or third sentence of a gloat, Evan had noticed some years back, was always a good time to do something.
He did it without taking his eyes from "Smith's": simply put his hand around Smith's gun hand, and turned it right around in one quick motion till the muzzle was dug deep into "Smith's" belly. "Smith's" eyes widened.
"Now you go right ahead and pull that trigger," Evan said softly. "Go on, Mr. 'Smith.' Or do you need some help?" He felt for "Smith's" trigger finger, felt it struggling to slip out of the loop, refused to let it do so. Evan started applying pressure. "You know," Evan said, "you're the kind of guy who could get thrown in jail for assaulting a Solar officer.
Except you probably won't live to." He pressed harder. "You'll probably wind up with a great fat hole in your middle.
And so will the people standing behind you.'' Evan added, thoughtfully.
The people behind Smith abruptly moved to either side. This isn 't going to last for long. Evan thought. / can't resort to silly business like taking this man hostage. This has to be won straight out if these people are ever going 72 SPACE COPS
to tell us anything we need to hear. Dammit, why didn 't I leave my suit on— ?
"Then again," Evan said, "it'd be a waste of the taxpayer's money to have to make out the paperwork after killing you. Not to mention that the cleaning people here would probably be annoyed with me." And with that he stomped down hard on "Smith's" instep, holding onto the gun.
"Smith" let go of it, screaming, and lurched away. Immediately three other people came at Evan, two from the sides. He didn't dare fire. He pulled the gun's charge pack out, threw it one way, and the gun the other, and with feet and fists piled into the people who were coming at him.
The next several moments became a series of images, as always happened in situations like this. An elbow here (snapped), a kneecap there (one kick, missed, the second one landing), a third kick at someone's gut (misjudged, too deep, the person falling out of view with that terrible looseness that meant a long hospital stay, if not the morgue). Then his arms being pinned, shaking off that pin, having another o
ne attached, too heavy to lose, someone punching him in the side of the head, a kick in the kidneys, the flash of pain up his back—
—a sudden thump in the back; not him being hit, but someone else, the force transmitting through. One of the people pinning him let go. He reached around with that arm, grabbed the person pinning on the other side, found his balance point, tossed him more or less toward the bar. A sudden WHAM! as a table hit him in the leg and went caroming away across the floor.
Someone went flying across his field of vision, a largeish bald man. Joss has arrived Evan thought, and turned, delighted that the cavalry had come over the hill.
Another man was being held more or less horizontally. The person holding him threw him out the door, almost effortlessly, and then waded into one of the three or four people left in the middle of the room.
The woman was sinuously slender: she could hardly have weighed more SPACE COPS 73
than 125 pounds, and she was two meters tall if she was an inch. She had black hair half as long as she was, and she was wearing a smudged grey skinsuit with a quilted rusty black jacket over it, and heavy boots of the kind that locked into the bottom of a pressure suit. She was presently inserting one of them, hard, in some guy's midriff.
She glanced at him, barely more than a flicker of eyes, as the man she had kicked went down. Another of the crowd went for Evan, a big bear of a man hardly smaller than he was. Evan wasted no further time, but stabbed the man stiff-fingered in the larynx, and stepped forward to punch a tall, skinny man who was standing behind him, desperately trying to fit together the separated gun and power pack. Pack and gun went flying again, and the man went down.
Immediately thereafter came a short, tough-looking man who had a metal chair in his hands; together man and chair described a short, graceful arc and fell on the tall, skinny man. Evan turned to see the woman dusting her hands off thoughtfully.
"Anybody else?" Evan said to the room at large, turning and glowering at everyone, one at a time. The patrons who had remained sitting either shook their heads, or dropped their eyes and got very interested in their drinks.
"Good," Evan said. He looked over at the barman and said, "Call Noel Hayden and tell him to come get this turkey and shove him out an airlock in his underwear. And then," Evan said, turning, "find out what this lady will have to drink.''
She nodded, smiled at him, went to the bar, picked up one overturned bar stool, and then another, sat on one of them, and tilted her head at the other one, looking at Evan.
That was how he met Mell Fontenay.
THREE
JOSS STRETCHED, AND TOSSED THE LAST PIECE
of paper to the floor, then sat back and flexed his fingers. The best thing that ever happened to me, he thought, was my touch typing course.
He drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair for a moment. There were a lot of data to sort through here, and it was going to take a good while for him to figure out what it all meant. One thing was clear, though: the disappearances had been going on for even longer than Noel had thought. It was at least four months since people had started disappearing in the same way. They would set out and they would not report in, usually within a period of no more than three days and no less than one. There might be more statistical factors involved, but Joss would let the computer play with its data and work out the details on those. He would follow the case that immediately attracted him.
He leaned back a bit farther and smiled to himself. Usually Evan was the one who had hunches. Joss had started out by laughing at them; then he had found that they weren't so laughable. Slowly he had started experimenting with following his own hunches. Sometimes, surprisingly often, they worked. They made him uncomfortable, though. His way of handling things had always been slow reasoning, logic, working things out step by step.
A man's got to learn new things, though, Joss thought, getting up and heading for the communications console.
74
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He touched it and said, "Willans control, this is SP vessel CDZ 8064. Anybody home?"
"Sure are, Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey," said a cheerful voice. "What about that drink we were supposed to have?''
"Oh, hell!"
"That's what I like to hear," the voice came back: "enthusiasm."
"Sorry, Cecile! I got snowed under with paperwork." He looked around the control cabin with some regret, the white mass all over the floor did indeed suggest Crans-Montana around Christmas time. "How late are you on, anyway? I would have thought you'd be off by now. Don't you sleep?"
"Life's too short, Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey." She chuckled at him. "I've got a few hours to go yet. One of my night people is down with the Titanian two-step."
"Not catching, I hope!"
"Oh no," Cecile said, "it was something she ate. Some Hungarian thing at Satra's."
"Oh dear," Joss said, "so much for the one good restaurant here. ..."
"Are you kidding?" asked Cecile. "There are about five good restaurants on this miserable rock, and my kids run two of them."
Joss shook his head in wonder. "Cecile, I promise you, I'll take you out to dinner at all of them."
There was another chuckle. "Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey, I bet you say that to all the girls."
"What the hell?" Joss said. "Sometimes it even works. About that drink, Cecile. I have to take a quick run over to the salvage heap. Take me about an hour, an hour and a half, to do what I need to do. Think you'll still be in the mood for that drink?"
"Sounds about right. Just give me a call when you come back. You know how to do the remote procedure on the hangar doors now?''
"First thing I checked," Joss said, "I tell you, Cecile, 76 SPACE COPS
this business ain't what it's cracked up to be. Glory and good pay, they promised me. I'd make more if I hired myself out as a secretary. And I wouldn't have to carry all these guns."
Laughter at the other end. "Always thought you guys liked the guns and all."
"They're a nuisance to keep clean," Joss said, "and if you walk into anything while you're wearing them, they bruise your legs up something awful. Never mind that just now. I've got to get out there and do sop things."
"Right you are. Willans control out."
Joss sighed and started picked up the paper from the floor, tossing it all in a pile on his bed, and shutting his stateroom door on it. There would be time to tidy everything back into order later; right now he was having suspicions, and those suspicions were distracting him from cleaning at the moment. He was glad of the distraction, too. He normally didn't like cleaning much, but Evan was awfully fussy, especially about their new ship and all.
He made his way back to the control console, tapped at it for a moment, and started the procedure that would open the inner doors of the hangar dome airlock. Then he started the heating process for the vectored jets and the iondriver engine.
There was an odd noise. He paused to listen to it: a sort of whine, it was, very peculiar indeed. He thought he knew every noise that this machine could make, but then again, they'd only had it for a few weeks. "Hmm," Joss said, and shut the vectored thrusters down.
The whine went away.
"Hmm," he said again, and killed the warmup of the iondrivers as well. For a few moments he just sat there, staring at the control console, and thought. He thought first of the weird patches on the domes, and the bizarrely patched-together ships in the hangar dome. Then he thought of the work he needed to be doing, and how little of it he would get done if he had to spend the next two days crawling around in the engines of his ship.
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He hit another control. "Willans control," he said finally, "this is CDZ 8064—"
"Done already, Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey?" Cecile asked.
"No such luck. Cecile, have you got a good mechanic on call? I mean, a really good one?"
"Only kind we have around here," Cecile said mildly. "We tend to lose all the others."
"Good," Joss said. "I th
ink I need one."
"I have somebody I can get over to you in a little bit," Cecile said. "May take awhile. It's off-shift time."
"No problem with that. I still have to go over to the salvage heap. I'll just walk instead."
"Exercise'll do you good," Cecile said. "Especially if we're going to all those restaurants."
Joss smiled. "Cecile," he said, "what do you look like?"
"I'm tall, with no neck, bad breath, and six grandchildren."
"Ah," Joss said, "an experienced woman."
Cecile burst out laughing. "Never mind that, you. Have a nice walk. Mind the holes; there are some pretty big ones out there."
"Will do, Gramma."
"That's Ms, Grandma to you, Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey. Willans control out."
Joss chuckled and cut the connection, then headed back into his stateroom to pull his pressure suit down out of its clamps.
IT WAS A PLEASANT WALK, IF A LONGISH ONE.
The salvage dump was well away from the settled part of the station, and was little more than a crater, somewhat slagged out to make it less easy for ships to be jarred out of position when others were dropped on top of them.
78 SPACE COPS
There were always four or five ships in there, according to Noel. The salvage assessors came through about once every month or month and a half, to determine amounts to be paid to salvaging miners, and to take away wrecks that had already been assessed and were ready to be scrapped. Joss was very interested indeed in looking at these ships to see whether any of them were by chance pieces of ships that had been reported missing, and to talk to the people who had brought them in. Noel hadn't immediately recognized any of them, true, but Joss had the feeling that Noel had so much to do, he might easily have missed something.
There really ought to be about four sops stationed here, Joss thought irritably, as he bounced gently along the rocky surface. The Sun was on the other side of the asteroid at the moment, and it was as dark as it might be on the back side of the Moon. There was nothing to go by but the bobbing light from outside his suit's helmet and the iner-tial tracker inside it, which he had programmed with the dump's coordinates before leaving.
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