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Maybe now Lucretia would stop worrying about their fuel allowance. . . .
EVAN LEANED BACK IN HIS CHAIR AND SAID,
"Do you come here often?"
She laughed at him. "I bet you say that to all the girls. Next cliche"?"
Evan blushed slightly. That in itself was so unusual an occurrence that it made him blush harder.
She leaned back in her seat and took a long drink; then made a face. "A little too young, this batch," she said to the bartender. ' 'What are you doing? Making the stuff out of the chips that don't get sold at lunchtime?"
The bartender glowered at her in a friendly sort of way and didn't deign to answer, just went back to polishing glasses.
Mell looked over at Evan and said, "I really shouldn't complain. They tried making vodka out of soybeans last month, and it's taken this long for the smell to go away.''
Evan shook his head. "Sounds foul."
"You have no idea," she said.
Evan was trying hard not to seem too interested, and failing. Mell Fontenay was, if possible, even better-looking sitting still than she was when fighting. For one thing, when she was sitting still, you could watch the thoughts go round and round behind that astonishing pair of ice-green eyes. Expressions variously calculating, humorous, scornful, amused, and thoughtful followed one another, only occasionally seeming to have anything to do with the conversation going on. It was the kind of thing that tempted you to say outrageous things in an attempt to produce the correct expression—or rather, to interest her enough so that the correct expression overrode the one that she was choosing to wear for her own reasons.
"You were going to tell me," he said, "why you mixed in when you did."
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"Was I?" she said, looking abstractedly into her glass for the moment. She put it down, empty, and pushed it at the bartender. "Same again, please. You know," she said to Evan, "this is rather a closed community. Any stranger attracts a bit more attention than he might find usual."
"So it seems," Evan said rather ruefully.
"Well, it's worse for you," she said. "You're the Government, after all."
"I am not!"
"Of course you are," she said, "to us. Or rather, to these people."
Evan raised his eyebrows. "You're not 'us'?"
"Oh no," she said. "I'm an independent contractor. Thanks, Mike." She took a long drink, put the glass down.
Evan laughed. "I thought everybody here was an independent contractor. Except maybe poor Noel."
"Poor Noel," she said, and smiled a little. "Yes, well. We're used to him by now."
"Eight years," Evan said, "I should bloody well think so."
"Oh, but this is no different from any other small community," Mell said. "Some people will never become part of it, no matter how hard they try. Some people wouldn't be part of it even if they were born here. Noel is accepted because he was ordered here, and because he cares. But as for you and your friend,'' she said, taking another drink, "as far as you're concerned, we're just another job."
"It's not exactly like that," Evan said.
"And some people here," Mell said, "aren't any too sure just what your job is."
"I should have thought that would be all over the place by now," Evan said. "The disappearances."
"Yes, well," Mell said. "There are people who aren't sure that the investigation might not turn to something more general after a while. There are a lot of people out here involved in things that are, shall we say ... marginal."
"Marginally legal, you mean."
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She nodded, and stroked her long hair back out of her eyes. It was a habitual gesture, one which Evan had noticed she made even when the hair wasn't actually in her way at the moment.
"Quite so," she said, and for a second Evan thought she was mocking his accent. The glint in her eyes said that this was more than likely. "The illegality might be marginal, too. But most of the people who've come here to live have little rackets running of one kind or another, or else they have something in their lives that they wouldn't want looked into too closely. People like you coming here—" and the glint turned very definitely mocking for a moment "—make the man in the corridors here nervous. Nobody likes seeing the status quo disturbed."
Evan sighed a little and took a good long drink himself. He said, "I'm not particularly interested in disturbing that status quo. Unfortunately, the people who send us here and there take a dim view of us running off after problems that aren't the one we were sent to solve. Also," he said a little grumpily, "we don't have the budget for it."
"That's not what I hear from your rooming house," Mell said, a little wickedly.
"That thief," Evan growled. "Man should be ashamed to rent out rooms in such a state."
"And what were you expecting? Conrad Hilton and silver trays?''
That annoyed him. "Lady," Evan said, "I've spent five months living out in a little dome at Highlight, where the patches on the ceilings were even worse than they are here, and if you saw washing water twice a month, it was an event. But at least when it came it was clean, and you didn't have to spend half your morning scraping the bleeding grunge out of the plumbing!" He took another slug of the horrible vodka to calm himself. It merely shifted his annoyance to the vodka: he began to think he could taste a certain bouquet of rancid deep-frying oil. "The man," he said, with what he hoped was more dignity, "is a thief SPACE COPS 91
for all that. But you won't see me arresting him. I have other fish to fry."
Mell looked thoughtful for the moment. "So you say. Well, I guess you ought to be given a chance to prove yourselves."
"I take that very kindly," Evan said.
"Ouch!" she said, and rocked back in the seat, laughing at his mockery. "We're even, I suppose."
"Oh, indeed," Evan said, and chuckled a bit. "Well, never mind that for the moment. Listen, Madam Chop-and-Change, Ms. Inconsistent, you still haven't told me why you decided to become the belle of the brawl."
"Pity?" she suggested. "A momentary weakness in the head? Curiosity?"
"Curiosity I might buy."
She shrugged. "Your technique was interesting," she said. "And maybe the odds were a little too high for my tastes."
"Hah," Evan said. "An adherent of the Marquis of Queensberry, out here? You're misplaced a bit, I'd say. But you know the rule, anyway. One riot, one sop."
"They sent two of you."
"So? We had two riots. Maybe now we can get down to work.''
"Third time usually pays for all, around here," Mell said, her eyes glinting again. And what was it this time? Anticipation? Evan breathed out in a moment's annoyance; the woman's moods came and went faster than a laser can tune itself.
"Are you implying that I'm going to have to take on Mr. 'Smith' again?"
"Who?"
"The lad who started the fight just now."
"Oh, you mean Leif the Turk?"
"What?"
"Leif the Turk." She started laughing.
"Not a very Turkish name," Evan said.
"No," Mell said. "But that's what everyone calls him.
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I think his folks were Russian and Finnish, or some such thing. But he was born on the Moon."
"So where does the Turkish part come in?"
"I think he killed one," Mell said. "Claim jump, apparently."
Evan finished his drink, pushed it in the direction of the bartender for another one. "There seems," he said, "to be a lot more of that going on around here than in other parts of the Belts."
Mell sighed and stared at her glass. "It would be nice if high-content asteroids were evenly distributed through the Belts," she said, "but they aren't. The explosion that created them is still geologically much too close to us in time. It's supposed to be thousands of years before the distribution evens out, and by that time will there be anything left to mine?" She looked thoughtful. "But in the meantime, what people find he
re, they take pretty seriously. And a lot of people find the competition too fierce over in the higher-yield parts of the Belts. The big companies are out there with their bulk sweepers, and the independent operators over there can afford better equipment than most of the people over here can."
She turned her glass around a few times, staring at it. "So tempers run a little high. It happens a lot less than it might, I think. But people tend to get pretty secretive." She glanced up at him. "So when a couple of sops with a shiny new ship come barging in here and announce that they're intending to investigate claim-jumping, a lot of people get twitchy. Even the innocent ones. And the guilty ones start wondering whether some inner-system sop with his shiny SP badge is going to have the same ideas about justice as they do."
Evan looked at her thoughtfully.
"Besides," Mell added, pushing her hair out of her eyes again, "some of the people based out of this station have their claims hidden in all kinds of interesting ways. They're not too willing to have information about how they're doing it made too public. For some of them, the secrecy of SPACE COPS 93
their claims' location is the only thing between them and bankruptcy."
"I'm not interested in making anybody bankrupt," Evan said, "or anything else of the kind. I want to find out why in the past few months, more people are being lost than should be. And I want to find out why someone is willing to go to quite so much trouble to make plain murder look like claim jumping. I think that's legitimate. Don't you?"
She looked at him from under the sweep of hair that fell across her eyes. "Don't you find that hair a problem when you're in a suit?" Evan said suddenly.
Mell smiled. "I tie it back. What do you mean, 'One riot, one sop?' "
Evan drew breath hi protest at being dragged off the subject again, then laughed resignedly. "It's an old story," he said. "There was once a group of lawmen called the Texas Rangers, back on Earth. The area they were policing was pretty wild—a lot of backshooting, robbery, rustling—"
Mell looked bemused. "People making crackly noises?"
"Not that kind of rustling. Stealing cattle. Anyway, these Rangers had a reputation for being extremely determined, and tough. One example: there was a saddlemaker who had a whole batch of his saddles stolen, and he asked the Rangers to do something about it. They did. Wherever they went, if they saw someone riding by on one of those saddles, they shot him off it. They got all the stolen saddles back," Evan said, playing to her shocked expression with some pleasure. "The saddlemaker went out of business a year later, though."
"Very effective," she said, "I think."
"Well. There was a town in Texas somewhere which was having trouble with rioting and looting, and they sent a message to the Rangers' HQ, saying, 'Having riot, send company of Rangers.' The message came back, "One riot, one Ranger.' " Evan smiled wryly. The story was one of Joss's favorites, and got told with depressing regularity.
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"And so you two are like those Rangers?"
"There are similarities," Evan said, "but we do try not to shoot people quite so much. Now about Leif the Turk; what's his grudge?"
"Grudge? Don't be silly. Leif's a mental case. There's nobody in this place he hasn't attacked at one point or another. But you sure bring out the worst in him. I don't know where he got a gun from. Usually nobody around here will let him have one."
Evan put that piece of information away for future reference. "Never mind him, then. My partner and I are going to need to start talking to people around here pretty soon, when we've finished our preliminary work. Have you heard anything about what we've found so far?"
"Hek's ship," she said, "yes. Digging starts in the morning, doesn't it?"
"As soon as we get our independents lined up, yes." He cocked his head. "Are you interested, then?"
"Not hi my line of work," she said. "I'm maintenance. I can recommend some names, though."
Evan nodded at that, while thinking. Maintenance? This is one of the people who repairs this place?
Or rather, doesn 't repair it? Dear sweet Lord, help us.
"I need people who are good operators with mining tools," he said, trying not to change expression too much, "and who can be careful about what they find. I'll want to vet your suggestions with Noel, of course."
"If you like," she said, "I'll meet you in his office tomorrow and you can check them out with him right there and then. Most of the heavy-tool operators who work here I know pretty well."
"All right," Evan sighed and had another drink. "If Leif the Turk is so mental," he said, "why haven't you people sent him off where he can get some help?"
"Because he'd go twenty times as nuts," Mell said sadly. "The doctor here monitors his medication and keeps him pretty calm. Leif had a hard life: he worked hard, then lost his wife and children all of a sudden, in a trans-SPACE COPS 95
port accident, while he was out mining. What good would shipping him off to a padded cell somewhere be? Let him live out his life here where he knows where he is, and people can take care of him."
There was really no arguing with that. Evan nodded. "And what about you?" he said. "What brings you out this way?''
"Ah," Mell said, "now we get personal. Mike, you remember what happened to the last person who got personal with me?"
"You married him," said the bartender, and went back to polishing glasses again.
"I consider myself warned," Evan said mildly. "Never mind, then. I was just making conversation."
Mell stroked her hair back, looking slightly bemused. "Do you ever, really?" she said. "I mean, doesn't everything go into the investigative pot, so to speak?"
Evan had to smile a little at that. "A lot of things do, I suppose. But sometimes I do just talk. And what about you? Do you ever say anything that isn't misleading, provocative, or vaguely insulting?"
Mell laughed. "Ahh . . . we're even again, I guess."
For a moment they both just sat turning their drinks around.
"I was born on Mars," Mell said after a while. "The usual thing: one of the little terraformed settlements, down in a deep rille. O2 farming, water mining, and so forth. Some archaeology, but no one took the brick diggers very seriously.
My mother and father had a garage." Mell smiled a bit. "They taught me my trade. Got started with skimmers, overcharging the archaeologists, then moved on to a lot of iondriver work when the Belts started to really open up.
Even had an Opel dealership for a while." She made a face at that. "It went under after awhile, and just as well; we all hated it. It was one of those mistakes you make sometimes. After my dad died, and I got old enough to start making decisions about what to do with myself, I came out this way. It seemed the best thing, and 96 SPACE COPS
emigration runs in our family: Dad left the Moon when he was about the age I left for the Belts. This was the first place I came, and I've been here ever since."
Evan nodded. "And you?" she said. "Surely you didn't spring fully formed from the Commissioner's forehead."
Evan laughed and gestured to the bartender to get them more drinks, privately considering that the only thing to leap from the Commissioner's head recently was an extremely stupid budget. He sat back and told her about Wales for awhile: how it was to grow up there, with the place a great hotbed of industry and business, and pressure from all directions to hurry and make something of yourself—the memory of the bad old days of poverty and unemployment had not gone away, by any means. Then the army, and training to be a suited soldier, and the occasional police actions. But always there had been a feeling that mere was something missing, something else he was meant to do. Odd, but when they had let him go at last, the anger had lasted only a very short time. The death of his first Solar Police partner. The detective work that led to the smashing of the drug ring that had caused that death. Finally his new partnering with Joss. It made a surprisingly short, dry tale, for all the thought and blood and tears and booze that had passed through it and him at one time or another
.
When he finally wound down, Evan wasn't even sure Mell had been listening. She was about halfway through her drink, and looking slightly weary. "I've bored you," he said, resigned.
"Lord, no," she said, though he couldn't have told it from her voice. But she pushed the drink away.
"I guess," she said, "the tendency is to think of a sop like you as just a lump of dumb meat, isn't it?"
Evan smiled slightly. "It's an impression I don't always try to correct," he said. "Sometimes it works to one's advantage."
She glanced at him with an expression of mild exasperation. Evan just shrugged.
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"Well," she said.
He looked at her. / am having unprofessional ideas, he thought, without the usual shock. She was definitely an interesting woman.
Well, more than just interesting. She can fight, too.
"Where did you learn to fight like that?" he asked. "Seriously."
She laughed softly. "Childhood on Mars can be pretty educational," she said. "You grow up fast. And on some parts of the planet, the man-to-woman ratio is still pretty high. A lot of the men there are used to trying to take what they want." She smiled. "No point in letting them have it without a fight. And every now and then you get a chance to practice here."
"More than every now and then," Evan said, putting his unprofessional thoughts aside for good. The woman would probably bite his head off if she even suspected what he was thinking.
But at the same time he enjoyed the thought. Dammit, they can't shoot you for thinking. Not yet.
"Penny for them," Mell said.
Evan laughed out loud. "You know," he said, "no one's said that to me since before I left Wales."
She raised both eyebrows. "Has the price gone up or something?"
Evan shook his head.
"So let's hear it, then," she said.
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