Kill Station

by Diane Duane; Peter Morwood

  What harm? said one part of his mind loudly, followed by another part commenting, She'll only probably kick your nuggets in, that's all. But it'll be one of the more interesting ways it's happened lately.

  "You might become violent," he said at last. "It's dangerously personal. And I'm not available for being married at the moment."

  Her eyes glittered a bit, even in the low light. "Funny," Mell said, "but neither am I."

  "Then I was thinking," Evan said, "that in another

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  I can relax a while. What are you drinking?" he added in a more normal tone.

  "Gin and tonic, if you would," said Cecile, and pulled out a bar stool for him. Joss smiled at her. Cecile was about five feet tall, cheerfully round, with the kind of figure that used to be called "pleasantly plump."

  She had hair that could only be described as pink, since it had been red originally, and was now turning beautifully silver. Her face was a map of friendly wrinkles, mostly smile lines, but it was still impossible to tell how old she was. And truly, Joss didn't care: her eyes were quite young, almost wicked.

  "Your mechanic should be along presently," Cecile said, when her drink came, and Joss had one to match it. "Sorry for the delay, but it was hard to find anybody who both felt like taking the call and had the expertise you need."

  "Ah," Joss said. "Well, never mind." He had a long drink, and paused a moment. "Something a little funny about this gin," he said.

  "It's the juniper extract," Cecile said. "It's synthesized. We can't spare the hydroponics room to grow juniper berries here.''

  Joss shrugged. "As long as you grow pigs here," he said, "I don't care." And he reached across the bar for the bowl of pig tails.

  Cecile looked at him with surprise and mild admiration. "However did you know we raise pigs?" she said.

  Joss wiggled his fingers in the air. "Basic research, ma-dame. It would be too expensive to import such a relatively low-protein food—and a delicacy, at that—as pig tails and ears. But if you have your own, it's a shame to waste. And they taste too good." Joss pulled one out of the bowl and bit into it with a crunch of crackling. "Besides, while I was out, I passed by the part of the aggie-dome complex where they're kept. Snuck a look in through the airlock. I see they're fed the skim milk and whey left over from your milk processing. Very sensible."

  SPACE COPS 1O1

  Cecile chuckled. "One of my grandchildren is a cheese-maker," she said. "Another one is in hydroponics—grain, mostly, the stuff we feed the cows on. We only wind up using about ten percent of our output for food, according to Randie."

  "That's what the records say," Joss said. "I've been at the station computers, you see."

  Cecile raised her eyebrows. "So that's what all those protocol transfers were earlier. I was wondering."

  "You noticed?" Joss smiled a little. This was what he had been wanting to find out.

  "About three hours ago, yes? Right. You're welcome, I'm sure," Cecile said, "as long as your transfer software doesn't have anything in it that'll confuse ours.''

  "I don't think it does," Joss said. "But I was kind of surprised to get such easy access to your data banks. Exactly how much of the station's business goes through your part of data processing?"

  Cecile laughed at him. "Why, Mister Sop Honey, all of it does. You think we're big enough to have separate computers for everything? No, indeed. The approach radars and so forth are in our offices because that way they'll be closest to the computers that drive them. No use putting them elsewhere! And if something goes wrong with them, it's easier to do something about it quickly."

  Joss was a little taken aback. "But your backups—"

  Cecile shook her head at him sadly. "You've been too close to the Sun too long," she said. "We can't afford total redundancy, not by a long shot. We have to mend and make do if something breaks. What do you think was happening when you almost got smashed flat coming in here?" She dropped her voice a bit and said, "You should have let us know you were coming a little sooner."

  "The surprise is the best part," Joss said, "usually. But never mind that for the moment."

  They drank in silence for a few moments. ' 'What I want to know," Joss said at last, very quietly, "is who here can SPACE COPS

  hear ship-to-shore traffic, like me to you in the hangar earlier."

  Cecile looked at him with slight bemusement. "Just about anyone who feels like tuning in to the frequency," she said. "We can't afford fancy scrambling and whatnot. Too many people's transmitters are the cheap and dirty kind, and we need to be able to hear them."

  Joss nodded. "I can see the point," he said, and considered a moment. "Cecile, do you keep tapes of the day's transmissions?"

  "For three months," she said. "It's the law. But there's never been much call for it. In fact, I can't remember the tapes being audited for as long as I've been working here. Fifteen years now."

  "And you just monitor ship-to-shore and close-in ship-to-ship."

  "On the main station frequency, that's right."

  "No suit traffic, then?"

  "You know how much memory that would take? No way, Sop Honey. There are eighteen or twenty different suit channels, well away from the dedicated ship frequencies. We'd go crazy trying to keep track; there are few enough of us paid to work here as it is. And people are always fiddling with the frequencies anyway, trying to keep their communications private. WeVe got suits spread all over VHP, talking to each other all hours of the day,"

  He sighed. It was what he had suspected. The thought had crossed his mind to try to rig some kind of surveillance, but his ship's computer core couldn't spare that kind of storage either; it had other business.

  "Is there any other kind of record of when people go out in suits?" Joss said.

  Cecile shook her head sadly. "Joss," she said, "you're looking for a level of organization we just don't have here. If you think of us in terms of a town in the Yukon around the old gold rush, or in Outer Mongolia somewhere, you'll probably have it about right. The real world ships us people, some money, a lot of finished goods. We ship back raw materials, but the balance of our economy is tipped SPACE COPS 103

  'way toward the export side. We can't afford the kind of supervision—of snooping, really—that the inner planets take for granted these days. And I don't think we want to."

  Cecile sat back and held her drink in both hands, swirling the ice around in it. "When I came here," she said, "quite a while back, after my murder rap—" Her eyes twinkled as she caught him trying to stifle his reaction. "Oh, yes," she said. "My first husband. I told him the first time he hit me that he wouldn't get to do it again. After I got out, it was a nightmare. I couldn't get a job— criminal record; it didn't matter that I'd done my time— couldn't get a loan, couldn't hold down a place to live that was any good. Everybody who wanted to could know everything about my life—right down to how much was in my piggy bank, I think—just by hitting the right buttons. The Moon was no better; neither was Mars. The chance came up to emigrate, and I did. Here, if I buy something on credit, I sign for it and my signature's good enough. If I contract for services with somebody, my word is considered my bond. And since people who break their word get thrown out where there ain't no air," she added, smiling slightly, "most people's word is good. Life isn't like it is in the inner circle, but it has its own rewards. And nobody finds out anything about me that I didn't tell them. Hardly anybody has a fancy data acquisition rig like you have. You, I don't mind having it. You have an honest face—"

  "Oh, don't say that," Joss said. "After everything I go through to make myself look tough."

  "You do, you poor thing. And it's useful, isn't it?" Cecile added, sipping at her drink. "That bland, innocent look—no one can see all those little wheels turning in there. Now, now," she said to Joss's shocked look. "I have grandchildren.

  You think this riff is anything new to me?"

  "Of course not," Joss said. "Heaven forbid I should ever have thought so."


  "You lie cute, too," Cecile said. "Anyway. ' She low-1O4 SPACE COPS

  ered her voice. "You were asking about suits. No, there's no way to keep record of the in-and-out traffic. There are something like eighty airlocks scattered around this place. Possibly more. People put in new ones on occasion. You're telling me, I think, that someone heard our little chat, then followed you out and tried to do you dirt."

  "Close enough for jazz," Joss said. "Cecile, who would want me dead? After I've been here all of two days and done nothing but get in a fight in a bar?"

  The look she turned on him was thoughtful. "Sometimes that's enough," she said. "But I wouldn't think it was in your case. You just ran afoul of Leif the Turk. That happens all the time.''

  "Leif the Turk?"

  "And you're sops," she said, "and sops always get beat up a little when they first get here, to remind them that this isn't a desk job."

  "I would have mistaken it for one in a second," Joss said, "believe me, I would." His stateroom chair had not turned out to be much good for extended keyboard work, and his back was letting him know about it.

  "Hmm," said Cecile. "Well, at any rate, it's doesn't seem like enough to get you killed. Word has certainly been going around about why you're here—at least, what you said in the bar. People are secretive enough here, some of them, but not enough to go out there and try to mess you over. What happened?"

  Joss told her, in brief. Cecile sat quiet for a bit, then said to him, "I think that was a dumb thing to do, Mister Sop Honey. Even without somebody annoyed at you. Or just trying to do you a mischief. This asteroid's movements aren't completely stable. Every now and then one of the little internal faults shifts, and things move."

  "The point is that someone was willing to help it move," Joss said. "But I managed to knock a chip off them, if nothing else. Maybe it'll make them a bit more cautious in future."

  ' 'Or a bit more determined to do something sudden and

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  permanent to you, the next time," Cecile said. "Tell me: would you know that suit again if you saw it?"

  "In a minute. Observer training has its advantages."

  "Good," Cecile said. "Listen. Most people don't bother taking their suits back to their domes with them; there's too little room at home, as a rule, to waste on the suit. Most people dump their suits near the airlock they tend to use to go in and out. I bet if you made the rounds, you niight find the suit in question. It would give you a hint, at least, of what part of the station the one you're looking for lives in."

  Joss considered that a moment. "It would mean a lot of legwork, which I don't mind myself," he said. "But Cecile, what proof would there be that the place where I found it had anything to do with the person's whereabouts? If 7 had just been trying to kill someone, I would try to leave that suit as far as I could from where I came in with it. If in fact I didn't scrap it on the spot. The person has to know that if I could see well enough to shoot, I got a look at the suit itself."

  Cecile pursed her lips and nodded. "That's true enough, I guess. But I don't think anybody here is flush enough to just throw away a suit. It might turn up in different form, recycled, after a while."

  Joss nodded. "All right. Meanwhile, I won't go out for walks alone. I just wish I had a motive for that little attack, that's all. Motiveless attempted murder bothers me."

  Cecile looked at him. "You know," she said, "just by yourself, you represent everything that a lot of people here have come to get away from. Organization, taxes—well, they haven't got away from that, much—governmental snooping, trouble of all kinds. It's not your fault, I know. You do good work. But some of the people we have out here won't see it that way. It might just have been mischief. It's just as well that you shot whoever it was. Word will get around, among other people who would want to make mischief. It may make them a little more reluctant."

  Joss took a breath, thought about what he was going to

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  say next, and let the breath out again. "You might hear," he said, "about anybody who needed medical treatment all of a sudden. An accident with a laser or something."

  Cecile looked at him. "I might," she said. "And if I can find a way to let you know about it without jeopardizing my own position, Mister Sop Honey, I'll see what I can do. But I have to live with these people. And sneaks and snoops have a tendency to come to grief out here."

  "So I notice," Joss said softly. "All right. And thank you. Meanwhile, what's your next one?"

  "The same again," Cecile said, "a double."

  "ANOTHER OUTBREAK OF WILD NATIONALISM, I

  see," Joss said when Evan came in through the airlock.

  "What?" Evan said.

  "You're singing that Toasted Cheese song again. At least you haven't started in on "Men of Harlech" yet."

  "I never," Evan said, mildly scandalized.

  "You do too. Constantly, and especially in the 'fresher. And usually in the key of M."

  "W, surely," Evan said.

  "Hush up, Supertaff," Joss said from the computer console. "Come look at this."

  Evan leaned over Joss's shoulder to look at the computer's readout pad. "I see lots of registration numbers," he said, "the significance of which is presently difficult for me to understand. So suppose you explain, which you're visibly itching to do."

  "I'm more interested in finding out who was trying to kill me just now," Joss said.

  "Been in the bar again, have you?" said Evan.

  "You should talk," Joss said, and Evan blushed. Joss noticed this with mild interest, but left it alone for the moment.

  Joss told Evan about his excursion to the salvage pile.

  SPACE COPS 107

  "You bleeding idiot," Evan said at the end of it, "why didn't you wait for me?"

  "Who knew when you were getting back from your little pub crawl?" Joss said. Evan blushed again. Goodness, Joss thought, what's going on with our lad tonight? "And besides, who knew someone was going to go to all that trouble to try to off me? It can't have been easy, pushing all that metal around." He sat very still for a moment, considering what he had just said. "And besides," he went on, looking up at Evan, "how would one person alone have done it?

  Without any lifting equipment? Without any heavy equipment at all? When I came out of that pile, there was nothing left but footprints."

  Evan looked at him thoughtfully. "Someone," he said, "has been out there ahead of time, cutting through vital bits of metalwork. Making it dangerous for anyone to investigate too closely. Hmm?"

  "You'd think that would be noticed," Joss said.

  "Now why would it be, then? On this place's night shift—and there is one, apparently, though people tend to keep late hours—who would notice one lone person out there with a cutting torch?"

  Joss nodded. "And there's evidence," he said, "that if people did notice it, they'd most likely keep it to themselves.

  You may have a point there, partner."

  "Let's take a moment, some time in the next few days," Evan said, "and tear that pile apart."

  "I was going to recommend it anyway. I want to see how many other ships we're looking for might be hidden in there.

  Probably not many more; it wouldn't be smart." Joss paged through the display of his data pad, brought up a graphic.

  "But look at this."

  Evan bent in close to look at the vidsnap of the hole in the engine pod of the VW Box. "What the hell?" he said.

  "Right," Joss said. "What made it?"

  "Nothing civil," said Evan. "That's military."

  "Nothing standard military, either," Joss said. "That's brand new weaponry that can do that, my friend. One of 108 SPACE COPS

  your new charged-particle scoops, or one of those damn muon-augmented braided noble gas lasers you were lusting after in Jane's last month."

  "I never lust after weapons," Evan said, and blushed again.

  "Hah," Joss said, and his curiosity was really getting the better of him now. "Nev
er mind that. Somebody out this way has been playing with state-of-the-art weapons that not even the Space Forces will buy yet because they're not yet fully tested—that is to say, the price hasn't yet dropped low enough for the boys in Acquisitions to justify buying them to the cheapskates in Accounting. This is not good news for us, Unka Evan, not at all. It means there are people running around out here who are lots better armed than we are; hell, lots better armed than the goddam Space Forces are—not that that would be hard. And these too-goddam-well-armed people have been getting terminally cranky with people who have been catching them at something they're doing. Maybe not even that. Maybe just being in the wrong places at the wrong times. But five'll get you ten that the people who have these weapons are somehow involved with the disappearances we're here to investigate. And ten'll get you twenty that someone has already attempted to get rid of one of the people investigating this situation, while you were in the bar shining up to the ladies. Hmm?"

  Evan blushed furiously.

  "I would have thought you were out starting a fight or something," Joss said, "to maintain parity, or the pride of the force, or some damn thing. Who is she?"

  "Mell Fontenay," Evan said. "She's Maintenance."

  Joss sat back at his console and listened to the tale Evan told him. It was an interesting one, but there were aspects of it that bothered Joss. "You know," he said, "I'm not entirely sure you weren't set up."

  "What?"

  "What's to say that she and this Turk character aren't in cahoots somehow? She seems awful full of the milk of

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  human kindness for someone who was about to kill you. Not to mention that it was pretty providential that she walked in exactly when she did."

  "It was a good thing she did, my boyo!"

  "Look," Joss said, "I won't argue that it was a help to you. I'm just not so sure how accidental it all was.

  Any more than my little contretemps out at the salvage pile was accidental. Though someone was trying hard to make it look that way.''

  "Now, wait a minute—"

  "And it's pretty handy that this lady knows all these miners she can recommend to help us dig," Joss said.