Kill Station

by Diane Duane; Peter Morwood

  He eased the ship out into the airlock, waited for it to seal behind him and to open before. The doors cracked open slowly, and he soared out. Joss was getting a better feel for the controls than he'd had for the first couple of weeks, and he was now getting more enjoyment than ever out of the way the ship moved and carried itself. Even on attitude jets, it maneuvered quickly and well, and it accelerated more and more nicely on iondrive. Running in finally, I suppose, Joss thought. Or maybe Evan's lady friend tweaked it.

  Evan's lady friend. Joss had to chuckle a bit at that, as he angled the ship away from Willans and headed out to where the other three diggers' ships were waiting for him. Evan was usually such a conservative type; it wasn't like him even to look at a lady, though he could be gallant enough when it pleased him. Now, though—all this blushing! It was hilarious—except for Joss's uncomfortable suspicion that the lady in question was somehow involved with the trouble they were investigating.

  Then again, he thought, in a place this small, almost everybody is likely to be at least involved with it . . . in some small or marginal way. No help to us, either. It's going to mean a lot more information for us to sift through.

  Behind him, Joss saw George's ship slip out of the airlock. "All right, everybody," he said to the other three ships,

  "you've got the coordinates. Let's head along."

  "Right," and "Gotcha," came the answers; and a third SPACE COPS 131

  voice, a heavily accented Eastern European one, said, " 'Ey, Sop Honey, what you call your ship?"

  Joss snorted good-naturedly. He had a feeling he was already so stuck with the nickname that there was no point in even fighting it. "Doesn't have a name yet," he said.

  "Not good," said another of the voices. "Bad business to fly a ship with no name, Honey. They have a way of turning on you."

  "Then what do you do with it in the meantime?" Joss asked.

  There was a chuckle from the Eastern European voice. "Nickname, at least. But you can't give it. Someone else must.

  When real name comes along, you give it proper, with wine. And the person who gave the nickname gives real name too."

  "This is just another clever ruse for us all to go out and get drunk," Joss said, chuckling.

  "And so if is? What better to drink for? Big strike, wedding, baby, name baby, name ship, funeral, wake, what else?"

  "You've got a point there," Joss said. He kicked in the iondrivers; around him, with thoughtless skill, so did the others, and they all accelerated together. "So what's the nickname then?"

  There was a brief silence. "You ask me to give nickname?"

  Joss paused, and said, "Madam, I ask."

  There was another pause, and then the voice said, "We call her Nosey. See, she has bump there."

  Joss had to laugh. The one thing he was most sensitive about on this ship—"Good enough," he said. "We'll make it official when we get in."

  There was laughter from the other two ships as well. "Mister Sop," one of their pilots said, "there's hope for you yet."

  "I surely hope so," Joss said.

  They accelerated for about twenty minutes, then flipped end-for-end and began to slow. Hek's asteroid swelled be-iaa SPACE COPS

  fore them, with its lopped-off end and the slight crater where the skin of the ship was exposed. Joss waited until everyone was in position, then said, "There she is. That's what we have to dig out. Ladies and gentlemen, we need to be as careful as we can about the digging. I don't want to lose anything we might find lying around the excavation site that might belong to the ship. We may—or may not— have some extensive reconstruction to do on the site, or when we get home. But any bit of waste metal could be what gives us the clue we need to find out who killed this lady."

  "We be careful," said the Eastern European voice.

  The ships landed at the far end of the asteroid, and after a few moments, the pilots got out and began pulling out light mining tools and the generators to run them. Joss put Nosey— he chuckled again; the name was going to take getting used to—down last, next to George's ship, got suited up, and got out.

  They were there for six hours. It was not a simple dig. The material thrown down around Hek's ship had fused unevenly. What was very solid melted rock and metal would give way quite suddenly to piled-up aggregates, and dust and molten stuff would suddenly be spraying all over the place as the laser drill found it had nothing in particular to work on. Flying rock became a problem. Joss's new faceplate got scratched. He found himself looking enviously at the miners' tougher composite faceplates, and wishing the SP would shell out for the same material.

  But slowly the ship began to emerge from the piled-up, fused rubble. Joss had asked the workers to leave the door areas for last—they weren't a priority—and to concentrate on the engine end; he was interested to see just what had happened to this ship. At one point, George said to him, "What are you expecting?"

  Joss touched helmets with the man, to keep it private. "Listen," he said, "do you ever hear stories of military vessels in these parts? "

  George looked at Joss warily. "Sometimes. A ship will

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  come to grief, and we'll find out there was some kind of Space Forces thing going on out in the Belts. Some kind of

  'organized maneuver,' they'll say. And we'll demand to know what happened to our ship, and we'll never find out. It hasn't happened in a long time—not for years now. But it used to happen quite a bit, before things got more settled out here."

  Joss thought of old stories of fishing boats getting their nets caught by cruising submarines. At best, they were dragged ten or a hundred miles; at worst, they were never seen again, and their fates were never revealed, since security forbade even admitting that the submarines had been there at all. / wonder, Joss thought, how much of what we're investigating could be attributable to that? Has the SP sent us on some kind of wild goose chase for political purposes?

  But what was in front of them needed investigating, politics or not. Joss turned his attention back to the ship's pod, which was coming free. The boxy shape was partly hidden by dust from the drilling, but there was a long scooped-out sort of walkway down to where the side of the craft went into the ground. Joss went down and stood as close as he dared. Lara, the Eastern European, was standing there with a small drill, hunched over, alternately breaking the stone away in short bursts and scraping loose bits away with an old entrenching tool. Joss picked up the tool and nodded at her. Lara blasted and Joss picked and shoveled for a few minutes. Then he stopped her with an arm on her suit, and said, "There. See that flange sticking up?"

  It was a sharp, curved piece of metal, protruding at almost a forty-five-degree angle from the ship's hull. Joss could see no expression inside Lara's polarized faceplate, but she held quite still for a few seconds, and finally said, "Blowout hole, huh?"

  "Looks that way, yes, ma'am," Joss said. "But let's get a closer look." Together they began to work around the edges of the hole, and, when it was defined, down the

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  front of it. The hole in the ship's side turned out to be at least three feet wide; flanges of metal bent out from it all around. Lara looked in sadly at the twisted and burnt cables and burst batteries inside.

  "Fuel cell," she said. "They blow often. I think they build them wrong. Not enough compartmentalization, not enough protection for these damn things."

  Joss said nothing for the moment, just patted Lara on the arm and said, "Keep working, I'll be back."

  He went around to the front, where George and Joe and Vanya were working. Vanya in particular was busy at the vessel's front hatch. "Let's see if we can get inside," Joss said, and started to help him.

  It took them about half an hour to finish clearing the rubble and fused rock away from the door. When it was free, all work stopped for a few moments while Joss and Vanya worked, first with crowbars, then with a drill and a crowbar, to pry the door open.

  Inside was dead dark, dusty, and in utt
er disorder. Hek's ship had been fairly roomy inside, for all that it was small; there was room enough for quite a few belongings. Now they lay all over the floors, stained and blackened by smoke; books, tools, a spare suit, plates, a blanket, a lacquered tray for tea. The teacups lay shattered. On top of them lay Hek's body, in its pressure suit.

  No one moved for that first moment. Then Joss stepped forward, and slowly and carefully turned the body over. It was like a board—not surprising, considering how long it had been exposed to vacuum.

  The faceplate was webbed with cracks; there was one neat hole straight through it. The face was a mummified mask of freeze-dried blood. Joss ground his teeth, thinking, She was a nice-looking old lady, once. But he said nothing aloud.

  He put her down gently, got up, and made his way toward the back of the ship. The entry into the engine pod was a cramped little access that Joss had to fight with to get undamped and open. When he succeeded, and crawled in, he was only slightly surprised by what he saw.

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  There was a small neat hole in the wall of the fuel cell on this side. Joss touched it with his gauntlet, brushed at it.

  Almost no carbonization at the edges. Somebody with a very high-powered weapon had pushed its total power through here, and the fuel cell on the other side had quite understandably blown up. Joss stood there thinking. A change of plans, somewhere along the way? This destruction, followed by a decision that someone might see through the coverup, and it was safer to bury the ship, and move the claim core to confuse the issue?

  If Joss had wanted reinforcement of the military connection, he had it now. The problem was, again, that he was sure not even the military had weapons like this just yet. Certainly they were being built, and certainly people were buying them. And using them. But not here.

  He made his way back out to the group standing over Hek's body. "Let's finish getting the ship up out of the ground,"

  he said, "so we can bring it home, and give this lady a decent burial."

  "It was fuel cell?" Lara said.

  "It was meant to look like fuel cell," Joss said, "but it was not. That explosion was caused from inside. Someone came in here, shot this woman, then went back and blew her engine out to make it look like an accident. And then someone else decided that the whole thing was better buried away. Tell your friends that; spread the word around. I want to know about anything military that has happened in this area that anyone knows about. Rumors, gossip, I don't care.

  This evening I'll be in the Astoria. I want to know why Hek was murdered. Ask your friends to help me."

  There was silence, and nodding.

  "Come on," Joss said, "let's finish getting this dug up. I want to go home."

  It was a couple of hours more before they were ready to take the ship in tow. Joss longed for the tractor beams of the old space serials, but technology hadn't got along that far as yet. They had to make do with cables strung 136 SPACE COPS

  between two ships, an incredibly twitchy and finicky business that Lara and Joe nevertheless brought off with great finesse. Better them than me, Joss thought as he headed home.

  They dropped the ship a short distance from the salvage pile. George grounded his ship nearby, to keep an eye on it until someone from Willans' private security could come and start standing watches there.

  Joss put Nosey back in the hangar dome and went looking for Evan. He bumped into him in one of the corridors leading to the dome. "You have any luck?" Joss said.

  Evan blushed.

  "Not that way," Joss said, and cuffed Evan good-naturedly on the arm. "Come on, you look like you could use some coffee. You smell like you could use some coffee," he added. "What've you been drinking?"

  "Swill," Evan said. He was blinking sightly, as if the light hurt his eyes.

  "I believe you." Together they made their way back to the ship. Once they were inside with the airlock closed, Joss said, "We finished our digging just now."

  "And?"

  "Somebody with one of your braided tuned lasers did Hek's ship in," Joss said, and gave him the rest of the details.

  Evan sat there with his brow furrowed. "Tea?"Joss said.

  "Yes, please. What I'm trying to understand," Evan said, "is why, after faking it, and well—if that vessel had been brought in for salvage as usual, probably no one would ever have noticed—they then tried to cover everything up as they did.''

  "I've been running afoul of that one too. A sudden change in command of the operation?"

  Evan sighed. "We'll have no way of knowing until we find out who did it, will we?"

  "And we can't do that until we trace them," Joss said. "I'm going to send a note back to Lucretia and see if she SPACE COPS 137

  can't find out something about any covert Space Forces business in this area."

  "I don't think they'll tell her anything," Evan said.

  Joss shrugged. "It's worth a try. I take it your meeting with the locals went well?"

  "I got into a fight," Evan said. But there was an expression on his face like a smile trying hard to happen, and being restrained.

  "And what else?" Joss said mildly.

  Evan blushed again.

  "Look," Joss said, chuckling, "if congratulations are in order, then congratulations. She seems like a nice lady. Just be careful what you say to her."

  "Joss," Evan said, "she's been a great deal of help. Those people wouldn't have talked to me today without her." His tone was pained: it was one Joss couldn't remember hearing from Evan before.

  "That's all very well. But I'm not sure of anybody's motives around here, not yet. Something fairly major is going on, and anyone who gets too close to it is getting killed. I'd sooner that didn't include us."

  Joss sat down at his data pad and brought up the graphic that he had been working on while he was talking to Ce-cile.

  "Take a look at this," he said. "You may have been able to pick up something that'll be of use. I've got them labeled by ship names."

  Evan sat down next to Joss and began puzzling over the graphic of nested circles and ellipses, the path of people's radio checks. "I don't know," he said finally. "I got a lot of rumor from those people, but very little in the way of hard coordinates where the missing ships were supposed to be heading."

  Someone knocked on the outside airlock. Joss whistled the door open.

  George came in. Joss nodded at him. "Everything set up out there?"

  "All set," George said, looking over at Evan. "Station 138 SPACE COPS

  security has the ship under guard. Though I don't think anything in particular will happen."

  "Neither do I," Joss said, looking with mild interest at the glances Evan and George were exchanging.

  Quite cool, those looks, and appraising. Uh oh, he thought, and resolved to have a little talk with Cecile later, if it seemed wise on second thought.

  "George," Joss said, getting up, "I was talking to Cecile about the check-in patterns of some of the miners hereabouts. How familiar are you with the reg numbers and dates that ships have been disappearing?"

  "Too goddam familiar," George said. "I did the original number crunching for Noel when he started to get suspicious."

  "Good. Let me bring this chart up on the holographic display. See if you can help us fill in some details."

  The pattern of circles and ellipses and long hyperbolae came up in midair over the map stand, looking very much like a messy ball of yarn tangled around a set of X-, Y-, and Z-axes. "There are the official radio checks, as far as I can pin them down," Joss said. "The ones in red are the ones that vanished. You can see they're all spinward of the station, but that's not a great deal for us to go on; that only leaves us about half the Belts to look at.''

  George stared at the display for a long moment. "We never thought to plot it like this. Even if we had, I don't think our machinery could have handled it. It's not numbers I can help you with here," he said. "I think I'm better equipped with gossip. This one—" He pointed at one narrow red el
lipse. "That was Cutty Sark, wasn't it? Nick told me not too long before he disappeared that he was working five-fifty in, and nine-twenty up and over. That's a diagonal course, an average of Y and Z, about here." George stabbed at one spot in an empty part of the hologram; Joss quickly marked it with a dot. "But his checks are all over here. Nowhere near where he said.''

  Evan looked suddenly alert. "Where's Langton's

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  Folly?" he said. "Baba told me that Hek said she was going to be working some rocks over by Langton's Folly."

  George looked at him with surprise. "Right about here," he said, and pointed at a spot about five hundred kilometers from the first spot Joss had marked.

  Joss marked that one too. "This," he said softly, "is statistically significant. Do you see what those spots have in common?"

  "No," Evan and George said together. And then looked at one another in what seemed like mild annoyance.

  "If you draw a line between them," Joss said, "the line is just within maximum transmission distance of all of both those ships' official check-in points. Those two points are the foci of an ellipse, possibly. But there's still much too much space to cover in that shape. Come on, you two, I want all the gossip you've heard, whether you think it's particularly important or not."

  They spent another hour at it, tagging either specific points or fuzzy globes meant to indicate loci of probability: areas where people were reported to have been headed, to have been, or even just to have been interested in. By the time they were done, the original ball of yarn was almost hidden within an outer surface of dots and cotton-ball globes. But one little patch of globes and dots was well removed from the ball of yarn, and at its heart was the maximum-transmission line that Joss had pointed out.

  "It's been drifting," Joss said, as they sat there drinking their tea or coffee, slumped in their chairs. "But there's a relay out there that all these ships were using to send fake check-in signals. The relay is somewhere here—" he tapped the little blot of dots and globes. "Not too much space to check. A cube of space about three hundred miles to a side.''