Kill Station

by Diane Duane; Peter Morwood

  It would be faster, though, if I still had my cable, Joss thought mournfully.

  There was a noise in the airlock. Joss didn't bother being startled; the lock was voiceprinted, and he knew perfectly well who it would be. Though Evan was a bit early, by his reckoning.

  "We have company," Evan's voice said cheerfully.

  "Oh?" Joss turned to see Mell come in behind Joss. "Well, well! So that's where you were!"

  "I caught her," Evan said, "in the act of trying to kill the guy who was trying to blow the station up, so you wouldn't find out what was going on."

  Joss smiled slightly. "Mell," he said, "if I've misjudged you, apologies. You just seem to have a gift for looking as if you might be on the other side of the argument."

  "How are we doing?" Evan said.

  Joss glowered at the screen. "Nothing yet. I'm still infecting the computer. Or trying to. But I know all the file names I want. There's a pile of stuff in there, Evan. Text files mostly."

  "Good," Evan said. "Everybody in there was heavily

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  armed—no suits, though. It's a paramilitary group, well financed, from at least one Japanese corporation."

  "1KB, they said," said Mell. "Evan, they were proud of it, they were bragging about it. I saw some of their execs touring the place a couple of days ago, when they brought me in to fix their miserable ships."

  She looked angrily at Evan. "Some of those belonged to people I know. Or knew!"

  "I know," Evan said.

  "Aha!" Joss said, almost singing. "Got it!"

  "Good," Evan said. "Get the goodies down, and let's run. What was the message from Lucretia, by the way?"

  Joss grimaced. "She understands what we think is happening, and agrees with us. There's only one problem. Security is being kept very low key for this event. The publicity buildup has been concentrating on the peace and brotherhood aspects of the project. Having the Space forces around is deemed—"

  Joss made a face "—inappropriate for the PR that's been conducted. So we can expect no help from them. And there will be no overt rollout of SP forces, either. It would be noticed, Lucretia says. And unfortunately, orders have come down from the Commissioner, that brass-plated loon, that the security arrangements are to remain exactly as has been previously announced to the public."

  "So we are going to have to handle this by ourselves," Evan said, in a voice rich with disgust. "Joss, they don't pay us enough!"

  "They never have," Joss said mildly. "But by Lucre-tia's reckoning, this is still the same riot. Any help we get will be strictly covert. And no big guns involved.''

  Evan sighed. "That's that, then. Mell, you have your choices. Come with us? Or stay? I think you should stay, myself."

  She looked at Evan coolly. "Think I can't take it with the big boys?"

  "I would prefer," he said, "that you were in a place SPACE COPS 213

  where the odds of your being killed were rather lower than they will be with us. If you didn't mind terribly, that is."

  "Of course you would."

  "Now, Mell, listen, you know I know you better than that—"

  "You just think you do! I think you—"

  "Mell," Joss said, "think of the salvage."

  Both Evan and Mell turned to look at him.

  Joss shrugged, keeping one eye on the instruments that were watching on the intruders, and another on the ongoing download. "It just occurs to me that no one owns that station, you see. At least, there's no one alive on it now. Is there?"

  Evan and Mell looked at each other.

  "Sensors don't reveal any movement in the above-ground parts," Joss said. "You would know better about the below-ground bits than I would."

  "There were never more than forty or fifty people in the place, even when it was full," Mell said.

  "I did for about twenty-five or so myself," said Evan.

  "Well, then. Mell, if you go back there, you can spend a little while rigging one of the leftover ships to run.

  I saw a couple of them there that were obviously unfinished."

  "I wasn't hurrying," Mell said with a slight smile. "I resent being made to work on a job without a contract.''

  "If you even want to leave," Joss said. "I mean, if there's no one on that station now, the first person on it, owns it." . Mell looked at Evan.

  He raised his eyebrows at her.

  "Right," she said. "When are you two leaving?"

  "Now, wait a moment!" Evan said, sounding slightly hurt.

  "I was just asking," she said.

  "We ought to be out of here in a couple of hours," Joss said. "One more message to Lucretia, to tell her what's happening. Then off we go. I'm almost through here. When you're there, Mell, you might want to seal off that

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  computer room. The computers themselves may be needed as evidence."

  "No problem with that," she said.

  "In the meantime," Evan said, "will you stay to dinner?" And he smiled most beatifically at Joss. "My partner makes a wonderful Spaghetti Carbonara."

  Joss rolled his eyes and said, "Unfortunately, we can't offer you any wine."

  "I can bring a bottle," Mell said. "TheyVe got lots of it over there." She paused and smiled and said, "IVe got lots of it.''

  "Good Lord," Joss said, looking at Evan in shock. "They must have money. Importing wine to the Belts?!"

  "I shan't complain at the moment," Evan said.

  "You're sure this doesn't come under drinking on duty?" Joss said.

  Evan pointedly took his helm off and tossed it onto the command seat.

  "Right," Mell said. "This suit's maneuvering pack is charged. I'll just run over and get a couple of bottles."

  "One will do," Joss said. "We have to save the universe in the morning."

  "Joss!"

  "Oh, all right," Joss said, seeing the look in Evan's eye. "Two, then."

  "Don't be long," Evan said to Mell, as she put her helmet back on.

  It was an excellent red. Joss sat nursing a glass of it, after dinner, while looking over some of the files from the base.

  These are sick people, he thought.

  There was a click as Evan's stateroom door unlatched. Evan and Mell came out, looking only slightly tousled. Evan grinned at Joss, a totally unrepentant look.

  Joss just twitched an eyebrow at him. Then he said, "Why don't you crack that other bottle, you two, and pull up a couple of data pads. We have some interesting reading here."

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  Evan saw to the wine and filled glasses all around, while Joss hunted up the extra pad and gave it to Mell. She fiddled with the controls for a few seconds until she got the feel of them, and then said, "Goodness. All this?"

  "There's a fair amount of material. But I've excerpted out the best of it for you."

  Evan settled down beside Mell and pulled his own pad over, and a companionable silence fell as they started to read.

  "TKB," said Evan after a little while.

  "Yes. And some others: but I think the board of TKB, and one man on it in particular, are the leading lights. There are a lot of memos in here, interoffice stuff—all very casual-looking. Copies of material on Earth, with the routing numbers still on it. Should make things convenient for us," Joss said.

  Mell was scanning down through some of this material. "It looks like so much executive talk," she said hi mild wonderment. "Until they start talking about the guns and the missiles. And not just selling them, either. Using them."

  Evan said, "TKB took quite a lot of losses after Union, didn't it? They were almost more powerful than some governments on Earth, while they had all those different governments to play off each other. And then all of a sudden, all the power bases were changed, they didn't have the influence they had before."

  Mell nodded. "Fewer wars, too. They made an awful lot of money out of munitions before Union."

  "They diversified, of course," Joss said. "They weren't stupid. But the family that ran the
company have to have felt they had lost a lot of ground, and Union was the cause of it. And this particular family was never the kind to sit around and be resigned about things. There are some interesting files hi here with records of industrial duty tricks going back a century."

  Mell's mouth was hanging open at something she was reading. "Get this," she said. "At present, profit projec-216 SPACE COPS

  tions are sufficiently poor in terms of past years' performance to suggest moderately radical measures.

  Destabil-ization of political structures as below should cause the usual positive speculation in the markets, consonant with the 'greed and fear' principle." She looked at Joss in confusion.

  Joss sighed. "Yes. The stockbroker's motto. People invest out of greed, or fear. When things are scary, or politically uncertain, the market goes up. When things are stable, it goes down."

  She shook her head. "That's awful. And it's a great rationalization, too. But it's not the kind of thing I was hearing on the station. That was more sort of—" her face screwed up with distaste "—racist stuff.

  Nationalist. Separate countries, and one of them better than all the others."

  Joss nodded. "Yes, that's in here too. I did some context-sensitive scans when I first ran across it. The board of TKB—several members of the same family are on it-are very interested in seeing Japan restored as a nation. And all the other remade countries subjected to it, in fact if not actually in name."

  "They're completely around the bend," Evan said, almost in awe.

  "They're busy hating the way the world is now, and blaming it for their problems," Joss said. "And wanting to change it back to the way it used to be. Or the way they think it used to be—or should have been. That's crazy by my definition," Joss said. "But they also have lots of money, enough to do crazy things on a very big scale. Like 'destabilizing' the Union. Can you imagine the results if these loons managed to actually blow up High-Lands? It wouldn't start a war, I don't think, but a lot of trust that has been a good while forging would be shattered. Destabilized is the word for it, at the very least. And almost certainly the damned stock market would go up. I can't stand the thought of these bastards profiting

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  from terrorism—since you can see from some of these reports that they've covered their tracks very efficiently."

  "They can afford to," Evan said softly. "This one report you tagged—very sweet. A lot of money spent in the Belts, here—paying off miners to avoid certain areas, killing others who would not avoid them, paying off station personnel to look the other way and not notice things. The money nicely laundered through several different accounts." He peered at the pad. "And the signatures are all people on the TKB board. Takawabara—one or another of the family.''

  Joss nodded. "Something else interesting there, by the way. Look at the next file list—no, the next one. That one there: the manifest list for the base. Recent shipments."

  Evan looked at the list, and sucked breath in appreciatively. "Goodness. Someone had a suit delivered. And not a cheap one, either. A Krupp-Tonagawa.''

  "Is that good?" Mell said.

  Evan laughed, a quick harsh sound. "Just about the best. They sell to the earthbound military, mostly. Space Forces are on too tight a budget to afford Krupp-Tonagawa suits. Pity," he added a little wistfully. "This suit has a lot of goodies on it."

  "And you will have noticed the name of the person to take delivery."

  Evan nodded. "Takawabara," he said, and frowned.

  Joss sighed and pushed his own pad away. "I've sent this stuff off to Lucretia by squirt," he said. "But I don't think it's going to change her mind, and even if it did, we have no guarantee it would change the Commissioner's. We have to proceed as if there is going to be no help. If you look at that 'action plan' that's tagged on the third list in, you'll see what they're doing. At lease we know, which is a help. There are already bombs in place on Highlands, in case the armed attack fails. Lucretia will have to do something about that, no matter what. But as for the rest of it . . ."

  Evan made a face. "Please, Evan and Joss," he said,

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  "blow up eleven ships better armed than you are, and possibly all stuffed with explosives, possibly nukes, to judge from that one we hit the other day; and don't make a fuss about it, and don't get noticed. And here's a peashooter to do it with."

  "Well, we're a little better armed than with peashooters," Joss said, patting Nosey's console apologetically. "But the situation is still pretty . . . uh, unbalanced."

  Evan laughed softly, then sighed and turned to Mell. "We're going to have to get started," he said.

  She just looked at him for a moment, then said, "I'll get my suit on."

  Joss busied himself with other things for a while, purposely keeping his attention away from the other end of the ship. After a while Mell came out, in her suit, and Evan with her.

  "Does your maneuvering pack need a recharge?" Joss said.

  "No, I'm in good shape."

  "Then go home safely," Joss said, "and for God's sake don't drink all that wine! We'll want some when we get back."

  She nodded vigorously. Without another word she grabbed Evan by the head and planted a kiss on him that would have curled up a bulkhead. Evan dealt with it the best he could, and came up smiling.

  "Nine point four," Joss said.

  Mell chuckled. "Later for you. Evan—keep him out of trouble."

  "I Ve been trying," Evan said. "It seems a life's work."

  Mell smiled at that, locked her helmet down, and got into the airlock.

  Evan closed it for her, and waved out the little porthole. A few moments later she was gone, and he closed the outer lock door as well.

  Joss reached over to the command console and began hitting the controls to wake up the iondrivers.

  "We'll see her safely inside," he said, "and then get the hell out of SPACE COPS 219

  there. We need to take a different course home, and still beat those people into Earth orbit."

  Evan said, "Can we do it?"

  "We'll find out," Joss said, and busied himself at the console.

  SEVEN

  "FINESSE," JOSS SAID, AND SNORTED.

  "Stop complaining," said the voice in his ear. "Gosh, it feels great to tell you that! It's been days."

  "Has been a little quiet," Joss said to Talya. They were in Earth orbit again, and once more she, and Lucretia, and all the rest of the SP, were just a half-second away.

  Unfortunately, they weren't being any help.

  "Look," he said. "I gave you no less than five possible locations for the damn bomb on the L5. What's keeping them, up there? We can't start our operation until that's handled."

  "Last I heard," Talya said, from safe in the data center under the Moon, "they had found bombs in every one of those places. They're combing the rest of the station now, as best they can. No one's supposed to notice, you see."

  Joss drummed his fingers. Behind him, in his stateroom, Evan was climbing into his suit. "When will we know?"

  "Twenty minutes, they say."

  Joss groaned. "The ceremony starts in twenty minutes!"

  "So I hear."

  "Joss," Evan said, "stop complaining. IVe got your dinky toys right here, and they'll never have a chance against them.''

  ' 'Always assuming you can get the contraptions up against them in the first place," Joss said gloomily. It was a plan of

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  his that he had never tried before, and as usual, when trying something for the first time, he was twitching.

  Evan came out with the little front pack of black boxes, eleven of them, each with its own magnet. He strapped the front pack on. "Look," he said. "I told you I can do twenty mps or so when I get going."

  "I just hope it's enough." The black boxes had two things inside them: a powerful comm link, that should be able to break into a ship's comms network from outside the skin; and a derivative of the virus t
hat killed the computer on the clandestine base. Comms on any small ship had to live in the master computer, otherwise, nothing got done. The virus would get into the ship's computer via comms, and freeze everything it touched, including the guidance and navigation computers, and the weapons systems, and the non-remote guidance systems of any bomb the computer was managing. A passing patrol vessel could then shoot out the ship's engines at its leisure. But there were complications. "I mean," Joss said,

  "What if one of those sons of bitches has fired a missile or something, and it's on remote? It'll just keep going."

  "Don't let them fire, then," Evan said. "Finesse it."

  "I keep hearing this."

  "You shouldn't worry so much," Evan said. "I'll blow anything that I can locally. Just keep those bloody braided lasers off me."

  Joss looked unhappy. The best way to do that was by drawing their fire himself. A ship with one of his black boxes on it wouldn't be able to fire; the laser wouldn't braid without computer control. It was getting the boxes on that was going to be interesting.

  "You're talking about pulling a lot of gee out there," Joss said to Evan, as he headed for the airlock. He was looking at the holograph, which had shown some of the enemy ships already in position, seemingly lounging through the area at low speeds, on other business. "Are you sure you're going to be all right?"

  "I'll be fine."

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  Evan climbed into the airlock. "You know the course we want?" he said.

  Joss nodded. "I'm swinging past the first two boys now. You should be able to hit them one after another. Just stay away from the fronts of them, if you can. Don't want you microwaved by their radars."

  "I'll try to avoid it." And the door closed behind nun.

  "You do that," Joss said.

  He kicked in the iondrivers, on low. His business at the moment was to seem to be a Patrol vessel ambling about its business. He had gone to some trouble, on the way out here, to change his registration numbers and to tinker with his own ID broadcast; he didn't want any of these raiders suddenly recognizing the sop vessel that had been hanging around Willans Station. These people were not dumb.