“Fuck, yes!” Bruce said, genuine excitement in his voice. He uncrossed his legs and sat up, flopping about excitedly. “We are so doing this! Okay, what do you want me to do?”
Stein swallowed. “You’ll have noticed that our respected and far–sighted chief engineer has just assigned us several weeks of tedious work?”
“Yes, sir. I will notice that, sir,” Bruce replied.
“It might be nothing, but I wonder now if Curts isn’t in on this as well.” She looked at the ceiling, collecting her thoughts. “I mean, he was acting strangely about the service requests. Told me not to look into them. And when I did, the next day he springs this little chore on us. And babysat me all day.”
“He’s also kind of a wiener,” Bruce observed. “That’s enough reason right there to rough him up a little to see what he knows.”
“Heh. Or we could not do that, and do something smart.” She paused, as Bruce held up his nose and pouted. “Here’s my thinking. If Curts is assigning me make–work to keep me from investigating this any further, I’m probably going to have him all over me for the next little while. Which means I need you to look up this Arlo Samson and retrace what Gabelman was looking at that day.”
“You want me to recreate the same series of events which led to a man’s death,” Bruce stated.
Stein grimaced. “I’m aware this plan has some flaws.”
“Oh, good. It’d be rude of me if I had to point them out to you.”
“I was hoping you could do everything Gabelman did that day, and then at the end, omit the ‘dying gruesomely’ part.”
“I see.” Bruce sat back on his couch. “Okay. It’s done.”
“Are you sure?”
“Totally done. I’ve already got a couple ideas.”
§
“Yeah, this is Bruce. Damper 2X–333–uh–3 is at, uh, three percent,” Bruce called into his terminal.
“You mean Damper 4H–993–L, right, Bruce?” Stein’s voice queried through the terminal.
“Uh, yes. That’s what I said.”
“Copy.”
Bruce was nowhere near either of those dampers. He was instead in the garden well, walking down the center of America, amongst a crowd of revelers dressed in horse costumes in the opening stages of what would become a lengthy orgy. For better or worse, Bruce would be long gone before anything interesting broke out, but for now it provided excellent camouflage. Should anyone be watching, being surrounded by a hundred or so people in costumes rubbing up on each other was a great way to appear uninteresting.
The ship–wide diagnostic had remained waiting for them when they arrived at the office that morning, Curts still there, hovering over Stein’s every move. This time, Stein had steered Bruce to a rarely visited corner of the ship to trudge through the diagnostic process there. And as they had discussed, he was doing nothing of the sort, radioing back completely fictional results while he made his way through this slow–burning pool of phony equine delight on his way towards the Bridge.
Located just beyond the aft edge of the garden well, the Bridge was home to the seat of the civilian government, and in the levels above it, much of the control apparatus for the actual operations of the ship. Back when cavemen were sailing their ocean liners around the Earth, there was an obvious purpose in putting the men in charge someplace up high, where the visibility was best. But as there wasn’t a great deal to see in space, there was little purpose in putting the ship’s brains on its outer surface, and, consequently, the control apparatus of the Argos was buried right in its heart. As anticipated, over time the decks underneath the proper control room had become a type of city hall and was where the elected officials rummaged around in the shit and mud of Argosian politics. Although the civilian government had no direct control over ship systems, the whole general area still retained the name ‘Bridge.’
As he approached the Bridge, Bruce reached into his pocket and pulled out a little bottle. Gently opening it so as not to spill the contents, he reached in and fumbled around, trying to grab one of the brightly multicolored pills from within. After a couple of tries, he eventually fished out a bright red pill and carefully recapped the bottle. The color of the pill would reveal its function to anyone who saw it: Brash. Bruce looked at it sitting in his palm, considering it for a second, before he reopened the bottle and pulled out another red pill. He tossed the pair down his throat and swallowed quickly.
“Whooo. Yeah. Everything is a gooooood idea!” he said to himself as quietly as he could. His plan was to figure out where Arlo Samson was and then look at the heating and cooling systems in that area. The fact that this wasn’t much of a plan at all had started to bother him on the walk over, which was what necessitated the chemical backbone infusion.
Reaching the main entrance of the Bridge, Bruce marched in the front door and approached the reception desk. “I’m looking for Arlo Samson’s office,” he said, choosing the direct approach.
“Sure,” the receptionist replied. “I’ll just call him now.”
“No, no, don’t do that. I need to go to his office. There’s a problem with his heat.” Bruce looked at the young man, and realized he hadn’t blinked in a long time. He blinked. And then once more, just to set the fellow at ease. “I’d have gone straight to see him, but his address got messed up. Was wondering if you knew where he sat?”
“Oh, I see,” the receptionist said. “Okay, he’s on the second floor, office 238. You can take the stairs just back there.”
Bruce blinked again, then launched himself across the room. This is going great. He noticed a bulky guy standing in an office doorway on the other side of the reception foyer, studying him closely. Bruce gave him a friendly nod, and then a blink for good measure.
The Bridge was one of the few places on board the ship where civilians could access areas above the fourth level. The mayor’s office itself was all the way up on the eighth level, although within the Bridge complex itself, this was confusingly called the fifth floor.
Bruce climbed the stairs to the second floor. Walking down the hall, he peered into offices, seeing various mid–level mandarins busy doing absolutely nothing. Some of them looked up from their desks as he walked past, startled to see him in his bright maintenance coveralls. He distributed some cheerful blinks and kept walking. This was a really good idea. He congratulated himself on the foresight he displayed in agreeing to it.
Bruce found office 238 with its door open and entered to see a man at work over his desk. Arlo Samson was in his forties, slender, balding prematurely. He looked profoundly unhappy, like a man who never understood jokes. “Can I help you?” Arlo asked.
“Arlo Samson?” Bruce asked. The man didn’t make any indication that this was incorrect, so Bruce continued. “You had a problem with the heat?”
Arlo swallowed, his eyes widening. He stayed frozen for a few more seconds before he quickly shook his head. “Nope, no problem here. I think you must be mistaken.” He looked around the room, as if checking the temperature of the room by sight. “See, perfectly fine.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean now,” Bruce said. “I meant a couple days ago. You had a problem with the heat a couple days ago.”
Arlo tried to maintain a blank face, though he did a poor job of it. “Nope. I haven’t had any problems with the heat in here that I remember.” He paused, studying Bruce’s face. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Bruce shot Arlo in the chest. Stunned at his own rapid movement, Bruce froze, his eyes flickering from the unconscious form of Arlo Samson to the stun pistol that had emerged in his right hand. “That was…brash.” He reslotted the pistol under his arm, where it had been concealed in a pocket underneath his tool webbing. He turned around to see the door yawning wide open. Startled, he hurried over and closed it, leaning against it heavily. “Boy, I sure hope stunners are as quiet as I think they are.”
After a few seconds passed without anyone inquiring why he had shot a man, Bruce crossed the
room again and grabbed Arlo under the shoulders. He laid him on the floor behind his desk and looked up. Realizing the desk had no front panel, that the top surface was partially transparent, and that Arlo was still completely visible to anyone entering the room or even walking by casually, Bruce grabbed and hauled him over to the wall the door was on, rolling the unconscious bureaucrat into a nook, out of sight.
Things were still going great, but maybe, Bruce decided, a bit less great than before. As he recalled, stun shots left people unconscious for twenty minutes or so. They also had a nasty habit of causing heart attacks, but he was glad to see that that had not appeared to happen here. He’d only had to use a pistol once before in his life, eleven years earlier. He didn’t recall it being so much fun, though he didn’t believe he was as incredibly high at the time.
What would Gabelman have done now? Excepting the fact that Ron probably hadn’t shot Mr. Samson in the chest, Bruce was now in roughly the same situation Gabelman would have been in three days earlier — in a client’s office investigating a complaint of too much heat. Well, one obvious place to check was the thermostat in the room. Bruce checked it against his own sensor on his webbing. No problem there. He looked at the main diffuser, then pried that off and looked at the damper in the vent beyond. No problems there either.
Bruce then realized he wasn’t specifically looking for a heating problem. He was supposed to be looking for whatever it was that Gabelman saw, something that he wasn’t supposed to see, while he was investigating a heating problem. Bruce looked around Arlo’s office. He poked and prodded at various surfaces on and around Arlo’s desk, not finding anything of interest. Arlo Samson appeared to be a government worker of middling importance, whose sole job was managing slightly less important government workers. Bruce couldn’t even tell what department the man worked in. A few minutes of poking around convinced Bruce that nothing Arlo Samson did was of interest to anyone. Nothing worth killing over.
A knock on the door. A second later, it slid open to reveal a middle aged woman, who looked at Bruce in surprise. “Oh! Is Arlo here?”
“He had to step out,” Bruce replied.
“Oh.” The woman looked unsure about that for a bit, before saying. “Okay. I’ll just drop this on his desk then.” She entered the room, terminal in hand and walked over to Arlo’s desk.
Bruce sighed, and walked around behind her, closing the door as she reached the desk. She turned around, an annoyed and self–important look on her face as she saw Bruce blocking the exit. Her eyes drifted to the corner where Arlo’s body was heaped. “Oh!” she said before being stunned to the floor.
Bruce surveyed the room, and finding nowhere better, hauled the woman over and deposited her on top of Arlo. He stood up, wiping his sleeve across his brow. Detective work is hard.
The next place Gabelman would go if he couldn’t find a problem here would be the air balancer servicing this area. Bruce checked his terminal and found the air balancer down the hall from Samson’s office. It looked like it was set correctly. Bruce left the office and walked down the hall a short way, where he stopped, looked up at the ceiling, and popped out the access panel. There was the air balancer. It looked completely normal. As he was stretching up to replace the panel, he saw an older gentleman come down the hall and stop in front of Arlo Samson’s door. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Bruce said under his breath. He hurriedly set the panel down and jogged down the hall as the man entered the office.
A minute later, Bruce re–emerged from the office, locking the door behind him this time. For a wienery little guy, Arlo Samson certainly was popular. Bruce reset the access panel into place. So, he had committed three assaults, and found absolutely nothing. A half hour ago, he had felt on the cusp of uncovering an enormous ship–wide conspiracy, but now it dawned on him that he might in fact be a psychopath. This troubled him.
“Well, in light of the fact that I can’t go backwards,” he said, steeling himself, and looked up. Onwards and upwards. If Gabelman had retraced all these steps and still had not tracked down the heating problem, he would visit the fan room for this section of the ship, which was on the third floor. Bruce found the staircase and made his way upstairs, managing not to incapacitate anyone along the way. Following his terminal’s directions, he found the fan room and entered it.
The fan room was tight and cramped, an awkwardly shaped space dominated by a series of enormous fans enclosed in a mass of twisting ductwork. Within these ducts, huge coils heated or chilled the air as it was distributed to the surrounding rooms.
Bruce crawled into, over, and around the fans and ductwork, looking for anything out of the ordinary. The fans looked fine. No dead bodies or ancient secrets or anything. He did find a multi–tool on the floor underneath a duct, identical to the one secured in his own tool webbing. There was nothing to indicate that it was Gabelman’s, but there was nothing to not indicate that it was either. He checked the time on his terminal. He had zapped Samson and the woman again when he had knocked out the old man. That meant he had another ten minutes or so until they woke up, unless it had killed them, in which case he had quite a bit longer.
In the back of the room, set on the floor, was an enormous wall panel off its mounts. Bruce walked over to examine it, leaning it away from the wall it concealed. Behind it lay a massive hinged access hatch, much bigger than anything he had ever seen before, set into a steel bulkhead wall. Normally held in place by large fasteners, Bruce could see most of them hanging loose. He loosened the rest of the fasteners and swung the hatch open.
Behind the hatch, a dark cavern. Turning on his terminal light, he directed the beam into the darkened space. It was room–sized, a bit smaller than the room he was in now, and cramped by an enormous piece of heavy machinery sitting right in the center. He stepped into the cavity and looked closer at the equipment, still not recognizing it.
The room smelled, oil and metal and something acrid. Moving around, he could see the machinery looked like someone had carved an enormous S out of incredibly thick metal. After circling it once, he decided it was actually two interlocking C’s. Each half of the machine — each C — was braced by enormous pistons. Flecks of corrosion covered the surface, but after looking closer, Bruce could see scratch marks, as well. It looked like it had been scrubbed clean recently. Each half of the mechanism was supported by massive metal pillars extending out through either side of the cavity. Bruce recognized those as the ship’s main structural members, laid out along the length of the vessel like ribs.
For all the mysteries the room did contain, notably absent was the secret hiding spot of a cabal of assassins who possessed the answer to Gabelman’s death. Disappointed, Bruce snapped a couple of pictures of the mechanism with his terminal, then stepped outside to cover his tracks.
§
“Thanks, Forth,” Stein said, noting down another set of figures on the desk display in front of her. Her eyes lingered on the clock. It had been almost twenty minutes since she had checked in with Bruce. He would be in the midst of doing something pretty stupid right about then. Hopefully, Curts hadn’t noticed she had stopped using Bruce, and he hadn’t seemed to — he had been busy tapping out messages on his own terminal for the last few minutes.
He looked up at her just then, seemingly startled by her staring back at him. He smiled thinly and asked, “S–s–sorry about that. How’s it going?”
“Okay,” she said. “Been making good pace.” Seeing a chance to stall and buy Bruce some more time, she tapped the clock on the desk display. “Might use a break though. Could go for a quick walk to work out the kinks.”
Curts nodded slowly, then stood up and moved behind her, looking down at the data she had been gathering. “Sounds like a plan. But how about we finish this next batch of p–points first, okay? That’ll t–take…what? Another ten minutes?”
Stein suppressed a low growl. “Yeah, about that. Okay. No problem.” Curts patted her on the shoulder and returned to his chair as she began ordering her tr
oops around to the next batch of control points. They were at a perfectly good stopping point as near as she could tell. But if Curts wanted to micromanage, she wasn’t going to rock the boat. Not today.
§
The two security men who found him in the fan room evidently hadn’t found the pile of unconscious bureaucrats first, or they would have had their weapons drawn when they entered. Bruce would later conclude that this meant they were guarding the fan room specifically, or at least had sensors nearby that were. It was probably how they had found Gabelman.
Bruce didn’t have his weapon drawn either, but he did have the enormous plastic wall panel in his hands, which served first as a useful method of concealment while he did arm himself, and then as a shield during the brief and haphazard firefight which followed. Emerging victorious from the gunplay, Bruce spun his pistol around on his finger. That was exciting. He hadn’t had anyone shoot back at him for a long time, either. This was probably a good sign that his welcome was worn out, and along with the slight twinge of fear which signified the wearing off of his Brash, he decided that was enough reason to go ahead and make his escape. Stepping over the unconscious security officers, he exited the fan room and jogged down the hall towards the main staircase.
At the bottom of the stairs, Bruce saw another security officer waiting, and cheerfully shot him in the face. He then ran down the stairs two at a time, waved to the young man at the reception desk as he sprinted by, and gave him one last blink for old time’s sake.
“Hey, Bruce? You got that reading on VAV–4H–340–20 yet?” Stein’s voice, sounding distant over the terminal. Bruce snatched it from his pocket as he ran towards the escalators half a block away.
“Yes, I got it right here. It’s fuck all percent, sir.”
“Ahhhhhh, gotcha. Forty–five percent.”
“Can’t talk for long, chief,” Bruce said as he reached the escalator bank. He pushed a couple of people out of his way as he descended. “Fan room on Bridge third floor. Behind the south wall panel,” he gasped into the terminal as he reached the bottom of the escalator. He ran around the bank of escalators to go down another floor, trying to think of how to describe the mechanism he had seen in the cavity beyond. Suddenly, it hit him, the device and its purpose rendered clearly in his mind. He blurted a single word into the terminal before the sizzling sound of gunfire cut him off.
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