by Larry Niven
Instead I offered a compliment. “Sounds like you’re pretty secure. I’ve seen banks with looser systems.” I meant it too. I didn’t mention that I’d seen banks with looser systems because I’d gone in to investigate the frauds that had occurred at them.
“You’ve got to understand, there are better than two million containers in the system. Every day we move thirty thousand of them through Tiamat. The cargo value in just one of those can get into the tens of millions of crowns. We can’t just lose track of one.” There was pride in her voice. She was a hands-on technocrat and the tranship system was her baby.
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the conveyor crane. The rollers on the container rack slid us into the jaws of the waiting cradle. I felt like Captain Nemo being attacked by a giant squid. There was a clang as the locking dogs engaged and then we were on our way, swaying gently in the minuscule gravity field. The crane loaded us onto the roller rails at the end of our row of container racks. The cradle disconnected and the crane swung away. The rollers began spinning and our container moved off.
I watched out the windows like a kid on a train for the first time. There was a double jolt as we were loaded onto a sorter, then a gentle surge as we launched into free fall. I watched in fascination as we soared past the tops of the container racks. We spun slowly and I got a revolving view of the entire, bustling hub. To my surprise we didn’t come within a hundred meters of another container. What looked like near misses from below were a trick of perspective. There was all sorts of room.
We reached the top of our parabola and began to descend. There was another surge as tunnel nineteen’s container receiver pulled us in. We landed perfectly flat and I realized what the spin had been for—Maintain This End Up at All Times. The whole experience was exciting but vertigo inducing. I got my stomach back under control and looked over at Hunter. He had eschewed the human-sized observation chairs, choosing instead to curl up on top of a large tool bin that afforded him a convenient view and loosely belting himself in with some cargo straps. He looked completely at home, curse him.
I was clearly going to have to get more zero-gravity time if I was going to fit in on Tiamat.
The conveyors hummed and with a gentle swaying we slid into the yawning entrance of tunnel nineteen. The swaying stopped as our container was grabbed by the roller tracks on all four sides of the tunnel. Darkness fell as we left the entrance behind. Merral hit a switch on her control panel and the floodlights came on, lighting the way ahead.
Vertigo jerked at my stomach as my inner ears fought to reconcile themselves with my eyes. The containers move down the tunnels at about fifty kilometers an hour. That’s not very much in the scheme of things but with the tunnel walls rushing past just inches away it seems very fast indeed. The tiny pull of Tiamat’s rotation is overwhelmed by the acceleration and deceleration forces along the container’s axis as it’s braked or speeded up to allow for other traffic in the tunnel.
My brain carefully weighed all this information and decided that I was falling headfirst down a bottomless elevator shaft. It was worse than the freefall in the hub. My knuckles were white on the arms of the chair and I found I couldn’t make myself let go.
“How long will it take to get there?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. It came out sounding tense anyway.
“About forty minutes.” It was clearly just routine to Merral.
Hunter yawned, curled up and went to sleep.
A track shunt appeared ahead of us. Luminous letters flashed by, too fast to actually read but I registered them as Y2. A black opening flashed by.
I closed my eyes and took three deep breaths and found I could relax my grip. I was just sitting in a chair in very low gravity. The seatbelt pulled gently as the container responded to the tracks and I could hear the whine of the rollers. I sat on my hands and opened my eyes.
Vertigo hit again, but I forced myself to keep sitting on my hands. Eventually I got used to the view. Another opening, another junction and W1 flashed by. Merral had brought up a tiny hologram on her board. I recognized it as a map of the shipping tunnels. Tiny white dots moved slowly along its tributaries. She pointed to one highlighted in red. “That’s us.”
I asked her some more questions about the tranship net and its security arrangements. She was happy to oblige me. I got detailed information on how data was stored, how transmissions were crypted and errors caught, how containers were sealed and how physical access was controlled. It really was an impressive system but she kept using the word “fail-safe.” An engineer really ought to know better.
After a while the conversation lagged and I fell to watching the hypnotically repeating panorama of tracks, rollers and supports. P3 streaked past. I thought about Holly and Suze. P2, P1, O1, N4, N3. I stopped counting them and thought about Suze.
My reverie ended when the deceleration kicked in and pushed me against my safety belt. A scrabble of claws from behind told me that Hunter’s nap had been interrupted and he’d nearly slid out of his improvised restraints. We slowed to a fraction of our former speed. A tunnel junction was coming up.
I looked in amazement at the luminous figures on the tunnel wall. J2—the container bay that didn’t exist. The floodlights illuminated a track shunt ahead, leading into a side tunnel identical to all the others we’d passed so far. I’d expected a complex trail of trapdoor computer programs and corrupt customs checkers. I’d imagined secret doors, illicit tunnels or a Slaver device that could move cargo containers into hyperspace pockets. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I certainly hadn’t expected a perfectly normal tunnel junction, labelled with glowing letters four meters tall.
The rollers braked our container some more and we were switched onto the side track. We rocked slightly from side to side as we entered the container bay and lost the stability of being guided on all four sides. Automatic handling gear clanged as it coupled to the container’s lifting lugs and slid us up a container rack. It was only four tiers high but otherwise identical to the one we’d started in at the up-axis hub. The locking dogs engaged with a solid thump and we were stopped.
Merral looked around from the side window. “Here we are,” she said, as if there were nothing unusual about it. I looked out the window and I knew we’d hit paydirt. Jury-rigged spotlights lit the scene. Most of the immense bay was empty, with only a single row of empty racks, although the conveyer was built to service a dozen more. Another container was shunted onto the bay’s only loading ramp. Its end doors were open and stacked around it were hundreds of white plastic crates stamped with UN code numbers. I had gambled on finding a lead. I’d found smuggler central.
Hunter and I piled out and jumped the thirty meters to the ground. He landed in a combat-ready crouch. I came down less gracefully but my nerves were just as taut. I drew my stunner from its holster on the belt of my patrol pack. I don’t usually carry the pack but I was glad I’d brought it this time. Now I wished that I’d worn my body armor too. For the first time I noticed Hunter’s only weapon was his ceremonial dagger and I realized that it was all he ever carried.
Merral came down after us, cautiously. J2 was just the disused container bay she’d expected, but she was more than smart enough to make the connections. Without words she took up a position behind us, watching the tracks leading to the container tunnel and letting us concentrate on the bay itself.
Nothing moved. I was about to relax and tell Merral there was no danger when Hunter’s sharp “Siisss!” warned me to silence. He was in a frozen crouch, his ears swivelled up and forward, twitching slightly back and forth. One paw was gesturing for quiet.
Suddenly he leapt, sailing across the vast chamber in seconds. His target was the entry to an access corridor in the opposite wall. He flew through the opening with unerring precision, landed on a handhold and took off again, down the corridor and out of sight. I followed him awkwardly. I knew I could never have the big cat’s reflexes, but I fervently wished I had at least Jocelyn Merra
l’s easy grace in microgravity. I missed my jump by better than twenty meters and floundered down while she waited patiently. The access corridor was half a klick long. I swallowed my ego and let Merral hold on to me. She pushed off into a long parabola. A couple of kicks en route brought us to the end of the corridor. The pressure door to the next section was closed and Hunter was examining it intently. He turned to us as we arrived.
“I heard a sound, which I now presume was this door being opened and then shut. There is fresh scent in this tunnel of a human male. He must have fled when our container’s lights entered the trackway.” The kzin showed his fangs and licked his chops with a deep-throated mrrrowl. “There is much fear in his sweat.”
I went to thumb the door open but the plate had been ripped open and bypassed. Not even an ARM ident would work now. Closer inspection revealed the locking mechanism. A hole had been cut in the door’s plasteel surface and a simple lever and pivot engaged the securing bolts inside. A metal pin attached to a chain could be inserted to hold the lever in the locked position. With the pin in place the door was proof against anything short of heavy energy weapons. The holes rendered the door useless in a depressurization emergency, but the smugglers wouldn’t be worried about that.
I tried the handle reflexively. It didn’t budge.
“I have already attempted that,” said Hunter mildly.
“It’s clear we’re not going to get through. Let’s seal this bay off and get the crime scene team down here.”
I grabbed the comm unit from my patrol pack and called Dispatch. I didn’t get anything but static. No repeaters in this unfinished section. Our runner had made a clean getaway.
Merral noticed the problem. “There’s a Port Authority comm on the control board in the container.” Hunter snarled in acknowledgement and launched himself back down the corridor, eager to be on with the chase.
I let him go, turning to Merral. “You know about this place?”
“Of course.” She gestured at the door and the pirated wiring the smugglers had used to power their floodlights. “Although evidently I didn’t know everything I thought I did.”
“Tell me about it.” We turned back down the corridor.
“This bay was supposed to serve a whole new industrial subsector they were going to put in right after the liberation. Turns out they overestimated the requirements and they never needed the space, so they just sealed it off and left it.”
Her explanation made sense but there were other problems. “The tranship net doesn’t even know it exists.”
We turned the accessway corner into the main bay. Hunter jumped down from the container. “The crime scene team and a detachment of Goldskins are on their way. They will open the pressure door from the other side. I will meet them there.” He leapt off again without waiting for an answer.
“Of course it does,” Merral continued.
“It doesn’t.” I paused, decided to trust her. The smugglers already knew we were on to them anyway. “Miranda Holtzman’s internal organs were found in a shipping container on Wunderland, along with a cache of stolen UN weapons. The container’s point of origin was 19J2, but when I tried to punch up the data on it the system drew a blank.”
“You did a shipping trace to get that data, right?”
“Yah.”
She nodded. “When you do a trace, the net uses the billing system data because normally you’re interested in who owns the shipment and who’s paying for it. This bay isn’t in the billing system because no customers are registered to it so it would never show up. But the routing software knows about every node around Alpha Centauri and that’s the data set that gets used when a shipment is set up and verified.”
The picture became clearer. “Is there any way someone could swap the source and destination addresses without a Port Authority ident, or at least without logging it in the computer?”
“Too easy.” She laughed and tapped a few keys on a board at the base of the container racks. Its display came up with a duplicate of the inspection container’s shipping panel. Another press brought up SRC and DST. She hit a final key and the readout flashed REJECTED for a moment and then, magically, TMU19J234C and TMUCA147A switched places from origin to destination. “You just refuse delivery.”
“What?”
“You refuse delivery. If you accept the shipment, you need a PA ident to accept the COD, clear customs control, verify the manifest and all that. If you refuse delivery, the tranship box just gets bounced back to point of origin still sealed so none of that matters, so you don’t need the ident. The shipper’s delivery bond is forfeited to pay for shipping the container back and the transaction is cleared out of the net. It’s a user function.”
“A user function?” I couldn’t believe my ears. “What happens if a refused shipment gets re-refused by the shipper?”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“What would happen?” I tried to keep my voice level.
She shrugged. “I don’t know…” She paused, thinking. “Grounded at the originating port, I suppose. At worst it would go back to the recipient again. It couldn’t get lost or redirected, only a PA ident can change the source or destination. Nobody could claim it unless they signed off with us.” She paused again. “Unless…”
“Unless it got shipped here.”
She nodded, understanding the problem. The tranship system had a couple of assumptions built into it—that the Port Authority was physically present at all the system endpoints, and that no shipper would refuse its own refused container. With dynamic encryption and multilayered security measures, the system was considered fail-safe. But a couple of reasonable assumptions made a security hole big enough to shove a twenty-meter container box through that wasn’t defined as a failure. There were no hackers, no high-level corruption. The system just worked the way it was designed to. It was a brilliant setup, a sort of digital jujitsu. The smugglers were only caught because of human error. I wondered if they considered their system fail-safe too.
It would be a while before the crime scene team arrived. Merral scrambled up the container rack to call in her findings to her team. I took the opportunity to look into the cargo box on the loading ramp. I got a shock. The white crates were all clearly labeled. They contained high-tech drugs, each molecule assembled atom by atom in zero gravity. I recognized some of the names—Polyhalazone, Quadrol and Ricaline. Every case here was worth fifty thousand crowns at a minimum, at least triple that on the black market, and there were hundreds of cases. There was more in the container, stacked parcels of brown quickwrap a half meter on a side. I ripped one open. Brand new fifty krona wafers spilled onto the floor. I couldn’t begin to guess how much was in the package. The next package yielded twenties. I ripped open a third. Hundreds. I picked one up and looked it over carefully. It gave away nothing to the naked eye although I knew it had to be counterfeit. I would have heard of a theft this big—the whole system would have. I was willing to bet it was a very good counterfeit. The Isolationists never did anything with half measures.
The scale wasn’t half-measured either. I counted packages and did some quick mental arithmetic, then did it again because I didn’t believe the results the first time. This container held a billion crowns at a conservative estimate. The krona isn’t the rock solid currency it used to be. Its value has been steadily eroded since the start of the occupation and the slide has only accelerated since the liberation. Even so, a billion crowns was a staggering sum. A fraction of a percent of counterfeits in the cash supply will upset a currency’s stability. With the Provo Government’s grip already shaky, there was enough here to undermine the entire system’s economy. If this container got through to Wunderland, Alpha Centauri would be in chaos within a month.
It wouldn’t, though, because we’d gotten here first. I felt suddenly shaky. This was a major haul. I was well aware of what the Provos knew and did not know about the Isolationists. The scale of their smuggling system, their expansion into medical facilities an
d organlegging and their counterfeiting operation were all new pieces of information. We were going to get positive DNA idents from this site, and the Goldskin interrogators would get the names we didn’t have from the ones we caught. This investigation was going to break the back of the Isolationists in the Swarm before they even got going and shut down a huge smuggling ring as well. The information we gained would let the Provopolizei put a major crimp in their operations on Wunderland too.
It was a good feeling—it was the way I used to feel when Prakit and I started to unravel one of our big cases back on Earth. And why not? This was just as big—maybe bigger. Tiamat might well wind up crowning my career and I’d only been here a month.
My enthusiasm damped itself. The whole Wunderland half of the project depended on the Provopolizei. They might well be “convinced” to close the case down by some pro-Isolationist politician.
I shook off the negative images. I was doing my job and doing it well. Wunderland was out of my control, but I’d already scored a major victory just by catching this shipment. No politician could take that away from me.
Merral came in, gasping when she saw the cash.
“Impressive, eh?”
She just nodded.
“Don’t get too excited, it’s not real.”
She looked at the stacked packages “There must be hundreds of millions of crowns here.”
“A billion at the very least.”
She whistled. “They could crash the market with this.”
“I think that’s the plan.”
She tore her gaze away from the money and handed me a hardcopy. “Here, you’re going to need this.”
It was from the data terminal in the inspection container. It listed thirty-six tranship boxes that had passed through 19J2 at some point, along with their points of origin, shipper, receiver and supposed manifest. This bay was a hub for smuggling activities ranging from UN outposts at the edge of the system to remote monorail stations deep in the Jotuns on Wunderland. One container was even shuttling back and forth from Earth itself.
