by Lee Killough
“After going over what we learned during Dr. Kolb’s examination of the body, I thought—”
“You told him that in your opinion the body had been used to smuggle something off the station.”
Janna winced inwardly at in your opinion.
If Mama did, too, it never showed. “It’s Dr. Kolb’s opinion as well. So I—”
“Informed a possible suspect that we discovered his crime?”
Singh’s mouth tightened.
Incredibly, Mama shrugged. “If he’s innocent of involvement, he needed to know what’s happened. If he’s involved, informing him could make him think he’s gotten away with it. I wanted to see his reaction.”
“Which was to deny any possibility of smuggling.”
“Of course, but . . . I found the denial interesting. Let me play a recording of the conversation for you.”
“I’ve already seen it, courtesy of Director Fontana, thank you. Now, I think we should have included the gentleman in the discussion.” He pointed behind them and ran his fingers over a keyboard in his desktop.
They turned to see flickering patterns on the screen behind the conference table resolve into the face of Leonard Fontana.
“Here they are, Mr. Fontana,” Paget said. “Detective Maxwell I’m sure you recognize. Next to him is his partner Detective Brill, and Lieutenant Singh. The floor is yours.”
Fontana nodded, his expression intently sincere as a politician’s. “Thank you, Director. I apologize again, sir, for interrupting your Sunday — here I tend to forget what day of the week it is there. I wanted to convey to you and the detectives my gratitude for finding Paul Chenoweth’s body, and hope you soon bring to justice the individuals who treated it so savagely. At the same time let me urge you not to waste the government’s time by calling in federal agents.”
“Smuggling—” Mama began.
“There has been no smuggling!”
Behind Janna, Paget said, “I have to say that I find the evidence for it compelling.”
The wolf’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. “The evidence is mistaken!”
“Our evidence,” Mama said, “includes some we haven’t had time to write up. This morning we were able to identify who hired individuals to jack the hearse, but then personally vandalized the hearse and mutilated Mr. Chenoweth’s body to recover the data stick. Denis Bekker of Johannesburg, South Africa, and Aliss Matiba of Nairobi, Kenya.”
Singh straightened in her chair.
Janna’s peripheral vision caught Paget coming on alert as well.
Fontana maintained annoyance. “Identified but not apprehended, I take it.”
Mama said, “They flew to KCI early Saturday morning and are likely out of the country by now.”
“Then you can’t confirm—”
“Mr. Fontana, I understand your concern about station security, and additionally how that might affect the stockholder meeting on Friday, but—”
“Stockholder meeting?” Fontana stared at Mama, something flickering in his eyes. Surprise Mama knew about it? Reassessment of him? “We won’t be affected by that.”
“Doesn’t that depend on whether Crispin Lanour remains CEO?”
“No.” Spoken with flat confidence.
Time for her to have a say, Janna decided. “Smuggling aside, we have questions about Mr. Chenoweth’s death. He made an ideal courier, with his implant’s opacity concealing the data stick from scans and its location accessible with such minimal invasion it didn’t register on your scan.”
The wolf’s eyes went back to narrow. “We investigated his death. It was a tragic accident. Even being an ideal courier, as you put it, he was not used for smuggling because, I repeat . . . nothing has been smuggled off the station.”
“He died on Tuesday.”
Fontana hesitated a moment, eyes wary. “Yes.”
“We have information that Monday evening Dekker and Matiba recruited individuals to jack a hearse coming from Forbes later that week.”
Fontana froze, staring at them. Shocked? Trying to absorb the implications of that? Or, if he were involved in the smuggling, dismayed at that information’s discovery? He took a breath. “Monday? That’s . . . very disturbing.” He paused, looking thoughtful, then took a breath and smiled. “Director Paget, with your permission I would like to invite your two detectives to be my guests for a tour of the station. Being leos, they might enjoy observing our security system.”
Janna blinked. What? She turned to see Paget staring at Fontana, then swung back to find Fontana’s gaze fixed on Paget. Neither spoke for most of a minute, but their expressions conveyed a silent, intense conversation.
Was Fontana offering what she suspected?
Apparently Mama thought so. Her cell, set to vibrate as they came up in the elevator, sent a tingle into her leg from her cargo pocket. Pulling it out, she found a text from him. Will let us review the investigation.
Paget broke the silence. “Guests?”
“Guests,” Fontana said. “My way of thanking them for finding my employee’s body and giving his family closure.”
“When would this be?”
Janna stared at Paget. Was he actually considering the offer?
Fontana glanced off to his right. “There’s a supply shuttle leaving Forbes at five hundred hours tomorrow. I’ll contact Terratrans and ask that the shuttle accommodate two passengers as well.”
“How long would this visit last?” Paget asked.
“Right now we’re in a personnel turnover period and have shuttles arriving every two or three days. They can return on one at the end of the week with outgoing personnel. Is that agreeable?”
“We can manage without them for that long.”
Goosebumps ran down Janna’s arms. Going to a space station topped even the childhood shuttle hop to China with her father. But . . . to a station with a killer on it, maybe invited by the killer?
With that thought, she nearly missed the conclusion of the conversation between Fontana and Paget . . . requiring they leave their weapons behind.
“Only my security staff are armed. We want our personnel feeling safe, not intimidated.”
After Fontana disconnected, Paget’s eyes bored into them. “I’m sure you heard what Fontana didn’t say. You’ll have the chance to examine the evidence in Chenoweth’s death. Very unofficially. So Brill, keep a leash on Maxwell and both of you tread lightly. Their people won’t welcome you second-guessing them. Remember . . . there’s no backup if you get in trouble there.” He gave them a wintry smile. “Bon voyage.”
Chapter Six
Wednesday
The shuttle captain, a small, stocky woman with Slavic features, called over her shoulder. “We’re coming up on the Lanour. I thought you’d want to see it before we start to maneuver for docking.”
“Thank you!” Using overhead straps, Janna pulled herself forward past the navigator, to where she could peer over Captain Varla Dorrance out the front windows. She sighed happily.
As a freighter, the shuttle lacked passenger amenities. Sleeping required hot-bunking, she and Mama taking turns zipping themselves into a crew hammock . . . where she had been until Mama roused her at Dorrance’s request. But along with the crew they enjoyed the same choice packaged meals as Moon and Mars passengers, plus trips into the cockpit for a pilot’s view of the universe.
Lanky co-pilot Jess Coulter grinned up at her. “In some ways, we never stop being kids, do we?”
“No,” Mama said as he joined them. “Even if some of us need to let out the kid more often.”
Janna refused to answer the jibe when she had this view in front of her.
Surrounded by stars glittering like ice chips on black velvet, the Earth filled the sky ahead, a glowing, luminous blue splashed with brown continents and the white swirls of weather systems. Did colonists, looking down on it during the shuttle flight up to their ships, have second thoughts about leaving? As Fontana had told Mama in that first phone conversation, from here the worl
d looked peaceful and beautiful, none of the evils showing.
Just as beautiful to her eyes, though, were the shuttles . . . taller than a two-storey house, the pointed nose and delta wings with their upswept and inward-leaning tips giving them the wicked look of manta-rays. A manta that took off like conventional aircraft and climbed toward space first on conventional jets, then scrams. But where the hop shuttles turned back earthward at apogee, theirs fired rockets that kicked them out of the atmosphere. The navigator, a wiry, dusky-skinned man who insisted on being called Grinch, gave them a running commentary during the forty-five minutes from ground to orbit. The short leg of the trip. One did not fly straight to space stations, Grinch explained. They spent two days chasing down Lanour’s . . . or letting it catch up with them.
“I don’t see the station,” Janna said.
“There.” Dorrance pointed.
Then Janna saw it, a black silhouette floating against the glow of the planet. A long shaft with modules like fat fingers protruding from all sides . . . topped by a great spread of solar panels and a bulbous structure like a knob on a newel post. A pair of module groups a short way down the shaft, and more toward the bottom, had been turned into wheels, fat rims linking the outer ends of the modules.
“It looks like the rims of the lower rings are finished now,” Coulter said. “You have to wonder what’s going in there. Labs that need gravity?”
Grinch said, “Something mega important. I hear Old Man Lanour’s made three visits in the past six months.”
Even excited about being here, seeing that station so far above Earth — so isolated — brought back the knowledge that somewhere in it lurked a killer. A killer familiar with the territory as they were not, with every opportunity to observe them as they came without backup and unarmed.
Well they would just have to tread not only lightly, but warily. Watching each other’s back.
“Time to belt in,” Dorrance said as the station grew to fill their view.
Janna said, “If you’re not going to change that sweater first, Mama.”
He glanced down at the sulphurous yellow reindeer flying across a screaming green sky. “I’m fine.”
Dorrance and Coulter exchanged smiles. “He’ll fit right in.”
She and Mama shuffled for their seats . . . feet adhering, tenuously, to the deck . . . courtesy of magnetic soles on the moccasins they bought at Forbes before boarding. The moccasins let them stroll or stand in place, but did not hold for a vigorous stride . . . or collision with Mama. That had sent her tumbling until she caught an overhead handhold. The crew wore their mag soles on ankle boots.
Docking took what seemed an excruciating amount of time, involving small jerks and continuous muttering by the pilots . . . responding to communication from the station audible only to them. By leaning hard into her harness, Janna had a partial view of the front windows, which showed the solar panels passing overhead.
The shuttle jolted.
“That’s the vacuum grapple attaching to tow us into the slip,” Grinch said.
The pull pressed Janna against the side of her seat, which turned into a bounce the other direction as it ceased.
Grinch’s hands played across his board, shutting it down. “Now comes the gangway.”
A mechanical whine passed overhead.
“Followed by sealing to us.”
Janna felt another jolt and a shudder that ran through the shuttle.
Grinch turned to grin at them, releasing his harness. “The remora has landed.”
Janna and Mama released their harnesses.
Dorrance and Coulter did so, too, when something rattled across overhead. “There’s the red carpet. Gangway’s open. Take our passengers up, will you, Grinch?”
Grinch shoved aft from his chair to a ladder on the bulkhead between the cockpit and crew quarters. One pull carried him up it to a hatch at the top. A panel there opened to reveal electronic controls. Holding the ladder with one hand, he tapped the controls, then cranked the handle in the middle of the hatch. Hissing, the hatch lifted and slid aside.
Grinch beckoned. “Ladies and gentlemen, before disembarking, please check around your seats for luggage and other personal items. We hope you enjoyed your flight and thank you for making Terratrans your transport choice. Follow me.” Somersaulting, he disappeared feet-first through the hatch.
Janna collected her duffle from under the seat and slung it across her back. But up at the hatch, she went through head-first rather than copy Grinch’s more athletic exit.
She emerged through the hatch to find herself in a chilly accordion tunnel arching across the shuttle’s top and stretching aft to the tail. Now she understood Grinch’s remora comment. A bulging pinkish layer where the gangway edges met the shuttle did suggest lips sucking on the hull.
And there lay the red carpet. More a tarp than carpet but red-ish, covering most of the shuttle’s top from the side of the hatch to the gangway wall and the gangway entrance back to the slowly folding wings of the cargo hold doors. Down the middle of it lay a conveyor . . . rollers between raised sides. Janna pictured the shuttle’s built-in crane placing containers on them and someone giving each a shove to send it down the gangway to the receiving bay.
Grinch caught her arm and pulled her sideways onto the tarp. “Keep along the conveyor.”
Gladly. Standing on the tarp brought the same tug at her moccasins as on the shuttle’s deck. Which let her walk to the receiving bay as well as protect the shuttle’s surface during off-loading. Hopefully the receiving bay had a deck like the shuttle, because approaching the gangway entrance, she saw no handholds in the huge space beyond.
It did, as the first step off the tarp reassured her. The second step froze her. A half dozen males and females clustered around the gangway exit . . . wearing uniformly short hair, ankle boots, and orange and yellow slim-fit coveralls. The coveralls, however, came in varying patterns and some blistering shades Mama must envy. Only three stood on the deck, however. Two extended sideways from the bulkhead beside the gangway entrance and a fem hung bat-like from the bottom of an overhead girder.
Behind her, Mama whispered, “Looks fun. We should join them.”
Fun? All right. Anything to quit gawking like a tourist.
Forcing herself not to shuffle, just keep her feet close to the deck in the gliding step the shuttle crew taught them, Janna moved to the bulkhead. She put a foot up on it — holding her breath, half expecting to fall — followed that with the other foot. Then took another step up, and another, until about three feet up.
Where the bulkhead suddenly became “down” to her. The receiving bay, now vertical, looked larger, and threatening, as it rose above her. The expanse dwarfed a group just visible on the far side of a wide shaft running through the center.
Janna counted two more gangway-sized hatches in the bay’s circumference, with the spacing indicating a third out of sight beyond the shaft.
Docking for four shuttles at a time. She would have thought only a station assembling colony ships handled that much traffic.
Applause caught her attention. For Mama, she discovered. He had gone her bulkhead walk one better, springing free of the deck for an overhead girder, where he hung from it like the deck crew fem.
Though from her orientation, he looked horizontal.
Then one of the crew said, “Hey, Grinch. Were things starting to thaw down there when you lifted off?”
The navigator had stepped out of the gangway.
He rolled his eyes. “Not even with the presidential rhetoric heating up.”
“You didn’t happen to chat with the Glenn in passing, did you? The gossip channel signals we’re catching claim Misty Armes has joined the Jubilee Company getting ready to launch from there. Every het jon and ho fem in Stores wants to know if this is the end of VR rump romps with her.”
Grinch shrugged. “Sorry.”
A big jon in solid yellow said, “Okay, enough. We have supplies to offload.” He reached up to t
he headband Janna noticed everyone wore and pulled forward. Part hinged down into a thin arc of visor. It made Janna miss her own visor, left behind with her Starke. Never mind that the loss of connection to Com and Data made it useless. The lack of communication signified by its absence emphasized her sense of isolation. And vulnerability. At least she still had her badge, meaningless as it might be here.
After working his fingers in the air, the big jon shoved the visor back up. “They’re ready for us in Two B.”
The crew pushed from the girder and bulkhead to the desk. Half of them glided into the gangway.
Grinch said, “Is there someone to take our passengers where they need to go?”
“Me,” said a female arriving from the direction of the shaft. An attractive Oriental in a sleek, pearly body suit, and braided hair coiled tightly on her head.
She smiled brightly at Mama. “I’m Ginneh Nakashima, Mr. Fontana’s executive assistant. He sends his apologies for not meeting you personally, but our local time is seven am and as usual at the beginning of the day, he’s tied up with administrative details. I’ll show you to your quarters. By the time you’re settled he should be ready to have you join him.”
Janna shuffled back down to the deck, relieved to have directions normal again.
Mama pushed off the girder to join her, and they followed Nakashima to the central shaft.
“Are they coming with us?” Janna pointed to a female on around the shaft, part of the group she saw earlier.
Nakashima shook her head. “They’re waiting for exit scans before boarding their shuttle.” She pointed at a closed hatch with a red light glowing above it. “The scanner is on around the shaft.”
“Director Fontana mentioned an annual turnover,” Janna said.
Nakashima nodded. “Personnel working on a year’s contract, and a few individuals whose failed health checks are unfortunately forcing them to return to Earth. Not everyone’s body tolerates the conditions here.”
“Bone loss,” Mama said.
“That’s one problem, in spite of measures we take to combat it.”
