Kill Station (11 page)

The woman was sinuously slender: she could hardly have weighed more
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than 125 pounds, and she was two meters tall if she was an inch. She had black hair half as long as she was, and she was wearing a smudged grey skinsuit with a quilted rusty black jacket over it, and heavy boots of the kind that locked into the bottom of a pressure suit. She was presently inserting one of them, hard, in some guy's midriff.

She glanced at him, barely more than a flicker of eyes, as the man she had kicked went down. Another of the crowd went for Evan, a big bear of a man hardly smaller than he was. Evan wasted no further time, but stabbed the man stiff-fingered in the larynx, and stepped forward to punch a tall, skinny man who was standing behind him, desperately trying to fit together the separated gun and power pack. Pack and gun went flying again, and the man went down.

Immediately thereafter came a short, tough-looking man who had a metal chair in his hands; together man and chair described a short, graceful arc and fell on the tall, skinny man. Evan turned to see the woman dusting her hands off thoughtfully.

"Anybody else?" Evan said to the room at large, turning and glowering at everyone, one at a time. The patrons who had remained sitting either shook their heads, or dropped their eyes and got very interested in their drinks.

"Good," Evan said. He looked over at the barman and said, "Call Noel Hayden and tell him to come get this turkey and shove him out an airlock in his underwear. And then," Evan said, turning, "find out what this lady will have to drink.''

She nodded, smiled at him, went to the bar, picked up one overturned bar stool, and then another, sat on one of them, and tilted her head at the other one, looking at Evan.

That was how he met Mell Fontenay.

THREE

JOSS STRETCHED, AND TOSSED THE LAST PIECE

of paper to the floor, then sat back and flexed his fingers.
The best thing that ever happened to me,
he thought,
was my touch typing course.

He drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair for a moment. There were a lot of data to sort through here, and it was going to take a good while for him to figure out what it all meant. One thing was clear, though: the disappearances had been going on for even longer than Noel had thought. It was at least four months since people had started disappearing in the same way. They would set out and they would not report in, usually within a period of no more than three days and no less than one. There might be more statistical factors involved, but Joss would let the computer play with its data and work out the details on those. He would follow the case that immediately attracted him.

He leaned back a bit farther and smiled to himself. Usually Evan was the one who had hunches. Joss had started out by laughing at them; then he had found that they weren't so laughable. Slowly he had started experimenting with following his own hunches. Sometimes, surprisingly often, they worked. They made him uncomfortable, though. His way of handling things had always been slow reasoning, logic, working things out step by step.

A man's got to learn new things, though,
Joss thought, getting up and heading for the communications console.

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He touched it and said, "Willans control, this is SP vessel CDZ 8064. Anybody home?"

"Sure are, Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey," said a cheerful voice. "What about that drink we were supposed to have?''

"Oh, hell!"

"That's what I like to hear," the voice came back: "enthusiasm."

"Sorry, Cecile! I got snowed under with paperwork." He looked around the control cabin with some regret, the white mass all over the floor did indeed suggest Crans-Montana around Christmas time. "How late are you on, anyway? I would have thought you'd be off by now. Don't you sleep?"

"Life's too short, Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey." She chuckled at him. "I've got a few hours to go yet. One of my night people is down with the Titanian two-step."

"Not catching, I hope!"

"Oh no," Cecile said, "it was something she ate. Some Hungarian thing at Satra's."

"Oh dear," Joss said, "so much for the one good restaurant here. ..."

"Are you kidding?" asked Cecile. "There are about five good restaurants on this miserable rock, and my kids run two of them."

Joss shook his head in wonder. "Cecile, I promise you, I'll take you out to dinner at all of them."

There was another chuckle. "Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey, I bet you say that to all the girls."

"What the hell?" Joss said. "Sometimes it even works. About that drink, Cecile. I have to take a quick run over to the salvage heap. Take me about an hour, an hour and a half, to do what I need to do. Think you'll still be in the mood for that drink?"

"Sounds about right. Just give me a call when you come back. You know how to do the remote procedure on the hangar doors now?''

"First thing I checked," Joss said, "I tell you, Cecile,
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this business ain't what it's cracked up to be. Glory and good pay, they promised me. I'd make more if I hired myself out as a secretary. And I wouldn't have to carry all these guns."

Laughter at the other end. "Always thought you guys liked the guns and all."

"They're a nuisance to keep clean," Joss said, "and if you walk into anything while you're wearing them, they bruise your legs up something awful. Never mind that just now. I've got to get out there and do sop things."

"Right you are. Willans control out."

Joss sighed and started picked up the paper from the floor, tossing it all in a pile on his bed, and shutting his stateroom door on it. There would be time to tidy everything back into order later; right now he was having suspicions, and those suspicions were distracting him from cleaning at the moment. He was glad of the distraction, too. He normally didn't like cleaning much, but Evan was awfully fussy, especially about their new ship and all.

He made his way back to the control console, tapped at it for a moment, and started the procedure that would open the inner doors of the hangar dome airlock. Then he started the heating process for the vectored jets and the iondriver engine.

There was an odd noise. He paused to listen to it: a sort of whine, it was, very peculiar indeed. He thought he knew every noise that this machine could make, but then again, they'd only had it for a few weeks. "Hmm," Joss said, and shut the vectored thrusters down.

The whine went away.

"Hmm," he said again, and killed the warmup of the iondrivers as well. For a few moments he just sat there, staring at the control console, and thought. He thought first of the weird patches on the domes, and the bizarrely patched-together ships in the hangar dome. Then he thought of the work he needed to be doing, and how little of it he would get done if he had to spend the next two days crawling around in the engines of his ship.

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He hit another control. "Willans control," he said finally, "this is CDZ 8064—"

"Done already, Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey?" Cecile asked.

"No such luck. Cecile, have you got a good mechanic on call? I mean, a really good one?"

"Only kind we have around here," Cecile said mildly. "We tend to lose all the others."

"Good," Joss said. "I think I need one."

"I have somebody I can get over to you in a little bit," Cecile said. "May take awhile. It's off-shift time."

"No problem with that. I still have to go over to the salvage heap. I'll just walk instead."

"Exercise'll do you good," Cecile said. "Especially if we're going to all those restaurants."

Joss smiled. "Cecile," he said, "what do you look like?"

"I'm tall, with no neck, bad breath, and six grandchildren."

"Ah," Joss said, "an
experienced
woman."

Cecile burst out laughing. "Never mind that, you. Have a nice walk. Mind the holes; there are some pretty big ones out there."

"Will do, Gramma."

"That's
Ms,
Grandma to you, Mister Sop O'Bannion Honey. Willans control out."

Joss chuckled and cut the connection, then headed back into his stateroom to pull his pressure suit down out of its clamps.

IT WAS A PLEASANT WALK, IF A LONGISH ONE.

The salvage dump was well away from the settled part of the station, and was little more than a crater, somewhat slagged out to make it less easy for ships to be jarred out of position when others were dropped on top of them.

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There were always four or five ships in there, according to Noel. The salvage assessors came through about once every month or month and a half, to determine amounts to be paid to salvaging miners, and to take away wrecks that had already been assessed and were ready to be scrapped. Joss was very interested indeed in looking at these ships to see whether any of them were by chance pieces of ships that had been reported missing, and to talk to the people who had brought them in. Noel hadn't immediately recognized any of them, true, but Joss had the feeling that Noel had so much to do, he might easily have missed something.

There really ought to be about four sops stationed here,
Joss thought irritably, as he bounced gently along the rocky surface. The Sun was on the other side of the asteroid at the moment, and it was as dark as it might be on the back side of the Moon. There was nothing to go by but the bobbing light from outside his suit's helmet and the iner-tial tracker inside it, which he had programmed with the dump's coordinates before leaving.

He watched the dust puif up from where his boots scuffed the surface—not real dust, of course, but the remnants of micrometeorite impacts over days and years.
Not nearly enough people to handle an area of this size,
he thought.

What kind of police force are we supposed to be running out here, anyway? Poor Noel must have something like
sixteen million cubic kilometers that he's responsible for. And a shoestring to run it on, poor kid.

Joss paused for a moment, checking his tracker to make sure he was headed the right way. Even on a body this small, it was too easy to get lost. But Joss was Moon-raised, and had the habits and reflexes of someone who had seen friends of twelve and thirteen go out, get careless, and not come back. In one case not even the kid's body had been found.
At
the bottom of some crater,
Joss thought,
or buried under some fall of moondust, I guess.
But it had tended to make the survivors careful.

He checked his tracker again.
A little to the left,
he

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thought;
sunward—
He bounced off that way, and came over the short apparent horizon to see the dump.

What a mess,
he thought. There, in a hole in the ground, was a tumbled pile of twisted-up metal: boxy bits, round bits, struts and pads sticking up in the air like the feet of dead bugs, all extremely untidy, looking like the toy box of an extremely destructive child giant.
Going to be the devil's own business looking at the stuff that's buried farthest
down,
Joss thought.
Oh well.

He bounced on over to the hole. It was nearly an eighth of a mile wide, and no more than about a hundred feet deep.

He paused a moment to wake up the small reference pad mounted on the forearm of his pressure suit. It had stored in it all the makes and registration numbers of the ships whose disappearances had been suspicious, and its link to his main datapad, back in the ship, was wide awake and working.

Now, then,
Joss thought, and hopped cheerfully down into the hole to start doing more clerical work.

For about three-quarters of ah hour he strolled around the edges of the pile, pausing every now and then to peer more closely at something. There were about thirty ships here at the moment. According to Noel, it had been about two months since there had been a collection—something about a very large salvage find further along in the Belts, which had kept the assessors from arriving as scheduled. There was an astonishing assortment of junk here: VW's that had to be forty years old, Ladas that had to be fifty.
Heaven only knows how they lasted that long,
Joss thought, since Lada was really not the best of the brands; there were more jokes about Ladas than about any of the others.
Then
again,
Joss thought,
maybe this one did break down fifty years ago.
... It looked likely enough. The thing didn't have a mark on it except for the usual slight collisions and bumps. Joss noted its number down on his pad and moved on to the next dead ship, wondering how a brand could go on so long when its craft had a rep for being so poor. /
guess
there are always people who're

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willing to buy something cheap that works, and take their chances on when it might stop working. . . .

Slowly he worked his way around the pile, pausing about halfway through as the Sun suddenly came up, throwing long black shadows over everything and momentarily confusing his directional sense. The asteroid had a slow longitudinal tumble; this "day" wouldn't last for long.
May as well make the most of it,
he thought.

Joss paused near the wreckage of an old Skoda medium-range cargo hauler and looked it over. Its engines had been cannibalized—no surprise, that: engine systems were the most adaptable parts of most of these craft, and could be fitted to almost anything if you had the know-how. The big squarish cargo shell was all that was left; its landing struts were broken off halfway by another craft, a Chevy, which had been dropped on top of it. The engine module was broken open like an eggshell, and cables and connectors dangled out of it, frayed and dusty. Joss leaned in to look at it, brushed some dust aside, and saw on the hull metal the scrapes and pinchmarks of a large waldo that had torn the module open.