Kill Station (17 page)

"I'd tell them I was going somewhere else," she said mildly. "You must run into that kind of thing every now and then."

Joss chuckled. "I mean, if you were a miner."

"Heaven forbid. Horrible lifestyle it is." There was a brief pause. "You're asking about how people hide their claims, I think."

"It was just a thought."

Cecile laughed. "Mister Sop Honey," she said, "there's probably more ways to do that than there are to skin a cat. Not that anyone I know would skin one; we have too many rats as it is, nasty things. Well, certainly the claim transmitter lets you know whose the claim is, if you can get close enough. But nobody wants anyone to get too close, right? Because that way they can avoid trouble. You'll have noticed that people tend not to file flight plans."

"Yes," Joss said, "and only the fact that we have five hundred million cubic kilometers of space in this part of the Belts keeps them all from ramming into each other."

Cecile laughed at him. ' 'Sop Honey, flight plans are an inner-planet invention. No one here needs to know where somebody else is going."

"They do if that somebody doesn't come back! And besides," Joss said, "the kind of electronics some of these ships are carrying, they couldn't tell if anyone else was coming if the other ship was exploding nukes to announce its presence. A lot of the ships in that hangar dome seem to think navigational hardware is an unnecessary luxury."

"For a lot of them, it is," Cecile said. "They can't afford it. They need drills and waldoes and explosives much more than they need fancy machines to talk to other ships. They don't
want
to see other ships, anyway."

"So they don't have the fancy equipment," Joss said.

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But even the least sociable of the miners has a check-in routine."

"Most of them do," Cecfle said. "They arrange to send us a signal, oh, every week or so. Since most of them tend to work a circular course around the station, and then spiral in toward the end of it, that works pretty well."

"I can see where it would," Joss said, seeing that the data transfer had ended. He cleared the pad, and brought up a scribble surface, reaching for his stylus. "So the station might be here—" he drew a dot "—and the miner would be out here somewhere," he said drawing a circle around it. "And at different points along that circle—or along a set of circles, since he might do more than one— he has his ship send a signal."

"That's right."

"And the signal is directional, of course."

"Along one line, yes. We can get a pretty crude trian-gulation, if we have reason to try: we have receiver masts at both ends of the asteroid. But it's not much of a baseline, and the parallax measurement is very, very tight. Mostly we don't bother."

"Well, you'd have no real reason most of the time. But a snooper who was keeping track of the direction their signals were coming from, and who knew the timing, could get a pretty good triangulation if he or she were out in a ship on his own, say fifty or a hundred kilometers out, and caught the new signal as it was coming in. He would use Willans as the other end of the baseline, and nail the location of the signal in tnree dimensions."

"Sure he could," Cecile said thoughtfully. "And then if he did that several tunes, whoever was out in the other ship would be able to establish the location of the circle, in three dimensions, as you say, and probably find the other guy's claim as well."

"It would take time, but it's doable," Joss said, doodling on the screen. "I'm trying to think of ways to subvert this process. I mean, if you know people are going to be doing it—"

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There was a pause. "You know," Cecile said, "I would find a way to send a signal from somewhere I wasn't."

"You have a sneaky mind, Gramma," Joss said. "So would I. I would rig a relay of some kind, and shoot it off on that circular orbit. And then I'd be somewhere else."

"But where?" Cecile asked.

"The other direction? If I were being mulish and individualistic and all?"

"Enough people here would do that," Cecile said. "I think the word you're looking for is 'ornery.' "

"Exactly," Joss said, considering that it was time he had another look at
Death Valley Days.

"Unfortunately, that only leaves about four hundred million cubic klicks of space in which to look for you."

"Seems like an advantage to me," Cecile said.

"You've got a point there." Joss stared at his pad. He didn't say what he was thinking—that the present proposition was a problem only if you had a single trace, or set of traces, to work from. If you had quite a few of them, and plotted those traces all at once, you might well have a better idea of where to look for that relay—or relays. It seemed likely there might be more than one.

"Heavens," Joss said, "this is frustrating. What would you do next, Cecile?" Joss, cleared the pad, asking it covertly to pull the entire Willans communications records for the last three months, without telling Cecile. The pad got busy with this.

"Go out for dinner. I know a nice little Italian place—"

"Run by one of your grandchildren?"

' 'I can see why you're in the police. Indeed I can, Mister Sop Honey. Do you like
calamari?"

Joss was amused. "You raise
calamari
here too?"

"No," Cecile said, "but the grandchild does a pretty fair fake out of soy protein."

The pad quietly told Joss that it was finished. "You interest me strangely, madam," Joss said. "Tonight, maybe?"

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"Depends on work," Cecile said. "I'll give you a call, if I may."

"You're on," Joss said. "Later, Cecile."

"Right, Mister Sop Honey."

Joss stroked the pad's control surface for a moment, getting it to connect up to the holographic display over the command console. When the connection was made, he started plotting,
in
three dimensions, every location fix from every ship that had reported in for the last three months. It was going to take him a couple of hours, he knew, but after that he might have something worth working with. And with some luck, Evan might have something to add to it that would be of use. From initial indications, there were an awful lot of people using this kind of technique; the first few plots were showing various exaggerated curves and parabolas. What they would need now was anecdotal evidence.

No one like Evan for getting that,
Joss thought cheerfully, and got on with the busines.s of the plotting.
People hear
that silly accent of his and spill their guts on the spot. . . .

EVAN'S PINT FELL OVER IN FRONT OF HIM,

spilling all over the counter of the bar where he stood.

Evan sighed, and cocked his fist back, and hit the man who had knocked his pint over.

It was not nearly as big or noisy a fight as the last two, but this mob had knives. Evan hated knives. They were much harder to take away from people than guns, and if you stepped on them, they tended not to break as easily.
Why don't
I have my suit on?
he thought, and punched the next person who dove at him over a table.

"Ah, hell," said a voice behind him. There was a grunt, and a rustling sound, and from behind him someone was picked up and thrown across the room. Another face got

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punched next to him, and Evan recognized the slim wrist attached to the fist that did the punching.

"Your social skills just aren't up to small communities, you know that?" Mell said, and kicked a large man in the goolies, making her way toward Evan. "What have you been
saying
to these people?"

"Hello, mostly," Evan said, and backhanded a small man who was raising a knife at him. There was a crowd of about ten more people to deal with, and he was thinking seriously about his gun, community relations or no community relations. "At least Leif the Turk isn't here," he added, tripping someone who was running at him from the side.

"Hey, you all—cut it out!" Mell shrieked. In a small space, the sound was most extraordinarily piercing, and a lot of people dropped things—glasses and bottles and knives—just out of shock. "Evan won't hurt you, you assholes, he wants to find who cacked Hek, that's all. Now, shut up and sit down, or your ships are going to start having problems real soon now!"

Evan propped himself up against a table and watched the crowd warily. All of them stared at him: some of them put down what bottles or knives they were still holding, and their expressions were slightly more forgiving than anything he had seen yet.
Possibly,
he thought,
because the idea of an annoyed mechanic works better than anything I might
say.

"You just let these people be," Mell shouted, "they're here on our side for a change. What about your buddy, Luke, forty years out on the rounds and all of a sudden he didn't check in? You think that was accidental? What about Mary LaBianca and her two kids, the best-maintained ship anybody ever saw? You think that was engine failure? What about Dele Marigny! What about Leo Ballinger!"

Faces were beginning to look somber all around. "Now you people come talk to Evan here," Mell said, "and you tell him what he needs to know about when you last saw the folks who disappeared. He doesn't give a shit about
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where your claims are. He wants to find out who's murdering our people, and all you're giving him is crap and more crap! You cut it out before I start sending you people bills for what you owe me!"

A visible shudder went through the whole crowd. The last time Evan had seen anything similar was in a crowd outside a besieged apartment building, when the residents had been told there was a nuke inside with the terrorists who were holding it. He couldn't say the effect made him entirely unhappy.

"Here," Mell said, and gestured Evan over to a table that had avoided having glass broken over it. It was wet, but Evan didn't care about that. He sat down at it, trying not to look either too smug or too relieved.

"What do you want to drink?" Mell asked Evan, as people around him started picking up chairs and setting them upright again.

"What do you suggest?" he said.

She looked at the crowd. "Ask for a Swill."

Evan looked up into those sea-green eyes with some bemusement, then said to the bartender, who had come out with a drying cloth, "May I have a Swill, please?"

The man nodded and went off. All around Evan, people were beginning to sit down in the chairs they drew up, and look at him. He wasn't sure he found this situation preferable to being punched. The people's looks were variously curious, suspicious and mistrustful, with degrees of fear, distaste and interest mixed in. Evan felt more threatened than he had in many places where guns were being pointed at him, but there was nothing he could do, and certainly no suit to hide behind.
Cope,
he said to himself, as he had that day he found himself outside the building with the nuke. He took a deep breath and went about coping.

"Baba, you come over here," Mell was saying to a small silver-haired lady who had been coming at Evan with a knife when he last saw her. Evan was glad things had broken up before he had to throw a chair at her; she re-126
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minded him uncomfortably of his mother. Also, "Baba" was one of the names Noel had given him to see, one of Hek's drinking buddies. Mell sat her down at the table with Evan and said, "You tell him about when you last saw Hek. And what she said.''

There was a pause while the bartender returned with a tall glass with ice in it. Evan looked at this with trepidation. Too many times in the army he had been given glasses that looked innocent on the outside, and on the inside were a great deal of trouble to him, either immediately or eventually. But he accepted this one, thanked the bartender, and looked at the people all around him.

"Thank you," he said to them.

They watched him, as if something was wanting.

He looked at the bartender. "Won't they have something?" he said.

All around the table, heads shook.

"Oh, come on," Evan said suddenly, "do." The memory of his mother brought back another one, of being coaxed over a plate of cakes at his auntie's house, and coerced into having another one, whether he particularly wanted to or not.

More heads shook.

Evan took the bit between his teeth. "Oh, now, you have to," he said to all the people around the table: smiling at them as he would have at his aunt, in cheerful revenge for all those afternoons when he was stuffed until he could hardly walk. "Won't you have something to drink? On me, for pity's sake," he added, "is there any question?"

There was an abrupt babble of voices, as about six people at once grabbed the bartender by the sleeve and began issuing orders, some of them very complex. Evan smiled slightly and waited until everyone's hand was filled. This took some time, while aromas floated up to him from the glass of Swill that hinted that this was one of those drinks for a brave man to fear. At least he wasn't hi college any more, where some real wit might be tempted to make the

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traditional Broken Kneecap with any hard liquor and dry ice, or a Bubble and Squeak with metallic sodium.

He didn't quite dare glance at Mell. She was sitting quietly to one side, with a drink identical to Evan's, for the moment doing nothing and saying nothing. When everyone had their drinks, Evan said to them,
"Slainte va,"
and knocked the drink back in one.

He was aware of their watching him as he raised the glass. He simply drank fast, without bothering to try to savor any specific flavors. It was just as well. He didn't breathe for the next few moments.

A sop doesn 't need to breathe,
Evan told himself, as he worked very hard indeed to keep from choking. His vocal cords felt as if they were paralyzed, and someone inside his head seemed to be hitting the backs of both his eyeballs with a very small, sharp-pointed hammer. His throat appeared to have had a grenade shoved down it, and someone seemed to have lit a fuse at the end of his spine. Evan wondered how long he had before he went off.