Kill Station (19 page)

The faceplate was webbed with cracks; there was one neat hole straight through it. The face was a mummified mask of freeze-dried blood. Joss ground his teeth, thinking,
She was a nice-looking old
lady, once.
But he said nothing aloud.

He put her down gently, got up, and made his way toward the back of the ship. The entry into the engine pod was a cramped little access that Joss had to fight with to get undamped and open. When he succeeded, and crawled in, he was only slightly surprised by what he saw.

SPACE COPS
135

There was a small neat hole in the wall of the fuel cell on this side. Joss touched it with his gauntlet, brushed at it.

Almost no carbonization at the edges. Somebody with a very high-powered weapon had pushed its total power through here, and the fuel cell on the other side had quite understandably blown up. Joss stood there thinking. A change of plans, somewhere along the way? This destruction, followed by a decision that someone might see through the coverup, and it was safer to bury the ship, and move the claim core to confuse the issue?

If Joss had wanted reinforcement of the military connection, he had it now. The problem was, again, that he was sure not even the military had weapons like this just yet. Certainly they were being built, and certainly people were buying them. And using them. But not here.

He made his way back out to the group standing over Hek's body. "Let's finish getting the ship up out of the ground,"

he said, "so we can bring it home, and give this lady a decent burial."

"It was fuel cell?" Lara said.

"It was meant to look like fuel cell," Joss said, "but it was not. That explosion was caused from inside. Someone came in here, shot this woman, then went back and blew her engine out to make it look like an accident. And then someone else decided that the whole thing was better buried away. Tell your friends that; spread the word around. I want to know about anything military that has happened in this area that
anyone
knows about. Rumors, gossip, I don't care.

This evening I'll be in the Astoria. I want to know why Hek was murdered. Ask your friends to help me."

There was silence, and nodding.

"Come on," Joss said, "let's finish getting this dug up. I want to go home."

It was a couple of hours more before they were ready to take the ship in tow. Joss longed for the tractor beams of the old space serials, but technology hadn't got along that far as yet. They had to make do with cables strung
136
SPACE COPS

between two ships, an incredibly twitchy and finicky business that Lara and Joe nevertheless brought off with great finesse.
Better them than me,
Joss thought as he headed home.

They dropped the ship a short distance from the salvage pile. George grounded his ship nearby, to keep an eye on it until someone from Willans' private security could come and start standing watches there.

Joss put
Nosey
back in the hangar dome and went looking for Evan. He bumped into him in one of the corridors leading to the dome. "You have any luck?" Joss said.

Evan blushed.

"Not that way," Joss said, and cuffed Evan good-naturedly on the arm. "Come on, you look like you could use some coffee. You
smell
like you could use some coffee," he added. "What've you been drinking?"

"Swill," Evan said. He was blinking sightly, as if the light hurt his eyes.

"I believe you." Together they made their way back to the ship. Once they were inside with the airlock closed, Joss said, "We finished our digging just now."

"And?"

"Somebody with one of your braided tuned lasers did Hek's ship in," Joss said, and gave him the rest of the details.

Evan sat there with his brow furrowed. "Tea?"Joss said.

"Yes, please. What I'm trying to understand," Evan said, "is why, after faking it, and well—if that vessel had been brought in for salvage as usual, probably no one would ever have noticed—they then tried to cover everything up as they did.''

"I've been running afoul of that one too. A sudden change in command of the operation?"

Evan sighed. "We'll have no way of knowing until we find out who did it, will we?"

"And we can't do that until we trace them," Joss said. "I'm going to send a note back to Lucretia and see if she
SPACE COPS
137

can't find out something about any covert Space Forces business in this area."

"I don't think they'll tell her anything," Evan said.

Joss shrugged. "It's worth a try. I take it your meeting with the locals went well?"

"I got into a fight," Evan said. But there was an expression on his face like a smile trying hard to happen, and being restrained.

"And what else?" Joss said mildly.

Evan blushed again.

"Look," Joss said, chuckling, "if congratulations are in order, then congratulations. She seems like a nice lady. Just be careful what you say to her."

"Joss," Evan said, "she's been a great deal of help. Those people wouldn't have talked to me today without her." His tone was pained: it was one Joss couldn't remember hearing from Evan before.

"That's all very well. But I'm not sure of anybody's motives around here, not yet. Something fairly major is going on, and anyone who gets too close to it is getting killed. I'd sooner that didn't include us."

Joss sat down at his data pad and brought up the graphic that he had been working on while he was talking to Ce-cile.

"Take a look at this," he said. "You may have been able to pick up something that'll be of use. I've got them labeled by ship names."

Evan sat down next to Joss and began puzzling over the graphic of nested circles and ellipses, the path of people's radio checks. "I don't know," he said finally. "I got a lot of rumor from those people, but very little in the way of hard coordinates where the missing ships were supposed to be heading."

Someone knocked on the outside airlock. Joss whistled the door open.

George came in. Joss nodded at him. "Everything set up out there?"

"All set," George said, looking over at Evan. "Station
138
SPACE COPS

security has the ship under guard. Though I don't think anything in particular will happen."

"Neither do I," Joss said, looking with mild interest at the glances Evan and George were exchanging.

Quite cool, those looks, and appraising.
Uh oh,
he thought, and resolved to have a little talk with Cecile later, if it seemed wise on second thought.

"George," Joss said, getting up, "I was talking to Cecile about the check-in patterns of some of the miners hereabouts. How familiar are you with the reg numbers and dates that ships have been disappearing?"

"Too goddam familiar," George said. "I did the original number crunching for Noel when he started to get suspicious."

"Good.
Let
me bring this chart up on the holographic display. See if you can help us fill in some details."

The pattern of circles and ellipses and long hyperbolae came up in midair over the map stand, looking very much like a messy ball of yarn tangled around a set of X-, Y-, and Z-axes. "There are the official radio checks, as far as I can pin them down," Joss said. "The ones in red are the ones that vanished. You can see they're all spinward of the station, but that's not a great deal for us to go on; that only leaves us about half the Belts to look at.''

George stared at the display for a long moment. "We never thought to plot it like this. Even if we had, I don't think our machinery could have handled it. It's not numbers I can help you with here," he said. "I think I'm better equipped with gossip. This one—" He pointed at one narrow red ellipse. "That was
Cutty Sark,
wasn't it? Nick told me not too long before he disappeared that he was working five-fifty in, and nine-twenty up and over. That's a diagonal course, an average of Y and Z, about here." George stabbed at one spot in an empty part of the hologram; Joss quickly marked it with a dot. "But his checks are all over here. Nowhere near where he said.''

Evan looked suddenly alert. "Where's Langton's

SPACE COPS
139

Folly?" he said. "Baba told me that Hek said she was going to be working some rocks over by Langton's Folly."

George looked at him with surprise. "Right about here," he said, and pointed at a spot about five hundred kilometers from the first spot Joss had marked.

Joss marked that one too. "This," he said softly, "is statistically significant. Do you see what those spots have in common?"

"No," Evan and George said together. And then looked at one another in what seemed like mild annoyance.

"If you draw a line between them," Joss said, "the line is just within maximum transmission distance of all of both those ships' official check-in points. Those two points are the foci of an ellipse, possibly. But there's still much too much space to cover in that shape. Come on, you two, I want all the gossip you've heard, whether you think it's particularly important or not."

They spent another hour at it, tagging either specific points or fuzzy globes meant to indicate loci of probability: areas where people were reported to have been headed, to have been, or even just to have been interested in. By the time they were done, the original ball of yarn was almost hidden within an outer surface of dots and cotton-ball globes. But one little patch of globes and dots was well removed from the ball of yarn, and at its heart was the maximum-transmission line that Joss had pointed out.

"It's been drifting," Joss said, as they sat there drinking their tea or coffee, slumped in their chairs. "But there's a relay out there that all these ships were using to send fake check-in signals. The relay is somewhere here—" he tapped the little blot of dots and globes. "Not too much space to check. A cube of space about three hundred miles to a side.''

"Child's play," George said, his voice dry and ironic.

"Exactly. George, what's out there?"

"Nothing at all. That spot's a lacuna—the distribution level there is very low. I'd be surprised if there were more
14O
SPACE COPS

than fifteen or twenty asteroids bigger than a klick on a side."

"A good place to hide a relay, then. It's high up, almost out of the orbital plane; it gets good coverage of everybody's fake check-in points. No one is likely to stumble over it, since no one goes there much. No miners, anyway."

They looked at one another.

"When do we leave?" George said.

Joss looked at Evan. "I wouldn't mind an evening to detox," Evan said, "after the morning I've had."

Joss nodded. "Tomorrow morning, then?"

"Fine."

"George? Can Noel spare you?"

"I should think so. I'll check and let you know."

"All right, then."

Joss noticed the two men looking at each other. "I've got to run over to Noel's office to bring him copies of this," he said, working at his comms console for a moment, and touching the controls necessary to make a solid copy. A second later the little data block popped up out of the slot. "I'll be back in a little while."

He headed out of the airlock, whistling softly to himself. One thing he had learned fairly early on in the business of being a partnered sop as that there was no point in interfering in some things.

Even if your curiosity was killing you. . . .

"I JUST WANTED TO SAY/' GEORGE SAID, "THAT I want you to be real careful."

Evan looked at him coolly, trying to give away nothing.

"There are several ways that could be interpreted," he said.

"She's very special," George said. "Very." He was wearing a frown that was getting deeper by the second.

"I agree," Evan said.

SPACE COPS
141

It was maddening. He desperately wanted to dislike the man. He was too good-looking, too intelligent—
entirely too
much of a threat,
some part of Evan's mind remarked, and was immediately shouted down by the rest. But it was true.

Mell had loved him.

Mell had left him.

"She speaks very kindly of you," Evan said. It was the most neutral thing he could think of.
Dammit! What is it about
this woman that leaves me with nothing to say but cliches?

"It's a little late for that," George said. Was that a spark of regret there? Even desperately hoped so. Mell had not gone into details about what had broken up her marriage, except that the split had been acrimonious; and as far as Evan was concerned, it was none of his business. But at the same time, he was very angry at the thought of anyone's having hurt her, for whatever cause, no matter how good the reason. And this man had.

He wished he was wearing his suit.

He wished he was somewhere-else. Anywhere else.

"You guys have a rep, that's all," George said, a little sullenly. "You come in, you go out, you—" He broke off. "I just don't want her hurt."

The urge to laugh in his face was considerable. But Evan squelched it. The man's face was screwed up like that of a perp making a confession, trying to hang onto his control. God only knew what his own face looked like.

"I don't wish to hurt her either," he said. It was all he could think of.

"See that you don't," George said, and his anger showed in his eyes very plainly for just that second. It was not a look that Evan was used to having turned on him. His hand was empty, and his suit was in its clamps, and this man was on his side.

Damn it all straight to Hell!

"Leave that to me," Evan said. He was going out of his way trying not to sound threatening. After all, who knew how he looked to this man? The glamorous career

142
SPACE COPS

sop, with his shiny ship, practically the white knight on his steed. He had to understand that Evan wasn't really about to sweep anyone off her feet—

But those sea-green eyes. And the soft voice, and the—