Kill Station (24 page)

softly, sitting at his command console again. "And God knows how long until they get the information out of the weapons firms. If they can get it at all. Maybe I am spoiled," he muttered. "Inner planet work and all."

"Just get the information, for pity's sake," Evan said, "and stop worrying about whether you're spoiled or not. Are we ready?"

"That we are," Joss said, and sighed. "You sure you have everything you want from here? This run's going to be a long one."

"Not everything," Evan said quietly.

"Yes," Joss said, "well. Willans control, this is
Nosey. "

"Listening, Mister Sop Honey."

"We're heading out. Prolonged absence, unknown flight plan. Sorry we can't be more specific. If anybody calls for us, tell them we'll catch them later."

"Will do. Good hunting, now."

"From your mouth to God's ear, Cecile," Joss said, and closed the channel down.

"She really must never sleep," he said, lifting
Nosey
up on her underjets and keying the release codes for the airlock doors. "Or maybe she has a clone."

Evan just sat in his seat beside Joss's, and looked out the plex.

"Anyway," Joss said, "no one here knows where we're going. Some people may guess, if they hear about it from George ... or someone else. Which is why we'll come at that area in a nice wide circle, and take a day or so about it, while our data comes in. Then we'll see who shows up."

"If anyone," Evan said.

"Oh, someone will. There's too much at stake. We turned up once, and saw something that we shouldn't have. So someone else will be out there to make sure it doesn't happen again. And my guess is that word of what we've

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been doing at Willans today will spark some interest out in the great nowhere. There should be a little more going and coming than usual. In feet, I'm counting on it. So we head out there, nice and easy . . .

and we wait."

AND SO THEY DID.

About half way through the second day, Joss was quite aware that the waiting was driving Evan nuts. The problem was that the surveillance they were embarked on at the moment was essentially computer-driven. There was no use concentrating on what appeared on the radar screens or the scanners, because the computers could watch better and more completely than they could. They hung there, waiting, not too far from where the relay had been, with the plex polarized to keep visible light in, and maintaining radio silence except for the briefest squirt of signal to acknowledge the receipt of incoming material from friendly sources.

Joss had been watching the monitoring equipment-nothing much to that—and the times in between he spent cooking, watching old vids, doing crossword puzzles written by a program in his datapad, and having an occasional nap. Evan had been trying to catch up on his reading, and failing miserably; he kept going into his stateroom to polish his suit, an act that Joss suspected as being profoundly symbolic of something else. What, he wasn't sure. The fourth or fifth tune Evan had started doing this, Joss had shrugged, and busied himself with Noel's report on the radar signatures of the ships in the salvage pile, passed not directly to them (for fear of someone in the station discovering their whereabouts), but sent first to the Moon, and then to
Nosey's
computer with the daily data dump. They were not revealing—there were no other "killed" ships in there—but Joss fed their radar signatures into his computer, on the off chance that whoever salvaged the

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wrecks might sell them to someone interested in scrap of good enough quality to fit with braided lasers.

Of course, other things had come in with the data dump as well, and they served to distract Evan, at least temporarily.

"REGARDING YOUR EXPENDITURES: I thought you two told me with your hands on your hearts that this was not going to be an expensive mission with vast bribes and benefactions flung around in all directions. You had better pray that the Commissioner is as impressed by your recording of what was shooting at you as I was. It's just as well that no one was able to claim the interesting little speed-of-capture bonus you were offering, since I think I would have more trouble explaining that to Upstairs than almost anything else. This is supposed to be good, steady police work, not a game of Interplanetary Beat The Clock. Jn the meantime, your bar bills are also of concern to me. I know that it is sometimes necessary to lubricate the natives somewhat, but the way you two are going about it, these people seem to have been subsisting on water vapors for years. Please try to keep some control over this, as the Commissioner is likely to get the idea that this is some clever ruse to hide the fact that both of you are closet alcoholics."

Joss snorted. "We don't have a closet," he said, and tossed his pad away. "What else does Miss Cheapskate have to say for herself?"

Evan looked oddly at him for a moment, then said, "Nothing much, except that the information from the weapons manufacturers will of course take time, et cetera, et cetera ..."

Joss sighed. "Typical. What the hell is the use of being the police if you can't ..." His voice trailed off.

"Never mind. I still don't know what their problem is. Five thousand seemed like such a nice round number.''

His console cheeped softly. This had happened before, twenty or thirty times a day, now, and it was always some remote radar pick-up that meant nothing of interest to

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them. But hope sprang eternal. Joss went over to look at the screen.

"Hmm," he said.

"Don't start!" Evan said. "What is it?"

"Hard to tell. A mark, certainly. And coming our way. Hmm."

"You need a hmm-ectomy," Evan said, coming over to look at the holographic display screen. He could make little of the radar tag that shone there, pale orange, hanging above the plane of the local Belt, and some few hundred kilometers further sunward, to judge by the X-, Y-, and Z-axes in the middle of the hologram.

"Nope," said Joss. "Heading the wrong way." He sighed and flopped down in his seat by the command console again, reaching for his pad.

Evan sat down beside him, staring at the blanked plex.

"I wonder where she is," he said.

Joss shook his head. "So do I, buddy," he said. "Not exactly like that lady to go off suddenly." He sighed, then, and put the pad down. "Unless, of course, this whole thing was a setup, and she's been working with them all along, and this was their way of lifting her and at the same time making her look above suspicion—"

Evan looked at him with that scowl again. Joss restrained a smile; he was getting used to it. ' 'Why do you always have to suspect the worst of people?'' Evan said.

"Because that way, when I discover the best about them, I'm pleasantly surprised," Joss said.

The console beeped again. "Damn thing," Joss said, tossing his pad down and getting up to go look at the chart. "I think I need to recalibrate it. It's too sensitive."

Evan picked up Joss's pad and stared at it. "Five-letter word for boredom?" he said thoughtfully.

"You should be able to tell me that, I would have thought," said Joss. "Hmm."

Evan pretended to throw the pad at him.

"No, no," Joss said, "really hmm. This is interesting."

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"Oh?"

"Yes. You saw that last trace. We saw him earlier this morning, doing a big, easy circle. Well, now look at him."

Evan looked at the hologram as Joss told it to display the previous course, and the present projected one. "How about
that,"
he said.

"Yes. He's changed right around. Heading out this way." Joss pointed at the little red light that represented them. And the line between them, and the suddenly suspect vessel, pointed straight in the direction that the ship with the nuclear lasers had come from.

"Let's go!" Evan said.

"Oh, no. Here we sit. We let him pass us nice and easy. What about it, then?"

"All right."

"No, I didn't mean
that.
The five-letter word for boredom. Where's that classical education gone?"

"Da always said that crossword puzzles were entertainments for the vulgar mind."

"Didn't take the
Times,
did he? 'Ennui.' Put it in there. Then I should be able to get 54 Down."

They sat with the pad between them, and alternately watched the hologram. The trace they were watching arced closer and closer to them. At its closest it was no more than ten kilometers away. It slowed down, lingering, then curved off away from the line they were interested in, heading sunward again.

"Damn," Evan said, and went back to staring at 23 Across.

Joss sat there for several seconds trying both to slow his pulse and find an eight-letter word for an assault, in which the third and fourth letters were C and A.

The console beeped again.

"I knew it," he breathed.

"Escalade," said Evan.

"I knew it, I knew it," Joss said, jumping to look more closely and make sure of the holograph. "Look at him!"

The radar trace had changed course again. It was head-

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ing back along the line out into the emptiness, the line they were interested in.

"There he goes," Joss said, almost dancing with glee. "They think we're out here. They're acting like we might be, and they've been wasting time, waiting to see if we would jump them, And we didn't. So now they head on out—"

"To what?" Evan said.

Joss shook his head. "You got me, partner. To a place where you can keep all the guns you've been buying, without nosey neighbors seeing anything there? A place where you can take ships you've ripped off?"

Evan shook his head. "An asteroid off the beaten track?" he said.

"Probably. I would. It'd be cheaper than building a freestanding station. But who is it ...
who?"

"Let's go!"

"Not yet."

They waited for another three hours. Every now and then the trace they were following would execute an arc off its proper line of approach, then get back on the line again. Joss watched it, and rubbed his hands, and went back to working on 36 Across, which was ' 'Italian casein-ate" with a Z in the middle. Evan polished his suit, and Joss didn't tease him about it.

And finally there was nothing to do but go after the trace, before they lost it entirely.

THEY FOLLOWED IT FOR A DAY AND A HALF, AT

dead slow speed, inching along behind at what was the very edge of their detection range, and what Joss hoped very much was the very edge of their quarry's. They should look more like a shadow to him than he did to them. Only the signal-processing equipment that had been installed in
Nosey,
at Joss's insistence, before leaving the Moon, was
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179

making the ship they chased visible to them at all. At the time Evan had thought Joss was just showing off by impressing the techs with the obscure equipment he wanted attached to the computer. Now Evan wasn't so sure.

At the end of the day and a half, something happened to the trace: it began to be fuzzy, as if other physical objects in the area were confusing its signal. "There, then," Joss said to Evan, looking again at the holograph. "What do you make of that?"

Evan looked at the holograph. "We're well above the plane of the Belts now," he said. "But there would still be a few rogue bodies up this high, here and there."

"Of course," Joss said. "So. Radio silence, and slowly in."

Evan nodded. "I wish Lucretia would come up with the bloody information about the guns," he said.

"I do, too. But now we have other things to worry about. There's no settlement in that area on any of the ephemerides. We have definitely found a clandestine operation of some kind. I just think we should get a much closer look, and a better idea of what's going on, before we report in."

Joss looked at Evan, and waited.

He nodded. "I'm with you."

"We'll do it, then."

And they spent another day about it, creeping along through the dark. Evan polished his suit less, and discovered that 36 Across was "Gorgonzola." Joss minded his instruments and kept his curses to himself.

He desperately wanted to kick in the iondrivers and blast out along that line, but that was a good way to get extremely dead. He let the computers handle their approach, a long, accidental-looking hyperbola—he knew better than to head straight after the ship they were following—and lay around trying to make sense of Evan's copy of
Pride and Prejudice.

And at the end of the day, they found the asteroid.

They got a better trace on the ship they had been fol-

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lowing first, of course. Joss had his little list of radar signatures ready, and as they started to curve past that distant ship, now slowing greatly, the computer saw a set of readings they recognized. Joss looked up sidelong from the console at Evan and said, "Know who that is?"

"Who?"

"That's another ship made out of pieces of missing craft. Atypical power curve, from what little signal I can get. Like his friend the other day. Not much engine, but too much gun."

"A patrol?" Evan said. "Sent out to find out what happened to the other ship?"

Joss nodded thoughtfully. "It seems likely. And sent out to kill whatever killed its buddy, if at all possible.

As you say: a patrol. But he didn't find what he was looking for, meaning us, and he's just heading for home. And there's home."

He pointed at the larger, fuzzier trace in the holograph. Slowly, some other traces were becoming apparent in the area, some of them moving quite fast, their dots in the holograph shading up through blue or down through red as they Dopplered. "It's a base," Joss said.

"And for some pretty big stuff," Evan said, noticing the size-and-mass readings on some of the traces becoming visible around it.