Kill Station (29 page)

Perhaps it had hung up. It
was
a privately written program, after all. There were always bugs lurking in such—

The screen began to fill with file names.

"Aha," Joss said with vast relief. "That's what I wanted to see." He had no idea what all the files meant.

That would take hours to tell, perhaps days, as he_ started sifting through them. But he had to get them first, and the home system would certainly object.

Or it would try to. Joss grinned.

He tapped a set of commands into the console. Down on the asteroid his little black box woke up and sent a small, tight burst of code into the station computer's main processor. This was perhaps the easiest part: injecting the virus. The.question was how long it would take to work.

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Joss thought he recognized the software systems the machine was using—off-the-shelf stuff, not custom.

That helped a bit. But a clever programmer could do quite a lot of customizing in the area of security, if he was feeling paranoid, or merely playful.

And there was really no way to tell what was going on, at least not while the virus itself was replicating.

When it had control of the central processor, it would let him know. Meanwhile he had to leave it to its own devices. It was a clever enough virus; it did a very sophisticated job of copying itself into numerous places, too quickly for whatever flu-shot programs were already resident to do anything about it. Once it was established, it would take about ten minutes to copy the entire contents of that computer into
Nosey's
data banks.

It would be faster, though, if I still had my cable,
Joss thought mournfully.

There was a noise in the airlock. Joss didn't bother being startled; the lock was voiceprinted, and he knew perfectly well who it would be. Though Evan was a bit early, by his reckoning.

"We have company," Evan's voice said cheerfully.

"Oh?" Joss turned to see Mell come in behind Joss. "Well, well! So that's where you were!"

"I caught her," Evan said, "in the act of trying to kill the guy who was trying to blow the station up, so
you
wouldn't find out what was going on."

Joss smiled slightly. "Mell," he said, "if I've misjudged you, apologies. You just seem to have a gift for looking as if you might be on the other side of the argument."

"How are we doing?" Evan said.

Joss glowered at the screen. "Nothing yet. I'm still infecting the computer. Or trying to. But I know all the file names I want. There's a pile of stuff in there, Evan. Text files mostly."

"Good," Evan said. "Everybody in there was heavily

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armed—no suits, though. It's a paramilitary group, well financed, from at least one Japanese corporation."

"1KB, they said," said Mell. "Evan, they were proud of it, they were bragging about it. I saw some of their execs touring the place a couple of days ago, when they brought me in to fix their miserable ships."

She looked angrily at Evan. "Some of those belonged to people I know. Or knew!"

"I know," Evan said.

"Aha!" Joss said, almost singing. "Got it!"

"Good," Evan said. "Get the goodies down, and let's run. What was the message from Lucretia, by the way?"

Joss grimaced. "She understands what we think is happening, and agrees with us. There's only one problem. Security is being kept very low key for this event. The publicity buildup has been concentrating on the peace and brotherhood aspects of the project. Having the Space forces around is deemed—"

Joss made a face "—inappropriate for the PR that's been conducted. So we can expect no help from them. And there will be no overt rollout of SP forces, either. It would be noticed, Lucretia says. And unfortunately, orders have come down from the Commissioner, that brass-plated loon, that the security arrangements are to remain exactly as has been previously announced to the public."

"So we
are
going to have to handle this by ourselves," Evan said, in a voice rich with disgust. "Joss, they don't pay us enough!"

"They never have," Joss said mildly. "But by Lucre-tia's reckoning, this is still the same riot. Any help we get will be strictly covert. And no big guns involved.''

Evan sighed. "That's that, then. Mell, you have your choices. Come with us? Or stay? I think you should stay, myself."

She looked at Evan coolly. "Think I can't take it with the big boys?"

"I would prefer," he said, "that you were in a place
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where the odds of your being killed were rather lower than they will be with us. If you didn't mind terribly, that is."

"Of course you would."

"Now, Mell, listen, you know I know you better than that—"

"You just think you do! I think you—"

"Mell," Joss said, "think of the salvage."

Both Evan and Mell turned to look at him.

Joss shrugged, keeping one eye on the instruments that were watching on the intruders, and another on the ongoing download. "It just occurs to me that no one owns that station, you see. At least, there's no one alive on it now. Is there?"

Evan and Mell looked at each other.

"Sensors don't reveal any movement in the above-ground parts," Joss said. "You would know better about the below-ground bits than I would."

"There were never more than forty or fifty people in the place, even when it was full," Mell said.

"I did for about twenty-five or so myself," said Evan.

"Well, then. Mell, if you go back there, you can spend a little while rigging one of the leftover ships to run.

I saw a couple of them there that were obviously unfinished."

"I wasn't hurrying," Mell said with a slight smile. "I resent being made to work on a job without a contract.''

"If you even want to leave," Joss said. "I mean, if there's no one on that station now, the first person on it, owns it." . Mell looked at Evan.

He raised his eyebrows at her.

"Right," she said. "When are you two leaving?"

"Now, wait a moment!" Evan said, sounding slightly hurt.

"I was just asking," she said.

"We ought to be out of here in a couple of hours," Joss said. "One more message to Lucretia, to tell her what's happening. Then off we go. I'm almost through here. When you're there, Mell, you might want to seal off that

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computer room. The computers themselves may be needed as evidence."

"No problem with that," she said.

"In the meantime," Evan said, "will you stay to dinner?" And he smiled most beatifically at Joss. "My partner makes a wonderful Spaghetti Carbonara."

Joss rolled his eyes and said, "Unfortunately, we can't offer you any wine."

"I can bring a bottle," Mell said. "TheyVe got lots of it over there." She paused and smiled and said, "IVe got lots of it.''

"Good Lord," Joss said, looking at Evan in shock. "They
must
have money. Importing wine to the Belts?!"

"I shan't complain at the moment," Evan said.

"You're sure this doesn't come under drinking on duty?" Joss said.

Evan pointedly took his helm off and tossed it onto the command seat.

"Right," Mell said. "This suit's maneuvering pack is charged. I'll just run over and get a couple of bottles."

"One will do," Joss said. "We have to save the universe in the morning."

"Joss!"

"Oh, all right," Joss said, seeing the look in Evan's eye. "Two, then."

"Don't be long," Evan said to Mell, as she put her helmet back on.

It was an excellent red. Joss sat nursing a glass of it, after dinner, while looking over some of the files from the base.

These are sick people,
he thought.

There was a click as Evan's stateroom door unlatched. Evan and Mell came out, looking only slightly tousled. Evan grinned at Joss, a totally unrepentant look.

Joss just twitched an eyebrow at him. Then he said, "Why don't you crack that other bottle, you two, and pull up a couple of data pads. We have some interesting reading here."

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Evan saw to the wine and filled glasses all around, while Joss hunted up the extra pad and gave it to Mell. She fiddled with the controls for a few seconds until she got the feel of them, and then said, "Goodness. All this?"

"There's a fair amount of material. But I've excerpted out the best of it for you."

Evan settled down beside Mell and pulled his own pad over, and a companionable silence fell as they started to read.

"TKB," said Evan after a little while.

"Yes. And some others: but I think the board of TKB, and one man on it in particular, are the leading lights. There are a lot of memos in here, interoffice stuff—all very casual-looking. Copies of material on Earth, with the routing numbers still on it. Should make things convenient for us," Joss said.

Mell was scanning down through some of this material. "It looks like so much executive talk," she said hi mild wonderment. "Until they start talking about the guns and the missiles. And not just selling them, either. Using them."

Evan said, "TKB took quite a lot of losses after Union, didn't it? They were almost more powerful than some governments on Earth, while they had all those different governments to play off each other. And then all of a sudden, all the power bases were changed, they didn't have the influence they had before."

Mell nodded. "Fewer wars, too. They made an awful lot of money out of munitions before Union."

"They diversified, of course," Joss said. "They weren't stupid. But the family that ran the company have to have felt they had lost a lot of ground, and Union was the cause of it. And this particular family was never the kind to sit around and be resigned about things. There are some interesting files hi here with records of industrial duty tricks going back a century."

Mell's mouth was hanging open at something she was reading. "Get this," she said. "At present, profit projec-216
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tions are sufficiently poor in terms of past years' performance to suggest moderately radical measures.

Destabil-ization of political structures as below should cause the usual positive speculation in the markets, consonant with the 'greed and fear' principle." She looked at Joss in confusion.

Joss sighed. "Yes. The stockbroker's motto. People invest out of greed, or fear. When things are scary, or politically uncertain, the market goes up. When things are stable, it goes down."

She shook her head. "That's awful. And it's a great rationalization, too. But it's not the kind of thing I was hearing on the station. That was more sort of—" her face screwed up with distaste "—racist stuff.

Nationalist. Separate countries, and one of them better than all the others."

Joss nodded. "Yes, that's in here too. I did some context-sensitive scans when I first ran across it. The board of TKB—several members of the same family are on it-are very interested in seeing Japan restored as a nation. And all the other remade countries subjected to it, in fact if not actually in name."

"They're completely around the bend," Evan said, almost in awe.

"They're busy hating the way the world is now, and blaming it for their problems," Joss said. "And wanting to change it back to the way it used to be. Or the way they think it used to be—or should have been. That's crazy by
my
definition," Joss said. "But they also have lots of money, enough to do crazy things on a very big scale. Like 'destabilizing' the Union. Can you imagine the results if these loons managed to actually blow up High-Lands? It wouldn't start a war, I don't think, but a lot of trust that has been a good while forging would be shattered. Destabilized is the word for it, at the very least. And almost certainly the damned stock market
would
go up. I can't stand the thought of these bastards profiting

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from terrorism—since you can see from some of these reports that they've covered their tracks very efficiently."

"They can afford to," Evan said softly. "This one report you tagged—very sweet. A lot of money spent in the Belts, here—paying off miners to avoid certain areas, killing others who would not avoid them, paying off station personnel to look the other way and not notice things. The money nicely laundered through several different accounts." He peered at the pad. "And the signatures are all people on the TKB board. Takawabara—one or another of the family.''

Joss nodded. "Something else interesting there, by the way. Look at the next file list—no, the next one. That one there: the manifest list for the base. Recent shipments."

Evan looked at the list, and sucked breath in appreciatively. "Goodness. Someone had a suit delivered. And not a cheap one, either. A Krupp-Tonagawa.''

"Is that good?" Mell said.

Evan laughed, a quick harsh sound. "Just about the best. They sell to the earthbound military, mostly. Space Forces are on too tight a budget to afford Krupp-Tonagawa suits. Pity," he added a little wistfully. "This suit has a lot of goodies on it."

"And you will have noticed the name of the person to take delivery."

Evan nodded. "Takawabara," he said, and frowned.

Joss sighed and pushed his own pad away. "I've sent this stuff off to Lucretia by squirt," he said. "But I don't think it's going to change her mind, and even if it did, we have no guarantee it would change the Commissioner's. We have to proceed as if there is going to be no help. If you look at that 'action plan' that's tagged on the third list in, you'll see what they're doing. At lease we know, which is a help. There are already bombs in place on Highlands, in case the armed attack fails. Lucretia will have to do something about that, no matter what. But as for the rest of it . . ."

Evan made a face. "Please, Evan and Joss," he said,

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"blow up eleven ships better armed than you are, and possibly all stuffed with explosives, possibly nukes, to judge from that one we hit the other day; and don't make a fuss about it, and don't get noticed. And here's a peashooter to do it with."