Kill Station (10 page)

"There," Joss said.

Evan looked out through the dust. There was no gleam of metal, not after heat like that, but a scarred, blackened shape that was definitely not something that occurred naturally in an asteroid. A corner of a cargo module was visible, though the blast of the ship's weaponry had melted it somewhat.

"That look familiar?" said Joss to Noel.

Noel looked stricken. He nodded. "That's Hek's ship, all right."

"We'll want to get it dug out, then," Joss said. "Can
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you have someone give us a hand with that? It's not smart to try to dig and examine evidence at the same time."

"Certainly," Noel said. He smiled weakly and added, "They're going to give me hell about my budget, of course."

"So what else is new?" Joss said. "Budgets were made to be broken. We're also going to want your records about the other claim jumps and missing people. There may be more tampering of this kind; we'll want to see if there's a pattern."

He turned the ship slowly and carefully away from the asteroid, and touched his console. "Call me suspicious," Joss said, "but I'm going to put one of our little hockey pucks down on the surface."

"Hockey pucks?" Noel said.

Evan smiled. "Don't ask him," he said. "It's a motion sensor, with a little camera on it—eh, Joss?"

There was a slight kick of reaction as something left the ship from near its rear end. "There," Joss said, looking at his instruments. "It dug in its spike nice and hard. Anybody comes here and meddles, we'll know about it. There's no telling who might have followed us out this far, after all. And if anyone has, and comes around here, he'll leave a record." He smiled.

Noel shook his head. "I wish I could get my hands on technology like this. But they only send us what they think we need."

Joss kicked in the ship's jets and finished turning it around. "Well, they sent you us," he said. "Maybe we can do you some good. Anyway, let's get back and start sorting things out."

SEVERAL HOURS LATER, EVAN LEFT JOSS HAP-pily buried in the ship, feeding it data from Noel's files. "You sure you don't want to come out and get something?" Evan said. "It's been hours since you ate."

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"No, no," Joss said, happily inputting at a keyboard in his stateroom. "Damn." He stopped to correct a misspelling, tossed one piece of paper to the floor, and picked up another.

"Why don't you just read that stuff in?" Evan said.

Joss shook his head. "This helps me think," he said. "Besides, Tee tried to improve my voice recognition algorithm, and it got messed up somehow—it keeps misspelling for me. Damned if I need a machine to do that. I can do it myself.

Anyway, you go ahead. I want to get as much of this stuff into the machine as I can. Pity I didn't ask them to put in an optical scanner, but who would have thought we would have to be dealing with paper?"

"Too right," Evan said. "Well, listen, I'm going out to get a bite. I'll be back in a while."

"Oh, by the way—" Joss fumbled about in the pile of papers, came up with his pad, and tossed it to Evan. "You didn't read your mail this morning, did you?"

"I was busy with the plumbing," Evan said, catching the pad. "Damned if I want to stay in that place another night."

"Possibly we should take turns," Joss said, tapping away. "But look at that."

Evan keyed the pad on and brought up the mail menu.
Oh, hell,
he thought, seeing the message waiting from Lucretia.

He scanned down past the transmittal strings and routing codes and found:

"ABOUT YOUR FUEL EXPENDITURE: Your computer tells me that yesterday you used almost your entire allocation for altitude jets in a matter of fifteen minutes. I have cautioned you about hotdogging in your craft. You have had two weeks to work out the inevitable high spirits."

"What??"
Evan said. "Why, that small, mean-souled beast, she'd pull a pacifier out of a baby's mouth if she thought it was having too much fun!''

"Gently," Joss said, tossing another piece of paper to

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the floor. "Who knows whether she managed to have this thing bugged before we left?"

"I hope she may have! Lucretia, you're a cheap little bottom-line buggerer!" Evan said pointedly to the ceiling, and tossed the pad back to Joss. "What does she think you were using the fuel for, for pity's sake? We'd only be freeze-dried beef jerky by now, the two of us—"

Joss laughed. "I merely point it out to you to give you a sense of how this mission is already shaping up," he said. "If you're going for drink, better make it small beer."

"Huh," Evan said. "Well. You're sure you won't come?"

"No, truly. Bring me back something, if you want. And stay out of trouble," Joss said, not looking up, but smiling.

Evan snorted good-humoredly and went on out. Joss was usually a bit that way, a worrier about things he didn't need to worry about. Evan didn't mind it much. And there was an odd inversion to this behavior, for when things got really bad, Joss tended to stop worrying entirely, except as a logistical exercise. He was not incautious; he just stopped wasting time being concerned about what concern couldn't affect.

He headed out through the hangar dome and began to make his way through the corridors of the station. Joss was really right: the place was much dirtier than it needed to be.
Going moribund,
he thought. But Noel had promised him that there were parts of it that were better off than others, one of them being the bar he had recommended Evan and Joss should try. Evan was quite sure he had the directions correct, though they had been fairly complicated.

The people he met as he strode along looked at him as if he were from Mars, but most of them nodded in a friendly enough manner. Evan nodded back, and smiled. A lot of them were wearing skinsuits that were very much out of fashion—much patched, or combined with other

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garments in a way that suggested new clothes were either hard to come by in this part of the world, or prohibitively expensive. It was hard to remember, sometimes, that the Asteroids, though not quite, as Noel had said, the end of the universe, were still far enough out that imports were surprisingly costly.

At least they don't have to import their booze,
Evan thought, sniffing the air,
or not much of it.
There was definitely a still in the area.
Potatoes,
he thought as he came around the corner, and the smell of spuds in advanced ferment hit him like a hammer.

And where there's a still, there's a bar,
he thought, seeing the open door of a small dome not too far away. There was a metal plate over the door, and painted on it the words LAST CHANCE SALOON. Someone had a sense of humor: the plate had been streaked with a base coat to look like old wood. There were only a few places where the paint had chipped to show the steel underneath, and these didn't really ruin the effect.

Evan walked in slowly, glancing around him to see where the bar was. This dome had lights hung from its small ceiling, and, whether accidentally or on purpose, looked like some antique bars Evan had been in on Earth: yellow metal railings (not real brass, of course) and leather-covered benches and chairs (plastic, of course). The bar itself was off to one side of the dome, done in some composite plastic, dyed brown, and carved into Georgian-looking swirls and acanthus leaves. If this was a saloon, it was more like the great old Victorian drinking salons of Belfast and Liverpool than anything else, and it was certainly an astonishing place to find halfway between Mars and Jupiter.

Evan stepped up to the carved bar and caught the eye of the barman, a tall, black-bearded man with cool eyes. "Beer?"

he said.

"Quarter-liter? Half?"

"Half, please."

The barman began to pull the pint. Evan leaned against

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the bar and looked around at the patrons. They reminded him too much of those at the bar last night: hunched postures, nursed drinks, no conversation much above a whisper. And as he glanced around, the eyes that looked up at him were definitely unfriendly.

Again,
he thought.
No. I'm not going to leave, and I'm not going to have any trouble, either. A nice quiet drink, and
then dinner—

Someone came up to stand beside him. Evan turned with a slight smile on his face. And didn't quite swallow.

"Well, Mr. 'Smith,' " he said. "And how are you tonight?"

"Smith" didn't say anything-for a few seconds, which hardly mattered, for Evan could see the answer to his question perfectly well. The man's face was swollen to about a third again the size it had been yesterday evening. He had been bruised by experts, and Evan knew who the experts were. It was very embarrassing.

"Well enough," "Smith" said. And something poked Evan in the ribs, hard. "Gonna be better in a moment, though."

There were other people rising from their seats in the bar. Evan cursed silently for letting himself be distracted by the work of the day and the pleasant look of the bar. It had been well-lighted and airy, not like a dive at all. He had let that fool him. That had been a mistake.

And there were more people in this bar than there had been last night, Joss was nowhere in sight, and there was no way to call him, not right this moment, not with the bad end of a blaster stuck into his side. Evan breathed deeply once, and the slight movement helped him feel the muzzle aperture. At least three-quarters of an inch.
Oh, my maiden aunts,
feel the flare on that. I'll have a hole in me you could install an Underground tube in. Unless something happens.

But at least it's not a knife
—

He was being surrounded by those unfriendly faces, three deep. As far as he could tell, none of these people had guns, thank heaven, but all of them, looked like they

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wished they did. Evan found himself staring at an assortment of gapped teeth, radiation-burnt, chewed-up noses and lips, and scabby, patchy, half-balding scalps such as he hadn't seen since the other side of the Belts, where there were also a lot of people who tended to be careless about their exposure to cosmic radiation. A lot of these people would come down with cancer within the decade, but he doubted they cared about that at the moment.
His
demise seemed to be a much more popular topic.

"Smith" was grinning at him. "You sops," he said. "You think mighty well of yourselves, insulting good hardworking people, starting fights in bars. But you're not so tough when you're alone, are you?" He went off into breathy laughter that smelled of cheap vodka and various food byproducts. "No, indeed. And we're gonna put a few nice little holes in you so you don't come bothering us a-"

The second or third sentence of a gloat, Evan had noticed some years back, was always a good time to do something.

He did it without taking his eyes from "Smith's": simply put his hand around Smith's gun hand, and turned it right around in one quick motion till the muzzle was dug deep into "Smith's" belly. "Smith's" eyes widened.

"Now you go right ahead and pull that trigger," Evan said softly. "Go on, Mr. 'Smith.' Or do you need some help?" He felt for "Smith's" trigger finger, felt it struggling to slip out of the loop, refused to let it do so. Evan started applying pressure. "You know," Evan said, "you're the kind of guy who could get thrown in jail for assaulting a Solar officer.

Except you probably won't live to." He pressed harder. "You'll probably wind up with a great fat hole in your middle.

And so will the people standing behind you.'' Evan added, thoughtfully.

The people behind Smith abruptly moved to either side.
This isn 't going to last for long.
Evan thought. /
can't resort
to silly business like taking this man hostage. This has to be won straight out if these people are ever going
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to tell us anything we need to hear. Dammit, why didn 't I leave my suit on— ?

"Then again," Evan said, "it'd be a waste of the taxpayer's money to have to make out the paperwork after killing you. Not to mention that the cleaning people here would probably be annoyed with me." And with that he stomped down hard on "Smith's" instep, holding onto the gun.

"Smith" let go of it, screaming, and lurched away. Immediately three other people came at Evan, two from the sides. He didn't dare fire. He pulled the gun's charge pack out, threw it one way, and the gun the other, and with feet and fists piled into the people who were coming at him.

The next several moments became a series of images, as always happened in situations like this. An elbow here (snapped), a kneecap there (one kick, missed, the second one landing), a third kick at someone's gut (misjudged, too deep, the person falling out of view with that terrible looseness that meant a long hospital stay, if not the morgue). Then his arms being pinned, shaking off that pin, having another one attached, too heavy to lose, someone punching him in the side of the head, a kick in the kidneys, the flash of pain up his back—

—a sudden thump in the back; not him being hit, but someone else, the force transmitting through. One of the people pinning him let go. He reached around with that arm, grabbed the person pinning on the other side, found his balance point, tossed him more or less toward the bar. A sudden WHAM! as a table hit him in the leg and went caroming away across the floor.

Someone went flying across his field of vision, a largeish bald man.
Joss has arrived
Evan thought, and turned, delighted that the cavalry had come over the hill.

Another man was being held more or less horizontally. The person holding him threw him out the door, almost effortlessly, and then waded into one of the three or four people left in the middle of the room.