Kill Station (13 page)

But the the victim had other plans. One leg held out stiffly, he—or she—went off at high speed, kangarooing with considerable skill across the bumpy terrain, and vanished over the horizon—which, on a body this small, was only about two hundred yards away.
Damn it to everything!
Joss thought, and followed. But when he had made it over the horizon himself, there was nothing to be seen. His quarry was probably two horizons over by now, and had likely gone to ground, possibly in one of the tunnels that led to the station. Joss knew that they were there, but hadn't had time as yet to investigate them.

He stood there with his gun in his hand, feeling very annoyed, but also somehow elated. There was at least one pressure suit in the station that he would recognize on sight. It would be easy enough to pick it out of all the suits in the place—but that could wait for later.

Right now, the situation had changed radically. He and Evan were obviously investigating something that made at least one person anxious to try to kill Joss, just on the off chance that he might find out something sensitive. He had information that some people would obviously much prefer that he didn't have. He was bruised in a few places, but no matter, at least, there were no holes—and what he needed to do right away was get back and send a note to HQ on the Moon,

88
SPACE COPS

Maybe now Lucretia would stop worrying about their fuel allowance. . . .

EVAN LEANED BACK IN HIS CHAIR AND SAID,

"Do you come here often?"

She laughed at him. "I bet you say that to all the girls. Next cliche"?"

Evan blushed slightly. That in itself was so unusual an occurrence that it made him blush harder.

She leaned back in her seat and took a long drink; then made a face. "A little too young, this batch," she said to the bartender. ' 'What are you doing? Making the stuff out of the chips that don't get sold at lunchtime?"

The bartender glowered at her in a friendly sort of way and didn't deign to answer, just went back to polishing glasses.

Mell looked over at Evan and said, "I really shouldn't complain. They tried making vodka out of soybeans last month, and it's taken this long for the smell to go away.''

Evan shook his head. "Sounds foul."

"You have no idea," she said.

Evan was trying hard not to seem too interested, and failing. Mell Fontenay was, if possible, even better-looking sitting still than she was when fighting. For one thing, when she was sitting still, you could watch the thoughts go round and round behind that astonishing pair of ice-green eyes. Expressions variously calculating, humorous, scornful, amused, and thoughtful followed one another, only occasionally seeming to have anything to do with the conversation going on. It was the kind of thing that tempted you to say outrageous things in an attempt to produce the correct expression—or rather, to interest her enough so that the correct expression overrode the one that she was choosing to wear for her own reasons.

"You were going to tell me," he said, "why you mixed in when you did."

SPACE COPS
89

"Was I?" she said, looking abstractedly into her glass for the moment. She put it down, empty, and pushed it at the bartender. "Same again, please. You know," she said to Evan, "this is rather a closed community. Any stranger attracts a bit more attention than he might find usual."

"So it seems," Evan said rather ruefully.

"Well, it's worse for you," she said. "You're the Government, after all."

"I am not!"

"Of course you are," she said, "to us. Or rather, to these people."

Evan raised his eyebrows. "You're not 'us'?"

"Oh no," she said. "I'm an independent contractor. Thanks, Mike." She took a long drink, put the glass down.

Evan laughed. "I thought everybody here was an independent contractor. Except maybe poor Noel."

"Poor Noel," she said, and smiled a little. "Yes, well. We're used to him by now."

"Eight years," Evan said, "I should bloody well think so."

"Oh, but this is no different from any other small community," Mell said. "Some people will never become part of it, no matter how hard they try. Some people wouldn't be part of it even if they were born here. Noel is accepted because he was ordered here, and because he cares. But as for you and your friend,'' she said, taking another drink, "as far as you're concerned, we're just another job."

"It's not exactly like that," Evan said.

"And some people here," Mell said, "aren't any too sure just what your job is."

"I should have thought that would be all over the place by now," Evan said. "The disappearances."

"Yes, well," Mell said. "There are people who aren't sure that the investigation might not turn to something more general after a while. There are a lot of people out here involved in things that are, shall we say ... marginal."

"Marginally legal, you mean."

9O
SPACE COPS

She nodded, and stroked her long hair back out of her eyes. It was a habitual gesture, one which Evan had noticed she made even when the hair wasn't actually in her way at the moment.

"Quite so," she said, and for a second Evan thought she was mocking his accent. The glint in her eyes said that this was more than likely. "The illegality might be marginal, too. But most of the people who've come here to live have little rackets running of one kind or another, or else they have something in their lives that they wouldn't want looked into too closely. People like you coming here—" and the glint turned very definitely mocking for a moment "—make the man in the corridors here nervous. Nobody likes seeing the status quo disturbed."

Evan sighed a little and took a good long drink himself. He said, "I'm not particularly interested in disturbing
that
status quo. Unfortunately, the people who send us here and there take a dim view of us running off after problems that aren't the one we were sent to solve. Also," he said a little grumpily, "we don't have the budget for it."

"That's not what I hear from your rooming house," Mell said, a little wickedly.

"That thief," Evan growled. "Man should be ashamed to rent out rooms in such a state."

"And what were you expecting? Conrad Hilton and silver trays?''

That annoyed him. "Lady," Evan said, "I've spent five months living out in a little dome at Highlight, where the patches on the ceilings were even worse than they are here, and if you saw washing water twice a month, it was an event. But at least when it came it was clean, and you didn't have to spend half your morning scraping the bleeding grunge out of the plumbing!" He took another slug of the horrible vodka to calm himself. It merely shifted his annoyance to the vodka: he began to think he could taste a certain bouquet of rancid deep-frying oil. "The man," he said, with what he hoped was more dignity, "is a thief
SPACE COPS
91

for all that. But you won't see me arresting him. I have other fish to fry."

Mell looked thoughtful for the moment. "So you say. Well, I guess you ought to be given a chance to prove yourselves."

"I take that very kindly," Evan said.

"Ouch!" she said, and rocked back in the seat, laughing at his mockery. "We're even, I suppose."

"Oh, indeed," Evan said, and chuckled a bit. "Well, never mind that for the moment. Listen, Madam Chop-and-Change, Ms. Inconsistent, you still haven't told me why you decided to become the belle of the brawl."

"Pity?" she suggested. "A momentary weakness in the head? Curiosity?"

"Curiosity I might buy."

She shrugged. "Your technique was interesting," she said. "And maybe the odds were a little too high for my tastes."

"Hah," Evan said. "An adherent of the Marquis of Queensberry, out here? You're misplaced a bit, I'd say. But you know the rule, anyway. One riot, one sop."

"They sent two of you."

"So? We had two riots. Maybe now we can get down to work.''

"Third time usually pays for all, around here," Mell said, her eyes glinting again. And what was it this time? Anticipation? Evan breathed out in a moment's annoyance; the woman's moods came and went faster than a laser can tune itself.

"Are you implying that I'm going to have to take on Mr. 'Smith' again?"

"Who?"

"The lad who started the fight just now."

"Oh, you mean Leif the Turk?"

"What?"

"Leif the Turk." She started laughing.

"Not a very Turkish name," Evan said.

"No," Mell said. "But that's what everyone calls him.

93
SPACE COPS

I think his folks were Russian and Finnish, or some such thing. But he was born on the Moon."

"So where does the Turkish part come in?"

"I think he killed one," Mell said. "Claim jump, apparently."

Evan finished his drink, pushed it in the direction of the bartender for another one. "There seems," he said, "to be a lot more of that going on around here than in other parts of the Belts."

Mell sighed and stared at her glass. "It would be nice if high-content asteroids were evenly distributed through the Belts," she said, "but they aren't. The explosion that created them is still geologically much too close to us in time. It's supposed to be thousands of years before the distribution evens out, and by that time will there be anything left to mine?" She looked thoughtful. "But in the meantime, what people find here, they take pretty seriously. And a lot of people find the competition too fierce over in the higher-yield parts of the Belts. The big companies are out there with their bulk sweepers, and the independent operators over there can afford better equipment than most of the people over here can."

She turned her glass around a few times, staring at it. "So tempers run a little high. It happens a lot less than it might, I think. But people tend to get pretty secretive." She glanced up at him. "So when a couple of sops with a shiny new ship come barging in here and announce that they're intending to investigate claim-jumping, a lot of people get twitchy. Even the innocent ones. And the guilty ones start wondering whether some inner-system sop with his shiny SP badge is going to have the same ideas about justice as they do."

Evan looked at her thoughtfully.

"Besides," Mell added, pushing her hair out of her eyes again, "some of the people based out of this station have their claims hidden in all kinds of interesting ways. They're not too willing to have information about how they're doing it made too public. For some of them, the secrecy of
SPACE COPS
93

their claims' location is the only thing between them and bankruptcy."

"I'm not interested in making anybody bankrupt," Evan said, "or anything else of the kind. I want to find out why in the past few months, more people are being lost than should be. And I want to find out why someone is willing to go to quite so much trouble to make plain murder look like claim jumping. I think that's legitimate. Don't you?"

She looked at him from under the sweep of hair that fell across her eyes. "Don't you find that hair a problem when you're in a suit?" Evan said suddenly.

Mell smiled. "I tie it back. What do you mean, 'One riot, one sop?' "

Evan drew breath hi protest at being dragged
off
the subject again, then laughed resignedly. "It's an old story," he said. "There was once a group of lawmen called the Texas Rangers, back on Earth. The area they were policing was pretty wild—a lot of backshooting, robbery, rustling—"

Mell looked bemused. "People making crackly noises?"

"Not that kind of rustling. Stealing cattle. Anyway, these Rangers had a reputation for being extremely determined, and tough. One example: there was a saddlemaker who had a whole batch of his saddles stolen, and he asked the Rangers to do something about it. They did. Wherever they went, if they saw someone riding by on one of those saddles, they shot him off it. They got all the stolen saddles back," Evan said, playing to her shocked expression with some pleasure. "The saddlemaker went out of business a year later, though."

"Very effective," she said, "I think."

"Well. There was a town in Texas somewhere which was having trouble with rioting and looting, and they sent a message to the Rangers' HQ, saying, 'Having riot, send company of Rangers.' The message came back, "One riot, one Ranger.' " Evan smiled wryly. The story was one of Joss's favorites, and got told with depressing regularity.

94
SPACE COPS

"And so you two are like those Rangers?"

"There are similarities," Evan said, "but we do try not to shoot people quite so much. Now about Leif the Turk; what's his grudge?"

"Grudge? Don't be silly. Leif's a mental case. There's nobody in this place he hasn't attacked at one point or another. But you sure bring out the worst in him. I don't know where he got a gun from. Usually nobody around here will let him have one."

Evan put that piece of information away for future reference. "Never mind him, then. My partner and I are going to need to start talking to people around here pretty soon, when we've finished our preliminary work. Have you heard anything about what we've found so far?"

"Hek's ship," she said, "yes. Digging starts in the morning, doesn't it?"

"As soon as we get our independents lined up, yes." He cocked his head. "Are you interested, then?"

"Not hi my line of work," she said. "I'm maintenance. I can recommend some names, though."

Evan nodded at that, while thinking.
Maintenance? This is one of the people who repairs this place?

Or rather, doesn 't repair it? Dear sweet Lord, help us.

"I need people who are good operators with mining tools," he said, trying not to change expression too much, "and who can be careful about what they find. I'll want to vet your suggestions with Noel, of course."

"If you like," she said, "I'll meet you in his office tomorrow and you can check them out with him right there and then. Most of the heavy-tool operators who work here I know pretty well."