Kill Station (14 page)

"All right," Evan sighed and had another drink. "If Leif the Turk is so mental," he said, "why haven't you people sent him off where he can get some help?"

"Because he'd go twenty times as nuts," Mell said sadly. "The doctor here monitors his medication and keeps him pretty calm. Leif had a hard life: he worked hard, then lost his wife and children all of a sudden, in a trans-SPACE COPS
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port accident, while he was out mining. What good would shipping him off to a padded cell somewhere be? Let him live out his life here where he knows where he is, and people can take care of him."

There was really no arguing with that. Evan nodded. "And what about you?" he said. "What brings you out this way?''

"Ah," Mell said, "now we get personal. Mike, you remember what happened to the last person who got personal with me?"

"You married him," said the bartender, and went back to polishing glasses again.

"I consider myself warned," Evan said mildly. "Never mind, then. I was just making conversation."

Mell stroked her hair back, looking slightly bemused. "Do you ever, really?" she said. "I mean, doesn't everything go into the investigative pot, so to speak?"

Evan had to smile a little at that. "A lot of things do, I suppose. But sometimes I do just talk. And what about you? Do you ever say anything that isn't misleading, provocative, or vaguely insulting?"

Mell laughed. "Ahh . . . we're even again, I guess."

For a moment they both just sat turning their drinks around.

"I was born on Mars," Mell said after a while. "The usual thing: one of the little terraformed settlements, down in a deep rille. O2 farming, water mining, and so forth. Some archaeology, but no one took the brick diggers very seriously.

My mother and father had a garage." Mell smiled a bit. "They taught me my trade. Got started with skimmers, overcharging the archaeologists, then moved on to a lot of iondriver work when the Belts started to really open up.

Even had an Opel dealership for a while." She made a face at that. "It went under after awhile, and just as well; we all hated it. It was one of those mistakes you make sometimes. After my dad died, and I got old enough to start making decisions about what to do with myself, I came out this way. It seemed the best thing, and
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emigration runs in our family: Dad left the Moon when he was about the age I left for the Belts. This was the first place I came, and I've been here ever since."

Evan nodded. "And you?" she said. "Surely you didn't spring fully formed from the Commissioner's forehead."

Evan laughed and gestured to the bartender to get them more drinks, privately considering that the only thing to leap from the Commissioner's head recently was an extremely stupid budget. He sat back and told her about Wales for awhile: how it was to grow up there, with the place a great hotbed of industry and business, and pressure from all directions to hurry and make something of yourself—the memory of the bad old days of poverty and unemployment had not gone away, by any means. Then the army, and training to be a suited soldier, and the occasional police actions. But always there had been a feeling that mere was something missing, something else he was meant to do. Odd, but when they had let him go at last, the anger had lasted only a very short time. The death of his first Solar Police partner. The detective work that led to the smashing of the drug ring that had caused that death. Finally his new partnering with Joss. It made a surprisingly short, dry tale, for all the thought and blood and tears and booze that had passed through it and him at one time or another.

When he finally wound down, Evan wasn't even sure Mell had been listening. She was about halfway through her drink, and looking slightly weary. "I've bored you," he said, resigned.

"Lord, no," she said, though he couldn't have told it from her voice. But she pushed the drink away.

"I guess," she said, "the tendency is to think of a sop like you as just a lump of dumb meat, isn't it?"

Evan smiled slightly. "It's an impression I don't always try to correct," he said. "Sometimes it works to one's advantage."

She glanced at him with an expression of mild exasperation. Evan just shrugged.

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"Well," she said.

He looked at her. /
am having unprofessional ideas,
he thought, without the usual shock. She was definitely an interesting woman.

Well, more than just interesting. She can fight, too.

"Where
did
you learn to fight like that?" he asked. "Seriously."

She laughed softly. "Childhood on Mars can be pretty educational," she said. "You grow up fast. And on some parts of the planet, the man-to-woman ratio is still pretty high. A lot of the men there are used to trying to take what they want." She smiled. "No point in letting them have it without a fight. And every now and then you get a chance to practice here."

"More than every now and then," Evan said, putting his unprofessional thoughts aside for good. The woman would probably bite his head off if she even suspected what he was thinking.

But at the same time he enjoyed the thought.
Dammit, they can't shoot you for thinking. Not yet.

"Penny for them," Mell said.

Evan laughed out loud. "You know," he said, "no one's said that to me since before I left Wales."

She raised both eyebrows. "Has the price gone up or something?"

Evan shook his head.

"So let's hear it, then," she said.

What harm?
said one part of his mind loudly, followed by another part commenting,
She'll only
probably kick your nuggets in, that's all. But it'll be one of the more interesting ways it's happened
lately.

"You might become violent," he said at last. "It's dangerously personal. And I'm not available for being married at the moment."

Her eyes glittered a bit, even in the low light. "Funny," Mell said, "but neither am I."

"Then I was thinking," Evan said, "that in another

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I can relax a while. What are you drinking?" he added in a more normal tone.

"Gin and tonic, if you would," said Cecile, and pulled out a bar stool for him. Joss smiled at her. Cecile was about five feet tall, cheerfully round, with the kind of figure that used to be called "pleasantly plump."

She had hair that could only be described as pink, since it had been red originally, and was now turning beautifully silver. Her face was a map of friendly wrinkles, mostly smile lines, but it was still impossible to tell how old she was. And truly, Joss didn't care: her eyes were quite young, almost wicked.

"Your mechanic should be along presently," Cecile said, when her drink came, and Joss had one to match it. "Sorry for the delay, but it was hard to find anybody who both felt like taking the call and had the expertise you need."

"Ah," Joss said. "Well, never mind." He had a long drink, and paused a moment. "Something a little funny about this gin," he said.

"It's the juniper extract," Cecile said. "It's synthesized. We can't spare the hydroponics room to grow juniper berries here.''

Joss shrugged. "As long as you grow pigs here," he said, "I don't care." And he reached across the bar for the bowl of pig tails.

Cecile looked at him with surprise and mild admiration. "However did you know we raise pigs?" she said.

Joss wiggled his fingers in the air. "Basic research, ma-dame. It would be too expensive to import such a relatively low-protein food—and a delicacy, at that—as pig tails and ears. But if you have your own, it's a shame to waste. And they taste too good." Joss pulled one out of the bowl and bit into it with a crunch of crackling. "Besides, while I was out, I passed by the part of the aggie-dome complex where they're kept. Snuck a look in through the airlock. I see they're fed the skim milk and whey left over from your milk processing. Very sensible."

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Cecile chuckled. "One of my grandchildren is a cheese-maker," she said. "Another one is in hydroponics—grain, mostly, the stuff we feed the cows on. We only wind up using about ten percent of our output for food, according to Randie."

"That's what the records say," Joss said. "I've been at the station computers, you see."

Cecile raised her eyebrows. "So that's what all those protocol transfers were earlier. I was wondering."

"You noticed?" Joss smiled a little. This was what he had been wanting to find out.

"About three hours ago, yes? Right. You're welcome, I'm sure," Cecile said, "as long as your transfer software doesn't have anything in it that'll confuse ours.''

"I don't think it does," Joss said. "But I was kind of surprised to get such easy access to your data banks. Exactly how much of the station's business goes through your part of data processing?"

Cecile laughed at him. "Why, Mister Sop Honey,
all
of it does. You think we're big enough to have separate computers for everything? No, indeed. The approach radars and so forth are in our offices because that way they'll be closest to the computers that drive them. No use putting them elsewhere! And if something goes wrong with them, it's easier to do something about it quickly."

Joss was a little taken aback. "But your backups—"

Cecile shook her head at him sadly. "You've been too close to the Sun too long," she said. "We can't afford total redundancy, not by a long shot. We have to mend and make do if something breaks. What do you think was happening when you almost got smashed flat coming in here?" She dropped her voice a bit and said, "You should have let us know you were coming a little sooner."

"The surprise is the best part," Joss said, "usually. But never mind that for the moment."

They drank in silence for a few moments. ' 'What I want to know," Joss said at last, very quietly, "is who here can SPACE COPS

hear ship-to-shore traffic, like me to you in the hangar earlier."

Cecile looked at him with slight bemusement. "Just about anyone who feels like tuning in to the frequency," she said. "We can't afford fancy scrambling and whatnot. Too many people's transmitters are the cheap and dirty kind, and we need to be able to hear them."

Joss nodded. "I can see the point," he said, and considered a moment. "Cecile, do you keep tapes of the day's transmissions?"

"For three months," she said. "It's the law. But there's never been much call for it. In fact, I can't remember the tapes being audited for as long as I've been working here. Fifteen years now."

"And you just monitor ship-to-shore and close-in ship-to-ship."

"On the main station frequency, that's right."

"No suit traffic, then?"

"You know how much memory that would take? No way, Sop Honey. There are eighteen or twenty different suit channels, well away from the dedicated ship frequencies. We'd go crazy trying to keep track; there are few enough of us paid to work here as it is. And people are always fiddling with the frequencies anyway, trying to keep their communications private. WeVe got suits spread all over VHP, talking to each other all hours of the day,"

He sighed. It was what he had suspected. The thought had crossed his mind to try to rig some kind of surveillance, but his ship's computer core couldn't spare that kind of storage either; it had other business.

"Is there any other kind of record of when people go out in suits?" Joss said.

Cecile shook her head sadly. "Joss," she said, "you're looking for a level of organization we just don't have here. If you think of us in terms of a town in the Yukon around the old gold rush, or in Outer Mongolia somewhere, you'll probably have it about right. The real world ships us people, some money, a lot of finished goods. We ship back raw materials, but the balance of our economy is tipped
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'way toward the export side. We can't afford the kind of supervision—of snooping, really—that the inner planets take for granted these days. And I don't think we want to."

Cecile sat back and held her drink in both hands, swirling the ice around in it. "When I came here," she said, "quite a while back, after my murder rap—" Her eyes twinkled as she caught him trying to stifle his reaction. "Oh, yes," she said. "My first husband. I told him the first time he hit me that he wouldn't get to do it again. After I got out, it was a nightmare. I couldn't get a job— criminal record; it didn't matter that I'd done my time— couldn't get a loan, couldn't hold down a place to live that was any good. Everybody who wanted to could know everything about my life—right down to how much was in my piggy bank, I think—just by hitting the right buttons. The Moon was no better; neither was Mars. The chance came up to emigrate, and I did. Here, if I buy something on credit, I sign for it and my signature's good enough. If I contract for services with somebody, my word is considered my bond. And since people who break their word get thrown out where there ain't no air," she added, smiling slightly, "most people's word is good. Life isn't like it is in the inner circle, but it has its own rewards. And nobody finds out anything about me that I didn't tell them. Hardly anybody has a fancy data acquisition rig like you have. You, I don't mind having it. You have an honest face—"

"Oh, don't say that," Joss said. "After everything I go through to make myself look tough."

"You do, you poor thing. And it's useful, isn't it?" Cecile added, sipping at her drink. "That bland, innocent look—no one can see all those little wheels turning in there. Now, now," she said to Joss's shocked look. "I have grandchildren.

You think this riff is anything new to me?"

"Of course not," Joss said. "Heaven forbid I should ever have thought so."

"You lie cute, too," Cecile said. "Anyway. ' She low-1O4
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ered her voice. "You were asking about suits. No, there's no way to keep record of the in-and-out traffic. There are something like eighty airlocks scattered around this place. Possibly more. People put in new ones on occasion. You're telling me, I think, that someone heard our little chat, then followed you out and tried to do you dirt."