Kill Station (18 page)

Some time later, he found that he could breathe, and there were people looking at him and applauding. He managed a weak smile and looked at the glass to see if he'd dropped it or tipped it over. Miraculously, it was intact, and mercifully empty.

Evan resisted the urge to shake his head, pant, or do any of the things that he felt like doing. He concentrated on making something like intelligent conversation with the people around him. He wasn't too sure how he was doing, but since he saw many of them drinking the same thing he was, Evan decided not to worry too much about it. He did turn to Mell, though, and when the people he had been talking to were distracted, he said, "What was in that?"

She smiled at him. "Industrial spirit. Some other things."

"Og diw,"
Evan said, and sighed. He looked up and said, "Bartender? May I have another Swill, please?"

All around him there were looks of great pleasure.
This

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is probably going to be even worse than being beaten up, later on,
he thought,
but hell, a sop must do his job. . . .

He had no clear idea of how long he was there. He talked for quite awhile with several of the people gathered around him, specifically the little silver-haired lady, Baba. She wasn't able to tell him much about where her friend Hek had been headed, only that Hek had said she had her claim very securely hidden indeed, though she didn't know how.

Baba, unfortunately, was not a miner herself, just the mother of one, and was short on any knowledge of technique.

"But she said," Baba said, "that she didn't expect it to stay hidden forever, the claim. She always said someone would probably stumble on it by accident. 'It's all just folly, that's all,' she would say to me." Baba shook her head sadly. "

'Just folly.' I guess she was right."

The old lady sighed and drank. Evan looked from her to Mell, and found Mell wearing an oddly intense expression.

"Folly?" she said. "Baba, did she say just 'folly'? Or maybe 'Langton's Folly'?"

Baba looked up, frowning slightly. "Maybe. Maybe she did. It was a while ago. She would always say, 'Out by the folly.' "

"That's an old station that failed," Mell said to Evan. "It went bankrupt about fifteen years ago, and it was too small for anyone to start it going again. It was salvaged, nothing there but empty shells, and a beacon to warn people that it's closed."

Evan nodding, filing the information away, and turned to the others. Quite a few other people had things to tell about friends who had disappeared—but again, they were short on hard details about coordinates and so forth. Evan was somewhat disappointed about this, but against the paucity of information he could weigh the fact that a lot of these people were much more kindly disposed toward him than they had been, and some help might be forthcoming from them now. At least, he-wouldn't get beaten up every time he came into a bar. If nothing else, his social life would improve.

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He looked over at Mell, who was leaning back in her seat with a Swill of her own. The cool green eyes were resting on him in a reflective sort of way.

"You make a good native guide," Evan said, while the gossiping went on around him.

Mell put her head to one side. "I think perhaps you needed one."

At first Evan felt embarrassed to admit it, but abruptly the embarrassment fell off him. Maybe it was the booze. "I think perhaps you're right," Evan said. "Thank you. I owe you one,
cariad. "

She raised her eyebrows. "Careful. I might collect."

Evan raised his eyebrows right back at her. "Think I'm scared, then?"

"You?" She chuckled softly. "You'd hardly show it if you were. Not your style, I should think." Evan smiled slightly at s

that. "Well, then."

She reached out for his hand.

He took it.

They got up and went out, leaving the gossip running hot behind them.

JOSS SAID TO GEORGE, "I SUPPOSE HE'S BUSY.

Best we get going."

"We're all set," George said, from inside his own ship at the other side of the hanger. "Let's go."

"Cecile?" Joss said. "We're out of here. Evan comes looking for me, tell him we'll be back in a few hours."

"Last I heard, he was over in Old Town, in the Hole in the Wall," Cecile said. "Some kind of fight."

"Oh, no! Is he all right?"

"Oh, yes. He was drinking again, last I heard."

Joss chuckled. "He's conducting business, then. No problem: we don't really need him for this. See you later, Cecile."

"Hasta la vista,
Mister Sop Honey."

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Joss had had the ship's engines heating up for a good while now, and had been listening to them with great care, besides running every diagnostic that he could think of through the systems. Everything came up negative. He wasn't sure whether to think of this as good or bad. If someone was going to try to sabotage his ship now, surely they'd try something too sophisticated for him to catch.
Small consolation it'll be,
he thought as he lifted the ship up on its underjets,
to die of something completely unexpected.

He eased the ship out into the airlock, waited for it to seal behind him and to open before. The doors cracked open slowly, and he soared out. Joss was getting a better feel for the controls than he'd had for the first couple of weeks, and he was now getting more enjoyment than ever out of the way the ship moved and carried itself. Even on attitude jets, it maneuvered quickly and well, and it accelerated more and more nicely on iondrive.
Running in finally, I
suppose,
Joss thought.
Or maybe Evan's lady friend tweaked it.

Evan's lady friend. Joss had to chuckle a bit at that, as he angled the ship away from Willans and headed out to where the other three diggers' ships were waiting for him. Evan was usually such a conservative type; it wasn't like him even to look at a lady, though he could be gallant enough when it pleased him. Now, though—all this blushing! It was hilarious—except for Joss's uncomfortable suspicion that the lady in question was somehow involved with the trouble they were investigating.

Then again,
he thought,
in a place this small, almost everybody is likely to be at least involved with it . . . in some
small or marginal way. No help to us, either. It's going to mean a lot more information for us to sift through.

Behind him, Joss saw George's ship slip out of the airlock. "All right, everybody," he said to the other three ships,

"you've got the coordinates. Let's head along."

"Right," and "Gotcha," came the answers; and a third
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voice, a heavily accented Eastern European one, said, " 'Ey, Sop Honey, what you call your ship?"

Joss snorted good-naturedly. He had a feeling he was already so stuck with the nickname that there was no point in even fighting it. "Doesn't have a name yet," he said.

"Not good," said another of the voices. "Bad business to fly a ship with no name, Honey. They have a way of turning on you."

"Then what do you do with it in the meantime?" Joss asked.

There was a chuckle from the Eastern European voice. "Nickname, at least. But you can't give it. Someone else must.

When real name comes along, you give it proper, with wine. And the person who gave the nickname gives real name too."

"This is just another clever ruse for us all to go out and get drunk," Joss said, chuckling.

"And so if is? What better to drink for? Big strike, wedding, baby, name baby, name ship, funeral, wake, what else?"

"You've got a point there," Joss said. He kicked in the iondrivers; around him, with thoughtless skill, so did the others, and they all accelerated together. "So what's the nickname then?"

There was a brief silence. "You ask me to give nickname?"

Joss paused, and said, "Madam, I ask."

There was another pause, and then the voice said, "We call her
Nosey.
See, she has bump there."

Joss had to laugh. The one thing he was most sensitive about on this ship—"Good enough," he said. "We'll make it official when we get in."

There was laughter from the other two ships as well. "Mister Sop," one of their pilots said, "there's hope for you yet."

"I surely hope so," Joss said.

They accelerated for about twenty minutes, then flipped end-for-end and began to slow. Hek's asteroid swelled be-iaa
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fore them, with its lopped-off end and the slight crater where the skin of the ship was exposed. Joss waited until everyone was in position, then said, "There she is. That's what we have to dig out. Ladies and gentlemen, we need to be as careful as we can about the digging. I don't want to lose anything we might find lying around the excavation site that might belong to the ship. We may—or may not— have some extensive reconstruction to do on the site, or when we get home. But any bit of waste metal could be what gives us the clue we need to find out who killed this lady."

"We be careful," said the Eastern European voice.

The ships landed at the far end of the asteroid, and after a few moments, the pilots got out and began pulling out light mining tools and the generators to run them. Joss put
Nosey—
he chuckled again; the name was going to take getting used to—down last, next to George's ship, got suited up, and got out.

They were there for six hours. It was not a simple dig. The material thrown down around Hek's ship had fused unevenly. What was very solid melted rock and metal would give way quite suddenly to piled-up aggregates, and dust and molten stuff would suddenly be spraying all over the place as the laser drill found it had nothing in particular to work on. Flying rock became a problem. Joss's new faceplate got scratched. He found himself looking enviously at the miners' tougher composite faceplates, and wishing the SP would shell out for the same material.

But slowly the ship began to emerge from the piled-up, fused rubble. Joss had asked the workers to leave the door areas for last—they weren't a priority—and to concentrate on the engine end; he was interested to see just what had happened to this ship. At one point, George said to him, "What are you expecting?"

Joss touched helmets with the man, to keep it private. "Listen," he said, "do you ever hear stories of military vessels in these parts? "

George looked at Joss warily. "Sometimes. A ship will

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come to grief, and we'll find out there was some kind of Space Forces thing going on out in the Belts. Some kind of

'organized maneuver,' they'll say. And we'll demand to know what happened to our ship, and we'll never find out. It hasn't happened in a long time—not for years now. But it used to happen quite a bit, before things got more settled out here."

Joss thought of old stories of fishing boats getting their nets caught by cruising submarines. At best, they were dragged ten or a hundred miles; at worst, they were never seen again, and their fates were never revealed, since security forbade even admitting that the submarines had been there at all. /
wonder,
Joss thought,
how much of what
we're investigating could be attributable to that? Has the SP sent us on some kind of wild goose chase for political
purposes?

But what was in front of them needed investigating, politics or not. Joss turned his attention back to the ship's pod, which was coming free. The boxy shape was partly hidden by dust from the drilling, but there was a long scooped-out sort of walkway down to where the side of the craft went into the ground. Joss went down and stood as close as he dared. Lara, the Eastern European, was standing there with a small drill, hunched over, alternately breaking the stone away in short bursts and scraping loose bits away with an old entrenching tool. Joss picked up the tool and nodded at her. Lara blasted and Joss picked and shoveled for a few minutes. Then he stopped her with an arm on her suit, and said, "There. See that flange sticking up?"

It was a sharp, curved piece of metal, protruding at almost a forty-five-degree angle from the ship's hull. Joss could see no expression inside Lara's polarized faceplate, but she held quite still for a few seconds, and finally said, "Blowout hole, huh?"

"Looks that way, yes, ma'am," Joss said. "But let's get a closer look." Together they began to work around the edges of the hole, and, when it was defined, down the

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front of it. The hole in the ship's side turned out to be at least three feet wide; flanges of metal bent out from it all around. Lara looked in sadly at the twisted and burnt cables and burst batteries inside.

"Fuel cell," she said. "They blow often. I think they build them wrong. Not enough compartmentalization, not enough protection for these damn things."

Joss said nothing for the moment, just patted Lara on the arm and said, "Keep working, I'll be back."

He went around to the front, where George and Joe and Vanya were working. Vanya in particular was busy at the vessel's front hatch. "Let's see if we can get inside," Joss said, and started to help him.

It took them about half an hour to finish clearing the rubble and fused rock away from the door. When it was free, all work stopped for a few moments while Joss and Vanya worked, first with crowbars, then with a drill and a crowbar, to pry the door open.

Inside was dead dark, dusty, and in utter disorder. Hek's ship had been fairly roomy inside, for all that it was small; there was room enough for quite a few belongings. Now they lay all over the floors, stained and blackened by smoke; books, tools, a spare suit, plates, a blanket, a lacquered tray for tea. The teacups lay shattered. On top of them lay Hek's body, in its pressure suit.

No one moved for that first moment. Then Joss stepped forward, and slowly and carefully turned the body over. It was like a board—not surprising, considering how long it had been exposed to vacuum.