Kill Station (20 page)

How can I be so sure?

'
'Look,'' Evan started to say, almost in desperation.
A truce for the moment
—

George got up, nodded stiffly to Evan, went out.

Evan slumped back in his chair, and a little sound, almost a moan, escaped him, much to his surprise.

Then he got up and headed for the 'fresher, to get ready for the evening.

And her.

JOSS GOT UP EARLY. EVAN WASN'T IN YET; NOR had he been expected to be, under the circumstances. His communications console, which he had quietly left running the afternoon before, had recorded Evan's conversation with George, which Joss had listened to and then destroyed, not entirely without mixed feelings. It was not exactly ethical to snoop like this. But these were not exactly usual circumstances.

There was a clanking noise outside the hull.
That'll be Mell, making her morning check,
Joss thought;
so Evan will
be along shortly.
He had a word with the control console and got it ready to run its diagnostic checks as soon as she was gone. It wasn't that he didn't trust Mell; it was just—well, he didn't trust her.

He put his head out the airlock door. "Good morning, madam," he said, and stopped very abruptly when he realized that it was not Mell out there, but a tall skinny man in a rusty black skinsuit, doing something to one of his attitude jets.

"Hey!" Joss shouted. The man looked up at him with a face that was so radiation-scarred, you could hardly tell where the nose stuck out. Only the eyes were alive and

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lively, and, at the moment, shocked. The man threw down what he had been carrying, a metal rod with a rounded end, and ran for it.

And limped as he ran.

It's my boy from the salvage heap!
Joss leapt down out of the airlock, voice-locked it behind him, took just a long enough glance at the attitude jet to see that a great gob of some kind of metal putty had been shoved down it, and then took off after the man, drawing his gun as he did.

"Stop!" he shouted, rather uselessly, but you had to do it, regs said: "Solar Police!" The man kept running, limping but still very fast, on out of the hangar dome, down the corridor, passing two rights, taking the third into a major intersection of corridors.

Oh, hell,
Joss thought, for in that intersection was a parking place for the little electric carts that people in the station used for moving cargo, and—when it pleased them or they were feeling lazy—themselves.
Well, at least I won't have
to run much further. I just pray I get one that's charged
up. ...

He plunged into the corridor, came to its junction with the others. There were about fifteen of the pink carts parked there, and the man was already on one of them, zooming away, turning a corner.
Oh, hell and damnation!
Joss thought. In a few days he had come to learn some of the ways around here. He knew the man was heading for the Old Town. Down there, in the little mazy tunnels, Joss could chase him for a week and not catch him if he didn't want to be caught. All the same, he had to try. Joss leapt into one of the carts, turned the key, and headed off after the fugitive as fast as he could.

It was a bad situation. The man had a head start on him, and was on his home ground. Joss could do little but try to catch up with him, possibly shoot his tires out. And as for backup—there wasn't any. No way Noel could get to him.

And as for Evan—

Joss snorted, swerved to miss a surprised woman coming out of a doorway. "Sorry, ma'am!" he shouted, driv-144
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ing with one hand, waving the gun with the other. Ahead of him he just barely had the man and his cart in view. The sound of more surprised screeching was coming from that direction, as other people in other carts or on foot got out of the way. /
need a siren,
Joss thought, turning a corner hard, another one, first left, then right. The man was ahead of him again. Sight was almost useless at this point, with so many corners and twists and turns; Joss was going by sound alone. He cornered hard, almost turned over, but not quite. The man was a hundred yards ahead of him, down a long straight corridor with no turns for a good white.
Aha,
Joss thought, and speeded up.

He began to close. Fate had been kind to him, this once, and had given his saboteur a cart with less charge. Joss crept up behind, closer and closer, pushing the cart to twenty klicks an hour, twenty-five—

They were approaching a T-junction. The cart ahead of him swerved left; Joss turned the corner after it—

—and from out of corridors to the left and right, about fifty yards ahead of him, other carts leapt out, two from one side, three from the other. Joss hit the brakes, trying to see faces and to manage the cart at the same time. It was hopeless; he spun, the thing's braking system cut out, cut in again; he skidded, rammed sideways into the wall, and sat there stunned for half a second.

Before he could do anything about it, the other carts took off, losing themselves down turns out of the corridors from which they had come.

Joss sat there for a few moments, breathing hard, then put his gun away.

Hell,
he thought. But he had to smile a little bit. He now had a piece of evidence that had been lacking.

The sabotage that had been going on was
not
random mischief, but organized. He had been led down

-this corridor on purpose, and his saboteur, the man who tried to murder him, had been rescued by friends. Five of them. More, they had taken care that their sabotage should seem to be
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nothing but Mell doing her morning work. They would certainly have known she was doing it.

Or possibly even arranged to have her do it? Was Mell on their side?

He made his way back to
Nosey.
It took him about half an hour; he had gotten extremely lost down those corridors.

Back at the ship, he checked the outside of it over most carefully. Nothing.

He looked at the clogged jet outlet. If this had been missed, when he tried to lift the ship up, it could well have blown the jet assembly straight backwards through the hull and into his stateroom on liftoff.
Tacky, tacky,
he thought, and picked up the discarded metal rod to dig out the putty before it hardened.

When that was done, he went into the ship and began running the diagnostics. About halfway through the process, they went red. There was something wrong with the iondriver.

Joss revised his estimate of the number of people involved in the sabotage. While he had been off on his wild cart chase, someone had been busy trying to ruin something else.

Now I wonder,
he thought to himself as he went out to get the engine cover off,
would Mell have noticed it when she
did her checks?

He turned and went back inside to make himself a cup of coffee.

"LOOKS LIKE THE BEAM GENERATOR'S HAD ONE

of its chips shorted out," Mell said, her voice slightly muffled, since she was under the ship on her dolly.

"Can you replace it?" Evan said.

"Not from anything in station stores," she said. "You insist in coming here in brand new equipment, you're going to have this kind of problem. If you were flying a VW, I could do something for you."

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"Nosey
is definitely not a VW," Joss said, coming down out of the airlock.

"Nosey?"
asked Evan, looking at his partner with mild concern.

"Have to call a ship something," Joss said, "or it'll turn on you. Here, Mell, is this the right part number?" He held down a small plastic packet with an antistatic stripe around it.

Her hand came out from underneath, took it, pulled it under. "Oh, good," she said. "I was hoping you would have one."

"We carry triple spares," Joss said blandly, "for everything except our brains. Want some tea?"

"Yes, thanks. I didn't get any breakfast."

"You're mean to this lady," Joss said to Evan. "Come on."

Evan was unsure whether to take this statement as read, so he said nothing, merely followed Joss inside the ship. "Is there something wrong?"

"Just a few things I didn't want to mention hi front of her," Joss said. Evan sat down as Joss closed the door, and listened to the tale of his morning's chase with ever-increasing bemusement.

"So they are organized after all," he said.

"That they are. And they're getting nervous."

"So are you, from the look of things."

"I think we have reason," Joss said. "We are going to have to start being very careful, Evan. I don't want one of those braided lasers up
my
backside, thank you."

"No," Evan said, "I would have to agree with you on that. Where is George this morning?"

"He's already waiting for us off the station beacon. When Mell's finished, we can head out." Joss looked at Evan with something that might have been pity. "Are you okay?" he asked.

Evan laughed out loud. Despite the various complications taking place around him, he had never been more
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okay in his life. But how was he going to explain that to Joss?

"I take it that means yes," Joss said.

How do I tell him?
Evan wondered.
I've never been in love before
—
or not like this. I don't know what to do, and
Diw,
I don't care—
"It does," Evan said finally. "Truly, don't worry."

He will anyway,
Evan thought. And, "I will anyway," Joss said immediately, so that they both laughed. But on Joss's part, the laughter was a little more restrained than usual.

"Yes," said Evan, "I thought you would. So worry. We have work to do."

Joss nodded. "Let's go see how she's doing, and then let's get out of here and go relay hunting."

FIVE

THEY WENT COASTING OUT INTO THE COLD

dark.

It took them a weary while to get to the spot they had in mind. Not that it was one particular spot; there was a lot of space to cruise in it, listening for the tiny electronic whisper of a relay that might or might not still be broadcasting. Joss had the ship's communications "ears" listening carefully for any breath of radio communication that seeme'd too close to be coming from where it said it was. But so far there was nothing but silence.

And Evan was having a hard time keeping his mind on his job.

"You must know a bit more about all this than you've been letting on," he had said, in the darkness.

Laughter. "I've fallen into an old vid," she said. "Now that the handsome cop has seduced me, I will tell him all my secrets. Where the gold is hidden. How I've been spying on the Government." She laughed harder. "Isn't this where the armed men come out of the closet and herd you off? No, that won't work. I don't have a closet. Wait, I've got it. Photographers come in, with those old cameras with the flashbulbs.

The blackmail pictures are sent to your home with a note attached, saying, 'Lay off or the local paper will get these.' "

Evan had laughed at that himself. He tickled her, then, and she squealed and hit him with the pillow.

"But seriously. You seem to know everybody in this
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place. I keep getting this feeling that you must know something else that could be of some help to us, if I could just figure out what it was."

"Ah," she said. "Subtlety."

"Mell, come
on!"

"Evan, you big dumb lug, listen! And stop looking so hurt. You try the dumb bunny act with me, I'm going to hit you right back with it. Of course I know illegal things that are going on here! People are always making mechanics the sort of peculiar offers they think the mechs can't ignore. Except. ..."

"Except?"

"Except I don't usually have time for that kind of thing. I prefer a quiet life.''

"Don't usually?"

"What do I look like, the Virgin Mary?"

"To tell you the truth, I had not been under that impression ... no." A chuckle.

She hit him again, harder. "Listen," she said, after the giggling had died down. "All kinds of people come through here.

Some of them wave money around and try to get the people here to do things for them. Sometimes people do them, because, hell, money is scarce! A lot of the miners working this station have more than themselves and their ships to worry about. The rest of us here understand that. No one tries to scare away harmless trade. No one calls more attention to it than it needs. If something really bad's going on, of course people will have nothing to do with it. But if it's something that seems innocent—"

Her voice trailed off.

"So you've done the occasional 'innocent' thing."

She just looked at him quietly.

"Do you really think I would be involved in something bad? Really?"

He gazed at her. The hair was a veil, the eyes were cool and a little sad.

"No," he said, "No, of course not. But I had to ask."

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She nodded, still looking sad.

"Knowing," Evan said, "that you wouldn't tell me."

"But I would," she said. And after a moment's silence, added, "I
think I
would."

Evan sighed, drew her close, and kissed her again, sank into her, drowned in the depths of her—

"Wrong signal," Joss said down the commlink to George, shaking his head. "That's a live ship. Check your screen. I've got them tagged."

"My screen isn't getting your fancy tags," George said, sounding cheerful enough even though he was mocking.

"Doesn't have the graphics capability."

"Oh, Lord," Joss said. "Well, never mind. Get your grease pencil or whatever and mark oif that one at, uh, two six eight mark niner four, because it's a live ship and nothing we want. I think we're still too close in."