Kill Station (21 page)

"Okay, got that," George said.

Joss sighed, sat back in the seat and stretched. "I can barely stand the excitement," he said to Evan. "You look similarly captivated."

Evan glanced over at Joss, and had to smile a little. For all his studious, careful, methodical act, Joss really did get worn down by prolonged chases, by those long periods during which they sat waiting for something significant to happen. "You ought to go watch a vid or something," Evan said.

Joss smiled a little. "You're
encouraging
me to go watch vids?" he said. "Possibly a historic occasion. What should I watch, then?"

Evan thought for a moment. "What's the one with the mouse in it?" he said.

"Your tastes," Joss said, "are in serious need of adjustment."

"What, all of them?"

Joss raised his eyebrows. "A few of them seem to be intact." His comms board cheeped at him; he turned, looked at it, then hit a control and said, "Ignore that, George. It's another live ship."

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"Gotcha."

"No mice," Joss said. "We'll discuss it later. You look like you could use some distraction."

"Not really," Evan said, but he knew it was hopeless. Joss had been with him long enough to have learned something about reading his moods.

"George," Joss said, "must be something of a problem to you."

Evan looked up and said, "Partners though we are, I'm not sure we really need to be discussing this."

"I think maybe we'd better," Joss said, "since your performance is being affected. Visibly affected. You don't usually wool-gather in situations like this."

Evan sighed and said, "It won't make a difference once things start happening."

Joss looked skeptical. "You can't be sure of that," he said. "You said yourself that this has never happened to you before."

"I said it won't make a difference!"

"All right," Joss said, very gently, as his board cheeped at him again. "Let it be for the time being." He looked at the board, and at the screen next to it, and suddenly straightened up.

"George," he said, "what do you have at oh oh six mark one eight up?"

There was a pause. "Ship signal," George said. "Not very strong."

"No surprise, that," Joss said, "because if the tag on my screen is correct, that ship almost fell on me in the salvage pile the other day."

"Holy shit," said George, sounding completely delighted.

"Indeed, yes," Joss said, as Evan hurriedly came up behind him and peered over his shoulder at the screen. The signal tagged there was winking on and off with increasing and fading signal strength.

"Look at that," Joss said. "See that fade? That signal's being bounced off an asteroid about a hundred klicks from
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here. It looks as if it's coming from there to someone listening at Willans. I wonder, have they installed another relay on that little rock? Or maybe just a reflector?'' He began fiddling with controls. "Never mind. George, are you getting the apparent direction of that signal?"

"Yup. It's weak, though, and I'm getting two of it."

"Secondary reflection," Joss said. "Perfect. You mark that. The stronger one of the two is the one we want. Here the relative strengths are obvious," he said to Evan, making adjustments to his board, "but they won't be obvious at Willans; they wouldn't be able to hear the primary signal from the relay at all.

What a great system! What a twisty little mind somebody has!"

"We hope they still have it," said Evan.

"Hard to say," said Joss. "But we should find out a few things shortly. George, you heading for the primary signal?"

"Straight in."

"Mind our signal, then. This would be a bad place to rub elbows. Evan, you might want to think about getting your suit ready. If the thing's little, I'd like you to have a close look at it."

Evan nodded and headed for his stateroom. "I could bring it in, if you liked."

Joss looked after him, thoughtful. "Hmm. I don't know. You think that would be wise? If anybody were to notice that someone had been tampering with the relay—"

There was that, after all. "No," Evan said, starting to get into his suit, "I see your point. Let's leave well alone, then. How long till we're there?"

"Hard to tell you exactly, but I'd be surprised if it took us more than half an hour."

"Probably more like twenty minutes," George said. "I'm getting the signal a lot more strongly now."

They coasted closer. Steady soft beeping began to fill the control room. Joss was letting the relay's pulse output stay audible. After a little while Evan stalked back into the control room and looked over his shoulder.

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"Do you know how heavily you walk in that thing?" Joss said, not looking up, but sounding quite amused. "Good thing there's nobody sleeping in here. You'd wake them up for sure."

Evan chuckled. "The suit wasn't exactly made for tiptoeing up behind people, that's true enough. How long now?"

"You really do want to get out, don't you?" Joss said. "About ten minutes. I think. George?"

"I make it about eight," he said. "Beginning to decelerate now."

"I'd better too, then," Joss said, and reached over for the command panel, swinging it close.

Evan braced himself a bit against one wall of the front cabin as the gee-stresses shifted. "Do we have any idea what this thing is going to look like?" he said.

Joss shook his head. "I would suspect that it's mostly batteries, since it has to be able to throw pretty concentrated beams of signal around. Solar panels wouldn't be any help to it this far out. Nuclear batteries, or chemical, I don't know which. But it'll be fairly massive."

"Right," Evan said, glad of the warning. Weightlessness was all very well, but heavy things retained their mass no matter what happened to their weight, and a careless move could get him crushed in very short order indeed.

"When weVe had a look at that," Joss said, "we'll be better able to find out how signals are being sent to the thing from farther out. Possibly we'll even get some indication of where they were sent, if I can break into the relay's software."

"You think you can do that?" Evan asked, putting on his helmet.

Joss flexed his fingers expressively. "Just try me."

"You missed your calling," Evan said. "You should have been a safecracker. Or a spy."

Joss smiled and turned back to his console.

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Evan finished closing the seals on his suit and went forward to look out the plex at the front.

"A little too soon," Joss said, touching controls here and there. "But look, here comes George."

Evan looked out and saw the glint of distant sunlight off George's ship—one of the station's typical designs, a box and a globe welded together, with struts to stand on. It was hard to miss George's ship.

For reasons best known to himself, it was painted with gaudy black and yellow wasp stripes, and looked (to Evan's way of thinking) rather like the wrath of God.

"Hard to miss him," Evan remarked.

"Just as well," said Joss. "Three minutes, now. You see anything? I have a small mass in scan, straight ahead. We might be on top of it already, to judge by the signal."

Inside his helmet Evan tossed his head, and flipped down his specs, the binocular light augmentation filter.

"Something out there," he said. "About a meter and a half long, if I'm judging correctly. Hard to tell without any other reference."

Joss nodded and started applying braking jets with a vengeance. "Here we go," he said. "On finals.

George, you have a visual yet?"

"Of you, yes. Nothing else."

"Evan has it at our eighteen hundred low. Close now."

For a few moments more there was no sound. Then George said, "Got it."

"Meet you there," Joss said. He made more adjustments to his console. "Just one minute."

Evan gazed out the plex and watched the little thing draw slowly nearer as Joss decelerated and they coasted past it. It was a sort of double beer-can shape, with a third beer-can sitting on top of the first two. Joss gave a final blast of the attitude jets, stopped them, and set the ship to station-keeping.

George's ship drew near, and hung there, poised.

"Your baby," Joss told Evan. "You know the cable that's coiled up in the clips in the airlock?"

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"The one with all the weird heads on it? Sure."

"Take it with you and plug one end into the port at the nose end of the ship. If I can't get this relay to dump its guts by remote, I may have to do it the hard way."

"Physical connection?" George said drily, giving an opinion that nobody had asked for. "How primitive."

"No kidding," Joss said. He looked over at Evan, who was heading for the airlock.

"Be careful," he said.

Evan smiled at him, not minding, since Joss couldn't see it. "Shall do."

He went out to the airlock, snagged the cable, and shut the inner door behind him. "You want to pull the air hi?" he said to Joss.

"At the prices we're paying on Willans, you better believe it." Sound hissed out of the airlock along with the air.

Evan picked the cable out of its clips, put the loop of it over his forearm, and reached for the first of the set of hull handles to his right, to pull himself along the skin of the ship. In front of him, Joss had put a spotlight on the relay.

"I think you were right about the batteries," George said. "Those two cans on the bottom."

"Yup," Joss said. In his earphones, while he plugged the comms cable into the hull, Evan could hear the sound of Joss's comms console being tickled. "Hmm."

"Stubborn?" Evan said.

"Mmf," said Joss. "Thing has a satchel code filter between it and its outputs. Nasty."

This was Greek to Evan. "Can't get hi?"

"Might take me a few minutes," said Joss. "Patience."

Evan made his way to the thing, letting go of the ship and giving his personal jets a light kick. He stopped himself a little distance from it, using his chest torch to look it over. The black surface coating was somewhat scarred
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with micrometeorite impacts, as might have been expected.

"You think this might be booby-trapped?" he asked Joss.

"Seems unlikely, but it's best to check. Move your hand toward it, but don't touch it."

Evan did this. "Okay . . . take it away again." He did.

"No change in impedance," Joss said.

"Is that good?"

"It's not rigged to go off with mere proximity," Joss said. "Could be pressure-rigged, though."

"Oh, wonderful," Evan said. "Shall I just hit it and see what it does?"

"How good is your armor?" George said, sounding worried.

"Well, if there were a nuke in here I wouldn't do too well," Evan said, looking the relay over, "but I don't think this thing is big enough to hold critical mass, even with a squeeze field. I'll just take my chances."

He reached out and gave the relay a quick poke, a stab of the right index finger that would have put a hole through the proverbial brick wall.

Nothing.

"You are an idiot sometimes," Joss said, sounding slightly testy. "Why didn't you just back off and lob a rock at it?"

Evan chuckled. "Now where would be the drama in that?"

Joss told him what he could do with drama. "Never mind that now," Evan said. "How are you doing with that thing? Got it to spill its guts yet?"

"Whoever designed this thing," Joss said, apparently between clenched teeth, "didn't know anything about subtlety. The damn cryptography is all hard-wired."

"Cheaper that way," George said. He sounded like someone trying to be helpful, who knew perfectly well he was being no such thing, but had a good line he didn't want to waste.

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"Hmmf," said Joss, and it was now quite apparent to Evan what the source of his testiness was. Joss liked to think that there wasn't a machine made that he couldn't outwit, blandish, or subvert.

"Shall I try the cable?" Evan said.

"Oh, go ahead, dammit," said Joss, sounding very cross indeed.

Evan moved carefully around the relay, looking for anything that might be a communication port. The upper body was quite smooth and unbroken. He gave himself a quick blast of downjets and started circling the lower part. "Hmm," he said. "Not much here. Let me try underneath."

"George," Joss said, "are you seeing that?"

"Seeing what?" George asked, as Evan looked over the bottoms of the two beer cans. There was nothing that looked like a port at all.

"Sort of a ghost at one oh one mark three five up and over."

There was a brief silence. "Jos's," Evan remarked, "this thing is determined to remain as tight as Aunt Ellie's jam jar.

Not a hole to be found."

Joss growled. Evan almost laughed out loud, but restrained himself. "Don't see a thing," George said.

"Hell. Never mind, I just lost it. Some reflection or something. Evan," Joss said, "make a hole."

"Where?" Evan said, looking the relay over.

A pause. "At the top, by preference. Then you see the little cable at the end where all the port connections are? The one with the little alligator clips on it?"

This time it was Evan's turn to pause, an uncomfortably long pause, before he said, "Yeah, got it."

"Just clip them to anything. A radio rig that well sealed is going to leak signal inside like a sieve. I may be able to upset its innards a little."

Evan chuckled and gave his jets a little push, so that after a moment he was floating above the top can.
Not too deep,
now,
he thought, and did the wrist twist that set the

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beamer in his right arm to wider dispersion. He flipped down the polarizer inside his helm, and gave the top of the relay about three seconds.

Metal boiled away. When the vapor cleared, Evan peered inside and saw a few exposed wires and cables.
Perfect,
he thought, and tucked the alligator chips in, making sure they made good contact.