Kill Station (26 page)

Joss looked at him with an expression that Evan couldn't decipher. "You truly don't remember? Well, we
have
been busy."

SPACE COPS
189

Evan stared at Joss. "What am I, then, a bloody social calendar?" he asked.

And then got quiet.

"Oh, heaven," he said. "The Highlands L5 is opening. Is it not? All those VIPs in one place, all that investment capital, all that cooperation. What a lovely target for a terrorist. To hold for ransom-" His breath caught in his chest again. "Or to blow up—"

"Seems likely, doesn't it?" Joss said. "God only knows the why of it. But we have a little time to find out. They can't go faster than ships of their kind normally would, or they'll blow their cover. At best, they might be in Earth orbit, oh, in thirty-six hours. If I can get Lucretia to come out of her hole—!"

But Evan had other thoughts in his mind. "Listen to me, Joss," he said. "There are other concerns for the moment. Just about all the firepower in that place has emptied out right in front of us."

Joss looked at Evan with dawning horror. "What are you thinking of? Don't tell me. YouVe been watching too many of my vids—that's the problem. You've got some damn death-or-glory stand in mind."

"Death strikes me as an interference with my plans for the moment," Evan said, "and glory is usually overrated, so you keep telling me. Hush now. Joss, almost all their ships are gone! What do we need the Space Forces for?"

"Phrased that way," Joss said, "the question practically answers itself. But there are other considerations, you dumb Taff. We can't be absolutely sure those guys are going to Earth. Courses can be changed. These guys have been doing that kind of thing for days, on their patrols."

"That wasn't a patrol leaving," Evan said, "and perfectly well you know it. That was a combat group. I know you're going to suggest following them, but there's no point in it! If they notice us—and the further we follow them, the greater the odds of our being noticed—then we're dead. They will chop us up like the garlic in your spaghetti sauce.

And at this point, which one would we try to fol-

19O
SPACE COPS

low, anyway? They've all split up. Hyperbolic orbits, I should think. Do a plot on them and see what you can make of it, fine, but don't waste your time following."

"You," Joss said, "want to get into your suit and trash that base."

"Of course not," Evan said. And grinned all over his face.

Joss looked hard at him. "And what am I supposed to be doing while you're playing soldier?"

Evan took a breath, choosing his words carefully. "Neutralization," he said.

Joss eyed him narrowly. Inside Evan rejoiced; he knew from that still look that he had caught Joss's attention perfectly.

"I can't go in there without proper cover, after all," he said. "You're going to have to do a little trashing yourself. We could completely ruin this place in a matter of minutes. Kill its radars, mess over the main exit airlocks inside those holes, seal up the people who are there inside. Then I go in and deal with them."

"Out of the question," Joss said. But he was thinking, and Evan knew it.

"I have to admit," Joss said, "that following them seems futile just now."

"I'll get my suit," said Evan.

"Now just you wait one goddam minute, you dim-bulb Tarfl" Joss shouted after him. "Has something occurred to you?"

"What?"

"If the people who have just left," Joss said, with the exaggerated patience of a man explaining a rainbow to the blind, '

'get wind of what we're doing, they will come back and trash
us.
And there goes everything. Your romantic life, my crossword puzzles, the great novel I haven't finished writing yet—"

"I read the first chapter," Evan said. "It's not half bad."

"What??!"

SPACE COPS
191

"Yes," Evan said, "and I found the bug you put on me four days ago, too."

Joss looked stricken.

" 'We don't have a closet,' indeed," said Evan. "So let's hear no more of
that,
you bloody little keyhole-peeping crypto-Irish voyeur!"

Joss actually hung his head. Evan had never seen anyone do that before, and he just stood and enjoyed it for a moment. "And anyway," Evan said, "if you in your great cleverness have in good time managed to kill these people's communications, then no one is going to find out
anything.
And what you can't subvert with your clever machinery, I can blow up."

"My cable," Joss said sadly. But there was a sort of gleam in his eye.

Evan pressed his advantage. "Weren't you talking to me the other week about how easy it was to jam selected frequencies from short range? Eh? You and your jargon, your superheterodyning and all. Well
do
something with it!

Check their frequencies and jam them solid. And then I'll find their transmitter masts and dishes, and blow them. Or you will. And with no way to yell for help, and three-fifths of their force gone—"

"Leaving me with five ships to blow by myself?"

"Na na na na na na na na naaaaaaaa," Evan said softly, in exact imitation of Joss.

Joss looked at him, eight-tenths convinced, with his eyes saying yes and his mouth saying no. "You don't even know who Bill Cosby is," he said.

Evan said, "I should very much like to find out. But if we sit here much longer, and some one of those lads comes out to do a patrol, I may not have the chance. Make up your mind, Joss
bwri. "

Joss knit his brows together, then abruptly let them loose. "Fortune favors the brave," he said. "Or something like that.

But plainly we can't wait for HQ to get off their butts." He shook his head. "What is going
on
with them?"

192
SPACE COPS

"With luck, this will all be over by the time we need to find out. Meanwhile, let's make our preparations.

Think a moment."

"Yes," Joss said. He gazed thoughtfully at the radar image of the asteroid. ' 'It looks to me as if a lot of the inside of that is gone. Slagged out and being used for service and so forth."

"And hiding their ships."

"So the actual population is probably pretty small."

"I would think so. Mostly ship's crews and maintenance people. You couldn't afford to have a large population here when you had some big paramilitary operation preparing. It's not even a question of cost.

There's the matter of security as well, of too many people knowing too much."

Joss nodded. "All right. So there won't be twelve million storm troopers with guns in there. How long do you think it'll take you to get at the vital parts? You want to take the main power out, I suppose, and the hardware of the radar. I won't be able to target that, though the masts and dishes and so forth will be no problem. But the hardware has to go. Otherwise an emergency setup could be rigged, and our friends could be called back to save the day."

"I couldn't give you an estimate as yet. I think we need to make one close pass," Evan said, "in to about twenty kilometers, to get a good look with our own radar, and with the mass detectors and your RF-detecting equipment. After that I'll know, and I can drop right away."

"Drop?" said Joss.

"Drop, of course; did you think I was going to ask you to land on that rock, you fool? You stay wingloose and do as much damage as you can, and then guard the upper echelon. I'll just bail out the airlock and make my own way down. You'll want the dropping pass to be closer."

"I should think so," Joss said. "Otherwise you'd take a week to get down, with those titchy little jets of yours."

SPACE COPS
193

"I'll have you know that I can make twenty mips when I'm in the mood."

"And your mileage is crap," Joss said. "Never mind that. I'll start plotting the recon sweep. You had better send a note to Lucretia, and make sure you tell the pad to scramble and pack it before it squirts. I don't want those clowns with their braided lasers hearing anything but a burp from this direction. And we're not going to start the blowing-up part of the operation before another three hours or so have passed. I want a good safety cushion between me and them, thanks."

"That seems fair," Evan said; and truly there was no arguing it.

It took Joss some time to set up his reconnaisance sweep; and then they went back to waiting again. Evan found this hard, even with his suit waiting for him, even with crossword puzzles to keep him busy. And images of Mell kept intruding. He spent a while writing the message to Lucretia, describing what they were going to be doing, and approximately when; he checked his suit over and over again, paying especial attention to the weapons systems. His beamers in particular were overcharged, which suited him well, and he was well stocked with the little Dart missiles that loaded from his backpack. All his electronics were in order.

There was nothing to do but wait.

And then two hours had passed.

There was still no word from Lucretia. Joss glanced over at him from the command console and said, "Time."

Evan went and got into the suit.

He was twitching slightly as he did so. Usually when he was working in the suit, he was in atmosphere of some kind or another. It was, of course, perfectly spaceworthy. But it was also vulnerable to exactly the same kinds of accidents that less well-armored pressure suits suffered. He could blow a gasket as easily as anyone else, when the suit was in strenuous use.

194
SPACE COPS

As far as he knew, though, it was in perfect condition. He would shortly be finding out.

Joss was already adjusting controls at the command console. "All right," he said. "Going to start swinging in now. You might want to lock yourself down. This is going to be tight and fast. I've been monitoring the frequencies they're using, mostly UHF, and I'll jam all of them that I can on the first pass, and pick up the rest on the second. But the less chance we give them to notice that anything untoward is happening, the better, Ready?"

Evan climbed into the seat next to Joss's. He had already spent some time readjusting the straps, "Let's go," he said.

Joss kicked in the iondrivers.

It was a wild ride, even faster than when they had been running from the altered mining ship, and Joss apparently had no concern for what rapid shifts in gee forces might do to a man's stomach. Evan was beginning to regret the late morning's Spaghetti Carbonara, and said as much.

"Shouldn't eat food that goes down so easy," Joss said, and grinned.

Evan rolled his eyes at him—not hard, since they were in the tightest part of the sweep around the asteroid, the top of the hyperbola. He turned his attention to the holograph. It was filling in with added detail of the asteroid; he could see the masts at either end of it now, like those at Willans, the tight-beam transmittal dishes, and the domes containing the power plants that maintained them. "Those are for you, I think," Joss said. "Here's my business."

He pointed in at the artificially enlarged holes in three places on the asteroid's surface. "The airlocks are down in each of those," he said. "If the correlation I'm doing between the radar and the mass-readers is correct, there's a hangar cave behind each one. Blow the doors off, and it's going to make repairs a lot harder for these people to do in the future. If they have a future. Any ships inside them won't, if I have my way. At the same time, there

SPACE COPS
195

should be pressure-lockable doors inside, so I think we can count on not killing everybody in the place with explosive decompression."

"Good," Evan said. "I'll try not to take too long about the sweep, through, after you've blown the doors."

"Yes, well, you'd better not," Joss said, "because it's going to be difficult for me to make pickup on you if you get in trouble. If I ram this ship into the side of an asteroid, Lucretia is going to cancel
both
our expense accounts."

"She's such a cheapskate," Evan said, letting loose his grip on his seat slightly, as the gee forces declined somewhat with Joss's easing up on the hyperbolic orbit.

"Now, while you're in there," Joss said, "you're going to have to find out if the place has computers for me. And if it does, you take this." He rummaged around down beside the command console, and handed Evan a small black box about three inches square, with a shiny metal contact panel on one side.

"This," Joss said, "is a comms pack and latchkey for recalcitrant machinery. Odds are I can get access into their computers, if you can get this onto any contact pad or exposed wiring that the computer has.

Make a hole, if you have to. I just wish we still had my cable."

"You'd need a much longer one," Evan said, tucking the access box into one of the pressure-tight bays on his forearm, the one that held spare grenades.

"Too damn true, but I still miss it. Those alligator clips were useful. If you can get this thing in the right spot, I should be able to dump their whole computer memory, at least everything that's presently running in the machine, into ours. And there ought to be something in it that will explain where our friends just went in such a hurry, and why. And who knows what other happy information we'll find at the same time? Do that first if you can. Then run around and wreak some random damage to keep people from interfering with my download.''

196
SPACE COPS

"I think I can manage something of that kind," Evan said.

"I just bet you can. All right," Joss said. "Take a good look at that holo. You want to copy it into your armpad?"

"I have it stored as a sketch already."

"Good. So shout for pickup when you're ready. And stay away from those airlocks until I'm finished with them."

"I'll do that."

"Good. Evan—"

With a look of mild embarrassment, Joss held out a hand. Evan took it.

"Break a leg, you dumb Taff," Joss said.

"Godspeed to you too," Evan said, and headed for the airlock.