Kill Station (28 page)

I must be getting close to something good,
he thought, and came up to the front of the gun. Bullets splattered off him in normally impossible ricochet angles as he picked up the gun by its muzzle, made sure of his grip, and then heaved it over.

The man on the other side of the shield sprawled over backwards. Evan shot him and moved on, pausing only a moment to look at his uniform. It, too, had die blue dragon insignia. Then he turned his attention back to the RF

detector. The incidence of RF in the area was getting quite strong.

Evan walked on, seeing and hearing no one further for the time being.
It didn't take very long to mobilize when we
came in,
he thought.
Definitely a paramilitary organization of some kind. Filing clerks would hardly respond that
quickly to an armed incursion. And their aim is pretty good. Not that it's been helping them.

He paused at a T-junction, and looked both ways to see what the RF detector suggested. It suggested that he go right.

He did, and as he passed one doorway, the reading peaked, then began to fall off a bit.

Aha,
Evan thought, and tried the door. Locked. Well,

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there were remedies for that. He leaned against it and gave it a good push. It didn't give right away.

Armored,
he thought.
Excellent. So there is something sensitive in there. But I'd really rather not
take the chance of damaging any of the equipment in there—Joss would have my head.

Evan set himself squarely in front of the door, found his balance point, and pushed, really leaning into it this tune. The door groaned, resisting him.
Reinforced hinges,
he thought,
inside right—
He administered a few focused blows to that side of the door with one gauntlet, then pushed again. His servos whined in protest.

He ignored them and kept pushing.

And the door fell inward, off its hinges, Evan fell in with it.

He bounced to his feet, expecting more shooting, and annoyed by the prospect; he didn't want this equipment hurt. But there was no one else in the room.
All right,
he thought, and looked around the place. The room had that same sort of tidy sterility that computer rooms had had for some centuries now; empty space, with low black cabinets lined up around the walls, and a central table for the people who worked at the computer and tended it.

He picked one of the black boxes, out of the way in a corner, and noted approvingly that it was a little way away from the wall. He reached down, felt around for a ventilating panel, found one, and carefully tugged it off. He tapped open the fairing on his arm and came up with Joss's widget; then looked around to see if he could find a contact pad inside the machine. Fortunately it was one of those that took plug-in modules, and the contact seats that those used would work just fine. Evan snugged Joss's little black box down against one of them and broke radio silence for the first time. "Need a check from you," he said.

There was a pause. "Reading you quite clearly," Joss said, "and I confirm that twice. Don't worry about it; you take care of business there, and I'll take care of it here."

"Right," Evan said. He replaced the ventilating cover

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on the back of the machine, pushed it exactly into place, and headed out to see what else he could see. There was something itching him, a hunch, a feeling that there was something he ought to look into. Evan tended to trust his hunches. Outside the door he paused and said to the hunch,
All right, ride me. Where do you want to go?

For a moment there was simply nothing. Then he thought he might go
off
to the right a bit further.

He went.

JOSS SAT AT HIS COMMS CONSOLE, SWEATING.

He had six kinds of alarm set up for the detection of any kind of radio traffic, for abnormal radiation, for motion outside the ship. They were all on the job, but at a moment like this he could never quite bring himself to trust them.

The little black box he had given to Evan was in place and was doing its job—or at least, it would start to, as soon as Joss could figure out what to tell it to do. Evan had'been canny enough to install it in what was apparently one of the machine's processing cores.
Or he was lucky. We'll find out later.
But in the meantime, all Joss was seeing on his readout screen was a flow of hexadecimal gibberish. The machine was in the middle of executing some program, and not one that he could understand just by reading it.

He instructed his logic probe to feel around a bit and see what else it could find. Its eye slid into another area of memory, found it static, not executing. All very well, but no use to Joss at the moment. It was files he wanted, not programs. He instructed the box to look for simple storage files.

The search came up with a long stream of more gibberish. In the whole system, the black box didn't see a single type of file name that it recognized.

Garbage,
Joss thought.
No one has
that
much security
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in a machine. Someone's probably encoded the file allocation tables, mixing descriptions of files
together with sizes and dates and so forth. That would be a good way to produce this result.

He told the black box to break off, then set it to send data through
to Nosey's
own computer, and started it reading the encoded file allocation table again. Once he had it all, he woke up the cryptoanalysis program that he had been working on sporadically for all these months with the ladies in Crypto on the Moon. Code had been a hobby of Joss's since his father had given him an antique Commander Bleep decoder ring when he was eight. It had turned out to be a useful hobby when he was older; maybe it would be more useful today than it had been for a long time.

The computer naturally made no sound while it worked. Sometimes he wished it would; tape carrels that went around and around, or lights that flashed on and off, would have added to the effect. But it didn't really matter. He preferred fast function to any amounts of lights, especially on a day like this.

Nothing seemed to happen for a shockingly long time. Joss sweated. Without the evidence about goings-on here that these files would provide, he and Evan would be in shit of a depths and smelliness such as they had never experienced before. Or would again, since they would certainly both be thrown out of the SP in short order.
Come on, machine,
he said,
get you act in gear here!

The machine sat and thought to itself, and didn't say a thing.

Oh, come on, come on
—

EVAN WAS STALKING.

He had been in a corridor one level down from where the computer was, moving quietly and looking down toward a T-junction about a hundred yards away. Hearing

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footsteps, he had tucked himself into a doorway, out of sight. There he had stayed for a moment.

Down at the end of the corridor, at the
T, a
man with a large package under his arm had paused, looked down the corridor, then hurried on again.

Evan's curiosity was piqued. He had waited about three seconds, then gone loping down the corridor in silence. He had had to dive sideways again; another figure in a coverall and a baseball cap had been fairly close behind the first man, and was hurrying after nun.

Evan waited another second or so, then hurried up the corridor himself and paused at the corner of it to see where the two of them were going.

Straight on down. Evan paused, then very softly followed them.

They did not use a lift; they took a stairwell some distance down the corridor, first the tall figure with the package, then the smaller one with the cap. Evan waited a decent interval, and stepped, down softly after them.

They went down a fair distance, four levels. Evan had been keeping a map in the helmet's memory of the places where he had been so far, and this put him and the people he was pursuing not too far from the airlock at which he had made his entry. This was good enough news; if he had to get out fast, he could.

Suddenly, about two levels down, the sound of their footsteps stopped. Evan hurried down as quietly as he could, getting rid of the RF detector and putting up an infrared detector instead. He could see the traces of their bodies' passage in the air, now, and be sure of not missing where they went.

No one but they had been down this stairwell for some time, so the track was clear. One taller, cooler shape, one smaller and hotter were both exiting this doorway. Evan pulled it open silently, looked out.

Both traces went to the right. Visually, both people were already gone, around the next corner. He followed.

And he knew he was onto something hot, literally, when

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he saw the yellow trefoil on black on the wall, and an arrow pointing down the hallway, and both of the traces headed that way.
Hot dog,
Evan thought,
the reactor!

He began to hurry. The thought occurred to him that there might be something nasty in the package under that guy's arm.

He paused at a bend in the corridor, looked around. There was a door open hi the next bend of the hall, and the second figure, the smaller one, was just slipping inside it. Evan made a small tossing motion with his arm, triggering the autoloader that would flip another magazine into his machine gun. He stepped forward.

A man's scream came from inside the room with the open door.

Evan ran forward, his gun ready, and as he reached the doorway he saw the two shapes in their coveralls struggling fiercely on the floor. The package was cast off to one side. The baseball cap fell off one of the fighting figures as it struggled to get to its feet—

—and long, long, black hair spilled out from under it.

Evan's breath stuck just under his sternum, and his heart skipped several beats it didn't particularly need.

He dashed in, picked up the package, and tossed it out into the hall so hard that it threatened to dent the wall. There was a muffled
boom
as it hit, and debris came raining in the doorway a second later.

That done, Evan went over to the man on the floor, who was launching himself at Mell, caught the guy by the front of his coverall, and side swiped him so hard that his head came off, flew across the room, and fetched up against a control console with a very audible crack.

Evan turned and put up his visor, just for the moment. "Mell," he said.

She stared at him in utter shock, then ran to him and threw her arms around his suit. Evan made a silent resolution to get it off as soon as possible.

"Where the bloody devil have you been?" he said. "What are you doing here?"

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"They brought me. They were people from Willans, Evan, people I knew! Some of them stopped by my place, said they had a repair job for me. But they wouldn't quite say what it was, and I got suspicious and told them I was busy. So they upped the ante." She shrugged, "I like money, but not that much, not if I'm not happy with the job. So they snatched me. Dragged me off here, wherever here is, and gave me this great useless heap of scrap metal, old ships, and told me to start mating the engine shells and the cargo pods together." She wiped her hair out of her face, the old familiar gesture. "I think they were adding some equipment to them afterwards—"

"I
know
they were,
cariad.
Listen, we can't take time for this now. We have to get you a P-suit and get you out of here." Evan looked around him in mild annoyance and added, "They were going to blow up their reactor's control room? Surely they knew the whole thing would go supercritical and blow—"

"To destroy the evidence, 1° thought. I knew someone was busting into this station, and I thought it might be you, and I didn't want the evidence destroyed. You'll need it. Evan, these are some kind of crazy people. They were going on about splitting the world up, splitting up the Planets. Getting the world back to the way it used to be before the Union."

"Separate countries?" Evan said, repulsed. "All that fighting again—are you crazy?"

"They probably think it's a good idea," Mell said. "I think they're arms manufacturers on the side. But a whole lot of these people are just plain raving loonies, Evan. Just fanatics. I heard them talking all the time, and it gave me the creeps. All this victory-or-death stuff."

"Wonderful," Evan said. "Come on, though."

Together they went out into the corridor. It was full of debris from the packed charge that Evan had tossed out there, and there was a good big hole in the wall. "Excellent," Evan said, and grabbed the wall by the wire rein-aio
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forcing in it. "Let's see. Stand back a bit, Mell, if you would."

Eyeing him suspiciously, she did. Evan made sure of his grip and pulled a ten-foot section of the wall away, with reinforcement and some plascrete still sticking to it. "Shut that door for me, will you? "he said.

Mell slapped the door's closer panel. Evan pointed his arm beamer at it and fused it solid. Then he leaned the section of wall against the door, tamping it into place.

"That should keep anyone who's still alive from trying that little trick," he said, "at least until Joss has what he needs. After that, it won't matter. But I don't think there's anyone left alive here. Anyway, come on—let's find you a suit, and I'll tow you out to the ship. I don't want to linger here."

JOSS SAT AT HIS CONSOLE, MUTTERING. THE

cryptography program was sitting there thinking to itself, doing nothing in particular, or so it seemed.

"Come on, you dumb pile of code," Joss said, "let's get on with it."

Nothing.