“The jobs,” Pip said, emphasizing the plural.
A faint smile twitched across her lips. “Yes, sar. Thank you, sar.” She disappeared into the pantry, closing the door behind her with a sharp click of the latch.
I looked at Pip. “I wouldn’t have suspected her.”
“I did from the first day,” he said.
“Really? And you didn’t say anything?”
“Only qualified steward in a herd of unemployed spacers?” Pip lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “Suspicion isn’t proof and we have a lot of people who may be getting paid by somebody other than us. None of it matters. It’s just TICs bloody-mindedness.”
“What if it’s not TIC paying them?” I asked.
He paused at that and looked at me with his head cocked to one side. “You’re thinking Manchester?”
I shrugged. “Whoever doesn’t want this station found.”
“Huh,” he said. “I wouldn’t have gone there. Interesting idea.” He lifted the tea cup and took a slurp from the top. His eyes widened and he pushed the mug away. “Merciful muses, that’s harsh.”
I grinned. “I rather like it.”
“You’ve had it before?”
“Sifu Newmar used to serve it regularly.”
He settled the cup back on the table. “Huh,” he said again. “Now what?”
“Now we have some lunch, get Al to declare liberty, and see what we can turn up on Plunkett’s Junkets here in Siren.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“As far as I know, one of Plunkett’s main tourist destinations is Odin’s Outpost.”
His eyes widened at that news. “Now if we only knew who hired her.”
“Any chance your friends at High Tortuga could help?”
“Pay records?” he asked. “Unlikely. They’re all about privacy.”
“But they fiddle with cargo records and ship idents?” I asked.
He shook his head. “They don’t fiddle with cargo provenance. It’s much easier to suborn a person than finagle a system that everybody knows is foolproof. Besides you can only change your own records. Not somebody else’s.”
I blinked at him, my brain spinning away on its own. “Doesn’t that make them useless?”
“It might if enough people knew how to go about doing it. It’s not like you can stop by your local IDs to Go.” He paused. “You’re thinking about Patterson again?”
“Yeah.”
“When you’re a pro, you use pro tools.” He shrugged.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means, he’s not messing with his own records.”
“Then who?”
“Not saying. At least not yet. We have a ways to go.”
“You’re not filling me with confidence,” I said.
He chuckled. “One step at a time. We need to find this place.”
“You think Brill’s involved?”
“I’d bet on it now,” he said. “There are just too many coincidences.”
“You think her parents were killed?”
He paused, his eyes focused somewhere far away. “No,” he said at last. “I think her mother is still alive. Dad’s probably a deader, but missing shuttle?” He shook his head. “I’m just cynical enough to think that just because she’s missing doesn’t mean she’s dead.”
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” I said, almost under my breath.
“So you keep saying,” Pip said. “So you keep saying.”
Chapter 31
Siren System: 2375, August 30
Pip got us a can of refined titanium bound—ostensibly—for Greenfields in Diurnia, my old stomping grounds. In reality, we headed back to Mel’s again. I didn’t know what they’d use that much titanium for, but it didn’t matter. The margin on it was good and I didn’t mind going back.
We were only a couple of days out of Siren, when Pip plopped down in my visitor’s chair unannounced. “We need to go to Odin’s.”
“Why?” I asked. “Just because Brill disappeared from Dree?”
“Not entirely, but that’s not a bad reason.”
“Why then?”
“I ran some traffic stats on Plunkett.”
“They don’t exactly file flight plans to Odin’s,” I said.
“No,” he said, “but they fly all around it. They fly that cross pattern at least every week. Dree to Jett. Breakall to Welliver. Only rarely stop at Diurnia proper.”
“That fits with what I suspected.”
“So, I pulled the data out of archive for 2350 to 2360.”
“Anything?”
“Plunkett’s runs started expanding in 2353 and by 2355 they were making three times the number of runs compared to 2352.”
“I ran into them in late ’71 or early ’72.”
“You mentioned scrubber problems?”
“One of their packets got shorted on scrubbers with an overload of passengers.”
“Going out?” he asked, leaning forward.
“They said they were coming back from a gambling junket.”
He leaned back and sighed. “Yeah. By 2360 the number of flights had cut back almost to 2350 levels, so that’s probably just a coincidence.”
“You think they were ferrying workers out?”
He shrugged. “Would make sense. They had to get a lot of specialized labor out of CPJCT space and into the Toe-Holds. The timing is about right.”
“Why couldn’t they just recruit from Toe-Holds?”
“Manchester would have wanted to get their own people out there and they don’t have a presence.”
“Or didn’t,” I said.
Pip nodded. “Here’s another little datapoint.” He tapped a fingertip on the arm of his chair. “I searched for anomalous shipments to see if I could spot raw materials movements.”
“Wouldn’t they just refine what they needed on site?”
He shrugged. “Possibly, and there are a lot of miners out there. Maybe we can talk to some of the old-timers around Mel’s when we get there.”
“What did you find?”
“You know what tellurium is?” he asked.
“One of the rare earths.”
“Yeah. Combine it with bismuth and you have the core for a thermal electric generator.”
“Hot on one side, cold on the other. So?”
“So starting in about ’51, while we were playing flea market games on the Lois, a lot of tellurium and bismuth started showing up in the refinery queues around that end of the Western Annex.”
“How much is a lot?”
“About four times the norm. Still not mountains of it, but that’s a big jump in some rare elements that don’t generally get a lot of attention.”
“Somebody hit a good rock?”
He grinned. “Somebody hit a good belt, apparently. The name Victor Flores keeps coming up. He operated in between stations on that end of the Annex. He ran an exploration and mining operation out of The Junkyard.”
“You think he found it?”
“There’s still a lot of unclaimed rock out there.”
“Even now?”
“Even now, but we’re getting all these timing and materials hints that we need to be looking somewhere not too far from Odin’s.”
“What’s your interest in the materials?”
“You can’t just build a big ship and jump it with a billion metric tons.”
“Diminishing returns on the mass of the ship against the Burleson drives,” I said.
“Right. And then there’s the power profile you need to drive it. I slept through that lecture, but I know the power needed to bend that much space is monstrous.”
“So far, so good. You have another rabbit to pull out of your hat?”
“It’s one we already know. The Mellon-Merc people developed a massive drive. New design. Not just bigger.”
“You’re talking about the Zetas?”
“Technically the Kyoryokuna but yeah. They shelved that desig
n early in the ’50s because they couldn’t power it.”
“I was just a kid on Neris then.”
“And I was juggling the books on my father’s ship, but pay attention. The blocks are all here.”
“So, you’re suggesting that Pravda came up with a new design to power these Zetas?”
“They must have. They were the only ones working in the area early on. If Mellon-Merc worked with them to come up with the power supply, that would open the door to Manchester being able to build the mega-hauler.”
“So, what’s with tellerium?”
He pulled out his tablet and flipped through a couple of screens. “I found this.” He turned his tablet around and scooted it across my desk. “Pravda designed a thermal electric generator based on the heat from a reactor on one side and the cold of space on the other.”
His tablet showed a scholarly article from an engineering publication I remembered from the academy. I skimmed it before sliding the tablet back to him. “Has the chief seen this?”
He shook his head. “Just you.”
“Why are we still using electromagnetic generators?”
“Because you need a mountain of tellurium and an equal amount of bismuth along with cartloads of other precious minerals and rare earths to make it work, according to those designs. They’re only theoretical.”
“So you think Flores hit the mother lode and what?”
“If Pravda and Mellon-Merc got control of it, they could have made their prototype.”
“And all they’d need is a big honking ship to test it on.”
Pip pocketed his tablet and bit his lip. “I suspect they’d need to design it from the keel up. This isn’t something you could toss on a Barbell and fly it.”
“Hence, Manchester’s involvement.”
He nodded.
“So why do we need to go to Odin’s again?”
“If they were using Odin’s as a staging area for the crews, they had to have been flying in and out of there pretty regularly.”
“How does that help?”
“Traffic control might know what direction they were flying from.”
“Why would they tell us?”
“I’m not even sure they’d keep the records this long,” he said. “It’s the only lead I’ve got.”
“Let’s keep looking,” I said. “We’ve got to get this can to Mel’s anyway. Maybe somebody there remembers a big push to recruit miners.”
“Back two decades?” he asked.
“Stranger things,” I said.
Chapter 32
Viceroy System: 2375, September 25
After being spoiled by Toe-Hold space with their stations positioned well out on the edge of the gravity well, getting out of Siren seemed to take forever. We had the drives to jump but the regulations about not jumping inside the posted limits kept us plodding out for what seemed like months instead of weeks. I could see the attraction of operating outside of CPJCT’s jurisdiction. Eventually we cleared Siren’s space and made a couple of longish jumps through the Deep Dark over the course of a couple of days, and arrived in Viceroy just before the dinner mess.
“Secure from navigation stations, Ms. Ross. Set normal watch.”
“Secure from navigation stations. Set normal watch, aye, Captain.”
I jumped up from the chair and scooted down the ladder to clear the way for the watch sections to get up and down as appropriate.
Chief Stevens followed me down the ladder. “Gotta tick, Skipper?”
“Of course, come on in.”
We settled in the cabin and the chief folded her hands over her stomach. “Have you heard about this idea that Pip has about Mellon-Merc and Pravda?”
“Yes. It’s interesting. I’m not sure how much stock to put in it.”
She pursed her lips and nodded, as if to herself. “It’s real.”
“What’s real?”
“All of it,” she said. “They tried to recruit me back in the late ’40s.”
“You didn’t bite?”
“NDAs,” she said. “They wanted me to sign a nondisclosure that would have crippled my ability to even write my own textbooks.”
“That early?”
“They’ve been looking for the mega-hauler design for a long time. Even the early diaspora ships ran barely over the 400 mkt level and they took forever.”
“I guess I never thought about that.”
“The early diaspora was pitiful compared to the expansion into the Western Annex. We learned a lot from those early steps into the stars.” She smiled.
“So, that’s really why you’re here.”
She nodded. “I want to find out how far they got. That power source is problematic.”
“Because of the rare earths?”
“Because they require the cold side to stay cold.”
“I don’t follow.”
She held up her hands, palms facing each other. “These are the two sides. One side is hot.” She shook her left hand. “The other side is cold.” She shook her right. “The difference in temperature drives the thermal reaction on the substrate between them.” She pressed her palms together. “The higher the gradient, the more power.”
“Reactors get hot and space is cold,” I said.
She nodded and lowered her hands. “But what happens when you put a lot of heat on one side?”
“I thought the point was for it to get hot?”
She laughed. “Up to a point. The problem is that the substrate has a tendency to bleed heat across to the cold side. You have to keep the cold side cold.”
“Well, space is about as cold as it gets.”
She laughed again. “It’s cold, but not that cold. It’s probably the coldest natural environment, but the problem is getting the heat off the cold plate. The only way to bleed heat in space is radiation. There’s no material in a vacuum for convection to move the heat away.”
“They covered that in the academy,” I said. “They’ve got the whole surface of the ship to radiate heat.”
She shook her head. “How much of our skin is exposed to space?”
“All of it.”
She laughed. “The can?”
“The can picks up heat by conduction from the rest of the ship, doesn’t it?”
She shook her head. “Not as much as you’d expect. The can is actually isolated from the rest of the ship. We need it to keep the hull stable, but those latch points are the only place the can touches us. It’s so we don’t introduce vibrations into the cargo and vice versa.”
What she said made sense. “I never thought of it.”
She shrugged. “No reason for you to. That’s why you have engineers.” Her grin could have split the face of a lesser person.
“So you think they’ve built it already?”
“I know they’ve built it already. It failed. I suspect catastrophically.”
“How do you know?”
“I know the engineers who signed the NDAs.” She shrugged. “They all disappeared from the public sphere but every once in a while a paper would surface. Something minor. Obscure. Esoteric. It showed up in fringe publications. Trade journals with less than rigorous peer review.”
“I’m following so far.”
“The tellurium Flores found is the key. If we can find that, we’ll have the station. If we have the station, we should be able to find out what happened to the ship.”
“Do you think it’s still there? The station?”
She nodded. “Nobody’s come in from the cold. Not a single one of the engineers I knew has come back to work in the open.”
“Neither has Brill,” I said.
“Brill?”
“Brilliantine Smith. She was on the Lois with Pip and me. Environmental. She went to the academy and graduated with a masters in closed-system ecologies or something.”
The chief’s eyebrows rose up her forehead. “Closed-system Environmental Engineering?”
“Something like that. She went to the academy with us
in ’53 but graduated in ’55. We tried to contact her on Siren, but she’s disappeared.”
“That would be about the time Manchester would have been building the yard.” The chief’s lips pressed together in a line. “They would have needed somebody with her skills to put together a full station. They were probably expanding the research facility that Mellon-Merc and Pravda had been running.”
“So this is what I don’t get,” I said.
She nodded.
“Sometime in 2363 this hypothesized ship was supposed to get the big reveal in Siren.”
“You’re going on the parts thing?”
“Yeah. The ship had to be pretty close on the mark for Manchester to supply even a limited number of spare parts to Siren.”
“I think that’s safe.”
“Assuming that was some kind of messed-up public demonstration, it’s been twelve stanyers. What are they doing out there?”
She smiled. “That’s what I want to find out, and I don’t want to do it while bound by one of their NDAs.”
“You suspect trouble?”
She shrugged. “TIC does. They’ve stepped up their efforts in the last couple of stanyers. The Chernyakova isn’t the only ship linked to this unlisted station.”
“You’d think somebody would have stumbled on it by now.”
She laughed at that. “You’ve been out here. You know how empty it is.”
“But there are still wildcatters, hardcore explorers, right?”
“Yes, there are, as a matter of fact.”
“And one of them has stumbled on it?”
She shrugged. “I think so. I think that’s why he’s missing.”
“Who’s missing?”
“An old friend named Demetri Regyri.”
“What’s his angle?”
“He had a hidden system out near The Junkyard. Been a one-man operation for stanyers. He built up slowly, adding capabilities as he needed them. Trading some nice ores for supplies to make an automated zero-gee smelter. He had a first-class hydroponic setup last time I saw him.”
“When was that?”
“I visited him in 2360 just after he sent his daughter off to the academy. His wife was already on the other side of the Annex. Wanted nothing to do with living in the dark.”
“This was at his station?”
She nodded.
To Fire Called (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 2) Page 24