by Amy Spahn
* * *
Areva met Viktor in the Org Crime break room for lunch, appearing behind him as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “I heard your conversation,” she said.
Viktor finished filling his mug and turned calmly to face her. “What do you think?”
“I think you should do it.”
“Accept the transfer?”
She nodded. “You don’t like being on the Endurance.”
“Does anybody?”
“Matthias does.”
“Good point.”
“And Okoro was right. This might be your only chance before we’re sent out to the edge of the solar system again. You’re still at least twenty years from retirement. You don’t want to spend all of them out there doing nothing. Not when you could do more good here.”
Viktor took a sip of coffee. “Why were you put on the Endurance, Areva?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I thought it was obvious.”
“I would like to hear your own explanation.”
“There’s not a lot to tell. I was in a different department. An investigation went bad. It changed me. Changed the way I worked. I wouldn’t shoot at anyone who was looking at me. Started staying out of sight whenever possible.” She shrugged. “I didn’t fit into the mold anymore, so they kicked me out. I think everyone has a similar story.”
“Most likely. If they offered you your old career again, would you accept it?”
She shook her head. “No. That’s not me anymore. I’d be no good to the department in that job. Besides, I have friends on the Endurance.”
“So do I.”
“Besides me? No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I play Wordsmithy with Officer Varma.”
“Over the ship’s network. You don’t even meet in person.”
“It still counts.”
“My point is, you don’t have anything to keep you on the ship. Not really. So why shouldn’t you take the opportunity to go back to making a difference, even if it is the position you had before?” Areva met his eyes with hers, and for a moment Viktor forgot to answer as he stared at them.
“I do not know,” he finally said.
She smiled. “So you’ll take it.”
“Perhaps.”
“I’m happy for you.” She patted him on the back. “And don’t worry. I’ll stop by and say hi to you whenever we visit Earth.”
“I would like that.”
The conversation turned to other topics as they headed down to the cafeteria, though Viktor still felt distracted by the other ideas turning around in his mind. He had enjoyed working on the Soun murder case so far. So why didn’t he jump at the thought of doing this every day? Was it Okoro? Did he not trust him? Was it Org Crime? Did he not want to work for the division that had dumped him before? Such a big decision to be made. So many questions to be answered.
* * *
The shot came as Viktor crossed the shipyard to return to the Endurance after an afternoon spent screening security footage and communication records. He passed a pair of patrolmen returning to the headquarters building after their day’s route and nodded to them. He’d done his own years as a traffic cop in Median before he was picked up by Organized Crime, and while he had doubts about returning to the latter job, he never wanted to return to the former. It was exhausting. In fact, returning to any job in Median would require him to move. He considered the annoyance of removing his entire gun collection from the walls of his berth. Did he really want to go through the hassle? He was just calculating how many boxes it would take to hold all of the weapons when something slammed into his back and threw him forward, face-first onto the pavement. He gasped as the landing knocked the wind out of him.
The two patrolmen quickly reacted to what happened. “Officer down!” one of them shouted into his intercom interface. “Shots fired into the Dispatch service lot!”
“Suspect sighted on a neighboring rooftop! We need hover squads up there!” said the other.
Viktor heard a set of running footsteps approach and looked up to see Areva, her eyes wide. She dropped to her knees next to him. “Are you all right? Where did it hit?”
Viktor groaned and reached behind his back to feel where the shot had struck him. It had burned a hole in his black uniform shirt, which annoyed him because he’d have to replace it, but more telling were the frayed layers of his under-shirt body armor. “It was an energy gun,” he said, gingerly sitting up.
Areva breathed a visible sigh of relief when she saw that he hadn’t been injured. “As soon as you went down, I spotted a guy up on a building on Market. He cut and ran right away. I would have tried to get in a shot, but …”
“But he was looking,” Viktor finished. He pushed himself to his feet and took a tentative step forward. He could walk; that was good. The shot probably hadn’t burned him, though he’d have to check with a medic to make sure.
Areva looked at the ground. “Sorry.”
“It is all right. He was foolish enough to try to shoot me here at headquarters. He will not go far.” Viktor looked over at the two patrolmen, who were now engaged in coordinating the manhunt. This was probably the most excitement they’d seen this year. If he and Areva hadn’t encountered the aliens last month, it would be the same for them. Viktor again felt the burned edges of the back of his shirt. “He must have thought I was not wearing armor, or he would have aimed for my head.”
“Good thing he didn’t. It would be hard to miss a target that big.” Areva looked toward the rooftop again, where a UELE hover car already circled the area. “They’ll get him.”
“Yes, they will.” Neither of them voiced the thought that if they didn’t, the assassin wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
* * *
“They didn’t get him.” Okoro minimized the digital photo of the rooftop and brought the profile of the assassin Cassius to the front of the screen.
Viktor closed his eyes to contain his frustration. “Why not?”
“Same reasons as always. Insufficient resources. Too many civilians in the area. He lost them in the crowd.” Okoro shook his head as he studied the profile. “If we used a better way of tracking people, this wouldn’t happen.”
“Freedom and security. It is always a tradeoff.” Viktor crossed his arms. “What were we able to learn?”
Okoro tapped the photo. “An off-duty sergeant saw Cassius run out of the building shortly after we lost eyes on him on the roof. Got a good look at his face and everything. And we matched the energy burns on your armor to the ones that killed Soun. This is our guy.”
“Is there any indication of where he went?”
“No, but he gave us something else we needed. Since we knew he was on that rooftop, we checked satellite telemetry from the time when he was there. We got the ID of his pocket computer.”
Viktor raised an eyebrow. “He is not still carrying it, is he?”
“No, he deactivated it shortly after we spotted him. But we pulled up the records of his past transmissions and found one that was sent just after Captain Soun was killed. I have a tech team tracing it now. We had to pull records from every satellite in the system. He bounced it off of half of them on its way to wherever it went. At the moment it looks like he sent it toward the outer planets.”
“Do we know what the message said?”
“No, we’d need to check the receiving station for that. But whether it went to a satellite or a ship, it gives us a place to pick up the trail, which might lead us to the man who hired him.”
“Killian Yang.”
“Yeah. If we find Yang, we can make him tell us where Cassius is, and we’ll nail them both.” Okoro glanced over at Viktor. “Don’t worry. We’ll get him before he has a chance to attack you again.”
“I am not worried. Areva has my back.”
“She didn’t exactly do a bang-up job the first time. You sure you don’t want someone else? Someone, you know, not from the Endurance? Or hell, someone who can handle being in public?”
“Do not mock her,” Viktor said. “Her idiosyncrasies make her good at her job. And she is a close friend.”
Okoro gave him a skeptical look. “Close is the right word, though I’m not sure about friend.”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“I saw your face when I offered you your old job. You had doubts. There’s something or someone who could keep you on that ship. Is it her?”
“You are imagining things.” Viktor said. “There is nothing to keep me on the Endurance. Areva and I are simply friends, nothing more. But I still insist that you respect her, as well as the rest of my current crewmates.”
“Fine. I will.”
“Good.”
Okoro turned back to the board. Satisfied, Viktor followed suit.
“So she’s single?”
Viktor whirled on Okoro, who held up his hands. “Just a joke. Calm down.”
“Your sense of humor needs improvement.”
One of the tech team members chose that moment to run into the conference room. “Got it!” she said. “We finished tracing Cassius’s message from the night of the murder. Guess where it went?”
“I do not do guessing,” said Viktor.
“A ship in far orbit,” said Okoro.
“Nope.” The techie shook her head. “The signal was received by a civilian research station orbiting Saturn. Number twelve, to be exact. It was built by the Lunar University system, though they rent it out to private firms, too.”
“Lunar University.” Okoro shook his head. “Seems like everything belongs to the moon these days.”
“Who was on the station when the signal arrived there?” Viktor asked.
“A team from Breakthrough Technologies,” said the techie. “They were experimenting with some new kind of gravity plating that’s supposed to work better in orbit of a planet or something. I don’t know. The important thing is, they’re still there.” She grinned at them. “Maybe one of them remembers seeing the signal come through.”
“Or maybe one of them passed it on to Killian Yang,” Okoro said. “Good work.”
The tech left. Okoro turned to Viktor. “Saturn has over an hour of lightcomm delay. We’ll have to travel out there to interview them. I also want to bring a technical team to take apart the station’s signal receiver to look for anything suspicious. It’s possible the Uprising bugged it and the satellite team isn’t even involved.”
“We will need a ship,” Viktor said.
“Yes, we will. I don’t know how quickly Dispatch can get one to us. We’re stretched pretty thin. If I submit the request this afternoon, we might manage a departure tomorrow at best, or over the weekend at the latest.”
Viktor grinned. Irony was delicious. “I happen to have some authority aboard one of the UELE’s ships, which does not have an assignment at the moment.”
“What, the Endurance? Isn’t it being serviced right now?”
“Only as a ruse to keep us occupied. You stated as much the other day. Dispatch will probably approve the mission. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Habassa’s D Drive is not precise enough to let us jump straight to Saturn, but we can still travel there in good time.”
Okoro tapped his fingers on the projection board. “I don’t know if this is a good idea. We’ll be in an area with few other UELE ships, and the local police departments are tiny operations. That’s probably why the Uprising people are out there in the first place. If something goes wrong, your ship might be the only one around.”
“We did recently win humanity’s first battle with aliens. We may not be Dispatch’s favorite people, but we are still trained UELE officers. I am confident that we can handle it.”
* * *
“I don’t think we can handle this,” said Chris Fish as he paced nervously around the rec room.
“Why not?” asked Matthias.
“This is the Uprising we’re talking about. They’re organized. They’re everywhere. They have a good supply of resources. United Earth has been trying to get rid of them for almost a century, but they’re still here. We weren’t trained for this!”
“Actually, I think this is exactly what we were trained for,” Matthias said. “Fighting the bad guys. Stopping crime. Catching killers.” He punched the air. “Feels good to act like a real cop, doesn’t it?”
“Oh please, we’re not the real cops here.” Chris pointed at Viktor. “He’s the only one doing anything on the mission. The rest of us are just here to give him a lift.”
“Then why are you worried?”
“Because the Uprising has a habit of stealing ships. They’re going to see us arrive at their station, where they’ve probably butchered the entire science team, and they’re going to sneak aboard, kill us all, and take the Endurance for themselves.”
“The Endurance is an old ship,” Viktor said. “I do not think they would want her.”
“What?” Matthias looked personally offended. “Why not? What do you mean, old ship?”
Fortunately, the captain entered the rec room at that moment and distracted Matthias, who said, “Hiya, Cap!”
Captain Withers nodded at each of the three officers. “Lieutenants. Sergeant. Where’s Lieutenant Praphasat?”
“I’m here.” Areva stuck her hand up from behind the plant in the corner.
“Okay, that’s a start, but I’d like you to stand here with everyone else. We’re meeting a representative from another division. I want to make a good impression.”
Everyone went quiet for several seconds. Then Areva asked, in a small voice, “Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
Another pause, then a sigh. “Okay.”
Areva came out from behind the plant and joined the group. Captain Withers appraised everyone. “Good, you all look professional. Now keep in mind, this is our chance to impress Dispatch.”
“You’d think discovering aliens would have done that already,” said Chris.
“Well, it didn’t. So be on your best behavior. Especially you, Mr. Fish. I don’t want you accusing him with any of your wild theories.”
“They aren’t …”
“Fine, your theories, wild or otherwise. Don’t talk about them to the lieutenant. In fact, don’t talk at all.”
Chris crossed his arms. “Fine. If he does turn out to be the assassin in disguise, I’ll keep my mouth shut and let all of you get shot.”
“Much appreciated.” The captain then turned to Viktor. “Is Okoro here yet?”
“He is on his way,” Viktor said. “We have been cleared for departure once he is aboard.”
“Hey Cap, how was your date?” Matthias asked. “You went out with Loretta Bailey last night, right?”
Withers shook his head. “It wasn’t a date.”
“But you went to a fancy restaurant.”
“Yes.”
“At night.”
“Yes.”
“With a woman whose life you saved only, like, a month and a half ago.”
“Yes.”
Matthias shrugged. “Sounds like a date to me.”
“It wasn’t a date! Loretta had some business deal on Earth. We just got together for dinner.”
“I think it sounds like a date,” said Chris.
“Me too,” said Areva.
“It wasn’t a date. It was just dinner.”
Viktor agreed with the others. What the captain had wasn’t just dinner; it was a date. “Just dinner” was when two friends shared a casual meal, like Viktor did with Areva all the time. It occurred to him that if he accepted the position at Org Crime, they wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. That would be a heavier loss than Viktor wanted to admit.
Okoro and his bodyguard—the big guy from O&I—appeared in the hatch to the rec room. All of the Endurance officers turned to greet him, and out of the corner of his eye Viktor saw Captain Withers smile broadly, no doubt hoping Okoro would notice how he’d reshaped the Endurance crew.
He didn’t. “We’re about ready to go,” said Okoro,
barely looking at each of the officers as he stepped into the room. “The tech team is on board, and they’re putting away their bags. I’m going to need somebody to link my computer to the ship’s network right away. I’m waiting on some paperwork from Dispatch, and I want to receive it immediately when it comes in. As soon as we’re done here, I’d like one of the ship’s engineers to report to my room.”
“This is a ship,” Matthias said. “We call them berths, not rooms.”
“Berths.” Okoro crossed to where the rest of the group stood. “Don’t interrupt me, Lieutenant …?”
“Habassa.” Oblivious to the correction, Matthias took Okoro’s hand and shook it. “Chief engineer. Nice to meet you!”
“Lieutenant Habassa.” Okoro freed his hand. “Listen up. I know I’m not the highest-ranking officer aboard, but Dispatch put me in charge of this mission. I don’t know what kind of laxity goes on here on a regular day …”
At that comment, every person in the room stiffened, and Captain Withers lost his welcoming smile.
“… but I’m going to insist on following all of the rules while I’m aboard your ship. I don’t have time to waste making sure people are doing their jobs right. Understood?”
Silence answered him. Viktor tried to work up a properly scathing reply. Before he could do so, Captain Withers smiled again, this time with an undercurrent of venom. “You must be a hit at parties. Don’t worry. We have no intention of messing up your mission, and I’ve enforced Dispatch standards since I took command here. I think you’ll find that the Endurance’s reputation is going to start changing.”
Okoro cast a disbelieving glance at the captain, but nodded. “I hope to see that. It’d be good to have another ship contributing to the UELE’s goals.”
“Fantastic. Now, can I introduce you to the crew and give you a tour as we get ready to leave?”
While Captain Withers smoothed over the situation, Viktor glared at Okoro’s back. So much for showing respect to the Endurance crew. Hopefully this mission would change Okoro’s opinion of them. If it didn’t, then Okoro clearly couldn’t overcome his own biases, and Viktor wouldn’t want to work for him. If that meant he had to stay on the Endurance instead of accepting the Org Crime job, so be it. Of course, he wouldn’t be happy about it, but he could definitely live with it.