Year of the Child

by R L Dean

  12 - Mat

  Yuri should be drunk by now, Mat reflected. The Sadie was on a long, straight course in the black emptiness between Mars and the Belt. The perfect opportunity— and normal— for Yuri to indulge in self-destruction. He had forgone that now for what Mat thought was an insurmountable amount of time. Instead of fits of sleep and drunkenness, Yuri now lived between fits of sleep and staring at his screen or handcomm. He was doing ... something ... but Mat had no idea what. Even now, he sat in the cockpit, his face haggard as though he had been drinking, with bloodshot eyes reading his screen, occasionally tapping the terminal.

  Mat sat at the command station for no other reason than feeling like he should. Haydon and Misaki were inside the machine shop refurbishing parts for whatever new work Misaki had created, and the Sadie sailed along without the need for Yuri, or him.

  Old habits die hard. Though, he considered, in the grand scheme of things, his habit of sitting at the command station for no reason was not an old one. The ship was old, but he owned her less than ten years.

  "Yuri, what are you doing?" He asked, his brows furrowed in curiosity.

  The Russian was so engrossed it took him a moment to snap back to the Flight deck and answer him.

  "Looking for something," he said, with no further explanation.

  Well, he supposed that if Yuri had intentions of sharing he would have done it already. Mat turned back to his own screen where the ship's finances were displayed. Loomed, his mind corrected, the finances loomed like the Sword of Damocles. The ice circuit in the Belt had been steady, but not as profitable as gas mining over Saturn, and the extra turrets had set them back significantly ... but no one complained. Not after the pirate tug.

  Owning a mining ship had never been a romantic notion for him, rock-hopping between the planets was not glamorous and he had known that going in, but balancing a budget and making sure Haydon and Yuri got their fair share was tedious. And, of course now, he had Misaki to consider. She had undercut herself in wage requirements, but he still had to think about that little extra coming out. In the past when they talked ship business and Yuri heard something he didn't like he insisted Mat make a full financial report, of which he would gripe about but never actually read. Up until Mat hired Misaki he hadn't asked for one in over a year.

  Mat rubbed his face and then pulled himself up from his seat, pivoting in the microgravity and shoving toward the deck's access tube. He might as well do something constructive. Ganymede was a long ways off, there would be plenty of time to stare at his bank account. Yuri ignored him and said nothing as Mat opened the tube hatch then slid inside. He pushed himself down past the Crew deck, to Cargo.

  The Sadie was rarely cargo heavy, they weren't in the delivery business, and as a consequence the hold was the largest clear space on the ship. Small crates of MREs and other necessities lined the bulkheads, leaving the center of the deck vacant.

  Mat pushed off the hatchway and drifted to the other side, stopping himself by grabbing a strap securing one of the crates to the deck. There, he began checking each strap and catch and eyeballing the inventory sheets on each crate. Their store of general supplies would last for months, but to fulfill Misaki's parts list they would need to stop somewhere along the way. Butte was out of the question, the newsfeeds— sensationalized, granted— warned of heavy traffic in orbit, hauler crews being assaulted by irate miners because they wouldn't risk taking their full canisters to the Moon for fear of piracy. There were even reports of deaths. They would have to stop at a drop-off station in the Belt, something small and out of the way, but the chances of finding what Misaki wanted would be just as remote.

  He was perhaps ten minutes into the job when the hatch opened and Misaki pulled herself inside. When he glanced in her direction she was flipping to a standing position, her magboots snapping on the deck.

  "Oh, hey," he said, and smiled. "You and Haydon going to train today?" She was in loose sweats, the only thing she wore other than coveralls, and Haydon was giving her lessons in self-defense. The clear spot in the center of the deck was the only space large enough to accommodate the awkward training in microgravity.

  "Hai," she said, and to many her blunted expression and dark eyes might hide the painful reason she was taking those lessons from Haydon, but not from anyone aboard the Sadie.

  Mat nodded. "Alright, I'll get out your way."

  He pushed to the deck and engaged his magboots and started walking to the hatch.

  "Have the nightmares gone away?" Misaki suddenly asked, as he passed her. Her voice had been quiet, and she was looking toward him, not at him.

  He stopped and turned to face her. With a faint smile he said, "Mostly." Sometimes he saw the pilot's pale face hovering in the dark. Mat had shot and killed the man months ago, but the scene was still vivid in his mind, if he let it go in that direction— the lighting, the loose panels and broken terminals, a drinkbox floating in the detritus. When they entered the Flight deck of the pirate tug they had thought he was dead, limp and floating against the straps of the cockpit seat, killed when the tug ran into the Sadie's canister. It had been a surprise when the man suddenly came to life and pointed a gun at Haydon's back, and then Mat reacted. He was a surprisingly good shot with a pistol.

  "How?" Misaki asked, her eyes just a little wider. A crack in her normal emotional armor, a peek into her vulnerable soul.

  The tug ... she must be asking because of her own nightmares. Misaki never talked about her experiences with the pirate crew, beyond being forced into drug addiction to make her more compliant. She was stoned out of her mind when they found her shoved in an emergency locker. What she faced in the darkness, laying in her rack during ship's night, must be horrific compared to Mat's own light afflictions. He shrugged. "It's not any one thing. I pray ... added things to my routine." He looked back to the crates and their straps. This was the third time today he came down to the Cargo deck, but there was a lot of time on a mining ship for minds to become idle. When he looked back at her the voice inside his head said, I thought of you, a lot. Out in the Belt her face in his mind had kept the other one out. "Really, just the same as you," he finished. Though, what he was doing was called puttering, what Misaki was doing to keep her mind occupied was called obsession.

  Misaki nodded, shifting her eyes to the deck, and said nothing further. For all that it might be due to her strict raising, her silence was a type of armor, as well.

  "We can talk about it," he began. When she looked at him with one raised eyebrow he said, "The tug ... if you want to."

  She seemed to think about it, then the hatch opened and Haydon pulled himself in.

  "Sorry, I'm late," the mechanic said. Then when he saw Mat, "Hey boss, am I interrupting something?"

  The moment was lost, but the fact that she had been about to say something, and the shifting of her eyes meant that other times would come. "No," he said. "I'll get out of your way."

  13 - Tetsuya

  In his career as a detective there were a handful of cases that had kept him awake at night. At first it was the horrific ones, gang violence and the like. Then, the puzzling ones, the perfect murders of a serial killer, once. And finally it was the cases in which he became attached to the victim ... where his sense of reason was overcome with emotion. Tetsuya sat on the couch in the darkness of the apartment, staring at the room's screen. The grainy and spotty footage recovered from the Pendleton's optical recordings showed a bulky mining tug advancing in the Pendleton's rear arc. Telemetry scrolled down one side of the screen.

  "Who are they?" Captain Pendleton's voice asked through a layer of static.

  "They're not transmitting ... their transponder must be off."

  Tetsuya thought that must be the Pendleton's son, Martin, and what he said was impossible. Ever major power system on a ship was routed through the transponder and it could only be accessed with a key— a physical key that UNSEC gave out to the Transit Authority, who in turned lent it to Control when it was needed to p
erform maintenance or repair work on a ship. He knew, because one of those keys lay in his desk drawer back at the TA office ... well, Velásquez would have it now.

  "What do you mean, their transponder is off?" Pendleton sounded incredulously. He was thinking the same thing as Tetsuya. It's not possible.

  "Roger," a female voice started. Pendleton's wife, had to be. "What do they ..."

  "They're firing!" Martin suddenly yelled, and Tetsuya found it uncanny that the audio was free of static in that moment.

  Muzzle flashes blinked from a turret on the tug and the Pendleton's main thruster assembly exploded, then the camera went black. The audio squealed and became garbled. There was yelling underneath it and something that sounded like metal ripping apart. Tetsuya stopped the playback and sat back on the couch, rubbing his forehead and looking at his lap. The remaining sixty minutes of the footage was the same. The tug's turret fire had hit something that affected the optics and audio, or it was the damage done directly to the black box after the fact.

  He had tried to identify the tug by running it through the TA database but the image was too degraded or the tug so heavily modified that the system couldn't find a match. This was the sort of frustration that he knew Baldwin was experiencing. The piracy cases could not be solved by detectives in a room dependent solely on what Forensics could provide them. The incidents were months old and occurred millions of kilometers away. There was nothing here to pass back to Regional. But, in this case he had another avenue to investigate. Misaki.

  The shadows shifted on the coffee table and Tetsuya suddenly realized he wasn't alone. He looked up and Itsumi was standing in the hall leading from the bedroom to the kitchen. Even in the faint glow cast by the grow-lights in her potted tea plants, his wife of almost twenty years was beautiful. She was in a white kimono-robe with a belt tied around her slim waist. Her handcomm was clutched tightly in one hand. The stark beauty of winter could never compare to the liveliness of spring, he lamented as the feeling of powerlessness settled in the top of his chest.

  She looked at him for a moment, then turned wordlessly into the kitchen. He heard a cabinet door open, and in his head he let their years old conversation play out.

  "Come to bed."

  "I can't sleep. It's this case ... something's not right."

  "Oh. I will make you some chamomile tea."

  As time went on the words had become unnecessary, but that night he found that he missed them. The simple exchange of words and touches between them. A smile, he would have taken just a smile, if she would give him one.

  With quiet steps Itsumi came from the kitchen and set the cup of warm tea on the coffee table. Tetsuya watched her turn and walk just as silently out of the room. He finished the conversation in in his head.

  "Come to bed, soon."

  She would kiss him lightly on the cheek. Or, she may give him a stronger reminder of why he should return to bed. Tonight a chill followed her, as she disappeared into the hall. This is because of your own self-righteousness, he reminded himself. If he had taken the position on Miyajima— dropped his investigation— things would be different. An old interrogation came out of the dark corners of his mind. It was his first, or early in his second year, of being a detective. He sat across the table from a stony faced man that he knew was a bōryokudan lieutenant. The details of their conversation were gone from his mind, but he remembered the man standing from his seat, and he looked directly into Tetsuya's eyes and said, "Righteousness and pain often travel hand in hand. That's the reason it's easy to bribe a man, detective. No one wants a difficult life."

  How absurd was the universe that a criminal should teach him that.

  Tetsuya dutifully sipped his tea, then picked up his handcomm and flipped through the case file. The audio and video was damaged beyond use, but there might be something recorded in the communication logs. When he opened them he discovered a flag from Forensics. He tapped it and read the notation. The data was corrupted beyond recovery— but— they did discover two strange gaps in the logs that didn't seem to have occurred from damage. One gap of sixty bytes, and the next five hundred bytes. They were cut out.

  He sat back again, staring at the message. Misaki's strange ability to be aboard the Pendleton when the pirates attacked, and yet walking onto Butte after the fact ... the pirate ship's transponder not transmitting ... and now gaps in black box communication logs. This case was becoming a list of impossibilities.

  Tetsuya recorded a message to the Forensics team, then sat with tea in hand, watching the darkness in one corner of the room. So, how did Misaki end up aboard the Sadie? Or, when? Could Captain Middleton have rescued her, somehow? The tug he saw in the Pendleton's optical recordings was not the Sadie. Control had footage of the Sadie docked on multiple occasions over the last few years. He had checked. Middleton and his crew were not the pirates. More likely, the story was that they were nothing more than hapless miners that found the shot-up Pendleton drifting in Saturn's orbit, went aboard for salvage and rescued the sole survivor, Misaki. Which led to more questions.

  He could feel Itsumi's tea working, his mind becoming sluggish. When his handcomm alerted him of the response to his message to Forensics he thought about letting it wait until morning, but he still craved answers. When he tapped the notice an older woman in a lab coat with gray hair cut close to her scalp appeared on the screen.

  "Detective, I can confirm that the log sections in question were edited out, not damaged. As to how this was done, it's difficult to say. Given the level of technical expertise required and the fact that the necessary tools for accessing the black box's data core are not found outside of a UNSEC Forensics lab ... I would say ..."

  The technician's voice was a blending of matter-of-fact and tired. She paused in her explanation, one corner of her mouth twisting. It would be impossible, Tetsuya finished for her. Only, it wasn't. That's what she was wrestling with. Instead she said:

  "It would take an engineering prodigy to do something like this without the proper tools."

  Tetsuya frowned and took a heavy breath. His piracy investigation was turning into a pulp fiction espionage case. The technician went on.

  "As to your second inquiry. Turning a ship's transponder off can be done, but it's not something found in a UNSEC manual. I don't know the specifics, but if your pirates are doing it, then it means they have proprietary knowledge. I hope this has been helpful to your investigation."

  Staring at the frozen image of the technician on his screen Tetsuya thought, wheels within wheels. He finished his tea and went in the bedroom to lie down beside his wife. Just as he closed his eyes he realized what the missing gaps in the logs were. A question ... and an answer. As his mind began to spiral down into fitful blackness he felt Itsumi's hand brush his back. A display of affection that had been absent for six months, then the mysteries of the mundane world were left behind as a fraction of the weight inside his chest lifted and he fell asleep.

  * * *

  The next morning Bratton responded to his request for a list of CI teams that were working piracy cases handed down from Regional. Seven in all, local teams stationed on ore drop-off points strung between the Belt and Saturn. If the cases were distributed evenly, and Baldwin had three in her queue before he took one, then it meant that there were about twenty active cases given to the Force to investigate. It was more than Tetsuya imagined, and there would be others that UNSEC was investigating on their own.

  And of course, he thought, looking down at his desk and reading the list. Those teams have their own problems. They'll put the piracy cases at the bottom of the pile, like Baldwin. Just like Butte, they would be faced with scared haulers and angry miners and increasing crime.

  Baldwin hadn't made any discoveries on the case she was working, so he attached the Pendleton files, along with his notes, to a message and sent it on to the CI teams. Maybe some detective out there could add to it.

  Tetsuya's handcomm beeped. It was Long. As soon as he answered the Chi
ef Superintendent's assistant said, "Get your team to the breakroom."

  When he arrived with Baldwin and Schindler, Long was standing at the head of the room with his arms crossed. Everyone from TA was there, seated on 'their' side of the table.

  "George and Falk are on their way," Tetsuya said and took his seat. They were following up on a mutual case, taking statements and making their presence known around an apartment complex on level two. They hadn't hoped to find anything useful for their investigation, at least not directly, but it was surprising what turned up if you rattled enough doors and then watched from across the street.

  "Fine," Long said. "We'll get started without them."

  Long tapped his handcomm and the room's screen came to life with the still image of a man sitting behind a large desk in an expensive suit, perfect hair, and the Apex Mining company logo mounted on the bulkhead behind him. It was Jensen Pollard, Apex's Executive Manager of Butte. He was rarely seen in public, and Tetsuya only recognized him from ads and bulletins on screens around the station. Beside the desk was a man in a maintenance uniform. Tetsuya didn't recognize him, but he was obviously a manager, not a technician.

  Stepping out of the way Long said, "This is a copy of an announcement Pollard is going to broadcast tomorrow."

  Long tapped his handcomm again and Pollard became animated. He folded his hands on the desk, and his face became something between affable and serious. Like, what he was about to say was important, but he didn't want to scare anyone.

  "Good morning, fellow citizens and travelers. This is Jensen Pollard with a message from our board of directors ..."

  Tetsuya listened to Pollard's lead-in with patience born of years spent on stakeouts, but bits and pieces of the Misaki case ... the Pendleton case ... refused to leave the forefront of his mind and he found himself glad when Pollard reached the reason for the announcement.

  "Chief Gurbert here," Pollard said, nodding to the other man, causing Tetsuya to recall who he was. Graves Gurbert, Butte's Chief Engineer. His actual title in official records was something more grand, but it meant the same thing. From the docks to the fusion plants buried under the burrow no wrench lifted without his say so. Tetsuya watched the Chief's face as Pollard spoke. "... has mentioned some concerns over the burrow's hydroponics and life-support systems. And while I, and the board of directors, assure you that the station is in no way compromised, safety is our top priority. And so we are suspending non-emergency docking authorization until a new pass-port policy can be implemented that will allow ..."