“Can’t you repair the distribution components?” Manny asked.
“Sure, if someone straps on a vacsuit and floats outside without a tether! The replacement parts are out in space right now.”
“Can you rig something up?”
She shook her head. “I need new circuit boards and processors. What we’ve got right now will have to do.” She gestured at the flickering fluorescent lights overhead. “I jury-rigged that, and I’m pretty proud of it.”
Manny squeezed her shoulder. “Good work, Ramachandra. Without you we would have had to abandon the station.”
I blinked. “How?” But I waved the question away as soon as I’d spoken; Module M had powerful magnets to propel escape pods outward from the sun in case of a catastrophe. We were lucky we hadn’t had to use it after the meteor strike. “Sorry,” I said. “Dumb question.”
The mess-hall communit beeped and Manny stalked over to it. “Go ahead.”
It was Lars Malichauk. “Bram is awake, Captain. He’s asking to see Inspector Tanner.”
* * *
“Anna said she had to take a piss,” Bram whispered to me. His eyes flicked to Malichauk, who was nearby but otherwise engaged. The dim light in the clinic had the doctor somewhat concealed; I could see his silhouette, but it was hard to make out exactly what he was doing.
“Don’t worry about him,” I said in a quiet voice. “Go on.”
“So she went into the lavatory and the hatch sealed.”
“Where were you?”
“Crew’s quarters.”
“Why’d you leave?”
He frowned. “I saw someone pass outside, in the corridor. Just a shadow, but the person was alone. It was before the meteor hit.”
My eyes narrowed. “Did he or she say anything to you?”
“No. I stepped into the corridor to look. I saw a man just as he rounded a corner.”
That was odd. Manny had paired everyone up. Shaheen and I were the only exceptions. A stowaway? Was that possible? “Did you follow?”
“Yes. I figured Anna might take a few minutes, and it wouldn’t cause any problems if I investigated.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
He looked surprised. “Actually, I thought it was you. You’re the only one who’s been walking around alone lately.”
I grunted. It made sense.
“I followed the guy down to the first level,” he continued, “but he disappeared. That’s when I noticed an open hatch, which is weird. I mean, hatches always close automatically on the station, in case of depressurization. So I approached the hatch and looked in.”
“What cabin was it?”
“It’s a storage area. Some tools, cleaning equipment, that sort of thing.”
“What did you see?” I asked, leaning forward.
“Nothing. It was pitch-black. I stepped in and someone plowed into me from the side. Pushed me to the deck. The hatch closed.”
It all sounded very, very familiar. “Someone attacked you? Did you fight back?”
“Of course!” he yelled, and then he immediately lowered his voice. “I fought like hell, but the guy was strong, I’m telling you. I didn’t get nowhere. I got slugged across the temple and the next thing I knew the guy was on me.”
I was on the edge of my seat, anticipating his next sentence.
“He grabbed my arm. Powerfully. A lot of pressure, let me tell you. It was intense.” He sighed. “I tried to fight back, Lieutenant, I really did. But I felt awful dizzy from the hit I took. I think I blacked out.”
My heart thudded in my chest; I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. I hadn’t informed anyone about what had happened in my cabin earlier, and the similarities between the attacks were too substantial to be coincidence.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I woke up here in the clinic, less than an hour ago now.”
I called the doctor over. He approached and shot me a wary look. I said, “Tell me what happened, from the meteor strike on.”
His brow creased. “Brick and I were here in the clinic. He was my partner. Everything shook suddenly and my supplies flew everywhere.” He gestured angrily at the shelves that lined the far bulkhead. “I’ve been reorganizing everything for hours!”
“What happened next?” I pressed.
“Manny—I mean, the captain,” he said, eyeing Bram, “called down and told me and Lieutenant Kayle to search for Bram. They had accounted for everyone but him.”
“Where did you look?”
“Anna had said they were in the crew module, so that’s where we began. I found him pretty quickly, actually.”
“Where?”
“In a tool compartment on the first level. He was just lying there, unconscious.”
According to Bram’s story, he had followed a lone person down there. Perhaps Malichauk had seen someone. I asked him.
He shook his head. “No, but it was dark. The power was out by then.”
The meteors had hit between the attack and Manny’s order to Malichauk to search for the missing man. It had been chaos by then—alarms reverberating through the station, red emergency lights activated—so his answer made sense.
“Where was Brick just before the meteors hit?” I asked.
“Here, with me. I was just doing routine work. He was reviewing orders from Command Group, I think.”
“Did he leave?”
“Don’t think so. I was back in the freezer for a bit, but not long.”
“What were you doing?”
He looked confused. “Why, the autopsies, of course. That’s where the bodies are stored.”
I frowned. “Autopsies?”
“Yes. Reggie and Bel. You know regs: after every death—”
I raised a hand. “I know. Slipped my mind, believe it or not.” I had done preliminary studies of the corpses and had assumed Malichauk wouldn’t want to do full autopsies. Perhaps after the whole debacle with Jimmy, he felt it was time to get back to following regs. “What did you find?”
He glanced at me. “Nothing that you didn’t. You did a fairly thorough job.”
I pondered that for a minute. “Did you check their blood?”
“Yes. I didn’t find anything.” He paused and looked at me. “Why? What did you think there would be?”
“Nothing,” I mumbled.
Could Brick have left the clinic while Malichauk performed the autopsies? Surely the doctor would have noticed...unless he had been too absorbed in the bodies to pay any attention to his partner, who seemed to just sit quietly in the corner anyway.
“I brought Bram back here,” he continued, “and except for the time helping you clear the damaged supply module, I’ve been with him ever since.”
“You haven’t slept since the accident?”
The lines in his face grew deeper. “Shaheen hasn’t. The crew hasn’t. You haven’t. The captain and first officer haven’t. I didn’t think it’d be right.”
I got to my feet. “How long will Bram be here?”
He shrugged. “The rest of the day. I’ll run a few more tests, make sure he’s okay.”
I turned to leave before something suddenly occurred to me.
“Lars,” I said, “what did Bram look like when you found him?”
He looked puzzled at my question. “Unconscious, as I said.”
“Did you notice anything weird on or around him?”
He shook his head after a minute’s thought. “Nothing out of the ordinary. No trauma of any sort, except for a bruise on the side of his head.”
I thanked both men and left. There had been another attack, similar to mine. Similar to the one Jimmy had witnessed. And it had happened during or just prior to the crisis.
But the guy hadn’t killed
Bram, like he had Reggie and Bel. The question was, why?
* * *
The killer was still several steps ahead of me, and I knew I was losing ground. Days had passed and I didn’t know much more than I had when I’d arrived. It occurred to me that perhaps I had lost my ability to see through deceptions and lies. I had screwed up on Mercury; now I had messed up here too—Reggie and Bel were dead, and someone had assaulted Bram. I wasn’t close to solving the mystery. The station was in shambles, and we were all lucky to be alive.
Shaheen had bent my ear rambling on about nanos, too, and I had wasted a good portion of an afternoon listening to her.
I closed my eyes, deep in thought. Who was strong enough to attack Bram and knock him out? He was a large man, stout and powerful. The guy who had attacked me had also been strong.
I took out a pencil and made a list of the most likely suspects. On a sheet of paper, I wrote,
Manny Fredericks. Motive: none. Strong enough? Maybe.
Avery Rickets. Motive: none. Strong enough? Yes.
Brick Kayle. Motive: owed Jimmy money, but why kill Reggie and Bel? Perhaps they knew something. Strong enough? Definitely.
Larry Balch. Motive: none. History of gross misconduct and insubordination. Strong enough? Maybe.
Godfreid Grossman. Motive: none. Strong enough? Yes. Doesn’t like me, but claimed to be a friend of Jimmy’s. Angry at his transfer to SOLEX.
Lars Malichauk. Motive: none. Strong enough? Too old.
Bram O’Donnelly. Motive: none. Strong enough? Yes, but someone attacked him too.
Under that I made a second list of the women on the station:
Ling Lee. Motive: none.
Katrina Kyriakis. Motive: argued with Reggie about sensor time. Not much of a reason.
Sally Johnson. Motive: none.
Shaheen Ramachandra. Motive: none.
Anna Alvarez. Motive: none. Records indicate she often has difficulties with crewmates. She did, however, inform me of the attack Jimmy had witnessed in the life-support module. If she was involved in this somehow, why tell me about it?
I threw the pencil down in frustration. Seven days and I basically had nothing. Whatever was going on here, I hadn’t begun to figure it out. There didn’t seem to be a reason for any of it. The deaths, the attacks, the blood. The nano.
The nano.
Something began to percolate at the edge of my mind. I recalled something from the attack in my cabin...his hands...something about his hands...
And the nano...
I marched back to the small tool compartment in Module E where the assault on Bram had occurred. I set down the portable light, got to my hands and knees and scoured the deck, searching for...
For what, exactly? I still wasn’t sure. For any kind of physical evidence, I guess, perhaps something that could identify the perpetrator of the bizarre series of events on the station.
Some blood maybe, like the drop in life support.
I didn’t find a thing.
Despondent, I stalked back to my quarters for some much-needed sleep. It was late and I was exhausted. I had grown weary mentally; this case had pushed me to my limits. I hadn’t had this much trouble catching the Torcher. That case had taken longer, but the clues had all been there; it had simply been a matter of following leads and doing routine work. Anyone could have caught him, really. It had just taken some perseverance and maybe a good hunch or two.
As I lay in the darkness of my cabin and mulled over the events of the week, a bizarre theory began to form in my mind. A theory that was so absurd that I would have laughed about it a few days earlier. And yet it seemed to make sense. It fit the facts. If true, it meant there was rhyme and reason to this nonsense, but it was so alien that I never would have thought of it, except for the drop of blood in the life-support module.
Was it possible?
I knotted a sweaty fist. It was crazy—but it was all I had.
Chapter Seventeen
I managed to get four hours of sleep, after which I stalked to Shaheen’s cabin, still tired and cranky. She’d had a rough forty-eight hours trying to repair life support and restore power to the station. However, as exhausted as she’d been, when she’d finished she’d continued to work on the nano problem.
And she had made a stunning discovery.
Her eyes were red and puffy. Her hair was messy and unkempt. Her uniform was wrinkled and covered in grease. Yet with all that, she still looked beautiful. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, in fact. It wasn’t normal for me during an investigation, and I silently chastised myself for it.
“Pay attention,” she snapped. “This is important.”
“What did you find?” I was still skeptical of the whole nano-being-part-of-the-mystery routine, but after Bram’s story, I could no longer ignore it. I had developed a theory that I was hesitant to tell her; I was hoping she had discovered something to negate what I had come up with.
“Remember when I told you it would be difficult to figure out the processor’s programming?”
I nodded. The nano, as I recalled, was bacteria fused in some way with a computer processor. According to Shaheen, the processor could be in control of the bacteria, compelling it to perform some mysterious function inside a human body. Its purpose, however, I had left for her to decipher.
“I had the scientists deliver a nano programmer from the clinic,” she said. “Doctors and engineers use the programmer to give instructions to nanos. For example: travel to the fibula and heal a fracture. Or destroy a tumor in the liver. Or fuse this new section of hull to the ship. Get it?”
“Sure. I know how nanos work, generally.”
“So I had the programmer brought here, on the hunch that I could modify it to communicate with the processor inside that bacterium.”
“Did you modify it?”
She slapped her knee. “I didn’t have to! I simply turned it on and accessed the nano directly!”
The original blood drop from Reggie’s lab was now between microscope slides on a side table in Shaheen’s quarters. Apparently the nano within it still functioned.
My forehead creased. “Just like that?”
“Yes. There was no security system or password or anything.”
“What did you find?”
She scratched her head. “Well, whoever created it didn’t need a security code. Everything’s encrypted.”
I frowned again. “But you found something.”
“Yes. Something bizarre. Something so insane, I can’t make sense of it.” She began to pace. “There is code in there of a type I’ve never seen. I’m not sure if it deals with the nano’s replication or not.”
“You mean the bacteria’s replication.”
“They’re one and the same, remember? The nano controls the bacteria. It is a nano. From now on that’s what we’ll call it, okay? No more talk of bacteria.”
I stroked my jaw. Foreign technology, Reggie had called it. Shaheen figured that was because it could replicate and was something no one had seen before. The inclusions in the bacteria—computer processors?—seemed to indicate that. Still, it was a difficult concept to wrap my head around, especially in the middle of a murder investigation.
She exhaled. “You’re exhausting sometimes. Now, some of the code may deal with replication. Since it’s encrypted, it would make sense.” She shrugged. “After all, this could be worth billions to engineers.” She hesitated and lowered her voice. “But I did find something that’s undeniable: a DNA sequence. The encryption couldn’t hide it. The computer decoded it quickly. Stood out like a sore thumb.”
A jolt coursed through my body. Exactly as I had suspected. “Coded into the processor?”
“Yes! Within this nano is the code for a strand of DNA.”
“Whose?”
“I dumped that section of the code and compared it with everyone on the station.”
“It matched with someone?” I rose to my feet.
She shook her head. “The DNA is foreign. It’s not one of us.”
“What about Jarvis Riddel?” He was the crewman Manny had sent to Mercury.
“Checked him too.”
“So whose is it?”
She shrugged. “There’s no way to tell.”
I considered this new development. I had access to an extensive DNA data bank. I would check with that and have the person’s identity within minutes. The benefits of having everyone’s DNA filed at the time of birth into a galactic registry were incalculable. To check I would just have to link to its location at Security Division on Earth.
Shaheen cleared her throat. “The question that I want to raise is, why would someone program the nano with a DNA code?”
I voiced the obvious thought: “To locate somebody.”
“Precisely. But the bigger question is, what for?”
I turned and slapped the hatch controls. “I’ll let you know when I’ve found out.”
“Good luck.” She yawned and crawled into her bunk. She dimmed the lights, but I saw her blue eyes gazing out at me. “I’ll be here.”
I stared at her as the hatch closed.
* * *
The database housed at the CCF’s Security Division HQ on Earth was the largest collection of personal information in the Confederacy. Along with DNA, the database contained fingerprints, handprints, retinal scans, brain scans and voice prints of nearly every single person in the Terran Confederacy. The DNA in the nano processor would be in the database. I had no doubt about that.
I logged on to the network with the station’s FTL communit. I had downloaded the DNA code into my datachip reader; uploading it to the database was merely a matter of tapping a few keys.
Somehow I’d known there would be something like this coded into the nano. It was intuition, a guess...maybe a hunch. I’d learned long ago to embrace my feelings and understood when to listen to them.
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