Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  But that could wait.

  For the moment Yates and Yesilkov themselves were more important than what they might represent.

  The Oversight Room was located in the hub of Sky Devon rather than the wheel because it had been among the first portions of the habitat constructed. It was inconvenient for the oversight crews to have to work in weightless conditions; but there were only six men and women on each shift, and they were among the lowest ranking of Sky Devon's personnel. It would have been far more inconvenient - as well as expensive - to reroute the lines carrying environmental data from every part of the habitat into the Oversight Room.

  The oversight crew - four men and a woman under a male foreman - twisted or turned when de Kuyper entered, more interested in their visitor than they were in the screens and data arrays which constituted their work. The grin with which the Afrikaner responded briefly to them was part wolfish, part bemused. He did not close the door. Instead he held it half ajar so that he could watch his quarry at the information pylon in the center of the docking area's floor.

  “Sir?” offered one of the oversight crew, perhaps the foreman, but de Kuyper had too little interest to look around and see for sure.

  “Go on about your business,” he growled. Yates, the man, said something to the woman. They began to move toward the rotating walkway which surrounded the stationary loading bay. Both of the visitors were hopelessly awkward in zero gravity.

  Sky Devon was a three-spoked wheel, and the only access between the hub and the rim, which rotated to maintain a semblance of gravity for the habitat's living and production areas, was by means of the paired elevators in the spokes. Once a visitor had reached the rim, the magnetic tramway would carry him to any other point on the circumference— but choosing the spoke closest to his destination would save considerable travel time later.

  As de Kuyper watched, Yates and Yesilkov struggled, only half under control, to the head of elevator B. Only then did the Afrikaner close the door and give his attention to the interior of the Oversight Room.

  All six of the personnel were still staring at him.

  “Go on,” de Kuyper repeated, his snarl only a flash submerged in his disinterest for these people and what they thought. His left hand fished out his ID card and waved it, too briefly for anyone to have read the data printed on its surface.

  They didn't need to read it. De Kuyper's nonchalance proved his authority; the card's blue border indicated he was involved with Air System Maintenance; and the colored square filling the upper left comer marked him as a supervisor, at least.

  Nobody in an orbital habitat wanted problems with the men who kept them breathing.

  The oversight crew shifted their attention, not so much back to their work as away from the intruder. One of the men turned his head and sniffed the air secretively, as if he could tell anything useful about the composition of the atmosphere that way.

  “No problem,” said the Afrikaner as he tucked his card away again. He was pleased in the same fractional way that he had been irritated before. He was focused on his task, and his immediate surroundings impinged only very slightly on the problems that mattered to him.

  There were twenty-four meter-square viewing screens arranged adjacent to one another around the walls of the Oversight Room. The screens were flat, not tanks for holograms, because the greater resolution of a laser-swept flat surface was more important to their use than three-dimensionality would have been.

  The only break in the array was for the door by which de Kuyper had entered, and it was to the pair of screens directly across the room that he now drifted. The slight tackiness of his boot soles gave the Afrikaner control without hampering him unduly in zero-gravity conditions.

  The shift foreman, who was probably younger than his baldness made him look, approached the interloper again. “Is there something the matter with the air, sir?” he asked obsequiously.

  “Not if you keep your mouth shut,” de Kuyper said as his hands worked the controls of both screens simultaneously . “This doesn't have to be any problem of yours at all.”

  As the foreman backed away, de Kuyper took an inhaler from his breast pocket. The room began to fill with the odor of brandy-soaked tobacco.

  Each of the large screens in the Oversight Room swept slowly across the view of one of the twenty-four sections into which the wheel of Sky Devon was divided. Beneath each vision screen were fifty flat gauges which reported air, soil, and water temperatures at selected locations within the section; atmosphere mix; and the flow of waste and nutrients through the section.

  No individual could keep track of everything that went on in acres of grain and vegetables, livestock ranging from cattle to rabbits, and fishponds - layered one atop the other and all mirror-illuminated from the direction of the hub, “up,” against the thrust of pseudogravity. In addition everyone on an oversight crew had nominal charge of four adjacent sections, a volume of space and information staggeringly beyond the collection and processing capacity of two eyes and a human brain.

  But the Oversight Room was not intended to deal with sudden emergencies: there were automatic alarms and shutdown procedures for that. What trained personnel with this battery of views and sensors could do was note a problem before it became an emergency.

  Did the slow build-up of methane in a carp tank indicate that an effluent filter was clogged? Did a differential of a few millibars pressure from a section's upper levels to its base mean there was an air leak? Were both the cattle and the sheep in stacked pens avoiding the same corner, suggesting that a distorted mirror was causing a hot spot?

  No one Jan de Kuyper knew on an oversight crew was enthusiastic about the job - but their cameras were ideal for the Afrikaner's present needs, about which he was as serious as death.

  Elevator B reached “ground level” of the rim, where two sections met. The cross wall, which could be sealed if necessary to contain a disaster in one of the adjacent sections, served here as a structural brace. The three spokes of the habitat's wheel had to balance the asymmetries of mass and rotational velocity throughout the rim. It was critical that those stresses - tiny but additive - be distributed through cross walls instead of merely the skin of the structure.

  The Afrikaner's normal duties required him to know the physical layout of Sky Devon as well as anyone in the habitat could. He didn't need the help of the oversight personnel to step directly to the proper screens and begin swinging the camera controls to display people leaving elevator B in either direction.

  Each picture was controlled by a handle like that of a joystick, mounted beneath the screen. The control levers did not move under the operator's pressure, but they transmitted the level and direction of force as commands to the battery of cameras feeding the screen.

  The two pictures in front of Jan de Kuyper sped toward one another. Smooth motion was punctuated by abrupt changes of perspective as a camera reached the limit of its field of view and the microprocessor switched to the next unit in the correct direction of travel.

  “There . . .” de Kuyper muttered under his breath in Afrikaans as the picture in the right-hand screen began to sever itself with the expanding mass of the barrier wall. At its base was the wide plaza onto which the doors of the passenger elevators opened - cargo was loaded and emptied at a still lower level. The doors swelled on the screen as the Afrikaner pushed the control in, increasing the focal length of the mirror-optic lens that the distant camera mounted.

  The other side of the cross wall rushed to fill the left-hand screen. De Kuyper grinned around the tube of his inhaler. Only a practiced torturer could have recognized the expression as one of humor.

  He didn't need the left picture after all. His targets stepped into sight on the right-hand screen, moving with assurance in the half-G pseudogravity - and staggering slightly because the acceleration of centrifugal force has side effects that true gravity does not. They walked to the transit stop near the elevator head, pausing to check their directions while more familia
r travelers pressed past them.

  The Afrikaner locked his camera down on the faces, the man and then the shorter, pale-haired woman. He held that close-up so long as the couple stood still. De Kuyper did not learn anything from the pictures, though it occurred to him (as it occasionally had before) that lip-reading would be a useful talent.

  In any case, the close-up was a useful preview of how the faces would look over a gun sight.

  The woman's head bobbed off the screen. De Kuyper's hand tugged up and pushed sideways on the control, expanding his picture and shifting it to follow the couple striding, as he more or less expected, toward the clockwise transit stop and the magnetic tram just gliding to a halt there.

  Yates and Yesilkov had not paused to recover their luggage - one case apiece, and that loaded well below the weight permitted without additional charge on shuttle flights. Yates' hands were free, but the woman carried with her the satchel that had been near her person from the first time de Kuyper saw her in the passenger bay at Headquarters Colony.

  The case bore signs of wear - scuffing at the corners, and a black streak on one side which was probably something rubbed on rather than a tear in the sturdy synthetic. There were no markings on the satchel's exterior, but its color was as close to the blue of Security Patrol uniforms as dyes in different materials could achieve.

  Most of the oversight personnel had returned to their duties. One of the men hovered in the background, glancing nervously toward the interloper who had ousted him from his position. De Kuyper looked without expression at the fellow - and felt, but did not show, his pleasure when the crewman blanched and spun away.

  The tram holding the Afrikaner's targets was gathering speed, but the picture slid along with it in a comfortable panorama under the guidance of de Kuyper's hand. The next transit stop was in the middle of the section where layers of garden truck surrounded a community reserved for personnel above technician class.

  No livestock was raised within this segment of Sky Devon. That should have meant there were relatively few complaints about air quality, since the only agricultural effluvia that assailed the inhabitants were those traces that simply could not be filtered from a recirculating air system.

  De Kuyper and his crews spent more time here than in any other segment of the habitat. Problems that don't exist are the most difficult ones to cure.

  The tram slid on. De Kuyper focused down on the platform to scan the passengers who had disembarked. The high-angle camera he was using showed the top of people's heads, not their faces, and tugging at the control lever did not slide the picture down.

  The oversight system was not intended as a tool for human surveillance. No batteries of cameras had been installed in the communities themselves. Fortunately, Sky Devon had been planned as a chain of tiny hamlets in the midst of farmland. The overlap of the oversight cameras was sufficient for the Afrikaner's present needs.

  Unless Yesilkov, with her bright hair and blue satchel, separated from the man Yates.

  Well, de Kuyper couldn't watch two targets at the same time anyway. He'd use what he had, and he'd make field decisions on whatever problems arose.

  Just as he always had, whether repairing a duct that didn't follow the planned routing or deciding whether to shoot a lone Kaffir or let him walk on without warning the column of guerrillas that perhaps slouched along behind him.

  The tram slowed for another stop while de Kuyper stepped to his right with a leisurely motion and took the control for the next screen. Both were the responsibility of the same member of the oversight crew. The woman watching the adjacent screens moved down to the last of her line of four, talking with false animation to the foreman.

  Yates and Yesilkov did not leave the tram before it accelerated into the next section of the wheel. Focusing carefully through the windows of the car, the Afrikaner was sure that he could see the splotch of blue that was the satchel. Reflection from the glass - processed out of lunar silicates instead of thermoplasticss which would have had to be lifted expensively from Earth's gravity well-made the windows montages of too many distorted images for de Kuyper to be sure of more than that.

  There was a phone beneath every fourth screen so that the oversight personnel could report apparent problems to the workers on the ground. De Kuyper took out his card again while his eyes and right hand tracked the train speeding past tiered livestock byres. He fed the card into the phone slot so that its microcircuitry enabled the Sky Devon paging system.

  Pressing zero now would turn the phonepad into a series of presets, each of which dialed a complete number that had been loaded into de Kuyper's card. Presets one through nine had been assigned by the Maintenance Department and were loaded with the extensions the Afrikaner had to call most frequently in the course of his regular duties.

  Preset zero rang the phone in Dr. Kathleen Spenser's attaché case.

  The tram slowed, halted in a community stacked like the livestock pens to either side of it - housing for Tech Threes and Fours like the oversight crew watching him furtively. The men and women who left and boarded the train here wore coveralls.

  Except for a couple who got off. The man's hair was light enough to be called blond in any company save the present, but the looks of the woman behind him were as straight and pale as teased flax.

  De Kuyper put the reeking inhaler in his breast pocket; keyed zero to enable the preset; and only then lifted the handset of the phone to cradle it between his shoulder and left ear. He did not look away from the screen.

  The couple waited, turning uncertainly while more familiar passengers strode from the transit platform on the way to their farther destinations. The blond woman touched her companion with her left hand and gestured with the satchel in her right toward what the vertical camera angle showed as a small square adjoining the platform: the elevator to the Pest Control Research lab.

  The couple were foreshortened to heads on shoulders on the screen. They stepped together in front of the elevator - more than a handshake but not, perhaps, quite an embrace. Then the woman broke away and disappeared within the elevator. Yates turned, laced his fingers together, and bent the joints fiercely backward.

  De Kuyper released the camera control and touched zero on the phonepad a second time. Yates' figure was moving in short arcs around the elevator head, as if he were tethered to it.

  “Yes?” said Kathleen Spenser's voice in the Afrikaner's ear - as chill and pure as a sword in a bed of ice.

  “There is a woman with a blue briefcase coming to you in a few moments only,” said de Kuyper, knowing that his accent was all the identification necessary on the microbiologist's private line. “You must not let her leave your laboratory until I get there.”

  The oversight crew was edging away from the sound of the intruder's soft, deadly voice. They formed two distinct clots in the corners of the room farthest from him, so that they could not even seem to be listening to the whispered conversation.

  “What do you mean?” Spenser demanded, her voice an octave higher than it had been before de Kuyper spoke.

  “Any means you please,” said the Afrikaner. He stroked the picture control, broadening the field of view until the man Yates was a mote wobbling near the minute square of the elevator. No other person was visible on the screen. “Seal the air lock, if you must. I will arrive soon, but she has a companion who must be gotten out of the way before.''

  “I can't -”

  “Mistress Spenser,” Jan de Kuyper said. “You must. Do you understand? You must.”

  Spenser's initial shock and uncertainty were gone. “Hurry, then,” said the microbiologist.

  The line clicked open.

  De Kuyper cradled the handset and gave the picture control a quick spin across his palm and fingers to make its previous alignment a matter of doubtful conjecture - if anyone even tried. He thrust himself toward the door of the Oversight Room, letting weightlessness benefit him. He gave the trio of crewmen which included the female a nod of his head as he left them,
courteous or grimly threatening as their minds chose to accept it.

  The luggage de Kuyper had abandoned when he boarded the outbound shuttle at UN Headquarters contained the plasma discharger he had thought he might need on the Moon. No matter. There were others here.

  As he worked his way through the bustle of the docking area, the Afrikaner was inserting his nose filters. They and the gas grenades which they accompanied had made the entire journey from and to Sky Devon in one bellows pocket of his trousers.

  Chapter 22 - DOWN ON THE FARM

  Kathleen Spenser was sure that de Kuyper's odd behavior, his chilling orders, and his urgency which left no time for the occasional “goodmistress” or even a “please,” must have something to do with the woman of whom he'd spoken. A woman with a blue briefcase and companion.

  Seal the air lock if you must . . . she has a companion who must be gotten out of the way first. . . . You must. Do you understand? You must. Too many musts. Something must, then, be terribly wrong. She'd half expected to hear from de Kuyper - hear about the Bradley woman whom de Kuyper was supposed to be bringing in for interrogation.

  The Afrikaner's behavior might not have been so frightening but for the conspicuous lack of success in the case of Ella Bradley. Not even a mention of her, or how it had gone, or when she'd be available for further questioning, or, if not, then why and what that could mean.

  Spenser ruminatively stroked the crystal phial hanging from her neck chain. I will arrive soon, de Kuyper had said, and she'd told him to hurry.

  Hurry before she lost her nerve, before supposition drove her mad, before . . . what? Before the woman with the blue briefcase arrived, if possible. Spenser didn't want to be involved with -

  The gentle tone of her desk paging system interrupted her thoughts. “Dr. Spenser?” came the receptionist's voice from the desk's speaker. “There's a Lieutenant Yesilkov here from UN Security who needs to see you on a priority basis? Immediately?” The voice piped from the entryway reception station made everything a question.