by Jake Elwood
Liz let out a snort of laughter. "I thought you were going to give him an aneurysm!"
Joss didn't look amused. "Are we leaving, then?"
"No. Not yet." He couldn't have said why exactly. Part of it was a stubborn annoyance. Jirani wanted him gone. So did Eloise Hansard. That made him want to stay.
"Are we looking for the kidnappers?" Liz asked, dropping into the helm station.
"I don't have the faintest idea where to start," Chan told her. He remembered Gustav Riverson reaching out a frail arm to deflect the shot that would have killed Chan, then doubling over in pain a moment later. "But yes," he said. "We're looking for them."
"Good." Liz gave him a predatory grin. "I want another crack at those hooligans."
Joss looked concerned, but she didn't speak, just nodded. "I'll see what I can find out," she said, and left the bridge.
"I might have an idea or two of my own," Liz said. She glanced at the bridge hatch where Joss had disappeared. "I'll let you know what I find out. Some time when that woman isn't around."
Chan sighed at her retreating back. He was really going to have to do something about the division in his crew. That would have to wait, though. First, he had to figure out where on Titan someone could hide a kidnapped executive.
Chapter 5
Dome Six was tiny, cramped, and utilitarian. Most of the residents didn't even have rooms, just sleeping pods that lined the walls and jutted into the corridors so that Liz had to lean and duck as she moved through the shadows. There were ceiling lights, but they were blocked by pods or by laundry hanging on short lines.
She guessed that Dome Six held more people than Helios, the adjacent dome with about fifteen times the volume. Still, she hardly saw anyone in the Byzantine corridors. People came to Dome Six to sleep. No one hung around during the day cycle. There wasn't room.
The exception was the atrium, which she found at the top of the dome. The atrium was an open space about twenty metres across, the curving skin of the dome forming the ceiling. The chamber was crowded with the first plants she'd seen in Dome Six, mostly vines that clung to the walls and ceiling to make the most of the limited space. A pleasant little fountain burbled in the center of the atrium, ringed by red stone benches. It was there that she found White Henry.
He was an albino, his hair disconcertingly white above a youthful face, his eyes tinged with pink, his pale hands showing a bit of grease under the nails and embedded in the creases of his knuckles. The grease and the grubby coveralls he wore identified him as a working man, but labor wasn't his only source of income.
Two men sat near him on stone benches, spacers with the gangly look of men who'd spent years in low gravity. They looked up as she walked into the atrium, then stood and shuffled out as White Henry made a gesture with his hand. She took a seat on the next bench.
"Well, now," said Henry. There was a hint of a drawl to his voice. "Who might you be?"
"I'm Liz," she said. "And you're White Henry, a man with a reputation for getting things done … discreetly, shall we say?"
"We shall," he agreed. He lounged on the bench, his posture unchanged, but his gaze was sharp. "What brings you to this lovely atrium today, Liz?"
His eyes widened only slightly when she brought a laser pistol out of her pocket. She rested the gun on her palm, careful not to point it at him. "Do you know how to unlock one of these?"
His lips tightened in annoyance. "I already talked to the other two cops. I don't know anything, all right?" He crossed his arms over his chest. "You all need to stop hassling me. I'm an honest businessman. I don't get involved in kidnappings."
"I never thought you did," she said. "But you're a smart guy. I need your expertise." She waggled the pistol in her hand. "I need this unlocked. Can you do it?"
He frowned at her, then reluctantly uncrossed his arms. He leaned forward, peering at the gun without touching it. "A Kessler," he said. "Looks like it's already unlocked."
"How can you tell?"
Henry shook his head. "You want to do a proper unlock on a weapon like this, it takes the right gear." He glanced up at her, giving her a toothy grin. "I only know this from watching the feeds, you understand."
She nodded impatiently.
"It takes a custom hacking rig," he continued. "If you don't have the rig, though, there's another way. You can just burn out the ID chip." He extended a long, delicate finger. "You see that little melted spot there?"
Liz lifted the gun to her eyes. A tiny circle marred the plastic body of the gun just above and behind the trigger, a hole surrounded by a ridge of melted, burned plastic.
"Someone fried the chip. The gun can't be locked now." He straightened up, shaking his head. "It's messy, but it works."
Liz put the pistol away. "So, you know how to do it, then?"
He grinned again. "Now, there's a leading question." He gestured at her pocket. "That's not my work, officer."
She scowled at him. "I'm no bloody cop."
He looked her over. "No, I suppose you're probably not. But regardless, I don't make a habit of burning holes in perfectly good sidearms. It's not my style."
"Why not?" she demanded.
He shrugged. "Well, first of all, it's not necessary." His grin was more of a smirk now. "Setting aside the fact that I'm a law-abiding resident with no interest in criminal activities, well, I do know rather a lot of people. Including a space rat or two who might just have a custom hacking rig."
"Why go to the trouble?" Liz asked. "Burning the chip out would be easier, wouldn’t it?"
"Not really," he said. "But that's not the reason." He gestured at her pocket. "Having a laser pistol at all is enough to get you into trouble here, but there's trouble, and then there's trouble. A gun with the chip burned out? Now, that's trouble of the second kind. I can disable the chip with a rig and if you get caught, well, it's a slap on the wrist. There's a fine, maybe a few days in the box." He leaned forward, his face serious. "If the constables finds that gun in your pocket, though? They take one glance at that hole in the case and you're looking at the same four walls until sometime next year. And I don't mean next Earth year, either."
Liz glanced uneasily at her pocket. "I see." She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "So it's not your work."
"No, ma'am."
"Well, then, whose work might it be?"
His face went still. "I wouldn't know anything about that."
"Look," she said, fighting her impatience. "There's a guy like you on every station. You know things, you know people, you can help someone get what they need when it's not exactly available at the station concession booth."
He stared at her, blank-faced.
"Maybe you break a few rules," she said. "But they're small rules. No one really cares. The suits mostly leave you alone. Until something happens like that kidnapping yesterday. Then everything changes. The cops can't find the kidnappers. They don't know where to look. But they can find you. So you get hassled. You get put under the hot lights, and suddenly nobody wants anything to do with you. You're not the guy who can get things done any more. Now you're the guy who's always got cops hanging around."
Henry scowled at her, not speaking.
"The sooner these kidnappers are found, the sooner you get your comfy life back." She patted her pocket. "You don't want people running around with unlocked laser pistols, kicking down doors and dragging people off to do God knows what. It's bad for your business. Am I right?"
He didn't speak, but his glare might have softened slightly.
"So give me someone else to hassle. Throw me a name. No one will ever know that I got it from you."
He stared at her while the seconds ticked past. Finally he said, "Ed Kwan. In Epimetheus. Him or his crew. Any of them might have done it." He grimaced. "Don't go see him alone, though. Those boys play rough."
Not as rough as I do, I'll bet. "Thanks, Henry," she said, and stood. "I won't be back."
"Kindly don't," he muttered sourly as she wa
lked out.
Joss walked into the open cafeteria that filled most of the lowest level of Dome Two. A third of the tables were empty, the rest filled mostly with men in small groups. A few women were sprinkled through the crowd as well.
Hamid sat alone, munching on a sandwich. He had the air of an unhappy man trying to project an aura of stoic unconcern.
Joss grabbed a tray and bought herself a sandwich and a coffee. Then she walked over and set her tray on the table across from Hamid. He glanced up, his reaction mostly dampened by a cop's habitual inscrutability, but she caught a faint flicker of emotion. Surprise, then pleasure, then suspicion, if she read it right.
She smiled brightly. "Do you mind if I join you?"
He responded by nudging the closest chair out with his foot. She sat. "I'm sure you can't talk about the investigation," she said. "That's okay. I just couldn't leave you sitting here all by yourself. And I've never talked to an officer of Solar Force before."
Some of the tension left his shoulders. "I talk to people in Solar Force all the time," he said, and she giggled.
"You must get to see the whole Solar system. Did they send you out here just for the kidnapping?" She put on an expression of mortified dismay. "Oh, sorry! That's asking about the case. But they couldn't have sent you all the way to Titan for that. There wasn't time. The kidnapping was only yesterday. Oh, I'm sorry I keep talking about it." She gestured at the tables around them. "It's what everyone is talking about."
He smiled. "It's okay, Ms. Kirk." The smile looked genuine. He was starting to relax.
"Oh, you can't call me Ms. Kirk, Officer Hamid," she told him. "It's Joss."
"Joss, then," he said, and his smile deepened. "My name is Mohammed. But my friends call me Mo."
"Mo. I like that."
They fell into easy small talk. She told him stories about her time on the Raven, none of them true, telling him that she'd been on the ship for a couple of years and they were just in from Neptune. He talked about being away from Earth for five long years, travelling on a dozen spaceships and visiting a bewildering number of colonies, stations, habitats and outposts.
Each time the conversation veered back to the kidnapping she feigned embarrassment and changed the subject. Blushing on command wasn't easy but she could do it. She grilled him on the minutiae of his travels, demanding to know what Belters were like and what people wore on the big tourist liners that came out from Earth.
"I've been on Crius about three months," he said. "They haven't had a full-time Solar Force officer in almost two years." He was cheerful and expansive now, his suspicion long gone. "The home office keeps talking about putting an entire office here. Half a dozen officers, some locals doing administrative work, even a ship or two at our disposal. We could police this side of the rings. They talk about doing the same thing on Coriolis Station." He chuckled. "They've been talking about it for a good ten years, but what have they managed so far? One man on Coriolis, and one man here."
"Wow," said Joss, her eyes wide. "You're so isolated."
His smile faded a bit as he nodded. "I'm starting to get to know the locals, though."
Sure you are. But you still eat alone. She didn't voice the thought. Instead she said, "There's the Crius Police."
Hamid grimaced. "Well. Yes. I'm afraid the local police see Solar Force as something of an intrusion. They're afraid I'll try to take over their investigations."
Joss frowned. "That's silly! They should be glad for your help. Especially for something like a kidnapping." She summoned another blush. "Sorry."
"No, no," he said, smiling. "It's okay. Really. Nobody really thinks Captain Chan is a suspect. That's why Detective Jirani was pressuring him to leave Titan. If he was really a suspect, your ship would have been impounded by now."
"Oh, that's a relief." She gave him her best wide-eyed look. "It must be fascinating, investigating a major crime like that."
His shoulders lifted, his chest expanded, and she felt a momentary pang of remorse for manipulating him. She suppressed it. She was making him feel great. How could that be bad?
"It's a fascinating case," he said. "There's so much more to it than meets the eye. For instance, I'm trying to figure out why Amalgamated Orbital didn't just hire Saturn Security. They've got their head offices right here in Crius, they're bonded, they have an impeccable reputation…" He let his voice trail off, and a sudden wariness appeared in his eyes.
Joss didn't speak, just gazed at him, wide-eyed.
"Anyway, it's a fascinating case. Usually I'm tracking drug dealers and petty smugglers. This is much more interesting."
He stopped talking, his posture a bit stiff. He was wondering if he'd said too much, Joss guessed. He would clam up now, unless she could recover the momentum of the conversation. She decided to risk a question.
"Where do you think they took him?"
Hamid leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. "Well, now, that's the intriguing part of it all. The thing is, he didn't go far."
"What do you mean?"
"People think it's easy," he said. "In the vids, the bad guys just jump onto a ship and go roaring away. Off into the depths of space, and no one can find you. But not here."
Joss did her best to look impressed with his insider knowledge.
"Crius has really good radar," he said. "They get a lot of traffic. So their ship tracking is top-notch. We shut down the port facilities as soon as we heard about the kidnapping, and not one ship has taken off without a thorough search. Riverson hasn't been on any of them."
Joss frowned. "But I thought Liz saw a ship."
He nodded. "She saw something. But the ship didn't leave Titan. Nothing showed up on radar. Nothing at all." He smiled. "Even that stealth ship you arrived on would show on the Crius radar, especially at close range. No, wherever they went with Riverson, it wasn't out into space."
She cocked her head, honestly puzzled. "But where would they go?"
"My best guess?" He shrugged. "I think they're here in Crius. I think they flew under the platform and docked to a dome somewhere else on the city. I think Riverson's tucked away somewhere within three kilometres of us right now." His face darkened. "Unless they just dumped him out, of course. I'm trying to organize a search of the surface directly below us, but it takes time."
"Dumped him?" She tried to imagine the long, cold drop to the surface of Titan. How long would it take to fall two hundred kilometres? Riverson would have time to choke to death on methane before he ever hit the surface. "How awful!"
"I'm still hoping we'll find him alive," he said. "I assume someone wants a ransom. If they just wanted to kill him, they could have shot him at the party. Of course, they might have dropped him, and still be demanding a ransom."
"That's ghastly! Have there been ransom demands?"
The guarded expression was back on Hamid's face. He struggled visibly while Joss remained silent, letting him see that she was hanging on his words. Eventually the desire to impress her won out over his sense of discretion.
"I don't know," he admitted. "The company isn't telling me everything." He grimaced. "Or the family, which in the case of John Riverson is the same thing."
That was the last useful thing she learned from Hamid. They continued to chat, about ZG-Ball and interplanetary travel and the last time they'd had real fresh meat. At last he said regretfully that he had to leave, and they made their goodbyes. He walked out of the cafeteria, and Joss stayed behind, lost in thought.
Where was Riverson? Who were the kidnappers? She had no idea where to begin finding those answers. What was Amalgamated Orbital up to? Could she charm someone in the inner circle? That seemed like a long shot.
What about Saturn Security? That, she decided, was a line of inquiry she could pursue. She took out a data pad and started exploring.
Chan sat at a public terminal in Dome Eleven, reading about Crius, tapping one toe impatiently while he waited to stumble across something useful. With no idea what he was searching f
or, the search was a frustrating experience. He was learning a lot about Crius, though.
Methane, unsurprisingly, was the city's main source of power. Down on the surface, methane fell as rain. Up at city level there was no rain, but condenser panels under the city collected enough methane to power most of the city's needs. The artificial gravity field was still handled by a fusion plant, but methane kept the domes warm and the lights on.
He wondered idly if a kidnap victim could be stashed in the methane collection equipment. Judging by the pictures he could find, it wasn't likely. It was an open secret that the police were searching every dome in the city, looking for Gustav Riverson. They were impressively thorough. Half an hour before, they had come through Dome Eleven, making Chan move back while they removed panels from the bank of terminals and peered inside.
It gave him cold shivers. If someone had Riverson stashed in the city, a good thorough search might just motivate them to cut his throat and dump his body down a garbage chute. He pushed the thought from his mind as best he could. The old man was alive. That had to be his operating assumption. Any other assumption was demoralizing, paralyzing.
Riverson would be found. Alive. By James Chan, if it was humanly possible.
"Mr. Chan?"
It was a woman's voice, soft and cultured, and Chan turned, half expecting to see Eloise Hansard. Instead he found himself facing a brunette with huge, luminous brown eyes in a solemn face, dressed in a black blouse and dark trousers. She was middle-aged, and he judged her clothing to be expensive but unobtrusive, selected to blend in among rough-dressed spacers. Something about her seemed familiar, but he decided after a moment's reflection that he'd never seen her before.
"That's me," he said cautiously.
She smiled for just a moment, her teeth flashing into view and then vanishing. She looked achingly sad, and Chan found himself wanting to comfort her. "My name is Sandra," she said. "Riverson."