by Sage Walker
He poured himself another cup of coffee and then pulled up the GON list and looked through it. It was short a murderer, if he could find one to add to it.
The data streams on Cash Ryan’s murder were full of stuff that might get overlooked, even this early in the game. Helt set up a sphere with a dot called Ryan in the center. Murder Management? Okay, at least it was a filename. He set fields for method, motive, suspects, with suspects at the periphery for now. Motive? Elena had one, maybe. Time. Four hours to deal with, including the dead camera hour between 1900 and 2000. The sphere was all too empty, but it was a framework. Helt moved alibied personnel outside the sphere, leaving Elena lonely in there, still near to the periphery but closer to the center than anyone else.
He went back to his off-list and stared at the names. Making it had been his most unpleasant daily discomfort until now. Going back to it felt almost like relief. Scanning the names, he felt secure that the people who were currently on it had earned their way off-ship. It contained a few unfortunates whose psychoses had surfaced on Kybele, the ones Jim Tulloch couldn’t ease back into any semblance of function. Embezzlers, mischievous unauthorized hackers, and other white-collar thieves, the ones who’d been caught, anyway, had always been shipped off by their division chiefs when found, and some had been found for this off-load. Some of the lottery winners were just flat miserable and wanted to go home. They would.
Ask people if they want to go to sea and they say they do. Ask them if they want to spend their lives in a submarine. Well, not so much, when you put it that way.
But these Seed Bankers weren’t planning on leaving. They were all colonists. They expected to spend their lives here. And perhaps they planned to make those lives short, along with the lives of everyone around them, to make a point.
He pulled up the Seed Banker bios and looked through them, searching for any sort of connections between them, for any incidents that might have clued him, or anyone, that they wanted to cause trouble. The agronomist woman, Andrea Doan, the only one whose name was on his second tier of possible off-listers, was there because she’d been shifted from team to team several times by Mena, and he’d asked Mena why.
“She’s a lottery winner, and she’s an expert brewmaster. A polymath of sorts,” Mena had told him. “I can use her anywhere, nurseries, fields, lab work. But people are happy enough to see her go somewhere else.”
“Bossy?”
“Not obnoxiously so. But she’s resentful about getting bossed. It’s not uncommon; most of us have authority problems. There’s something else, something bitter about her, people say.”
Helt had let it slide. He wished he hadn’t. Doan’s mug shot showed a plump woman with a determined expression, dark hair slicked tight to her head, older than most colonists, a lottery winner. Doan had once been Doãn, the tilde a victim of net-induced standardization. Her surname was Vietnamese and he was beginning to scroll through her bio when he heard someone in the hall. He switched his screen to a news feed.
The someone, Doughan, arrived at his door.
“Let’s talk to a Seed Banker, IA.”
“Okay.” It was a relief to hear that Doughan hadn’t spent his night playing tough cop, but his assumption that Helt would drop everything on the instant was irritating. Mildly. At least Helt would have a chance to structure the rest of the interviews, if not this one. “Which one?”
“Kelly Halkett, electrical engineer. He’s a good one, too,” Doughan said. “It’s early, and he’s not on duty, so we don’t have to rush. Might I have some of that coffee?”
“Sure.” Helt poured coffee and tossed his trusty windbreaker off the visitor’s chair. Doughan hung his windbreaker on a hook and made himself at home. For Saturday time off, he looked like a movie cowboy, shoulders braced on the chair back, butt on the edge of the chair, legs full length and ankles crossed. He was wearing a denim-blue T-shirt, jeans, a totally disreputable leather belt that featured some sort of Native American silver buckle, fair-sized but not in the least flashy, and well-worn boots, the rough leather kind called “roper.”
Kelly Halkett’s bio flashed up on the wall screen. He’d come up on a ten-year contract. He had worked on some of the step-downs from the big generators, both fusion and “solar,” meaning the power captured from Kybele’s quartz sun and the turbines that caught and distributed winds from the poles in Center. Halkett had designed some generators, smaller and simpler than the originals, to capture a few joules from the spin of the wheels under the trains, and that had earned him a colonist upgrade seven years ago.
“I don’t see any red flags on it,” Helt said. Kelly Halkett was a native of the Scots highlands, educated at Edinburgh, sometimes teased with the name “Scotty,” a persistent homage to eighteenth-century age-of-steam engineers. “What does David II have to say about him?”
“I’ll ask him after we talk to this Seed Banker. David II’s coming over here,” Doughan said. “So is Engineer Halkett.”
“Here,” Helt said. “When?”
“As soon as David II and said engineer finish soccer practice. We’ll record everything, of course. The lawyers can sort it out later.”
Helt checked the Cleared List. The station cameras showed Kelly Halkett going home after shift, and they didn’t show him anywhere after that until the next morning.
“He’s pretty much accounted for on Wednesday night. I’m not prepped for this. I wasn’t planning on becoming an interrogator so soon.”
“You’ll do fine,” Doughan said. “Think of it as low risk. After all, Halkett will be off-ship no matter what. And all we need to know from him is if there’s a connection between him and Cash Ryan.”
“Right,” Helt said. “Get the info but don’t spill the beans and let the man know he’s been found out. Doughan, I am not good at lying. I’ll do what I can, but I’ll use any info I need to use. That’s how it has to work.”
“Accepted,” Doughan said.
“Damn. What you’re saying is that you’re going to be evaluating my interview performance, and you’ve given me no preparation time at all. At the very least, I want to look through whatever bio we have on the man. And I’ll want to do the interview in here, please.”
“What about the conference room upstairs?” Doughan asked.
“It’s too big for four; those empty chairs make people want to perform for an audience, and they get too much space to set their distances in. I’d say Nadia and Jerry’s office is the right size, but I don’t have time to vet the clutter in there. I’m sure there’s nothing too perverse left out, but something in the mess might clue the guy that something big is up.”
I sound like a fussy guy with OCD, Helt realized. But these things count, damn it.
“I’ll get some chairs,” Doughan said.
“Thank you,” Helt said. He scanned on down Kelly Halkett’s history on Kybele. Relationships. Nothing much on Kybele. Heterosexual, a wife and son in Scotland, deserted forever after Halkett got his colonist bid. Hmmm. Helt moved Halkett’s name into the scrutiny of his interaction sorters, some individuals in it newly overlaid with a sickly orange glow of Seed Banker funding. He found, in addition to the money highlight, a cluster of activity centered at a site devoted to playing variable-g football. Okay.
He heard voices in the lobby. Doughan put down the two chairs he was carrying and went out front. Helt stayed put and heard quick intros and some comments about the condition of the turf in the Athens stadium.
Both David Luo II and his guest were freshly showered, dressed in jeans and black team jerseys, and hauling gym bags. The logo on their shirts was a pair of robotic hands with prominent nuts and bolts, cradling a stylized Kybele, an oblong spheroid floating in a spindle made of the struts of the plasma shield.
“Helt, this is Kelly,” Doughan said. “I don’t know if you’ve met.”
Kelly Halkett was a knotty-looking man, mid-sized, mid-forties, with sandy hair going gray, fair skin, and blue eyes that darted here, there, and everywhere. Big
hands, big knuckles, but he shook hands with a firm medium-strength grip that was courtesy and not a challenge. Kelly Halkett moved quickly and looked tightly wound. He took the chair Helt offered and settled his gym bag beneath it, precisely centered in the square formed by the chair legs.
David II sank smoothly into his chair. The word smooth always entered Helt’s mind when he was around David II. The engineering boss might have been made of some advanced polymer whose characteristics included resistance to chemicals, fire, and psychic distress of all kinds. He was always calm, pleasant, and polite, as far as Helt knew. He was a handsome, athletic, ethnic Chinese, and he was horribly talented. People worked themselves to exhaustion for him.
Doughan resumed his good ol’ boy chair slouch, but with his arms crossed so that he had a firm grip on each bicep.
“What’s up?” David II asked.
Oh, great, Helt thought. Doughan hadn’t clued David II about his plans for the interview.
“Trouble,” Doughan said. “I’ll let Helt explain.”
Halkett’s eyes darted from Doughan’s face to David’s to Helt’s, and then went back to David’s again.
“It’s about Cash Ryan, the man who died in Center.” Not about your sudden windfall, Dr. Halkett, and although Helt watched for any sign of relief or relaxation in Kelly’s face and muscles, he couldn’t spot one. “NSS is pretty sure he was murdered.”
Halkett gave Helt a quick glance. He looked back at David II, who displayed no startle response at the news and offered Kelly no suggestions about how he should respond. After some silence, in which responses like “I’m sorry to hear that” or “Am I under suspicion?” didn’t get said, Helt figured that Electrical Engineer Halkett probably didn’t have much innate capacity in verbal social interactions and bailed the guy out.
“Cash Ryan didn’t leave us much information about himself, and he didn’t seem to have many friends. Did you know him?”
“I knew his name.”
“But not the man?” Helt asked.
“I knew he worked for Navigation as an engineer,” Kelly said.
“Have you had any contact with him in the past three years?” Helt asked.
“Very little. When he came aboard, he was assigned one of the three tunnel crews I was supervising then. He requested a transfer a couple of weeks after he got here. I okayed his request.”
“You didn’t talk to him about it?” Helt asked.
“I did not.”
“Do you, usually? Talk to someone about why they want to move?”
“The answer to that would have to be yes, and no,” Kelly said. “The crew Cash Ryan was working with told me he was thinking about asking for a transfer. Sometimes that means a newbie is shy and afraid asking for a transfer would make trouble. Sometimes it means the crew doesn’t like the newbie. In either case, it’s better to have crews who are comfortable with one another. So we don’t question a bit of shifting around when someone is settling in.”
“Ryan’s record doesn’t give us much that would clue us on why someone would want to kill him. Engineer Halkett, at this point we’re just looking for people who have any information about Cash Ryan, about what he did when he was off work. Anything that might have gotten him cross-ways with anyone. Who brought this death to your attention?”
“I think it was Birdy who said something about him.”
“Oriol?” David II asked. “Oriol Bruguera?” Oriol Bruguera was on the Seed Banker list. David II had a gift for giving nothing away. Nothing in his voice or posture indicated anything but polite interest at hearing the name.
“Yes,” Kelly said.
“Did Birdy know him?” David II asked.
“He knew who he was, anyway,” Halkett said.
“Birdy works on one of the reactor crews, Helt,” David II said. “What did he say?”
Halkett looked as if he were trying hard to pass an exam on a difficult subject and knew he hadn’t studied. “Birdy said he remembered that Ryan worked with his crew for a few days and then got transferred somewhere else. He said he didn’t remember his face but he recognized the name when it showed up.”
“Anything else?” Helt asked.
“Not much. Birdy started talking about the guy’s trajectory off the tower. He said he looked at the GPS coordinates of the roped-off area NSS put up and he tried to calculate how he got that far away, and the figures don’t work out.”
“Tell him it was windy,” Helt said. “Wait a sec, I’ll give you the numbers.” He looked at Jerry’s notes about the weather that evening. “Sixteen kph with gusts to sixty.”
That got him a quick eye contact from Kelly Halkett.
“Oh. I will.” Halkett stared into infinity. Helt could see the calculations going on and waited. “Yes. That works. I’ll tell Birdy.”
“You and Birdy are on the same football team. Do you play variable-g with him as well?”
“Oh, sure. Birdy’s good at both. I’m better with the virtuals.”
Helt smiled. “Is gambling involved?” The question got the reaction of puzzlement that Helt expected. Kelly looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to be alarmed. Gambling wasn’t prohibited, but if you ended up on Basic Support with debts to pay, medical would give you a gentle nudge about psychiatric help. “You don’t have to answer that.”
Kelly thought it over and decided it was okay to smile back, quickly and briefly, and some sort of barrier went down.
“Do you play, Dr. Borresen?” Kelly asked.
“Helt. No, I don’t. I played the live game as a child. I just looked at the home page, though, and it looks like the virtual game could eat my lunch really fast.”
“Aye, that it might.” With that single phrase, the Highlands came through and Helt realized the man’s lilt had been there from the beginning. “There’s a beauty in it. It would seem an enjoyable thing, to take the great games of the past and play them again by recalculating impetus and trajectory for every move the ball makes. The concept is to end with the same score as the original, and it’s possible. But try it at a g and a half, or a quarter. There are sets of scores, one set based on your accuracy at calculating the force applied and the direction of the ball to keep the scores as they were in the original games. Then, for taking a player’s initial position and playing the game de novo at that same altered g. And that is when things get a wee bit more complicated. We’ve upset many a championship in our own version of alternate history.”
This time the grin was wider and not so quickly hidden.
“More complicated than the live games you’re playing,” Helt said.
“Not so. Not so, Mr. Borresen.” Halkett sighed. “The variable-g games, now, when a man enters a direction, a point of impact, and a force, the ball goes where it should. Out on that field, a man’s muscles don’t always do what they’re told.”
“You trust the numbers,” Helt said.
“That I do.”
A corner of Helt’s screen strobed. He gave it a quick glance. Yves Copani. Coming to your office.
“Pardon me,” Helt said. Helt. OK 30 min, he replied, and vanished the info.
“Sorry about that. Tell me, Mr. Halkett, the probability that we’ll get to turnover without a stray rock getting past the plasma shields.”
David II shifted in his chair. If his expression changed, Helt couldn’t see it.
“Any size rock?” Kelly Halkett asked.
“One big enough to kill the ship.”
“At a tenth light, with our hide made of four kilometers of nickel iron, something the size of a soccer ball would burn down to a size I can hold in my fist.”
It was an impressive fist, clenched hard enough to pale the man’s knuckles.
“Even so, such a rock would blow a hole about—I say about—two kilometers square. That it would.”
“The probability?” Helt asked.
“The probability is something I cannot”—canna, Helt heard—“calculate without more data. There’s a lot of faith in thos
e pulsar navigation systems we’ll be sending out ahead, but. We’ll do our best to aim for empty sky, that I trust. But we don’t know enough about interstellar dust, now, do we? We don’t know where it is for a certainty and how many dinguses of what size there might be in it. But we know it’s out there.”
Doughan raised his head and stared at the electrical engineer. “You’re a mathematician and a gambler. Why did you choose to gamble on Kybele?”
“The probability is that I’ll be long dead before a rock hits us hard enough to do damage. By my calculations, it’s a better risk than the risk of getting killed by a stray outlander in the Highlands.”
They kept coming, the outlanders, coming out of the dry south, armed, desperate, seeking a place to drink clean water, plant a crop, stay alive a little longer. Most were killed. Some got through the cordons and into the hills.
“You left your family behind,” Helt said.
This time those blue eyes looked directly at Helt and did not shift away. “With their blessings on me. I may never forgive myself for that.”
The man’s pain was obvious.
“I’m sorry. You’ve been very helpful,” Helt said. “Thank you.”
Doughan accepted the signal that the interview was over and got out of his chair. He and David II ushered Kelly Halkett out of the office. David II went with Kelly to find Birdy. Doughan came back in.
“What did you learn from that?” Doughan asked. “I can’t say I didn’t enjoy your exploration of this guy’s little pleasures, but what purpose does any of that serve?”
Doughan didn’t curse in public and he didn’t curse now, but the air was thick with unspoken expletives. He’d said once that he’d learned that if you don’t say the words in private, they won’t come bursting forth to haunt you in public. It was a skill learned by politicians, diplomats, and people who didn’t want to get in trouble with their superiors.
Even so, Doughan was a master at speaking italics and even all caps. Helt was still practicing the art. He didn’t always succeed.
“He’s likable, isn’t he?” Helt asked. He was pushing Doughan’s limits with the statement and he knew it.