Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  Gil sat in his shop, waiting for the molds of several hair-fine extrusions to finish producing the tiny model parts. Something was definitely wrong with this picture.

  If, as he had good reason to believe, Haskins was murdered, then either the door scanners had missed somebody or the truth scanners had erred. Occam’s razor said that it was the latter: the door cams were difficult to rascal, they were hardwired and fed into a central recorder, whereas the truth scanners required human operators. Assume the killer was one of the thirty-four. Then he or she had lied about it and the shallow scan had missed it—or been altered.

  Gil plugged into the library and downloaded several files on the history of electroencephaloprojic readers. It took nearly two hours for him to finish reading, and it wasn’t until the final section that he found what he was looking for. He smiled.

  Gil put in a com to Millet.

  “Did you know that a shallow scan can be beaten?”

  Millet said, “I’ve heard that it is possible. Some hypnotic drugs supposedly’ll fuzz the test. But we do drug scans on everybody to check for that.”

  “There’s another way,” Gil said. “By telling the exact truth.”

  “Huh?”

  “Suppose you ask me if my name is M. Gil Sivart. Is there any way I can truthfully answer that no?”

  Millet rolled that one around. “I don’t see how, that’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “Not precisely. I have a middle name, too, it’s Meyer. Technically speaking my name is Gil Meyer Sivart, so I could say no to your question and be telling the truth.”

  Millet considered this. “Yeah, I can see that. But you’d have to be real clever to get through a whole session without slipping up,” he said. “And it wouldn’t fool a deep scan.”

  Gil went on. “But if you had an idea of what they were going to ask you and you had time to set up your replies, the machine would never blip because you would be telling the literal truth, right?”

  “You’re reaching.”

  “Oh? Assume you’re the killer. The tech asks, ‘Do you know how M. Haskins died?’ And you take his question to the limits of knowledge—you don’t know the precise cause of death, yes, he was crushed by a robot, but what exactly killed him? Unless you had access to the autopsy report, you couldn’t say for certain, could you?”

  “Come on. What if I asked you point-blank, did you kill Haskins?”

  “Nobody asked that question. I have the list right here. And even if they had, the killer could have safely answered no and have been telling the truth. He didn’t kill Haskins. The robot killed him. Yes, he caused the robot to do it, but he could have touched a control and turned away, say, not looking the actual event, and would have been able to deny that he had seen Haskins die.”

  “This is real iffy stuff here, Sivart.”

  “I know. But it opens up an otherwise dead end.”

  “You won’t get a legal order for deep scans on thirty-four people, not unless we are talking about espionage, station security. You’d have to bring the military in on it. Even so, they’ll hear screams way out in the spiral.”

  “I think we might be talking about just that,” Gil said. “But maybe I can narrow it down. I’ll get back to you.”

  Gil went to see Linju at her cube. Partially this was to ask her some questions, partially it was to see where she lived. She was on Basic Green, a quarter of the way from the hub, in a neighborhood that was much like Gil’s own. With her new credit line she could easily move to one of the luxury places, on Dark Yellow, or even down in the Violet, where a lot of the commercial rich folk lived. Double- or even triple-sized places with all the perks that money brought. A lot of his sculptures occupied display tables down in Violet, given that he didn’t give them away. Truth was, Gil could probably afford one of those places if he wanted, the going price of one of his models being as high as it was. He didn’t need the room, though, and his ego wasn’t so fat it needed an expensive address to drop into polite conversation. That was too easy, to get snared in the mine-cost-more-than-yours trap.

  Linju met him at the door. She wore a long robe of pale green silk that was belted at the waist. The robe covered her, save for a flash of leg when she sat, but it was thin enough to cling in interesting curves and hollows. After appreciating those interesting places, he remembered to look around. The cube was clean, furnished in basic extruded furniture, a lot of cushions on the floor. A couple of paintings were hung, acrylics, one of two nude people embracing, the other of a group of children playing in a water fountain. There was a small statue of a dancer in a ballet pose on a table near the door, bronze or resin cast to look like bronze. There was a rack with infoballs slotted, books, and holovids. Here was a place where you could feel comfortable, and he did.

  “Chair or a cushion on the floor,” she said.

  He chose the floor. So did she.

  “What have you found out?”

  “Not as much as I need for legal reasoning,” he said. “I want to know more about Hask’s work. What exactly did he do?”

  She thought about it for a few seconds. “You know that the military subcontracts out a lot of things. Hask worked for Sensor Systems. They do a lot of different projects, but their biggest contract was to install and maintain the external hull pickups. Doppler, radar, light-spectrum visuals, magnetics, like that. It’s an ongoing process. FTL screws some of them up, microdust and stray hydrogen atoms knock them out of tune or even off-line.”

  “Go on.”

  “Hask checked on the installations, making sure they were working and encoded properly. He had about a dozen people on the team; he was responsible for making sure what they did came up to milstan specs.”

  “I would have thought the military did that themselves.”

  “They’re supposed to, technically, but they’re stretched thin. The officer in charge might suit up and go EVA for form’s sake, but basically he signs off on the subcontractor’s inspection—if he knows him. Hask spent most of the trip out doing this, plus he was ex-military himself, so the military guys knew his work was clean. Once a year there’s a major systems check and if everything passes they figure they can trust you. Hask’s sections always passed. He had the fewest glitches on the station last test. He was proud of that. Hask would laugh and screw around with the best of them, but when it came to his work, he was tight, he didn’t goof off.”

  Gil considered that.

  “Any help?”

  “Yes. We know he was murdered and we know how. I think maybe I’ve got part of a reason why, and that gives me some possibilities as to who.

  “One more question. Do you know when the last major system check was?”

  “Couple months ago. No problems.”

  “So there wouldn’t be another such test for maybe ten months?”

  “That’s right.”

  “In which time the station would be likely to see more action against the Ichtons.”

  She shrugged. “Military hasn’t said for sure and of course they wouldn’t, but that’s the scat.”

  He nodded. “I’ll call you soon. I think we’re getting close.”

  At the door, she touched his shoulder. “Gil?”

  “Yes?”

  “It means a lot to me to put this to rest.”

  “I know.”

  “I appreciate all you’ve done, even if you don’t figure it out.”

  The weight of her fingers through his tunic was small but much of his attention was gathered on the spot; suddenly it had grown warm almost to the point of heat. There were a lot of things he could have said, but he only managed a somewhat flustered thanks.

  As he walked away from her cube, Gil grinned wryly at himself. Careful there, Sivart, your professional judgment is about to fall off a high-gee mountain. And it would be all too easy to take advantage of her grief. Not something a decent man should do.

  Hell of a thing, ethics. Tended to get in your way all the time. Damn.

  Back in his own cube
, Gil listened to the recordings he had made with his sub-rosa device. Rawlins, the man who’d found the body; Millet the cool; the medic; Linju. There was a piece missing, one crucial part. He felt it tapping at the perimeter of his mind, a small thought he could not quite catch. It was a key, if he could only slip a net over it and grab it, it would somehow open the hidden door.

  He went through the flatscreen’s material for the fifth time. Nope, it wasn’t there, whatever it was he wanted.

  He accessed the library computer and began searching and researching material he had read before. Along the edge of the computer’s image, the on-line charges blinked and grew. This was going to cost him a nice piece of change, all this blind skipping hither and yon. He almost had it, he was sure of it, he had a reason, though it was iffy, it didn’t quite make enough sense to nail down and call it that, but it was almost right, he knew it. Damn!

  He was watching the on-line charges get bigger when it suddenly came to him. Of course! There it was, right in front of him, crap, how could he have missed it?

  Gil grinned. Had it been a micrometeor it would have taken his head off because he’d been too stupid to duck.

  He ran through his recordings and nodded to himself. With a specific idea in mind, the library obediently gave him the correlations he needed. There it was, plain as white bread.

  Time to go and talk to the murderer.

  Rawlins’s skull tattoo was beaded with sweat as he stacked honeycombed plastic crates of sensor components on a lift. He was alone in the storage room when Gil arrived.

  Rawlins looked up. “Sivart? What do you want?”

  “A confession would be nice,” Gil said.

  “Confession? What are you talking about?”

  “Killing Haskins. Trying to kill me. Espionage. Anything else you’d like to unburden yourself of.”

  “What, are you crazy?”

  “I don’t think so. It took me a while to put it together, but anybody who looks carefully can see it.”

  Rawlins stepped away from the stack of crates and stood facing Gil from five meters away. His hands were empty. “See what?”

  “Why you did it. It went past me at first, the motive, because I was too close in, I couldn’t see the larger picture.”

  “What is this larger picture?”

  “Oh, you know that. I’d guess you are in for a full wipe at the very least. Me, I’d shove you out a lock if capital punishment were still legal.”

  “You are crazy,” Rawlins said. He put one hand behind his back.

  “Nope. And I have enough to get a judge to go for a deep scan to prove it.”

  Sweat ran down Rawlins’s face. He blinked it away, appeared to consider things, then pulled something from under his back coverall flap and pointed it at Gil.

  “Well, well,” Gil said, “what have we here?”

  “It’s a heartstopper,” Rawlins said. “Induces cardiac fibrillation out to about twenty meters, in the hands of an expert. I’m an expert.”

  “So that’s how you managed to get Haskins set up in front of the drone. I expected it was something like that.”

  “No, you didn’t, or you wouldn’t be here. Who have you told?”

  “Nobody, yet. I wanted to get your confession recorded first.” He pointed at his breast pocket.

  Rawlins laughed, a nasty sound. “You don’t think I’ll get to play with that recorder after you, if I want? You are crazy.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Gil said. “I scored very well on my last psych test.”

  “All right. Let’s cut the scat. How much?”

  “How much are you offering?”

  “Don’t play cute, pal. If you aren’t greedy, you can retire in comfort. Half a mil.”

  “What I’d really like is to see you swing from a yardarm,” Gil said. “That’s an old nautical term. They’d tie a rope around your neck and hang you by it. Death by choking, or, if you were lucky, a broken neck.”

  “You’re not in any position to be threatening anybody.” Rawlins waved the weapon.

  “Another accident will be hard to explain.”

  “There won’t be an accident. You’ll just disappear.”

  “I might have told somebody where I was going and why,” Gil said.

  Another laugh. “No, I don’t think so. I think you’re one of those guys who thinks he can handle anything. All that kung fu stuff you play with, the kind of work you do for the corporations to keep the cools out of it. Yeah, I checked up on you, pal. You’re gonna make the carp in the recycle ponds real happy when they find you chopped up in their food. This is a discom, sucker.”

  Rawlins aimed the heartstopper and pressed the firing stud. There was a high-pitched burble from the device.

  Rawlins’s grin faded as Gil’s grew.

  “Can’t trust technology, can you?” Gil said. He pulled the crow strip on his tunic open and revealed a thin and glittery gold mesh vest concealed under the clothing.

  Rawlins threw the heartstopper and tried to rush past, but Gil ducked, then slid over and snapped a fast counter sidekick up. The fleeing man more or less impaled himself on Gil’s heel, whacked himself smack on the solar plexus, and stopped cold, unable to breathe.

  Gil stepped in and swung a backhanded hammerfist to Rawlins’s temple. It was a solid strike, he felt it all the way into the middle of his back, and it stretched Rawlins out full length, unconscious before he hit the floor. It was unnecessary, the hammerfist, but it made Gil feel a lot better. His hand would be sore, but it was worth it. He touched his personal com.

  “Officer Millet? I have a present for you.”

  Once again in Linju’s cube, Gil sat sipping at tea.

  “Very good,” he said, nodding at the cup.

  “Yes, sure, it’s wonderful. Come on, Gil.”

  He smiled. “Okay. Once we were pretty sure that Hask was murdered, the first question that has to come up is why? Since nobody seemed to have any personal grievances against him worth homicide, then that left his work. The killing was carefully planned and executed, so that argued against a crime of passion.”

  Linju nodded.

  “What he did was inspect sensors, equipment essential to the battle worthiness of the station. So I figured that it was either something he had discovered or was about to discover that somebody didn’t want found out. That narrowed it down to the people who worked for him.”

  “But they all had passed a scan,” she said.

  “Right. So I dug around and found a way that you can rascal a shallow scan. That opened it back up again. Hask had a dozen people working for him, but some of them worked pairs, some of them were off-duty, and some of them were EVA when he was killed. That left me with two possibles, one of whom was Rawlins.

  “I went over the scans; and I went over the tape I made of my first conversation with Rawlins. When I listened to it enough times, I realized he had evaded some of my questions, but very skillfully. When I asked if he knew how Hask had come to be where he’d been found, he sidestepped it. I didn’t realize it at the time. Very sharp.”

  “So you suspected Rawlins all along?”

  “He got better as a prospect after I found the pusher on my circuit breaker. He was a tech, he knew how to work such stuff.”

  “Then why didn’t you turn him in?”

  “Before I could point the cools at him, I needed a reason. Why would Rawlins in particular want Hask dead? What did he want to hide that bad?

  “Rawlins was an installer. He put sensors onto the outer hull itself, the first line of defense against any incoming threat.” He paused, waiting to let that sink in.

  It only took a second. “He was sabotaging the sensors,” she said.

  It pleased him that it didn’t get past her. “Yes. And according to what Millet found out from the military, they wouldn’t have found out about it until the next full-scale test of the system. Until then, they would work well enough, unless triggered by an esoteric combination of radio and radar pulse. Once activat
ed, there was a computer rigged to reroute the feed from fully functional gear so they would still seem to be working, but in fact would leave a rather large blind spot in the system.

  “The military is reluctant to say just how big this gap would have been, or if it would have constituted a real danger, but I suspect that the hole created would be enough for an attacker to slip an antimatter spike or maybe a ceepee beam through it. It’s classified information, where the hole was, but depending on where it was, it could cause major damage. Maybe even destroy the station entirely.”

  “Christo,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  “So Rawlins was a spy? An agent of the Ichtons?”

  “Well, yes and no. That was my problem. There’s no record of Rawlins leaving the station since he arrived, no indication of how he would have been contacted by them. There are ways, of course, but it’s not as easy as the trivid dreadfuls make it out to be.

  “My problem was that I was looking at the motive wrong. Little versus big. On the near end, we had Hask discovering the tampering, and that was a problem for Rawlins that had to be corrected. Probably he called Rawlins on it and Rawlins stalled him long enough to set up the murder. We’ll find out for sure when they do the deep scan. But there didn’t seem to be anything in Rawlins’s background to show him as a traitor in the employ of enemy aliens. It was when I was watching how much my library charges were going to cost me when I remembered one of the oldest rules in investigation, something I should have been looking at all along.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “ ‘Follow the money.’

  “You see, the Ichtons don’t try to communicate with men, at least they haven’t so far. They squat on a planet, kill everything that moves, and take over. While they might have a lot to gain by taking out the Hawking, they probably wouldn’t have any idea whatsoever of how to go about hiring a human agent.”