Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  Viv, wearing only a clinging T-shirt, walked farther into the apartment. The invitation wasn’t very subtle. But then I wasn’t there for subtle. The Institute had gotten her a great place—two rooms all to herself. Not bad for a university sentiologist on a grant. Shame it was down here among the gators.

  “You bet.”

  “Handsome as ever?” I asked.

  “Beautiful,” she said, clearing aside a scribe unit and some more junk so I could sit down. “He was in the caf for almost three hours today. Just sat there again, tapping his fingers.”

  Viv was an antiquarian who had turned out to have a talent for dealing with other races. She had silky blond hair, a most generous figure, just where it should be, and the biggest and deepest brown eyes I had ever gazed into. Said I was an antique of sorts, but never explained. With her legs, I never questioned what she saw in a low-paid, civilian security investigator. Every day Viv worked near the caf, talking with the gators, getting to know the way they thought. The Institute was paying her good money for the culture profile and she was earning it. I’d seen the pile of disks cluttering up her apartment. The gators were the most important of all the races that were supporting the Fleet against the Ichtons. Physically very different, but surprisingly like humans in their attitudes.

  Last week Viv told me she had spotted him. She’d described her mystery man as between twenty and thirty, with the body of an unarmed-combat instructor and white-blond hair. His only flaw seemed to be that he wore glasses, but Viv said it made him look sensitive and intellectual. And he just sat there for hours, motionless, staring at some spot on the bulkhead. She’d guessed that he was another scientist working with any of the dozen alien races that had settled into the lower levels of the Hawking and asked me to look out for him, let me know more about what he did and where he went. I went to the caf, a dingy place at the upper end of the color that dealt with several races, but he had gone. Then we had that mess involving the Ichton attempt to bribe their way aboard the Hawking on an Indie so they could breed larvae and I’d had no time.

  The next day, in bed, she’d informed me that at precisely the same time, he was there again. And the next.

  “The guy’s in a rut,” I said. I had been on Violet Eight for less than a minute and was already sweating freely. She opened up the small galley freezer, pulled out an icy one, slid it through her auburn bob and down her neck for the cool, and threw it to me.

  “I’m telling you, he isn’t normal,” she said. “There’s something funny about the way he’s been acting.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said, opening it. “Probably got the hots for one of the caf workers. Or maybe he likes the smell of gators.”

  “Squams!” she said angrily.

  “Sorry.” The Squams were an allied race. They looked like a large, multicolored walrus that had been shoved into an alligator coat and weren’t very comfortable with the result. They walked on all fours, thick hands at the bottom of each foot. For fine work they used a beard comprised of a dozen long, silky fingers just under a wide, smooth-toothed mouth. On the upper decks most people had never seen a real Earth gator, so the nickname had stuck.

  Viv looked at me like I’d just given my kid sister a haircut with a steak knife, then flopped down on the bed beside me. “Today I watched him while I pretended to type. He sat there for nearly four hours without moving anything but his fingertips.”

  “Like this?”

  She knocked my hand away. “I’m serious!”

  “All right,” I said. “Forget the caf workers. I think he’s got the hots for you.”

  “Yeah. Right,” she said.

  “Why not? You said you always went for lean men.”

  She traced the old scar that ran across my left pectoral with her fingertips. “Almost always.”

  We fooled around for a while after that. Afterward, she said, “That woman was there again today, too. I’ve seen her at the Handi-Mart.”

  “Pretty?” I arched an eyebrow.

  “Very. Distinguished-looking.”

  “Hmm. Sounds like my type.” I watched her reaction and took another pull of beer from the bottle, now warm.

  She shot me an amused look.

  “Well, that’s it,” I said. “Mr. Handsome sits across from Ms. Beautiful.”

  “Or vice versa,” she said. “Who cares? Someone’s leering at somebody.”

  “That’s all you ever think about.” But she smiled.

  “I’m a cop in a small town with some big-town tastes,” I said, trying to forget the big-city trouble that had forced me to volunteer for the Hawking. “Besides, since I haven’t seen your mystery man yet, I don’t have anything but your say-so to go on.”

  “Can I help it if he shows up while you’re working?”

  “Go on, laugh if you want,” she said. “Just the same, there’s something about him. He scares me now.” She looked at me and I believed her. “He doesn’t even move his eyes behind those glasses.”

  “You sit close enough to see whether his eyes move?”

  Viv knew I’d caught her out. “All right. I went over to have a closer look. I wanted to see if you were right about . . . perspectives. I thought the woman was alone at first, but one of the Squams I talked with told me she was there to watch two hatchlings!”

  It was kind of unusual for a human to nanny aliens, but the Hawking was a human station. The richer aliens had figured out that a human could do a better job of keeping their offspring out of trouble on it. Most also figured an armed battlestation was a lot safer place to raise them than their own worlds with the Ichtons busily invading one about every two months.

  “She stays all afternoon?”

  “No,” Viv said. “She arrives around 1200, an hour or so before he shows up. They leave almost at the same time, though—around 1730. She spends all her time talking to the Squamlings—teaches them English, I suppose—while she knits.”

  “Knits?”

  “Scarves, I think.”

  I let that pass. “The parents of those kids must be pretty rich if they can afford a nanny,” I said. “Have any of your gat . . . Squam friends told you who they are?”

  “I haven’t asked.”

  She was quiet for a minute. “I wonder if he’s there to spy on someone.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s never in the caf at any other time. I asked one of the waitresses to keep an eye out for him. He always paces back and forth just outside the door before he goes in, like he’s waiting for a signal.”

  “That’s new.”

  “No. Jannie—that’s the waitress—says he’s done that since he first started coming in.”

  “What’s the beautiful nanny doing while he’s walking around?”

  “I don’t know. She lives near the caf on Violet Seven. When I’ve seen her at the Handi-Mart she’s always buying a lot of stuff and usually she has the Squam kids with her.”

  I looked at her. “Maybe I should bring down an application form.”

  “For what?”

  “Security. You could replace Kenvich—or Omera.”

  “Ha-ha. You’ll see.”

  Around 2000 I made dinner. Afterward, we decided to leave the dishes and walk over to the caf for a drink. Viv rooted around in the junk for her sweatpants. She’d gotten about as much as she was going to get out of these gators and had already found a new place on another deck. Half her things were already packed. The other half were strewn all over the floor.

  As for me, I had no choice but to put my shirt back on despite the heat. Walking around with your blaster showing is considered unprofessional in undercover cop circles.

  The walk to the caf was quiet. Most of the residents in Violet kept to their own special environments. After eight hours walking through the rec areas, keeping the Indies from getting too rough, it was nice to be able to relax with your girlfriend. Even if you had to do it in a sauna.

  We walked toward the lifts, then turned right. We came
into a large open area, a kind of city square the amphibious aliens had put together themselves. Some of the condos connected up to Violet Seven, giving the place a split-level effect.

  The most expensive places faced onto the long, shallow tanks in the center of the square. Squams, old and young, lay on their backs in the pools. They were happiest when they had plenty of humidity to keep everything going smoothly. The steam vents they had rigged up from the heat-dissipation system were okay, but there was nothing a Squam liked better than a nice soak in that green, reclaimed water.

  Viv made some noises at a few of the Squams sitting on the curbing around the pools. I just smiled. We were always getting lectures by the Fleet sentiologists on how to deal effectively with all the Alliance races represented on the Hawking. The warm-fuzzies (as we usually referred to all the vaguely mammalian races) you could pretty much treat like everyone else. It was the hard-skinned, cold-blooded ones that I couldn’t get used to. They were just so completely different.

  As we made for the caf, a Squam male (Viv had taught me how to tell them apart) stopped her. They hissed at each other while I looked around. He was impressive. They all were. He measured a good two and a half meters from claws to crest. His horny skin was a dull gray-brown and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. He looked like a giant swimming machine—all muscle and shoulder—wrapped in a boxy alligator bag.

  But the thing that stayed with you was the eyes. Nothing lived in those faces except for them. Black. Deep-set. Shining. Unknowable. Never moving, never dilating. Once in a while, the greeny-white membranes would sort of roll up in something like a blink, but that was all you ever saw.

  I took a last drag and threw the soggy cigarette into a can and looked into the crowded caf.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Viv hissed something else to the Squam and turned around. “What?”

  “Is that him?”

  Her gaze followed mine through the big plastic-walled front with the frosted edges and the glitzy chromium fittings. Beyond the chairs and a couple dozen heads, I had seen a white-blond human.

  “That’s him!” she said.

  It felt like I was meeting an in-law for the first time.

  “What’s he doing here so late?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” She said it like it was indecent for him to be there.

  “Let’s go.” She took my arm and we went into the caf.

  It was dark inside and there was a steady flow of clientele. There were a couple of admin types getting stupid on the funny Squam beer. Some girls from the rec decks were helping them. The staff were mostly human, with one or two Khalians thrown in. Except for Romeo, the rest were pure gator.

  There was an empty table next to his and we took it. While I sat with my back to him, Viv scoped him out from over my shoulder.

  “Hey, Viv,” a woman in a tight synthetic T-shirt asked. “The usual?”

  “Hi, Jannie,” Viv said. “Yeah.”

  “Soda water it is.” The waitress looked at me.

  “Whiskey,” I said. It wasn’t the real stuff, but it worked.

  “Single malt or blended?”

  “In a glass’ll be fine.”

  She didn’t smile.

  “He been here long?” Viv whispered, nodding at the man.

  “Since you left,” Jannie said before walking away.

  “Well?” I said quietly. “You going to ask him to the prom?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He looks like he’s asleep.”

  His eyes looked white in the reflection of the halogen light strips in his glasses.

  “You said he doesn’t move much.”

  She looked at him. “His fingers aren’t even moving.”

  Jan reappeared with the drinks a few minutes later and Viv paid. We talked for a while about the profile she was working up and what she was planning to do after she got back from the Core.

  “You want to teach?” I asked her. That’s what most sentiologists I’d met wanted to do.

  “I doubt it. I’ve got other interests.”

  “Yeah?”

  She leaned forward. “You don’t think I took this job just for the fun of talking with other races, do you?”

  “I was under the impression that this was the kind of fieldwork some sentiologists wait a lifetime for,” I said.

  “I’m more interested in, shall we say, planetary resources.”

  I smiled. “You want to be an Indie instead of a sentiologist.”

  She laughed. “Indie? They’re poor. I want it big time—merchant or nothing! How many people do you think have the cultural and linguistic background to trade with the Squams? Ten? Twenty? Three of us.”

  “Anybody can talk to them with a translator,” I said. I had never seen her so animated.

  “Anybody with a tie-in to a Fleet battlestation mainframe, you mean. Otherwise not enough to really do a deal.”

  I saw her point. “So you’re going to get a job with the merchants cutting deals with the Squams.” The Squams were one of the few expansive races we had found in the galactic center, they occupied almost seven worlds and were looking for more when the Ichtons arrived.

  “That’s it.”

  “What about the Institute?”

  “They’ll get their culture profile.”

  “And so will some merchant.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “They’ve already paid for it.”

  Double pay. No wonder she could afford a bigger place.

  “He still there?” I asked a few minutes later.

  She looked over my shoulder. “You . . .” Her face went pale and she stood up. Her eyes were fixed on the man behind me.

  “What is it?” I said, turning as I followed her eyes. Under his chair a small pool of blackening blood congealed with some kind of transparent fluid. He was very dead. Viv screamed.

  Almost an hour later the forensics team had finished with the scene. After that, it took only a minute for the med team to bag him up and haul the body out of the caf. I was just finishing with Jannie when Kenvich walked in. His Fleet uniform was perfect, right down to the freshly polished Military Intelligence pips on the collar.

  “What’s the situation here, Detective?” he said.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

  He folded his arms together. “You know the drill, Bailan. Security is supposed to be informed on all felony calls. Informed immediately.”

  It had been like that ever since they’d declared martial law on all levels after Gerson and it stank like moisture-reclamation tanks under a whorehouse.

  “Handsome over there got in the way of a needler,” I said, pointing to the black body bag the medicos were carrying away.

  “Boys said you were first on the scene. Notice anything?”

  “I was less than a meter from him when the lady there”—I hooked my thumb at Viv—“spotted the blood. Prelim assessment puts the time of death around 1700, but we’ll know for sure soon.”

  Kenvich looked hard at Viv, then back to me.

  “How long were you here?”

  “About a half an hour before she spotted the blood.”

  “You sat next to a stiff for half an hour and you didn’t notice a damn thing?”

  Kenvich was a weenie. I’d known officers like him in the Marines and I hadn’t been impressed.

  “Right, Kenvich.”

  “Captain Kenvich.”

  “Asshole,” I said.

  “What was that?”

  “I said ‘Yes, sir,’ mon capitan.”

  He glared at me and looked at the plastic caf front. The frosted edging as well as the clear windows were unmarked. “Shot from outside while the door was open?”

  “That’d be my guess,” I said, “which means whoever offed him is one hell of a shot or had really good sights and a stable platform. Could’ve been someone passing by or from the condos across the square.”

  Kenvich grunted. “About the victim,” he said. “Confine your inve
stigation to the external elements of the case as much as possible.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Trying to steal a little thunder, Kenvich?”

  He moved in close. “Listen, mister. You do what I say, when I say it. In case you’d forgotten, you’re under martial law. It’s only out of courtesy to Chief Omera that we’re letting you civilians handle this at all. And as for your wiseass remarks, this comes straight from Internal Security HQ: leave the victim out of it as much as you can.”

  “Great. How about the murderer?”

  He gave me one last look and went over to talk with a couple of the uniforms who were questioning people.

  I walked over to Viv. “When you’re ready, I’ll take your deposition.”

  “Me?”

  “Absolutely. You’re the only person who can give us something useful to go on.”

  “What about his ID? His room?”

  I moved her into the corner. “He didn’t have any ID on him. Nothing in his pockets except for a card key to a storage container, location unknown, and a lot of credits. No distinguishing features. So far we have nothing on the guy.”

  Viv looked at me.

  “Don’t say it,” I said. “Either Fleet Intelligence is already in on this or they will be in about two hours. And I mean in. Security’s already dicking around. It’s only a matter of time before the big boys want to play, too. Let’s hope we can get this thing rolling before they put a lid on it. You ready?”

  “Sure.”

  I got a recorder from one of the uniforms and came back. “All right. Did you notice this man today?”

  She smiled. “Yes. When I arrived here this afternoon he was in his usual place.”

  “And the blond nanny?”

  “Yes. She was over there, as usual.”

  “And in the last eleven days you never once saw them speaking. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. From where they sat, they couldn’t have without shouting. They were about eight meters apart.”

  “And they’d sit there, motionless, all afternoon?”

  “Except for her knitting and talking to the young Squams.”

  “Always knitting? For nearly two weeks?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t notice what type of knitting it was, did you?”