Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  Bruce entered the locker room, facial muscles twitching. She knew he was putting it on but let him be. Truthfully, she was in no mood to talk either, about work or anything else. She had lost all interest in whatever M. Melson was hiding, and the strange booby traps he had planted there. The issue with the service requests still bothered her, but she wasn’t in the mood for puzzle solving anymore. The only thing she was in the mood for, being away from here, was all she was hoping the evening provided. She exchanged a perfunctory greeting with Bruce, swapped some half–hearted insults directed at their stuttering ass of a boss, then left the maintenance office and went home.

  Outside, she began walking in the direction of her apartment, wishing she could be there faster than her feet were capable of moving. As she rounded the corner onto 38th, she heard a voice calling, “Hey! Hey, uh, ma’am!”

  She turned to see a girl walking over to her, all teeth and knees. Stein recognized her as the receptionist from the licensing office she had visited the previous day. “Oh, it’s you, uh…” Stein began. “Miss…?”

  “I’m Carrie,” she said, coming to a stop in front of her.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Laura.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Stein replied. Silence. Stein braced herself as the conversation swerved violently towards the ditch.

  “So,” Carrie began after a few more awkward seconds. “The reason I came to find you is I heard about Ron. That’s awful.”

  Stein blinked. She’d only paid a passing glance at the news feeds that morning, and was mildly surprised to see that the news of Gabelman’s death had only just broken that day. She’d assumed everyone else had found out about it when she did. “Yeah. Awful,” she agreed. The conversation lurched and shuddered along.

  Carrie bravely continued on. “So, when I read about what happened this morning, it got me to thinking. You know how yesterday you were asking about that request? The one Ron was working on?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it’s weird. Greg didn’t make that request. My boss. At least I don’t think so. Because when Ron came to check it out, he asked for a different name.”

  Stein’s eyes widened fractionally. Oh, lord. No more puzzles, dammit. Not today. “What name?”

  “I think it was Arlo Samson?” Carrie said. “I don’t know how it’s spelled.”

  Stein recognized the name. Arlo Samson was the original caller for the service request. She remembered it from the Big Board when she’d dispatched Ron to deal with it. That was why she had done a double take when she saw Greg Watson’s name appear on the service request yesterday; it had been changed.

  “I had no idea who that was,” Carrie continued. “I’m pretty new. But I asked one of the other girls there, and they said he had been promoted six months ago and is working in the Bridge now.”

  “And you told that to Ron?”

  “Yeah. When he left, he said he’d go ask around the Bridge.” She blushed. “He looked like a nice guy, you know?”

  The corner of Stein’s mouth twitched up. The girl thought Ron was cute. Wow. Way to go Ron.

  “So, I thought if you were his friend maybe you should know what I saw him doing that day. Maybe it’d help you somehow.”

  “Did you tell security about this?”

  “I didn’t think to. Do you think I should?”

  “Maybe,” Stein drummed her fingers on her pant leg. She was feeling considerably more awake now. “Wait. Did anyone from security talk to you at all yesterday? Like come by and interview you or anyone at your office?”

  Carrie shook her head. “Nope. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

  Stein frowned. “Not necessarily,” she said, lying.

  “Do you think I should go talk to them now?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m sure they’ll come talk to you when they’re ready,” Stein said. The important part of the conversation had ended at that point, with Stein not really paying attention as they exchanged banalities for another few seconds before making their goodbyes.

  She walked away, her mind racing. That was a lot of mistakes to crop up all of a sudden in the service request system. Was someone trying to conceal what happened on Ron Gabelman’s last day? And why wasn’t security investigating his murder? Retracing a victim’s steps before they were murdered seemed like pretty basic police work to her.

  She looked up to realize she had been wandering in the wrong direction and stopped to reorient herself. She was no longer dealing with a puzzle, a broken widget to diagnose and repair. Definitely much bigger than that. She was reluctant to believe in conspiracies, having never observed anything that couldn’t be explained by small–scale human selfishness and stupidity. She looked back in the direction she had come. There was a person who had no problem believing in crazy far–reaching conspiracies. She picked up her terminal to send a message to Bruce, then hesitated, looking at the terminal with mistrust. Now that was definitely being paranoid.

  She tucked the terminal back in her webbing, setting off for home again. Maybe a little paranoia would be healthy for the time being. Besides, it felt more appropriate to conduct this sort of conversation in the dead of night.

  §

  There was a reason they had sent Stein and not him this way on their first time through, Bruce realized as he came crashing through the ceiling of Maurice Melson’s mystery studio. As the dust settled, he rolled over on his back and took an inventory of his various parts and organs, eventually deciding that they were all in place and in working order. Also noteworthy, his sudden and wildly unorthodox entrance into the room hadn’t triggered any booby traps. He sat up. He had scanned the room before opening the damper, firing every type of useful electromagnetic radiation he could from the safety of the ducting, looking for anything dangerous. Finding nothing, he created his own danger via his rapid room penetration technique and the sudden stop at the end it necessitated.

  He hadn’t told Stein he was coming back here — it was apparent his colleague had lost most of her interest in these sorts of hijinks in the wake of Gabelman’s death. She had her responsibilities. She never said it, but she liked being the boss. And he was proud of her. It was a tough job, and she did it well.

  It wasn’t for him though; it required a certain amount of effort that he didn’t like to apply in public settings. Effort attracted attention. He had once snapped a kid’s arm in half during a wrestling match, thanks to effort. That was awkward, but less so than when he did it again, three months later, to the same kid. Very embarrassing. The kid’s dad was furious; he had come running out onto the floor, yelling at the coach, yelling at the referee, yelling at Bruce. Raising his fists. Everyone agreed that when Bruce broke the dad’s arm, it was justifiably self–defense, but that it was probably a good idea to quit wrestling for a while. He quit a lot of other things not long after.

  So, he let Stein do the trying, while he assisted with the much safer chore of making clever observations from the sidelines. He saved his real effort for when everyone else went to bed. Stein tagged along with that sometimes, but she had always been a bit of a fair–weather burglar. She was in it for the fun.

  Although perhaps not containing a lot of fun, Bruce was still convinced there was something interesting going on in this particular room. He had been considering what he knew about Maurice Melson over the last couple of days and decided that it was an alias used by someone in the navy. Someone fairly senior, possibly within the IT group, capable of creating false records in the ship’s database. And this person owned this room to keep something hidden in it — something he couldn’t keep in a place linked to his real identity. Bruce concluded that it was something embarrassing, probably illegal, and if so, very valuable, if only as blackmail material. And assuming he hadn’t crushed it when he had entered the room, Bruce desperately wanted to find out what it was.

  Moving gingerly now, Bruce stood up and slowly looked around the room. It was bigger than he had imagined it, or at least b
igger than Stein had described it. There were shelving units along three of the four walls, and a doorway that led to the closet that Stein must have used to access the service tunnels. He frowned. Which shelving unit did Stein think she had jostled to set off the booby trap? Where was the booby trap for that matter? Above the ceiling space seemed likely. Retrieving a chair from the far end of the room, Bruce positioned it under the hole he had just made and peered up above the false ceiling, using his terminal as a light. Nothing interesting up there.

  What would a blinder booby trap be used for anyways? It would only be useful for momentarily stunning someone, or maybe scaring them away. But he didn’t see what use it would have in an unguarded room against a dedicated thief. If Stein had been so inclined, she could have set it off, blinded herself, waited for her vision to recover, and then kept stealing whatever she wanted. Unless the room was monitored, there would have been no way to prevent her from doing just that, or, for that matter, him doing that right now. Of course, if the room was being monitored, he was already caught. But Stein would have been caught, as well. “So, probably not monitored,” Bruce said aloud, daring the room to prove him wrong.

  He began his search, unwrapping the cases and dust covers off of the various items on the shelves. Nothing that remarkable — he didn’t even bother with his value scanner. Just old art supplies and several pieces of fairly mediocre, or fairly fantastic, art — he freely admitted he didn’t have an eye for the stuff. What he did have an eye for was blinding booby traps, and he noted a complete lack of them. Having checked everything on or under the shelves and around the room, he began systematically shaking and rattling every piece of furniture. Nothing. Not even any signs of a booby trap mechanism — no lines or springs or sensors or pits in the ground with foliage over them.

  “What the fucking fuck?” he asked the room, spinning around. Frustrated, he began pacing back and forth in a grid, inspecting the grayish ceiling tiles, looking for anything out of order. He had decided that whatever Stein had seen was much smaller than the blinders he was familiar with. Maybe something embedded in the support grid of the suspended ceiling itself. Something small like a button, or a crevice, or…that enormous meter long gash.

  Running almost atop a member of the support grid, and mostly camouflaged by it, lay a thin black gash in the ceiling. Standing on his toes, Bruce could see that both the ceiling tiles and support grid were completely cut through. He retrieved the chair, moved it over to the spot with the gash, and stepped up, cautiously moving the slashed ceiling tile out of the way. Above him, he could see the rough rock surface of the ship’s frame, with a matching black gash.

  Bruce scratched his ear. This mystery had become a completely different one, and one which had considerably less likelihood of producing valuable loot. Instead of loot, he had a mysterious gash in the ceiling — and a fresh one. Something had cut through here from the floor above. But, what? There was nothing on board the ship that he knew of that could cut through that much rock in one sweep. Back when the ship was constructed, the crews hollowing out the asteroid had used fusion torches to cut chunks out of the ship — those would clearly do the job, but none had been left on board the Argos when it pushed off. Indeed, a tool which could casually punch a hole through the hull of a spaceship was a real fucking liability for the people who had to live on that spaceship. Which meant someone would had to have built it.

  “What the fucking fuck?” Bruce asked again. The room continued to offer no answers.

  §

  Stein knocked on the door as quietly as she could.

  “What?” a voice yelled, muffled by the closed door. She knocked again, this time louder. The door slid open, revealing Bruce, naked. “Who the hell knocks?” he asked.

  Stein blinked, and directed her gaze upwards at Bruce’s less objectionable upper half. “Just let me in,” she said, walking past the man before he could answer.

  Bruce allowed the door to close, then turned to look at her, and the bulky brown coat she was wearing. “Why are you dressed like a bag of meat?”

  Stein ignored him and took off the formless jacket she had slipped on earlier, hoping to disguise herself from any watching sensors. She considered asking Bruce to wear it himself, but she knew from long experience that if she called attention to his nakedness, he would just do something to make her more uncomfortable. Tumbling probably. Instead, she asked, “Do you know who Arlo Samson is?”

  Bruce placed his index fingers on his temples and rubbed them around. “Can’t say as I do.”

  “Wanna do me a favor?”

  “Without hearing what it is first? Absolutely.”

  Stein smiled. Forcing her eyes to look at his face, she told Bruce everything she had learned about the altered service requests, the strange timestamps, and finally, the critical meeting with Carrie the receptionist. “I’m getting the distinct impression that someone is trying to keep people, or at least me and my team, out of the aft of the ship.”

  “The timestamps on the service requests…” Bruce began.

  “For maintenance in the aft of the ship,” Stein finished his sentence. “The timestamps have been altered so that they won’t come up during the day shift. They get delayed until the swing or skeleton shift, at which point those crews handle them.”

  “Why would anyone want to keep us out of the aft, but let those maniacs back there?” Bruce asked.

  “No idea. But I think that it’s been happening for at least the last month. Then yesterday, the same thing started happening for service requests in the annex.”

  “And you think that’s why Gabelman got murdered? Because some bureaucrat observed him doing his job? I know those lazy bastards don’t like being made to look bad, but that sounds a bit farfetched.”

  Stein shook her head. “No, listen. He got assigned to a pair of service requests in the Annex. When he got there, he found out one of them was called in by someone called Arlo Samson. Arlo Samson used to work in the Annex until he changed offices a few months ago. The service request system had filled in his old address automatically, and he never noticed when he submitted it.”

  “So what?”

  “So, Ron attends the call and figures out the address was incorrect. He finds Arlo Samson has moved to the Bridge somewhere.”

  “In the middle of the aft.” Bruce turned away from Stein and began pacing back and forth, making a show of thinking. “Okay, let me get this straight. You think that if the system had got his address correct, the timestamp would have been manipulated to steer the request away from us?”

  “That’s right.”

  Bruce sat down. “And you think security is in on this?”

  “Do you have to sit like that?” Stein said, looking at the ceiling. A quick glance showed the man had crossed his legs at the knee, one leg swinging jauntily. Looking back up, she continued, “Yeah, I do think security is up to something. They don’t appear to be investigating Ron’s death too thoroughly.”

  Bruce crossed and uncrossed his legs as he thought. Eventually, he leaned back and said, “Okay. Let’s think this through a bit. Say that there is someone on board this ship that wants to keep people from snooping around the aft. This person — or persons I guess — would have to be a fairly senior security or government or IT guy. So, question number one is, why would they do this?”

  Stein held up a hand in front of her, angled to block specific parts of Bruce. “No idea. The engines and fuel pods are the most sensitive things in that part of the ship, but we wouldn’t go near those anyways. Most of the aft is City Hall, government offices, and crappy apartments. Can you think of anything?”

  “Oh, holy shit, yes.” Bruce said. “M. Melson’s studio? With the mystery blinder? Guess who was there again tonight?”

  “You, pantsless.”

  “Partial credit,” Bruce confirmed. “And you didn’t see a blinder. You saw a fusion torch.” Bruce explained the scar in the ceiling that he saw.

  That explained at least part of the
mystery, the part that didn’t have a fusion torch tell her about Vlad. “Of course,” she said. “I am so stupid. That was in the aft too. How did I forget that?”

  Bruce nodded. “On 6th.”

  Stein drummed her fingers on the desk. “Okay. So, someone — hell, let’s not kid ourselves, this must be a lot of people — is doing something weird in the south of the ship. Cutting through rock. Why?”

  Bruce shrugged. “Because fuck that rock, that’s why.”

  Stein laughed, then stared at the floor, slowly shaking her head. “Yeah. I can’t think of anything either.”

  “Which I guess brings us to our next question: so what?” Bruce said. “I mean, do we even do anything about this? Aside from the insatiable sense of vengeance you must feel for what happened to a valued team member, why exactly do we care about this? Because it kind of looks like something people are willing to kill for. I think that makes this interesting as hell, but I’ve got well–known problems. So, using you as a better barometer of sense, why do you care?”

  Stein frowned. It wasn’t because of some deep–felt connection to Gabelman — she was already struggling to remember what the kid looked like. But someone was doing something on her ship and wasn’t telling her about it. She couldn’t believe she felt tired earlier this day. Until this was solved, it was going to drive her up the wall. She hated secrets, despised locked doors.

  Stein eventually reached a conclusion. “Because I don’t like being jerked around, and I can feel my leash getting tighter and tighter. That’s why I want to do something.”

  Bruce seemed to weigh that statement carefully. “Like a couple of private detectives?”

  “Yes. Don’t you think that’d be fun? Solving murders? Running around with magnifying glasses and solving crimes, just like we always talked about?”