Viewed from the runabout on approach, Maltraw's ship was a standard, three-for-a-credit cargo hauler. The owner had put lights and a flashy white exterior on it, but it was only a skin deep cosmetic treatment. That skin was pitted and holed, marked with the craters of interstellar dust, little more than another floating warehouse underneath.
Kama turned on auto-dock for their approach, hoping to avoid a repeat of their clumsy departure from the station.
Once they were secure, the airlock hissed open, and bright, pinkish light poured out around them. She hauled open a pair of doors, and led them through into a cargo bay, jam-packed with goods. The place sold everything she'd expected—clothes, books, games, chocolate, liquor, pornography.
A man approached. He carried himself with a swagger, a gold ring set with diamonds on his right hand, and a thick gold chain around his left wrist. One ear was bedecked with half-a-dozen ruby studs. Costume jewelry quality, like the skin-deep glitz of the ship.
"Name's Maltraw, Jay Maltraw. Welcome aboard. What can I do for you folks this evening?" He extended a hand.
"Captain Maltraw." McTavish took the hand, flinching under the grip. "Rafe McTavish."
Maltraw glanced at Kama and Greg, and then raked his gaze over McTavish's grimy, blood-encrusted clothes. He sniffed. "The little missus burn dinner?"
Kama didn't see the humor, but a hint of a smile played over McTavish's face. "I'd like to see Janice Fisher."
"Well and wouldn't I love to show her to you, but she's off shift now. Maybe you want to do some shopping and have a bit of refreshment while you wait?" A pair of crafty hazel eyes looked Kama up and down.
She wanted to spit in his face.
"We're in a bit of a hurry," McTavish said. "If you could please ask her to see me immediately, I'd make it worth your while."
"I see." Maltraw narrowed his eyes. One bejeweled finger tapped his lips. "I suppose I could ask her to start early, but her fee will of course be somewhat higher. And if it's a threesome you want, that'll be triple."
"Shiva take you," Kama muttered.
McTavish plastered that charming smile on his face and said, "A chat will do. Be a good fellow and call Ms. Fisher."
"A chat you say? That'll be one hundred credits."
Kama goggled. "A hundred credits to talk?"
"I'll need some other items as well. Let's say I authorize five thousand credits, and you can charge up against that," McTavish said. "Can you call Ms. Fisher now?"
Maltraw registered surprise, then scrambled for his order pad. "Yes, sir, Mr. McTavish. Happy to do business with you. If you'll just enter your account information there and a thumb print."
The merchant tapped a few times on his nanocom, and they all waited for Janice. When she arrived, she seemed to writhe instead of walk between the rows of goods. Fierce turquoise eyes gave McTavish a guarded look, while she tossed masses of blue hair with streaks of neon green and orange back from her shoulders. Her musky scent arrived before her. Greg's eyes widened, and his mouth popped open.
"What can I do for you, stranger?"
"Jay, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to speak with Ms. Fisher alone." McTavish waited for Maltraw to disappear into his inventory before continuing. "Dr. Fisher, Rafe McTavish. We've had a rather bad accident on the station. One of the miners has been severely burned and all the medical supplies on the station destroyed. The medic is overwhelmed. We need your expertise."
All the sexual posturing dropped away, and Janice crossed her arms. "I'm not a doctor. I'm sorry you've wasted your trip. Jay has some medical supplies, but that's the extent of what we can do for you."
"You were a doctor, researching tissue regeneration in situ before you ran afoul of the pharmaceutical companies. Given that I'm not a corpse, I believe you've retained your skills."
Janice scowled at him. "Doesn't matter who I used to be. I'm not risking prison for practicing medicine without a license, even out here in the cesspit of the solar system."
"I appreciate your situation, but a man's life is at stake. To compensate you, I've opened a generous tab with Jay, on which I'll expect to see billing for your 'standard services' for both the treatment you provided me and for Warner, the injured miner. His condition is grave; we need to hurry."
Fisher pursed absurdly pouty lips. "You don't take 'no' for an answer do you, Mr. McTavish?"
"I'll say," Kama whispered.
McTavish grinned. "Rafe. Call me Rafe."
Janice trotted off to gather her medical kit, and McTavish wandered the aisles pulling out clothing, a coffee maker, and a bag of gourmet coffee. Kama added half a dozen ration bars to his pile. McTavish raised an eyebrow.
"I'm a little short. You don't mind getting those, do you?" she asked.
Maltraw rang up the purchases. A moment later, Janice arrived with her silver trunk.
"Look, McTavish, you shouldn't go back," Kama said, hoping he might be reasonable this time. "It's too dangerous."
"Just as dangerous for you," he replied. "When Leon's security forces board in the morning, things could go sideways in a hurry. And there's a killer loose on the station. It's not safe there. Wait with Greg on the EcoMech ship."
She grabbed his arm and faced him, toe to toe.
"No one's trying to kill me," she said, angered by the implication that she couldn't take care of herself and determined to change his mind.
"Do we know that for a fact?" he said, voice rising. "Perhaps they were after two birds with one stone."
"Get a room, for God's sake," Janice commented, halting their argument. They both stared at her, struck dumb. McTavish recovered first.
"Let me help you with that, doctor."
He grabbed Janice's trunk and dragged it toward the airlock. Kama watched him go, fuming. What was she going to do now? Maybe she could ask the doctor for something to drug him with. Yeah, that should do the trick. Then she'd tie him up with a fancy ribbon and ship him back to Goldman before he got himself killed. She tramped into the airlock behind them.
***
Back on the station, they found the medic set up in a conference room, Warner stretched out on the table. Fisher walked over to her patient, checked his stats on his wrist monitor, and swept her eyes over him.
"Holy Mother of God," she breathed. "I can stabilize him, but then he'll need transport to the jump gate station hospital facilities, or maybe even to a med station in Earth orbit. It doesn't look good."
"How soon can you ship him out?" McTavish asked.
Kama held her breath. Somewhere on the station, a killer lurked, a killer with Oasis' secret. Running Warner to the jump gate would be a perfect way to escape.
"Can't say for certain. We'll know more in the next twelve hours, if he makes it that long." She unlocked her trunk and began extracting equipment.
McTavish led the way into the corridor carrying his bundle from Maltraw's. The emergency lights no longer flashed, and the corridor was wrapped in a dim night silence. Exhaustion plain on his face, he looked first left and then right.
"Which way is the infirmary?" he asked.
"This way."
He shuffled along, occasionally grimacing, until they reached the corridor outside the infirmary. Soot grimed the floor and walls, and the stench of burned chemicals and burned flesh hung in the air. They stood by the infirmary door, crumpled and hanging crooked from its frame, a black hole beyond its gape. Kama fished a work light from her bag and shone it inside.
"You should wait out here." McTavish took the light from her and stepped through.
She followed him in. Glass shards and twisted metal littered the floor. Glass-fronted cabinets hung open, their contents shattered and burned. McTavish pointed the light at something on the floor and crouched beside it. He picked up a length of plasteel and held it to his nose.
"Table leg—with plastic explosive residue on it."
He wiped his hand on his pants, then rose and moved forward, flashing the light across the floor. It stopped on another leg,
or at least part of a leg. It still had most of a work boot on an all too human foot. Not far away, the light picked up a shattered torso, half-dressed in a loud tropical-print shirt. The torso was mostly intact, pallid white under the jellied bloodstains, arms broken and bent. It stopped at the waist, a vast jagged wound spilling entrails onto the tiled floor. McTavish checked the shirt pocket. Kama sucked in her breath and covered her mouth.
"Go back out," McTavish ordered.
"That's Davy Todd. Or it was. He wore that shirt while I worked on his prospecting ship." As the light swung away, she spotted a second body. "And that's probably Juan Rodriguez, his partner."
Despite the horror, Kama heaved a sigh of relief. Todd and Rodriguez must have been Levine's accomplices, must have killed him and dumped his body in hydroponics. She'd need to search their ship to be sure they didn't have a copy of the Oasis contract, and then her job here was done.
"Can we go now?"
"Not until I find answers." McTavish, swinging the light her way, returned to her and placed his hands on her shoulders. "You don't have to do this."
She trembled under his touch and swallowed hard. "What are we looking for?"
Resigned, he swung the light back to the floor. "The charge was made from plastic explosive. You can heat it, freeze it, take a sledgehammer to it, even throw it on a fire if you want to, and it won't blow up. It only goes off if you put a current through it. The detonator may tell us something about the device, or at the very least, provide evidence that will convict Levine of murder."
"Levine? But it was Todd and Rodriguez in here with the bomb."
McTavish bent down, sifted through debris, and plucked something from the floor. He held it in front of the lamp. "Yes, strange that they'd be in here when the blast went off."
"What's that?" she asked.
"Part of the device. If they planned to leave the bomb in here with me, they needed a way to set it off. Timer, remote detonator, something like that." He dug something out of a melted chair-back. "Here's more. Looks like part of a remote detonator. Just a radio receiver, basically, tuned to a particular frequency. You send a signal from any radio transmitter and off you go."
He crossed to where his cot had been. The floor was gouged beside it, and the ceiling above marked with a rosette of blackened insulation.
"This was the point of detonation. Next to the cot. I'd asked for a work table, and they brought one. They set it down here…" He meandered around, examining the patterns of blast damage.
"They meant to leave the table, and then blow you up," she said. If he hadn't sneaked away to the shower… "But their detonator malfunctioned and went off early?"
"It doesn't add up," he said frowning at the blast marks. "We've got two miners skilled in the use of explosives, using a substance they're intimately familiar with, accidentally blowing themselves to bits in an attempt to kill me and possibly you, too."
"Accidents happen," she said.
"Neither of them is carrying a transmitter," McTavish said.
Her earlier sense of relief snuffed out, suffocated by a creeping chill that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. If she'd told McTavish about finding Levine dead, would Todd and Rodriguez be alive now? She had to find a bolt hole for the two of them, and then she had to tell him the truth, all of it, before anymore lives were lost.
Their search of the infirmary completed, Kama led him through the dim corridors, avoiding sections where she thought they might encounter miners. She stopped outside Levine's quarters, checked to be sure no lurking watchers observed them, and pressed her ring to the lock. She hurried McTavish through the door and locked it behind them.
He wandered through to the bedroom. Kama heard the shower running. Unbidden, the memory of his naked body arose; those firm, well-defined shoulders, lean muscular back, tight buttocks, shapely legs. He must be hot in the sack.
What was she thinking? He was the CEO of a Fortune 1000 company, a charmer, a manipulator extraordinaire. Definitely not her type. Definitely. She was in the middle of a mission gone horribly wrong. And now she needed to tell him her dark secrets before more people died, not add her name to his list of bimbo conquests. Her head ached. She dived into her duffel and extracted equipment, trying to put him out of her mind. She had data to review, a killer to find, a mission to complete.
Hooking a black box to Levine's vid screen, she set her gloves on the plasteel coffee table and sat on the couch. She used her nanocom to access the station network and tunneled through to the message queue. Her bots had returned victorious; she had financial data on Levine, Roshal, Browning, and Miss Patty.
Now all she needed were the files off McTavish's nanocom. It, too, was tucked away in the duffel, rescued from where he'd abandoned it in the shower room. She pulled it out. The smell of soap and coffee washed over her, and she twisted around, startled. McTavish stood behind her.
"Excellent, you found my nanocom. You wouldn't have a coffee cup in there, would you? I'm afraid I didn't think to pick one up."
He was dressed in baggy tan cargo pants and a denim work shirt, the top several buttons open to expose muscled pecs and curly black chest hair. He'd padded up undetected on bare feet. His sparkling eyes swept over her equipment.
Kama dug her travel cup from her bag and handed it to him. He shuffled back to the bathroom and returned to sit gingerly on the couch beside her, a steaming cup in his hand.
"What's all this?" he asked.
"Just some stuff I use." Kama took a deep breath, afraid that if she didn't tell him now, she'd lose her nerve. "Levine's dead. His body's hidden in hydroponics."
His blue eyes fixed on her. He seemed speechless and took a slow sip of coffee.
"I found him while you were gone. Someone caved his head in." Her hands formed hard knots in her lap. "It wasn't Levine who tried to kill you."
His expression became guarded. "You weren't going to tell me, were you? You were going to let me keep looking for him. Why?"
Kama squirmed. She was good at lying. Why couldn't she just make up a story? But he'd know if she lied. He was a damn psychic. "I think the killer may have found something that Oasis lost and would like to have back."
McTavish settled into the couch. "Lost?"
"Fumbled is a better description, sent to Levine by mistake a week ago."
"Ah. Unfortunate." He sipped the coffee again. "Can you tell me what it is?"
Kama gritted her teeth. "A time-sensitive document of great value, but only for another seven days."
"So it's small, electronic, easily hidden, easily transported. Who might find this document to be valuable?"
"Someone of means who wanted a substantial return on their investment."
McTavish snorted. "Someone like me, for instance, a rich playboy? And here I thought it was my masculine charm that kept you hovering."
She glared at him. "You're a successful security professional; I was concerned you might get to the document before me. This isn't a joke."
His expression turned serious. "Sorry. I'm easily distracted. Do you think it's possible that Leon Goldman might be the buyer?"
"Goldman." She hadn't thought about him since McTavish arrived, but of course he'd be exactly the kind of buyer she'd imagined. And he was right here at the station. "Has anyone from the station contacted him? Did he say anything about Oasis?"
"He has other things on his mind." McTavish stared down at his coffee, frowning. "It seems like we're in this together for better or for worse. What I'm going to tell you is in the strictest confidence and can't end up in a file somewhere."
So he knew who she really worked for, and he still trusted her. Her heart thumped a fast staccato rhythm, unexpectedly happy. Foolish. She had commitments to Oasis, and she'd tell them whatever he said. But maybe this time, she wouldn't. Maybe she could keep some information back.
"Tell me," she said.
"I was hired by Goldman's father to find out why Leon insisted on buying this station, and I have. He was
blackmailed into it. He doesn't know his blackmailer's identity, but he's convinced that Levine could tell him who it is. The blackmailer doesn't want money; the objective seems to be to get Leon thrown out on his ear. As bad as the financials are on this place, the purchase will do it."
It was Kama's turn to sink back into the couch, stunned by McTavish's revelation. So his masquerade as an inspector wasn't for the benefit of the miners but was part of some family feud at the highest level of EcoMech management. "Hence his determination to board the station with those mercs of his. I suppose we should retrieve the body."
"We should leave it until an EA forensic team arrives. There's one based at the jump gate station. They could be here in six hours."
She grimaced and pushed away the vision of body parts separating as the corpse was pulled from the vat. "He's, um, in a hydroponic tank… dissolving."
"Ah," he replied, nose crinkling. "No wonder you didn't want salad. So the longer we wait, the more forensic evidence we lose."
"What will Goldman do if he finds out Levine is dead?"
"Same as us—go after the murderer."
"And the miners? How will they react?" Her stomach tied itself in a knot. With no target for their anger, they might turn on McTavish.
He sighed. "Who knows? Yuri said they wanted to go back to work, something I'd suggested they do, and I when I nixed that idea, he warned me that they might retaliate."
Surprised, she stared at him. "So the infirmary blast might not be the work of the murderer but just a bunch of pissed-off miners?"
"I don't think so. Another beating would have finished me without risking Warner's life. The bomb was meant to kill me and hand investigators the two perps on a platter. If the infirmary wall had given way—as I think it was intended to—the evidence to contradict that theory would have been lost in the blow-out."
He shivered and went for a coffee refill. Her mind wandered to his arrival beating. He must know who his attackers were. Why hadn't he fingered them to Goldman or EA? Maybe he worried that the men had friends who'd come after him, and he'd file charges when he got clear of the station.
"We have until morning to sort out who killed Levine," he said, returning with his coffee. He sucked the stuff down like most people breathed air. "After that, the place will be crawling with security forces. You can bet that if Leon gets his hands on Levine's accomplice, he won't end up in EA custody. I can't let someone go free after committing three murders. I think we keep the body quiet for the time being."
Calculated Risk Page 15