Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System

by T. K. F. Weisskopf

  "What's going on?" Sadie asked apprehensively.

  "Kimble has booked passage on the Ocher Dust, under another name. I think we have a bank robbery on our hands."

  "How?" Sadie's blue eyes widened.

  "Through the closed Struck It Rich on the other side of the vault."

  Sadie pulled up the station specs on the computer. "You can count on me."

  Legs ran a quick set of diagnostics on her prostheses. Everything was in working order. She suited up in her shortest miniskirt, long-sleeved cotton shirt, and protective synthleather vest, adding a couple of miniature grenades to her standard arsenal. One in her right pocket, one in her left. Whoever she was up against wasn't likely to have any grenades, or be prepared to use them.

  She checked herself in the mirror, and decided a little camouflage was in order. Legs twiddled the controls on her prostheses, adding height to her legs, and covering them in fishnet stockings, red spike-heeled shoes, and lacy garters. In the mirror she looked less threatening, more distracting, but it all felt the same to her. Floating on the field generated by the disks, she only noticed the difference in height. Until she looked down.

  In the office Sadie continued her frantic study. Legs nodded to her. "Hold down the office until the pyrotechnics start. Then get into the suit and to wherever you need to be for access to Main Street. The problems won't start until after the pyrotechnics."

  Barely glancing up from the display, Sadie said, "I'll be ready."

  In truth, Legs had no intention of letting Sadie, an untried inexperienced deputy, anywhere near any action that might include gunfire. Not even if everyone called her the Sidewinder, and quaked in fear of her. At least the girl would be mobile and well defended, whatever happened. It did mean Legs would have to fight this battle alone. Still, it could be worse. Breathing a sigh of relief that Corin wasn't deputy any longer, Legs left the office.

  Without proof either way, Legs couldn't eliminate or accuse Jack and Elmer of collusion in this. She hoped she'd have some answers before they got back. If not, she'd have to wing it. This time she had no intention of letting Longshanks shoot out her prosthetics.

  Legs had to go all the way down to the docks before she was alone, and could enter the duct system. Purgatory Station had a simple layout with a main level for human living, and a series of lower levels for engineering, vats and hydroponics, and docking. It took her another hour to wind her way through the tight duct passageways back up to the Struck It Rich. Her watch said she had a few minutes to wait until the pyrotechnics started.

  From her post, sheltered behind the duct grating, she had a good view of the restaurant. And a great deal of nothing. Most of the chairs and tables were gone. She had no idea what they'd done with them. Five large, gray, plastic packing crates, open and empty, huddled in the center of the vacant restaurant floor. Ten shiny canisters of packing foam leaned against the cleared counter, which had served as both bar and kitchen, to her left. The wall behind the counter, smack-dab up against the bank's vault stood as it always had, seemingly unbroken.

  Maybe she'd been wrong?

  Kimble and Karybdis arrived right on time, as the shouts of the crowd and whine and pop of the pyrotechnics filtered into the empty restaurant. They shed their outer coats, revealing protective vests and lift belts. Legs watched the two of them open a concealed door to the vault.

  Right. Kimble had had time to plan this.

  A few moments more to allow Sadie to get positioned, and give Kimble and Karybdis time to carry a couple loads of ill-gotten gains from the vault to the empty crates in the restaurant. Legs burst from the duct, ministunner in her left hand, grenade in her right.

  The men dropped their loads, shut the concealed door, and grabbed hastily for weapons concealed in their clothes.

  "Stop it! Hands up!" Legs hadn't really expected them to obey her, and she wasn't disappointed. They ignored her order, continuing to scramble for weapons. With protective vests and ministunners all around, they'd end up shooting at each other until someone's vest failed. Since there were two of them and one of her, it stood to reason her vest would fail first.

  She tossed the grenade onto the transparent wall. It exploded on impact, taking a portion of the wall with it.

  A temporary force-field crackled over the shattered wall. Alarms screeched. Emergency bulkheads dropped. The force-field would contain everything in the restaurant larger than a pea, and it would slow the air loss. Just long enough for any presumed customers to get safely to the emergency pods now dropping from the ceiling. Legs had the air reserves in the restaurant calculated to approximately two minutes. Not long enough for a ministunner fight. She'd always loved emergency drills.

  Kimble started shooting at the pods, blowing holes through them. "Get the pods," he shouted to Karybdis. "She won't make it without them."

  Karybdis joined in the destruction. Legs ducked behind a shot-out, holey pod, figuring, one pod for every ten people, and the restaurant rated for a maximum of two hundred people, so they had to destroy nineteen pods.

  The low whine of wind escaping began, and loose objects started creaking and shaking.

  When the shooting stopped, she stood up. Kimble was climbing into the last good pod, Karybdis already ahead of him. Kimble glared at her and said, "A few more minutes and you won't be a problem anymore."

  He entered the pod, and sealed it behind him.

  Everything loose in the restaurant began a slow, inexorable migration toward the force-field, crates and canisters making a high-pitched wavering shriek as they scraped against the tiled floor. Not wanting to be trapped in the force-field, like a bug in a spider's web, Legs ran to the bar, against the wind, and opened an emptied cabinet. She crawled into it, watching crates, canisters, cash, and bits of broken pods scoot across the floor on their way to the force-field, accelerating faster with every second that passed.

  With a muffled whoosh the last of the atmosphere emptied into the void. Legs settled farther into the cabinet as her prosthetic legs disappeared and the crackling lines of a body field appeared around her.

  The manual hadn't mentioned that she wouldn't have legs if the body field was on. Something to keep in mind if she ever wanted to turn it on manually.

  Pulling herself out of the bar, Legs contemplated the remaining operational pod, and her prisoners. Kimble and Karybdis would remain trapped in the emergency pod until pressure was restored to the restaurant. Legs had to make sure they'd be trapped just a little longer, until she could decant them into a jail cell.

  Crawling over to the pod, she began the long and difficult task of fusing the seal with her ministunner, set on low. Legs started at the bottom, the easiest to get to, and worked her way up the pod's seal, to as high as she could reach, standing on the stumps of her legs. The inhabitants of the pod struggled and shook against the sides, but couldn't escape without proper pressure. She left the last handspan or so of the sides and the top unfused, since she was unable to reach that high, but she'd fused enough of the pod's opening to keep them in.

  By the time she finished, she was exhausted and her ministunner's charge nearly wiped out.

  She crawled back to the bar, and pulled herself up onto it. She didn't want to meet anyone while flopping around on the floor with her legs off. She took a deep, shuddering breath before reaching for the chain to pull the watch-communicator out of her left vest pocket.

  A sudden thud accompanied the restaurant's door falling inward. A whole squad of silvered emergency-containment-suited figures trooped in. One stood head and shoulders above the others, stunner in hand and pointed into the restaurant, looking for trouble. Only one person in Purgatory Station fit that description.

  Legs pointed her ministunner at the tall figure, and they faced off a moment. He lowered his stunner, and switched his visor to transparent, so she could see his face.

  Elmer looked tired, twitchy, and worried.

  "How'd you know where to find me?" Legs asked, keeping her ministunner aimed at his
heart, and desperately desiring some sort of cover for the stumps of her legs.

  "The Sidewinder told us what she knew, and we guessed," Elmer said. "I wish you hadn't hired her as a deputy. I was planning on hiring her as soon as she was old enough. Damnation, half the mine owners wanted to hire her." He held his hands up in surrender, and walked closer.

  Behind him the rest of the troop lowered their weapons, and cleared their visors. Legs saw Jack and Jim Nutil and Corin Minerva and Langdon Kade and Sadie Amber and most of Jack's crew. No way could all of them be involved in this. No way, no how. Impossible.

  "Where have you been?" She was feeling a bit tired and twitchy herself.

  "Staking a new claim. I didn't mean to worry anyone." Elmer looked down at her ministunner, just touching his suit directly over his heart. "You going to shoot me?"

  "Damnation, Elmer. It's empty." She tossed it toward the force-field. "I'll have to strangle you with my bare hands."

  Jack pulled Elmer away from her, pointing toward the shattered transparent wall. "Careful, Sergeant. She's in one of her moods."

  Nutil waved at the gently rocking pod.

  "Kimble and Karybdis are in there. I caught them stealing from the bank's vault." Legs motioned to the wall behind her. "After we repressurize here, I'll show you the door they've hidden there. You can see the vault's contents, decorating the force-field."

  Cash glittered like faraway stars around the dark hulking crates in the crackling rifts of the shattered vista wall.

  Legs tapped the bar beside her. "Karybdis bought this place and shut it down, not for redecorating, but to get access to the vault. Kimble's been playing with the bank's accounting. My guess is he's been trying to hide their tracks, and confuse the issue of exactly how much is missing when we finally found out. Make it a lot harder, if not impossible, to track them down once they'd left the system."

  Sighing, Nutil shook his head. "You had to shut down the entire station to take them?"

  "I didn't know who all I was up against, who I could count on for help, or how heavily armed they would be."

  Snaking an arm around Nutil's shoulder, Jack grinned. "This is exactly how she was in the war. Did I ever tell you about the time . . ."

  "Just can't make some people happy." Jack shook the flimsy he picked up off Legs' desk, the one with the headline that read, "Sheriff Still in the Dark on Raiders' Whereabouts."

  "I don't expect to anymore," Legs answered easily.

  "Anyone figured out what to do about setting up a bank in the interim?" Jack asked. "Until we get back in six months."

  "Not my problem." Legs smiled and settled back into her desk chair. "Nutil will have to deal with it. The same as he has to deal with the station repairs. I just have to get Kimble and Karybdis safely to your brig, for transport to the sector penitentiary."

  Kimble and Karybdis, lounging morosely in the second cell, glared at her, but made no overt threat. They hadn't said much since they'd been decanted into the cell, and stripped of their weapons. Legs guessed that they were probably both waiting until they'd talked to a lawyer before they shot their mouths off. They probably knew about the auto-spies constantly recording them, too. One more bit of evidence she'd be sending off with them.

  "We could make Longshanks be banker." Sadie looked up from the main cell, where she had the door completely taken apart and in pieces all around her. The cell's bunks were filled with snoring drunks. "He don't need time to work his claims anymore. He's rich as Croesus, with that new claim. He could float this whole station. He'd have the time. He could do it."

  Jack and Legs exchanged a look.

  "He'd hate that," Jack said.

  "But he'd do it, if he thought he had to." Legs narrowed her eyes. "It'd serve him right for not reporting in. He didn't have to give his position, but he could at least have let us know he was all right."

  "Not his style."

  The door opened, and Elmer walked into the office, dwarfing everyone and everything in it.

  "Sidewinder." Jack tilted his head toward the door. "Take a break, let me buy you a drink."

  "She ain't legal, Captain," Elmer said.

  "Complain, complain." Jack grabbed Sadie's arm. "Come on." They left.

  Legs raised her eyebrows questioningly at Elmer, but he seemed fascinated with the half-mended cell door. She waited patiently as he cleared his throat, and uhmed and uhed for several minutes.

  "Get on with it," Jack shouted from the porch outside the office. "We don't have all day, Sergeant."

  Elmer looked at his scuffed boots, and said, "The new claim turned out real good. We made quite a bit off of that."

  "Aim for the target, Sergeant!" Jack's hollered order floated in through the open door.

  Clearing his throat, Elmer tried leaning against the bars of the main cell in what he might have thought was a casual posture. "I wanted to give you time to settle into yourself after . . . Time for me to make a little more of myself."

  "Damnation! Do I have to come in there?"

  Red faced, Elmer walked over to Legs' desk, and dropped a ring into the middle of her display. A diamond the size of a pea twinkled in the glow of the computer.

  "Say it," Jack shouted.

  Legs grinned up at Elmer. "Marry me?"

  He nodded.

  "Damnation!" Jack shouted from the porch.

  THE CUTTING FRINGE

  Paul Chafe's first published fiction appeared in Larry Niven's Man-Kzin Wars series. After meeting him at a World Science Fiction Convention and learning a little more about his avocation (playing with big guns for the Canadian Army), I asked him to contribute to this volume. And after I read his story, I asked him to follow in Charles Sheffield's very big footsteps and explain just where the science in his story left off and the speculation began.

  Paul Chafe

  I was driving up to Holmes' house when I became aware of a ghostly voice rising over the strains of Vivaldi coming from my car stereo. At first it didn't quite register, but then I heard it again. I turned down the volume, and there it was, quite plainly.

  "Bewaaarrrre. The goverrrrmennnt is watchinnnnngg youuu."

  Reflexively I slammed on the brakes. My Porsche has antilock brakes big enough to stop a tank. It didn't skid, but I nearly went through the windshield with the deceleration. Sixty to zero in one point nine seconds flat. Well okay, eighty to zero in three point four. Don't give me that look, of course I was speeding. I drive a Porsche.

  For a moment I thought I was hallucinating—I had a few experimental experiences back in college that I don't want to repeat. After the initial fear of incipient paranoia faded I looked in the rearview mirror, but it was nothing that obvious. It had to be Holmes' doing of course, the only question was how. I turned off the ignition and got out and looked in the ditch, looked up in the trees for hidden loudspeakers, for wires, for some bizarre gadget of no clear purpose. There was nothing. I thought about it. The voice had been too close for it to be a distant source, and it had moved with the car—no Doppler effect up or down as I passed it. Maybe some kind of transmitter? A huge magnet turning my whole car into a speaker?

  With Holmes it could be anything. I looked at my car. It had been parked in my garage all day, and while he was perfectly capable of building some gadget to make my car talk to me, it would have been far too much effort for him to actually sneak into my garage and install it. You have to understand, Holmes isn't lazy, not at all, but he's very focused on his work. It wouldn't be worth his effort to go so far out of his way.

  Probably not, anyway. You never could tell with Holmes. I tried to remember if I'd had the Porsche at his house last time and made a mental note to bring the Jag next time. If it ever did enter his head to play around with one of my cars I wanted it to be one I wasn't quite so finicky about.

  I got back in, started the car and drove off. A hundred yards down the road the voice came again. "Dowwwnn with federrraalll surveeiillllancce lawwwsss." The voice was right in the car. It even sounded like Ho
lmes. I sighed and turned up Vivaldi.

  Perhaps some explanation is in order. My name is John Watson, and I never would have met Holmes if I'd had any other name, despite the fact that we lived just across the hall from each other in the dorm. I studied arts and spent my weekends playing rugby on the varsity team and chasing girls. He studied physics. And computer science. And chemistry, and math, and geology, neuroscience, biology, statistics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, aeronautics and astronomy, to give a nonexhaustive list. He spent his weekends co-authoring papers with his profs, who occasionally came to blows over who would get to be his mentor for his postgraduate work. I had seen him a couple of times in the hall, this tall gangly student in ill-fitting jeans and a faded black T-shirt that said "The Wrath of Con," wild blue eyes with a mop of dirty blond hair that looked like he styled it by sticking his fingers in a power socket. Maybe he did, it would explain a lot.

  It was Jane Proudfoot who introduced us at the residence Halloween party. "John, you'll never guess what. There's this guy on this floor named Holmes! You have to meet him." I was in hot pursuit of Jane who was barely dressed in a harem girl costume, so I let her drag me over to talk to this obvious misfit who was trying to reprogram the flashing orange lights in the plastic pumpkin-ghoul's eye sockets to send secret Morse code messages in the middle of a party. His first name, thank God, was Brian and not Sherlock, and after Jane had giggled at the coincidence of our names Holmes launched into a demonstration of how he could count to a thousand and twenty-three on his fingers, a trick I neither understood nor was interested in understanding. Before I could figure out how to extricate myself and Jane from his nonstop lecture she excused herself, leaving me trapped. Every time I tried to break the conversation he launched into another tangent, gabbling on about complementing twos, nybbles with a "y" and how to use hex, whatever hex was. None of it made any sense and I was much more interested in complimenting Jane in order to get nibbles with an "i." Hex had the wrong letter too, for my purposes. Across the room I saw Brock McMaster pick up his beer and head for Jane, who was now talking with friends by the beer tub but shooting glances his way. I could see my chances of getting laid that night falling rapidly toward zero and wouldn't have put it past her to have attached Holmes to me so Brock would have a clear run. I was about to simply turn and leave on an intercept course when Brian mentioned something about free long-distance calls.