Star Cops

by Chris Boucher

  STAR COPS

  CHRIS BOUCHER

  The year is 2027. When a swimmer is found drowned in a London park, the police computer rules the death as accidental. Chief Superintendent Nathan Spring’s natural instincts lead him to suspect otherwise, and he begins an investigation - despite the objections of his colleagues and superiors. To deflect him from pursuing this, Spring is manipulated into accepting a job that he does not want - as commander of the International Space Police Force, an organisation set up to enforce law and order on various space stations orbiting the Earth. The ISPF, disparagingly nicknamed the ‘Star Cops’, is an undistinguished force populated by undisciplined officers, concerned mainly with their own welfare and making money on the side, rather than upholding the law.

  Arriving at the European space station Charles de Gaulle, Spring struggles to adapt to conditions in low gravity while working to mould his team into an effective force for law enforcement. Before he’s even begun to adjust, he discovers that several crewmembers have recently died, following unforeseen spacesuit malfunction. Although these apparent accidents fall well within the limits of statistical acceptability, Spring’s instincts again lead to him to suspect the work of a saboteur. He decides to expose the culprit by taking a desperate course of action - gambling with his own life...

  Elsewhere, Spring’s second-in-command David Theroux investigates an explosion on a distant space freighter that has knocked the craft off course and condemned its two pilots to death, the Star Cops are warned of terrorist attacks by a communications expert based on the Moon, a scientist disappears without trace from the American space station - with the crew denying his very existence - and rumours begin to grow of alien artefacts having been discovered on Mars...

  Chris Boucher broke into high-profile television writing with three sets of scripts for Doctor Who in the mid-1970s: The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and Image of the Fendahl, each of which featured the character of Leela, his own creation. He was recommended by Doctor Who script editor Robert Holmes for the vacant script editor’s position on the then-embryonic BBC science fiction series Blake’s 7, a role which Boucher occupied for the show’s duration of four series. Having moved on to work on more mainstream BBC drama such as Shoestring, Bergerac and Juliet Bravo, he returned to science fiction with the creation of Star Cops - a troubled production eventually broadcast on BBC2 in 1987, now widely recognised as one of the BBC’s most ambitious and well-written forays into science fiction. More recently he has returned to his roots, writing four Doctor Who novels - Last Man Running, Corpse Marker, Psi-ence Fiction and Match of the Day - for BBC Books.

  First professionally published in the UK in 2013 by

  What Noise Productions,

  Third Floor,

  207 Regent Street,

  London,

  W1B 3HH

  www.whatnoise.co.uk

  Text © Chris Boucher 2013.

  This novel is a work of fiction and the characters and events in it exist only in its pages and in the author’s imagination.

  ‘Head Music’ is an imprint of What Noise Productions.

  Design and layout by David Darlington & Daniel Latimer.

  Proofread by Robert Dick.

  Edited by David Darlington.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-9568539-7-4

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  STAR COPS

  CHRIS BOUCHER

  Contents

  An Instinct for Murder

  Conversations With The Dead

  Intelligent Listening For Beginners

  Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits

  Little Green Men and Other Martians

  Conclusions

  An Instinct for Murder

  Crime Scene

  There was a chilly breeze blowing. It chopped the surface of the reservoir into small, brisk waves, but the man did not seem to notice. He walked across the green-slimed shingle and into the water with none of the shivering hesitations of the average swimmer. He did not pause to tug at his shorts or adjust his goggles or check that his hair was completely covered by his swimming cap. He simply walked out until he was waist deep, and then launched himself forward into a smooth and unhurried crawl.

  Somewhere overhead, in geosynchronous orbit approximately twenty-two and a half thousand miles out from the Earth’s surface, a construction engineer paused briefly at the access hatch of his living quarters to check the tell-tales on his suit. Satisfied that all the readouts were in the green, he cracked the airlock seal and with a practised push launched himself forward into space.

  Like the swimmer, the engineer’s action was smooth and unhurried. Like the swimmer, the engineer had perhaps five minutes of life left to him.

  In the middle of the reservoir, when his wrist-counter told him he had completed four hundred metres, the swimmer switched from crawl to backstroke. He was slightly more vulnerable now, though nothing he did could save him from the killers rising towards him from the green shadowed depths of the murky water. Even if he had been able to see the tell tale lines of needle-thin bubbles and to realize what they meant, escape was already an impossibility.

  The engineer had used his jet pack sparingly, so that his float across the gap between the main complex and the construction area was no more than a controlled drift. He reached the spiderwork of new girders without a suit-damaging collision, and carefully adjusted his direction and slowed his relative velocity. Like the swimmer, the beauty of his surroundings no longer startled him. Lost in routine, he hardly noticed the high whites and deep blues of the Earth as he steadied himself against a cross-member on the latest section of the station to be completed. The quality control inspection he was about to start was standard, but it was necessary, and he was a conscientious man. Completely absorbed in looking for faults and fractures, he was an easy kill.

  The attack, when it came, was too sudden for the swimmer to understand what was happening. It came from below the water, which gave his shocked senses nothing reasonable to work on. For a stunned moment when the hands grabbed him, he was surprised – but not afraid. Then, as the two frogmen dragged him below the surface with splashing and bubbles echoing in his ears, fear came abruptly. He lashed and struggled. Suffocating panic held him in the darkness. He tried to scream, and only sucked sour water into his choking throat.

  The engineer was just as disoriented. The first jarring contact was unthinkable. There was no logic to it. He should have been alone but then abruptly he was lurched into from behind as though he was on a busy street in his home town. Absurdly, his first impulse was to apologies to the two spacesuited figures who crowded in on him. Nothing in the situation was familiar enough to trigger his survival instincts, and he watched in a sort of daze, wondering at the bizarre deliberateness with which the two reached towards him.

  Still he could not work out what they were trying to do. He ma
de several attempts to speak to them, but his suit radio produced only static. Carefully, the two silent figures forced him against a stanchion and pinned his arms between them. His surprise gave way to anger, then. He bellowed at them, but the sound remained stubbornly trapped in his own small bubble of air. One of the figures reached across to his backpack, and for several moments worked on it with an adjuster. Desperately, he craned his neck trying to see what was happening. Then the air began to vent from his suit.

  Like the swimmer, the engineer panicked. Like the swimmer, he struggled and screamed. Like the swimmer, no one heard him.

  At the muddy margin of the reservoir, the swimmer floated face down in the shallow water, his corpse rocked gently by the small, wind-chopped waves. Far out from him, the dead engineer floated face towards the Earth. His spacesuited corpse drifted very slightly, almost a rocking motion, as though it too was lapped by small waves.

  Chapter 1

  “He didn’t drown there, presumably.”

  Detective Chief Superintendent Nathan Spring sipped his coffee and waited for Brian Lincoln’s inevitable misreading of the comment. Something was wrong about this one, he thought. Or rather something wasn’t right. Yes, that was what it was. Something wasn’t right about this one.

  On the big communications screen, Detective Inspector Lincoln shrugged his slightly drooping shoulders wearily. “There’s a breeze. He’ll likely have drifted.”

  “What do you think?” Again Nathan knew what the older man’s answer would be, knew that the answer would irritate him, and wondered in passing why he had asked the question at all.

  Lincoln looked down at the corpse where it lay in the water and scratched his beard thoughtfully, then he shrugged again. “We’ll see what the machines have got to say.”

  Nathan slammed down his coffee cup and thumbed the one-to-one circuit. Lincoln lifted his hand and looked at the communicator strapped to the inside of his wrist. A small close-up of his tired, baggy face appeared as an insert in the top corner of the big screen, and beside it was displayed the image of Nathan he would now be seeing. “Damn the bloody machines Brian,” the image raged, “what have you got to say?”

  Lincoln’s expression remained unchanged, but he blinked slowly, as if he was trying to focus his eyes. “There’s not much to go on, is there?” he said. “Not yet awhile.”

  Nathan’s anger subsided when he saw the nervous spasm it had prompted in the older man, and he felt guilty as he always did after he had lost his temper. He leaned back in his chair. “Not until the machines have run the probabilities, right Brian?” he said and smiled wryly. The smile, he knew, was a saving grace – perhaps his only one. At its most sardonic, it was charming and open, and made him look much younger than his forty-one years. He used it with shameless calculation, and it worked even with people who knew him.

  Lincoln beamed back at him from the screen. “Why keep a dog and bark yourself?” he said cheerfully.

  Nathan said, “It isn’t just barking we’ve given up, though, is it?”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “I do say so.” Nathan rose from his workstation, and went into the kitchen to pour himself more coffee. “And rather too often these days. I’m beginning to bore myself.”

  Lincoln waited for him to come back into the scanning range of the communications screen before speaking. “Can we go ahead with disposal?”

  “Removal logged at twelve oh two,” Nathan said, and time-coded the main visual record.

  On the big screen, Lincoln moved forward and gestured to the paramedics. Two of them, in full protective suits and masks, waded into the water to gather up the corpse. On the bank, a third unrolled a body bag, while a fourth checked a small case of instruments. Lincoln watched for a moment, then moved back out of shot and addressed the wrist screen.

  “There was a time when this man’s police force had more coppers than forensic medics,” he said. “Some days I have trouble remembering those buggers work for us and not the other way round.”

  “That’s because they don’t work for us, Brian, they work for the computer. And mostly they’re cheaper than we are.”

  “They may be cheaper than you are, sir, but I doubt whether they’re cheaper than me.” Lincoln smiled as he said this.

  It seemed to Nathan like a genuine smile. From most others in the department it would have been an ingratiating expression that would have done little to disguise the hostility. His comparatively rapid rise to Chief Superintendent had made him a few enemies, and fewer friends. But if Brian Lincoln shared the general resentment, he hid it well enough and Nathan was grateful for that. It almost compensated for his Inspector’s stubborn refusal to think for himself. Almost, but not quite. “You get what you pay for, Inspector.”

  When Nathan didn’t smile, it was difficult to pick the jokes. Lincoln had never made the mistake of trying. “So what do you think, sir?” he asked carefully.

  “I think I want this one investigated, Brian. Whatever the machines say, Brian.” As Nathan said this, a data window flashed on in the bottom right-hand corner of the main screen, and the preliminary readouts from the paramedics’ instruments began to scroll up.

  There was nothing in these immediate data to support his instinct that this was a wrong ’un, and he was conscious that right now the central computer would be marking the case down, way down, in the priority action listing.

  He keyed a replay window and looked again at the undisturbed bank next to the body. Prior to the police team, no one had walked there recently, certainly not within the time frame of the death. It seemed unlikely that this was where he would find an anomaly, a logical inconsistency that might interrupt the computer’s inexorable progress. He was still hesitating about whether to risk an overspend and call up enhancement and spectroscopic analysis when Lincoln interrupted his thoughts.

  “Is there anything else you want me to do here before I start back?”

  Nathan made up his mind abruptly. “Take a scanner round the reservoir,” he said.

  Lincoln lowered his wrist, and moved into the main frame. He gestured vaguely across the water. “Where to? Anywhere special?”

  “I want a record of the bank. Ten metres or so from the water’s edge.”

  “Yes, but where?”

  “All of it, Brian.”

  “That’ll take bloody hours. Look at the size of this place.”

  “You’d better get started then.”

  Lincoln was back on the one-to-one screen. He wasn’t smiling any longer. “I’m off shift in fifty minutes, sir.”

  “I’ll authorize the overtime. You were the one who was complaining about not being paid enough. And keep your eyes open. Maybe you’ll find it before you’ve done the full circuit.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “If I knew that, I’d know where to send you.”

  Lincoln grimaced, a small doubtful scowl. “Sir, don’t you think that’s a bit…?” His voice trailed off, but the doubtful expression remained.

  “A bit what?” Nathan prompted – though once again, he knew what the other man was going to say.

  “A bit extravagant, maybe?” Lincoln offered. “I mean, that would be a pretty detailed approach for a triple-A rating, and this hasn’t even been allocated a file yet.”

  “At least they’ll know I’m serious.”

  “If it doesn’t get rated, Accounts’ll have your balls.”

  “It’s been tried before,” Nathan said, and wondered whether giving the bean-counters another shot might not be such a good idea.

  “Practice makes perfect,” Lincoln murmured, echoing his thought. “And suppose we do all that –” he went on.

  “You do all that,” Nathan corrected.

  “I do all that,” Lincoln agreed mournfully, “and we still come up em
pty?”

  “What’s not there can be more important than what is, Brian, you know that.”

  “Like balls, sir?”

  Nathan smiled. “Just get on with it, Inspector,” he said, and broke the connection.

  The median age for people earning their living off-Earth was currently thirty-four, and in this respect flight engineer David Theroux was statistically unremarkable. There were, however, three other fairly obvious characteristics that did set him apart from his colleagues on the European space station Charles De Gaulle. He was American; he was black; and he was a cop, though not necessarily in that order.

  Today, as he propelled himself through the rigid connecting tube and floated towards the Communications Centre where he was already overdue for his second-eight shift, it was his problems as an Inspector in the International Space Police Force that were at the front of his mind.

  Originally he had taken the job because he had nothing better to do with his off-duty hours and because for a part-time appointment the pay was generous. He realized almost immediately, though, that it was a mistake; police work was not for him, but by then it was too late to cry off. Theroux had been brought up to believe that if you take the job you do the job. Whatever the job is. Not only that, but you do it right; by the book, if there is one. There were days, however – and this was definitely such a day – when he wished that games had been more to his taste. At least chess and weightless volleyball did not usually involve looking at corpses. God, he hated looking at corpses. And, just recently, he seemed to have been doing a lot of looking at corpses.