Star Cops

by Chris Boucher

  “Chief Superintendent Fantastic, if you want to be strictly accurate,” Nathan said.

  “Oh, by all means,” said Lee, “I want to be strictly accurate. Is it strictly accurate to say that you’ve been short-listed for the Star Cop job? This Star Cop job you don’t want. This Star Cop job you have no intention of taking?”

  “I applied for the damn job as a formality. I didn’t do it because I wanted it. I did it because I was expected to do it.”

  Lee nodded. “That’s rather the way you agreed to a marriage contract with me isn’t it,” she said. “If we’re being strictly accurate.”

  “The bastard!”

  Theroux transferred the memo from the communications screen to the notepad in his wrist unit.

  “Two word clues don’t count,” Butler said, as he hopped through the bulkhead hatch and hustled towards his workstation. “Give me the year, the star, the director, and a reasonable bid, and we’re in business.”

  “You’re late,” said Theroux.

  “Our well-beloved general manager wanted to go over the details one more time,” Butler said. “She’s hoping to find someone to blame before someone finds her to blame. Oh the wailings and moanings, the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.” He beamed suddenly and chortled, “I love it, I love it, I love it!”

  “Yeah, well, it could be that she’s not the only one who’s running for cover. Take a look.” Theroux cut his communications console output onto Butler’s mixer screen.

  The message which flashed up read: David Theroux return Earthside soonest. Report Detective Chief Superintendent Spring, Europol 7. Timecode as set.

  Butler was even more amused. “Looks like that newscast was right. It’s bum-kicking time and you’re up, David old love.”

  “Why me?” Theroux demanded. “Why are you getting off so goddam lightly? You were base control.”

  Butler stopped grinning. “You’re not suggesting it was my fault, I hope?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. As it happens, I don’t think it was anybody’s fault.” Theroux rubbed his eyes, and wondered why the fuck he was lying to Butler. “I can’t answer for this Spring guy, though.” That much was true anyway. Jesus he was tired. He didn’t seem to have slept since the two engineers, Brownly and Goff, had tugged Hendvorrsen back to the airlock and through to the waiting resuscitation team. Way too late for the poor bastard. Another one who had died angry and frightened, by the look on his face. More angry than frightened, maybe, but then the guy made a profession of ‘angry’. This time it could be that it was his natural expression, at rest, as Butler had said about that other poor bastard, Stein. But even so. Somebody was to blame. And it sure as shit wasn’t him. Not this time it wasn’t. Not then either. It wasn’t his fault that Gary died. Gary, that was his name. Gary Benson. And the others. Where the hell were they now? What happened wasn’t his fault. Was it?

  “That Spring looks like a hard man to me,” Butler said, interrupting his thoughts. “He’s the type who’ll knock all your teeth out then kick you in the stomach for mumbling. Ten, the bid is ten.”

  “Not now, Simon.”

  “Yes now,” insisted Butler. “You have been preventing me from recouping my losses. I think it’s a deliberate strategy. The bid is ten going once, going twice.”

  “The Big Sleep.”

  “Wrong,” Butler crowed. “It’s The Long Goodbye.”

  “It’s The Big Sleep.”

  Butler shook his head. “It’s The Long Goodbye,” he said. “And it’s altogether more appropriate, given your present circumstances, don’t you think?”

  “Fuck you,” Theroux said flatly.

  A standard spacesuit lay in its separate pieces on the polished wood floor. Nathan was carefully checking through the component parts of the backpack, the main operating units of which had been set out in a rough semblance of their functioning order. He was following the sequence using a step-by-step, interactive maintenance guide displayed on the screen of his communications unit.

  At least, Theroux assumed that’s what it was, though it looked to be a good deal more responsive than most of the interactive training packages he had ever come across. It seemed to be responding to every tiny move the man made, displaying prompts and offering on-screen evaluations not just of the machinery, but of his actions in relation to it. It was like a teacher stopping a pupil from skipping over essential parts of a lesson. And like a teacher, it did not seem keen on interruptions.

  “I’ll be with you in a moment,” Spring had said to him when he stepped out of the elevator into the apartment which doubled as the man’s home and the detective office designated Europol 7. “Only if I leave this now, I shall have to start again, and I haven’t got the time to waste.”

  “No problem,” he’d said and then had stood watching as the fool played forensic analyst with a piece of hardware even specialist engineers only understood bits of. The bits they were trained to understand.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” Nathan said without looking up from what he was doing. “Help yourself to anything you need. Coffee? Take a bath if you like.”

  “Does my personal hygiene give offence?” Theroux asked with wry politeness.

  Nathan glanced up to see that the man was half smiling, and the hostility he had shown when he came in was more marked now. “A bath was one of the things I missed most out there on the station. Thought you might feel the same way.”

  “Not really. I’ll take the coffee, though.”

  Nathan nodded towards the kitchen. “Through there,” he said. “Get me one while you’re at it, will you?”

  “Yazzer, boss,” muttered Theroux as he walked away.

  Nathan put down the catalytic coupler he had been examining and watched Theroux disappear into the kitchen. What was the man so tense about? He looked as though he hadn’t slept for days. Hostile, exhausted and… what else?

  “That is an essential link between waste gas analysis and the emergency purging system,” Box said.

  “I know that,” Nathan replied. “And my instruction was screenwrite, not oral.”

  “Your action indicated that you had overlooked the screenwrite.”

  “The action was misinterpreted. Just follow my instruction, please.” Please was the command word which was supposed to reinforce current operating instructions. As often happened though the complexity of Box’s systems produced a response which was slightly different from the expected one.

  “Your instruction,” Box said, “was to familiarize you with the basic construction and working of the Mark 14 standard –”

  “Box,” Nathan interrupted, using the word which activated the device and so was the command override, ”screenwrite.”

  The rest of what Box had to say printed up on the communications screen in slightly larger than normal script.

  In the kitchen, Theroux had listened to the exchange with mounting consternation. Shit, he thought, the guy is talking to himself and he’s throwing his voice while he does it. It’s a paranoid schizophrenic vent act. He ground the coffee – at least the guy went in for the real stuff – and waited while it perked, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do now.

  By the time Theroux brought the coffee through to the living room, Nathan had finished the backpack tutorial and was reviewing how little he had learned. Exasperated he pushed the suit away and got to his feet.

  “I worry about my memory,” he said. “Policemen and liars need good memories.”

  “You’ve got a problem?” asked Theroux.

  Nathan smiled, “I don’t seem to retain as much as I used to.”

  “Could be you need professional help,” Theroux suggested.

  “Professional help?”

  “Maybe it’s organic.”

  Nathan took his coffee
and went back to looking at the spacesuit, poking the pieces dubiously with his foot. “Well, if it is,” he said, “the last person to know will be me. Bit like dying.”

  “Excuse me?” said Theroux.

  “Assuming death is the end of it, the only person who’ll never know you’re dead is you.”

  Theroux tensed visibly. “Me?”

  Nathan wondered in passing whether the American was on something. “Anybody,” he said, adding, “Sorry, I got into a rather morbid conversation with Hans Dieter on the flight back.” He sipped his coffee. “It’s taken a while to shake off the shuttle-lag. I expect you’ve got the same problem.”

  Theroux shook his head and said, “The medication works for me.”

  Nathan put down the coffee mug and began to reassemble the spacesuit. “Any connection between these deaths of yours, apart from the extreme environment?” he asked.

  Theroux said, “The computer couldn’t find one.” These deaths of mine? he thought. Even if this guy did turn out to be crazy it didn’t follow that he wasn’t capable of putting a frame round anyone who’d sit still for the picture.

  Nathan said, “Except that they were suit failures.”

  “You can get all this from the ESA computer, you know,” Theroux said.

  Nathan was disappointed. The American had given him no particular cause to expect better than that, and yet somehow he had. “I don’t want it from the computer,” he snapped. “I want it from you. Inspector. What about the other stations?”

  Theroux scowled. “They have failures,” he said, coldly.

  “As many?”

  “Some do, some don’t. Year on year, the statistic doesn’t change. Overall, the percentage of suits that fail is constant.”

  Nathan said, “That’s how the computer sees it. What about the people?”

  “What about the people?”

  Nathan stood up and brandished the half-assembled suit. “Christ, man, if my life depends on this thing, I find it hard to be philosophical about its failure rate, however constant that might be.”

  “Do you require a prompt for the next step?” Nathan’s voice asked from just behind Theroux.

  “Jeezzus!” Theroux gasped, and turned too quickly for the medication to prevent his head from spinning.

  “If I need a prompt, I’ll ask for one,” Nathan said.

  “Very well,” said Box, and Theroux focused his eyes and located the device where it rested on the desk workstation.

  “It’s a remote self-selecting machine interface and system controller with some personalized algorithms thrown in,” said Nathan. “I call it Box. It’s a sort of customized personal assistant.”

  “I thought you were talking to yourself,” said Theroux, staring at the less than impressive-looking box.

  “According to the man who gave it to me it’s not unlike that, apparently. I’m not convinced, myself.”

  “What does it use for a carrier beam?” Theroux asked.

  “Whatever’s appropriate,” Nathan said, irritated that Box would now be a source of curiosity to the American. “You were telling me about the reaction to the suit failures?”

  Theroux moved to examine Box more closely. “It’s controlling the interactive instruction manual, is that it?” he asked.

  “It’s tailoring one to my needs, yes.”

  “That’s an impressive piece of kit.”

  “So is this,” said Nathan, putting the spacesuit back on the floor and taking the next element for reassembly. “Tell me how the users feel when it doesn’t work properly.”

  Theroux turned to look at Nathan. How did a cop get to own something like that? “They get tense,” he said.

  “And?”

  “And there was some pressure brought. The Russians undertook to improve their quality control standards.”

  “And?”

  Theroux shrugged. “And you can’t make any system perfect.”

  Nathan said, “In fact, the failure rate was unchanged, if not very slightly worse,” and thought, This is no detective, what the hell sort of questions has he been asking? “What was the feeling then?”

  Theroux said, “That the purchasing people were probably on the take.”

  “Corrupt officials accepting substandard equipment,” Nathan said pedantically, sounding a bit like a court transcript – which was not the effect he wanted, and which did nothing for their mutual confidence.

  “Any port in a shit-storm,” said Theroux flatly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean exactly?”

  “People look for plots.”

  Frowning, Nathan glanced up at Theroux. “But no-one complained,” he said.

  Theroux’s smile did not get as far as his eyes. “Who would you suggest they complain to?”

  “You?”

  “That’s a joke, right?”

  Nathan stared at the screen, trying to decide why he could not get a hose coupling to fit. “That is what the police are normally for,” he said.

  Theroux said, “But we’re not normal police, are we?”

  “You’re better paid for one thing,” Nathan said.

  On the screen, the explanation of where he was going wrong was displayed in shamingly graphic detail. He connected the hose coupling, then said, “I didn’t ask for a prompt, Box.”

  Theroux finally could stand it no longer. He peered theatrically at the laid out spacesuit. “What exactly are you looking for here?” he demanded. “Some sort of clue? Should I play boy detective too, or do I just watch? Shit, I want to give value for money here, boss.”

  Nathan sighed and got to his feet. “David,” he said, “I don’t know what your problem is, but there are three things we should get straight between us. First I’m not your boss.”

  “That’s just a formality. Question of time.”

  “Second, I’m not looking for clues here, I’m uprating my training. If there’s a chance I might die in one of these things, I’d like some idea of how. It’s less easy to scare me if I understand what’s happening. Not impossible, but less easy. Ignorance isn’t bliss, unless you enjoy being afraid of the dark.”

  “And the third thing?”

  “The third thing is you make terrible coffee,” Nathan said, and smiled his most disarming smile. “Box, end session.”

  The communications screen went blank. As Nathan took the coffee mugs back to the kitchen, he said, “That must be why you resigned from the American space programme, I suppose. Career prospects blighted by poor coffee making?”

  “Who says I resigned?”

  It was a clumsy evasion, and Nathan wondered if the American was naive enough to suppose that he did not already know his background. “So what is an American doing on a European station?” he asked conversationally.

  “Just trying to make a living.”

  Nathan spooned fresh beans into the grinder and set it. “Where there’s living, there’s policemen,” he said, quickly transferring the coarse ground coffee into the percolator. “That’s one of nature’s rules.”

  Theroux watched him carefully measuring the precise proportions of coffee and water. “You seem fond of slogans,” he said, remembering Kenzy’s scathing comment about slogans and brains.

  Nathan paused in what he was doing, as if considering this idea for the first time. “I suppose I am,” he said, “but they’re aphorisms, aren’t they? If you want to be strictly accurate about it.” He smiled again. “The wit and wisdom of the bumper sticker, my father used to call it.”

  Despite his weary wariness, Theroux found himself smiling back. The guy did have charm, he thought, no question. The smile was a killer; he’d noticed that before. Probably made him even more of a threat – what can’t smile, can’t lie…

  Nathan was relieved to see
him smile. It had begun to look as though they weren’t going to be able to work together after all. This might not be the best detective he had ever come across, but he was going to need someone with experience out there if he was going to limit the damage the investigation was going to do. Too many damn people sweating on a result. Even Lee. He had calmed her down, convinced her that he had no choice – but for how long?

  “How long do you want me to stick around?” Theroux asked.

  Nathan said, “How long have you been a Star Cop?”

  “Two years?”

  “Solved many cases in that time?”

  “We don’t really do that. It’s not what we’re for.”

  “What are you for? You never really explained that.”

  “You tell me,” Theroux said sourly, thinking, Looks like we carry the can for careerist sons-of-bitches like Hendvorrsen, and you.

  Nathan said, “It’s not a trick question.”

  Theroux shrugged. “We keep space safe for democracy. I don’t know, what the fuck does a peace officer do when things are peaceful?” He shrugged again. “We validate the legal procedures.”

  “You rubber stamp computer decisions.”

  “Yeah, if you want to put it like that.”

  Nathan watched the freshly brewed coffee dribbling into the jug. “When did you start to doubt those decisions?” he asked.

  “I didn’t. I was just uncomfortable with a run of suit failures. Christ, you make it sound like I had some sort of a religious conversion.”

  “Questioning the infallibility of the one true God?” Nathan said wryly then, changing the subject abruptly, asked, “The Russian spacesuit test figures. Have you seen them?”

  Theroux was only momentarily thrown. “I’ve seen the figures their PR outfit published,” he said.

  “As it happens, they’re not much different from the unpublished averages,” Nathan said.

  Theroux was genuinely surprised. “They let you see their classified stuff?” he asked.