Nathan nodded. “The suits aren’t reliable enough, for one thing,” he said and Theroux half-smiled as though he wasn’t sure whether it was intended to be a joke. “There are plenty of orbit vehicles around,” Nathan went on, “are you going to tell me they’re never used unofficially?”
Theroux had to admit to himself that it was a possibility. “They’re easily spotted, though.”
“How easily?”
I didn’t realize you still couldn’t tell shit from shuttle, he remembered for no obvious reason. “Traffic controllers vary,” he said. “A competent operator shouldn’t have any problem.”
“Good. Box, put the investigation readouts on all Star Cop consoles and make sure the officers are aware of them.”
“Audible and visual prompts?” asked Box.
“Thank you, Box.”
“Is that a good idea?” said Theroux.
“Maybe,” Nathan said, “they’ll come up with some ideas about how this should be handled.”
“You can bet on it. None of the offices are any more private than this one. These stations breed rumours like sewers breed rats. What you’re doing will get to be common knowledge, real quick.” Theroux peered at the screen where the first details of Box’s investigation were already scrolling up. “It’s going to look like everyone’s being investigated. They’re going to think they’re all under suspicion.”
“Well there’s not much I can do about that,” said Nathan irritably. “Strictly speaking, they are all under suspicion, aren’t they?”
When Theroux entered the communications module, Butler was staring at a console screen. The output had not been switched onto the main mixer, but Theroux knew what it was. “That’s confidential,” he said.
“What the hell does your man imagine he’s doing?” Butler demanded, still watching the small screen intently.
“You’re not supposed to be looking at it, Simon.”
“If he wanted it secret, he should have coded it properly. Jesus Christ, look at that. You do realize the bloody man’s got my background and employment record scrolling up here for anyone to see.”
“It’s not anyone that’s eyeballing a confidential transmission. And you must know that stuff already, right?”
“It’s the principle of the thing.”
“Yeah right. The principle of the thing? You couldn’t even spell the word.”
“T-H-I-N-G,” said Butler, finally looking up and grinning at Theroux. “So what is he up to?”
Theroux said, “It’s just a data check to see how good our security systems are.”
Butler hunched himself down slightly, and narrowed his eyes. “You always have a very smooth explanation,” he said in a passable imitation of Peter Lorre.
“Points?” asked Theroux.
“Five; you’re not nearly reluctant enough.”
“It’s The Maltese Falcon and the next line is,” Theroux essayed his more haphazard Humphrey Bogart, “’What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?’”
“That’s the worst Donald Duck I’ve ever heard,” said Butler. “You should stick to your Pluto impressions, they’re much more convincing. Where is Mickey Mouse by the way? Retired to his quarters to think deep thoughts and throw up?”
“Who’s covering for me in here?” asked Theroux.
“I am,” said Butler. “Don’t I always?”
“Operating solo as ever?”
“You meet a nicer class of person that way.”
Theroux sat down at the back-up console and flicked through the internal communicator circuits. “Pluto to Mickey Mouse,” he muttered. “Come in, Mickey Mouse.”
Nathan was alone in the suit storage section of Cargo Bay One. As he moved slowly along the line of spacesuits, he was making no attempt to combat the nausea-inducing weightlessness. Quite the contrary. Using the storage racks as springboards, he was twisting, rolling, bouncing off the walls and doing somersaults. At one point he pedalled his legs in a furious cycling motion to see what gyroscopic effects he could produce. There were none that he could detect. Had any of the regular personnel seen him they might have been forgiven for thinking that Nathan was just another zero-G tourist letting himself go the way most of them did. But that would have been a mistake. He was not playing, and he had the sick-bag to prove it.
“How are you doing?” Theroux’s voice suddenly boomed in his ear.
“Deaf!” Nathan snapped. “How the hell do I turn this down?”
With neat precision he halted an ‘upward’ swoop he had been practising, coming to rest against the ‘top’ of the cargo module, where he steadied himself delicately. He hung there for a moment trying to relax and stop all movement, but he found that complete stillness was impossible to achieve. He could not eliminate the small twitches and involuntary muscle-flexings which seemed to jog and nudge him.
“Sorry.” The volume of the voice in his ear had dropped sharply. “That better?”
“I’ll let you know when my head stops ringing,” he said, pushing himself off the wall and flying slowly back to the racks and the spacesuits he was supposed to be checking.
“Numbers tally?”
“So far,” said Nathan, who had only looked at the service inspection tag numbers on a couple of randomly selected suits to satisfy himself that Theroux did accurate work.
“How far have you got?”
After that he just glanced at the occasional serial number as part of his self-imposed training regime. “Halfway, give or take.” Once he had completed each bout of stomach-churning aerobatics, checking a hard-to-see number against Theroux’s interminable list seemed like a reasonable test of co-ordination and concentration.
“Feeling nauseous?”
“No David, I always go this attractive green colour when I’m having fun.”
“I did offer to do it.”
“Checking your own work is a fast way to make the same mistake twice,” Nathan said and thought, and in this case it would be a complete waste of time. There’s only one suit that would have been tampered with, and that’s back on Earth with Forensics who didn’t seem in any hurry to supply the appropriate list of inspection tag numbers. “Any response from Forensics?” he asked.
“Yeah. They want to know why we want to know.”
“‘Because I fucking say so, you bureaucratic groundsider prat’?” said Butler admiringly, as he slid uninvited into the seat next to Nathan and across the table from Theroux. If he realized he was interrupting their conversation, it clearly did not bother him. “That message,” he went on, “may just have saved your reputation out here. These security checks you’ve been running are not exactly popular, in case no-one’s mentioned it. I particularly liked the use of ‘groundsider’. That was subtle, extraordinarily subtle for a policeman, if I may say so.”
“You think that’s subtle,” said Nathan, “you should see the way I get rid of people I don’t want sitting next to me when I’m talking business.”
“You’re not supposed to talk business in the mess. Bad form. I don’t expect David to understand, being a colonial, and a tinted colonial at that, but you’re English. It should come instinctively to you.”
“Excuse us, will you,” said Nathan politely.
“Leaving already?”
“No.”
Butler looked hurt. “You want me to leave?” He looked at Theroux. “You realize you could get blackballed for this,” he said.
“Goodbye, Simon,” said Theroux amiably.
Butler got up. “I’m tempted not to tell you why I sat in the first place,” he said.
“Have you ever considered joining the job?” asked Nathan.
“The job?”
“Police work,” Nathan said and smiled. “You’d probably be very good at it. You have all t
he natural attributes of a top flight detective.”
“Is that right?”
Nathan nodded and still smiling said, “You’re nosy, thick-skinned, and won’t take ‘bugger off’ for an answer.” Then he allowed the smile to fade from his face.
Butler took a mini-CD from his pocket, and floated it towards Nathan. “Your list of serial numbers came through,” he said. “They’re on track twenty-nine.” Nathan made a clumsy grab, and bobbled the catch elaborately.
As the tiny, shiny disc flashed away, Theroux reached out and snatched it down. “That’s a dollar you owe the fund, Simon,” he said.
Back in the office, when they compared the list of serial numbers from Hendvorrsen’s suit with the list of numbers Theroux had originally taken, they found that one of the inspection tags was different by three digits. It was not a vital component. It had not been involved in the failure which killed Hendvorrsen. Box estimated an acceptable probability of human error in recording the number.
Theroux too found this explanation acceptable. “I could’ve taken the number down wrong. I must’ve done.”
“Three digits,” Nathan said thoughtfully.
Theroux shrugged. “If that’s the only mistake I made in a full rack check, it wasn’t a bad effort.”
“Maybe it was the only mistake someone else made.”
“In what, for Chrissakes?”
“A duplicate spacesuit? Rigged to fail.”
“Oh come on, Nathan. You want to kill a guy out here, it’s not that complicated. You can find a hundred ways to get dead.”
“The motive might dictate the method.”
“I thought motive was the easy part.”
“In theory there’s only one question: who stands to gain?”
“So?”
“So, you have to define ‘gain’.”
“Hendvorrsen died of asphyxia when the waste gas elimination on his suit went down. Chances are he was dead before he knew he was dying. Who stood to gain from that?”
“Box,” said Nathan.
“Is Box cued only to your voice print?” Theroux asked as Box’s indicators flickered on.
“Unless I instruct it otherwise.”
“Voice prints can be faked: you thought of that?”
“Anybody wants the thing that badly can have it.”
“You have an instruction?” asked Box, as the preset time limit was reached.
“Yes, Box I want to know if any of the off-Earth personnel has a connection with corporations involved in spacesuit technology, or sensitive strategic materials. Look also for links with extreme right wing political groups and anyone in the off-Earth purchasing agencies. Same Star Cop notification procedure as before. Thank you, Box.”
Theroux looked baffled. Nathan waited for the inevitable questions, hoping that he could come up with some plausible explanation.
“Sensitive strategic materials?”
“The confrontation commodities,” said Nathan. “There’s money to be made from tension and little wars, even little cold ones.”
“Right wing groups?”
“Crusaders for capitalism. Some Russians are still socialists at heart. Apart from the usual mafia.”
Then Theroux saw what he was getting at. “You think someone’s trying to get the suit servicing contract away from the Russians?” he asked, not trying to keep the disbelief from his face and voice.
“It’s a possibility,” said Nathan. Lee had thought it was a possibility.
It could be very profitable, if the right palms were greased in the purchasing departments.
You know it never really occurred to me before, but is that how you buy for Corner Store?
Nah. It’s against company policy. Besides, when they find out you’re sleeping with a policeman, you stop getting the worthwhile propositions.
And still Theroux did not ask the obvious question: why was this investigation being pushed out onto screens with little or no security, screens that people had been primed to sneak a look at?
When the most dangerous of them came looking for him, Nathan was alone in the Engineering Equipment Store.
It had been difficult to find places to practice his weightless techniques unobserved. He had managed two solo visits to Cargo Bay One; and he had played up the nausea to get time alone in the sleeping quarters. In other solitary moments when he had to be more circumspect – in the mess for example – he limited himself to practising hand-eye exercise; floating and retrieving small objects, or batting coins and food packs from hand to hand like an apprentice juggler who had yet to master the upward arc.
He was not really sure why it was important to him that no-one else should be aware that he was trying to improve his physical control and co-ordination. He knew it was partly embarrassment; he had never grown out of a childish shyness which had made him dislike being seen doing anything at which he was less than totally competent. There had to be more involved here, though, because as his skills improved, he instinctively strived to conceal them. This in itself forced him to progress further. It was a paradox he quite enjoyed – that he had to keep improving, in order to hide his continuing improvement. He half convinced himself that it was just another exercise, another way to develop the professionalism called for by the job. He knew he could not be as good as the people around him, but maybe he could make up for that by being better than they expected. You could improve the impact of a skill by making it an unexpected skill. It was always an advantage to have people underestimate you. But as he practised a controlled drift between the storage cages of construction materials, he was not sure what it was about this situation that made him feel that he needed such an advantage.
“That stuff you’ve been putting out about us is shit!”
Brownly shouted the last word as he stepped out from between the stacks. He was a tall, thin Irishman, and he was shaking with rage as he confronted Nathan. His naturally pale face, made almost translucent by months on the station, was flushed with angry blood, the colour clashing strangely with his close-cropped, red hair.
“What stuff is that?” Nathan asked, jerking himself down to the walking strip, trying to look as though he had been struggling for equilibrium.
“You know very well what stuff is that,” Goff said behind him.
Nathan spun round. It was a manoeuvre he could now manage easily, but he nonetheless allowed himself to lose contact with the floor strip, making it necessary to clutch at an equipment cage to steady himself.
“You are trying to make us the scapegoats,” Goff went on, “for the death of that…fool.”
The squat, dark-featured Swiss was an odd pairing with the gangling Irishman. They might have made a comic duo if their intentions had been less obviously aggressive. As it was, their grotesque contrast only served to emphasize the threat.
Nathan anchored himself again, standing so that he could look at each of the men without needing to turn round. His back was against the cage in case it came to a fight, though he hoped the move did not look defensive – that might be all the cue they needed.
The two men had good reason to be hostile. As Box refined and narrowed the definitions of what would constitute a suspect in the Lars Hendvorrsen killing, the names Brownly and Goff kept on showing up. The two of them were present at the crime scene; it was they who retrieved the body; they had technical backgrounds and a lot more EVA experience than anyone else out there that day; and now, most damning of all, there were share portfolios which had been carefully concealed through nominees and dummy companies. Here were incriminating links with corporations who might make substantial profits from a change in the status quo. A strong circumstantial case had been building against Brownly and Goff. It was happening in full view of anyone curious enough to put a small effort into eavesdropping, and that was probably most o
f the off-Earth community.
“I don’t know where you’re getting your information from,” Nathan said, “but it’s not very reliable, trust me.”
Brownly sneered, “Trust you?” Then, unable to contain himself, he shouted, “Our fuckin’ heads don’t zip up at the back, yeh bastard yeh!” and began to move down the walkway towards Nathan.
“Take it easy, Liam,” said Goff, also moving in Nathan’s direction.
“Listen to your friend, Liam,” Nathan said, watching Brownly’s advance and wondering how effective a kick to the balls would be in this situation.
“Shut your mouth!” Brownly shouted.
Nathan put his left hand behind him and grasped the mesh of the cage.
Goff said, “If you attack this man he will only use it to make things look worse for us.”
Brownly stopped. “How could they look worse?” he demanded. “He’s got us in the frame, Oggy. You’re too Swiss to understand.” He took a step closer. “You haven’t seen how the English branch of Europlod gets the job done.” He reached forward to grasp at the front of Nathan’s coveralls.
Still holding onto the cage with his left hand, Nathan grabbed Brownly’s wrist with his right. “I wouldn’t,” he said flatly. “Assaulting a police officer is an offence.”
“You’re an offence,” Brownly snarled and pushing forward, his feet braced as leverage, he jabbed a punch with his free hand.
Although the chance of a fight had occurred to him, the punch came as a shock to Nathan. He was used to the aftermath of violence, but the habit of aggression was not part of his life. Automatically, he ducked down and the punch took him high on the forehead. There was no pain but a sudden flash of outraged fury blazed through him. He straightened, and using his hold on the cage to keep himself anchored and his grasp on the man’s wrist to give the leverage, he kicked up hard between Brownly’s legs. It had no effect except to detach Brownly from the floor strip, twist him free of Nathan’s grip, and push him backwards in an untidy somersault.
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