Theroux left the console and headed for the hatch. “Take over. Nathan Spring’s on empty, resus is on the way to lock B, Butler’s AWOL.”
Vanhalsen moved to block his way. “Have you got him?” he demanded.
“Got who?”
“Brownly, who else!”
“Brownly’s been disposed of.” Theroux ducked past and hopped through the hatch.
“What does that mean?” Vanhalsen called after him.
“He got himself wasted,” Theroux shouted back, unsure why the ugly pun sprang so readily to mind and wondering uneasily where Simon Butler had gone.
“Jesus,” Vanhalsen muttered as he keyed in to the duty log, “when did it get so dangerous out here.”
Nathan was very sleepy…sleepy very…sleepy… He kept blanking out. Despite concentrating fiercely on the station surface flowing past him he could not keep his attention focused. He drifted as he drifted, his mind drawing back behind his eyes until it was so far from them there was no link could connect them, nothing –
He woke again thickly. He had to stay awake. He was not sure why. Why did he have to stay awake? He looked ahead in the direction of the airlock. Christ it was a long way away and his line of travel was not exactly right not to reach it right exactly right –
The resuscitation team and Theroux arrived together at the airlock. Butler was already there, suiting up. “I thought it was quickest,” he snapped before Theroux could ask and went on, “I didn’t want to lose another one.” He pushed the helmet at Theroux and bent his head forward. “Who’s on the monitors?”
Theroux said, “Vanhalsen.”
“Get him to patch you in to the suit circuit. It’ll save time.”
“Why no blue code one?” Theroux asked as he hurriedly worked the helmet down into its seating. Butler’s answer was too late to be heard through the sealed suit.
To Vanhalsen’s eye the man was obviously trying too hard. He was making difficulties for himself. Having overshot the airlock he seemed to be trying to turn round now rather than simply reverse the movement. And manoeuvring the other man was proving to be almost beyond him.
He repeated the only instruction he could think of which might help: “Take it slower, Simon,” if only the fool would listen. The body was inert but without weight intervening that should have made Spring easier to handle not more difficult.
“Stop telling me that! There isn’t time to take it slower!”
Vanhalsen watched the screen helplessly as Butler shoved Spring back towards the airlock and immediately lost control of him.
“Oh shit!”
He jetted in pursuit, using too much thrust so that he pushed them both past the airlock once more. It would have been funny if the time he was taking was not costing Spring whatever chance he might have of survival. He was turning to try yet again when, quite unexpectedly, the outer hatch of the airlock closed.
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” Butler bellowed. “Who in God’s name is playing silly buggers with the automatics?!”
Seconds later small plumes of gas flash-clouded from the safety valves as someone used the emergency venting cycle. Then the hatch opened again and a figure emerged and made straight for where Butler was still struggling with Spring.
“Who is this, what’s going on?” demanded Butler.
“I don’t know,” Vanhalsen said and opened a general channel. “Operative exiting secondary EVA, B for Baker, identify yourself please.”
“David Theroux,” was the terse response, “now shut the fuck up both of you and lets get Nathan inside.”
Nathan Spring, Chief Superintendent on attachment to the ISPF, was dead when they got him through the airlock and into the station.
Chapter 12
“How do you feel?” Theroux asked.
“I’ve got a splitting headache,” Nathan said, “apart from that…”
“Apart from that you feel like shit, right?”
Nathan wanted to pull a duvet up round his neck and turn his face into a soft pillow but the med-lab sleeping frame into which he was strapped offered none of these options. “I’ve had better days,” he said.
“It is not likely,” Lancine remarked as she peered without much comprehension at the readings on the total-body monitor to which Nathan was hooked up, “that you ’ave ’ad luckier days. Pieter estimates that you were within seconds of being irrecoverable.”
“Pieter?” asked Nathan.
“Pieter Loos,” said Theroux and, when Nathan did not respond, prompted, “Belgian? Biochemist? The only trained paramedic on the station.”
Nathan sighed, “Yes, yes. I didn’t ask for a CV.”
“But you do know who I mean?” Theroux persisted.
“Yes I do know who you mean.”
“Well?”
“Well what for Christ’s sake?”
“Well what is it that he does?”
Nathan sighed again. “I don’t know what this is about but I’m not in the mood for games.”
“He leads…?” Theroux said as though questioning a very young child.
“A life of unspeakable debauchery; the off-Earth weightlifting rankings; what do you want me to say? He leads… the resuscitation team: what?”
Theroux looked relieved. “He leads the resuscitation team,” he said. “And his estimate was ninety seconds to brain-death. That’s a pretty good margin.” He grinned and shrugged. “Hell you don’t want to get back too early right, why waste the time?”
Lancine said, “It seems that there are no signs of physical injury. The impairment of brain function is ’owever a possibility. You will require periodic monitoring for a number of years to decide whether this ’as happened.”
“A year,” said Theroux encouragingly, “eighteen months tops,” and then drawing Lancine aside lowered his voice to murmur. “Is now a real good time to be discussing this, Françoise?”
Nathan gave up any thought of comfortable infirmity, without Lee to nurse him it would be no fun anyway, and began to undo the straps and release himself from the frame.
Theroux hurried to restrain him. “Hey, whoa! Computer instruction is you remain on that monitor for twenty-four hours while it diagnoses and prescribes.”
“I don’t have to stay here for it do that,” Nathan said and finished unstrapping. He disconnected the standby treatment lines and switched the body monitor to remote. “And could we avoid one of those cliché ridden scenes where the ill-natured patient discharges himself against advice from interfering bystanders.”
“Interfering bystanders?” Theroux asked.
Lancine said, “If David ’ad not interfered you would not be alive now.”
Nathan had been struggling to get free of the sleep-sack and now when he was almost out he realized that he was naked. Embarrassed he stopped moving, half in and half out of the sack, and said, “That was then, this is now. Interfering is a bad habit to get into.”
“Well fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” Theroux murmured, and moved to the hatch saying over his shoulder, “I’ve got peace officer work to do. There’s two stiffs to bag-and-tag and computer forensics to agree with.”
“Wait!” Nathan said, more sharply than he intended. Christ his head really hurt. It made thinking difficult and tact impossible. Theroux stopped and turned. Nathan said to Lancine, “If you’d excuse us please. This is police business.” She looked for a moment as though she was going to object, then she said, “Of course.”
On her way out she plucked a pair of coveralls from a locker and floated them back in Theroux’s direction. She hopped through the hatch saying as she went, “Your colleague needs those. He looks ridiculous wearing that sleep-sack.”
Without being asked Theroux checked the coveralls for a bug. Box registered nothing. Puzzled, Nathan sa
id, “Box please re-scan for listening devices.” The unexpected result had been confirmed by the time he had freed himself from the sack and while he struggled into the clean pair Theroux checked the coveralls still in the locker. They were not bugged either.
Nathan said, “We’ll need to find out why this lot are different. Make a note, David.”
“I’ll add it to the list,” Theroux said.
“Just don’t forget, okay,” said Nathan irritably. He was clammy and shivering now. The coveralls stuck to the small of his back and the backs of his legs. His face and neck were cold and slick with sweat. As well as the blinding headache, the horribly familiar nausea had returned. And this time he knew he wasn’t going to be able to control it. He looked round in desperation. Wordlessly Theroux handed him a sickbag and he put it to his face and retched miserably.
Theroux said, “I have the feeling that if the computer’d said get moving you’d have stayed where you were. Like you were supposed to?”
“There are two more corpses out at the construction zone,” Nathan said when he got his breath back. “They’re in the main module… B7 is it?”
Theroux’s reaction was muted. “I don’t think we’re missing anyone else. Just Brownly and Goff.”
“These are strangers,” Nathan said. “Strangers to me at least.”
“What were they doing there?”
“They were trying to kill me.”
Theroux nodded. “That’s what held you up?”
“Fighting for my life wasn’t included in time allowed to the outward maximum. Stupid oversight.”
“And you killed these two strangers.” Theroux’s tone was neutral but though he tried to keep his face expressionless the scepticism was there to see.
Nathan saw it clearly but he was too preoccupied and uncomfortable to react. “I didn’t have to make it look like an accident,” he said. “How good are the station radars?”
“Compared to what?”
It was a reasonable question Nathan realized but it irritated him anyway. “Are they precise enough to locate an individual within a few feet?”
“Your would-be killers are not likely to have snuck past them undetected if that’s what you mean.”
“It isn’t what I mean. Don’t interpret the bloody question just answer it,” Nathan snapped. “Have we got accurate, close range, small-scale radars?”
“No.”
So. “So one of them was watching me.” It was further confirmation if he needed it. The question was could he prove what he now knew.
“One of them was watching you, waiting for a chance to jump out.”
“That wasn’t what I meant either,” Nathan said and yawned.
“Listen,” Theroux said, “I know you’re not going to want to hear this but a breathout can play weird games with your head. It’s possible that none of what you remember out there really happened.”
“It’s possible that none of what anyone remembers really happened,” Nathan said and yawned again. He was suddenly quite sleepy. “Has the machine already given me some sort of medication?”
Theroux looked at the treatment readouts and then called up the user notes. “Relaxants mostly,” he said. “To counter the stuff the resus team used. Stabilize you.”
“I think,” said Nathan drowsily. “it overdid them. Go and retrieve those bodies, David. The thing about police work, good police work, is that it doesn’t require faith. Just evidence.” Then he let go and fell into sleep, floating there where he was, in the middle of the med-lab.
The orbit shuttle was on the other side of the construction zone, hidden from the main station radars by the complex geometry of building work in the foreground, and the jumble of junk which drifted through the background of any scan.
Theroux remembered.
“I didn’t realize you still couldn’t tell shit from shuttle.”
“Without the computer nobody can, not even you.”
“Don’t take any bets on that, David old love,”
They must have come in slow, he thought, and on exactly the right trajectory. They went to a lot of trouble. This was a well planned crime.
The corpses were where Nathan had said they’d be. They were a mess but their IDs said they were freelance shuttle-jocks out of Moonbase. They had borrowed the transportation and the flight was neither authorized nor cleared.
This intelligence had amused Simon Butler inordinately. “How can Moonbase tell? Their traffic control is currently being fucked by one, Sally McMasters, which is not inappropriate since rumour has it she did a lot of that to get the job in the first place.”
“I hadn’t heard that rumour,” Theroux said.
“Every woman in a senior position is the subject of such rumours,” said Lancine, resting her hands on the desk in front of her and drumming her fingers lightly.
Butler said cheerfully, “I don’t start them I just pass them on,” and helped himself to another squeeze-pack of the general manager’s coffee. “How is it your coffee is so much better than the stuff in the mess?”
“I give sexual favours to the Beverages Department of the Quartermaster Division,” she said without smiling.
“Now that rumour I had heard,” Theroux said but Lancine remained unsmiling.
“’Ow much longer have we to wait for ’im?” she asked, drumming her fingers a little harder.
Theroux was not sure whether the gesture was theatrical or an uncharacteristic sign of real agitation. Before he needed to make up his mind though and frame an appropriate answer, Nathan shambled in.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.” He moved clumsily to the vacant seat and pulled himself onto it. “Doesn’t get any easier does it?”
“Life?” asked Butler, now fully into his amused Englishman persona.
“Weightlessness.”
If that were true Theroux found himself thinking, how come you took out two experienced attackers with an L-tip switchblade?
It doesn’t get any easier? Nathan thought, why do I persist with these games, and said, “I expect you’re wondering why I asked for this meeting.”
Butler chortled. “Presumably you’re going to tell us whodunnit.”
“I fail to see the ’umour,” Lancine said and the expression on her face left no doubt of that. “Death is not funny.”
Nathan smiled at Butler. “I expect you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here to the library – is that the idea?” he asked.
Before Butler could reply Lancine snapped, “We ’ave a serious problem here.”
She looked suddenly older as she glared at Nathan. It was odd, he thought, how quickly fine bone structure became simply thin and haggard under stress.
“This station,” she went on, “now ’as a death rate in excess of any of the other off-Earth installations.”
“Whadya mean now ?” Theroux demanded. “Christ we’ve been above average for months.”
“But we haven’t been killing visiting celebrities or stuffing each other into waste disposal units,” remarked Butler.
He really did seem to find it funny, Nathan thought. Was it funny? He wondered for a jangled moment whether he’d miscalculated all this. “That was a mistake,” he said.
“A mistake?” said Lancine, expressionless with anger.
“Ill-thought out,” said Nathan. “A stupid departure from a successful strategy.”
“He is still on medication, I imagine,” Butler said quietly, looking at Lancine.
“The system worked perfectly well,” Nathan continued, “when killings were done by strangers from unrelated locations.”
“What killings are these exactly?” asked Butler.
“Deaths from suit failure,” Theroux said. “Deaths made to look like they were from suit failure.�
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Butler smiled. “Oh not that again,” he said. “David old thing, does the word obsession mean anything to you?” He turned the smile towards Lancine but she was staring fixedly at Nathan.
“It was an elegant MO designed simply to fool the computers,” Nathan said. “Elegance and simplicity are usually synonymous in such things.”
“What things?” she asked.
“Programmes, investigations, crimes.”
She nodded. “Continuez.”
“If the death looked like an accident; and if there was no obvious motive for anything else; and if all the safety procedures were in operation; and if everyone on the station was accounted for…”
Theroux said, “If it looked like a duck and it walked like a duck and it quacked like a duck, odds-on it was a duck.”
“The computers have a weakness for probabilities,” said Nathan. “Odds-on is enough for them.”
“But you know better,” murmured Butler. “Despite all evidence of anatidae, that’s duckdom to the uninitiated, you recognize it’s not a duck when you see one.”
“And the mistake?” Lancine asked. “What caused that?”
“Jesus!” said Theroux looking at Nathan. “It was you right? You did it.”
Butler was chortling again. “That’s original anyway,” he said. “The detective did it. What’s the procedure in cases like this, is the arrest put out to private tender?”
“You were using Box,” Theroux went on, “to feed all that stuff onto the open screens because you wanted to spook them. That’s why you made such a big production about going outside. You knew you’d be a target.”
All three were staring at Nathan now. It wasn’t the reaction he wanted at this point and he was annoyed with himself. He hadn’t got any bloody proof of what he was saying and without it he needed to develop a line as carefully as if he was conducting an interrogation. This lot was all over the sodding place. It was his own fault. He should have briefed Theroux beforehand. He couldn’t really blame the man for thinking on his feet, well on his arse anyway, though he could blame him for blurting out his conclusions. Why was it that Americans never seemed to understand the advantages of discretion.
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