Star Cops

by Chris Boucher

  “Aren’t you sure?”

  “I can’t remember ever not knowing her.” He thought, I can’t imagine not knowing her for all that’s left of forever. The only person who doesn’t know you’re dead is you… Oh God, Lee, you are dead.

  “Sir?” murmured Corman to Devis, who gave her a baleful look which she ignored as she drew him to one side. “The man’s obviously in shock. Don’t you think maybe we should give him a little time…?”

  Devis glanced across at Nathan, who stared unseeing at the playback screen. “Just star temperament, that,” he said and smiled at the pun. Corman was not amused.

  Devis switched off the playback and said to Nathan, “I don’t think there’s much point in going on with this at the moment. I shall want to talk to you again.”

  “Yes,” said Nathan. “I’ll want to talk to you once I’ve cleared my head. There’s something not kosher about this whole thing.”

  “You think not?”

  “They left a message on the screen, the place still in darkness with the light and elevator system overrides still there for us to find. I can’t believe they carried out such a careful plan so carelessly.”

  Devis frowned and said, “Yeah, well, you can safely leave us to worry about that.”

  “Leave you to worry about it?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Someone walks into my home,” Nathan said getting to his feet, “and kills the only real friend I ever had, and I should leave it to you to worry about it?” He began to climb the steps towards the exit at the back of the tiered seats.

  “Unless you’d prefer a charge of obstructing justice?” Devis called after him.

  Nathan turned back down the steps towards him. “I’d prefer some co-operation,” he raged, “so that I can catch the bastard who did this!”

  “So that you can catch the bastard who did this?” Devis shouted and started up the steps. “Listen, glory boy. You might be flashy as all hell up there, but down here you’re just another citizen.”

  “Like fuck I am. I’m a copper. I paid my dues at the door.”

  “Brotherhood of the Job?” Devis sneered. “I don’t think so, Commander Spring.”

  They were facing each other now. Nathan could see the dull resentment in the other man’s eyes. “No neither do I, Chief Inspector Devis,” he said.

  “This is my case,” said Devis. “I suggest you be very careful to remember that.”

  “I just want them caught,” said Nathan flatly. Somehow he didn’t have the energy to fight with this fool any more. He didn’t even want to listen to him.

  “They will be,” Devis was saying. “All you’ve got to do is answer the rest of my questions. Then you can hop on a shuttle and go back to playing spaceman with that public relations exercise you call a police force. Leave detective work to real policemen.”

  Nathan turned away from him. “Let me know when you’ve checked with the computer and found out what the rest of your questions are,” he said as he headed for the exit again. “And I’d suggest a hard copy, listing them in order of importance. You won’t want to overtax yourself, will you?”

  “You’ve run the full list? Asked all the questions,” Theroux had asked, “and there’s nothing? No fault of any kind? That just leaves us with a glitch in the system. A million to one shot. Is that what we’re saying here?” He had touched the key and an electronic signal indicated that his mic was now deactivated and the communications console had switched to receive.

  On the small screen Mike’s face continued to stare at him without reaction. “Knock once for yes, twice for no,” Theroux muttered to it, aware that this was in poor taste considering the guy really was dead. It would be minutes before the frozen face could respond. The outgoing transmission had to reach Dædalus, where it would animate Theroux’s blankly staring face on its communications screen, then Mike’s answer had to make the return trip here to Moonbase and the open console.

  The delays inherent in talking over such distances made for halting conversations, which in turn made for occasional misunderstandings and wanderings from the point. For this reason, most off-Earth communications consoles incorporated Longcom-Prog which built up a record of developing exchanges and made available an ongoing summary or a full transcription, and even offered prompts to guide a dialogue back to the course it had identified and analyzed. Not everyone was comfortable with this, but most people used the system, as Theroux used it now, because it was there and because if you didn’t and you fucked up it was that much harder to justify yourself. Longcom-Prog was a major solution to a minor problem and, Theroux thought in passing, it was a classic example of Nathan Spring’s ‘anything that can be used to stop people thinking for themselves’…

  “That’s about the strength of it,” Mike said from the screen. “Everything is faultless, as far as we can tell. The good ship Dædalus is as sound as the day she was commissioned. A million to one shot. Wouldn’t you bloody know it? I never won a thing in my life before.”

  Lara stuck her face into scanner range and said, “Oh, thanks a lot.” Despite her shaved head, or maybe because of it, she looked very young and vulnerable. Theroux felt a sudden urge to protect her, a strangely sexual longing, almost an ache.

  Mike said, “I never thought of you as a prize. More of a just reward for a clean and virtuous life.”

  Lara said, “I can see the logic of that from your point of view, but look at it from my side. I’ve always been clean and virtuous, so how come I ended up with you?”

  Theroux watched them play-acting. He couldn’t decide whether to be touched or irritated by the ritual performance of grace under pressure. Cargo-jock stereotypes joking with death. Why bother, for Chrissakes? Who was it for? Surely not for him, a fast receding stranger, a red-shifted cop assigned the shitty job of accident investigator because he happened to be there. He guessed it must be for other people they knew would be watching. And for the record. And for posterity. It’s a good day to die. No blindfold. Long live freedom! Viva Zapata, viva Mexico! Shit, what a fucking waste.

  “This is not relevant to the matter in hand,” prompted the flat, unhuman tones of Longcom-Prog. “A reminder of the questions still to be addressed will precede your responding transmission.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Theroux muttered, and disconnected the system abruptly. It queried the disconnection and chimed a warning alarm which Theroux also disconnected. The technicians on duty in the European Operations Suite looked up and glanced in his direction but none of them stared or spoke. Etiquette required they give the impression that they were not listening, though obviously they were. Theroux was aware too that there was a certain coolness towards him, but now he was a full-time copper he was getting used to that.

  On the screen, Mike turned his attention back to camera and spoke directly at Theroux. “Listen, we know this isn’t what you want to hear. We know it would make things easier for you if we could find a reason why this happened.” He shrugged and grinned. “Christ, it might even make things easier for us.”

  “I don’t see how,” Lara put in.

  “Be nice to know it wasn’t our fault,” he said.

  Lara said, “Dead’s dead.”

  “So?”

  “So don’t you think that’s too late for blame, love?”

  No, Theroux thought, I don’t think so. There may not be life after death, but there’s blame without question and without end. Guilt goes on.

  “We’ll go on while you run the accident simulations and whatever else,” said Mike. “For whatever reason. You’ve got one last chance to see if we missed something. Only don’t take too long, David. We haven’t decided whether to wait it out or not.”

  Lara’s face pushed into frame again as she said, “Let’s not rush it all right? I’m barely used to being dead, and already the experi
ence leaves me cold. This is nothing like what it said in the brochure.”

  The electronic bleep ended the transmission, and the faces of Mike and Lara froze on the screen; she smiling, he looking pensive, both of them looking lost.

  “What will you tell them?”

  Theroux had no idea. He looked up to find it was the Base Co-ordinator, Roland Paton who had asked the dumb damn question. He must have wandered through from the Secretariat while the message was coming in, and he was standing now at Theroux’s shoulder peering intently at the images of Mike and Lara. Paton was a slightly built, dapper Frenchman. Why in the hell was it that all Frenchmen were dapper, just as all Frenchwomen were elegant? And how did the guy contrive to look so neat and well-groomed in a standard issue coverall? P’raps it was the job. Just an illusion because he was as close to a CEO as the Moonbase set-up had. It wasn’t only the Brits who bred the habit of deference into their people. “I don’t know, sir,” Theroux said.

  “Will they self-destruct?”

  Fox, the duty Traffic and Logistics Officer – a Scot who seemed to Theroux to be constantly on the verge of violence – jumped up from his workstation and two-hopped to the coffee dispenser. “Their options are a bit limited, wouldn’t you say?” he remarked harshly, as he drew coffee into a tall beaker.

  Theroux noticed the polite fiction that no-one had been listening to the communications with Dædalus had been unceremoniously dropped. Paton glared in the direction of Fox, but otherwise ignored the comment. “I meant, of course, immediately. Is it your opinion that they might do it immediately?”

  “I hope not, sir,” said Theroux, “but it is a matter for them. I don’t feel I should even try to influence their decision.”

  Paton nodded unhappily. “Yes.” He moved towards the passageway which connected EOS to where the Secretariat had its offices, in the central hub of the wheel-shaped underground complex.

  Unlike on the Earth orbit stations, in the Moon’s one sixth-G environment it was not the convention to keep the feet in contact with the floor. Velcro walking strips and slippers were provided in all the installations just as they were on the zero-G stations, but unlike the heel-and-toe skill of weightless walking, control-hopping was what separated an off-Earther from a groundsider here on Moonbase. Smooth soled footwear was the mark of the lunar professional.

  Paton was a slighter man than Fox, his movements less extravagant, but his looping strides showed the same basic technique. Since it was this technique that everyone used, Theroux had been quietly trying to perfect it ever since he arrived, and now he watched the casual expertise of the Frenchman’s departure with some small envy.

  “I will be in my office should you need me, Inspector Theroux,” Paton said, as he disappeared through the bulkhead pressure doors.

  “As if anyone could possibly need him. Man’s pathetic,” Fox said loudly. “I cannot understand how he came to be in that job.”

  Gina Andreotti looked up from logging communications traffic and said, “You cannot understand how he came to be in that job and you did not, is this not so?”

  “Senior management? Moi? Christ, no, this is not so. Not me, sweetheart, I’m strictly a labourer in the vineyard.”

  “Sally McMasters thinks you want her job.”

  “That’s different. I think whoever’s in that job should do good work, not just give good head.”

  “Sexist Neanderthal,” Ernst Kohl muttered, as he ran the calculations of the life-support refunds accruing to the European operation over the previous month.

  Fox looked across at the Section Quartermaster. “Did you speak, Ernst?” he asked.

  “I find your manners are not good,” said Kohl, his thin face pinched with disapproval and not a little anxiety.

  “You sanctimonious little shite,” Fox said amiably, “you wouldn’t know good manners if they threw up in your lap.”

  “You see, that is exactly what I mean. You are crude, Guy.”

  “He was joking, Ernst,” Gina said, shaking her head and smiling.

  “Does Roland Paton have a personal connection with the Dædalus crew?” Theroux asked of no-one in particular, glancing round the wide but claustrophobic room.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Fox said, “Lara’s his love-child. That the sort of thing you have in mind?”

  “I wondered why he was so concerned,” said Theroux. “I wondered if anyone had any ideas?”

  “You’re the detective,” Fox sneered.

  “Dædalus is carrying a lot of Professor Paton’s most recent work,” Kohl said. “It must be…” He gestured with his hands as he reached for the appropriate words.

  “A real sickener,” Fox finished for him.

  “Paton’s a biologist, right?” Theroux asked.

  “Current specialization: cryogenics,” Fox said. “So at a guess, that’s one part of the Dædalus’s cargo that a colony on a freezing hellhole like Mars can manage without.”

  “Mars is a logical location to pursue ultra-low temperature research,” said Kohl primly.

  Fox sipped his coffee. “Life support supplies would have been more use to them. But it’s largely academic now.”

  “We haven’t checked the cargo yet,” Theroux said, more or less thinking aloud.

  “We haven’t?” asked Fox. “Who ‘we’, exactly?”

  Theroux was conscious that the man seemed to be getting more aggressive. He wondered if the coffee was affecting him. “I didn’t ask Mike and Lara to check the cargo. I guess I should’ve done.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?” Fox demanded. “Do you like pestering the dead? Do you get some sort of kick out of it?” A single stride brought him to the communications console and he stared down at Theroux as if he was only waiting for an answer to begin the fight.

  “Stop it, Guy,” said Gina quietly. “He’s doing his job.”

  “It’s a shitty job!” Fox snarled.

  Theroux nodded sombrely. “You got that right.”

  “Then why do it? Let them go in peace, man.”

  “I can’t. You know I can’t. It’s standard operating procedure. Policy.” Theroux regretted the word as soon as he said it.

  “Policy? What’s the fuck is ‘policy’ supposed to mean?!”

  “It means,” Gina interrupted calmly, “that we all need to know if there is a design fault in that ship.”

  Fox turned to look at Gina. “Design fault, my arse,” he said finally, as though he had suddenly become very weary. “You know as well as I do the only design fault in that ship won’t be investigated at all.”

  “Oh yeah,” Theroux asked, “why’s that?”

  Fox headed towards the other passageway which led from the European Operations Suite, this one linking it to the outer ring where the mess and recreation areas were located. “I’m taking a break, Gina,” he said.

  Theroux raised his voice. “You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Fox.”

  Fox did not look back. “Question?”

  “Why won’t it be investigated?”

  “Because your average Star Cop,” said Fox, “couldn’t find his bum with both hands.” Still without looking back, he went out through the pressure doors.

  Theroux got up from the communications console and hopped rather clumsily to where Gina was sitting. “Was it something I said?” he asked.

  She was a good-looking woman, short dark curls framing a squarish face, big eyes, big breasts, legs that wouldn’t quit, all the things he found attractive except for the most important one: she obviously wasn’t attracted to him in the slightest.

  “He and Mike were friends,” she said.

  “That’s it?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know him that well.”

  “He seemed to think you understood what he was talking a
bout. You know as well as I do, that’s what he said.”

  “He was wrong.”

  “You sure?”

  “Are you interrogating me, Inspector?”

  Theroux smiled his best smile. He had been practising that, too. He was never going to do it as well as Nathan Spring did, but half as effective would still make it a pretty useful device. “Were Mike and Lara popular?” he asked.

  Gina said, “They were famous.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  She considered for a moment then she said, “They were lovers. Lovers are popular at a distance. Distance is difficult, in a place like this.”

  Theroux thought, it’s not difficult any more – not for them, that’s for damn sure.

  Gina said, “They will be more popular than before.”

  “Could you patch a call through to Earth Central for me?” Theroux asked.

  “You could do that for yourself,” she said. “It’s a standard console.”

  “To the one in our new office,” he jerked a thumb in the direction of the inner complex. “It isn’t fully plumbed in yet, but I figured if anyone could manage it…” He tried the smile again.

  She didn’t react, but she did say, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Without looking up from his workstation Ernst Kohl murmured, low but distinct, “Does he have call authorization codes?”

  “Muttering’s ill-mannered, Ernst,” Theroux said loudly. “And yes, I do have authorization codes.” He waved his ID from the ISPF, unexpectedly enjoying the feeling of power. “It’s police business.”

  Nathan sipped his coffee and frowned at Theroux on the main screen. “A glitch in the system?”

  “Standard engineer-speak for: could happen to anyone, don’t uncross your fingers,” Theroux said, shifting his position a bit, trying instinctively, and pointlessly, to get a better view from the scanner.

  Nathan realized that on Moonbase his screen image would be partial and irritating but he couldn’t bring himself to sit in the optimum position at the workstation. Lee hadn’t sat there, he knew, but it made no difference. The truth was, he couldn’t sit anywhere in the apartment. It was irrational, but he felt that if he sat down, he would be accepting something, moving on, and he wasn’t ready to do that. “No, that’s not good enough, David,” he said.