Star Cops

by Chris Boucher

  The youth rushed at him, left shoulder down, hatchet raised in his right hand. The silent charge caught him before he was fully upright, hitting him in the ribs, knocking the breath out of him, and spinning him back down so that a savage swipe with the hatchet missed him only narrowly.

  Nathan scrambled away and snatched the gun from his pocket. While he was searching for the safety catch, he fumbled, juggled with it desperately, and then dropped it on the ground. In the flat moonlit shadows, the gun vanished. He bent quickly to feel for it. It wasn’t there. As he groped around he shouted breathlessly, “I’m a copper! Fuck off, kid, before I run you in!”

  This time he didn’t even see the attack coming. He looked up just as a feint with the hatchet flashed at his face. He jerked his head away and lurched upright. The kick to his groin ended any thought of fighting back and he doubled over. The youth kneed him in the face, then kicked him in the stomach, and kicked his legs out from under him.

  Nathan fell hard, but he was a long way past feeling that. He would have been sick if it wasn’t for the pain; if there’d been anything left to be sick with. He retched weakly. “Oh Christ,” he whispered. He wanted to curl up round the agony, but there was too much of it. He wanted to curl up and die, but if he did, he would die – he knew that much. He knew he couldn’t lie there. He had to move, because if he didn’t move, he would be chopped up and scalped and whatever else this little brute could think of. He pushed at the path, dragged his knees under him and heaved himself onto all fours. “Don’t make me hurt you, kid,” he mumbled as he began to lose control and tilt to one side. He shoved his hand out a long way to correct the imbalance and put it on the gun. Hope surged through him. He grabbed up the gun and waved it about unsteadily. “I’ve got a gun here! Don’t make me use it!” he croaked. He struggled back into a more or less upright position, and stood swaying and peering around. He couldn’t see the urban apache. Where the fucking hell was he? “Where the fucking hell are you?” Had he run off? Please God let him have run off.

  He took a few shuffling steps. He was giddy and nauseous. New pains seared out of his guts, spreading down through his legs and cramping up his arms. He remembered the seat. He badly wanted to sit down. Unsteadily, he made his way towards the wall and he had almost reached it when he fell over the body.

  The urban apache was lying on his back, stretched out and staring blankly at the stars. One hand was clenched into a fist, the other still gripped the hatchet. Holding the pistol pointed squarely between the unblinking eyes, Nathan gingerly felt the neck for any sign of a pulse, but the youth was safely dead. He looked smaller now, already old and helpless. Nathan pushed him over. There was a warm, wet hole, small and about a hand’s breadth below the left shoulder-blade.

  “All right, where are you?” Nathan said. “Hullo? Come out, come out wherever you are? Whoever you are?” He sat back on his heels, as the temporarily forgotten pains surged back. “Oh shit,” he said, “I think I’m going to be sick,” and he retched until he was sobbing for breath.

  When he finally stopped, a voice close by whispered, “Sorry about all that, Commander. I didn’t bring you here for someone else to kill you.”

  Still breathless, Nathan managed to say, “Come out where I can see you.”

  “Why should I?” the voice whispered, and with what could have been a snigger added, “I can see you perfectly well.”

  Abruptly Nathan was sure that the urban apache had been a playful child compared to whoever this was. Clutching the gun tightly, he stumbled the short distance to the wall and pressed his back against it. Carefully, he raised the gun in front of him and arranged his hands in the correct combat position on the grip.

  “Don’t bother,” sneered the whisperer. “You’ve already demonstrated your expertise with our friend there.”

  “We all have our off-days,” said Nathan, trying to decide where the voice was coming from. The whispering made it hard to pinpoint. Was that why he was doing it? Or was it some sort of theatrical scare tactic?

  “Even on my worst day, a UA would have been no more than a casual irritant.”

  “Did you kill him?” Nathan asked, glancing backwards and forwards along the front of the ruin, making himself giddy in the process.

  “Yes.”

  He was behind the wall, Nathan decided. It was the only place he could be. Nathan he tried to see which end was the easiest to get round. “Speak softly and carry a pig-sticker, right?” he said, reminding himself that without Lee, there was no-one to recognize the wordplay, reminding himself that without Lee there was no-one… He chose the more overgrown end of the wall – because he hoped it was the less obvious approach – and crept towards it.

  “Now we come to the main event,” whispered the voice. “Now it’s your turn, Spring. You are next.”

  Nathan stopped. He should have known. Actually, it wasn’t that much of a surprise; perhaps he did know. He moved on.

  “Yes, that’s right,” the whisper gloated. “Even you must have worked out by now that it was me killed your lady.”

  Nathan reached the end of the wall. Whoever it was did not seem to have moved position. What tone there was in the voice did not seem to have changed either. Maybe he’d outflanked him; maybe the bastard had underestimated him enough to give him a chance. If killing the bastard was his only chance… Something in him hoped that killing the bastard was his only chance. He checked the settings on the gun and took three slow, deep breaths. He was ready for the final plunge round the wall, ready as he’d ever be, ready or not here I come. He tensed himself.

  Before he could move, there was a loud shout from the lakeside path. “Armed police officer! Freeze!”

  A burst of shots crackled and small calibre slugs spattered off the top of the wall somewhere behind Nathan. Without thinking, he crashed forward through the brambles and evergreen scrub, and ducked round the corner of the ruin. Someone was running away, up a shallow slope towards a stand of spindly pines. He fired a couple of shots after the indistinct figure and watched helplessly as it disappeared into the trees.

  When he came back out from behind the wall, he found Sergeant Corman bending over the corpse. He leaned his shoulder against the rough brickwork and asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “I was following you,” she said.

  “Oh, that was you, was it?”

  Corman looked up. “You mean you lost me deliberately?”

  In fact, Nathan had not been aware of anyone following him. He had made a routine double shuffle but that was all. “Did you see him?” he asked. “Did you see the suspect?” The adrenaline rush was subsiding rapidly, and exhausting pain was draining back.

  “No,” she said.

  “Then what in God’s name were you shooting at?”

  “I saw a movement.”

  “Probably me,” he said tiredly. “You were probably shooting at me.”

  “It was on the wall above you,” she said. “A figure. Something.”

  “Get away from that,” said Nathan as she turned her attention back to the dead youth. “You know better than to interfere with a crime scene.”

  She stood up and moved away from the body. Nathan made his way to the bench and sat down. “Tape off the area,” he said, leaning his elbows on his knees and putting his head in his hands. “I want a category A forensic. Everybody here, the whole turnout and double fucking quick.”

  Almost everybody had turned out. Technicians from most of the shifts offered their services, and for a while the European Operations Suite had ground to an over-manned halt. It had been Paton, demonstrating an unexpected taste for management, who had rapidly pulled together a project team and got all the specialist parts of it concentrating on every necessary aspect of the problem. Once they were working, however, he reverted immediately to his normal ineffectual behaviour, and by the time Therou
x came back from his meal break, he was hopping nervously about on the edge of things, largely ignored by the busy groups gathered at the various workstations.

  Theroux sat back down at the communications console. He stared again at the frozen hope on the faces of Mike and Lara, as they had signed off to go and locate the cryogenic equipment in the cargo pods and begin preliminary modifications and hook-ups. In some ways, he found the optimism they couldn’t hide was harder to take than their previous desperate laughter. They looked to him like the victims of some dumb practical joke, who were doing their best not to be bad sports about it. Why was he more uncomfortable with their situation than they seemed to be? It couldn’t be because the chance of a rescue had overwhelmed any investigation? Jesus, surely not. Did becoming a cop make you that much different from a regular human being? Just because I’m a cop, it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. I guess it does mean I assume everyone else is though…

  Gina interrupted his thoughts as she hurried across from the huddle of propulsion experts. “We have just finished the full simulation,” she said. “Theoretically, it works, okay? An explosive release of all the remaining air out of the ship does alter the Dædalus’s trajectory enough to bring it back into the solar system.” She paused slightly now and frowned. “Eventually.”

  “How eventually?” Theroux asked.

  “Retrieval in six, perhaps seven years.”

  “Well, shit, that’s a lot less eventually than dead would be, huh?”

  If she found the comparison encouraging, she gave no sign of it. “The manoeuvre must be carried out within the next thirty hours to have a realistic chance of success,” she said, still frowning.

  “That’s the margin for error?” Theroux said. “How long for the cryogenics package?”

  “With the setup they are putting together, they must be at least twelve hours in the capsules for their body temperatures to reach the required minimum. And that will be pushing the safety limits on the schedule for administering the drugs.”

  “So they may not be ready in time,” said Theroux. “It’s lucky Professor Paton didn’t wait any longer to mention the idea.”

  Gina glanced towards the fidgeting Paton. “Luck favours the prepared, they say.”

  “I hope not, because so far we haven’t been,” Theroux remarked, as he debated whether to waste precious time summoning Mike and Lara to the communications screen so that he could urge them to hurry.

  Paton, meantime, had caught Gina’s eye and, mistaking her gaze, he had smiled and started towards her. As he neared the communications console, he was intercepted by a scowling Guy Fox.

  “Not now, Guy,” Gina muttered.

  Theroux heard her, and looked up to see the two men facing each other. Gimme a break here, he thought. Fox punching out the Base Co-ordinator in the middle of this shit? This is all I fucking need. But before he could get to his feet to part them, Fox smiled and stuck out his hand to Paton.

  “Congratulations, Professor Paton,” he said. “I underestimated your worth – the worth of your work, I mean.”

  Paton accepted the gesture gracefully. “You are most kind.” They shook hands.

  “Those freezing chambers of yours could have been designed for the Dædalus,” Fox enthused.

  Paton said quickly, “They are not ideal, I fear.”

  “I’m just glad the things happened to be there at all.”

  “They are intended primarily for use in larger ships. Ultimately, of course, the aim is to freeze a crew, to put them into suspended animation, thus at last making possible genuine deep space exploration.”

  “If it works,” said Gina.

  “It is a melancholy way to test my theories.”

  “Cheer up, man,” Fox said. “At least they’ve got a chance now. A chance is all anyone can ask for.”

  Gina said, “And there’s a chance at a place in history for the scientist who is successful in this field.” She had stopped frowning but, unlike Fox, she was not smiling either.

  Death had come between them. It had separated them, so that each had forgotten why they had been obsessed with the other’s face and body and touch and voice, why their presence had been essential to life. Somehow, an infinity of nothing was too all-embracing to cope with as a couple. Dying was not something you could share, unless perhaps you had shared most of living, which Mike and Lara had not. Secretly, too, some small part of each of them blamed the other for the advancing darkness.

  So they had joked with the investigating Star Cop – but in between transmissions, they had hardly spoken except where the work had called for it. While they carried out the accident procedures and systems checks together and with calm professionalism, they faced death alone and disordered.

  Then the new offer of life came and brought back all the old feelings, with a renewed intensity. They were close again, they were dependant again, they were in love again, but, live or die, loneliness would never leave them again.

  As they finished buckling down the webbing which strapped the cryogenic capsules against a bulkhead, Mike said what they were both thinking. “They look like coffins, don’t they? Let’s hope that’s not what they turn out to be.”

  “I wasn’t scared before,” Lara said. “Not as scared as I am now.”

  Mike took her hand and kissed the palm. “Me too.”

  “Some chance is better than no chance,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  “It’s got to be,” he said. “At least I think it’s got to be. I mean, I suppose it is possible that we could wake up in six years time with frost-bitten extremities.”

  “I’ll try and love you even if your nose does drop off,” she said.

  “The way my luck’s running, it won’t be my nose that drops off.”

  “An extremity?”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I’d call it bragging.”

  “Penis envy, that’s what this is. A bad case of penis envy.”

  “Penis envy?” Lara said scornfully. “Why should I be envious of that? I own it anyway,” and she grabbed at his crotch.

  “We haven’t got time for this,” he protested, but he already had the beginnings of an erection, and he wrapped his arms round her, and ran his hands over her small, tight buttocks.

  “You stupid fucker!” yelled Devis.

  Nathan leaned his head back into the cushions of his favourite seating and moved the ice pack over onto the bridge of his nose. He winced. “It wasn’t bright, I’ll allow,” he murmured, through lips that were swollen and stiff.

  “Bright?” glowered Devis. “All I need to make this a perfect case is for you to go and get yourself killed as well!”

  “So you’d have two – three – unsolved murders, instead of one. So?”

  Devis sneered, “You’re not counting that urban apache, are you? The more of those little scumbags that kill each other off the better.”

  Why is it that the biggest reactionaries are always fat reactionaries? Nathan wondered. Or do they just look the biggest?

  He said, “He was killed by the same man who killed Lee.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. And I almost had him.”

  Devis moved closer, and peered at his injuries. “Looks like it,” he said dryly. “Pity Corman’s such a lousy shot. We’ll never know now, will we?”

  Nathan said, “Forensic’ll confirm it.”

  Devis did his best to look unconcerned. “I called that off,” he said.

  “You called it off?” Nathan sat up abruptly, tossing the ice pack onto the coffee table.

  “Star Cops might have unlimited budgets, but we don’t,” Devis said, managing to sound accusing rather than defensive.

  Nathan’s head was spinning. He poured himself a Scotch from the bottle on
the table, drank it quickly and poured himself another. The liquor burned in his throat and stomach. It did nothing for his spinning head, but a warm glow began to spread through him. He’d pay later; for the time being, he’d settle for the relief. He sipped the second drink, and said, “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about wasting Category A resources on investigating the sort of killing that happens every night in that area,” Devis snapped. “Victoria Park is fucking Psycho Central, or didn’t you know that?!”

  Was it possible the man was really that stupid? Nathan thought. Maybe he was in on it; maybe he was devious rather than stupid; devious Devis, a bent copper. “Are you doing it deliberately, Devis?” he asked.

  Devis looked at him with obvious pity. “The computer gave it a double F,” he explained, patiently irritated. “Who can argue with that?”

  No, he was probably just stupid, Nathan thought, and said, “I can. I’ll lay odds it was the same man, and probably the same weapon, that killed Lee.”