Star Cops

by Chris Boucher

  Theroux looked and saw in the distance where the other orbit shuttle had been, a smear of vapour and small particles was fading outwards to nothing. “Lucky we didn’t get any closer,” he said.

  “One of those ground controlled defence satellites,” Nathan said. “Way over to the left there, I think. See it?”

  Theroux had already picked out what he thought it was from the jumble on the pilot’s radar. “Must be right at the edge of its range,” he said.

  “My God,” Corman said, “they didn’t even hesitate.” Then obviously calculating what could be salvaged from the mess she went on grimly, “At least we’ve got some idea of the lengths they’ll go to.”

  “They didn’t have much choice,” said Nathan, matter-of-factly. “They were dealing with a dangerous criminal.”

  “They didn’t know that,” she said.

  Nathan kept his tone even, unchanged. “Yes they did. I arranged for them to be told. In fact, I used my authority to ask for their assistance. If he got to where he got to, and my chances of apprehending him seemed remote, then I requested them to stop him. At all costs.”

  “Do you realize what you’ve done?” Corman demanded furiously.

  “Yes.” I’ve had a man executed because he killed me, the better part of me, Nathan thought. Was it revenge?

  “We need to know about that station.”

  Or was it retribution, or just to stop him winning, and it made no difference, I don’t feel any different… and I still want to kill you.

  “Because of you it’s been for nothing. The woman died for nothing.”

  Theroux stared at Corman, horrified. “You’re crazy, you know that?” he said. “You are crazy. ‘The woman died for nothing’? You’re fucking right the woman died for nothing!”

  “We need to know about that station. Knowing about it could make the world safer.”

  “Jesus, Nathan,” Theroux said, “are you going to kill this rabid bitch or do you want me to do it?”

  The earth had sunk a little, but it was still mounded up on the grave. It would be several weeks, apparently, before it had settled enough for the marble gravestone Nathan had chosen to be placed over her. He thought perhaps he should remove the wreath, which was decaying now, but then he decided against it. He had nothing to put in its place, and the bare soil was too lonely to leave unmarked.

  In the old cemetery, the only light was the soft glow from the solar charged globes which illuminated the pathways. He wondered why he couldn’t cry, not even here in this private darkness where he was closest to her silence.

  A voice behind him asked, “You normally visit cemeteries at night?”

  Nathan turned to see Colin Devis strolling towards him. “What are you doing here?” he asked ungraciously.

  “Looking for you.” Devis looked at the grave, and shook his head appreciatively. “Traditional interment. And in a place like this. Must have cost you an arm and a leg.”

  “What do you want?”

  Devis seemed impervious to Nathan’s obvious irritation. “I wanted to apologize,” he said mildly, “for that bitch Corman. For not knowing about her.”

  “I didn’t spot her either,” said Nathan. “Not until it was too late.” He stared down at the grave. “I’ve got a real gift for that.”

  Devis said, “Yeah well. I didn’t spot her at all. A fortnight late and a quid short, as usual.” He nodded thoughtfully. “That’s why I was on it. That’s why the spooks arranged to have me put on it. But then, I expect you’d worked that out, hadn’t you?”

  “I’m finding it hard to believe that they killed Lee just to put pressure on me. It’s not a good enough reason to kill someone.”

  “Not someone you know anyway,” said Devis.

  Nathan took an angry step closer to him and peered into his face. It was set in its habitual slightly sour smile. He didn’t look as though he was being sarcastic, but simply stating a fact as he saw it. Nathan said flatly, “Not anyone.”

  Devis showed no inclination to argue, confining himself to saying, “Difficult to feel much for strangers, I find,” before getting down to what he really came to say. “Listen, I’m going to bring charges against Corman. Accessory before and after, conspiracy, perversion of justice, impersonating a police officer… anything I can take into court.”

  “You won’t get a conviction.”

  “I know.” Devis smiled the small, sour smile. “But I’ll embarrass the hell out of her and her masters. Shine a little light on them. Maybe they’ll dry up and blow away.”

  Nathan said, “I’ll be glad to give evidence if that’s what you’re going to ask.” He began to walk away from the grave.

  Devis fell into step beside him. “No, what I was going to ask was whether you’d give me a job. When they sling me out.”

  “Can’t promise anything,” said Nathan.

  “Thought I’d mention it,” Devis said, without any sign of resentment.

  They reached a path and Nathan quickened his pace, uneasy in the comforting artificial twilight, and obscurely shamed by the other man’s unconditional honesty.

  “Why were you visiting her grave at this time of night?” Devis asked.

  “I thought maybe you could see the stars,” said Nathan. “It seemed an appropriate way to say goodbye.” It struck him then that he hadn’t said goodbye, that he would never come back to this graveyard, that if he cried it would be for himself, that missing her would be something he’d get used to living with…

  “Bit sentimental for my taste,” said Devis.

  “I’m old fashioned at heart,” Nathan said. “I’m going to change that.”

  “Last time I looked up at the stars,” said Devis, “something nasty dropped in my eye. I think it was bat shit…”

  Intelligent Listening For Beginners

  Despite the high security which isolated Outpost Nine from the rest of Moonbase – itself fairly isolated – Dr. Michael Chandri still felt exposed as he sat in his office deep inside the secret installation. He was thinking about the smooth and effortlessly superior Dafyd Talor, and what he had said. The request that had been made – oh, very politely made, of course – was quite obviously a test. Did the sponsors back on Earth think he was such a fool that he couldn’t see it? They expected him to fail. They had always expected him to fail, he knew that. He knew what the assumptions about him were: that he wasn’t of the top scientific rank; a second rate mind from a third world background; an inferior, whose credentials could never be entirely trusted. He knew that without his father’s reputation and wealth no-one would have paid him serious attention. Were he not the son of his father, there would have been few academic honours, little or no advancement. He would certainly never have been given control of the project. Under such circumstances, the shame of failure would be too great to bear. He could not fail. Whatever happened, he must not be seen to fail.

  Dr. Michael Chandri loved and respected his father. He determined now, with a renewed fervour, to bring honour to the name of Chandri. Or to die in the attempt. Then, as was his habit when panic pushed his thoughts to dark spiralling despair, he turned to his books for comfort. To get them to the Moon had entailed monstrous freight costs, but without the touch of them he would certainly have gone mad. He took a volume of poetry from the small shelf, let it fall open at random, and began to read aloud.

  “O Rose, thou art sick!

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm,

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.”

  As always, the familiar textures and the remembered sounds, gentle reminders of the secure happiness of childhood, comforted him.

  W
ith the upgrade, the central control room of the expanded rail tunnel complex linking the United Kingdom with mainland Europe had become entirely independent of the people who were nominally in charge of it. This made no difference to the staffing levels, of course.

  To their frustration, the directors of the company discovered that the majority of the travelling public could not be persuaded to use an unmanned undersea transport link. It should have been a plus-point that the network was operated by tireless machinery, but sales surveys and focus groups had shown that without a human presence, the great unwashed would stay away in droves.

  Inevitably, the ads showed tall, handsome and confident men and women, unblemished specimens of physical perfection – ‘a team of highly trained and motivated technicians, round-the-clock guardians of your comfort and safety…’ – working and walking and smiling to the corporate jingle.

  When the confidential market research was leaked to the Guild of Transport Engineers, they used it to negotiate a generous employment package for the workers. Senior management found this even more frustrating and they were provoked into pressing for ‘a maximum-plus’ return on company assets. Roughly translated, this meant doubling the volume of tunnel traffic.

  During the Public Enquiry, management and union blamed each other’s greed for the system overload which escalated a small accident into a major disaster. While it was in no-one’s interest to point out that ‘a small accident’ was a contradiction in terms, what did become clear from the testimony was that the employees were sharply divided about their purpose. Despite the pay and conditions, the corporate uniforms, the huge operations monitor screen in the underground central control room and all the rest of the paraphernalia, for some workers, the token nature of their jobs was unmistakable. It was not lost on them that the routes to the control room started high in the main passenger concourses on all-singing-all-dancing monorails. Other workers could not see themselves as just a public relations exercise; for them, such expensive embellishments were proof that what they did was important.

  It was a coincidence – the kind which suggests to the gullible there is some symmetry to existence – that Ben Rykker and Leo Pond were both there on the day it happened. Of all the shift managers – ‘shift manager’ was the inflated title given to each lone watchman at the big screen – these two best typified the opposing attitudes to CRC manning policy. Ben was the type who knew it was all bullshit. Leo knew that it wasn’t. Ben spent most of his shifts working on an investment portfolio. Leo spent his worrying over what the multi-input screen was reporting about tunnel operations.

  At first, in the moments before the horror began, the shift changeover seemed routine as ever. “Okay Leo,” Ben had said as he thumb-printed the lock and the inner door closed behind him, “you’re relieved,” and he had crossed to where Leo was sitting. Neither man noticed that, although the door mechanism chimed softly before it flashed up Access: Secure. Environment: Closed cycle – which was normal – the indicator flickered – which was not.

  Leo had looked at his replacement, but he made no attempt to vacate the impressively padded swivel chair. “I am too,” he had said, then added, “Relieved I mean.”

  Ben dropped the leather case containing the emergency radio link beside the chair and shed his quasi-military, uniform jacket. “That’s what I just said,” he said.

  “They put sixteen extra trains through this shift,” Leo whinged. “Sixteen! Bloody board was flashing like a flock of fucking fruit machines.”

  Ben glanced up at the big screen, on which direct visuals from fixed cameras at the tunnel entrances and all the crossover points was combined with continuously updated digital readouts of temperature, atmospheric pressure, air contaminant levels, train weights, speeds, and relative distances. It made a vivid show but only the computer could get a useable overview from so much data, and its current assessment of the immediate situation was indicated by the blocks of green lights lined up across the bottom of the display.

  “You shouldn’t keep staring at it, you know. You’ll go blind,” Ben said.

  Leo stood up and stretched his cramped muscles. “You can laugh.”

  “Pity you can’t.”

  As they busied themselves with the small tasks, petty rituals and pointless bickering involved in the shift handover, Ben and Leo were too absorbed to observe the second, more bizarre sign of trouble. Five of the screen’s green sit-rep lights went out, one after the other, and in their place in each of the darkened panels a single word was flashed up: O – Rose – thou – art – sick. When the sentence was complete, the words faded and the green lights were restored. It happened quickly enough to be overlooked – and it was.

  Leo was pontificating. “The Company’s got to be made to realize that profit isn’t everything.”

  “Yeah well,” Ben said, “loss isn’t anything,” and he chortled to himself at the joke.

  “A lot of good it’s going to do you and the rest of the shareholders,” Leo lectured, warming to his theme, “if there’s an overload and the computer crashes.”

  Ben shrugged. “I’ve got some stock in a couple of hospitals and three medical supply houses,” he said, and took his place in the chair.

  “You can forget medical supplies if that happens. They’ll all be well beyond medical help and you know it.”

  “You’re right,” Ben said solemnly. “Heavy lifting plant, tunnelling equipment, funeral parlours – that’s where the smart money should be. Wonder what price they’re quoting…”

  “I’m serious, Ben.”

  “Yes, Leo.”

  “Safety? They’ve got no bloody idea.”

  “Yes, Leo.”

  “I’ve warned them.”

  “Yes, Leo.”

  “I’m sick of warning them.”

  “Did you ever think,” Ben asked, rummaging around in the emergency radio case for his notepad, his lunch and various other personal odds-and-ends he had stashed there, “maybe they’re sick of it, too? I know I am.”

  Leo stopped fastening his jacket. He turned on Ben angrily, but then he forgot what he was going to say, because behind the other man, he glimpsed the unthinkable. The whole of the giant screen blinked. For the briefest time, there was nothing on it. His voice squeezed with shock, he said, “Did you see that? It blinked. The screen blinked.”

  “If I didn’t know you better,” Ben said dryly, “I’d think you were playing silly persons with me, Leo.”

  “The whole fucking thing just blinked off.”

  “Why don’t you do the same?” Ben snapped the case shut and put it back on the floor. “Your shift’s over,” he said. “Blink off.” He looked at Leo, who was staring at the screen as if transfixed. “For Christ’s sake, Leo,” he went on, still suspecting a gag, “you’re not the world’s wittiest, you know what I mean?” And then he looked at the screen.

  It was blank.

  Ben punched the desk communicator open and reported almost calmly, “This is central control to engineering, we have a perceived malfunction on the main screen, do you copy?” There was no response, but he pressed on. “All data input is down, switch to alternate, I repeat switch to back-up systems and confirm please?”

  There was still nothing.

  “I told you,” said Leo. “The computer’s gone down. Everything’s out. Communications, everything. I told you this was going to happen.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Ben shouted snatching for the emergency radio.

  In the tunnels, two trains were already decelerating and two accelerating as they approached the switching points which would cross them from the high speed line to passing loops and then back again. At either end of the system, two more trains were entering, each on primary acceleration, and behind them two more had stopped boarding passengers and were cleared to follow within minutes.

  S
uch intricately co-ordinated movements allowed two way streams of traffic, local cross-Channel trains and a staggered succession of city-to-city expresses to use the same line and pass safely without losing vital speed.

  Of the six trains committed to the tunnels when the computer failed – four local plus the London Bullet and the Brussels Flier – none survived. Only the two locals – loaded and cleared, but delayed and still above ground – were not wrecked.

  It was over in slightly less than an hour. Fifteen hundred and thirty-seven passengers were killed in the tunnel-constricted impacts and the suffocating fires which followed.

  Trapped in the central control room, Ben and Leo could only guess at what was happening. From the panic-stricken gibberish coming over the emergency radio, it seemed that everything was breaking down. Not even the simplest and most basic of the safety back-ups were working. Nothing that involved the main computer in any way could be relied upon.

  “Listen,” Ben said holding up his hand, straining to hear the mutterings of distant vibration. “Did you hear that, Leo?”

  But Leo wasn’t listening. He paced up and down. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “It wasn’t my fault, Ben. I didn’t… I mean I warned them to pay more attention to safety…not to keep pushing the computer.”

  “This isn’t an overload,” Ben said. “An overload wouldn’t take out the secondary systems at the same time. I mean look at the board.” He gestured at the blank screen. “Do you see any sign of them kicking in?”

  Leo stopped pacing abruptly and looked at the screen. “Terrorists? You think it was terrorists? How would they have done it?” And then, answering himself, he said, “Bomb. A fucking big bomb.”

  Ben said, “Stop babbling, Leo. Christ, they’d have had to nuke the place. Even then, it wouldn’t have been like this.”