Star Cops

by Chris Boucher

  “It was his old man who made the money,” Nathan agreed. “Build a better locking system and the world beats a path to your door.”

  “And can’t get in, huh?” Theroux said, but found the joke was spoiled by yet another slow motion replay of the falling aircraft. “…the world holds its breath as it waits to see where the horror will strike next…”

  “Screen off,” Theroux said and turned to look at Nathan. “I’ve been listening to that stuff for a while now. You want to know an interesting coincidence? It’s a Blake poem that’s featuring in machine failures.”

  Nathan was wondering if Box would have missed anything as obvious as a weapons patent. “A Blake poem?”

  “‘Poetry precedes disaster?’ They’re suggesting it’s some weirdness of Blake’s.”

  “So?”

  “So Chandri said he was a Blake fan, didn’t he?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  Theroux hesitated. “There’s another one.”

  “Another poem?”

  “Another coincidence. Chandri Security Systems had supply contracts with all the companies who’ve been hit.”

  “They’re a big outfit,” Nathan said. “They’ve got contracts all over. Why the sudden interest?”

  Theroux looked slightly embarrassed, as though he’d been discovered indulging in some private vice. He shrugged. “I noticed them on the lists in the background briefing Box put together. I guess two coincidences are just two coincidences…” His voice trailed off, and he turned back to his screen and punched up the latest batch of work permit applications.

  “Three, actually,” Nathan said. “If you count the gun.”

  “The gun isn’t a coincidence,” said Theroux. “Leastways it doesn’t fit with the other two.”

  “It doesn’t fit with anything,” Nathan said, his interest piqued now. He was getting that feeling again – something was wrong, or rather something was not right. “Perhaps there are a couple more questions I should put to the good doctor.”

  “You figure he’ll answer? You heard how he feels about communications circuits.”

  “Forget communications circuits,” Nathan said. “Questions have to be face to face. We’re coppers, not market researchers. You can’t tell they’re sweating –”

  Theroux interrupted, “-if you can’t smell they’re sweating, yeah, you did mention it.”

  Nathan smiled. “Notify Outpost Nine that I’m on my way, will you?”

  “You can’t go now,” Theroux said.

  “I can’t?”

  “Did you forget? Hubble’s coming. So you can meet him, greet him, and fire him?”

  “You do it.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Privilege of rank, Chief Superintendent,” Nathan said, and smiled.

  “It’s a privilege I can do without, thanks.”

  Nathan shook his head. “A privilege of my rank, not yours,” he said, and smiled more broadly.

  The MoRo was slower. Nathan had never been tempted to try his driving skills and this time was no different. He had fed the destination co-ordinates into the navigation computer and given the go-command and that was his only contribution to the journey. Oddly enough, he found such machine-run solo trips less stressful than travelling with other people. He put this down to not having to worry about disgracing himself. He had never considered the other possibility – that despite what he thought he believed, he actually trusted computers more than human beings. Whatever the reason though, talking to Theroux now on the communications screen while the MoRo hummed steadily onwards, he felt relaxed and in control.

  “Hubble is history,” Theroux was saying. He looked pleased with himself.

  “Just like that?”

  “He couldn’t wait to resign.”

  Nathan nodded. He’d been corrupt, why would he put up a fight? “Gutless too then?”

  Theroux said, “Pal Kenzy’s twice the man he’ll ever be.”

  “We need replacements for both of them,” Nathan said, suppressing his irritation that Theroux was still pushing the bloody woman.

  Theroux’s face began to fade and break up. “And then some,” was the last thing that got through before the Outpost Nine security computer isolated the MoRo. “The man’s security obsessed,” muttered Nathan, as his relaxed control faltered. The communications screen was filled with white noise. The static hiss sounded like tension.

  Devis climbed up the steeply sloping central aisle of the Earth-Moon shuttle looking for unoccupied seats – preferably two, so he could spread himself a bit. He was not hopeful. All the sleeping cubicles had been booked, which suggested that there were not going to be many empty places on this flight. He hadn’t expected the Temple Bay Spaceport, stuck out on the Cape York Peninsula in Northern Queensland, to be as popular as this. He hefted the three day cabin kit – ‘Everything you need to stay comfortably human without weight or volume penalties’ – which he had just bought in the terminal, and pressed on past another set of the rigid, red brocade curtains which separated each block of seating from each much narrower block of couchettes.

  All the seats in the next section looked to be taken too, and he was beginning to get a little out of breath. This was unlikely to be a problem for his fellow passengers, he thought, since most of them were younger than him and slimmer, still, what the fuck. Once you got off-Earth, weight and volume penalties didn’t count as much – but that would be then and this was now, and the launch pad tilt was definitely getting to him. The time to be choosy was over. He decided to take whatever presented itself. And then he saw her.

  “Is this one taken?” he asked, waiting politely for her to remove the flight bag from the seat beside her.

  Pal Kenzy glared up at him. “You have got some kind of nerve,” she said.

  “You mean, it isn’t,” he said, and when she made no move to shift the bag, picked it up. “Allow me,” he said, and stowed it in the overhead locker.

  Kenzy leaned back and closed her eyes. “Security must really be shit on this run if they let ratbags like you on board,” she said, as he sank gratefully into the seat and sighed his relief.

  “Feel like I climbed halfway there already,” he complained conversationally, then asked, “Did you manage to get a berth? Only I was too late. If you got one, maybe we could share? Turn and turn about and split the cost?”

  Kenzy opened her eyes and turned to stare at him.

  Devis smiled. “Or,” he said, “we could use it together even. I’m very cuddly when you get to know me.” Kenzy looked as though she couldn’t quite believe what was happening. She seemed to struggle briefly for the right reaction. Then she laughed. To Devis it sounded like male laughter, unforced, nothing hidden in it. “Devis, you are a miserable pig,” she said.

  “That’s better,” he said. “I didn’t think a fine looking woman like you would be the type to bear a grudge.”

  “I got the impression you didn’t like women much,” Kenzy said.

  “Women police officers,” Devis said.

  “And I’m not a police officer any more.”

  “Unless your trip to Canberra was everything you hoped?” he asked, knowing it hadn’t been.

  Kenzy did her best to sound positive. “They’re going to bring pressure.”

  Nodding, Devis said, “Are they indeed?”

  “I’ve got contacts working on it,” she said.

  “Arms manufacturers and the like?”

  “Yeah well you cut me out of that loop. And doubling the order just like that? Your boss plays dirty.”

  “He’s had some ugly teachers.”

  “Him and me both. And it’s not over yet.”

  Devis decided it wasn’t only her arse and her laugh that he liked about this woman. “Is that why you
’re going back up there?”

  “Out there.”

  “Sorry?”

  “We say ‘out there’ not ‘up there’.”

  “So we do, I keep forgetting. Is that why?”

  “I’m entitled.” For the first time, Kenzy looked genuinely defensive. “I can still find a job out there. I used to be a pretty good engineer.”

  “Before you discovered money?”

  “I haven’t been charged with anything,” she said flatly.

  “Push it, and that’s what he’ll do,” Devis said seriously. “Nathan’ll charge you.”

  She shrugged. “I can’t help that.”

  As she said it, Devis thought he saw finally what it was that mattered to this bold woman. “You really like it out there, don’t you?” he said.

  “Yeah. I really like it out there.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “It’s a flat-out sort of life. No whinging, no cringing.”

  “No weakness,” Devis offered.

  She shook her head. “It’s not about strength or weakness, it’s about… living till you die. No excuses. I reckon you can cling to life so tightly that you strangle it. Groundsiders never see that.”

  And then he really could understand it. “That’s why you didn’t care about ripping him off? The bloke I was pretending to be?”

  “He didn’t belong out there.” It was a statement of fact.

  “No sympathy for him at all.”

  “Sympathy’ll get you killed.” She looked into his face. Her eyes were bright, the vivid blue quite startling against her pale skin. “What do you think of it out there?” she asked.

  “This is a trick question, isn’t it?” he said. “Is there a prize? Rampant sex if I get it right?” But something in her expression told him he had already got it wrong. He frowned, and grunted noncommittally. “Pay’s good and there’s no heavy lifting.” Then he couldn’t help himself, and he smiled. “And it’s amazing. I’ve been enjoying the novelty, I’ve got to admit.”

  On the seat screen, a flight attendant began an announcement. The unnatural clarity and the perfectly bland face suggested that she was probably computer-generated. “Ladies and gentlemen, Pacific Spacelines welcome you aboard their Earth-Moon shuttle…”

  “A thrill seeker?” Kenzy was clearly not impressed with this either.

  “…final countdown will begin in twenty minutes. In the meantime drinks are still being served in the main lounge…”

  “What’s wrong with thrills?” Devis asked, opening his travel kit and rummaging around to see if it provided anything in the way of booze. It didn’t.

  “It’s a dumb reason for doing anything. Are you married, Devis?”

  “Is this a proposal?”

  “…seats are still available in sections seven and nine.”

  “Is this an evasion?”

  “I’m not married at the moment.”

  “But you have been?”

  “Five times. I told you I was cuddly.”

  “Five times and you still don’t know the value of money?” Kenzy said, looking at the kit. “I can’t believe you actually bought that crap.”

  When Nathan came out of the airlock, Chandri was waiting and fidgeting. He made no move to help with the suit helmet. This did not seem to be out of discourtesy but rather because he was distracted, totally preoccupied with his own thoughts. Free of the helmet finally, Nathan said, “I hope I’m not interrupting you, sir,” and began working on his gauntlets.

  “A little. You are a little,” Chandri said.

  Nathan frowned. On a bad day, the gauntlets could be more of a problem than the helmet – and this looked to be a bad day. “I won’t take up much of your time. It’s quite a minor matter. An error in your personnel file.”

  Chandri chortled suddenly. “You expect me to swallow that?”

  “It is an offence, sir.”

  The amusement ended as abruptly as it had begun. “Of sufficient importance to be dealt with by the Commander of the Star Cops?”

  “We’re not quite up to establishment yet.”

  “I am of the opinion that you are on a fishing expedition,” Chandri said, walking out of the reception chamber.

  Nathan finished the gauntlets, and wondered whether he should take off the rest of his suit or follow as he was.

  “This way if you please, Commander Spring!” Chandri called from the corridor. Clearly Nathan was not expected to waste any time. Feeling clumsy and uncomfortable, he shambled out.

  In Chandri’s office, nothing had changed. Plants, gods, holograms and books: everything was in its place, and the screens were still carefully blank. On the desk, an optical enhancing frame had been set up and within it were some partially analyzed electronics. Chandri sat down and gestured Nathan to a chair. “Why have you really come here?” he asked.

  “I wanted to ask you about the laser pistol.”

  Chandri was silent. Nathan let the silence hang, waiting, half-expecting the man to feign ignorance. Eventually Chandri said, very softly, “Ah. That.”

  “You did develop it, then?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I could.”

  “It’s a vicious thing for a man of your background.”

  “Weapons aren’t vicious.” Chandri said it without much conviction, the empty repetition of a lobbyist’s paid-for argument. “Only the people who use them are vicious.”

  “That’s the sort of drivel,” Nathan said, surprised by his own anger, “that idiot gun-freaks and bomb-happy monsters like Edward Teller used to peddle. You’re ashamed of it, aren’t you? That’s why it isn’t in your records.”

  “My father said it was the cleverest device he’d ever seen,” Chandri said.

  “You made it to please your father?”

  Again, the small head-turning shrug. “He is never pleased.”

  “They never are,” Nathan said, recognizing the man’s pain.

  Perhaps there was sympathy in his voice. Perhaps Chandri heard it and for a second or two forgot the plan, departed a little from the carefully prepared text. Perhaps sympathy was just too much for him to leave unchallenged. “I have made a momentous discovery,” he bragged, indicating the electronics on the desk. “It is of profound significance to the whole of mankind. Look.”

  Nathan leaned forward to peer at the small analyzer screen. “What is it you’re examining?” he asked.

  “This is the standard door control developed by I.T. Chandri.”

  “Your father.”

  “My father.” He pointed with a micro-probe and the analyzer screen switched briefly to a visual of part of a control chip. “Do you see it?”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “The threat.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “The invisible worm,” Chandri said softly, “that flies in the night.”

  The shuttle had reached its preliminary orbit without incident. “Passengers are further reminded that the remainder of the flight will be in zero-gravity. For your own safety, you are requested to remain in your seats until weightless procedures have been fully demonstrated.”

  Devis slowly unclenched his buttocks and his teeth, and relaxed into post adrenaline-rush euphoria. “Lift-off’s the most telling argument I’ve come across yet for staying out there,” he said grinning.

  Kenzy was smiling too. “Out here. ‘Out there’ starts here.”

  “Christ, we just rode the fireball, how come the computer still talks to us like we’re idiots?”

  Across the aisle a nondescript man in his late twenties released himself from his seat harness and floated forward along the hand grips towards the stiff curtain at the end
of the section. Watching him Kenzy said, “Because some of us are.”

  “Obviously a man who’s unimpressed by demonstrations,” Devis remarked.

  “I hope he knows how to use a weightless toilet,” Kenzy said. “Otherwise that’ll be one place to avoid for the rest of the flight.”

  Devis sniggered. “And one unsavoury passenger I should think,” he said, leaning against his harness and reaching down into the seat pocket to pull out the Velcro soled overshoes, so that he could fit them before the instruction tape started its lecture by telling him to reach down into the seat pocket, pull out the Velcro soled overshoes, and fit them.

  “The original concept of the worm programs,” Chandri said, carefully manipulating the probe, “was worked out by Shoch and Hupp fifty years ago; more. Like most brilliant ideas, it was developed and perverted by the military. It became an anti-computer weapon.” Nathan sipped the coffee that had been pressed on him when the mood changed, and let Chandri talk. The man seemed calmer now, almost happy as he worked and lectured. He went on, “It was like one of those hideous parasites that invade the human brain and render it useless and irredeemable. The programmes could be made self-replicating, self-defending. They could multiply and spread like any other disease.”

  “Computer viruses were banned by the Tokyo treaty,” Nathan interrupted, “and most of them were eliminated within five years. As far as I remember almost all the signatories have retained the death penalty for, lets see, ‘any person deemed to have created or aided in the creation, development, or passage of any machine virus as defined by said treaty’.”

  Chandri smiled without looking up from what he was doing. “All Tokyo did was to weed out the amateurs, the techno-anarchists, the cyber-biologists, the hobbyists and the inadequates. But make no mistake about what went on in government laboratories. There was a classic arms race. Development, counter development, back and forth. More and more powerful; more and more expensive. A sort of stalemate exists now within the strategic military computers. Only they are defended.”