Fratricide

by Craig Martelle

  Lindy mumbled an apology on her way past, testing the heft of her railgun when she was directly in front of them.

  Once they had taken two corners and were far out of hearing range of the two men, Rivka yanked Boran to a halt.

  “What’s the real story?” she demanded, still gripping his arm.

  “That fucker called it operator error. All five times. And that other fucker wanted me to annotate that it was the first fucker’s policies which put the people at risk. But it wasn’t the first fucker’s policies; those are mine, and they are by the book and letter-perfect. Fuckers!” He thrust his middle finger in the general direction of the docking gantry.

  Rivka bit her lip to keep from laughing, but Boran was serious. And he was upset by the deaths. He had been thorough. His conclusion was that the workers should not have died. But they had, and that baffled him.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of it. I have resources you don’t that could make the difference.”

  Boran nodded. Red and Lindy kept watch within their limited line of sight. The safety manager motioned to keep moving. “It’s not far.”

  They walked no more than ten meters when he stopped and pointed out a window. “Happened right there.”

  Rivka couldn’t see anything.

  “We’re going to have to go outside and take a closer look.” At Boran’s confusion, Rivka clarified, “Integrated shipsuits. We’ll be fine in space for a few minutes. Where’s the closest airlock?”

  Boran pointed again. “Close. That’s why the surprise. See those two main supports?” He pointed to two I-beams facing each other.

  “Did he get in between them?”

  “That’s what we call the line of fire. No. He was off to the side. He was crushed about five meters up, on the side, when the structure over there moved.”

  “Just a different line of fire.”

  “There’s no lateral stress on that secondary structure. I’ve confirmed it with the engineers.”

  Rivka held up one finger to pause the explanation. She removed her datapad and took pictures, then beamed them to Ankh for analysis. “We’ll have our systems people look at them. Continue, please.”

  He led them to the airlock. Rivka’s team pulled their hoods into place and the suits pressurized. Boran put on one of the transient suits located next to the airlock.

  “There’s no work in this location at present. We won’t encounter any bots or workers.”

  “Then why was our victim out there?” Rivka’s voice was muffled through her flexible helmet, and Boran leaned close to understand what she was saying.

  “Structural inspector. The work was completed last week. He was making the final inspection before passing it to the next phase.”

  “As a structural inspector, he would have known the pressures and where not to stand, right?”

  “He would have, and he did. He was in a location deemed safe. You can rip out my toenails, and I couldn’t tell you any different.”

  “Do you think I torture people?”

  “Just a saying, ma’am. If you did, you would get the same story.”

  He finished snapping his rigid helmet into place, and the group crowded into the temporary airlock. “Red,” Rivka cautioned.

  “Just my stun baton, Magistrate,” he quipped.

  “Mine’s not,” Lindy added.

  Boran couldn’t turn his head to see the banter, but it bothered him. They seemed to be taking it lightly. “That’s fucked up,” he said before realizing they would hear him.

  “Please don’t take it that way. We’ve been shot at, blown up, blasted, beaten, burned, tortured, and about anything else you can think of that you don’t want to happen to you. We will get to the bottom of this by giving it all we have, but it’s refreshing to have a case where we don’t feel like people are trying to kill us. Those are no accidents, either. We’re not just armed, we’re armed to the teeth. Anyone comes after us, we’ll kill them. Let us have our sense of peace and any humor we can scrape from a shitty situation because it’s the only way we can retain our sanity.”

  The airlock door opened before Boran could reply, so he pushed himself through and floated out the door, turning so Rivka could see his face. “For me, this is my whole life. I don’t see anything else but the universe closing in on me, crushing me as tightly as those girders did to Jones. I am sorry, Magistrate. I didn’t put myself in your shoes.”

  “They’d probably fit. She’s got some flippers on her,” Red said as he followed the safety manager out. The rest tumbled through the hatch once the big man was clear.

  Rivka grabbed the line Boran dropped behind him. The others followed, and he used his suit’s thrusters to take them to the accident site.

  “Right here,” he said.

  Jay asked the question they were all thinking. “Is it safe to be here?”

  Rivka looked up to see where the pivot points were that would have allowed the structure to shift as it did.

  Ankh?

  What? the Crenellian replied.

  I’m going to transmit the images using my datapad. I want to know what kinds of forces were at work to make this accident happen, and how someone could manipulate the energies to make it intentional instead of an accident. We don’t have motive or means yet, and probably not even opportunity. This could be a pure accident and the group here the unluckiest in the whole universe.

  I don’t believe in luck, Ankh replied.

  Rivka operated her datapad with one hand, capturing a running series of images for Ankh’s analysis.

  “Where’s the pivot point that would allow the movement of this section?” she asked.

  “That’s just it. There isn’t one. Let’s go up top.” Boran accelerated along the beam to the structure overhead. It looked to be firmly affixed to the station. The only members that appeared to be less than solid had nothing to do with the accident.

  Pan to your left and head toward the inner structure, Erasmus directed, taking over from Ankh.

  “This way.” Rivka gestured with her datapad. Boran turned and hit his jets a couple times to change the conga line’s course. As they moved away from the expanded section toward the inner core, they found what Erasmus had seen.

  “How did I miss this?” Boran asked.

  What am I looking at?

  Red moved a cover plate out of the way.

  Are you getting all this? Rivka knew he was, but until he told her, she didn’t understand why this was important.

  “It’s supposed to be welded solidly, not on a pin with a hydraulic ram.” Boran hurriedly pulled the design specifications up on the heads-up display, the HUD, within his helmet. “That’s not how it was supposed to be built.”

  “It appears we have a bunch of new questions to ask,” Rivka remarked. “We can go back inside now.”

  Boran took one last look at the construction. “This shouldn’t do this.”

  “So what you’re saying is, this looks like an intentional effort to create a trap in which a worker could be caught and crushed?” Rivka asked.

  “That’s a bold statement, Magistrate, but I can’t think of another purpose for something like this. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one. This is only the third station I’ve worked on, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Boran checked that everyone was clinging to the line and headed toward the airlock. They squeezed inside and cycled the pressure, and when the big green light signaled that they were clear, the inner hatch opened. Lindy was first through because they had made Red stay in the back.

  “Follow me to my office, and I use that term loosely.” Boran walked at a measured pace—quick, but not fast or out of control. He already felt vindicated, and it showed in his stride. He nodded politely as the group passed workers going into or out of side passageways in various stages of completion.

  The desk in the middle of an open work area looked grossly out of place. To the side was a double-wide locker. He popped it open and produced high-visibility vests and
hard hats with safety visors. The last thing he pulled out were gloves. He handed pairs to the three women before looking at Red and trying to gauge his hand size. Boran held up his fingers and Red matched his hand, but the bodyguard’s fingers were twice as thick and half again as long.

  “I don’t think I have anything that will fit.” Boran scowled.

  “That’s it. As soon as we get back to the ship, you’re going into the Pod-doc.”

  “Bullshit!” Red blurted a little more loudly than he’d intended. Rivka’s glare froze the blood in his veins, and he had to look away. “My apologies, Magistrate. As soon as we get back unless you want me to go now.”

  “Now would be good,” Rivka replied, allowing no room for misinterpretation. Red scowled as his mind worked.

  “Thank you,” Lindy mouthed before speaking out loud. “I’ll coordinate with Ankh to spin up the nanocyte program.”

  Rivka nodded and turned back to Boran.

  “Why didn’t your investigation find that pivot point?”

  “Straight and to the point. Standard safety investigations require drone footage of every square centimeter of the accident area. The drones don’t disturb the scene, so they passed over the plate that hid the mechanism beneath. It looked like solid sheeting.”

  Rivka tapped some information into her datapad. “I’ll need copies of those videos.”

  He pulled them up on his screen.

  She removed one of Ankh’s discs from her pocket and held it up for Boran to see.

  “This is a device that allows my people into your system. I am granting a warrant for full access. You deserve to know.” She put the coin-shaped device next to the monitor.

  Ankh, can you access the computer system?

  I’ve been in the system since ten seconds after our arrival. The EI installed in this station was easily swayed.

  Rivka picked up the coin and put it back in her pocket. “Seems he’s already in and poking about.”

  “What if I have porn on my computer?”

  “You don’t,” Rivka replied.

  “Damn! You’re good.”

  “But he does.” She pointed to the only other occupant of the space. The creature, a multi-tentacled humanoid, looked shocked and started tapping furiously with at least six of his limbs. “Make sure you turn him in for that.”

  “Bill, you lame fuck.” Boran stormed up to the creature and slapped him upside the head. “Get back to work. Go on!”

  The creature flowed from his chair and smoothly departed.

  “I can’t imagine what Grebus porn looks like, and I don’t want to know. Fucking Bill.”

  Rivka crossed her arms and looked across the space. Twenty workstations sat empty, a workforce out on the job where something was going on and no one knew what it was.

  “I’m going to have to shut the job down until we find out who’s behind this. If someone is sabotaging the station, we need to stop them. Before then, we’re putting the workers at risk. We need to choke off their supply of victims.”

  Boran sucked air through his teeth. “The guys are going to be pretty mad. They don’t get paid if they’re not working.”

  “Even on a legal hold?”

  “Even on a death in the family. These contracts are straightforward. In order to be non-discriminatory, the workers get paid when they work, and at no other times. If there’s a death in the family or illness, the worker takes care of it, but they aren’t getting paid when they’re not on the job. They won’t be fired, but there’s less work whenever they return.”

  “So you put sick people on the job, where they can make everyone else sick?”

  “We don’t work that close together, Magistrate. Much of the work is done in environmental suits, and the workers all have their own. One worker for every ten bots. Generally, the workforce is a healthy bunch, and we don’t usually have visitors, so no new bugs are introduced.”

  “Which means the workforce that started work here is the same one that’s here now.” Rivka’s mind had seized on information she wanted to clarify.

  Ankh, double-check work schedules with the accidents and find me a list of people who were close to all of them.

  The station isn’t that big, Magistrate. Anyone could be anywhere at any point in time.

  “Boran, each worker’s suit has a tracker, doesn’t it?”

  “Of course. It’s standard safety equipment. Geolocation is verified before the worker starts for the day.”

  Ankh, find out where they store the suit movement data and then perform the check. Look for locations up to one week prior to the accidents.

  We’ll check.

  Rivka smiled. Ankh hadn’t anticipated the suit movement data. She had finally been able to tell him something he didn’t know. She felt smug, but guiltily so. It wasn’t her job to be smarter than her team. Rivka only needed to be smarter than the perp.

  “Take us to the next accident site, please.”

  Chapter Five

  Federation Border Station 13 – Under Construction

  Rivka and her team visited all five of the accident sites before returning. The first and second were vastly changed from the time of the accidents. When construction had continued, the station had absorbed those sites within more superstructure, piping, cabling, ventilation, and finished spaces.

  “We’ll have to take a thorough look at every picture taken, along with the drone videos.” Rivka stared at a spot on the wall as her mind tried to digest everything she had seen.

  “Of course, Magistrate. I expect your boy already has all the information.”

  “Our boy?” Jay wondered and started to laugh.

  “You have green hair,” Boran stated with a smile.

  Red and Lindy gave each other knowing glances. Is that what passes for flirting at a deep-space construction site? Lindy used the comm chip to talk to the team privately.

  Jay gave her a harsh look before giggling.

  Boran smiled.

  Oh, brother, Lindy added.

  “Time to go back to the ship,” Rivka told the team.

  “If there is anything you need, anything at all…” Boran looked only at Jay.

  Rivka stuck out her hand. The safety manager took it, and they shook. Lindy pushed Jay in front of her as she headed back to the gantry where Wyatt was docked.

  Boran looked disappointed by the rapid departure.

  “Conduct some training or something,” Rivka recommended.

  “No can do. Everyone is up to date, and the company won’t pay for more.”

  “The company? This is a Federation station. I’m sure I can approve…” Her words tapered off since Boran was shaking his head.

  “Even the Great Waldini can’t pull that one off. The station is built under private contract first, then sold to the Federation. The government doesn’t have anything to do with this; that’s why we didn’t call you in after the second death. It was still a private issue. I thought we should have handed over jurisdiction with the third death, but they dragged their feet. Finally, at five, we had the most fatalities of any space station the Federation had ever built. The construction superintendent couldn’t sweep things into the garbage chute any longer.”

  “He did the right thing, but I need your help to figure this out, and most importantly, stop it from happening again.”

  “Can you execute the guy who did it?”

  “There are a lot of conditions that would have to be met for these to be considered capital crimes. State of mind, mens rea, we call it, has to show premeditation and lack of remorse. If the guy, as you named him, although it could be any gender or race, if the guy met the criteria for capital punishment, I could execute the criminal.”

  Boran Waldin looked shocked. He struggled to ask the next question. “Have you executed anyone?”

  “I usually only get called in when things are bad, and they are nearly all capital crimes. I have administered appropriate justice. We’ll leave it at that.”

  “You’ve executed
people!” Boran leaned away from the Magistrate, a subconscious move that showed his fear.

  “Only the very worst criminals are punished in the worst way. Do you think you have one of those here? Jack the Ripper stalking the new corridors of unlucky number thirteen?”

  “I don’t think so.” Boran scratched his head as he tried to think of anyone who creeped him out. The crew was solid. He’d been with most of them before. Same bunch moving from job to job doing the same work, but for a different main contractor.

  “Then we’re good. I’ll be back with more questions. I already know I’ll have a bunch.”

  “I need to work!” an angry voice shouted. Others joined in chorus.

  “It’s probably best if you go.” Boran headed for the gathering crowd appearing from one of the passageways leading into the area the safety manager called home. “Come on, fellas. She’s one of the good guys. She doesn’t want to see your dumb ass dead and befouling a coffin.”

  “Can’t feed my kids with no pay!”

  “You can’t feed anyone if you’re dead.” Boran blocked the way into the space. Rivka took her cue and headed out. Red backed down the corridor behind her. The shouts grew louder, and the Great Waldini’s voice could no longer be heard.

  “Sonofabitch,” Rivka complained as she started to run. Red turned and ran after her, glancing over his shoulder to make sure the mob wasn’t getting closer. They caught up with Jay and Lindy, who broke into a run of their own. The four reached the gantry and ran down the access tunnel without breaking stride.

  Through the airlock and securing the hatch behind them.

  “How long?” Rivka asked.

  “Seven hours, Magistrate.”

  “Anyone pick that number?”

  Lindy sheepishly raised her hand. Rivka shook her head.

  “I thought it was a safe bet. I take no pride in being correct, but I will take the credits.”

  “The High Chancellor had seven hours on the running bet, too. You’ll have to share. Sorry, babe.” Red tried to sound apologetic but not convincingly.

  “The High Chancellor?” Rivka was sure the betting had gotten out of control.