“Maybe,” Danel said. “I don’t think any of us has had a chance to worry about it.” He sat strapped into a seat in front of the biomonitor console wearing a surgical gown and looking like a victim of attempted mass murder. He glanced up and shot her an expression that made her reconsider the idea that he might have been the victim.
“Where is doctor?” she asked.
“She and Seva are in surgery with Shona,” Danel said.
“And other patients?” she asked, dreading the answer and trying to hold herself steady inside. Do not let them be dead.
“Jeph is unconscious and in diagnostic chamber three. He’s got a concussion and will need facial reconstruction, but he’ll wake up in a few days with a brainache from hell. Alyx is stable, but critical. She’ll need constant monitoring for the next week or more, but we can keep her in hydro suspension and on external support until we grow replacement organs.”
She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath, frustration overwhelming her momentary relief. She held her voice level by force of will. “So what is urgent enough to call me off repairs?”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to rattle you,” Danel said, apparently realizing what she must have thought. “Anju is having trouble with the osteo-printer keeping up. She said you needed to look at it.”
“Is fortunate to be working at all,” Rocky said. “I do not know what I can do to make it work more quickly.”
“I know that,” he said, glancing up again. “If she’d just slow down and breathe now that they’re all past initial stabilizing maybe we could get her shoulder set too. We’ve already given her enough neuroblock to stall a robot, but we haven’t been able to get her to stop moving long enough to set it.”
“Is not problem. Seva is big girl,” Rocky said, shrugging. “Have her hold Doctor down.”
“My real concern is that she’s using her surgical-augment arm in place of her flesh arm. The buffer on the neuro-implant isn’t rated for continuous use.”
She pulled a thin pad from her coverall pocket and tried to log in to the medical equipment database, before she remembered Dutch was still restarting and not operational. “Chert voz’mi. Is she showing evidence of buffer-burn?”
“Some,” he said. “She’s losing fine control of the aug-arm, but won’t unplug and give the interface a chance to cool down.”
“How long does she intend to continue?”
Danel shook his head. “Several more hours at least.”
“I do not believe she will respect orders to rest,” Rocky said. “Not from me.”
“Is it possible to dial down her buffer somehow, so it won’t burn out?” he asked, glancing up from the screen in front of him again.
“I do not know,” she said, looking at the thinpad and shrugging. “Until computer is up, I cannot answer your question.”
An alert tag popped up on Danel’s screen and he pushed away from the monitor. “That will be a thigh bone. I need to get it in to them,” he said. He paused at the door and pulled his mask over his face before he turned back toward Rocky. “What scares me even more than having to be a surgical nurse, is that if she doesn’t unplug soon, we’ll lose her as a surgeon.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Main Docking Facility: Galileo Station:
“May I speak with you a moment?” Investigator General Edison Wentworth asked as he approached. He was almost as well known across the Union as Chancellor Roja, and her security entourage parted to let him pass without question.
“Of course,” she said, waving her guards back to a discrete distance. The IG hunting her down as soon as she returned, gave her pause. She tried to read his expression as he slipped into place beside her on the central rail. What have I missed?
“I’m on a tight schedule, so if you don’t mind, can we keep moving while we chat?” She tugged on the handrail to pull herself toward the main concourse. He fell in beside her smoothly. Perhaps it was his age, or the fact that he spent a lot of time traveling, but he seemed almost as comfortable with microgravity as any fleet trained officer.
“Your office said you were just returning from L-2 and that I might catch you here,” he said. “I hope your trip wasn’t a problem.”
“Nothing overly pressing,” she said. “A supply issue in fact. It may be something that requires high-level interagency pushback to resolve, so Admiral Quintana asked me to come and look into it.”
“One of the necessary evils of bureaucracy,” he said.
“An unfortunate truth,” she said, nodding and slowing before they entered the main hub. “I’m sure you didn’t come all the way down here to discuss the nature of government?”
“Actually, I am headed out on a business day trip, so it was convenient,” he said. He glanced around the busy concourse of the docking facility and lowered his voice. “I want to say thank you for your cooperation in the Zora Murphy homicide investigation and—”
She grabbed the handrail and jerked herself to a full stop. “What did you say her name was?”
“Zora Murphy,” he repeated, raising an eyebrow as he hauled himself to a stop beside her. “Why?”
“And she works in SourceCartel Materials Reprocessing?”
“She did,” he confirmed. “Once again. Why?”
Holding up a finger, she turned toward the captain of her security detail. “Give us some privacy.” She watched as they moved away and blocked the entrance to the corridor before she turned back to Wentworth.
“Her name is known to me,” she said. “Was she killed aboard the Pegasus?”
“We don’t believe so,” he said. “In fact, I was coming to say you could release the hold on the ship and send it on its way.”
She squared herself to him and lowered her voice to whisper. “My problem is that I’m restricted in what I can say to you by the pending Sealed Docket Session. I’m not allowed to discuss the potential subject of the session with anyone.”
“This has something to do with that?” he asked, his face showing the slightest amount of surprise.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Do you know where she was killed?”
“Not yet,” he admitted. “We’ve been tracing a series of optic failures on the security grid. They lead from the access gangway for the Pegasus, back to a social club near where she had her apartment. We’ve nailed it down to somewhere in that area, but our best evidence, is a lack of evidence.”
“When did she die?”
“Five days ago,” he said.
She nodded. “Suppose I could give you a lead that somebody in SourceCartel is covering that up?”
“Her death? It was rather obvious that she was dead,” he said. “I would definitely say that’s not much of a cover-up.”
“I’m up against that line where I can’t discuss this until after the SDS,” she said, “but I will say I find it interesting that this supply issue I’m having, involves Zora Murphy. In fact, according to our records, she signed off on a remittance service request for materials delivered. Two days ago.”
“That would be highly unlikely,” he said. “She’s currently in cold storage.”
“I think you might want to look into that.”
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
“You look wiped,” Cori said as Rocky pin-wheeled onto the deck, snagging a handhold to pull down into a seat and latching the strap to hold her in place. “You need some offline.”
“Cannot. Have much yet to do,” she said, waving off his suggestion. She looked around the room. There were no free-floating droplets of blood in the air. “Did you repair filters?”
Cori nodded and yawned. “Was just a breaker reset. Figured, when they called me, I’d make myself useful.”
“Is Dr. Soresh still performing surgery?” she asked.
He shook his head and smiled. “Danel and Seva are tying her to a bed. They finally talked her into losing the aug-arm and then had me help while they set her shoulder. That was no fun.”
“I am sure. At least machines
do not feel pain.” She shook her head, trying to imagine what they’d been dealing with. Her own twelve hours of turning a wrench on the heels of a six hour EVA, before this all went sidewise, seemed far less intense.
“She was showing signs of buffer burn on her control implant,” he said.
“I am aware,” Rocky said. “How are patients?”
“The commander is asleep still,” he said. “Shona’s got nerve damage in her lower spine. There was some other organ damage too, but she will probably be alright in a week or two. Was a miracle she didn’t end up worse, but I guess she landed … uhm … on something soft.”
He floated over to look into one of the diagnostic chambers. He cleared his throat and shook his head. “Alyx wasn’t so lucky,” he said after several seconds. “But at least she was soft.”
“Oh. I see,” she said, the air in her lungs feeling like concrete.
He snagged a thinpad from a console and blinking several times gave up on reading the screen. Instead he tossed it toward the engineer.
Reaching out to snag it as it floated in her direction, her fingers closed on empty air. Just beyond her reach it turned a fast 180 and shot back at Cori, narrowly missing his head and smashing against the chamber’s window.
The chair’s belt dug into her waist, but it held her anchored to her seat.
“Fragging hell,” Cori gasped as he slammed into the window behind him, nearly shattering the transparent plastic.
Just as suddenly as it appeared the impact passed, leaving behind the echoing crashes of things flying around inside the ship. That and Danel bellowing in the distance at Seva to make sure the doctor was still secured.
“Collision Alert! Collision Alert!” The claxon added its redundant announcement to the cacophony.
“Status report?” Rocky said, opening the shipwide com.
“We’re airtight. Breakers tripped in main power again and we’re on batteries. Stand by,” the pilot said from the ConDeck. “Looks like we might have more structural damage on one of the external hardware racks. There’s something obstructing an optic.”
“Crew report?”
“We’re good,” Danel said. “Anju is awake and pissed, but she’s still roped to the bed.”
“I’m cross eyed, but undamaged,” Cori said, twisting to look at the medical readouts of the patients. “They all look stable. The commander’s heart rate is up, but the other two are in hydro-bags so they should be good. At least they won’t be any worse off than they are already.”
“We’ll need to replace the door to my quarters,” Chei said. “I landed on it, but it cushioned my fall.”
“Following up on the structural damage report,” Kiro said. “We’ve definitely got a twisted rack.”
“I don’t know if they’ll take another broadside hit like that,” Chei said.
“Do we have thruster control?” Rocky asked.
“Yah,” the pilot said. “But the HDA is stuck in the deployed position, maneuvering will twist it bad.”
“Noted, but irrelevant,” she said. “Bring us to heading that puts spine of ship along line of impact. We must be bow forward in case impact happens again.”
“Recommend we do it immediately,” Chei added, his voice sounding like he was giving orders and not making a suggestion.
“Whyso?” the engineer asked, gritting her teeth.
“This might be cyclic,” he said. “If so we’ve got more hits inbound.”
“Do it,” she said. “All hands brace for maneuvers.”
The ship twisted as Kiro pushed the thrusters to full power and they swung into the next impact.
Normal procedure was a short impulse to begin rotation and then another one when they completed the maneuver. To give them the maximum translation rate, Kiro kept the thrusters running all the way through, pushing them, first in one direction and then equally hard as he reversed the motion, to bring them to a stop in the correct orientation.
The sound of straining metal echoed down the chute. She knew it was the sensor array bending under the force, but there was little choice.
The hissing vibration of the thrusters hadn’t yet died when the next waves slammed everything into the floor twice in rapid succession, at about half the intensity.
“Collision—” Kiro cut the announcement off without letting it play out.
“Yah we get it,” he said.
“Good call Chei,” Danel said, coming in and grabbing a seat. Seva floated into the medical control room behind him and anchored her feet to the floor with a click.
“Indeed,” Rocky added. “Is possible to anticipate next impact?”
“We’ll know in about three minutes,” Chei said. “Last time there were several waves that got smaller in amplitude each time. Like echoes.”
“Echoes of what?” Seva asked.
“That’s the big money ask,” Kiro said.
Just over two minutes and forty-five seconds later, they had their first answer. Even if it left them with more questions.
Civilian Morgue Facility: Galileo Station: Lunar Lagrange One:
Edison Wentworth was trying to decide whether he should follow up on a hunch.
“Josiah Carsten.” The voice of the Deputy Inspector sounded stressed as he answered the com.
“Joe, where are you right now?” He stood outside the door to the morgue watching the swirling masses of workers sliding past. He held his com close to his ear and struggled to listen over the noise of the crowd.
“A dive called the Passport Lounge, why?” he said. A locator tag opened on the screen showing him where it was in the station. He’d never been there, at least as far as he could remember. It was a low rent zone and not one he’d want to be seen frequenting, even in his line of work.
“Still supervising the Murphy homicide?” he asked.
“Bingo,” Joe said. “This place was her last known, but nothing’s breaking loose. I miss the old days when you could bend some flesh to get a squeak.”
Edison snorted. “Never marked you as a pain pal. Can you get free from there or do they have you tied to a chair?”
“Not my pain!”
“If you say so.” The IG grinned. He and Carsten went way back together and although most everyone knew his public face, Joe knew better.
“I might have something new for you,” Wentworth said. “Can you meet me at the morgue?”
“On my way,” Joe said. “Five minutes. Eight if traffic’s bad.”
At this point in his career the Investigator General seldom got his feet dirty on the ground, so he wasn’t surprised that the security clerk, who was facing the highest law enforcement officer in the Union, fumbled his way through the authorizations. By the time he stood at the door to the cold locker and had punched in the cadaver request for Zora Murphy’s body, Carsten had managed to catch up.
“What have we got?” he asked, sliding to a stop on the slick floor.
“A lead, maybe,” he said. “But we’ve got to play this close to the chest. It might be tangled up in that Sealed Docket Session that’s coming down. If so, where I got the source can never be leaked.” A countdown timer ticked off the time it would take for the retrieval bot to pull her corpse from the locker and bring it to an examination chamber.
“Shit, really?”
“Katryna Roja just told me something that makes me wonder if we’re not digging up something much bigger.”
“Then I’m glad we decided to keep this one in our pocket rather than turning it over to the locals,” Carsten said. “Bigger how?”
He looked up at the screen as the robot opened the door to the cold storage and trundled Murphy’s naked body onto an examination table in a cloud of condensing vapor. The door on their side opened and they stepped into the exam room. A glass wall still separated them from the cadaver and the cold air beyond, but they had an array of manipulator arms they could use as necessary. Carsten walked up and identified himself with a biometric scanner. The unit blinked green authorizing him to ac
cess the tools if needed.
“According to the chancellor, Miss Murphy here signed off on paperwork between SourceCartel and FleetCartel less than two days ago,” he said.
Carsten shot the IG a quizzical eye and then looked into the examination chamber. “I’m pretty sure she’s really dead.”
“Yep. That means one of two things,” he said. “Either someone’s duped her biometrics, or the corpse isn’t Zora Murphy.”
“The ME did a standard DNA run on her.” Carsten said, shaking his head.
“We want to dig deeper,” Edison said. “I’ll need another cell plug.”
“Sure.” Joe grabbed the needle arm controller to aspirate a new sample. “It’ll come back the same,” he said. “It’s that insanity thing. Do the same thing, get the same results. Won’t change who she is.”
“That won’t work. I need a cubic centimeter, so you’ll need to cut it,” the IG said. “From inside the mouth if you can.”
“That big a chunk?”
“Humor me,” the IG said. “I’m not taking this through official channels.”
CHAPTER NINE
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
Rocky called everyone, except Anju, to the ConDeck so they could explore options until the commander recovered.
“Good news is we have power and atmo is tight,” she said as Chei floated in and took a position near the railing to the chute. He’d been outside again to check the damage from the second series of impacts, but he showed no signs of being tired after completing his second EVA since all this started.
Must be good to still be young, she thought.
“There’s no evidence of a collision on the hull this time either,” he added. “Unfortunately, we’ve only got one manipulator arm left and the racks are fragged. One more solid broadside and we’ll be scattering the TICS all over space.”
“Can we use the arm to bend the racks back into shape?” Danel asked.
“Single arm probably has sufficient strength, but would be close to limit,” Rocky said, stifling a yawn. “Could burn out servomotors.”
Kiro shook his head. “If we do that, we’ve got no way to cut ice to refuel.”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 8