April 6: And What Goes Around (15 page)

Irwin cracked his
neck both ways, shut the monitors down, reclined the seat a bit further and sat
still, hands in his lap and head still full of all the trades and transfers
he's crammed in the last few hours. If he wasn't careful he'd go to sleep right
here until his employees came in and woke him up. Which wasn't all that far
away now. He looked past his monitors at the glass wall with the bank name in
gold letters and the corridor beyond. It was bright out there any shift, day or
night. He'd been staring at the screen so long it was hard to refocus in the
distance.

The view was what
he saw every day. It was etched in his brain. But even in his fatigued state
something was different. He couldn't place
what
was different, but it
was. He sat there frowning, then it became obvious. There was a little box,
close to the color of the corridor wall itself that hadn't been there, well,
recently
he was sure. As tired as he was he might not have figured it out, but it
moved
.
Creeping along the wall horizontally towards the cafeteria, until he sat up in
shock and it froze at his motion. That
really
got his attention. This
time he sat unmoving on purpose. After about a minute the little object resumed
its journey. Irwin just watched until it passed out of his sight, not wanting
to trigger it again. However it was programmed, he didn't want to it to have
any conditioning or altered responses about his bank.

He really wanted
to go home and sleep, but that was out of the question now. He turned the
monitor back on and called station security. He expected to get a duty officer
and have to rouse Jon from his bed. Instead he answered the call himself.
Looking at his unwrinkled shirt and clear eyes Irwin was pretty sure he was in
the office early, not coming off an all-nighter like he was.

"Irwin! He
said cheerfully. "You know... you look like hell, guy?"

"I love you
too," Irwin responded.

"Yet you
never send flowers," Jon quipped.

"Jon. I've
been up twenty six hours. I just watched the farce that they label an economy
below us melt down like it hasn't in three score and ten years. I'm not in a
mood to banter. Now either I'm hallucinating, which isn't outside the realm of
possibility, or I just saw something that is an important enough security
breach to delay going to bed to tell you."

"Indeed? Does
it involve the bank?"

"I don't
know... " Irwin thought about it a little. He
was
tired. It took
him a minute to think and Jon waited patiently. "I don't
think
so,
but I can't be a hundred percent certain. Do you have, uh,
sensors
out
in the corridors?" he asked Jon.

"That isn't
something I generally discuss with people."

Irwin let out a
frustrated sigh. "Jon,
I'm
the fellow on this corridor who has cash
and gold bars in my vault. Do you think I'm trying to do a social crack of your
security so I can break in Zack's place and steal his chocolate chip
cookies?"

"Ummm, point
taken. I have some sensors, but you shouldn't be able to tell they're there.
They are passive."

"You don't have
a little box with vent slots in the edges," Irwin asked, holding up index
fingers and thumbs to define a rectangle a bit bigger than his wallet,
"that crawls along the wall but freezes if it sees any motion around
it?"

He definitely had
Jon's attention. "I'd agree you are hallucinating, but I can't imagine you
hallucinating anything so strange. How does it hang on? Little suction
cups?"

"How would I
know?" Irwin asked, really irked. "Something underneath it. How does
a bug walk along the wall? Maybe it has little tracks like a tank with sticky
pads. What does it
matter
? The question is
what
is it
doing?"

"Sorry. I
don't have anything that moves around. Nobody else should either. I just got
caught up in the details. I don't like this," Jon decided.

"Well it
doesn't thrill me either. I have no idea how long the damn creepy thing was
hanging there watching me," Irwin said.

"Could it
have been reading your monitor?" Jon speculated.

"We're not
that stupid. None of our monitors can be seen from the corridor windows. They
are all shielded electronically and we even made sure there aren't any
reflective surfaces behind us off which to read the screen. It did move on after
I shut down though," Irwin remembered.

"It's not
there anymore?" Jon asked, worried.

"No, I sat
still so I didn't trigger it again and it continued on toward the cafeteria. At
the rate it was going it will take eight or ten minutes to get there. Well,
half that now, since we've been talking. Are you going to
do
anything
about it?" Irwin asked.

"Yeah, I'm
texting one of my people even as we speak," Jon said. "He'll walk
past it and get a good look at it. They'll record it with security spex. Then
I'll probably set up some instruments for it to go past and get a really good
scan of it. Maybe backscatter analyze it from the other side of a bulkhead and
see if it emits any radio traffic in the next day."

"Why not just
have somebody scoop it off the wall into a Faraday cage or smack it with a four
kilo engineer's hammer?" Irwin demanded.

"That might
not be smart. The size you indicated, it could have a hunk of explosive in it
the size of a deck of playing cards. You'd be astonished how much
BOOM
a
hunk
of third generation metallic explosives that size can make. If it
is remotely operated they'd see you putting the box over it and have time to
trigger a self destruct.  Even if it doesn't go boom big I don't want a hunk of
fused scrap that won't tell us who was using it. I've got to have a survey
done, quickly, and see if we have any more of these crawling around Home,"
Jon told Irwin.

"Oh... I
didn't think of that. I thought one was bad.
Crap..
. "

"I might set
up an ambush and hit it with an EMP. If there are others it might just look
like a failure to them. And they'd keep operating any others." Jon said.

"Why would
you want that? What possible benefit to allow somebody to keep spying on
us?" Irwin asked.

"Well, if it
is spying and we can figure out what sort of data it is returning we can feed
it false information. But if it isn't a spy device, then yeah, we can
neutralize them all at once." Jon agreed.

"What could
it be but a spy device?" Irwin asked irritated. He was tired. Jon didn't
take offence.

"It could be
a private project by some kid who doesn't know how much it would alarm us. I
know several teenage kids who have the technical skills to make something like
this but lack the wisdom to see what a bad idea it would be. Or... it could be
a small combat robot. An assassination machine." Jon speculated. "It
may be searching for a face and waiting to get within range. Or even have a
list with priorities assigned."

"I was going
to walk past it, home," Irwin said. He seemed to be having second
thoughts.

"Perhaps you
should take the long way around the ring today," Jon suggested, "go
to a different elevator."

"I can't
imagine anybody would want to hurt me," Irwin said. But he didn't sound at
all confident.

"You must
live the life of the pure and righteous," Jon said. "I know
lots
of people who would like me dead. The hard part would be narrowing the list
down. You do deal in large sums of money. People aren't always rational. If one
of your customers lost money they may blame you. Even if you did exactly as
they instructed you. The human mind has a vast capacity for refusing blame and
transferring responsibility to others."

"But most of
my customers who lost serious money lost it in the last day. Surely this has
been here longer than that. I think it's been about thirty hours since the last
shuttle docked on Home," Irwin said.

"Don't bet
your life on it. Walk around the long way," Jon insisted.

Irwin nodded a
yes. So tired he could barely hold his eyes open.

"Call me after you sleep and are up and functioning," Jon
invited. "I should know something by then," he said, and
disconnected.

* * *

Barak sat and
stewed wondering what was happening for a long time after being sent to his
cabin. Nobody sent him a message and it was hours before Deloris finally came
back to him. She was clean with fresh clothes and wet hair, so she'd stopped at
her own place and cleaned up. Alice was similarly cleaned up and now he was
paranoid enough to wonder if they had been together discussing the situation
before talking to him. He couldn't blame either of them if they didn't want to
get sucked into his problems. At least they were here. No reason they couldn't
have just decided he was too toxic to continue associating with on their own
time.

"I'm confined
to my cabin by order of the acting Captain," Barak told them right up
front.

"Yeah, she
told us. If she intended for us to stay away she forgot to actually
order
us," Deloris said.

"How bad was
the fire?" Barak wanted to know.

"It didn't
really damage any part of the ship. It discolored a bit of deck and a shelf
above, but it was basically confined to a few self heating meals in a shrink wrap
block," Alice told him.

"We didn't
lose too much air like we were talking about?" Barak asked.

"Not enough
reserve nitrogen to matter," Alice said. "The cupboard is just a
place to hold the next few days food. You have the main stores in three
separate locations for security. It was planned we could lose one of the three
and make it home, although we might lose a few kilos and meals could be a
little boring. It's not even that bad, now that we are short crewed.

"We lost
about a dozen cans total of beef stew, lasagna, and chicken teriyaki. The other
stuff just needs wiped off to remove some smoke film. As soon as I vented the
room it stopped the cans from heating. We only lost about two cubic meters of
air."

"Do you know
how it started?" Barak noticed he was the only one asking questions, so
Alice must have run through all this for Deloris already.

"Oh sure. I
can even tell you which can. It had a nice ding on the bottom edge. Somebody
got rough with the block of meals and smacked it on the deck hard enough to
actuate one. In fact the little recessed dimple on the bottom you need to pop
in to start it heating on purpose was still unmarked. It's the same kind of
banging stuff around that killed Harold really."

"Well, about
that...  Charlotte says she and Jaabir think I somehow killed Harold and they
just haven't proved it yet," Barak revealed.

The women looked
at each other not even trying to hide their shock. Apparently Charlotte had not
intimated that little gem to either of the woman. That was just more proof to
Barak she didn't really believe it herself or she'd have feel obligated to warn
them he was a danger.

"That's
crazy! You were in the lock. Do they think you stayed behind every day and beat
his boot flanges with a hammer until they cracked?" Alice asked.

"She informed
me my suit recording were erased, and they find that
very
suspicious." He switched to helmet talk. "But I have copies of
them."

"I don't
believe it. Every time you plug your suit systems in to recharge it dumps your
data log to the ship's computer.
And
they get the camera stream from
your suit to view on the bridge. You mean to tell me they don't record that
stream too? They would want it recorded just in case you don't make it back to
plug in. If your shift log was missing they'd have been complaining about it
back then, before the next shift certainly, not now," Deloris said.

Alice meanwhile
wiggled her finger and said in helmet talk  – "Get them. We'll make more
copies and hide them," while Deloris talked.

"I think I'd
just like to watch a movie and not have to think about this awhile," Barak
said. He signed – "I want you guys to hear my conversation with
Charlotte."

They both nodded
agreement.

"I have one
on my list I wanted to see about old open cockpit airplanes. Is that
light-hearted enough to de-stress you?" Deloris asked.

They both agreed.
They turned up the volume and the ladies listened to his encounter with
headphones while the movie played to explain the lack of conversation.

They all had
simple vocabularies in helmet talk and had to finger spell a lot of things.
Deloris knew this was going to take far too long that way so she made sure her
private pad wasn't connected and typed the message on screen. She'd hard delete
it when done.

"She messed
up telling you she would give you your hearing. That little fit of temper is
going to come back on her. I've read the regulations repeatedly, they are
important to know, and I can assure you it is within her authority to call a
disciplinary hearing as acting Captain on an extended voyage. It would never
fly on say a six hour orbit to orbit, but this authority was decided before the
Mars missions left. Then she admitted flat out she could not prove you hit
Jaabir. Stupid, stupid thing to do. She exonerated you. I doubt she even
realizes it. And the licensing body doesn't allow a second hearing on the same
issue, so your ticket as an able spacer and extra-vehicular specialist is
safe."

"But, she
still confined me to my cabin," Barak helmet spoke such a short easy
phrase.

Deloris cleared
the screen and typed. "Yes but she has the authority to remove you from
duty if she has lost confidence in you. It's her obligation to do so actually
if you perform life critical functions. But when we sort this out back home
they will consider if doing so was reasonable or prudent under the
circumstances. She didn't impose anything as a punishment or declare you unfit.
She didn't even formally end the hearing, but she didn't declare it would be
reconvened either. So I'd consider it ended when she sent you to your quarters.