Severance (12 page)

Carrie shook her head. “Nope. That’s kind of weird, isn’t
it?”

Stein frowned. “Not necessarily,” she said, lying.

“Do you think I should go talk to them now?”

“I don’t think so. I’m sure they’ll come talk to you when
they’re ready,” Stein said. The important part of the conversation had ended at
that point, with Stein not really paying attention as they exchanged banalities
for another few seconds before making their goodbyes.

She walked away, her mind racing. That was a lot of mistakes
to crop up all of a sudden in the service request system. Was someone trying to
conceal what happened on Ron Gabelman’s last day? And why wasn’t security
investigating his murder? Retracing a victim’s steps before they were murdered
seemed like pretty basic police work to her.

She looked up to realize she had been wandering in the wrong
direction and stopped to reorient herself. She was no longer dealing with a
puzzle, a broken widget to diagnose and repair. Definitely much bigger than
that. She was reluctant to believe in conspiracies, having never observed
anything that couldn’t be explained by small–scale human selfishness and
stupidity. She looked back in the direction she had come. There was a person
who had no problem believing in crazy far–reaching conspiracies. She picked up
her terminal to send a message to Bruce, then hesitated, looking at the terminal
with mistrust.
Now that was definitely being paranoid.

She tucked the terminal back in her webbing, setting off for
home again. Maybe a little paranoia would be healthy for the time being.
Besides, it felt more appropriate to conduct this sort of conversation in the
dead of night.

§

There was a reason they had sent Stein and not him this way
on their first time through, Bruce realized as he came crashing through the
ceiling of Maurice Melson’s mystery studio. As the dust settled, he rolled over
on his back and took an inventory of his various parts and organs, eventually
deciding that they were all in place and in working order. Also noteworthy, his
sudden and wildly unorthodox entrance into the room hadn’t triggered any booby
traps. He sat up. He had scanned the room before opening the damper, firing
every type of useful electromagnetic radiation he could from the safety of the
ducting, looking for anything dangerous. Finding nothing, he created his own
danger via his rapid room penetration technique and the sudden stop at the end
it necessitated.

He hadn’t told Stein he was coming back here — it was
apparent his colleague had lost most of her interest in these sorts of hijinks
in the wake of Gabelman’s death. She had her responsibilities. She never said
it, but she liked being the boss. And he was proud of her. It was a tough job,
and she did it well.

It wasn’t for him though; it required a certain amount of
effort that he didn’t like to apply in public settings. Effort attracted
attention. He had once snapped a kid’s arm in half during a wrestling match, thanks
to effort. That was awkward, but less so than when he did it again, three
months later, to the same kid. Very embarrassing. The kid’s dad was furious; he
had come running out onto the floor, yelling at the coach, yelling at the
referee, yelling at Bruce. Raising his fists. Everyone agreed that when Bruce
broke the dad’s arm, it was justifiably self–defense, but that it was probably
a good idea to quit wrestling for a while. He quit a lot of other things not
long after.

So, he let Stein do the trying, while he assisted with the much
safer chore of making clever observations from the sidelines. He saved his real
effort for when everyone else went to bed. Stein tagged along with that
sometimes, but she had always been a bit of a fair–weather burglar. She was in
it for the fun.

Although perhaps not containing a lot of fun, Bruce was still
convinced there was
something
interesting going on in this particular
room. He had been considering what he knew about Maurice Melson over the last
couple of days and decided that it was an alias used by someone in the navy.
Someone fairly senior, possibly within the IT group, capable of creating false
records in the ship’s database. And this person owned this room to keep
something hidden in it — something he couldn’t keep in a place linked to his real
identity. Bruce concluded that it was something embarrassing, probably illegal,
and if so, very valuable, if only as blackmail material. And assuming he hadn’t
crushed it when he had entered the room, Bruce desperately wanted to find out
what it was.

Moving gingerly now, Bruce stood up and slowly looked around
the room. It was bigger than he had imagined it, or at least bigger than Stein
had described it. There were shelving units along three of the four walls, and
a doorway that led to the closet that Stein must have used to access the
service tunnels. He frowned. Which shelving unit did Stein think she had
jostled to set off the booby trap? Where was the booby trap for that matter?
Above the ceiling space seemed likely. Retrieving a chair from the far end of
the room, Bruce positioned it under the hole he had just made and peered up
above the false ceiling, using his terminal as a light. Nothing interesting up
there.

What would a blinder booby trap be used for anyways? It
would only be useful for momentarily stunning someone, or maybe scaring them
away. But he didn’t see what use it would have in an unguarded room against a
dedicated thief. If Stein had been so inclined, she could have set it off,
blinded herself, waited for her vision to recover, and then kept stealing
whatever she wanted. Unless the room was monitored, there would have been no
way to prevent her from doing just that, or, for that matter, him doing that
right now. Of course, if the room was being monitored, he was already caught.
But Stein would have been caught, as well. “So, probably not monitored,” Bruce
said aloud, daring the room to prove him wrong.

He began his search, unwrapping the cases and dust covers
off of the various items on the shelves. Nothing that remarkable — he didn’t even
bother with his value scanner. Just old art supplies and several pieces of
fairly mediocre, or fairly fantastic, art — he freely admitted he didn’t have
an eye for the stuff. What he did have an eye for was blinding booby traps, and
he noted a complete lack of them. Having checked everything on or under the
shelves and around the room, he began systematically shaking and rattling every
piece of furniture. Nothing. Not even any signs of a booby trap mechanism — no
lines or springs or sensors or pits in the ground with foliage over them.

“What the fucking fuck?” he asked the room, spinning around.
Frustrated, he began pacing back and forth in a grid, inspecting the grayish
ceiling tiles, looking for anything out of order. He had decided that whatever
Stein had seen was much smaller than the blinders he was familiar with. Maybe
something embedded in the support grid of the suspended ceiling itself.
Something small like a button, or a crevice, or…that enormous meter long gash.

Running almost atop a member of the support grid, and mostly
camouflaged by it, lay a thin black gash in the ceiling. Standing on his toes,
Bruce could see that both the ceiling tiles and support grid were completely
cut through. He retrieved the chair, moved it over to the spot with the gash,
and stepped up, cautiously moving the slashed ceiling tile out of the way.
Above him, he could see the rough rock surface of the ship’s frame, with a
matching black gash.

Bruce scratched his ear. This mystery had become a
completely different one, and one which had considerably less likelihood of
producing valuable loot. Instead of loot, he had a mysterious gash in the
ceiling — and a fresh one. Something had cut through here from the floor above.
But, what? There was nothing on board the ship that he knew of that could cut
through that much rock in one sweep. Back when the ship was constructed, the
crews hollowing out the asteroid had used fusion torches to cut chunks out of
the ship — those would clearly do the job, but none had been left on board the
Argos when it pushed off. Indeed, a tool which could casually punch a hole
through the hull of a spaceship was a real fucking liability for the people who
had to live on that spaceship. Which meant someone would had to have built it.

“What the fucking fuck?” Bruce asked again. The room
continued to offer no answers.

§

Stein knocked on the door as quietly as she could.

“What?” a voice yelled, muffled by the closed door. She
knocked again, this time louder. The door slid open, revealing Bruce, naked. “Who
the hell knocks?” he asked.

Stein blinked, and directed her gaze upwards at Bruce’s less
objectionable upper half. “Just let me in,” she said, walking past the man
before he could answer.

Bruce allowed the door to close, then turned to look at her,
and the bulky brown coat she was wearing. “Why are you dressed like a bag of
meat?”

Stein ignored him and took off the formless jacket she had
slipped on earlier, hoping to disguise herself from any watching sensors. She considered
asking Bruce to wear it himself, but she knew from long experience that if she
called attention to his nakedness, he would just do something to make her more
uncomfortable. Tumbling probably. Instead, she asked, “Do you know who Arlo
Samson is?”

Bruce placed his index fingers on his temples and rubbed
them around. “Can’t say as I do.”

“Wanna do me a favor?”

“Without hearing what it is first? Absolutely.”

Stein smiled. Forcing her eyes to look at his face, she told
Bruce everything she had learned about the altered service requests, the
strange timestamps, and finally, the critical meeting with Carrie the
receptionist. “I’m getting the distinct impression that someone is trying to
keep people, or at least me and my team, out of the aft of the ship.”

“The timestamps on the service requests…” Bruce began.

“For maintenance in the aft of the ship,” Stein finished his
sentence. “The timestamps have been altered so that they won’t come up during
the day shift. They get delayed until the swing or skeleton shift, at which
point those crews handle them.”

“Why would anyone want to keep us out of the aft, but let
those maniacs back there?” Bruce asked.

“No idea. But I think that it’s been happening for at least
the last month. Then yesterday, the same thing started happening for service
requests in the annex.”

“And you think that’s why Gabelman got murdered? Because
some bureaucrat observed him doing his job? I know those lazy bastards don’t
like being made to look bad, but that sounds a bit farfetched.”

Stein shook her head. “No, listen. He got assigned to a pair
of service requests in the Annex. When he got there, he found out one of them
was called in by someone called Arlo Samson. Arlo Samson used to work in the
Annex until he changed offices a few months ago. The service request system had
filled in his old address automatically, and he never noticed when he submitted
it.”

“So what?”

“So, Ron attends the call and figures out the address was
incorrect. He finds Arlo Samson has moved to the Bridge somewhere.”

“In the middle of the aft.” Bruce turned away from Stein and
began pacing back and forth, making a show of thinking. “Okay, let me get this
straight. You think that if the system had got his address correct, the
timestamp would have been manipulated to steer the request away from us?”

“That’s right.”

Bruce sat down. “And you think security is in on this?”

“Do you have to sit like that?” Stein said, looking at the
ceiling. A quick glance showed the man had crossed his legs at the knee, one
leg swinging jauntily. Looking back up, she continued, “Yeah, I do think
security is up to something. They don’t appear to be investigating Ron’s death
too thoroughly.”

Bruce crossed and uncrossed his legs as he thought.
Eventually, he leaned back and said, “Okay. Let’s think this through a bit. Say
that there is someone on board this ship that wants to keep people from
snooping around the aft. This person — or persons I guess — would have to be a
fairly senior security or government or IT guy. So, question number one is, why
would they do this?”

Stein held up a hand in front of her, angled to block
specific parts of Bruce. “No idea. The engines and fuel pods are the most
sensitive things in that part of the ship, but we wouldn’t go near those
anyways. Most of the aft is City Hall, government offices, and crappy apartments.
Can you think of anything?”

“Oh, holy shit, yes.” Bruce said. “M. Melson’s studio? With
the mystery blinder? Guess who was there again tonight?”

“You, pantsless.”

“Partial credit,” Bruce confirmed. “And you didn’t see a
blinder. You saw a fusion torch.” Bruce explained the scar in the ceiling that
he saw.

That explained at least part of the mystery, the part that
didn’t have a fusion torch tell her about Vlad. “Of course,” she said. “I am so
stupid. That was in the aft too. How did I forget that?”

Bruce nodded. “On 6
^th
.”

Stein drummed her fingers on the desk. “Okay. So, someone —
hell, let’s not kid ourselves, this must be a lot of people — is doing
something weird in the south of the ship. Cutting through rock. Why?”

Bruce shrugged. “Because fuck that rock, that’s why.”

Stein laughed, then stared at the floor, slowly shaking her
head. “Yeah. I can’t think of anything either.”

“Which I guess brings us to our next question: so what?”
Bruce said. “I mean, do we even do anything about this? Aside from the
insatiable sense of vengeance you must feel for what happened to a valued team
member, why exactly do we care about this? Because it kind of looks like
something people are willing to kill for. I think that makes this interesting
as hell, but I’ve got well–known problems. So, using you as a better barometer
of sense, why do you care?”