The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (22 page)

              “So what’s the second piece of news?” Templeton inquired. Staples surmised that he hadn’t finished castigating himself up for hiring two sadists, but she decided to press on for now.

              “The satellite we found, the Yoo-lin mark VII? It went missing less than two days before we left Earth. There’s no way that it could have gotten that far on its own, especially once we consider that it was barely moving when we found it. Someone stole it out of orbit and then left it in our path.”

              He grunted. “Three guesses on who that was.”

              “The question is not who did it, but who hired the
Doris Day
? Why hire a ship to steal a satellite, drop it right in front of us, fight us for it, then follow us all the way out to Cronos Station, blocking our coms along the way?”

              “Don’t forget helping us fend off a pirate attack.”

              “That too,” Staples agreed.

              “It just doesn’t make any goddamn sense.” Templeton’s frustration was apparent.

              “No, it does. We just can’t see it yet. We’re missing something.”

              “What?”

              Before she could answer, there was a knock at the door. The captain looked at her first mate quizzically, but he just shrugged. He stood up and went to the door. When he opened it, Dinah Hazra stood with her feet slightly spread and her hands behind her back. She wore her usual black tank top and cargo pants, the latter looking newly pressed. Her hair was freshly shorn. Templeton stepped to the side, and Staples stood up to face the other woman.

              “Dinah. How can I help you?”

              “May I come in, sir?”

              “Of course.” Templeton stepped back, and Dinah entered stiffly and closed the door behind her.

She stood for a moment in silence, and the other two looked at her expectantly. “Sir, I am here to confess to the attempted murder of Parsells and Quinn.”

“What?!” Templeton nearly yelled. His voice filled the small room. Staples regarded her steadily.

“Would you like me to repeat myself, sir?” Staples saw that Dinah was affecting her middle distance stare at nothing in particular.

“Yes, I damn well would!”

Dinah opened her mouth to speak, but Staples cut her off. “I’m sorry, Dinah, but I don’t believe you.” Her voice was calm and even.

“I am confessing, sir.” Her face was inscrutable.

“Okay, let’s play this out then,” she replied. “Why did you attempt to kill them?”

“I was angry at them for attacking our passenger.”

“If you wanted them dead, you would have killed them when you defended that passenger. You could have easily done it, don’t tell me otherwise, and if you had killed them then, you could have claimed self-defense.”

“It did not occur to me to kill them then. I only decided to do it afterwards, sir.”

“Just like it didn’t occur to you to tell me you were going to jump in an EVA suit and start cutting power cables on a pirate ship?” She did not wait for an answer. “But fine, let’s say that you somehow became angrier after the attack than you were during it. Why not kill them conventionally? You have access to every weapons locker on this ship, and it is abundantly clear that you could kill them even without a weapon.”

“Something could have gone wrong, sir. They might have escaped from the room.”

Staples looked at Templeton, who still wore a look on incredulity on his face. “I think we all know you better than to think that you couldn’t handle two semi-conscious, severely beaten men. So again, why not kill them conventionally?” Her voice carried the air of an inquisitor asking questions to which she already knew the answer.

The engineer’s eyes strayed for a bit, then assumed their blank stare again. “I didn’t want to get my hands dirty.”

“You
love
getting your hands dirty!” Templeton objected. “You’re an engineer for Christ’s sake!”

“Dinah, I’ve seen your work dozens of times over on this ship in the last two years. You are a consummate professional. You may indeed love getting elbow deep in grease, but I’ve never known you to do a sloppy job. The hole in the door where the vacuum pump was attached was cut with a torch. Badly. The angles were so poor that whoever attached the hose had to use half a roll of duct tape to get a clean seal. That’s not your work.”

“I was in a rush, sir.”

“A rush job and a bad job are not the same thing. We also know, all three of us, that you would never leave a job half finished. Even if I believed everything you’ve said here, which I don’t, by the way, there’s no way that you would not have stayed to ensure that the job was finished.”

Dinah stood stock-still and stared at her invisible point on the far wall.

“Dinah, it’s a noble gesture, but I need to know: who are you protecting?”

A moment of silence passed. “Please accept this as my confession to attempted murder, sir.”

Staples heaved a great sigh. “Fine. Don, please call Mr. Jang here with his sidearm.” Templeton looked at her in disbelief, but she met his gaze evenly. “Trust me.”

              Piotr Kondratyev opened the door to his cabin and blew out a great sigh. It was a mess. Clothes were draped over the chairs, on the floor, and on the bed. He was a terrible house-keeper, and he could never be bothered to keep his room organized. This dereliction of tidiness was made far worse on a space ship that regularly underwent periods of weightlessness. He never got around to folding and placing his clothing, dirty or clean, in the dresser provided, and so every time the ship lost gravity, it would float about his room at random. Now that the ship was under thrust, most of it lay where it had fallen, and he stepped over a pair of slacks and kicked a stray shoe out of the way as he headed to the back of the room and the restroom beyond. Paradoxically, he had always been meticulous about his kitchens. His knives, pots and pans, and other utensils and tools of the trade were obsessively placed in the order he preferred, and he could not abide anyone disturbing that order, but all of his resources were spent there, and so he had few left for his living space.

              Upon reaching the restroom, he opened the door and began to rummage through the drawer beside the sink. The vial he was looking for, a small tube perhaps ten centimeters long and about half full of a clear liquid, lay amongst his beard trimmer, toothbrush, and various other sundry toiletries. At a glance, it might have passed for a bottle of cologne or some other beauty-related product. He picked it up and placed it in his pocket. He then knelt down and opened the cabinet. His hand felt around inside, up around the basin of the sink, until it fell upon the taser he had liberated from one of the obscure weapons lockers in one of the seldom-used holds of the ship. He ripped the tape away that secured it and placed it into his other pocket as he stood up. He regarded his reflection in the mirror briefly; the man he saw was trapped and unhappy, desperate but determined. He nodded once to himself and strode through the door.

              His destination was one deck down, which currently meant one deck over, and a few dozen meters of climbing hand over hand down the slatted ladder in the corridor. It only took him five minutes to get there. When he reached the door, he climbed off the makeshift ladder on to the flooring provided by the bulkhead surrounding the hatch at his feet. He closed it as quietly as he could to provide solid ground to stand on. He produced the taser from his pocket and flicked it once, watching the blue electricity crackle in the still air. Adrenaline surged through his veins, and his stomach was a mess of snakes, but he had no doubts. He forced his breathing to slow, blowing out another large sigh. Once he placed the taser behind his back, he knocked on her door, feeling disturbingly like a high school student with flowers on a first date. A few seconds later, the door opened, and he made to lunge inside and strike the woman with the taser, rendering her unconscious. He froze as the visage of Kojo Jang greeted him, the stunner pistol in his hand pointed at Piotr’s chest.

             
I have made entirely too many trips here lately
, Clea Staples thought to herself as she looked around the medical bay. Templeton stood next to her, armed with a pistol, and Piotr Kondratyev sat handcuffed and sullen on a bed. The doctor was at the back of the lab, bent over his surface, attempting to ascertain the contents of the vial they had removed from her cook’s pocket. Though Jang had all but insisted on staying, Staples had assured him that he was not needed. The baldheaded Russian had not put up a struggle. Indeed, it seemed that now that he was caught, all the fight had gone out of him. There was no trace of the anger that had driven him to strike the counter when he learned that Yegor had been killed. Staples wondered idly how much of that fury had in fact been directed at himself.

              “Piotr,” she said. He did not look up. He was slumped, his large belly protruded, and she could only see the top of his head and his dark brown beard with its light salt and peppering. “Piotr,” she said it louder. He did not move, but breathed heavily through his nose. “I want you to tell me what the doctor is going to find in that vial.”

              “I don’t know.”

              “I don’t believe you,” she replied immediately. “You know something about it. Tell me.”

              “It not supposed to kill. Only make stupid.” He spoke quietly to his stomach and his cuffed hands clasped before him.

              “Make stupid?” She looked across the bay at Jabir, who caught her eye and shrugged.

              “There are poisons and chemicals that will damage the brain in various ways without causing death,” the doctor conjectured. “That does help me refine my search.” He bent back to his surface to continue his research.

              She directed her attention back to the traitor on her crew. “Why do you want to damage Evelyn’s intelligence?”

              He shook his head, his beard scraping against his shirt. “Don’t. Just paid to.”

              She held up a small storage drive. “We found this taped to the inside of your bathroom sink. Is this the drive you used to install the virus into our mainframe?”

              He did not look up, but he nodded.

              “Who paid you? Where? When?” She was attempting to remain calm, but her voice rose as she spoke anyway. Beside her, Templeton radiated tension. She was sure that he would like nothing more than to beat the handcuffed man senseless.

              “I don’t know. Skinny man. No name. On Mars. Emailed me, offered much money. Said no one get hurt.” He shook his head at this.

              “Keep talking,” Templeton prompted angrily.

              “Told about pirate attack. Said no one get hurt, they just take girl, not hurt her. All I have to do is install virus.”

              “Then why the poison?” she asked.

              “If pirate attack failed, said I had to do it, or no money.”

              “Why? Why did you need to damage her? Why is she so important?” Staples was furious at him, and it took a great deal of restraint not to yell, to shake him. His refusal to look her in the eye was making it far worse.

              He shook his head again slowly. “Don’t know. Didn’t ask.”

              “Look at me.” He did not move. “Goddamn it, Piotr, look at me!” The imperative impelled him to raise his head, and she regarded a broken man. His eyes were red rimmed and tears could not be far away. No one had laid a violent hand on him, yet he looked beaten nonetheless. He met her eyes. “Why did you do this? Why did you betray me? I’ve known you for years!” Now she was shouting. Templeton shifted uneasily, perhaps preparing to stop her from attacking the cook, and Jabir was looking up at them now as well.

              “My brother-in-law is gambler. Much debt. He and my sister have many children. He… left. She needs money for children.”

              “We would have helped you, Piotr!” She wanted to shake him, to slap sense into him, to yell at him loud enough that his past self would hear her and make a different decision.

              He looked down and shook his head again. “Too much money. People want Katya to pay his debt. Much too much. Small man gave some, said much more to come. But no money if she got to Cronos and did job.”

              “Maybe that’s what this is all about,” Templeton offered. “Someone wants Cronos station to fail. Awful lot of trouble to go to. Rival company, maybe?”

              “It’s a pretty roundabout way to go about it. It’s hard to believe that there aren’t simpler and more thorough ways to cripple a liquid-hydrogen mining station in space.” She pondered this for a moment.

              An idea struck the first mate. “Can your friend look into who supplied the money to him?”

              “It’s an idea, but that will probably take some time. I’ll ask her once we get to Cronos. I’d just as soon not have Vey intercepting that transmission. I don’t know if they broke her encryption program, but I’m not feeding that bastard any information I don’t have to.” She looked back at Piotr and raised her voice. “So, I’m going to run through this, Piotr. Tell me if I get anything wrong. You were contacted and offered a great sum of money to stop Evelyn from reaching Cronos and doing her job. Some small man on Mars, and we’ll want more of a description than that before we’re done, gave you a vial and a drive loaded with a computer virus. You were to upload the virus when we were about six days out from Mars. You knew the pirate attack was coming and you were assured that it would be non-lethal. I’m sure Yegor’s parents will not find that comforting.” The man winced and sniffled when she said the coms officer’s name.