Chapter 6 The Cargo Ring

Deck six was cold the way only unused machinery is cold, the chill of systems still drawing power to stay ready and getting nothing in return. The cargo ring wrapped the station's spine at its widest point, a long tube of numbered bays that had once held freight for the trade route the war had closed. Now most of them stood empty and dark, and the ones that did not were sealed against a leak that everyone knew about and nobody had fixed. Bay seven was at the end of the row. "Access pass says out of service," Wexley said, holding her slate up to the lock. "Access log says somebody has opened this door eleven times in the last month. Maintenance has no record of any of them." The door opened, and the smell came out, and Ilyse knew before she saw anything that they had found two things and would only get to keep one of them. The terminal was along the far wall, and it had been wiped the way a professional wipes a terminal: not broken, not smashed, but scrubbed—logs overwritten, caches flushed, the local storage reformatted in a single command that ran to completion and left a clean, innocent machine behind. Whoever had done it had done it recently, because the drive was still faintly warm. And on the floor between the terminal and a stack of freight pallets lay a man in a station-maintenance coverall, one arm folded under him, his slate cracked beside his open hand. Tobin Skarrow, who had worked the cargo ring for six years and whose only known vice was a taste for fixing machines that other people had declared dead. "Wexley," Ilyse said. "Do not touch anything. Do not call it in yet." Wexley had gone gray. "He is—" "He is dead. I need ten seconds to know why before the station writes it down as something else." She crouched by the pallet. The pallets were loaded with sealed coolant drums, each one heavy enough to kill a man if it fell, and one of them had fallen, or had been made to look as if it had. The drum rested across Skarrow's lower back with a casualness that no gravity accident produces: a real falling drum rolls, and this one had been set down. She looked at the coverall, at the collar, where there was a neat burn the size of her thumb, the kind a discharge tool leaves when it fires at close range into a conductive weave. "He was killed first and crushed after," she said. "Which means somebody wanted the station to file him as a worksite accident and stop asking why the terminal was busy." Wexley's voice came out thin. "He was the only maintenance tech with a key to this bay." "Which means the killer took his key, used it, and then decided the key was safer dead." Ilyse stood. "Now you can call it in." They stood in the cold and looked at each other over the body, and Wexley said, in a voice that had gone thin and young, "We should call it in." "We will. In a moment." Ilyse made herself read the room the way she read a bad sentence, from the grammar forward. Skarrow had come down here for an inventory he had not been scheduled for; the slate by his hand was still lit, and it showed a list of coolant drums, which was his ordinary work. He had found the bay open. He had walked to the terminal. And then someone had come in behind him and put a discharge tool against his collar and, when the floor was already a crime scene, had chosen the least convincing accident on the station to hide it under. Why a drum? Because a drum was available, because the killer had not planned this and had reached for the nearest heavy thing. It fit the shaking hand. Whoever had done it was not a killer by trade. Whoever had done it was a translator, or a clerk, or an officer who spent his days on the spine and his nights moving words. Wexley crouched by the slate, careful not to touch it, and read the inventory aloud. "Forty-one drums, all present. He was almost finished." She looked up. "The last line is a note to himself. It says the bay seven key is not on the hook, check with, and then the name is half typed. It starts with a D." She looked at the terminal, then at the dead man, then at Ilyse. "The killer came in before he could finish the sentence. He was writing down whoever gave him the key." Ilyse put a hand on Wexley's shoulder and made her stand up and step back, because the analyst was shaking now and shaking people touch things. "You have the time stamp?" "Twenty-six minutes ago." "Then the killer is still on the ring." She looked down the long cold curve of deck six, at the bays standing sealed and dark, at the junction where the one working camera watched a corridor that led back to the spine. "Which means he walked out past that camera, and it means you and I need to be very careful about how we tell this story, because the first version of it will be the one that sticks." She called Prell on the private channel, and while the call connected she did the thing translators were trained to do and soldiers were trained not to: she listened to the silence of the room, and in the silence she heard the terminal's drive still turning, cooling, finishing the reformat it had been given. The command that ran it had left a timestamp. The timestamp had a start. The start had an author. Someone had been in this bay three minutes before Skarrow, and eleven minutes after. The station's response was efficient, which was the worst thing about it. Prell arrived with two officers within four minutes, sealed the bay, and did the small, careful work of a security chief who wanted the scene documented before anyone with an agenda could disturb it. She listened to Ilyse's account twice, examined the collar burn herself, and then said the thing that told Ilyse she had found at least one honest person on the deck. "This is a homicide staged as an accident," Prell said. "I can see it, you can see it, and by morning the administrator's office will file it as a worksite death with a note about the investigation continuing, because a homicide on a neutral station during a peace accord is a diplomatic event, and diplomatic events get managed." She looked at Ilyse. "You went into a sealed bay against an order. Tell me why I should not put that on the record." "Because I am the only person on this station who can read both of the sentences somebody died over," Ilyse said, "and if you lock me in a cabin to keep me safe, the next person who dies will be an envoy, and the station will file that as an accident too." Prell considered her for a long moment, and then she did the arithmetic she had clearly been doing since she walked in the door. "Deck six has forty-one camera feeds," she said. "One of them is dead—the one covering bay seven—and it has been dead for a year, which is longer than this conspiracy, which means it is real maintenance neglect and not a cover. But the camera at the corridor junction still works. Whoever came down here did not need to pass the junction, which means they came from inside the ring, and inside the ring is only staff." "Staff with cargo credentials." "Staff with cargo credentials," Prell agreed, "and I am going to give you a copy of the junction footage because I would rather have one person on this station who is already asking the right questions than a report that says nothing. In exchange, you tell me the moment you learn who it is, before you tell anyone else, including Solvig." Ilyse looked at the dead man, and the clean terminal, and the fallen drum that had been set down gently on a broken spine. "Agreed," she said, and shook the security chief's hand in the cold of a bay that had lied about being empty. ---