Immediately prior to the evacuation, Wednesday returned to the portal station for her own reasons. While there, she discovered a body, believed to be that of Customs Officer Gareth Smaile, who was listed as “missing” after the evacuation. Officer Smaile is confirmed as having been one of the individuals responsible for maintaining immigration records for persons entering and leaving Moscow system via the portal station, before the holocaust. When Wednesday found him he appeared to have been murdered — a unique event on a small colony that averaged one violent crime every five years.
Abandoned by the body were written instructions to parties unknown requesting that all customs records relating to immigration be wiped prior to evacuation, save for a single copy that was to be returned to the author of the letter.
Taking this report at face value, someone wants to cover up the fact that they quietly entered or departed Moscow system through Portal Station Eleven shortly before the catastrophe. Whoever they were, they had an agent or agents aboard the Dresdener starship Long March when it called at Old Newfie to evacuate the survivors — an agent who was willing to commit murder.
If this is a hoax, it’s a violent one. [Newshound: Trace police blotter report CM-6/9/312-04-23-19-24A, double murder.] Two hit men were sent after our informant; she evaded them, unlike the rest of her family, who woke up dead two days ago. Someone maliciously bypassed the gas-conditioning inlet to their home and disabled the alarms. Police crime investigation officer Robin Gough characterized the murder as an “extremely professional” hit, and says she’s looking for two men [Newshound: Trace police arrest warrant W/CM-6/9/312-B4] wanted for murder. Here’s a hint: Septagon police are efficient enough that if they haven’t been found within half an hour, they’re not going to be found at all because they’re not on the station anymore.
The Times is not yet certain about what’s going on, but it appears to be a particularly nasty game of spy-versus-spy. The implication — that there is an attempt in progress to cover up the true story of the destruction of Moscow — appears compelling, and we will continue to investigate it. In the meantime, we are releasing this raw and uncooked interview in order to render pointless further attempts to maintain the cover by murdering the surviving witnesses.
The Times has this message for the culprits, whoever they are: The truth will out!
Ends (Times Editorial)
Cymbals chimed: the floor gave a faint lurch, almost imperceptible, barely sufficient to rattle the china in the dining lounges as the huge liner cut over to onboard gravity. Junior Flight Lieutenant Steffi Grace shook her head. “That’s not very good.”
“It’s within tolerances, but only just,” agreed her boss, Flying Officer Max Fromm. He pointed at the big status board in front of her. “Want to tell me why?”
“Hmm. Kernel balance looks good. We’ve stabilized nicely, and the mass distribution is spot on — no problems there. Um. I don’t see anything on board. But the station…” She paused, then brought up a map of the ambient gravity polarization field. “Oh. We picked up a little torque from the station’s generators when we tripped out. Is that what you’re after?”
“No, but it’ll do.” Fromm nodded. “Remember that. These big new platforms the Septs are building kick back.” He brought back the original systems map. “Now, you’re going to talk me through the first stage of our departure, aren’t you?”
Steffi nodded, and began to take him through the series of steps that the Captain and her bridge crew would be running upstairs as they maneuvered the huge liner clear of the Noctis docking tree. Down here in the live training room things weren’t as tense; just another session in the simulator, shadowing the bridge team. The training room was cramped, crammed with console emulators and with space for only a couple of people to crowd inside. In an emergency it could double as a replacement bridge — but it would have to be a truly desperate emergency to take out the flight deck, five levels down inside the hull.
“Okay, now she’s pumping up the C-head ring. That’s, um, five giga-Teslas? That’s way more than she needs to maintain a steady one-gee field. Is she planning on buffering some really heavy shocks? Attitude control — we’re steady. No thermal roll to speak of, not out here in Septagon B, so she’s put just enough spin on the outer hull to hold us steady as we back out at five meters per second. That’s going to take, uh, two minutes until we’re clear far enough to begin a slow pitch up toward the departure corridor. Am I right?”
“So far so good.” Max leaned back in his chair. “I hate these stations,” he said conversationally. “It’s not as if there’s much other traffic — we’ve got nearly a thousand seconds to clear the approaches — but it’s so damn crowded here it’s like threading a needle with a mooring cable.”
“One wrong nudge—”
“Yeah.” The Romanov was a huge beast. Beehive shaped, it was three hundred meters in diameter at its fattest and nearly five hundred meters long. The enormously massive singularity lurking inside its drive kernel supplied it with power and let it twist space-time into knots, but was absolutely no use for close-range maneuvering; and the hot thrusters it could use for altitude control would strip the skin off a hab if the Captain lit her up within a couple of kilometers. That left only the cold thrusters and gyrodynes for maintaining altitude during departure — but they had about as much effect as a team of ants trying to kick a dead whale down a beach. “One-sixty seconds to burner ignition, and we can crank up to departure speed, a hundred meters per second. Then just under an hour and a half to make it out to fifty kilometers and another blip on the burners to take us up to a thousand meters per second at half a gee. Another two hundred kilometers out, then we begin kernel spin-up. I haven’t looked at the flight plan for this run, but if she does her usual, once the kernel is up and running the Captain will crank us up to twenty gees and hold for about twelve hours. And she won’t mess around. That’s why she ran up the bulkhead rings now, when she’s got spare power to pump into them.” He stretched his arms out overhead, almost touching the damage control board. “Seen one departure, seen ’em all. Until the next time.”
“Right.” Steffi pushed back her chair. “Do we have time for a coffee before the burn sequence?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Steffi stood up and squeezed past Max’s chair, trailing a hand across his shoulder in passing. He pretended not to notice, but she caught the ghost of his smile reflected in the screens as she turned toward the door. Two or three weeks of stealing time together didn’t make for a serious relationship in her estimate, but it beat sleeping alone on her first long cruise, and Max was more considerate than she’d expected. Not that she was incapable of coping. WhiteStar didn’t employ child labor, and she’d joined up at thirty-two, with her first career under her: she’d known exactly what she was letting herself in for. If anyone had accused him of taking advantage of her, she’d have taken a pointy stick to them. But so far discretion had paid off, and Steffi had no complaints.
There was a vending machine near the facilities pod down the gray-painted crew corridor. She punched for two glasses of iced latte, thought about some biscuits, and decided against it. Bridge crew, even trainee bridge crew, dined with the upper-class passengers on a rota, and Max was up for dinner at the end of his shift in a couple of hours. It wouldn’t do to spoil his appetite. She was about to head back to the auxiliary control center when she spotted a stranger in the corridor outside — probably a passenger, judging by his lack of ID. “Can I help you?” she asked, sizing him up. He was tall, blond, male, blandly handsome, and built like an army recruiting poster. Not at all like Max, a little voice in the back of her head said critically.
“Yah, yes. I was told the, ah, training bridge was on this level?” He had a strange accent, not hard to understand but slightly stilted. “I was told it was possible to visit it?”