[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult (6 page)

‘Oh, Alicia, I’d love to,’ said Phoebe, ‘but I’ve got a
thing
.’

‘Nonsense! You never have a thing,’ Alicia turned to Peterson and tugged his sleeve. ‘Tell her she has to stay!’

‘Your future career progression depends on it,’ said Peterson, with a ponderous nod. Facial cues went on letting Phoebe down, so she couldn’t tell if he was joking and reluctantly let herself get dragged into the middle of the group. Alicia sloshed out some thick green juice from a bottle into a cocktail glass.

‘Have some Lavian gin! It’s really expensive! Because it’s fermented in the guts of marmosets or civets or something!’

‘I think I read that it kills the civets,’ said Phoebe, frowning. ‘It’s actually a very cruel process.’

‘I know! I read that too! Isn’t that brilliant? It’s why it’s so exclusive.’

Phoebe looked through the throng to where Misha was still loitering, studying a complimentary vol-au-vent. She waved. He waved back. Phoebe pulled an apologetic face, rolled her eyes theatrically, mouthed the words ‘work stuff’ and held up a hand to indicate five minutes. Misha gave her a thumbs-up and mouthed ‘no problem’. Then he did a little mime. At least, Phoebe thought it was a mime, it could have been an epileptic fit or something. She had no clue what it was supposed to convey, but she grinned at him anyway.

‘It’s great down this end of the station,’ said Alicia. ‘So much more urban. The way you’ve got
litter
in the corridors. Our neighbourhood is so clean and anodyne. Such a good choice of venue for an art show, it’s got real edge.’

‘Yes, we don’t see you guys round here very often.’

‘Today’s a special occasion!’

The homicide detectives chest-bumped and gave themselves another round of high-fives.

‘What are you celebrating?’ Phoebe asked.

‘We’ve closed the Cliff Ganymede case! Our division’s hundred percent clean-up record goes on standing!’

Alicia whooped and the homicide jocks made a sort of boo-yah noise.

‘Hey, that’s fantastic, congratulations,’ Phoebe said, not even trying to sound like she meant it. ‘So … who did it?’

‘Did what?’

‘The murder.’

‘Nobody!’ shrieked Alicia. ‘It turns out it was a suicide all along!’

‘A suicide?’ Phoebe stared at her, blankly. ‘But he was
beaten
to death with a copy of his own book.’

‘Yes, that’s right. We’re working on the theory that he beat himself to death.’

‘What about the
anonymous hit
that had been placed on him? The bounty offered on one of the pirate message boards?’

‘Yes, well, we couldn’t get any leads on that,’ said Alicia, with an airy shrug, ‘So we figured it was probably a hit placed by Ganymede himself, to make it
look
like a murder.’

Phoebe goggled at her. ‘But … why? Why would he do that?’

‘Because he was mentally unbalanced, obviously. You’ve got to remember that the guy must have been
suicidal
to kill himself, so that makes you do strange, unexplainable things. And he was a writer. Writers are messed up.’

‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Alicia. It just … it doesn’t really sound plausible.’

Alicia sniffed. ‘Gee, Phoebe, it’s great to have your input. And I’m sure there are lots of things that you know – about
customs
and
excise
. If I had a customs and excise question I’d definitely come to you. But this is, or rather
isn’t
, a homicide, and we’re homicide detectives, so I
kind of
think we know what we’re doing. Besides, I heard you have your own super-exciting, poorly-filled-out-cargo-manifest case to deal with. But anyway, let’s not talk about that. Ganymede’s not the only big news. Can you keep a secret?’

Phoebe nodded, and felt her stomach knot.

‘I shouldn’t be telling you – it’s embargoed until next week – but I’m on the shortlist. For the “thirty police under thirty to watch out for” thing.’

‘Oh. Fuck. I mean, wow. That’s really excellent, Alicia.’

Alicia flicked her flicky hair back. ‘I love this outfit by the way! You look like you’re going to a children’s party. It’s so Phoebe! It’s really refreshing how you don’t care about your appearance.’

Misha had made the final centimetre of his drink last for the best part of twenty minutes, but he didn’t think he could pretend to be engrossed in
Prometheus, Reclining, Contemplates The Howling Void
for much longer. He chanced another quick look towards the bar, where Phoebe was still chatting with her friends. Probably, Misha thought, his shoulders drooping, she had called them from the toilet.
Please rescue me, I’m trapped talking to a man who won’t quit flapping his gums about the spaceship he obviously doesn’t really own.
And what was with that ludicrous attempt to mime being ‘shot through the heart’ just then? Where had
that
come from? He ran his hand through his hair, and a bit of vegetable gristle dropped out.
You have pig guts on you. She’s not coming back. You’ve blown it in the space of an hour. When you get back home you’re going to top yourself by jumping into the Gippsworld mineshaft.

The club was starting to thin out. Misha waved for a baristabot to bring him another cocktail, then remembered that he couldn’t afford it. He ordered a slightly cheaper perception filter instead, so that at least his recollection of the evening would have the more appalling edges softened. He sat at an empty table, peeled off the back of the filter, stuck it to his arm, and was about to resign himself to another night alone with
Mission: Thargoid Kill-Punch
when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

‘Excuse me.’

Misha looked up. It took him a little while to place her. It was the dazzlingly beautiful platinum blonde from the market hall.

‘Hello,’ said the dazzlingly beautiful platinum blonde, flashing a dazzling smile to match the rest of her face. ‘I couldn’t help but hear you talking about your thriving intergalactic space-trading business earlier.’

‘Yes,’ said Misha, shaking his head, as a wave of self-disgust crashed up against the perception filter and easily overpowered it, because the Omar Sharif Jazz Lounge watered their product down pretty badly. ‘I was talking about that.’

‘Can I buy you a drink?’ The blonde sat down next to him and put her mouth very close to his ear. ‘I’ve got a proposition for you.’

Phoebe rubbed her eyes, popped another sobriety pill and decided that, in retrospect, those civets and their endangered digestive tracts deserved everything they got. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure how the rest of the evening had progressed. She remembered getting trapped in an argument with Alicia about the merits of an entirely noodle-based diet. She remembered noticing Misha talking to an irritatingly beautiful platinum blonde, and she remembered that by the time she’d finally got free from the homicide goons he had vanished. She remembered Sergeant Peterson explaining his theories on story structure, which somehow tied in to why he thought pugs were a lazy type of dog. She had a dim recollection that she might have agreed to read his unfinished novel. That was the bit that was making her anxious, so even though it wasn’t on the schedule, she decided to take a ship out and patrol the dead space around the station; that way she could avoid her boss and hopefully nobody would try to talk to her.

She chose Police Viper number six like always, because it had an ammonia leak coming out of the starboard wingtip that maintenance never seemed to fix. Phoebe had become pretty adept at timing it so that with a few spins and twists she could leave behind a fleeting floating gas doodle in the vacuum. Sometimes she drew famous landmarks. Sometimes she drew actor’s faces. Most of the time she drew genitals. She wasn’t particularly proud of herself, but it was still a skill.

After a couple of hours she got bored of the space doodling, and decided she should probably at least go through the motions of her actual job. She scanned a readout showing all the traffic coming and going from the
Jim Bergerac
that day. A methane shipment. Some Indigenous Outsider Art. Some more Indigenous Outsider Art. Methane. Art. Art. Methane. Art. Then a name caught her eye:

And before she really had time to think about it, she found herself beaming across a message.

Misha didn’t reply, but a
Ready
code meekly signalled his acquiescence, and his ship slowed to a crawl as her computer, in turn, automatically matched his pace and fired out a wobbly docking tunnel.

Phoebe scrolled through the rest of his ID. She frowned.

For a moment she thought that maybe it was a different Misha. But then his picture flashed up, and there he was, looking slightly lumpier and pastier than she recalled from the night before, but definitely him. According to the log, his ship – designated Transport-Barn
Malkovich,
the sole ship for which he had a licence – hadn’t ever gone more than thirty miles from Gippsworld. And his trading history suggested that his import-export business empire was limited mostly to export, and the luxury items were limited entirely to the pigs. Phoebe excitedly straightened her police hat and brushed some of the previous night’s noodles off her jacket. Nobody had bothered lying to her for ages.

‘Hi there! Unexpected spot-check!’ she said, stepping through the airlock and flashing him both her badge and a nervous grin. Misha’s stricken, sweaty face instantly made her regret the whole idea. It had seemed as if it would be cute a few moments earlier, but the poor guy, obviously mortified about being shown up, looked like he was ready to puke.

‘Hi there,’ he said weakly, waving her through into the ship’s cramped, little cabin.

‘I guess the top-of-the-line Anaconda is at home for the day!’ She meant that to sound like a breezy shared joke, but as soon as it was out of her mouth she worried it had come out like a dig, because Misha just stared miserably at his shoes. Phoebe coughed awkwardly. ‘Sorry about running off last night. My colleagues are a bit hard to escape.’

‘Sure, no problem,’ mumbled Misha.

‘I can’t even remember the details of half the stuff you and me were talking about, by the way,’ she lied. ‘That Lavian brandy goes straight to my head. Seems like I don’t have hollow legs!’ She tapped her metal leg in a self-deprecating way, but he didn’t say anything. Perhaps, thought Phoebe, sinkingly, it would be best to just act business-like and get this over with as quickly as possible.

‘So, let’s check out the cargo, shall we?’

Misha, still avoiding any eye contact whatsoever, led her through to the hold. About forty Gippsworld pigs, not blessed with magno-boots – unlike their human companions – were bobbing around, gently bumping into each other, letting out odd snorts.

‘I’m sorry about the smell,’ said Misha. ‘Away from Gippsworld they start to go off a bit. Though, to be honest, they don’t smell that great to start off with.’

‘You know, in all the time I’ve been posted here, I never thought to ask – who actually
buys
these things?’ said Phoebe, gingerly tapping one that was drifting towards her head.

‘Mainly they’re sold as a bacon substitute to the more fundamentalist planets that would quite like to eat some bacon but whose religions forbid them to eat either actual pigs or printed synthetic products,’ he replied robotically.

‘Sounds lucrative,’ she said, flicking through the manifest.

‘Not really. They’re a poor product. I mean they
act
vaguely like pigs, and the flesh seems a little like pork, so long as you just look at it and don’t put it in your mouth, but that’s about as far as it goes.’

‘What do they taste like?’

‘Bark. Sponge. Burnt rubber. You have to do a lot of chewing. Usually, once a planet has tasted its first Gippsworld Virtual Pig the inhabitants either decide they can do without pork substitute after all, or they change their founding religious texts right there and then to allow the real stuff and to ban our version. We don’t get much in the way of repeat business.’

Yikes
, thought Phoebe.
He’s REALLY sweating
.
Even worse than in the club
. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a human being sweat so much. And his hands were shaking. She averted her eyes, embarrassed for him.

‘Anything else I should know about?’ Phoebe asked, as she wandered around the hold, making a show of banging on things in a professional-looking way. She tugged her lapels in a pantomime of an old-fashioned detective. ‘I notice that you seem slightly ill at ease.’

Again, she thought that maybe by making a joke of it, she’d get him to relax a little. It didn’t work out like that. Misha wobbled in his magno-boots and covered his face with his hands.

‘I’m sorry! I’m
so
sorry!’ He rocked back and forth. He let out a strangulated gasp. Appalled, Phoebe realised that he was crying. She had a sudden flashback to the school field trip when Bobby Osher had refused to come out of the Imperial Fortress on Proxima
6
until she agreed to hold his hand at break. The teacher had made her go along with it and she could still remember Bobby’s terrible, clammy palms, and the way he’d clumsily tried to lick her cheek afterwards. Worst of all she remembered the distraught look on his face after she had pushed him into the hyper-moat.

‘Hey, look, don’t worry. People exaggerate things when they’ve had a drink; it’s not the worst crime in the galaxy.’

But Misha wasn’t listening; he was just babbling on.

‘I’ve never done anything like this before! I don’t know what came over me! I just agreed to drop it off. She said it was antiquities, you know – like a fancy vase or something – nothing bad, no
drugs
or anything like that. It won’t be a big deal, that’s what she said. Oh
god
.’

Phoebe’s mind rewound a bit.

‘Drop what off, Misha?’ she asked, levelly.

Misha crossed over to the astronavigation console, opened a small refrigeration unit, and pulled a squat, black box out from where it was hidden behind a pile of pork samples.

‘Oh god. Oh god. I’m going to
jail
.’

He handed her the box. It vibrated gently in her hands as she flipped it over a few times. She gave it a quick scan with her sonic truncheon but already knew that was pointless. This was a fancy bit of hardware; she could tell that because of the label on the side. It boasted, in a series of perky bullet points, about the impregnable polycarbide shell, the lead lining designed to block any sort of readings, and, most impressively, about the unbreakable Quantum Lenslok. It didn’t take Phoebe’s six years of police academy to work out that it had to contain some very high-end contraband.
That explains the sweating
.
It’s not your irresistible pheromones sending him into a tizz. What an ego on you.

‘Okay, Misha, I think you better start at the beginning.’

Misha yanked anxiously at one of his eyebrows. ‘It was a woman in the bar, after you’d gone. I think I was drunk by that point. She sat down next to me and asked if I wanted to earn a bit of extra money “the easy way”.’

‘Can you describe her?’

Misha shrugged. ‘She was sort of … a stunningly beautiful platinum blonde.’

‘She wasn’t
that
beautiful,’ muttered Phoebe.

‘What?’

‘Nothing, go on.’

‘She said it would be really simple. I just had to leave the station, then she’d send me some coordinates, somebody would meet me, I’d hand the thing over, it wouldn’t take more than a few hours. I can’t believe I’ve been such an idiot. How much trouble am I in?’

‘It kind of depends what’s in here,’ said Phoebe, tapping the box.

‘I’ve ruined my life. I had so much potential,’ Misha sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘I was going to learn a coding language.’

Phoebe tried to think of something reassuring to say about first time offences when a light on the astronavigation console started to flicker.

‘Should it be doing that?’ she asked.

Before Misha could reply, some other lights in the spaceship joined in, along with a bunch of alarms, all flashing and wailing like they’d scored Thargoid Madness on a Cliff Ganymede pinball machine. Alerts blared out from the flight computer:
Approaching object. Weapons targeting detected.
Other unwelcome sounding sentences.

They both swivelled their heads to stare out of the cockpit window, where an ominous silvery speck was getting bigger and bigger.

‘Bother,’ said Phoebe, as the speck suddenly fired a spray of yellow plasma bolts, which – eating up the space between them like a hundred eager pac-men – tore into the hull of her empty Viper. They watched it explode soundlessly. The pig transport wobbled in an invisible swell.
That’s going to be a week’s worth of paperwork, right there
, thought Phoebe, as dirty great chunks of her spaceship floated past the window.

‘What’s happening? Why is somebody shooting at us?’ said Misha, sounding aggrieved.

‘I don’t know what you’ve got mixed up in, but I think it’s safe to say that whatever is in this box isn’t a
fancy
vase
,’ said Phoebe, as the hulk of their assailant’s ship whooshed over the top of them.

‘Should we do some sort of evasive manoeuvre?’ said Misha. ‘When this happens in an episode of
Galloping Ganymede!
they usually do an evasive manoeuvre.’

‘We’re in a barn full of pigs,’ said Phoebe.

Phoebe and Misha simultaneously experienced Mixed Emotions. Phoebe’s emotions were mixed because on the one hand she didn’t want to die whilst she had an unused noodle coupon back in her apartment, but on the other hand this was the first exciting thing to happen in her job for as long as she could remember. Misha’s emotions were mixed because on the one hand he didn’t want to die without ever having kissed an actual woman on the mouth, but on the other hand he thought it was a Core Dynamics Federal Corvette that was attacking them, which was notoriously one of the really difficult starships to tick off in the
Gollancz Bumper Book of Space Going Vessels
.

‘Look, we’ve got about thirty seconds before it swings by again,’ said Phoebe. ‘Where are the escape pods?’

‘Over here,’ Misha pointed to a bulkhead across the cabin. They ran as fast as the magno-boots would let them. Phoebe, getting there first, punched a button on the first pod. An ‘Out of Order’ sign blinked on. Misha looked a bit guilty.

‘I haven’t done a health and safety check in a little while.’

Phoebe tried escape pod number two. Another ‘Out of Order’ sign blinked on.

‘I really did
intend
to,’ said Misha. ‘But you know how it is. Things crop up. Have you ever played
Mission: Thargoid Kill-Punch
?’

‘Have you got any survival suits?’

‘There’s this,’ Misha said, pulling a bulky, old-fashioned spacesuit with a large domed helmet out from a locker. ‘It’s for EVAs. Cleaning the solar panels and things. Look, there’s a built-in jetpack. They were giving them away free at an agriculture conference.’

‘But you’ve just got the one?’

‘It’s quite big. You’re quite small. I think we might both be able to squeeze in at once.’

They both looked at Misha’s slightly-too-chunky belly for a second.

‘Well, come on then,’ said Phoebe. ‘We’ll just have to do our best.’

They did their best to squeeze. In the process Misha accidentally pressed the override button on Phoebe’s loose RemLok mask, and a big skein of protective plastic wrapped around them, like a gigantic condom.

‘Sorry,’ said Misha.

With a bit of wriggling they managed to get the suit zipped up. Outside, the corvette had lined up for another run, and more bright yellow dots started to zoom towards them. They waddled, like kids in a three-legged race, towards the emergency airlock bolts.

‘Pull it!’ said Phoebe.

Misha strained, managed to wangle a finger free from the plastic, get his arm into one of the suit’s sleeves, and yank the eject lever. The bolts fired, the airlock door jettisoned off into the void, and they tumbled out after it, just as the rest of the cargo transport disintegrated under the impact of a hundred more plasma blasts. They spiralled off into nowhere, and held their breaths in the gloom, waiting to see if their attacker would notice them amongst the debris and the pigs.