Severance (4 page)

In the bow, the lone civilian use of the vast, floaty space
was the floatarium, a multipurpose area near the central axis, where Argosians
could amuse themselves in the micro–G environment. Stein tugged her way down the
access corridor using the hand holds mounted on the walls, beads of sweat
quickly forming on her brow. It was always warm up here, though Stein conceded
it was probably a little warmer than normal. Not that Griese was the sort to
complain unnecessarily. As she neared the end of the access corridor, she palmed
herself to a stop and looked down into the floatarium.

Griese Otomo stood on one of the twenty different surfaces
in the room that laid claim to the designation “floor.” Above him floated a
half–dozen other people, scripts clasped in sweaty hands, rehearsing a scene
from what appeared to be
Taming of the Shrew.
Stein watched quietly as
Petruchio, gesticulating wildly in the course of a monologue, accidentally
struck his assistant, sending the boy backwards and into the gathered crowd of
players, scattering the group like billiard balls. Everyone broke down
laughing.

“Having some problems with your blocking?” Stein asked from
the entrance.

Griese looked up, recognizing his old friend. “That was
intentional.” Which was entirely possible. No one attended a low–G play to see
it go right. “So, you finally got around to us?” he asked, though Stein could
tell the annoyance in his voice wasn’t genuine.

“It’s nine thirty!” Stein replied. “You’re my first call of
the day.” She kicked off the floor of the entrance and sailed across the room
to Griese. “I’m amazed you’re even awake. I thought you arty types didn’t roll
out of bed until noon.”

Griese watched her approach, offering up an arm for her to
catch. She caught him by the wrist and planted another hand on the back of a
chair, spinning her body around to land roughly on this new floor. “That’s my
wife you’re thinking of,” he said. “As for us, would you believe we were trying
to beat the heat?” He poked a finger at a bead of sweat on Stein’s brow. “You
see our problem then?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty steamy. Are you guys growing drugs up
here?” Stein looked at the gaggle of actors, which had retreated to the far
side of the space, still giggling. “Or just consuming?” Griese laughed, though
not with his eyes. Stein decided not to prod him anymore. “Let me see if I can
do something about that.”

She pulled her terminal out of her webbing, and called up a
display of the bow’s ventilation systems. She immediately spotted the error,
two thermostats reading the temperature in the room at 15 degrees Celsius. The
system had thus concluded it should stop supplying cold air to the room. It was
even trying to supply hot air in its place, though she knew that that wasn’t
going to work, thanks to a damper that had been deliberately bent shut eighty
years previous. She tapped a couple of commands on the terminal to enable an
override, pumping chilled air into the room temporarily while she replaced the
sensors.

Looking up from the terminal, she scanned the many floors of
the room, trying to figure out where the thermostat was hiding. Spotting it,
she bounced across the room, landing neatly on the wall where it was hidden,
and with a practiced twist, disconnected it. The designers of the ship had been
acutely aware that every element of it would be replaced at least a dozen times
over the length of the journey. Every system on board the ship was based on
nearly antique designs, all with decades–long track records of reliability. And
they were all designed to use parts that could be easily recycled and re–fabricated
onboard the ship. Almost everything was made of soft metal or thermoplastics,
capable of being scavenged, melted down and recycled. A routine piece of trivia
delivered to school field trips in the vessel’s fab shops was that these shops
were just as critical a part of the ship’s life support systems as the
hydroponics or carbon dioxide scrubbers. As with most pieces of trivia
delivered during field trips, it failed to impress.

Stein turned the old thermostat over, quickly diagnosed it
as a worthless piece of junk, and reached into her tool webbing for a new
sensor. With it popped in place, she checked her terminal to see if it was
registering on the ship’s internal systems. Satisfied that it was, she pushed
off back to the entrance of the floatarium.

For all the efforts made to make the ship maintainable
during the design phase, some mistakes were inevitable. And these thermostats,
at least amongst those who had the task of replacing them, were considered the
biggest of those mistakes. Every decade or so someone attempted to redesign
them, invariably someone who had to work with the fucking things every day.
None had succeeded, and replacing wonky thermostats remained the most common
chore for the maintenance team. At any given moment, Stein had two or three
replacements on her person, more during working hours.

Stein backtracked a short distance down the entrance
corridor. An air duct ran under one of the surfaces, supplying cooled air to
the observatory. Her terminal had indicated that the second broken thermostat was
within this air duct, so she pried open a panel, earning a blast of cold air in
the face. Inside, she quickly found and replaced the sensor. That done, she
looked down the duct towards the floatarium, blinking in surprise at a lumpy
obstruction. Opening another panel in the corridor revealed a dead robot wedged
into the ducting.

“Hey, little guy,” she said, reaching inside and yanking it
out.

A huge gash had nearly ripped the maintenance robot in half.
Somewhere upstream the thing had lost a fight with a supply fan. She frowned.
If left to their own devices the robots were normally smart enough to avoid
that kind of damage. Stein guessed that if she downloaded its memory, she’d see
a custom program another technician had entered, sending the robot to go un–jam
a fan. The proper way to do that — shutting off the fan, isolating the area,
physically securing the blades — was time consuming. Reprogramming a robot wasn’t.
And if the fan started up again and sliced the fucker in half, well, they were
replaceable. A technician’s free time wasn’t. Stein didn’t have a problem with
that reasoning; she liked free time. But she didn’t approve of the stupidity of
leaving the shattered robot in the ducting. They were lucky it hadn’t jammed
another fan. She tucked the husk of the robot into her webbing and closed up
both hatches.

Returning to the floatarium, she launched herself back down
to where Griese sat. Stein examined her terminal again, and disabled the
override to check that the system would continue cooling the room on its own
initiative.

“All done,” she announced, satisfied.

“Thanks,” Griese replied. “Sorry I was pissy with you. Just
frustrated with the sweat running down my ass for two days.”

Stein smiled. “No worries. That’s why I thought I’d deal
with you myself. Don’t need you ripping the head off any of my doofuses.” She
flicked her eyes at the actors floating above them. “Can we talk for a second?”

Griese raised an eyebrow. “Sure.” He waved away his troupe. “Go
towel off, guys. We’ll meet back here in ten.” After they had dispersed he
turned back to Stein. “What’s up?”

“This is going to sound kind of weird.”

“Only kind of weird? That’s a big improvement for you.”

Stein snorted. “Thanks. Okay. I’ll just ask. What does a
blinder look like?”

Griese narrowed his eyes. “A blinder? As in a stun grenade?”

“Yeah.”

“And you think I’d know because…”

“I know we don’t talk about it.”

Griese cocked his head. “Fair enough. I guess I could know.”
He held up his hands. “But I don’t. Never had that misfortune.” He looked at
Stein. “Ellen will have.” Griese studied her face for a moment. “Do I want to
know why you’re asking?”

Stein smiled. “It’s nothing bad. Not too bad at least. Not
yet. I just thought I might have stumbled upon one.”

“I guess we all need our hobbies.” Stein hadn’t told him
everything about her nocturnal activities, but he was smart enough to guess, if
Bruce hadn’t drunkenly told him everything. Griese waved his arm at the room. “For
me, it’s low–gravity prose. More classy.”

“Oh, highly classy. I like the way Kate’s skirt keeps
billowing up. You know, I think they did have undergarments back in Shakespeare’s
time.”

“We can’t completely defy the audience’s expectations, Laura.
This is still the Argos.”

Stein smiled. “All right.” She looked at the door, then the
time on her terminal. “I think Ellen and I are meeting at the Prairie tonight.
You coming?”

“To chaperone you two? Sounds dangerous. I’ll see.”

“It won’t be any fun without you.”

“I’ve been told by several reliable sources that Ellen is
much more fun without me around,” Griese said, smiling. “But your kind words
are appreciated.”

§

Sergeant Sinclair Hogg walked down the street at a measured
pace, scanning back and forth. Tall, wide, and solid, Hogg looked like a cop; even
in plain clothes, his size and bearing marked his profession as clearly as if
he had a little rotating blue light on his head. He had exited the trolley a
block earlier than necessary so he could arrive on foot. Good for seeing what
he was walking into, but more importantly, it allowed people to see him coming.
He could tell a lot about someone by how they reacted to a security officer
approaching. That was something his partner, Steve Ganty, had told him on his
first rotation. That Ganty had been stabbed in the stomach by someone who saw
him coming, did temper the value of the advice a bit, but in situations where
stomach stabbings were unlikely, Hogg still regularly followed it.

Hogg was currently on his fifth rotation in the corps, not an
uncommonly high figure. Unofficially, the rotation policy had been intended to
reduce the risk of corruption and complacency amongst the security corps by
repeatedly introducing new blood into their mix. Whether this was effective or
not was open to debate; it took a certain type of person to want to be a cop in
the first place, and given the variety of perverts and recreational substance
abusers on board the ship there was a limited pool of suitable volunteers. Consequently,
security officer jobs tended to rotate amongst a fairly small group of
regulars, and in practice, the only difference between a security officer and
an off–rotation officer was that one got to wear kind of a neat hat.

Hogg rounded the corner and set off down the side street,
moving away from the main shopping traffic along Asia. Ahead he could see the
rest of his team along with Sergeant Koller, clustered outside the door of a
modest apartment. Standing in front of the door was a balding middle–aged man,
wearing stained, fraying clothes. He was yelling obscenities at the gathered
security men. Not very original ones, Hogg was disappointed to hear.

As he approached, the distressed man noticed Hogg and
immediately shifted the focus of his anger, having correctly pegged Hogg as
someone in charge. “You can’t do this! You bastards can’t do this!”

Hogg waited until he was close enough to the man to not have
to shout. “Sir, you were informed months ago that you’d have to relocate. You
have no one to blame for this but yourself.”

“You don’t have the right to make me move, you fascist
fucker!”

Hogg arched an eyebrow. “Sir, the ship’s government has the
right to reallocate space and personnel as it sees fit, if it’s in the interest
of ship–wide operations. I’d suggest you look it up; it might make you feel
better.”

“You can’t just take away our home! My family has lived here
for a hundred and fifty years!”

Hogg inhaled deeply. “And you were given multiple
opportunities to sell it at a fair price. Now you’ll sell it at an unfair price.”
Hogg wagged his finger at the man. “Not too bright, was that?”

He extended his big paw to push the man out of the way, the poor
dummy nearly falling over at his touch. With a flick of his head, Hogg directed
one of his officers to open the door of the apartment. The young officer
slapped the back of his hand against the door controls, overriding the lock,
then stepped aside, making room for Hogg.

The apartment was woefully decorated, the walls covered in
amateur art that Hogg immediately despised, the type sold by idiots to other
idiots in parks every weekend. The back of the suite was dominated by a pair of
paper walls dividing the space into separate rooms. In the main living room
stood a woman, arms clasped around a young boy in front of her.

“You can’t do this,” the woman whimpered. Behind him, Hogg
could hear the father pushing to get past Sergeant Koller, who had moved to
block the door.

“Yes, I can,” Hogg said. “It’s really quite easy.” With
three big steps he covered the distance between them and plucked the boy from
his mother’s surprised grasp. Holding the shocked child out in front of him
like a bomb, he spun around and walked out the front door of the apartment. The
mother’s tiny little fists played percussion on his back, not slowing his
movements in the slightest.

Outside, he set the child down abruptly. Hogg estimated that
the boy was about four years old, and either too scared or stupid to cry. The
mother darted past him and threw her arms around the child, before hurling some
language at Hogg of the type generally not recommended for use around children.
Hogg observed the boy’s father staring at him, his hands balled into fists; a
couple seconds of eye contact was enough to prompt them to unclench. The father
cautiously circled Hogg and came up behind his wife and child.

The man whispered something to his wife and child, who
withdrew a few steps away. Turning around to face Hogg, the man approached
within a couple of steps and stopped. Teeth clenched, he said, “I didn’t know I
was working for them. They didn’t tell me. How could I know?
How could I
have known?
”