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  He took a deep breath happy to find he still got that deep thrill of being in a forbidden place he'd had as a teenager, even if he did have government sanction now. The place was ridiculously small for the home of a well paid and important worker. Everything he'd heard on Earth was these people were all rich, yet this nano-electronic engineer was living in an apartment the size of his parents garage. He was starting to doubt he'd find anything worth boosting for himself while he was here.

  A quick walk through was in order. The house com console was an unlikely place to keep anything really sensitive. Most of its memory resided in the network and it could never be made sufficiently secure. Of the two tiny bedrooms the first obviously belonged to the teenage son, with very casual clothing and a mess of study papers and printouts on the desk. The kid was a pack-rat with boxes of junk and electronic parts piled in the corner and bottom of the closet. Some sports equipment was piled on the unmade bed and a mound of visibly dirty footies and grimy socks was piled by the desk.

  The father's room looked like the jackpot, with an actual stand alone computer. He cut all data feeds in and out and sealed the ventilation as he'd been trained. There was still no alarm, so the environmental controls depended on positive reporting, not fail safes. The shoe box size computer unit was optical fibered to the wall screen, instead of wireless, with no network connection at all. That was damn suspicious for a computer able to do some complex modeling. Who monitored his usage if it was off line?

  His briefing had not told him explicitly what he was seeking. He was to bring any and all technical materials and computer memory out with him for somebody else evaluate it. The computer looked like the target, but first he did a general toss of the room. He took his general purpose tool out and used the pliers to get a grip on the carpet in the corner, systematically pulling it all up. He pad-scanned the mattress and pillows, but used his knife to slit them open just to be sure. There were some old fashioned hard print codex books, all of which he riffled looking for loose papers. All he got was a few personal photos and old receipts, that might have simply been bookmarks. They were all commercially published so not anything he'd want, even if technical.

  There was little clothing but he pulled each piece off the hangers. The ones with pockets he either searched or simply squeezed the pocket to feel for anything. There was a hard copy file with some legal papers and some currency with writing in a language he didn't know. It was all non-target material, but in the bottom there were three small gold coins. This was just the sort of personal bonus he'd hoped would be common when he applied for training. He carefully sealed them in a pocket, somewhat satisfied.

  He wanted to be able to exit immediately once he dealt with the computer, so he took a moment to relieve himself. He used the toilet, returned to the bedroom and made a simple line drawing of a laughing seal, with a globe of the world balanced on its nose and the barest simple outline of the Americas on the sphere. No point in having this much fun and not intimating who tossed their place. It was always good to sow a little fear.

  It didn't directly violate his orders, he reasoned, since they had to infer that the seal was meant to be a SEAL. He wasn't going to draw any anchors around the globe, or anything blatant. He drew it right on the big thin screen on the wall, ruining the plastic surface with the vacuum marker, ignoring the little voice in his head that said this was a bad idea.

  He was finally ready to do the computer and get out of here. A quick check with the pad showed no outgassing from any explosives and no signal was being sent over the power cord. It shouldn't have an alarm or be booby trapped. He took the multi-tool and snipped the optic fiber. If disconnecting the power raised some sort of alarm, he would immediately trot out the door with the whole box under his arm. It was a normal push and twist plug at the wall, but no connector at the case, so he unplugged it and then immediately cut the cord almost flush with the case. Still no alarms, so he relaxed another small increment and pulled a chair up to crack the box open for the memory.

  The case was a little taller than wide. He used his multi-tool to take the fasteners out of the two top corners. Then he tipped it on its side, to raise the bottom corner where it was easy to get at. There was a sort of boiling sound he could feel through the case and he immediately felt heat on his face. He jumped up in a panic, so hard he left the deck in the low G, knocking the chair over behind him and whipped the box back upright, but it was too late.

  There was a plum size ball of white hot molten steel already melted through the side of the case before he could tip it back. It was far too hot to look at, so he had purple flash blobbies floating before his eyes before he could look away. Art had heard of thermite before in training, but never seen what it really looked like first hand. The composite counter top was holding up better than the metal computer case had, but it was sizzling, melting a crater and giving off lots of smoke.

  The horrible plastic fumes were already making his flash shocked eyes water. There was a plastic waste basket under the desk and he grabbed it running for the shower in the tiny bathroom, desperately muttering, "Shit, shit, shit," all the way. The flow was good and he had an almost full waste basket in seconds.

  Rushing back in the ball was visibly lower in the counter top. He tried not to look directly at the glare of it. It was not through yet, the low G was helping him there and he sloshed a big splash of water across it. The steam that flashed back with a loud hiss rolled up the wall, to join the layer of gray smoke fanning out across the overhead and burning his hand holding the rim of the basket, badly enough to make him jump back.

  There was a drawer underneath the shelf the molten metal was eating through and he yanked it open and hastily dumped the rest of the water in it on top of the pencils and pens and things and slammed it shut. The steam that had flashed up condensed on the cool bulkhead immediately, where it ran back down, cutting clean streaks through the soot and pooling like ink on top of the counter. He ran back to the shower, coughing at the burnt plastic smell to fill his improvised bucket again. Behind him he heard the sudden hiss, as the white hot mass fell in the drawer with a layer of water in the bottom. By the time he ran back in it had melted through the pens and such, then the bottom of the drawer, before he could get the waste basket under it. It was only yellow hot now. The water in the drawer poured out slowly in the low G, right on top of the diminished but still soft ball.

  That was a lucky accident he hadn't foreseen, but it helped a lot that all the water was directed right where he needed it. He slowly poured the new pail of water on it too, forcing himself not to pull back when the steam billowed up, even though it made him gasp and cough. It quickly dropped to red heat and then a dull grey. At last it was simply making a sizzling boiling sound, instead of the breathy sound of steam flashing.

  When he'd dribbled the last of the water out he stepped back and tossed the empty waste basket on the bed. He hands were shaking from the realization he'd barely stopped it before it melted through the deck into the next apartment. As it was the metal decking slumped around the dull lump, so it was a close thing. He poked it with his toe, but it was welded tight to the metal deck. It was still hot enough it boiled off an expanding dry circle around itself as he watched, water fizzing on the edge of the expanding circle between wet and dry.

  He glanced up at the seal and globe he'd drawn. Maybe that hadn't been the very best idea, but it was too late now. He certainly wasn't going to try to roll up the big thing and take it with him. He stumbled back to the bath again, pulling the bedroom door shut behind him, to close off as much of the stink as he could. He turned the shower on dead cold and very low flow, adjusting it to a fine mist. He stripped his glove and held his burnt hand in that cold spray as long as he dare. At least no skin had come off with the glove. He stepped back and stripped as quickly as he could, the burnt hand slowing him.

  The shower mist in the small room cleared the stink from the air pretty well. He soaped up his sooty face left handed, checking it in the mirro
r set at face level in the stall. He tried to ease on a little warmth in the spray, but as soon as it hit his burnt right hand he gasped and turned it back cold. It was a bright pink, but he decided it wouldn't blister or peel right away. Once he looked presentable he eased the blow dry on and stood shivering as the stall flushed with warm air, holding his right hand above his head, out of the direct flow.

  He was recovering enough to be angry now. If he had some bobby trap of his own he'd gladly leave it, but his superiors had debated at length, before allowing him just a pistol and frangible rounds. He was sure they had come close to sending him unarmed. Right now he was so hot, he would have cheerfully left a nuke for these damn people, if he had one. Somehow, he had to get back and get a piece of these people another time – to even up the score.

  It was awkward to dress one handed. His shirt was so sooty he decided it would be less obvious inside-out. But the air in the tiny living area was not too bad when he went out. It didn't make his eyes water and burn, as they had in the bedroom. He punched for the door to open, called lights down, stepped through, locking the door from outside with the number code again.

  He was just happy not to meet Fire and Rescue responding in the corridor. Back at the Holiday Inn, he'd get some ointment from his kit on the burnt hand and some fresh gloves. Well, he thought. How in the hell am I going to write this up, to sound like it wasn't a total screw up?

  Chapter 2

  At the other end of M3, another agent of the USNA had also experienced some difficulty. He was in fact, one of the spooks Art had made in the shuttle coming up. Jon Davis, head of Security for M3 peered out of the clear shield of a biohazard mask, examining the agent face to face, so close most people would have found it very intimidating. Jon was a huge man with a bull neck and a sour expression on his face. The calm with which the agent ignored his scrutiny, was due to the ballpeen hammer driven deep into the man's forehead.

  Finding a dead body on M3 was unusual. Finding two floating in the same maintenance space gave Jon indigestion. That one was a local really frosted him. He felt it a personal failure when one of his people came to harm. The strange dead guy was FBI, but there was no documentation on him to reveal that to Jon. He'd trained to do sneak and peeks years ago and had loads of experience at them, but always as a team. He'd needed those team mates today in a strange environment, but the expense of an orbital lift had made his bosses cut corners. He wasn't leaking anymore. In fact he had contributed very little to the bloody mess of droplets floating in the air and wetting the walls. The other body, bagged and floating in the corridor now, had done most of the bleeding. Fortunately Security had responded and got the area sealed off fast enough they didn't have to declare a biohazard emergency.

  Jon's assistant was busy vacuuming what blood wasn't on the walls, out of the air. He ignored her and was analyzing what happened here. Another team member was cleaning the wetted corridor walls already with antiseptic wipes, tossing them in a biohazard bag. They'd still run a check on the blood, to make sure neither man was an unwitting bio-weapon.

  The loose access panel had floated on the ventilation currents, halfway down the corridor to the lift by the time they arrived. The recessed service space the panel covered, was filled with a massive run of parallel cables and fiber bundles. Most of them ran between offices and sections internally, but some went from here to various antennas and transmitters on the outside of the non-rotating hub. It was pretty safe to assume the dead man was responsible for a number of slim clip-on bugs installed over those cables, except for the one Jon found floating loose beside him.

  "Margaret!" Jon called. "I want Eddie here - right now and get us a couple freight boxes up here for these two," his nod included the bagged shape floating beside her. “I don't want people to see them on the way to the infirmary cooler in body bags and the news to get out before we have a handle on this."

  "Also, get our police curtain down on the corridor ends when we're clean and put up a maintenance barricade instead. Get Jack's supervisor here to do that. I'll break it to him his man is dead and ask for his cooperation to keep it quiet."

  "Sixty people will know it before the shift is over," Margaret predicted.

  "That's fine. We won't ask they keep it a secret forever, just ask them not to leak it Dirtside and wait to tell the story around here for a couple days. The less you ask of people the more likely you'll get it."

  "I'll ask Denise to bring a helper too," Margaret said, "and Maintenance can take them to the cooler. If anybody sees Security pushing a big box around, it will raise as many questions as using a body bag. Does he have family on 3?"

  "No, we lucked out there. Jack had no close family living, just some cousins and an older aunt down in Mexico. He was from some little town in the Baja and never was very close to them. I happen to know because he worked out with some of us Wednesday evenings and we'd chat waiting turns. Whoever this slime-ball is," he indicated the corpse floating before him," he probably never thought he'd be interrupted and if he was, he would have never guessed the fellow surprising him would be a hard case ex-Marine. Big mistake," he enunciated sharply.

  Margaret didn't even bother to agree. The old fashioned sixteen ounce ball peen hammer half buried in the man's forehead spoke for itself. His eyes were open and he just looked relaxed with his mouth slightly open like he had finished considering some question and might reply.

  "I have all the visible stuff sucked up. I'd like to burn an Iodine vapor bomb, so we can drop the curtain and turn the ventilation back on."

  "OK," Jon approved, going through the dead man's pockets and putting each item in a separate evidence bag, as he had the gun and bug found floating free when they arrived. "Take a sticky pad and collect residuals off his hands and feet before we bag him. Be sure to label them right and left. I want him bagged before we contaminate him with the disinfectant."

  "My right and left, or his right and left?" Margaret asked with a little edge in her voice.

  Her sarcasm brought him out of his concentration enough to realize he's spoken to his best detective like she was a six-year-old.

  "Sorry, I know you know procedures. I'm kind of running my mouth on autopilot," he admitted.

  "You want a dust and pix on the hammer handle too?"

  Jon took the time to look at her face to see if she was still needling him or serious. "Go ahead. I don't think he shot Jack for his hammer and then smacked himself in the head, but you know - some idiot just may ask if we checked it down the road. Damn lawyers are great at bringing silly theories like that up in court. Or someone may suggest a third party was involved, which is more believable. After you image it, go ahead and pull it. It would be damn awkward bagging him with it sticking out. I have pix of it in situ."

  At the end of the corridor there was a sharp whistle. That could only be one person. They both glanced. About forty meters away a man made a final check on his face mask and unzipped the flimsy bubble airlock in the plastic film barrier, at the cross corridor. He gently pushed himself off the plastic to avoid damaging it and then launched himself toward them very aggressively from a take-hold on the wall. When he got near, he propelled a couple broken down foam boxes to Margaret. They had old UPS stickers on them.

  "Theo said you needed these and I have a roll of tape too," Eddie said, muffled by the mask he wore. He stopped himself by hand and flipped over and took a toe hold, while he patted his pockets to find the roll. By that time Margaret had the box folded open and looked dismayed. It was about a meter cube, to hold a two meter body. I think you'll have to bend him knees against his chest and tape him like that to fit him in," he suggested looking, at the body bag. "He isn't stiff yet is he?"

  "He isn't even cold yet," Margaret snapped, suddenly angry.

  "What happened? Who is this?" he pointed at the bag, knowing her anger was nothing personal, just frustration.

  "Jack from maintenance. A young Mexican fellow, a cable jockey, who's been up about two years."

  "Crap,
I knew him," Eddie said, upset now too. "He played guitar sometimes when there was a party. Who'd want to hurt him?"

  Jon swung aside to answer that, uncovering the corpse floating behind him. Eddie took that in and even through the mask his face looked sick.

  "Exhibit B," Jon offered. "Listen to Jack's call." He pulled his pad and spoke so softly to it Eddie couldn't hear.

  "Security, I have a panel loose and somebody in restricted space." Jacks indignant voice came out of Jon's pad fairly loud.

  There was a sheet metal sound and a ghost's voice said, "Take your hand off the mic."

  "What the hell are you doing?" Jack's angry voice demanded. "Oh shit," and there was a soft cough and a thud of something hitting the corridor wall at the same time. Then a pause of almost a full second and a grunt of great exertion, that could have been either man, followed quickly by a sharp >Smack< sound. Then after another pause, "Got you too jackass," Jack said, in a barely audible voice.

  "The way I make it," Jon explained, "Jack saw the panel was out of flush a hair because the cam lugs were not turned down to draw it in like the others. He stopped and could hear somebody inside. Nobody legit, would pull the panel back over them like that and work in the dark and if somebody was here in the same section working, they'd have told him when they sent him out. That's a basic safety rule."

  "Instead of leaving and calling us from around the corner in a cross shaft where the guy wouldn't hear him, he just keyed his mike and called us right here. Not the smartest thing to do, in hind-sight, but he certainly didn't expect an armed intruder. The fellow hears him call in, knocks the panel away and tries to stop him from transmitting. As soon as he doesn't submit, the fellow here drew a gun to silence him."