Blood Feud
Kemper stared at his plot board in disbelief as the little craft adjusted course to remain on a collision course with his. Just what the hell were they playing at?
He flipped the ‘Record’ button, and recorded, “Unknown craft on a collision course with me, just what the hell are you playing at?” and then set that to play on all channels in a cone pointed at the unknown little ship.
A few minutes later, a response came:
“Mining craft, mining craft, please be advised that this is the Space Shepherd Interceptor Craft Bob Barker Seventeen. Please bear off, repeat, please bear off, we intend to defend the crystal formations on 5309 MacPherson.”
Kemper let the message play three times as he sat there, feeling stunned. Space Shepherd? Who the hell did these jokers think they were? The crystal formations were the whole point of mining 5309 McPherson, were why he’d spent… well, an ungodly amount of money, really, on obtaining mineral rights to the little asteroid.
He didn’t touch the controls. He had plenty of fuel for corrective burns; he’d planned to be out here for a month or more in continuous operation. Leaving collision avoidance for the last minute wouldn’t cost him anything, but it might make the lunatics in the much-smaller ‘Space Shepherd Interceptor’ craft sweat a bit.
Kemp climbed out of the cockpit and propelled himself down the little tube to the main body of the spacecraft; he had a few hours, and he’d cope with this better on a full stomach.
What the hell kind of name was Bob Barker Seventeen, anyway?
Five hours later, Kemper woke up from a sound sleep to proximity alarms. There was an annoying voice on the cabin loudspeaker saying, “…craft, please be advised that we intend to maintain this course, even if it means collision. Please bear away. Repeat…” and the dregs of a pouch of beer in his hand.
He fought his way up out of the stupor his nap had left him in and twisted his body this way and that, gradually propelling himself into arm’s reach of one of the grab bars that were placed all over the walls; once he had a firm grip, he propelled himself forward, toward the cockpit.
While he strapped himself in, he keyed the ‘record’ button and said, ‘What the hell are do you think you’re doing, Bob Barker Seventeen? Over.” And sent it; maybe thirty seconds later, after he’d strapped himself in, the reply came back:
“The crystal formations on the asteroid you intend to mine are a treasure that rightfully belongs to all mankind,” said the annoying voice, a short while later. “We intend to preserve them.”
Kemper pursed his lips and stared out the window of his cabin, contemplating his options. On the one hand, this was a totally infuriating development; on the other hand, it was the sort of thing he’d come to expect: He’d bought the mining craft he was currently piloting and then found that it didn’t have the Carbon Extractors he needed to mine the asteroid fraction he had rights to, despite the fact that the purchase contract said that the Carbon Extractors were there, and his only recourse was basically to sue, but adding up lawyers and research, for the cost of the lawsuit he could get mineral rights to a more accessible ‘stroid…
Which was apparently under the protection of these lunatics.
He keyed record again. “Bob Barker XVII, are you aware that the contact plates on this vessel are designed for high-impact contact with rock, so that I can crack the surface of an asteroid surface formation and then process its shattered remains?”
There was a pause before the annoying voice came back. “Mining craft, we’re perfectly aware of the destructive capacity of your vessel, which is why we’re attempting to ward you away from the crystal formations on 5309 MacPherson, which are a treasure and a heritage to be held sacred for the future…”
Kemper flipped the “stop” button on the recording, and sat still, visualizing the maneuvers necessary to bring the impact plate in line with the spot where the little protest craft would hit the mining ship. If he burned just right, they’d end up pulled into the refining and processing gear exactly like unknown ore; and taking random mangled bits of metallic whatever and turning them into storable cubes and ejecting the rest into space as micro-fines was precisely what his ship was designed to do…
He sat in the cabin, in the dark, and wondered just what kind of person he was.
Luz whistled as he walked into the First Contact, whistled as he wandered over to his usual spot on the end — none of his regular drinking compatriots were there yet — but he stopped drinking as the bartender approached: May, who was tending bar tonight, hated it when Luz whistled, said it hurt her ears.
Instead, he pulled a heavy, dangerous-looking piece of machinery out of his satchel and thunked it down on the bar, looking extremely self-satisfied.
“The hell is that?” May was already halfway through drawing Luz’s regular.
“That,” said Luz, “That is the emergency transponder beacon of the Bob Barker Seventeen.”
“No shit,” said May, who had never heard of the Bob Barker Seventeen but could hear a cue when it was written out for her. “Where’d you find it?”
“It was in a crevasse,” sad Luz. “On some shit little asteroid, so rocky and nothing-small it doesn’t have a name of its own, just a number. Pointed in just the right way that you could only hear it if you pass by just right.”
Alby Lewis came in just then, forty and soft and named Albemarle but went by “Alby” instead of “Al,” which in Luz’ opinion told you a lot about the guy. He worked for one of the salvage companies that occupied the same section of the space station as where Luz parked his tug.
“The hell did that come out of?” He reached out and touched the big hunk of metal: It was shaped like a rounded-looking pyramid, six inches on a side and designed to always land with what looked like a big reflective blinker pointing up. “It looks twenty, thirty years old.”
“I shit you not,” said Luz, “It’s out of Bob Barker Seventeen.”
And unlike May, Alby whistled under his breath, because he’d been in the salvage business a long time and knew the names of the famous missing spacecraft, the ones that were going to get found one of these days in a crevasse.
“Where’d you find it?”
And Luz told him, in detail.
The transponder was a type that used to be popular out here, when it was a lot more sparsely settled. It was a breakaway: When your ship impacted something, these little things were supposed to scatter all around. They were magnetic in a variety of different field-types and the surface was basically designed to be sticky; the idea was that if you impacted an asteroid — by far the thing you were most likely to hit, out here — the breakaway would stick to the asteroid, even if you and your ship didn’t, so even if you were disabled and adrift, the asteroid would carry your beacon, broadcasting like mad, until someone heard it; and then they could plot where the asteroid had come from, and hopefully find you.
Alby tapped the sacred and scratched plastic surface of the bar, and it came to life. He opened a plotting app and found the asteroid on which Luz had found the transponder, and a couple of taps later the path of that asteroid over the past twenty-four years was a bright line across the plot.
Another couple of taps, and the publicly-filed flight plan of the Bob Barker Seventeen appeared, pale red contrasting nicely with the white of the asteroid. A couple of complicated two-handed screen-gestures brought the intersection points of the two lines into focus; or rather, the potential intersection points, because the plan as filed by BB17 didn’t seem to bear much resemblance to the actual path they’d taken, bouncing between asteroid claims and generally making nuisances of themselves.
Two of the three crew members of the Bob Barker 17 had been relatively wealthy and important, so the search had been long and extensive, despite the fact that nobody else flying around had given to rat’s asses for the fate of the irritating little craft or its occupants; there had been Bob Barker 17-hunting drones roaming around out here for years.
Luz reached down and thoughtfully opened a search filter, filling in some criteria: Asteroids that had paid big in the year after BB17 vanished — After all, that was exactly the sort of operation that BB17 was out there to interfere with. A couple of thinner, less vibrant lines lit up the plot. One of them intersected neatly with the thick white line at a spot well within the intersection range for Bob Barker 17.
The line said, “5309 MacPherson.” A little tag next to it expanded at a tap, giving lots of helpful information about the mining operation that had eventually involved an entire huge mining industry but which had started with a single ship, operated by…
Abby Lewis suddenly hit the “shut down” button, closing the plotting software abruptly without saving the work they’d done. Beneath the scratched bar top, the screen reverted to its standby state: The Space Station’s logo, a big rotating piece of crystal and the bold legend, “Kemper Station.”
The two men drank their beers and didn’t say much more that night.
It was between three and four in the morning when station security came silently through Luz’s hangar, up the stairs to the little sleeping loft, and gently, softly, arranged themselves in a circle around his bed, quietly lining his sleeping face up in the sights of heir stun guns.
Alfred Monday, the chief of the station’s security service, stood at the foot of Luz’s bed and cleared his throat, softly, then looked around at his officers, exchanging an evil little smile, when Luz didn’t wake right up.
“Mr. Duena,” said Monday, his voice at a normal speaking level, as though he was seeking to get the attention of someone at his table across a meal.
Luz’ eyes fluttered open, and he turned his head. As soon as he caught sight of the black-masked men surrounding his bed, he jerked upright, seeming to try to cover himself at the same time he lunged groggily in the direction of one of the security officers, who happened to be standing on Luz’ bathrobe.
All the security men shot him.
Monday rolled his eyes and sighed heavily; now it would be five more minutes until Luz woke up again.
“All right,” said Monday, “The other half of his warrant says, look for anything that looks like spaceship parts.”
All the security men looked out the window of the loft space, which overlooked a ship repair shop bay, Luz’ tug hanging from parking rails in the middle of it.
“You know what I mean,” said Monday. “Specific parts from the ship named in the thing, the warrant. The ‘Bob Barker XVII.’ Also, anything to do with a woman called Julie Swanson.” He held up a picture. “This is her. If you see a picture of her, a letter from her, anything, dollar, and I’ll have dave collect it.”
Dave gave a little wave. He’d been through the Forensics Specialist training, and was thus qualified to pick things up than anybody else on the security team.
Monday stared at Dave for just a second, and then made a motion which, according to the security team’s manual, meant “execute the order given.” Everybody stood there until Dave started moving, and then all the other security team members began wandering Luz’ space, looking for spaceship parts and love letters.
Monday stood at the foot of Luz’s bed and watched the tug driver gradually shake off the effects of being stunned by six stunners at once. When he was eventually conscious enough to sit up, Monday got him a glass of water from the sink near the door.
“The hell is going on?” Luz sounded vaguely drunk, but also vaguely overdone, like Monday’s little brother, when they were kids, and Monday’s little brother was pretending to be asleep after having been caught by his parents playing games in the middle of the night. It made Monday wonder if maybe Luz hadn’t been as badly stunned as he thought.
“I have a warrant for your arrest,” said Monday, “Along with anything in your possession which might relate to the ship ‘Bob Barker XVII,’ or to one Julie Swanson.”
Luz blinked. “Julie? What’s she got to do with anything?”
Monday stared down at him, wondering if he really had no idea or if he was just pretending innocence very well. Monday’s eyes narrowed at the idea that Luz might be faking this.
“Apparently,” said Monday, “She’s missing, presumed dead.”
“Missing,” said Luz. “What?”
Luz and Julie had dated for five years, moved in together twice and Julie had moved out twice, when she was working as a traffic controller on Hobart Station, where Luz had had his tug parked before he’d got a better offer from Kemper. As far as he knew, she had gotten a job planet-side two years ago and was living in Los Angeles.
“I don’t know much more than ‘missing, presumed dead,’ said Monday. “I’m to take you into custody and see you transported to Los Angeles, there to be tried in connection with her disappearance.”
“How the hell would I get to Los Angeles to kill Julie, even if I wanted to?”
Monday looked significantly at the tug, hanging quietly in the bay. It took Luz a long time to realize that Monday was answering his question.
“I can’t fly that to Earth,” said Luz, “It would take three months, and besides, it can’t navigate the gravity well.”
Monday just stared at him. Like a lot of people, even people who lived on space stations, a space ship was a space ship to Alfred Monday.
“Do you know a guy named Kemper?”
“What?”
“Like, did you fuck his wife, or spit in his beer, or something?”
Luz stared across the table at his lawyer. The man was a public defender, and actually pretty good, from what his reviews said. Still, he wasn’t sure how much he should…
“The man who owns the space station I live and work on is named Kemper.”
“Huh.” The lawyer flipped through an actual paper file. “That’s funny. The District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles is also named Kemper, as it turns out.”
Luz sat back, his mouth open. The idea that his arrest for the murder of still-missing Julie Swanson was connected to his discover of the Bob Barker XVII’s beacon had been a certainty in his mind since he’d woken up to find Station Security standing around his bed. This was the first time he’d been able to put together a plausible reason why.
“If I had done something that really, really irritated someone who was related to the district attorney,” said Luz, slowly, “Would that make this situation clearer, to you?”
The lawyer slowly nodded. “It might,” he said.
“Well,” said Luz. He looked around the little concrete cell that constituted a “meeting room.” “Here it is then.”
And Luz laid it all out: The discovery of the beeping thing in the asteroid crevasse, the discovery of the asteroid’s intersection with the path of Kemper’s mining ship, how he’d quietly wrapped the beacon up and mailed it to the Space Shepherd organization, along with the log of his own tug’s path, marked clearly with annotations where he’d found the beacon.
“Huh,” said the lawyer. “Let me look into it and get back to you.”
And that was the last time Luz saw his lawyer until the day of his trial.
They found Julie’s body up some canyon, gnawed by wildlife and having been sitting there, apparently, since shortly after she’d gone missing. Luz could only imagine the gnawing irritation of whoever had killed her in order to charge him with her murder, waiting for someone to find her…
Luz was someone who made things work; he went out and got broken spaceships, and he either fixed them or took them to where they could be fixed. Luz made people’s plans work, after things had gone wrong. Imagining how the plan to frame him had gone wrong in this small way, imagining the anxiety of the people whose plan it was, didn’t make him happy, it just added to his level of unhappiness, somehow.
He supposed that that made him unsuitable for being involved in this sort of thing.
He kept assuming that the lawyer would appear with a deal, with some sort of offer: Say you didn’t find that beacon after all, claim that you made it all up, and they’d drop the charges and let you go back to your life.
But nothing like that came back. After a while, he realized why: They — the Kempers, whoever was doing this — gained nothing by offering him a deal. He was powerless, and now he was completely discredited as a witness, and having him claim that he’d faked the evidence against Kemper would just raise questions. Right now, all Kemper had to say was that the man who’d brought allegations against him was a dangerous and unstable murderer, and that would be that.
Luz got comfortable in Jail. It wasn’t all that different than living on a space station, really, except that he wasn’t allowed to go out and fly his tug.
It hurt, that he wouldn’t be able to fly his tug again. But Luz had gotten used to a lot, in his life, and he’d gotten used to this.
The day of the trial he’d numbly followed where he was led, and he sat in his chair and listened while the evidence against him was laid out, and then while his lawyer — the one who’d said “let me get back to you” and hadn’t — laid out the evidence in his favor: As he’d expected, a competent defense, delivered in a lackluster way, and not really a match for the prosecution’s splashy murder-graphics.
In the end they sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison, and he was surprised and grateful that it wasn’t life.
“Hey, Charlie.”
Charlie Kemper looked up. He was sprawled in a comfortable if too-large chair in the big glass-surrounded conference room; the big table was covered with old-fashioned manilla envelopes, which was one of the ways Los Angeles county chose to screw with outsiders: Official files came in physical form, with real seals and little provenance-tracking cards in them, which you had to sign whenever they changed hands.
The Organization had a working process for dealing with this — when a file was delivered and signed for, it was immediately scanned and stuck in an old fashioned file-library — but Charlie liked doing this part the old fashioned way; it made it feel like he was opening a present every time he reached into the slush pile.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up from the file he was going through. The people who wrote the summaries over at the DA’s office had a habit for obfuscation which he took a perverse joy in decoding.
“You related to a Jesse Kemper?” Regina Flax, one of the other attorneys for the Organization, was holding up a folder of her own.
“Yeah,” said Charlie. “Crazy old pirate. Ran a dodgy space station, out in the asteroid belt. Died three, four years ago of something totally curable, if he’d been willing to come planet-side.”
Rickets, or something equally old-fashioned sounding. Was rickets even a real disease? He made a mental note to look it up later.
“Yeah, and your dad was the DA for, what, fifteen years?”
“Yeah…”
“Well,” said Regina, “This file literally has your name written all over it, and it’s sketchy as fuck.”
Charlie had been sure this would happen, at some point; in fact, it’d been one of his motivations in getting involved with the Organization in the first place: To fuck with his father. It was, he thought, at some level, every young man’s ambition, to manage to show his father up, to prove that he was the big asshole that…
“Let me see,” he said. He reached for the file, but Regina held it up without looking, outside his reach, and he had to go get it from her.
“Some guy, mechanic or something, looks like he found something that made your granddad look bad, and then your dad got him charged with killing his wife or something.”
There was an AI, a sophisticated pattern-matching system that went through these files and flagged plausible cases of miscarried justice; every quarter or so, there was a couple of days of going through all the files that’d been flagged, casting a lawyer’s eye over them to see whether there was a case to be made. There was always at least a quarter’s worth of work, which should have been depressing, but made Charlie feel exhilarated.
Now, though, looking over this file, he just felt thoughtful. It was one thing to hope to catch your father out, to show him up, but this… the more he read, this was… someone had killed that girl, had set up this mechanic… no, tug driver… for her murder, in order to…
He sat very still, looking inside himself. Up until now, he’d thought of himself as having an ordinary amount of father-directed anger, or at least, within normal bounds; some fathers and sons were natural friends, some were natural rivals, some would… this was something different. If he went forward with this… this was some Russian novel shit, was what this was.
“Hey, House,” he said, loudly.
“Yes, sir.” The speakers built into the wall spoke quietly in a very neutral woman’s voice.
“House, bring me everything we’ve got on the disappearance of the Bob Barker XVII.”
Charlie Kemper sat back in his chair, holding the Luz Duena file in his lap but not really reading it, just staring at it, and he wondered what kind of person he was.
