Chapter 9: Cruiser Crash

He fixed the lock on his door and we went to the official launch pad and got into a small blue ship, all boxy angles and bulges that looked as if they had been added after the vessel was built.

It was two billion kilometres from Saturn's orbit to the Belt in a fast transfer ellipse. Ohls made the run in three-quarters of an hour. At the end of that time we slewed to a stop in front of a slowly-twisting asteroid, too small and irregular to have a name. We slowly rounded the tumbling rock.

"There she is - by the power barge," Ohls said, pointing at the screen with one of his toy cigars.

The barge was a massive black recovery craft, blazing with lights from several opened hatches showing spaces large enough to swallow Ohls's ship without even noticing. Something was being hauled into one of the openings, a large black and chromium in-system spacecraft showing no running lights and with a nasty-looking absence where the nose should be. Men in spacesuits were crawling over the surface, even as the recovered ship docked and the hatches began to close.

Ohls nudged his ship and we docked at an exterior port and walked a quarter mile to the bay where the damaged craft was. Ohls said hello to a deputy in green khaki and a man in a plain black suit. The barge crew of three men leaned against a guard rail, one of them still peeling off pieces of space armour. That would be the one who first went into the twisted wreck.

We looked the cruiser over. The front section was almost completely missing, vaporised by the collision. The passenger compartment was mostly intact, but the glass of two ports was shattered. The interior looked like a blizzard had struck it, paper and personal items everywhere, thrown about by a violent depressurisation.

The driver was draped around the control console with his head at an unnatural angle to his shoulders. He was a slim dark-haired kid who had been good-looking not so long ago. Now his face was bluish-white and he had the pop-eyed look of one who had been exposed to a hard vacuum. His cybernetic legs lay still, winking red lights. On the left side of his forehead there was a dull bruise that stood out against the whiteness of the skin.

Ohls backed away, made a noise in his throat and put a match to his little cigar. "What's the story?"

The uniformed man pointed up at a large screen overhanging the dock. It showed the slowly rotating asteroid just outside. The rock twisted to show a new crater surrounded by a slew of debris, a slowly expanding cloud of fragments the asteroid's gravity was too weak to retain.

"Went in there. Must have clipped it pretty hard. There are a few pieces of the nose a million miles away, which makes it around ten last night. Maybe nine-thirty. That's consistent with what we can read in the logs in the autopilot, which is pretty screwed. She shows on the radar when some tourists come by this morning, so we get the barge to reel her in and we find the dead guy."

The plain-clothes man scuffed at the deck with the toe of his shoe. Ohls looked sideways along his eyes at me, and twitched his little cigar like a cigarette.

"Drunk?" he asked, of nobody in particular.

The man who had been removing segments of his spacesuit went over to a bucket and cleared his throat in a loud hawk that made everybody look at him. "Got clogged," he said, and spat. "Not as much as the boy friend got, but some."

The uniformed man said: "Could have been drunk. Showing off all alone in the middle of the Belt. Drunks will do anything."

"Drunk, hell," the plain-clothes man said. "The autopilot's set on a collision course and the guy's been sapped on the side of the head. Ask me and I'll call it murder."

Ohls looked at the man in the spacesuit. "What do you think, buddy?"

The man in the spacesuit looked flattered. He grinned. "I say suicide, Mac. None of my business, but you ask me, I say suicide. First off, the ship was sealed from the inside, so no-one except the deader could have set the autopilot. Then he hit the rock with plenty of speed, dead-on. He could have hit his head when the cabin burst."

Ohls said: "You got eyes, buddy. Frisked him?" he asked the deputy. The deputy looked at me, then at the crew further up the dock. "Okay, save that," Ohls said.

Part 1

Part 3