Gaby took over from him, and produced a screen full of little images. They were all the same, showing the outside of the air lock, with only the shadow from sunlight changing length and direction.

  She scrolled down.

  “There,” Jonathan said.

  A couple of the thumbnail images were different.

  Jonathan skipped to the first one and started the video there.

  It showed the air lock entrance, but an indistinct object approached in the right hand corner. Slowly, it came closer, but it remained very hard to see what the object was.

  “What is that thing?” Gaby asked. “It looks like a chunk of rock.”

  “If I’m right, it is a chunk of rock. The sunlight is on it and it overexposes the surface, that’s why it appears as a shapeless blob.”

  “How is it being moved?”

  “There is a drone pushing it.”

  Now something was happening at the airlock. A strip of light grew as the door opened.

  When it was fully open, the drone went in. Now that the angle of view changed, the object and the drone were visible side-on.

  The drone was quite small, the same size as a small communications satellite, which was as big as a dinner table. It had a number of long grappling arms and probing sensors.

  It was pushing an irregular dark rock that was wider than its greatest width.

  “It’s taking a small asteroid inside.”

  “It’s a comet, actually, if I’m right.”

  The outer airlock door closed.

  “Is it really going inside? That thing is just going to evaporate like crazy. It’s made of—”

  She stared at Jonathan.

  “Yes,” he said. “There are some comets which contain a very high percentage of carbon monoxide. Most of them don’t, and you would have to scour many candidates before you could find them, but this is a station where those analyses were being done, and Shelton is a specialist in robotics, so programming the drone would have been easy for him.”

  “You’re still thinking that’s what he’s done?”

  “I think he has. I think he put the chunk of ice into the recycling vat, which he wheeled under the airlock, then he closed the lid and let the gases evaporate as the comet warmed up. There is a pressure escape valve on the lid and I think he had a taped-up contraption that led the exhaust fumes into the air duct. I think the pressure might have gotten too high, the lid blew off, dislodged the vat on the pallet and shot it across the room. When everything had calmed down, he quickly took off the tape and temporary tubing, tossed it in the air lock and vanished. I’m pretty sure he’s the person still at large in the station—what?”

  Gaby stared at the door. “I can hear something.”

  Jonathan heard it, too: footsteps in the corridor.

  “Gaby, turn it off!” He jumped up from his seat, but the next moment the door opened. In the doorway stood the captain with two other crew.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “What’s going on here?” the captain asked.

  Jonathan glanced over his shoulder. The screen had gone dark, but he had no doubt that the crew knew exactly what they had been doing.

  “Uhm—we were just watching something on the big screen.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “I’ve had a breakthrough in my investigation.”

  “Oh? Are you still on about that missing person?”

  “Not so much the person, but I’ve discovered how it was done.”

  The captain flicked up his eyebrows. He sat down, his arms crossed over his chest.

  There was nothing for it. Jonathan had to tell him what he and Gaby had just discovered.

  Throughout the story, the captain listened, showing little emotion.

  When Jonathan finished, he said, “So you think we have a murderer on the loose in the station. Do you really suggest that we catch this man and take him on board this ship? My first concern is for my passengers. They won’t be happy when they hear about this. I suggest we leave this to the authorities.”

  Jonathan said, “We can leave him on the station, but if we need to wait until those authorities arrive, he won’t live that long.”

  Gaby added, “The air quality is marginal at the station and deteriorating every day. He doesn’t have a lot of resources, and the recycling plant is already at a tipping point at which it will rapidly start to emit carbon dioxide and methane. That’s a recipe for disaster.”

  The captain glanced at her. “What would you want us to do then?”

  Jonathan said, “Apprehend the man and take him to the first available port. Then the authorities can deal with him and all the data we will give them.”

  “We don’t have the facilities to take prisoners on board. He’s already in a prison. Let him stay there.”

  “He will die there, and he will never be brought to justice, we’ll never find out what happened, or whether there were other people involved.”

  “Yes. Yes, sure.”

  Jonathan couldn’t help shake the feeling that he was uneasy.

  He asked, “Why did your crew go out and collect the camera footage for the air lock in question?”

  “My crew received the orders from headquarters that we were to take records from all cameras, especially ones that showed the operation of our drones. They’re patented by Prosperity Mining and we protect them from our competitors. I hope I don’t need to remind you that you’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement before boarding this ship.”

  Whoa, was that a threat?

  “Why that airlock in particular?” Jonathan asked.

  The captain replied, his face stiff. “Because the detection process is automated and if the record contains footage of any drones, my crew was to obtain and secure it. They were given a list.”

  It was almost convincing. Save that one of their precious drones had been used to bring the comet into the station—by someone who was considered to be an expert on drones. And no one had noticed or questioned why a drone had come to this airlock that was even on the wrong side of the station?

  Jonathan didn’t want to push harder on this matter. In fact, when they went back to their rooms, Gaby was surprised that he’d asked about it at all.

  “I can’t believe you mentioned that camera,” she said while they walked back to their cabins. “I think it was clear that they were trying to hide something from us.”

  “I wanted to let him know that we know about it. I would like to doubt that this is about covering up for Shelton. Knowing companies, I believe him when he says it is about some trademark company secret stupidity. For one, if they really knew what was on that footage, they wouldn’t have put the data box on the seat where I could see it.”

  “I hope so,” Gaby said. “I really don’t want to think about the alternative.”

  “We’ll find out tomorrow,” Jonathan said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

  Sleep seemed a good idea.

  But before Jonathan drifted off, he received a message.

  The captain had agreed to send Jonathan and Gaby back into the station with a team to try to capture Shelton. He balled his fist. Yes, they were giving in.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jonathan and Gaby met this team at breakfast the next morning. It consisted of nine people, seven men and two women. Lance was one of the men. Jonathan recognised one of the others as the ship’s cook and another was an engineer. Two guys from the “data team” were also in the group. Jonathan and Gaby learned that their names were Nick and Damien. Neither of them said very much.

  Of course he knew now that Lance was never meant to be a helper.

  He was meant to guard Jonathan and Gaby, to report on everything they did and to make sure that they didn’t cross any company lines.

  For them, this was still about company lines, Jonathan was sure of that. When one of the men sat down, Jonathan spotted the unmistakable shape of a weapon under his overalls. He couldn’t see it well enough to determine if it was a stun gun or a more serious weapon. He presumed so, because not even many Corps troops carried a weapon that used bullets inside a space habitat.

  The briefing, held over breakfast, was business-like, without much warmth.

  They would go to the store room, call out a warning, and if there was no reply, they would set loose a mechanical dog: a device that traced very small amounts of scent.

  They discussed what they would do to get Dr Shelton to show himself.

  “The guy is dead,” the engineer said. “The atmosphere has deteriorated too much. People who kill usually end up killing themselves, too.”

  “Or if he’s still alive, he’s likely to blow himself up when we find him,” Nick said.

  Gaby shook her head. “I doubt it. If he wanted to kill himself, he would have already done so. Most mass murderers commit suicide, but not all of them. Some have a perverted sense of sensationalism. They want to see the result of their actions. Others want to go out with a bang and cause as much damage as possible.”

  “We should focus on talking to him,” Jonathan said. “We want him alive, so that he can answer our questions in court.”

  Several members of the group gave non-committal nods. No, they didn’t want to capture Shelton alive. Neither did the captain, who kept insisting the ship had no facility to deal with criminals.

  As if he’d never heard of locking people in their rooms.

  Jonathan made the team agree to a plan that would concentrate on finding Shelton and getting him out alive.

  The engineer then had to set up the mechanical dog. It was like a sausage dog, shaped like a cylinder placed sideways on four wheels. The engine sucked in air through the open “mouth” at the front, and passed it through several filters that analysed the composition. Like a real dog, it needed a sample of the target’s scent to calibrate it.

  So they would need to go to Shelton’s cabin.

  Jonathan mapped out the route through the station while they sat in the shuttle. Gaby sat next to him and the company thug Damien on the other.

  By now, Kenzie was well-acquainted with the route and the station’s docking system.

  When the docking procedure was complete, everyone did up their suits, put on their helmets and went into the air lock.

  Company people must have come into the station to clean it up. All the tools on the benches were packed away in crates and stood against the wall opposite the second docking tube.

  Jonathan led the way into the station, with Gaby behind him, and then Nick with the mechanical dog.

  Shelton’s room was in the bottom floor corridor together with all the other staff residential quarters. They first had to walk past the auditorium, now empty, with the door open.

  Jonathan shuddered at seeing the stains on the carpet.

  The corridor on the other side of the auditorium and library had doors on both sides. Most were closed, but some stood open, with the resident’s belongings still in the room.

  “This one here,” Gaby said.

  She had stopped at a room on the left hand side of the corridor. The door stood open.

  The room was fairly tidy, but some clothes lay draped over the chair.

  Nick picked them up and held them out to the mechanical dog. The thing made a loud zooming noise like a vacuum cleaner and then took off into the corridor. It went into the stairwell, where Nick picked it up and carried it up one floor.

  On this level, it ran a few circles on the landing before it took off again in the direction of the store room. Jonathan wondered when they would get to the real hunting. He could have told the group that the store room was a good place to start the search. That machine might be clever, but it wasn’t by far as fast as a person could walk, and meanwhile, they were wasting valuable time.

  In the store room, the thing trundled around making beeping noises.

  Jonathan could no longer hide his frustration. “I already know that he’s been here. We need to know where he is now.”

  “There is only one entrance to this room,” Lance said.

  “Then put the thing back in the corridor and see if it will take us somewhere else.”

  Nick did that. The device trundled around in circles again before turning back in the direction of the stairs.

  “The top floor,” Gaby said. She also sounded frustrated.

  She didn’t wait for a reply from the others, but set off for the stairwell at a good pace. Jonathan followed her. Besides the control room and the recycling plant, the top floor of the habitat contained a number of offices and meeting rooms.

  Jonathan and Gaby looked into each room for signs that someone had been here recently. The others followed. Nick still carried the mechanical dog which was beeping frantically, even while he carried it under his arm.

  “I think it reacts to a component in the air,” Nick said, as if he needed to apologise for the malfunctioning device.

  With the recycling plant’s output decreasing ever further, the air quality here was worse than on lower floors.

  They checked all the rooms, finishing up in the control room, where the screens still flashed information about the station to empty seats.

  The others were having an argument about the mechanical dog that kept beeping more insistently.

  “Just turn the thing off. It’s annoying,” Lance said.

  Damien said they couldn’t because the crew on the ship would know.

  “Jonathan,” Gaby said. The tone in her voice sounded urgent.

  She stood in front of a screen that displayed images from security cameras around the station.

  Jonathan joined her.

  “I would swear that when we first came here there was another shuttle in the dock.”

  “There was,” Jonathan said.

  Gaby pointed wordlessly at a camera displaying information from the docking area. The screen next to the docking tube’s entry said vacant.

  Jonathan’s heart jumped. He remembered distinctly that there had been a shuttle in the dock.

  “Shit. When did that happen?” he asked.

  “No idea.”

  Jonathan hadn’t paid the second dock any attention during his last visit. No one had said anything about removing the shuttle. He had the station’s activity logs, but they didn’t cover that time.

  Gaby was scrolling back through a list of arrivals and departures.

  “There,” she said.

  The shuttle had left the dock in the middle of the night in ship time.

  She fed the time into the video log and managed to pull up a recording. A single person in an environment suit walked quickly through the corridor outside the entry port, punched something into the panel next to the door. It opened. The figure vanished off the screen when going into the tube.

  “Where would he have gone? To the ship?” Gaby asked.

  Jonathan thought about that for a while. There wouldn’t have been anywhere else for the shuttle to go. But surely, if the shuttle had gone to the ship, the crew would know about it?

  In that case, what were they doing here with him and Gaby, and mucking around with that silly machine? Wasting time with it?

  He met Gaby’s eyes through the visor of the suit. In her eyes, he read that she had come to the same conclusion: the company was playing games. They were protecting Shelton, giving him refuge on the ship.

  Which meant that they had to tread very carefully, at least until they had arrived at Ceres Station.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jonathan and Gaby backed away from the workstation. They joined the others who were still following the mechanical dog around the floor. They pulled open doors to storage cupboards and maintenance passages, even went into some of them.

  It might be likely that Shelton had been here and had hidden in those places while people from the ship were searching the station. Maybe. Or maybe not. It was irrelevant. He was no longer at the station.

  Kenzie announced that time was up, and Nick confirmed it.

  “Come on, guys, we haven’t found our fugitive, but time is up. The captain wants to go.”

  Gaby and Jonathan joined the group. Jonathan’s heart was thudding. He hoped that no one had noticed what they had found out.

  They said nothing, not even when Damien made a needling comment about not having found anything. Because apparently, if the mechanical dog couldn’t find Shelton, he wasn’t there.

  “Yes, I was probably wrong,” Jonathan said.

  He didn’t like lying and he didn’t think he could do it convincingly.

  He’d be glad when they arrived at the ship.

  But when they did, it was to have the members of their Incident Mitigation Team waiting for them. They accompanied Jonathan and Gaby into a meeting room.

  They wanted to know the finer details of why Jonathan thought Shelton was still alive and why he thought he was responsible.

  Jonathan told his story yet again.

  “He’s a well-known figure. His reputation is beyond reproach,” Ron said.

  “Yes, it smells like a vendetta to me,” said another.

  “How do we know you’re not a spy from Ariana Industries?” This man looked directly at Jonathan.

  Whoa, whoa, this was going in entirely the wrong direction.

  “We’re in the employment of the Space Corps on loan to Prosperity Mining,” Jonathan said. “I have no financial interests anywhere in the Asteroid Belt. I’m a scientist and I look at the facts as I can measure them. We have one visitor on the station, one resident in hospital. We should have counted the same number of people as the number on the official personnel list. But one is missing. We’ve identified Shelton as the missing person.”

  “Yet, you didn’t find him. That’s because he isn’t there. Why don’t you tell me what your game is?”

  “Please, calm down. We’re not interested in your company’s operations. I’m a recycling specialist. Gaby is a doctor. What would we do with mining secrets?”

  He looked around the room, meeting angry expressions.

  “I don’t think this meeting helps anyone,” Gaby said. She got up from the table. “Excuse me, we’re tired and would like to clean up before dinner.” She walked around the back of the table in the direction of the door.

 

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