“Many men shot at us, sir. It was chaotic there at the end.”
Ketkar smiled. “Yes. And somehow with inflated suits you managed to get all the way back to camp. Most impressive.”
Wit motioned to the flagpole, where a red sheet posing as a flag flapped in the wind. “You have men in your vehicles who are still in the game, sir. If you’d like to take our flag, you won’t meet any resistance. All of us are out of the fight.”
Ketkar smiled. “I think it best if we call this a draw and leave it at that.”
“Good idea, sir.”
Ketkar saluted and got back into his vehicle, and the convoy drove away. Deen and Averbach stepped out of the woods once the convoy was out of sight, their dampening suits still operable.
“I figured you two would be riddled with spider rounds by now,” said Wit.
Deen looked offended. “A little confidence, Captain. Averbach and I don’t give up that easy.”
“I don’t suppose I want to know what you did with the cars.”
Deen patted him on the arm and took a drink from the cooler. “Nothing a good motor sergeant can’t fix.”
He and Averbach moved over to the pile of suits and added theirs to the heap.
“I have to admit this is not what I expected, sir,” a voice said.
Wit turned. It was Lobo, there beside him in his undergarments, staring into the firelight, soaking wet and holding a vitamin drink.
“Will the training be as grueling as Major Ketkar says?” Lobo asked.
“You’re in MOPs now, Lobo. I shouldn’t have to answer that question.”
CHAPTER 8
Glaser
The archives room on Makarhu was a dark, claustrophobic space filled with rows of blinking computer systems and humming servers. Lem was floating in the shadows back near a corner with his holopad plugged into one of the server inputs. A video of the attack on El Cavador played in the holospace above his pad. It showed a laser cutting through a pebble-killer on the hull of the free-miner ship. As Lem watched, the severed PK spun away and struck one of the free miners on spacewalk. Lem moved his hand through the holospace to stop the video, then he wiggled his fingers in the right sequence to rewind the video and play it again in slow motion. He couldn’t be certain, but it looked like, as he had feared, he had killed the man.
The bump with El Cavador had been far more violent than Lem had anticipated. It was one thing to talk of lasers cutting through sensors and equipment. It was quite another thing to see it all unfold before your eyes as Lem had done-the entire attack had been recorded by several cameras and projected on the big holospace on the helm.
No, he mustn’t use the word “attack.” That sounded incriminating and prosecutable. “Attack” implied wrongdoing and sparked headlines on the nets like: LEM JUKES ATTACKS FAMILY OF FREE MINERS. Or: HEIR TO JUKE FORTUNE ATTACKS CHILDREN. No, “attack” was far too aggressive a word. It painted a completely inaccurate picture of events. It suggested malicious intent and automatically put people into false categories. Good versus evil. Black versus white. And in truth, there were no good guys and bad guys in this scenario. They were just two parties after the same asteroid, which, let the record show, didn’t legally belong to anyone in the first place. Lem wasn’t taking something from the free miners because it wasn’t theirs to begin with. If they had possessed some deed perhaps or a bill of sale asserting them as the owners of said property, then yes, Lem would be in the wrong. But maneuvering someone away from an asteroid for which they had no right of ownership wasn’t a crime at all.
Maneuvering. Yes, Lem liked that word much better.
The PK in the video spun away from the laser again and struck the man. Lem froze the video at the moment of impact. The man’s neck was bent unnaturally to the side. Lem had never seen a broken neck before, but he was fairly certain that was what he was looking at.
“Mr. Jukes?”
Lem spun around, banging into two of the servers in the process. The archivist, a Belgian named Podolski, was floating at the end of the row of servers in his sleepsuit, looking at Lem with a confused expression. Lem felt panicked, though he worked hard to conceal it. The man should be sleeping. It was hours into sleep-shift.
“You startled me,” said Lem, smiling and switching off his holopad.
The archivist stared, confused. A moment of silence passed.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” said Lem. “I let myself in to review a few files.”
“The system alerts me when anyone accesses the core files without my authorization code,” Podolski said. “It’s a security precaution.”
“Ah,” said Lem. He hadn’t known that, or he would have figured out some way to circumvent the code. Lem chuckled. “How stupid of me. I’m so sorry. If I had known that, I would’ve come to you first during normal hours. I feel awful that I woke you.”
“You do know, sir, that you can access any files we have here in the archives using your personal terminal in your room.”
Of course Lem knew that. He wasn’t an idiot. But he didn’t want the ship to have a record of the files being transferred to his room-or to any other terminal on the ship for that matter. Nor did he want merely to look at the files; he wanted to erase the only copies in existence here on the main servers.
“I had some business to attend to in the mining bay,” said Lem. “So I thought I’d slip in here and check a few things. I didn’t know I’d make a stir.”
It wasn’t the best lie, but Lem had delivered it convincingly enough. And it could withstand scrutiny. The mining bay was close to the archive room, and in the days since the bump, the mining crew had been working long hours in the bay getting ready for the field test. It wasn’t implausible to suggest that Lem had been there.
Podolski nodded. “Is there something I can help you find, sir?”
“Very kind, but no. Just finishing up here. Thank you.”
Podolski nodded again, unsure what to do next. An awkward pause followed. “Well, if you need anything, sir, my quarters are right through that hatch over there.”
Lem made a show of straining his neck and looking at the hatch even though he knew exactly where it was. “Thank you. If I need something, I’ll let you know.”
Podolski drifted away, an uncertain look on his face.
Lem waited for the hatch to close, then began erasing files quickly, not even bothering to review them first. Earlier, when Lem had decided to go through with this and erase any record of the bump, he had briefly considered giving the chore to Podolski, who was obviously more familiar with the servers and thus better qualified. But then Lem had realized how unsettled that would have left him: He would have always wondered if Podolski had made his own copy of the files in the hope of blackmailing Lem in the future. Some of Father’s employees had tried such things over the years-their attempts had always ended in their own humiliation and never in Father’s, but Father had found the experiences exhausting nonetheless. Plus, giving the order to Podolski would only raise the man’s suspicions when most people on board, Podolski included, were still unaware of what had happened during the bump. No one but a few trusted senior officers knew of the incident with the free miner, and Lem thought it best to keep it that way.
When Lem finished erasing files, he checked and rechecked the servers and backups to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Then he ran a program that deleted any record of the erasing. The last step was patching up holes. There were now gaps in the video surveillance records, so Lem filled those in with random footage of space already on file. When he was done, every scrap of potentially incriminating evidence was gone.
Lem pocketed his holopad and made his way to the exit. He had hoped that by erasing the files he would also erase the sting of guilt that had been pecking at him ever since the bump, but as he left the archives room, he felt as anxious as he had before. He shouldn’t have watched the video, he realized. If he hadn’t watched the video he could have maintained the possibility in his mind that the man wasn’t seriously injured. He could have led himself to
