‘The weapons come out of New Washington,’ he uttered. ‘We pick them up and route them down to the surface where it’s easier to hide them.’
Foxx sat down alongside Nathan, interested now. ‘Easier how?’
‘Big wilderness,’ Scheff replied. ‘The orbital cities are too enclosed, too easy to bust operations if you get the kind of tip–off that a snitch–loser like Asil gives you, so we ship them down and bury the stashes. Been goin’ on for years.’
‘How do you avoid security?’ Nathan asked. ‘Every city’s wired to detect contraband.’
‘Sure they are,’ Scheff said with a grim smile, a thin flash of gold like a mine seam in black rock. ‘But security’s only as good as the man monitorin’ it, right?’
‘You’ve got security teams in your pocket,’ Foxx said. ‘We’ll need their names.’
‘Like hell,’ Scheff snapped. ‘You got the info’, you don’t get no names.’
‘Obstruction of justice,’ Nathan pointed out, ‘at least another four years.’
‘I don’t know the names!’ Scheff snapped. ‘We don’t know who lets us through, only the times we have as windows to make passage down to th’ surface. Same deal down there.’
‘I take it that you don’t carry the weapons yourself?’ Foxx said.
‘I look like an amateur to you? We got mules, they get paid to run the weapons down. They get busted, we stay clear.’
‘Then who was the shooter?’
‘The shooter?’
‘Ricard’s murderer,’ Nathan said. ‘If he was shot with an illegal firearm, which we’re assuming is true because you were there, then you must have known who it was?’
‘I jus’ told you, I don’t know. Just because I was planet–side at the time of this murder you’re shoutin’ about doesn’t mean I was right there at the scene, right?’
‘Then where were you on the afternoon of Friday May 12th?’
‘I can’t remember!’ Scheff wailed in exasperation. ‘But last time I was planet–side I was with my crew the whole time near Ocean Beach. I gotta be on some camera somewhere, check ‘em all out. I din’ pull the trigger on anybody.’
Foxx nodded.
‘We will, so who’s the big wheel behind this smuggling operation?’
‘I don’t know,’ Scheff repeated slowly and clearly. ‘All I know is that they’ve got the muscle to shift the weapons, maybe rank or leverage over somebody, I don’t know.’
Foxx stared at Scheff for a long moment as though something, a dangerous thought perhaps, was rolling around in her head.
‘Is there another shipment due soon?’
Scheff shrugged. ‘They come and go, I don’t hear nothin’ until a couple days before we’re due to run another one down. I tol’ you enough, now get me a deal.’
Foxx stood up. ‘We’ll let you know what the DA says.’
She led Nathan out of the box and turned to face him as the door slammed shut behind them.
‘You buyin’ his alibi?’ she asked.
‘Most people can’t remember what they were doing on a given date three months ago, I sure as hell know I can’t. My suspicions would only be raised if he
did
know what he was doing, and he said to check cameras. That doesn’t sound like guilty to me.’
‘I like him for it,’ Foxx said, ‘but I get his alibi too. If he’s just a pawn in this then the big wheel must be in the services.’
‘Could be police, could be prison service, even military,’ Nathan agreed.
Foxx nodded. ‘Scheff’s just the courier, we need to take this further up the chain.’
‘That’s a bad idea, it could alert whoever is behind this to what’s happening.’
‘We don’t have much of a choice. Scheff can’t give us the information to intercept a fresh consignment of illegal weapons, so we can’t back trace the origin and find out who’s behind all of this.’
‘It must be somebody with direct access to these kinds of weapons,’ Nathan said. ‘Vasquez said that the plasma weapon we found on Asil was an older type, one no longer used by the Marine Corps. Back in Denver we used to have a system where old weapons and those recovered from crimes were disposed of or made safe as evidence. Does the fleet have some kind of disposal system in place, a way of destroying weapons so that they don’t hit the streets?’
‘Sure,’ Foxx replied, ‘but it’s heavily regulated and controlled. Nobody could get weapons out of that system without avoiding countless checks and balances designed to prevent that very crime.’
‘Where there’s a will…,’ Nathan said.
Foxx saw the gleam in his eye and relented. ‘Okay, it’s worth checking out but right now we’ve got a bigger problem. Reed is in prison still.’
‘We need to talk to him,’ Nathan insisted. ‘We now know that Scheff was down on the surface at the time of Ricard’s murder and had access to weapons just like the one that Asil had in his hands when I caught up with him. If he didn’t shoot Ricard, then somebody else did. Right now we have enough doubt over the conviction to get Reed the hell out of Tethys Gaol, right?’
Foxx bit her lip. ‘I doubt the DA will authorize his freedom, but we might have enough to get him pulled out of Tethys and placed in one of the holding ships. It’s safer, cleaner, and he won’t be a target there because we can inform the security crew that his conviction is under serious doubt. They’ll go from mortal enemies to protective friends once they hear that.’
‘Do it,’ Nathan said. ‘The sooner he’s out of Tethys, the sooner we can take our time in solving this. I don’t want to be informing his family that we cleared him of homicide right after he’s been murdered. How soon can we get up there?’
‘You want to go into Tethys yourself?’ Foxx asked, amazed.
‘If Reed’s been framed, and by somebody inside the service to boot, then they’ll do anything they can to stop us from freeing him. I don’t trust anybody with this but us. You game?’
Foxx folded her arms and looked at him with a wry smile.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Nothin’,’ Foxx replied as she breezed past him. ‘I just find your passion for this sort of thing cute.’
Nathan’s chest swelled and he couldn’t help the grin on his face as he turned to follow her.
‘You find me cute?’
‘Don’t go getting excited,’ she replied over her shoulder. ‘I find kittens cute too.’
***
XIV
Tethys Gaol,
Saturn
‘Wow.’
Nathan sat in his seat and watched as the shuttle craft turned after emerging from its super–luminal cruise from Earth to Saturnian orbit, a journey of just over one hour. The interior of the shuttle was not much larger than the private jets he had once seen taking off and landing from Denver International, but the exterior was much larger to accommodate the fusion core engines and the hull plating needed to protect passengers from the rigors of super–luminal cruise and the intense radiation of space.
What he found strangest of all about travelling in such craft was that although they had no windows, they had screens that seemed just like windows that offered a view of the cosmos outside. Nathan knew that when in super–luminal cruise there was nothing to see outside as all light information was stripped away after a brief flare of brilliant white light, and all that remained thereafter was the blackest of all blacks, a darkness so deep that it was said the only thing more frightening was to stare into the depths of a black hole. To spare passengers this intense psychological discomfort, the windows instead displayed a scene of stars drifting by in the blackness, just like he’d seen when watching space shows on TV as a child.
When the shuttle had emerged from super–luminal those stars had blended perfectly into the background of normal star fields, while ahead another screen had shown Saturn growing rapidly larger but, to his surprise, not so rapidly that it rushed upon them in the manner of a science fiction movie. Saturn’s immense size meant that it emerged as a particularly bright star that grew for several long seconds before them as they approached at a velocity just below the speed of light, the rings becoming visible and the orbiting moons glowing in the distant sunlight before the pilots slowed the shuttle and the huge planet loomed to fill the entire cosmos before them, the immense rings spreading out to both sides on such a scale as to be almost intimidating.
Against the vast backdrop Nathan had caught the familiar sight of Polaris Station, the headquarters of the fleet. Like a tall, thin metallic mushroom twenty miles high the station was home to dozens of battleships, frigates and destroyers, its immense bulbous surface flecked with thousands of tiny lights and surrounded by gigantic docking bays designed to take the very largest of vessels.
‘Where’s the prison?’ he asked Foxx as the shuttle sailed past the military base.
‘Four planetary diameters from Polaris Station,’ Foxx replied. ‘Close enough that any prisoner who ever escaped would find themselves face to face with the fleet, and far enough away that they could never hope to reach safety.’
The shuttle cruised past the immense military base, and Nathan spotted a bright spot of light hovering above the tremendous span of Saturn’s rings, one of the planet’s moons in orbit nearby and casting a perfectly black shadow down onto the rings thousands of kilometres below.
‘I still can’t believe I’m seeing this stuff,’ he said almost wistfully as they travelled.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Vasquez replied from the seat behind as he idly flipped through the digital pages of an electro–film, catching up on Saturnian news. ‘Most people don’t come out here though because only military vessels and mining stations have enough power to escape the planet’s gravity.’
Nathan nodded. He had learned some time ago that smaller craft like the shuttle had to use very defined flight paths in order to dock at the relevant station. Failure to do so would see them plummet past Polaris into the gas giant’s turbulent and lethal atmosphere, doomed to be crushed to death tens of thousands of kilometres inside the planet’s ultra–high pressure liquid hydrogen core.
‘He is kind of cute in an innocent way, isn’t he?’
Betty Buzz Luther glanced at Foxx and winked once as she nudged Nathan in the ribs with her elbow.
‘Tell me again how you got here, Betty?’ Nathan asked, pretending not to notice how Foxx’s porcelain smooth skin flushed with color at Betty’s jibe.
‘We’re partners,’ Betty said, ‘partner! Where you go, I go.’
‘We’re just glad you’re not driving,’ Vasquez said from where he sat beside Allen.
Betty turned in her seat and glared at him. ‘You watch your mouth, young man.’
Vasquez shrank down into his seat as Nathan rested a hand on Betty’s shoulder.
‘I’m glad you’re here, partner, but Tethys is a step too far. We’ll meet you on Polaris once we’ve spoken to Xavier Reed.’
Betty raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ve arrested over three hundred perps in my time Nathan, many of them armed and dangerous. I can cope with a handful of delinquent convicts already locked in their cells.’
‘I know you can,’ Nathan assured her. ‘But this is my call, okay?’
Betty frowned and then turned in her seat and folded her arms across her chest as she looked out of the windows.
The shuttle slowed down again and Nathan saw Tethys Gaol resolve itself before them in all its gruesome glory. He was reminded somewhat of an oil rig from his time on Earth, massive towers of angular steel that topped a bulky base ringed with what looked like massive buoyancy aids but were in fact probably storage containers where mined gases had been held for loading onto massive trade ships. Nathan could see large docks around the prison’s rim where container ships had likely loaded up, the whole station painted a dull rust red, the result of cosmic debris and dust gathering and clinging to the huge hull.
‘It used to be a mining post,’ Foxx said as though reading his mind. ‘Awful place, both then and now. It shut down when the automated mining drones were put to work a few decades ago and became a prison instead.’
‘Xavier Reed has been there for three days,’ Nathan said as the shuttle banked around and came in to land, the sheer size of the mining platform now dominating the already dramatic backdrop of Saturn and her moons, flashing proximity beacons flickering rhythmically. ‘You think he’s still alive?’
Foxx shrugged. ‘I don’t want to think about it right now. If you turn out to be right, he’s going through an even worse hell than the criminals who actually deserve to be there.’
The shuttle was swallowed by a landing bay, a row of lights guiding the craft in to the prison’s interior. An airlock bay closed around it as the atmosphere was normalized in swirling blooms of vapor, and then the next set of bay doors opened and the shuttle drifted inside and settled onto its landing pads as the engines whined down.
Nathan unbuckled from his seat and stood to leave, but Foxx remained.
‘You’re not coming?’ he asked, surprised.
‘This is your rodeo,’ she said with a smile. ‘Xavier’s your case, and if you want Forrester to hand you a detective’s shield then you’re going to have to lead this one yourself. Vasquez and I will head across to Titan with Betty and check out the leads on these stolen weapons. You and Allen here can talk to Xavier, if he’s still alive, and find out what happened to him down in San Diego.’
Vasquez smiled cheerfully up at his partner, who winced.
‘How come I get the prison and this joker gets Polaris?’ Allen asked Foxx.
‘Experience,’ Foxx said, ‘Vasquez has history with the Marines so he’ll be of more use to me over there and besides, I want somebody reliable to keep an eye on Ironside. These places can get rough sometimes.’
Vasquez’s smug smile suddenly dissolved into a hurt look. ‘You think I’m not reliable, that I can’t hold my own in there?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Foxx replied defensively as Allen tightened his collar and winked at Vasquez.
‘You head over to Polaris,’ he whispered amiably to his partner. ‘It’s the right thing to do. It’s
safer
there.’
Vasquez offered a dirty look to his partner but said nothing as Nathan turned and walked with Allen to the shuttle exit. They walked down the ramp, the first thing Nathan noting being the stench of oil and stale air, metal and a temperature that felt almost cold. Awaiting them at the bottom of the ramp was a giant of a man with a fearsome red beard who thrust a hand the size of a shovel at Nathan.