Chapter Eleven
“Did you say ‘Opatz’” asked the young officer that was taking their statements.
“Yes,” replied Jeanette. “Miss Valerie Opatz.”
“Any relation to Ryder Opatz?” asked the officer.
Jeanette looked at Libbie and Margaret, who both nodded.
“Ryder is her dad,” said Alex.
“The Ryder Opatz?” insisted the officer.
“Yes dammit! Ryder Opatz. The Ryder Opatz, as in Ryder Opatz. Have you got it yet?”
“What’s so special about her dad?” asked Jeanette.
“He’s a percussionist for a band,” said Margaret.
“A band?” asked the officer. “You mean the band. He’s part of The Rockers. They played to a packed house here last night.”
“Last night? Have they left yet?” asked Alex hopefully.
“They should have, but I don’t know for sure. I’ll have to look it up.”
“Please do,” said Jeanette. Everything had been in a bit of a mess since they’d arrived. Once they’d convinced Balga Control that they weren’t a threat or trying to smuggle anything into the station, they had had to contend with an under staffed and under trained constabulary. They were more accustomed to handling drunks and bar fights than any proper organized criminal activity.
Most of the crew of the Heart of Stone was here in the makeshift legal department that had been quickly set up inside the quarantine section to take their statements. After a few minutes of wrestling with the console, the officer continued speaking.
“The band has left. Since the loaders are on strike, the stage and instruments are still waiting to be loaded and their manager stayed behind to oversee everything.”
“Is his name Ordovus Cleverly?” asked Alex.
“Um … yes, that’s him.”
“Can you let us see him, or ask him to come here?” interjected Jeanette.
“Yeah, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Range?” asked Guiora.
“Three hundred meters and closing slowly. Everything stable,” replied Isacus.
“How close do you want to get, Captain?” asked Guiora.
“Twenty meters,” replied Powell. “I don’t want to run the risk of one of these boxes getting away from us.”
“You know,” continued Guiora,” five hundred meters is normally considered quite close when transferring from ship to ship, even in a gravity well.”
“No risks,” said the Captain tersely.
“What about the risk of the ships colliding?”
“You’re too good to let that happen. I know you won’t put any scuff marks on my hull.”
“Thanks Captain. That’s just swell.” Under his breath, Guiora muttered, “Some windows would be nice right about now.”
The displays showed only the Fallen Angel totally dominating one side of the sky. They weren’t designed to show ships so close to each other, and judging the exact distance was an absolute nightmare. Not to mention that even the tiniest amount of momentum, if left unchecked, would cause the ships to either drift apart or collide with each other. Or worse, crush the workers who would be between the ships transferring the cargo.
“How close did you want to get?” came a voice from the comm.
“Don’t worry Captain Tetrault, we won’t damage your ship,” said Powell.
Aboard the Fallen Angel, Captain Tetrault exchanged worried glances with his navigator and his second. The Celiker was a lot closer to his ship than any other ship had ever been during his time flying her. To say that he was nervous was an understatement.
“You do know that if you push something out here, it keeps going? Getting closer won’t make it any easier,” he said over the comm to the Celiker.
“I don’t want to risk the cargo getting away from us,” replied the other Captain.
“Try this on,” said Captain Tetrault sweating visibly. “This is a formal request that you not bring your ship any closer to ours. There’s barely a hundred meters between us now!”
“Fine. Hold position here,” said Powell. “The two airlocks are pretty much lined up. We’ll come aboard and collect the cargo now.”
Captain Tetrault let out a deep sigh. Docking with a station was one thing, since the station would out-mass the ship by several orders of magnitude. That made it a relatively stable object to dock with and even then, the computers would do all the piloting and bring the ship in on a laser straight line. Bringing two ships together like this – and piloting by hand! It was madness.
In the open main airlock of the Celiker, Jed and Deva were suited up and ready to fetch the cargo out from the Fallen Angel.
“Birds clear to leave the nest,” said Papo over the comm. Jed and Deva drifted slowly across the gap between the two ships. It was an awesome spectacle to see. There were dozens of ships visible in the area, plus the station creating a massive backdrop on one side. The two ships were so close that their lights illuminated each other, making every little detail stand out in bright contrast. The space below them was open to the void of space and fell away forever.
Reaching the airlock of the Fallen Angel, they could see three of the crew suited up and waiting for them. Strapped down to the deck were three larger than normal boxes. Working together, the five of them quickly freed the first box. Jed and Deva both strapped leads onto the box to make sure that there was no chance of it slipping and drifting away.
A short puff from their maneuvering packs and they set out on the short trip back to the Celiker. Deva even took the time to look around as they crossed the gap once more. There were ships in almost every direction she looked. Every so often one would fire some thrusters to stabilize its position, showing as a bright spark of light. All of the ships had navigation lights and strobes going. With all that light pouring out from every direction, there wasn’t a star to be seen anywhere. The contrast was simply too great for them to show up.
Once back inside the airlock of the Celiker, the outer door was closed. Working quickly, Deva and Jed undid themselves from the box and lashed it down to their own deck. Once it was secure and tested, the outer door was opened again and they headed back across for the next box.
Originally the plan had been to have the crew from the Fallen Angel bring the first box while Deva and Jed went to fetch the second and then have the crew bring the third. Captain Powell had vetoed that idea in favour of just fetching the cargo themselves. The reasoning was that with fewer people moving around there would be less risk of a mishap and they were ahead of schedule anyway, so there was no need to rush.
Zavil sat in apparent meditation. His eyes were closed, his hands rested in his lap. There were two signs that he was not meditating. The first was that his eyes darted around under his closed eyelids, showing that he was actively thinking. The second was a rather conspicuous cable that was attached at the side of his head and was connected to a large processing station.
Gerogi watched Zavil in a state of apparent boredom. He and Selinin had been watching Zavil trawl through literally billions of records for the last few hours. Every so often he would ask Zavil a new question or Zavil would provide the information he had found. It was a fairly simple process, but he was hampered by not knowing the right questions to ask.
From the outside, the Hall of Records seemed to be an ordinary building. Quite large in its own right, but dwarfed by it’s neighbours, there was nothing to make it stand out from the thousands of other buildings that made up the biggest city on Belousov.
What the average person did not realize was that almost the entire building was a data core. The Hall of Records should really have been called the Tower of All Records. Almost every transaction, every message, every document that passed through the large public service networks was stored here.
However, such an enormous volume of information was virtually useless unless something productive could be done with it. This was were the ministers came in. Ministers such as Zavil were upgraded and trained to be able to scan through all the information looking for data as it was requested. Or to be more accurate, they were used when obscure information was being sought, or when connections between apparently unconnected bits of information were needed.
The vast bulk of the requests came from the judicial system and the taxation systems. Some people went to great lengths to hide their money, or hide themselves when they had been naughty. But the ministers were able to make connections between the most trivial scraps of information and pull apparent miracles of deductive reasoning.
“Nope, can’t find it,” proclaimed Zavil as he opened his eyes.
“Auwagh, this is impossible!” exclaimed Selinin and threw his arms in the air. “This must be where the Judges gave up in frustration.”
“We just need to ask the right questions,” muttered Georgi.
“There are a variety of ways to search through the fountain of knowledge. If you give me better context, I may be able to divine that which you seek.”
Gerogi sighed inwardly. This was why they were called ministers. They spent so much time with their brains plugged into their damned machines that they started getting screwy in the head. It wasn’t in human nature to be plugged in for so long. But this was where his search had led him and he wasn’t about to give up now.
“Can you get all the records that you have for movements of the Judges during the ten years we are looking at?”
Zavil closed his eyes for a few seconds and then opened them. “I have the knowledge in my palm.”
Selinin glanced at Georgi.
“Do you have any records for Judge Jordi Leshem?”
“Yes, there are one hundred and seventy six documents that mention him within the time period specified.”
“Are the documents spread out or concentrated in a specific window?”
“Almost every document related to Judge Jordi Leshem is clustered around a ten day window, starting from his arrival to his departure.”
Selinin sat up, suddenly interested. Now they were starting to make some headway. Previously they had been asking about Asoye, of whom there had been no trace.
“Where did he go?” asked Georgi excitedly.
Zavil went back into his deep-think mode. And then continued. After a moment, his brow furled and then he opened his eyes again. “It is not clear. He arrived at Zakharina Spaceport aboard a ground transport. Three other people accompanied him. He then entered the Spaceport and the ground transport left, driven by a fifth person. Once inside the Spaceport, he purchased several items from various shops, namely Krystalynn, Elements and Nextworld Studios. The final data with his name is when he had a meal with his group at The Elephant and Wheelbarrow.”
“He never left the Spaceport?”
“There are no records that he did.”
“It couldn’t be that easy, surely,” said Selinin. “The space port is the first place the follow-up team would have arrived and odds are the staff would have reported something smelly in the back rooms if he died there.”
“He wouldn’t have stayed at the space port. There’s no reason to – it’s a connection point, not a destination.” Gerogi turned to face Zavil again. “How many ships departed during the following twenty hours after the last contact.”
“Seven.”
“Ah-ha!” said Georgi. “I was worried that it would be something horrible like seven hundred.” He paused for a moment and looked back at Zavil, fully expecting him to say ‘hundred’ or ‘thousand’. When he didn’t, Georgi continued talking with Selinin. “I bet you anything you want that Jordi was aboard one of those seven ships.”
“Who were the other people that were with him? One would have been Asoye, but who were the other two?”
“Who were the other members of the group?”
“There is no record. Judge Jordi Leshem was the one who thumbed for everything. The other three did not buy anything or call anyone.”
“Are the video feeds still available?”
Zavil gave a little chuckle. “After almost a hundred years? No, the video feeds are only kept for twenty years. And even then many people consider that to be excessive and a waste of valuable storage space.”
Gerogi sat back and thought for a moment. He almost felt like jumping on top of Zavil and prizing his skull open to try and get at the information himself, but that was not only an inherently stupid thing to do, it wouldn’t get him anywhere except jail.
“The ground vehicle, is the registration available?”
“Checking.” Georgi was now accustomed to the long pauses that Zavil made. He didn’t really agree with the idea of people doing a job that an AI could have done, but AI’s were illegal to grow. It was considered slavery to have a sentient being perform work without reward, and AI’s invariably only wanted to watch television, starting from the beginning. Nobody knew why, and people had grown bored of trying to fix that long ago. “There are no longer any records of the vehicle. The toll check records are only maintained for seven years. No other data is available to link Leshem with the ground vehicle.”
“Bummer,” said Georgi.
“We are not interested in where he came from,” said Selinin, shifting in his seat. “We want to know where he went.”
“Good point. Was Leshem aboard one of the seven ships that left?”
“Unknown.”
“Did Leshem leave the space port via another means?”
“Unknown.”
“Are there any other means of leaving the space port?”
“Yes. At the time there were two train services that carried passengers going to and from the spaceport. There are seven major roads for service vehicles and there were provisions for light flyers to land on the western edge. And thirteen paths available for pedestrians.”
“That’s a lot of ways far a small group to leave. They could have arrived with Leshem thumbing everything so there would be a record of him arriving at the spaceport and then have one of the others thumb a cab as they left. They could even have just walked out into the countryside.”
“Possible,” conceded Georgi. “But why would they?”
“Maybe to start a commune, I don’t know,” exclaimed Selinin. “He has a perfectly nice single female with him, has the Narjus in his pocket which you assure me is enough of a liquid asset to buy a planet – do the math’s!”
“So who were the other two people?”
“I don’t know, maybe he discovered how great swinging was. Maybe he was being forced. Maybe he just couldn’t be bothered being a Judge any more. Face it, it’s a dead end.” Selinin ended his tirade and settled back down in his chair. It wasn’t very comfortable and that was making him irritable. He vaguely wandered if a good thump to the side of the head would make Zavil work better. It certainly helped his old holovid at home.
“During the ten days that Leshem was here, did he check into any hotels or residences?”
“Yes. On his first night he stayed at the Apostle, a hotel next to the spaceport. Afterwards, he stayed at The Mount Olympus Hotel next to the judiciary building downtown. He wasn’t registered at any hotel or residence on the last night that he was here.”
“Do you have access to the judiciary logs?”
“No. Old judiciary logs are available upon request from the judiciary archival repository, but requests have to be made in person. And you need to know the specific records that you are after.”
Georgi thought a bit longer. He was close, but this was going around in circles. He could probably pump poor Zavil for information until the end of time and still not come up with anything useful. What he needed was to ask the right questions.
“Ready to go home yet?” asked Selinin.
“Just a little longer,” replied Georgi. “We’re here. If we have to, we can check in somewhere and come back tomorrow.”
“And the next day and the next day,” said Selinin. “I’m sore, tired and cranky. You stay here and talk to data boy, but I’m going for a walk to stretch my legs. If you want me, I’ll be over at that nice cafeteria we saw on the way in getting something to eat.”
Selinin got up and stretched elaborately. “White whale, I tell you.”
Georgi watched him walk away. Zavil just sat with a placid smile on his face.
“Were any of the seven ships reported missing?”
Zavil blinked for a long time and then said “No.”
“Did any of the ships return to Belousov after they departed?”
“Yes. Of the seven ships, five made subsequent return trips. Four were regular traders and returned many times. The other was an executive ship that had made a stop for repairs before continuing on its voyage.”
“Was anyone matching Leshem’s description on any of those ships?”
“Unknown.”
This was getting nowhere. What he needed was another hard bit of data to cross reference with the information that he already had. The problem being that this was the only remaining source of data that still had any meaningful information. Most other planets only stored such records for a dozen years or so, and that was normally on hard copy.
“What were the two other ships that didn’t return?”
“One was a small courier named Swift. The other was the Hammer of Iron, a warship that was destroyed in the Battle of The False King in the Okimoto system.”
“Could Leshem have been aboard the Hammer of Iron?”
Zavil gave another long blink. “Possible, but highly unlikely. It was a military ship and would not be likely to carry passengers. As a Judge, he could have commandeered the ship and had them take him anywhere in the galaxy, but not without the Hammer leaving a report or record as to what had happened.”
“Oh, I give up,” said Georgi. “Selinin was right, I’m wasting my time. Thank you for your services Zavil,”
“No problem,” replied Zavil. “Enjoy your stay.”
Georgi wandered down the hallway looking for Selinin. Briefly he considered what time the waitresses finished their shifts at the cafeteria.
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