Kill Station by Diane Duane & Peter Morwood Page B

alloy, underneath a stone surface. That.''
    He pointed at the asteroid they were approaching. It was another lumpy one, a sort of two-potato asteroid, the potatoes welded to one another side by side, the long way. Joss touched the command console again, slowing the ship down, and started to swing it around the asteroid. "Let's see, now," he said.
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    Evan looked with interest at the surface of the asteroid. It was the usual mess—pocked with microasteroid impacts, dusty, rocky, cracked. But there was something else interesting about it. "Joss,"
    he said, "a bit lively, isn't it?"
    Joss nodded. "Yes," he said. "It's tumbling too much, much more than from a simple collision. Someone's been interfering with it. Someone added something to its mass, and not too long ago—and didn't bother to stabilize its orbit afterwards."
    "Not that that would have helped them," Evan said, "with Sherlock Holmes on the job."
    Joss smiled slightly. "People get clumsy out here," he said, making another adjustment to the console.
    "You'd think they'd never heard of physics." He looked out the plex. "There!"
    "There what?"
    Joss was tapping at the console again. "We passed it. Half a second while I slow us down."
    It took more than half a second, but that was the way it was on chemical jets. Evan told himself to be patient, and waited. They came right around the asteroid again, and Joss had them down to the barest crawling drift by the time they passed the point again. "Right there," he said, pointing again. "What does that look like to you?"
    Evan looked down and smiled, an angry smile. There was no mistaking it; he had seen it on the other side of the Belts, as a convenient way to hide drug caches. "I'd say that someone dug a hole, dumped something big over it, raked some rubble in on top, and fused it."
    "Something made of metal," Joss said, looking at one of his instruments, "and massing, oh, about thirty tons— eh, Noel?"
    Noel nodded. "That was Hek's weight of registry, yeah?" he said. "Close enough."
    "Now, then," Joss said, and reached for another part of the console, the part with the capped controls on it. One by one he performed the touch patterns that made the
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    panel swallow the caps, leaving the pads for the ship's weaponry free. ' 'Let's see if we can manage this without damaging the evidence."
    "You sure you don't want me to go down there and just dig it up?" Evan said. He was only half kidding. He was getting angry again, and ripping an asteroid apart would have been oddly satisfying.
    Joss looked at him with an expression that said he was tempted to let Evan try. "Better let me," he said.
    He selected several controls, depressed them, and said, "Medium dispersion. This should take the first three meters off. Three seconds."
    Evan breathed in, breathed out. The next moment, the plex went white with the asteroid-reflected fire of the weapons going off. Dust and vapor blew by the plex shield, and there were rattles and tinkles against the hull as bits of rock and other debris hit the ship and bounced. When the light cut off and the noise died away, Joss looked out the plex and scowled a bit.
    "That's annoying," he said. "They were supposed to be tuned higher than that. Hardly the top meter went off. One more time."
    Once more the blinding light lip up the cabin, and bits or rock rattled and banged against them. Evan saw Noel wince.
    He understood the feeling: Evan had never liked the sound of anything colliding with a ship he was in; you could never tell if it was going to come through.
    "There," Joss said.
    Evan looked out through the dust. There was no gleam of metal, not after heat like that, but a scarred, blackened shape that was definitely not something that occurred naturally in an asteroid. A corner of a cargo module was visible, though the blast of the ship's weaponry had melted it somewhat.
    "That look familiar?" said Joss to Noel.
    Noel looked stricken. He nodded. "That's Hek's ship, all