Late Shift

On duty: DC Nisha Chakraborty and DC Zoltan Kaminski (absent)

London, Mid-Earth.

1972. December.

Chakraborty asked the question first. “Where is Zoltan?”

“Kaminski?” DC Holland shrugged from the other side of the office. “If he’s not stuck to your side like usual, how the fuck should we know?”

Staring for a moment at Kaminski’s desk, she tried to remember the last time he had been late for a shift. Despite his scruffy appearance, Kaminski was always on point: rarely late, always sharp, ready to go from the moment he walked through the door. As long as he had a cigarette in his hand, at least. He wasn’t answering his home telephone.

Robin looked up from her desk. “He was here earlier. Wanted to pick something up, I think. Or drop something off. I’m not sure - he seemed to be in a hurry.”

Strange.

There was a clatter as a polystyrene ceiling tile dropped to the floor next to where Chakraborty was standing. The electrician on the ladder shrugged apologetically. “Sorry about that, love.”

She glared up at him. Of all the days and all the shifts to have an office refit.

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know,” Robin said, tilting her head as if hoping the knowledge would fall out of her ear. “He had a quick chat with the boss, then headed out.”

The boss. Bakker. Chakraborty looked over her shoulder towards the DI’s office, the blinds pulled tight. Him and Kaminski had been having one-on-one meetings for a while. She’d been worrying that Kaminski was angling for a promotion, or a transfer, behind her back.

“Alright, thanks Robin, let me know if he calls in.”

She could go quiz Bakker, but that would seem needy, and not a little silly. Kaminski was a grown adult, he could look after himself. Chakraborty’s desk was adjacent to Kaminski’s and she fell into her seat, propping her feet up on a pile of unfiled papers. She had no appointments or meetings scheduled, so could afford to wait. She called out across the office. “Robin, do you have anything new for me to peruse?”

“Why, of course.” Robin, efficient as ever, hopped up and brought over a ring binder full of one-pager reports. “Here you go, everything sent over from Scotland Yard. Unconfirmed SDC jurisdiction, so take a look and see if anything looks exciting.” She flashed a smile, then headed back to the reception desk.

Flicking through the binder, only half paying attention, Chakraborty’s attention continually slid back to Kaminski’s whereabouts. Perhaps she should call the The White Horse, see if he’d ended up in there somehow. But, then, he’d been in the office earlier, so it’s not like he was in a ditch sleeping off a hangover. A photo in the binder of a mutilated corpse caught her eye and she grimaced. It had been found in the east end, but looked as if it had been mauled by a tiger. Nasty.

Unbidden, her mind darted back to the coroner’s report on John’s death. She’d memorised lines from it, without even meaning to; they’d seared into her memory on first reading. She could visualise each line as they were typed on the autopsy, next to the comedic, simplified body sketch, marked up with red pen.

Bruised and lacerated right ankle, consistent with tail whip from a koth.

Two broken ribs on left side. Impact bruising on back matches damage on wall in apartment.

Fractured skull at rear from blunt force trauma. Hair sample from kitchen wall matches.

Head has been removed, mixture of incision and immense force.

The worst of it had been the line about ‘probable cause of death’, as if that was in some way up for debate.

Screwing her eyes shut, she bit her lower lip, breathing slowly in through her nose, out through her mouth. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes.

Another crash as part of the strip light dangled out of its mount, swinging down against Kaminski’s desk. “Sorry!” shouted the electrician, his head somewhere in the ceiling.

“Fuck it,” Chakraborty said, pushing away from her desk. She strode across the office, aware that the others would be watching, Holland no doubt judging with a grin, and knocked once on Bakker’s door. Without waiting for a response, she turned the round, brass handle and opened the door. “Where’s Kaminski?”

Bakker was sat on the edge of his desk, arms half-crossed, one hand to his chin, as if he’d been biting his nails. He looked at her, not annoyed as she expected but instead displaying an expression of concern - and, perhaps, determination. “Detective,” he said. “Come in. Close the door. We need to talk.”

*

London, Max-Earth.

2542. December.

Logan Jeffries had always wanted to be a hacker, or a space pirate. He’d always been good with devices. Pulling them apart, hooking them up to a pad and altering their programming. Instead, he’d flunked out of his studies in his late teens due to an obsession with a not-quite-illegal weed imported from Palinor, had failed to land a university place and had found himself working various menial tech jobs around Europe. There was no shortage of those. Quantum machines is where he wanted to be - but he knew enough to see that they were where the real money was, and that he was a long way from ever touching one.

It wasn’t all bad, though - he’d got a lucky break from a good reference and had ended up working at the portal station, or just outside it. The London anchor of the African space elevator was the final, critical part of the triverse trade route, able to lift incoming cargo to geostationary orbit, and Logan was responsible for keeping it running smoothly. He’d gone from one role to another at the facility, rising slowly but surely to his current position as chief digital technician. Practically, that meant he kept an eye on the computers that kept the automated systems running, pulling newly delivered cargo from Mid-Earth off the loading cranes, selecting the correct containers for extra-planetary delivery and transferring them onto the elevator platforms. From London they would rise at a steep angle towards the junction point above central Africa, before being lifted out of atmosphere to the space dock on the far end. After that, it was none of Logan’s business, with cargo shipped off to various planets and satellites around the system. There was in reality a whole team of people doing this work, but Logan was happy to think of himself as the lone operator.

It wasn’t hacking, and it wasn’t going to space. But it was pretty close.

The space elevator was exquisitely balanced. The payload thresholds were calculated and re-calculated in real time by a quantum megaship parked next to the space dock, its tendrils linked into every sensor along the entire 38,000km cable. Every container was scheduled, and logged, and checked at multiple intervals. There was a buffer, of course, to avoid any catastrophic failures, and the necessary speed of transit in order to keep the global freight network in play meant that there was significant post-hoc correction required. Discrepancies would often only be detected when a package was already halfway along the route from London to the junction point. That was fine. The system could take it, and anomalies dealt with as and when they were identified. Individual containers could be isolated and removed from the transit system by offloader machines - or in an emergency could be jettisoned entirely, though that was a last resort as nobody wanted a shipping container crashing down onto their street.

A display beeped and flashed up red, drawing Logan’s interest. A container had been flagged as being two hundred pounds over its registered weight, which shouldn’t be possible. The container in question had come all the way from Palinor, weighed at that end as well as upon arrival in Mid-Earth. No alterations had been logged, meaning that nothing should have changed in terms of the container’s contents. Nothing in, nothing out. Two hundred pounds was hardly going to upend the system, but get a few thousand containers with that level of discrepancy riding the cable at the same time and it could turn into a problem. He flicked his fingers across the controls, marking the container’s ID for extraction. The offloaders would do their thing and take it out of transit for further inspection by the customs authorities. It would inconvenience whoever had paid for that particular shipment, but the network would keep on running just fine. It could even be reloaded at the junction point after the checks were completed, if all was as expected. Measurement errors did happen, after all, especially when relying on data from the other two dimensions.

*

Kaminski was no longer being pressed so hard to the floor of the container that he was unable to move. After the void shape of the portal had passed by, he’d found himself still in the container, his situation largely unchanged. Banging on the doors did nothing, and opening them was impossible. He’d been thrown around as the container was lifted and moved in seemingly arbitrary directions, then a sudden acceleration had pinned him to the floor, as if on an extreme theme park ride, his hand crushed onto his chest and his eyes squeezed back into his skull.

That had lasted for about thirty seconds, which had felt more like an hour. The slight vibration in the metal of the container made him think that he and it were now moving at a significant speed, even if the acceleration had stopped. Given he’d been pushed into the floor by his inertia, he could assume he was now travelling up.

He was beginning to think that visiting the portal station on his own had been a bad idea.

Pulling a cigarette from its packet, he considered briefly that he ought to conserve the oxygen in the space, given he could be in there for some time. “Fuck it,” he muttered, the cigarette between his lips as he flicked at his lighter. The relief was palpable. It even subdued the smell of oil that permeated the container.

He ran back through events. The kid at the station, the little arsehole, had locked him in. It hadn’t been an accident, not with that gleeful, shit-eating smirk. Maybe he’d spotted the old warrant after all, though he could have simply denied him access. Kid could have panicked, perhaps, assuming he was in on, well, whatever it was that was going on. Out of the corner of his eye Kaminski was acutely aware of the large, black, curving, anonymous shape that shared the container with him.

Before arriving at the portal station, he’d picked up the warrant from the office. He’d gone to see Bakker, had filled him in on what he’d found at John and Zara’s. The box. He’d left it with Bakker, but he’d kept the key. He wasn’t sure why, but it had felt prudent at the time. He’d told him where he was going, but that probably wouldn’t help. Bakker couldn’t take direct action without drawing too much attention, and even if they did follow up it’s not like they’d think to hunt him down inside a random shipping container.

The long and short of it was that he was entirely, completely fucked. Jesus, what a mess. He’d not even said anything to Chakraborty. Shit, she wouldn’t handle losing someone else, not after Callihan.

He wondered how long the oxygen would last in a space the size of the container.

The relatively smooth ride was interrupted abruptly, Kaminski thrown to the side, sliding across the floor and bashing into the wall, spraining his wrist in the process. There were more jolts and changes of direction, the container starting to sway as if no longer fixed securely. Half an hour trudged by, nausea building minute by minute at the subtle rocking. He fought down the urge to vomit.

Another crunching change of direction, and then a silence and lack of movement that felt startling. There were mechanical noises from outside. He shuffled away from the doors, staring expectantly.

Then they swung open, the air rushed out, his ears popped and his brain entirely failed to comprehend what was in front of him.