The Furnace Read online

  * * *

  Bryce was a good enough sort. He respected my abilities, and he usually laid off the military protocol when I was around, which suited me just fine. But around others he would bark orders, demand salutes and practically humiliate new recruits. At least he followed regs and didn’t mess around with my investigations. Regardless, soon he would send me to another colony in the system, and I would report to a different contact.

  He flipped me a salute as I entered his office. He was overweight and had three chins, but he still managed to stand as I entered.

  “Lieutenant Kyle Tanner,” he said.

  “Hello, Bryce.” I sat in front of his desk and stared at the maddening little model of the solar system that sat there, forever spinning. Along with the Oort cloud and the Kuiper Belt, Pluto was included in most models of this type—for nostalgia’s sake—and every time it and Neptune crossed orbits, there was a tiny squeak. After thirty of them, it was enough to drive you crazy.

  Bryce had probably listened to it a hundred thousand times or more, and it didn’t seem to faze him.

  “Good work on Quint Sirius.”

  “I just hope he gets what he deserves,” I muttered.

  “Of course he will. What else do you think will happen to him? He killed two people, one of them an officer in the CCF. His trial is in three days.”

  “Do you want me to—” I began.

  “No. You’re going to SOLEX One.”

  “Never heard of it until today. Where is it?”

  He exhaled and pointed to the model undulating on his desk. “Here.”

  I peered past his finger. “The sun?”

  A chuckle. “Just about. It’s an energy-generating station orbiting pretty much as close as we can get. Five million kilometers. It’s gathering solar energy, massive quantities of it, converting it to microwave form and beaming it outward.”

  My heart sank. I’d thought Mercury was bad. This was worse.

  “Where are they sending the microwaves?”

  “Right now, to a single satellite orbiting Earth. It’s a feasibility test. When this phase is over there will be a thousand of these things orbiting the sun, beaming microwaves all over system. It’s cheaper than fusion and totally clean, or so they tell me.” A grunt. “Could be someone’s pet project. Who knows? Just a little dangerous for the people who work the collectors.”

  “Must be.” Five million kilometers. Sounded insane to me. Here on Mercury the daytime temperature got up to seven hundred Kelvin, hot enough for rivers of tin and lead to flow freely on the surface. And Mercury was fifty-eight million kilometers from the sun. SOLEX was one-tenth that distance.

  “And,” Bryce continued as he tapped a few keys on his reader, “there’s been a murder.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Ha, ha,” he barked sharply. “Good one.” He wheezed for a few seconds, then spent a couple more trying to catch his breath.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “I have orders here from CCF headquarters on Earth. They asked for you.”

  “Why me?” I murmured.

  “I guess they haven’t forgotten your work with the Torcher. Word is the Council members themselves are looking closely at this one.”

  My jaw dropped. “The Council? Why would they be interested in this?” Our ruling body usually had more important matters to deal with, like seeding colonies and maintaining peace.

  “Who knows? Maybe one of their relatives is on the station. Hell, maybe it was the victim.”

  I sighed. “Damn it, Bryce. I hate other people interfering—”

  He held a hand up. “You won’t have to worry about that, trust me. SOLEX is so remote that you’ll essentially be on your own up there. No one coming or going. There aren’t many ships with heat shields that can take that stress.” I shot him a pointed look, but he had seen the question coming. “SOLEX One CG has access to a small ship with a shield that’ll get you there just fine.”

  “SOLEX One CG?”

  “The command group for the station is located here, on Mercury. Maybe that’s why the Council requested you.”

  There were other homicide investigators on Mercury they could have called. I stared at the sun on Bryce’s desk. I had seen a lot of places in the solar system, but nothing that equaled this. It seemed more dangerous than he was letting on.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It can’t be that bad. The station’s personnel have been there for months now.”

  I tore my eyes from the model. “Do you have the murder report?”

  “No, just the orders. The file is at the Command Group a few tunnels away. Here are the directions.” He gestured to a scrap of paper on his desk with some scribbles on it. “The commander there will tell you everything you need to know.” He stood abruptly and saluted. “Good luck.”

  I got to my feet and returned the salute wearily. “Who do I report to when I’m done?”

  He frowned, hesitating. “Me, I guess. Back here.”

  “Very well.”

  I turned and left his office.

  “Watch your back, Tanner!” he yelled when I was ten meters away.

  “Thanks,” I muttered. I couldn’t think of a worse assignment.

  * * *

  SOLEX One Command Group was simply a couple of rooms carved from the rock—like all other places in the city—with monitors on the walls that displayed information related to the station’s energy production. One showed a schematic of SOLEX. It was essentially a series of cylinders, two massive solar panel arrays, and a transmitter that beamed microwave radiation and FTL signals outward. Seemed straightforward enough.

  The floor of the main room held large rectangular tables covered with papers and files. When the hatch slid open, a man in a uniform with lieutenant commander’s insignia stepped forward to greet me. “Are you the investigator?”

  “Lieutenant Kyle Tanner, Homicide. Nice to meet you.”

  The older man grimaced. “Actually, I wish I’d never met you.” He noticed my expression and shrugged. “Sorry. Sometimes I’m a little crass.”

  I was well aware that the reason I entered most people’s lives meant a complication of a violent nature had occurred. No one ever welcomed me. It was something investigators had to grow accustomed to, or they turned bitter as time passed. And being resentful of life was the last thing I wanted—especially when I dealt with death almost every day. “Don’t worry,” I said finally. “A lot of people say that when they meet me. I actually find it amusing.”

  His expression turned contrite. “I’m Jase Lassiter, in charge of the Command Group.”

  “A military installation, obviously. I didn’t know that.” Bryce had said the person in charge was commander, but he had neglected to supply the rest of the rank.

  “Yes. It’s surprising, isn’t it? Most people think our government would rather stick with fusion, which is proven and reliable.”

  “I figured it would be a private enterprise trying this out, yeah.” In fact, the Council was notorious for farming out this type of thankless endeavor to civilian companies, simply because the CCF had better things to do. Perhaps this station was more important than I had initially thought.

  “Well, the Council is actually looking forward for a change. They know energy collectors like SOLEX are better in the long run.”

  “Tell me about the station,” I said as I studied my surroundings.

  “It’s been running with fifteen people. Six officers, four scientists and five crewmen. I’ll give you a bio on each.”

  He’d anticipated my request. “Good. Who died?”

  “One of the crew.” He led me to the schematic and pointed out the obvious features. “The Engineering Corps built the station in Venus orbit. Took roughly eighteen months. The energy-
to-microwave converters were the most expensive components, the heat shield next most.”

  “How does the shield work?” It could get damn hot at only five million kilometers from the sun. Vacsuits had to withstand incredible temperatures, but ordinary ones weren’t rated for places much hotter than Mercury.

  “The station’s hull is coated with a bright ceramic that reflects a great deal of shortwave energy. As a result its albedo is incredibly high. About point nine nine. The ceramic also has to take intense heat for several decades at least. The temperature where SOLEX orbits is about fifteen hundred Kelvin. This material is very effective, providing it covers the entire hull. If it’s compromised by a meteor, for example, the crew has to get it repaired quickly.”

  I knew the basics of course. Space itself has no temperature. It’s a vacuum. However, in direct sunlight an object that absorbs the sun’s radiation will heat enormously. In the shade the temperature will be freezing. It’s an interesting dichotomy that gave the original pioneers some troubles in designing the first vacsuits. The Apollo suits, for instance, from way, way back, had to withstand temperatures of -180 to +150 degrees Celsius. And that was just the range in Earth orbit. Closer to the sun where SOLEX was, the difficulties of living and working in space were magnified a thousandfold.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me why I’m here.”

  His face fell. “A report we received from our doctor on the station, Lieutenant Lars Malichauk. It caused a major ruckus when we got it, let me tell you.” He stopped abruptly and just stared at the dusty floor.

  “And?”

  “Well,” he said finally. “I’ll let you read it. It speaks for itself.”

  * * *

  He led me to a small room, within which was a tiny steel desk. On it was a lone black folder.

  “You can read that hard copy, but leave it here when you go,” he said. “I’ll upload the entire thing to your reader.”

  Lassiter sealed the hatch. I sat and with some trepidation opened the folder. I had an uncomfortable feeling about all this already. At the time I attributed it to paranoia. Now, however, I’m not so sure.

  The first page featured a picture of the victim, Crewman James Chin, a young Asian man who smiled affably at the camera. The next couple of pages contained Malichauk’s report. I read it, my interest growing as I turned each page. Finally, I flipped the last one.

  I looked up to see Lassiter staring at me from the hatch.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

  Chapter Three

  Ten minutes later I was on my way to the largest spaceport on Mercury. It was a massive cavity in the planet’s crust, carved decades earlier to make room for a burgeoning population. Clearly marked berths sectioned the rock floor; within each, ships were either parked or preparing for departure. Airtight umbilicals connected the ships to an underground warren of tunnels. In the ceiling of the spaceport—at least two hundred meters up—a large opening permitted the passage of landing or departing vessels. The immense cave was fully open to vacuum, but its location under the surface prevented the sun’s radiation from penetrating, except for the hour when the sun was at its zenith. It made work around the ships more manageable.

  The ship was there, already prepped and ready. Equipped with the heat shield, it would take me directly to SOLEX. It would remain docked at the station until I had finished my investigation and caught the killer.

  I didn’t have many possessions—just a small bag with a couple of items for hygiene and a change of clothes. The good thing about being in the military was that I didn’t have to invest much thought into what I was going to wear—it was the same thing every day: the black, pressed, crisp uniform of a Confederate Combined Forces officer.

  The CCF had been my life for sixteen years; I had enlisted just prior to enrolling at the academy. My parents had died when I was twelve, and afterward I’d moved to Seattle to live with my uncle. He’d been a requisitions clerk in the CCF, and I’d often ended up spending time at the local base.

  While the military provided me with a top-rated education, my recruiter noticed something in my profile and psych-test results: apparently I had a highly analytical mind with an innate sense of deduction, human psychology and truth detection. My hunches were often accurate. It was enough to trigger some alarms, and as a result, at age twenty-three, I found myself placed in the Security Division of the CCF, Homicide Section.

  The military was all-powerful in our society. It made catching killers easier, without much question, and I did my job well. However, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a civilian who objected to our authority.

  All too often, those who did seemed to disappear rather suddenly.

  * * *

  Departure Control placed me at the head of the queue, and my ship, so tiny it didn’t deserve a name, only a license code of six numbers and three letters, started its countdown. The air-lock connector withdrew and disappeared underground. I looked up through the cave’s opening to the massive fireball burning a mere sixty million kilometers away.

  “Next stop, hell,” I murmured.

  * * *

  Liftoff went smoothly. Our intrasystem drive, called gravtrav, simply reversed the pull of gravity to provide propulsion. We could amplify it enormously to allow travel at tremendous velocities. We could also reverse the process, grab onto nearby bodies—often more than one—and increase their pull to provide the speeds needed for solar travel.

  The same technology also permitted artificial gravity on board a ship. An acceleration of five g’s could shorten distances enormously, and meanwhile the crew would never feel more than a constant single gravity. It was this ability that had opened up the solar system to colonization.

  In distant space, past the gravity wells of any nearby stars or planets, gravtrav would simply not function. There we used a hyperspace drive, which allowed our ships to slip out of normal space and pass through massive distances in significantly less time. The hyperspace drive was useless if there was a star too near; its gravity field interfered with the process and prevented travel.

  Gravtrav had allowed us to settle the solar system, but it was the hyperspace drive that had given us the stars.

  * * *

  Two hours out from Mercury, I opened Lars Malichauk’s report detailing the death of James Chin on board SOLEX. I read it again, but this time only skimmed it for the most important details.

  Report Filed by: Dr. Lars Malichauk, Lieutenant, CCF

  Report Location: SOLEX One, Close Orbit, Sol

  Date: 12 June 2401

  Report Type: Murder (?)

  The question mark after Murder had immediately struck me as odd. Why was Malichauk unsure of the cause of death? He was a doctor with decades of experience. If it was indeed murder, someone must have concealed it expertly.

  At approximately 1300 hours on 11 June, James “Jimmy” Chin was engaged in an EVA activity outside the station. He was performing routine maintenance on the solar collectors...

  ...At 1315 hours, Jimmy transmitted a call for assistance. Something had compromised his suit. For the exact transcript, you can...

  ...We recovered the body at 1400 hours. Decompression was immediately determined as the cause of death. There was a tear in his suit. It was impossible for one man to seal. A sharp instrument of some sort was responsible. I placed the body in the freezer and planned to perform the official autopsy the following day at 0800 hours.

  I stopped there. According to military regs, medical personnel performed autopsies on every single death that occurred in space, no matter the cause. It was a matter of maintaining protocol, even when the death wasn’t suspicious. There was nothing odd about what Malichauk had done, except perhaps waiting eighteen hours for the procedure. I’d have to check with him on that.

  ...At approximately 0815 hours the
following day, I removed Jimmy’s corpse from the freezer. I immediately noticed that the body’s head and hands were missing. Someone had used an extremely sharp cutting instrument. There were no other signs of tampering, no injuries other than those consistent with death by decompression...

  ...I am filing this as a possible murder report, though I am unsure if the actual death was intentional. Surely tampering with a body is immoral and against regs, but it is perhaps not associated with Jimmy Chin’s death.

  I closed the file. The report intrigued me; already I had numerous questions. First, who had been on the EVA with Chin at the time of the accident? When working outside a ship or station, crew always paired up. It was perhaps the strictest regulation related to EVAs. When Jimmy’s suit had ripped, a partner could have sealed it for him. Instead, the man had died. Had Malichauk simply failed to mention Jimmy’s partner? Or had the captain disobeyed regulations and allowed a man to go EVA by himself? It was unthinkable, but possible, I guessed.

  On top of those issues, an even bigger question remained: why had someone felt it necessary to remove the corpse’s head and hands?

  * * *

  I spent the rest of the trip skimming the CCF dossiers on the officers, scientists and crew of SOLEX. Nothing stood out as being abnormal, but I would review them in detail when I had more time. All the personnel had passed their psych tests, none of them had criminal pasts—though a few had spotty records—and there hadn’t been any problems leading up to Jimmy’s death.

  So nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Surprise, surprise. It didn’t matter though; people were often far different in real life than they were on paper. When I questioned them, I would find something. A little squabble that Jimmy had had with someone. A debt he owed. A fight over some liquor.

  There was always something.

  * * *

  Six hours later I approached SOLEX and prepared to dock. The sun had become so intense that the auto-dimming viewport was now nearly opaque. The star’s outline was visible, but only barely, against the backdrop of starless space. I could see huge tongues of plasma lashing out, almost as if the sun was swatting angrily at my pesky little ship—an insect that dared invade its territory. The surface was a burning maelstrom; eddies and currents of pure hell rolled across the star ceaselessly.