Chapter 4

Spacewalking was basically a "pay attention and don't fuck up" proposition Qi concluded. If the equipment was going to fail, you were screwed. If you could slap on a patch in less than 30 seconds, parts of your body would survive. As long as a person maintained the fact in the forefront of the brain that humans did not belong in space, the chances of survival were good. For extra excitement, gamma ray bursts were out there zinging about; they were the universe's version of Russian Roulette.

Riding the perimeter with Dickhead was an experience for Qi's personal diary when the time came to actually keep one. Dickson looked like a penis head; he was bald and shiny. He also had the personality of a prick, which made him a less than communicative travel companion for the shift. The security agent also smelled like unwashed balls in a dirty jockstrap, but luckily they were in self-contained spacesuits aboard the little runabout.

Actually the man smelled like bad cologne in the locker room while they were suiting up. It was a memorable scent though, a kind of cross between battery acid and stale urine with a dash of vanilla.

They tooled along in a space modified FAD (fusion aided design) along "The Back Forty" as Dickson called it, as if the back end of the deep space storage yard had any resemblance to the Wild West of ancient North America. The heat inside was iffy and the front screen kept fogging up at inconvenient times.

"The beacon means that the fence is active, correct?" Qi said.

"Yeah," Dickson replied with brilliant repartee.

"Can the beacon be disconnected from the fence without setting off the alarm?" Qi asked.

"No, it don't work that way," Dickson said.

Qi wanted to come back with a follow up question and decided it wasn't worth the aggravation. He changed tacks. "If nothing can come through the fence without setting off the alarm, can anything leave the yard without setting off the alarm?"

"If you can't get in, then you can't get out," Dickson said. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"I'm asking if someone on the inside, who wants to remain inside, were to push equipment through the fence to people on the outside, would they trip the alarm?"

Dickson paused in place. Qi watched him as the man froze, not moving a muscle as the FAD pushed closer to the fence.

"When the beam is broken, the alarm sounds," Dickson said with a sharp jab of the steering jets. The proximity alarm went off in the FAD with high decibel shrieks. "You can't get too close to the fence anyway because the frickin' proximity alarm goes off in the FAD or your suit. The damn thing will bust your eardrums before you could touch a beam."

Qi's last question was unspoken: Do only TSC suits respond to the proximity alarms? Can non-company suits turn off their alarms? The answer was obvious. However, Qi didn't want to give Dickhead anything to report back to his superiors and he kept his mouth shut.

The end of the tour was in the atmospheric warehouse. There were long rows of shelves filled with crates and pallets. Many of the shelves had parts laying open, looking as if someone tossed out incredibly expensive equipment as the cart zoomed past. At the front door was a comp with thumb and retina locks on it that contained the inventory and location of each part. The comp sat on a desk with a chair. While Dickson was looking out on the room describing the eye-spies and the motion detectors, Qi opened the desk drawer on his left. A printout of the inventory and its location marked with last month's date was resting in the bottom of the drawer. He shut the drawer quietly and stood up.

After a second shift meal, Qi decided to play a hunch. On his desk comp, he brought up the list of missing items and had the comp generate the location of the items on ship blueprints. Only two different ships appeared on the screen out of a possible thirty two. One was a tactical fighter and the other was a large destroyer of some sort.

The second discovery was the same locations were present on those ships. The parts that were missing were either in or around the fusion core/phase shift assemblies or the navigation components. The thief wasn't interested in just any parts, which would indicate someone stealing for money. There was a definite pattern with many instances of overlapping parts. Qi wasn't an engineer but the overlaps were easy to see, even to someone unfamiliar to the inner workings of a ship.

He brought up the official report and searched the details of the components list. In their dense verbiage, someone had noted the same patterns but had failed to pursue that angle. In fact, the writer took another tack, pointing out that the similar parts were close to each other in the yard or on the shelves. The writer concluded that the thief grabbed what was nearby rather than shopping the shelves with a list.

Qi disagreed. He charged ahead and compared the lists of components side by side. There were more parts of the tactical fighter missing than the military transport. Qi opened a third column and pasted in the dates when the missing components were noticed. Most of the tactical fighter parts were stolen early.

Qi ran a T scale statistic test on the third column, testing for intervals. Ten week intervals between groups of missing items appeared on his screen. He was fairly certain that inventory sweeps were done much more frequently than every ten weeks and if he was correct, wherever these parts were being shipped, the location was four to five weeks distant. Qi sat up straight after one last scan of the data. The last snatch had been ten weeks ago.

Two items popped into his brain. First, TSC had rerouted him on the fly because the dates of his trip and the record of the last snatch coincided by one or two days. Second, if there was to be another break-in, then it would be very soon, possibly third shift.

Qi went back to the two columns of parts comparisons. Three possible targets for the transport vessel were possible. All of them were navigation components and all were in the atmospheric warehouse. Qi let his hands slip from the input board to his knees.

He argued with himself for several moments, listing the pro's and con's of what he was contemplating. Regretting little other than not getting another glimpse of DeeDee's breasts, which wasn't a serious one, he had little to lose.