I looked back and saw no one else had managed the same. It was just the two of us. I reached the airlock as we cleared the dock platform, then remembered I couldn’t access my skeleton key. Luckily, Li Fei had that covered.
“Move aside, I’ve got this.”
It’s standard Arbiter Force policy to keep your skeleton key loaded in the finger of your drop suit whenever you’re wearing it. Li Fei may have played it fast and loose, but he was certainly a veteran Arbiter. He used the skeleton key to override the door and got the airlock open for us. We crawled inside, and just as I closed the door behind us, I caught a glimpse of open space.
“You move pretty smoothly in that drop suit, Contralvo.”
“We have bigger concerns right now, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure I do.” He turned away from me and unlocked the inner airlock door. “I’m not sure there is a bigger problem.”
“The fact that we’re currently boarding this ship entirely on our own? The fact that your drop ship can’t even fire on it now that we’re inside?”
The inner door slid open. I was half-expecting a face full of grenade shrapnel, but there was no one on the other side. Just an empty white room with tasteful furniture.
“Cute,” Li Fei commented. “Love the minimalism.”
He was right about that, anyway. The room we were in looked like a Shinto temple, all clean lines and understated elegance.
“Standard search?” I suggested.
He turned and looked at me, and for a minute I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He could just as easily have shot me as anything else. After all, we were now alone on a potentially hostile spaceship with no one to stop him. It would be easy.
At last he nodded. “Okay. Standard search. I’m Senior.”
“Of course.”
The whole time I was in the Arbiter Force, I never made Senior. It seemed natural to let Li Fei take the lead on this job. As strange as it was, having a Senior Arbiter to back me up made me feel more comfortable about what we were doing.
“You take point.” He gestured for me to go ahead of him. I looked at him for a moment, trying to read him. I could now just as easily get shot from behind as from in front. In the end, I went ahead, knowing there was nothing I could do about it now anyway. If Li Fei wanted me dead, then so be it.
I stepped out and walked past the white table with its two elegant white chairs. I walked to the door on the opposite end of the room and checked the corners. It led out into a slick white corridor. There was no one here, and no sign that anyone had ever been here.
There were doors on either side of the corridor, and I reasoned that it would make sense to head fore instead of aft. We took the first door to the right and entered a comfortable suite, with large holo screens providing a view outside. Europa was below us, and above loomed Jupiter. There was a bed in the room, carefully made. No personal effects of any kind that I could see. We went back out to the white corridor and tried another door. The next room was the same, and the one after that.
“This place is like a hotel,” I commented.
“These must be guest rooms for the people who come here to meet with Kote.”
“That makes sense.”
We passed maybe twenty doors before we came to an exit, leading out into what looked like a dining room. I hugged the left wall while Li Fei went right. We cleared the room and found it as empty and pristine as the rest of the ship so far.
The room was huge, with rich carpeting on the floor and even a real wood table. Several woven tapestries hung from the walls, and I took a closer look at one. The tapestry depicted twelve beautiful, genderless figures with serene faces holding golden crowns. In the background, fires burned across a blackened landscape littered with human bones. The juxtaposition was more than a little unsettling.
“Is there anyone on this ship?” I asked.
“I admit it, this is strange.”
“Should we just head for the bridge?”
“No,” he answered. “We stick to the search, and that means room by room. I don’t want to get cut off from behind because we rushed it and went straight to the bridge without checking everything.”
On the other side of the cafeteria, there was a kind of lounge—an open space with more view screens showing the space outside of the ship. There were small tables and some chairs, but also a lot of nooks with low couches, areas hidden behind curtains, and a full bar. It was like an image from one of those movie posters I’d seen back on Venus, but like everything else we’d seen so far, the lounge was empty and unused.
“Slow down enough to check for traps.”
That made sense. Whoever was in control of this vessel had used a team of military androids with powerful weapons to delay us from boarding. It didn’t make sense to think that they would simply give up now, not when all it would take was a mine behind a door. A ship this size could withstand the blast, but the same couldn’t be said about our drop suits.
I paused at the door to the lounge and looked closely for tripwires or any other sign of a booby trap. There was nothing there, so I went through the door and into the next room. It was a conference room as far as I could tell. There was a long table with chairs along both sides, and a single chair at the head of the table. Like everything else on this ship, the basic design was simple but extremely elegant. White furniture and white walls, a slick space with no frills.
A folded piece of paper on the table caught my eye. It was about property for sale on Venus. On Tower 7, actually. Venusian property was suddenly available for development at cut-rate prices. That made sense, but it still disgusted me. All those deaths on 2/77 reduced to an investment opportunity.
“What is that?” asked Li Fei.
“It’s just a real estate brochure.”
“So far I’m not seeing any sign of a human trafficking operation.”
“Are you saying they sent six combat androids after us with illegal heavy weapons just to keep us from seeing what we’ve seen so far?”
“No.” His voice was as cold as it had been on the station. “I’m saying you’re not really investigating a human trafficking operation at all. This is about something else, and whatever that is, it killed Mitchell.”
I stopped where I was and turned back in his direction. “I’m sorry your partner’s dead. I mean that. I’ve been in the same position.”
“Uh-huh. Where was that? In Section 3?”
I turned back around and started walking again. There was no point in trying to solve this with words. It just wasn’t going to happen.
Leaving the conference room, we entered what we soon recognized as the service areas of the ship. The first door we opened led to a room obviously for the crew, with five bunk beds. There was no one there, and all the beds were neatly made. Behind the second door was a slightly larger briefing room, as spotless and tidy as it was empty.
Where were all the people? And if there weren’t any people, then who was piloting this ship? We cleared three more rooms, all just empty work areas.
“They could have been doing some maintenance,” Li Fei pointed out. “Or even a retrofit.”
“Yeah, I suppose so. It’s just so strange.”
We came to a double door and recognized immediately that this must be the door to the bridge.