A short Amerind lady sidled up to Hafas. The inspector had to bend to catch her whisper. He nodded once, offered the coverall-clad informant a word or two in return, and straightened as she ambled off, whistling softly to herself.
“Madras Teranglo Ltd. had a valuable container of their own heading offworld this morning. The lady wanted me to know that it got off safely.”
“I’m delighted to learn that our competitors are having no trouble.”
“I knew you would be,” said Hafas dryly. “The Braun-Roche-Keck package from Albuquerque is due in shortly.”
“Nine-twenty is the designated time,” piped the Minder.
Hafas eyed the sphere with fresh interest. “It responds to conversations without prompting?”
“When it perceives an interest.” Manz glanced fondly at the hovering device. “Sometimes it’s a pain; more often than not the information is helpful. I could shut off the function, but I kind of enjoy the little reminders.”
Don’t think that makes you anything special. Humans need constant reminding, or they’d forget to eat, sleep, maybe breathe.
Speaking of which, I know for a fact that you’re forgetting something right now. Something important. Something you should have done this morning. Don’t try to deny it. You know you’re forgetting something.
Maybe you’d better go check on it. This can wait.
Hafas checked his watch.
Why don’t you idiots call it a "time"? Honestly.
“We’ve got a few minutes yet. Enough to show you what kind of arrangements we’ve made, what sort of equipment we’re using.” He looked around sharply. “What happened to your colleague?”
“Amazing how someone who looks like that can just vanish into a crowd, isn’t it? Vyra likes to sort of check things out on her own, in her own inimitable fashion. That’s not a derog on you or your department. She’ll rejoin us when she’s finished.”
The inspector mulled it over. “I was kind of hoping to advise her on the situation personally.”
“Take it from me, Hafas, she’ll figure it all out on her own. There’s no empty space behind that pretty face.”
Obviously disappointed, the inspector sighed and gestured. “Come along, then.” With his men flanking him, he stepped out into the flow of cognitive protein.
There wasn’t a helluva lot to see. Dimensions excepted, shuttleports tended to be the same no matter where you went. Facilities, equipment, entire structures are interchangeable, performing the same function no matter which side of the planet, or for that matter which planet, you happen to be on. Only differing climates forced certain specific adaptations. JeP, for example, had to deal with extremes of heat not to be found at the Port in, say, Helsinki.
To mitigate the brutalizing effects of constant commerce, the Port interior was exuberantly decorated. There were numerous rest stations, food stations, bright paint and wall hangings, lavish landscaping, even fountains and running streams. The resultant artificial habitat helped to keep human spirits upbeat while disguising the unavoidably less esthetic aspects of moving vast amounts of cargo from one point to another. The presence of so much vegetation and water was a deliberate attempt on the part of the Port’s architects and builders to counteract the sere Southwestern moonscape in which it had been constructed.
Manz was appreciating a freeform planter fashioned from some beige-stained polyfoam, inhaling the fragrance of its lush stand of sugar cane, when he was bumped sharply from behind. Reflexes and experience caused him to whirl, but his hand halted halfway to the pistol riding in his shoulder holster.
The woman who’d stumbled into him was petite, an exotic but not offworld. Making a snap judgment based on her features, Manz guessed her background to be Terasian. Southeast ethnic, probably Vietnamese or Laotian, with some mittel-European mix. She was very pretty, and the tight metal-and-plastic suit she wore had been woven to flatter her figure. Where there was bare skin, trendy body paint tended to predominate. Her face and feet had not been exempted from decoration.
“Xin loi ong,” she muttered, bending to pick up the bag she’d dropped. “Excuse me.”
“That’s all right.” Manz beat her to the bag and offered it up with a smile, his Minder dipping with him. She accepted it gratefully. Hafas let out a sigh and waited patiently while Moses observed the byplay with interest.
She checked the catch on the bag and looked up at him shyly. “I do not usually try to run over people.”
“I don’t feel run over. Aren’t you in the wrong terminal? It’s none of my business, but you look like a passenger.”
“My boyfriend works here. I was watching for him instead of where I was going. Sorry again.” With an impressive if diminutive display of pelvic torque, she hurried off into the crush of busy people and machines and was soon lost to sight.
“If you are quite finished?” Hafas prompted his guest with grudging admiration. “She was pretty.”
“Yes. Well equipped, too.”
Hafas pursed his lips. “I suppose. Being a married man, I don’t notice such things.”
“Of course not. However, in this instance I was referring to the gun she was carrying.”
“You don’t have to explain, I …” The inspector hesitated. “What gun?”
“In her handbag. Felt it through the leatherine. Kallashruger Sixty, lady’s petite. Fires eight-caliber mini-pellets that explode on contact. Nasty little pretty-pretty.” He let Hafas digest this before adding, “Said she was looking for her boyfriend. Maybe she was. Port areas can be full of unpleasant types and she wasn’t very big, but I still think her choice of defensive gadgetry was unusual.”
The inspector concurred with a grunt and set one of his two silent associates to trailing the woman. Better to be safe than end up looking stupid
V
Hafas led Manz to an interior courtyard. Double sliding doors shut out the noisy confusion of the shipping bay. There were far fewer mechanicals at work here, and the occasional human tended to wear a business suit instead of slick work coveralls.
A metal shed sat in the center of the courtyard. It was surrounded on three sides by stylish and exotic landscaping that thrust branches and fronds toward a domed skylight. A miniature brook provided music and motion while simultaneously helping to nourish the greenery. Manz squinted at the filtered desert sunlight that poured through the dome.
“It opens.” Hafas anticipated his question. “We can drop reinforcements right in, without having to force our way through the traffic outside. Needless to say, anyone attempting unauthorized roof access would set off half a dozen redundant alarm systems.”
“Too obvious an approach anyway,” Manz concluded.
“We think so too. Nevertheless, we’ve been maintaining the same kind of close watch on the roof as everywhere else. Not that it’s done us any good.”
Manz was studying the rest of the atrium. “Where do the shipments enter from?”
Hafas gestured toward the far side, beyond the shed and slate-floored courtyard. “They don’t even transit the main shipping bay we just passed through. Small, especially valuable shipments are brought directly into the administration building via a separate, heavily guarded, restricted-access passageway. Four armed guards then bring them via sealed container cart in here, where they’re locked in that security shed. As you can see, it sits right in the middle of this decorative garden.
“It’s visible at all times from all sides. In addition to your own Company security personnel, who are stationed in that room over there”—he pointed toward a modest one-way window set in the wall on their left—“Port and JeP police are on day-and-night irregularly timed patrol here and outside. Port administration workers frequently have their lunches out here. It’s a pleasant place to eat and chat, what with the vegetation and brook. Since this all began, I’ve had the opportunity to relax out here a few times myself.
“I remind you that no shipment has ever been stolen while in transit, or while leaving this room on its way offworld. All three jackings have occurred while the goods waited in storage awaiting transshipment, sometimes only overnight.”
Manz nodded absently. He’d virtualed the entire setup back home, but no matter how expensive and accurate the simulation it still wasn’t the same as being someplace. He immediately identified at least two of the “administration workers” strolling absently through the courtyard as Company operatives. They would be armed and alert, concealed weaponry at the ready. It was a measure of their professionalism and expertise that they hadn’t even glanced in his direction when he’d entered with the two cops, even though they’d been briefed on his arrival.
There was also a vending machine in one corner that wasn't a vending machine, and several light fixtures that weren’t light fixtures. It was a very impressive exhibition of unobtrusive security. It should also have been inviolable. Except that three missing shipments stated otherwise.
“I’ve seen your installations myself,” Hafas was saying, reading Manz’s eyes if not his mind. “Metal and explosives detectors, scanners from the ultraviolet to the infrared. Electromagnetic wave detectors crawling all over the spectrum. Everyone who goes in or out is checked and scanned. We were too, as we came in.
“The Port Authority is trying to do its part. Those double doors we entered through are designed to snap-seal and trap an entering or escaping felon between them. They can’t be shot out, and their melting point is high enough that anyone trapped between them would end up boiling himself as well. The other entrances to Administration are equally daunting. The building itself will stand up to anything short of a thermonuclear blast.”
“But no one’s blasting anything,” Moses observed. “In fact, the thieves aren’t even making any recordable noises.”
“Exactly.” Being a cop, Hafas was quite comfortable conversing with mechanicals. “We’ve even considered that some kind of matter transmission might be involved, but of course that’s only science fiction.”
“Anyone who’d developed a functional matter transmitter would be making so much money off it they wouldn’t need to steal. Why jack Braun-Roche-Keck when you could simply buy the Company?”
