Something Coming Through

22. In The Can

Mangala | 26 July

The shipping container, painted a light blue that reminded Vic of Earth’s sky, sat in front of a short row of flat-roofed modular offices. The doors at its end were closed, with a crime-scene notice papered over the joint.

‘Finn Bergmann spotted the broken seal,’ the freight yard’s security manager told Vic and Skip. ‘After we looked inside, we hauled it out of the stacks, and your friends in drug enforcement took over. You ask me, it’s a clear case of people-smuggling, but anything funny happens here, it’s always drug enforcement comes in and causes me headaches.’

The manager, Barry Moon, was a short, barrel-chested English guy in his fifties, hair shaven to disguise his receding hairline, sleeves of his checked shirt rolled back from tattooed forearms, a high-vis vest in a fluorescent orange that left after-images, a white hard hat. Vic and Skip were wearing hard hats too, and temporary passes on lanyards around their necks. The vast yard bustled and clanged around them. Shipping containers were stacked five or six high in long rows, like Lego walls built by an inept giant. Ribbed steel boxes painted red oxide, painted white, painted yellow or blue. Familiar logos from a small blue planet twenty thousand light years across the Milky Way. Men and women shouting. Tall cranes rolling on rubber tyres straddled shipping containers, cans, and hoisted them effortlessly. Trucks beeped as they backed up to receive their loads. Little yellow forklifts scooted about, orange flashers whirling. A long low beast of a machine locked the cradle at the end of its hydraulic arm onto the top of a container and effortlessly hoisted it into the air.

Beyond the rows of shipping containers were stacks of construction materials, plastic-wrapped machinery on pallets, and neat grids of new cars and trucks that stretched towards the perimeter fence. The skyscraper bulk of the shuttle loomed above all of this, blocking out half the sky, hung in an invisible cradle created by manipulating space-time’s sub-quantum foam or some such bullshit, using technology that had to be taken on trust because, like most of the Jackaroo’s gifts, no one understood it. The shuttle had a human crew, and a human captain who was nominally in charge, although all she did, apart from dining with VIPs while the shuttle manoeuvred from Earth to the wormhole mouth fixed in L5 orbit and then drove in from the wormhole exit that orbited Mangala’s star, was supervise the loading and unloading of passengers and cargo. The shuttles to the fifteen worlds arrived and departed on schedules fixed by the Jackaroo, and carried out their manoeuvres and transits without any human intervention.

Vehicles negotiated massive concrete access ramps that curved a hundred metres in the air to the big round door in the skin of the shuttle. Crawling in and out like ants busy around a nest. Vic remembered that he and the other passengers of the second shuttle flight had clambered down rope nets to the ground after the door had dilated, and had unloaded cargo using improvised cranes. Laborious, back-breaking work. Half of their stuff had still been aboard when the door had closed and without any fuss the shuttle had fallen away into the sky, leaving them lonely and bereft in their strange new world.

Barry Moon said, ‘We unloaded over two hundred thousand metric tonnes of cargo this go-round. Including more than a thousand cans. Now we’re loading stuff for export. Marble from Broken Hill, fresh vegetables and herbs from Idunn’s Valley, sheets of reclaimed Boxbuilder shit, electronics from Mitsubishi’s new factory, glacial ice from the polar edgelands. You name it. After the shutdown over Landing Day we’re working 24/7 to catch up. Finn did good, spotting this one.’

Dust was blowing off the playa, skirling past the parked vehicles and skittering across concrete. Vic turned his back to the blustery wind, itchy and exasperated. As far as he was concerned, the day had gone to hell. On the way over, his ex had called him about those damn boxes in the garage; to get her off his back, Vic had to promise her, cross his heart and hope to die, that he’d come by for them on Saturday. Meanwhile, the boy detective had been bending his ear about the shipping container, believing this was another clue to be added to the unlikely structure of guesswork and conjecture he’d woven around his whodunnit. Now he was asking the security manager where Finn Bergmann, the Transport Police officer who’d spotted the broken Customs sticker, was at.

‘He finished his shift and went home,’ Barry Moon said. ‘If you want a statement, you’ll have to catch him there.’

‘What kind of Mickey Mouse police do you have here, working to the clock when a crime’s been discovered?’ Vic said.

‘By the time the drug enforcement people were done, it was a good four hours past the end of Finn’s shift,’ the security manager said. ‘I should have finished for the day also, but I stuck around to help you.’

Vic slit the crime-scene notice with his pocket knife; the security manager cracked open the doors to reveal stacks of cardboard boxes containing TVs. Twenty or thirty had been removed to create a narrow passageway that ran back to a steel bulkhead. There was an oval door with a heavy-duty latching system. The long narrow space beyond was padded with quilted cotton and lit by clusters of bright LEDs. Three low, narrow couches were lined along one wall, black padding, straps, nylon privacy curtains. They reminded Vic of his journey on the shuttle, thirteen years ago. Rows of couches in a low-ceilinged compartment jerry-built from plywood and steel I-beams. The pressure of acceleration, as the huge craft had risen away from Earth. The stark reality of it. Some people crying. Some throwing up during a brief interval of free fall. Most, like Vic, lying still and quiet. He remembered that the woman on one side of his couch had been mumbling what might have been a prayer, eyes squeezed shut, hands tremblingly pressed together. The man on the other side had been plugged into his tablet, had stayed plugged in for most of the trip; Vic hadn’t learned his name until they’d run into each other a year later.

The security manager was pointing out the air-conditioning plant, a microwave, plastic crates of freeze-dried army rations, a water-recycling set-up, a hi-tech toilet. It was hot and close in there, and it smelled about the way you would expect it to smell after three people had been living inside it for four days.

‘This is a fifty-three-foot High Cube, the biggest can we use,’ Barry Moon said. ‘But it isn’t my idea of luxury accommodation.’

Skip said, ‘The shuttle’s hold is pressurised, right? They could have got out, walked around.’

‘Yeah, but it’s freezing cold. Like forty below zero. The refrig units that transport perishables are warmer. Only the passenger accommodation is heated. And there are CCTV cameras so the crew can keep an eye on the cargo, make sure it doesn’t shift. If I was riding this can, I would have stayed inside the whole trip.’

Vic said, ‘Did you find any personal belongings?’

‘Your friends took some stuff. Old clothes mostly. Whatever else they found, you should ask them. They took DNA samples from me and Finn, too. Like we were criminals.’

‘That was just to eliminate any contamination,’ Skip said.

‘They downloaded video from the security cameras, too,’ Barry Moon said.

‘And I bet they won’t find anything,’ Vic said. ‘Because it’s a funny thing about all the cameras here, they never seem to see anything. Like the people in the Terminal Authority, they don’t notice the clandestine shit that goes back with legitimate cargos.’

‘That’s Customs’ department, not mine,’ the security manager said.

‘We’re really only interested in these stowaways,’ Skip told him, shooting a look at Vic. ‘You’ve never had an incident like this before?’

‘This is the first we found.’

Vic said, ‘Are you certain? Because we’re going to check the records anyway.’

‘These people were loaded onto the shuttle at Earth,’ Barry Moon said. ‘You want to find out how they got on board without being detected, you should go back there.’

Outside, after Skip had soothed the security manager, as they were walking towards their cars, Vic told him that it was interesting, but he couldn’t see any connection with Redway and Parsons.

‘You have the two guys riding here on tickets,’ Skip said. ‘One is killed just outside the terminal. And now we find that three people smuggled themselves up here in a shipping container. On the same shuttle. So I reckon it would be a bit weird if there wasn’t some kind of link. I should ask the guys in drug enforcement, see what they think.’

‘Not much, probably,’ Vic said. ‘I mean, what crime has been committed here? I don’t think we even have a statute about what I suppose you’d have to call illegal aliens. If anyone knows anything about this, it’s that security manager, so-called.’

Skip said, ‘You were riding that bloke pretty hard. What was that about?’

‘The woman who had the job before him was involved with a gang smuggling vintage wines. She took bribes to look the other way. You think your friend Barry Moon doesn’t know what’s going on in his yard?’

‘It doesn’t mean he had anything to do with this. And he called it in.’

‘The Mickey Mouse cop called it in. And I bet the people who rode inside that can knew this place is porous. Knew they had a good chance of getting through.’

‘I’m wondering exactly how they got out,’ Skip said. ‘Was it through the gate, or through a hole in the fence? And who was waiting for them on the other side?’

Vic said, ‘You want to hear my advice?’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘No, you don’t. My advice, make a note, stick it in the case file, move on. This is down to drug enforcement and Customs, and they won’t thank you for trying to get inside their thing. But if you attach a note to the file, you’re covered if there’s any link to the murder. Meanwhile, you still have the friend of the dead guy in the wind. That’s what you should be working. This foolishness, it’s a distraction.’

‘Even so, I have a feeling about it,’ Skip said, meeting Vic’s gaze with a stubborn look, a muscle knotted at the hinge of his jaw.

Later, Vic would think that this was the moment when he lost his authority. The moment he made an assertion that would quickly be proven wrong, and Skip decided that he knew better. Looking back, he wished he’d cut the kid more slack.

But all he said at the time was, ‘Stick to what you know. Don’t make up stories to cover what you don’t.’