Kill Station Read Free Page B

that moment he realized that the ship was in fact slowing, slowing a little faster every moment, so that those doors, surely no more than five hundred meters away now, came toward them a little more slowly, a bit more slowly still.
    "Are we going to be able to stop?"
    "Good question," Joss said. Evan broke right out in a cold sweat.
    They slowed, they slowed—and the doors were four hundred meters away, three, two— " 'Our' ship, I should think," Evan said, trying desperately to sound conversational.
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    "Sure," said Joss. "Come on, you idiots, come to! Isn't anybody home?"
    —and they slowed and slowed, no more than fifteen meters a second now, ten meters a second—Evan watched the passive meter on the console read down, digit by digit. But ten meters per second could still kill you quite dead if your shell breached and the atmosphere got out. Not to mention the simple shock, and the results of hitting, say, a dome, and being in the way of an explosive decompression equivalent to a thousand tons per square inch of released pressure—
    Joss was cursing actively now as they came down past five meters per second, and the bay doors were seventy meters away. Four meters, three—the meter hovered there for what seemed like a little lifetime.
    Why did deceleration seem to take longer near the end? Evan wondered. Two meters per second, one and a half—
    —and the doors were right in front of them, right in front of the plex, and the rounded front of the ship hit the doors, neatly on target. For a horrible fraction of a second everything seemed to stand still while the physics of the situation sorted itself out. Evan visualized several physical laws standing there in that moment, playing scissors-paper-stone with one another, and he listened with all of him for the sound of the groaning hull that in a moment would be a single bang, and then no sound at all—
    And then they started going backward at half a meter per second, and accelerating, because of the attitudinals' setting. Joss cursed harder and started hammering on his board again.
    "There, how about that?" he nearly shouted. "The doorbell didn't work. Isn't knocking enough? Wake up in there!"
    Evan wiped his forehead. In front of them, slowly, the docking bay doors started to open.
    It took another five minutes to drop their backward acceleration, and to pull forward again into the bay.
    The docking bay proper was little more than a metal box fifty
    SPACE COPS IS
    meters on a side, fitted inside the dome to cut down on the loss of air. It was a dark box; half its lights were out completely, and the rest seemed to be running at half or one-third power. They were in any case quite dim, and the dimness only served to point up the occasional fractured and welded sideplate. Apparently some of the pilots had not been as careful as Joss at getting into the bay.
    While the back doors were closing behind them, and Joss was setting the ship down onto its vectored jets, Evan said,
    "If that's typical of what happens when you try to get in here, it's no wonder people leave and don't come back."
    Joss nodded, and said, "The question is, was that an accident?''
    Evan put his eyebrows up. "Now why would anyone here want us to come to harm?" he said. The question was meant ironically: no matter where you went, there was always somebody who didn't care for sops. "And how would they have been able to react so quickly, if they did?"
    "They wouldn't have needed voice transmission to know us," Joss said. "Our black box transponder will have been talking to their radar computer for the past hour and a half, maybe more."
    "That would narrow down the list of suspects somewhat," Evan said. "The people in the station radar room. You'd think they would find a better way to off us without attracting attention to themselves."
    Joss sighed and said, "We're starting out on our paranoia a little early, aren't we?"
    "I hate to get caught in the rush," Evan muttered.
    "And we really have to