Junkyard — Part 3 (a free science fiction novella)

Hey, folks! Many thanks to those of you who have grabbed a copy of Fractured Stars. It picks up the adventure of McCall, Scipio, Junkyard (and a new hero) a couple of years in the future.

But for now, let’s continue on with the story of how McCall met Junkyard! (If you’re coming in new, make sure to start with Part I).

**Just a reminder that this hasn’t been edited yet. I should have the final (edited) ebook version in November. Thanks for taking this early peek!

Junkyard Part III

McCall sipped espresso from a cup as she sat in her office and watched the traffic camera footage at ten times normal speed. She had tried coding a search algorithm, but as she’d feared, it had been too difficult to instruct the ship’s computer in regard to what looked suspicious. Numerous delivery vans visited the warehouse every day, dropping off supplies for the sugarhouse, and others came to pick up drums of syrup. In addition, large farm and logging vehicles rolled down the street many times a day on their way to their rural destinations.

“What’s this?” she murmured, leaning forward in her chair and swiping her finger through the display to pause the playback.

A black ship had appeared on the nearest traffic camera. It had flown over the maple trees, the back fence, and hovered over a towering debris pile in the middle of the junkyard.

“Zoom in on the ship,” she ordered the computer.

It complied to the best of its ability. The camera had been focused on the street, and the ship had stopped at least a hundred yards inside of the junkyard. It was only luck that it showed up at all.

“Identify the model of the ship,” she said, hoping the computer could tell from the blurry outline. She didn’t see any identification, so it was unlikely she could look up the owner, but this could be the starting point she’d sought. The time display on the footage informed her that this had happened at two hours past midnight local time. The dark ship wouldn’t have been visible to the human eye if not for the lights along the perimeter of the junkyard.

“Unknown model,” the computer informed her.

“Unknown?”

“Affirmative.”

That was strange. It wasn’t as if there were that many manufacturers of spaceships in the system. The sys-net had information on anything large enough to have been produced in even a limited run.

“It is a spaceship, right?” McCall asked. “Not simply an aircraft local to this moon?”

The computer answered by displaying “ninety-five percent certainty” that it was a spaceship, along with a list and table of reasons for the assessment.

McCall tapped the holo controls, ordering the footage to play at normal speed. The ship didn’t hover for long before a hatch opened. Something fuzzy rolled out of it and fell onto the debris pile. No, not fuzzy. Furry.

She cringed as the junkyard dog struck down—he must have fallen twenty feet—and then tumbled down the side of the pile and out of sight. The hatch closed and the ship flew away.

This must have been when the dog was impaled. She glanced at the date stamp. Thirty days ago. Damn, the dog had been running around with that shard in his side for four weeks? He must have kept bumping it and causing it to bleed anew. The poor thing.

McCall dashed aside tears and, struggling for scientific detachment, backed up the video to when the hatch had been open. Who had pushed the dog out?

Though she zoomed in as much as possible, it was too blurry to see anything with certainty. She glimpsed what might have been a person’s gloved hands, but it might have been a robot or android too. She never saw a face, nor did the back side of the ship reveal any identification as it turned and flew away.

At no point did the black vessel approach the warehouse or stop again to pick up any cargo, not within sight of the traffic camera. There was another street-side camera farther up the road from the warehouse that would have caught it if the ship had landed on the other side. Her own ship was currently displayed on it.

As McCall rolled the rest of the footage, she checked the spaceport’s logs for that night. Only two ships had landed or taken off, and neither were black vessels, model unknown.

Did that ship and the poor dumped dog have anything to do with the maple-syrup mystery? Or was the dog a second unrelated mystery? Why would someone have dumped him in a rural junkyard? If he’d been a guard dog and become too much of a nuisance to keep around, why not kill him? She would never do such a thing, but she had no trouble imagining imperial security shooting a dog.

Not that the ship she’d been had possessed imperial markings. It hadn’t had any markings at all.

McCall growled and watched the rest of the traffic-camera footage. It caught up to real time, with nothing else of note happening.

“Either I blinked at an inopportune moment or the theft happened longer ago than Dunham believes.”

It wasn’t a question, so the computer didn’t answer. And, since she was alone in her office, nobody else did either. That was typical, but the silence made her think of the dog. Funny that she could imagine him lounging on the deck and snoring while she worked. But a spaceship wasn’t any better a place for a dog than a junkyard. Where would he run? Would he do laps around the cargo hold? Would she have to get a doggie treadmill to set up alongside hers in the tiny exercise cabin? And where would he… do his business?

A knock sounded at the door, and she rose to stretch her back. It was well past midnight according to local time.

“Come in, Scipio.”

He opened the hatch and stepped inside. “I can confirm that your random assignment of sex was correct.”

“For the dog? It wasn’t random. I knew he was male as soon as he flung himself against the fence. What female would do such a thing?” She smiled, but it was a weak joke. Her mind was still on the image of the dog being pushed out that hatch.

Scipio cocked his head. “There are many species in which the females are more aggressive than the males. Had the dog been protecting a litter of pups—”

McCall lifted a hand. “Never mind. How is he doing? Were you able to remove that piece of metal?”

She felt guilty for foisting the surgery on Scipio, but she didn’t have the ability to download software to instantly teach herself how to perform a new skill. Nor did she like the sight of blood or the insides of bodies, human, canine, or otherwise.

“Yes,” Scipio said, “but you may wish to come look at his X-rays and examine him before he wakes up.”

“Examine him?”

She envisioned holding a med-lyzer to his furry chest or probing orifices with instruments. The latter sounded particularly unappealing. Then she realized Scipio might have found something that would explain why the dog had been dumped.

She followed him to the ship’s small sickbay, cabinets, counters, and a single examining table the extent of its furnishings. Seeing a huge unconscious dog lying on his side on it was a strange sight. As was the shaved fur around the wound. At least the metal protrusion had been removed and the wound sealed and smeared with QuickSkin.

“The shard was a relatively recent wound, but he’s suffered numerous other injuries in the past.” Scipio pointed to X-rays hovering in a holodisplay behind the exam table. “He’s had numerous cracked ribs, a fractured skull, and the tip of his tail was cut off, perhaps caught in some machinery. It is possible an accident caused the other wounds, but it is also possible the injuries were not accidental.”

McCall’s eyes welled with sympathetic tears as she looked from the dog to the X-rays and back again. She stepped forward and stroked his thick, furred neck.

“I only sanitized the area directly around the wound before operating on him.” Scipio looked pointedly at her hand.

“What?”

“He may harbor all manner of bacteria. You should wear a glove when touching him so you don’t contract a disease.”

She snorted but admitted, “His fur is a bit crunchy.”

“Have you found any further leads in regard to the maple syrup heist?”

McCall went back to stroking the dog’s neck, crunchy fur, regardless. “Unfortunately, no.”

She couldn’t help but wonder if that ship was related, but since she hadn’t seen it take off with tons of maple syrup, she couldn’t assume it was.

“I stand by my earlier belief that this is an inside job, but nobody listed on the payroll has a criminal past. I have a short list of suspects simply based on suspicious activity, and I intend to poke into their personal records to see if any are in untenable debt or may be possibilities for blackmail, but this whole setup is making me wish I was more comfortable with—and a lot better at—questioning people directly.”

She shuddered at the mere idea of being confrontational. Sometimes, when her nerves were frayed and she was tense, she snapped at people, but she preferred to avoid arguments and hurt feelings whenever possible. She preferred avoiding people whenever possible. Talking to Louis might be all right, since he would most likely burble about his passion for maple trees instead of asking questions or getting defensive over her questions. Maybe she could chat with him in the morning.

“I can question the suspects on your list and assess the likelihood that they are telling me the truth,” Scipio said. “By analyzing human body language, I can determine whether someone is lying with sixty-eight-percent accuracy.”

“That’s not bad.”

“I am less adept at determining human motivations for committing crime.”

“Tell me about it.”

She had a list of typical motivations hanging on the wall by her desk, and she sometimes had to glance over and remind herself. So little of what motivated other people even interested her. All she wanted from life was the freedom to go where she wished and do work that challenged her and that she enjoyed. Now and then, she thought about what it would be like to have a life companion, but she was so horrible at dating that she didn’t even try. When she had added Scipio to her ship, it’d had the unintended result of giving her someone to talk to when she was lonely. She wondered what her mother would have said of her making friends with an android. The poor woman had never quite understood McCall or her sister McKenzie. They were too much like their father, aloof and hard to live with. Hard to love, she supposed, though Mom had done her best.

“Do you wish to rest before the workday starts inside the warehouse and sugarhouse?” Scipio asked. “I have observed that you function optimally when you get at least seven-point-five hours of sleep a night, and it is already late.”

“So I do.” She was somewhat amused that her new android friend thought it was his job to take care of her. “I may poke deeper into those people’s backgrounds though. I especially want to comb through Dunham’s credit records, as it seemed to bother him that the maple syrup is worth so much and he apparently earns little after expenses and taxes. I could envision him stealing his own syrup, selling it on the black market, and stashing the earnings somewhere he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on them. I have to admit it bemuses me that there’s a black market for syrup. A few days ago, I never would have guessed.”

“Would Dunham have hired you if he had stolen it himself? Would he not have preferred to let the slow-acting and possibly indifferent local authorities deal with the crime?”

“Those are good questions. Unless he’s confident that he’s hidden his tracks so well that we would never discover proof. Perhaps, in hiring us, he wants to show that he made every attempt to find the syrup.”

“Perhaps,” Scipio said neutrally.

“I’m going to do more research before sleeping.” McCall patted the dog’s neck and headed for the hatch. “I better find some blankets and prepare an area for our guest too.”

“Our guest?” Scipio’s neutralness disappeared and something akin to alarm—an android’s version of alarm—entered his voice. “I planned to return him to the junkyard before dawn so nobody would miss him.”

“We can’t kick him out right after operating on him.”

“It was a minor operation, and there would be no kicking involved.”

“I’ll make up a spot for him in my cabin,” McCall said firmly.

Scipio opened his mouth.

“I’ll keep the hatch shut so he can’t wander into your cabin and find your tassels.”

Scipio flattened his lips together and looked down at the loafers he wore once again. “My tassels are on the loafers on my feet.”

“All the more reason that you wouldn’t want him finding them.”

So that was what a long-suffering sigh sounded like coming from an android.

 

* * *

 

It was raining the next morning, a warm rain that melted dents and divots in the gray mounds of snow that plows had pushed to the edges of the road and parking area. McCall followed Scipio around the warehouse and the sugarhouse as he questioned the employees who had made her short list. She hadn’t dug up evidence of any significant debt in Dunham’s record—just a line of credit and a mortgage, both of which he paid regularly each month. She’d also looked up his family members and the business itself. Maple Moon Factory didn’t have a huge profit margin but was in the black with no accounts payable outstanding that she had been able to dig up.

When Louis came in—an hour later than most of the employees—she veered away from Scipio and braced herself to ask questions.

But Dunham reached him first, scowling as he stomped out of his office. He planted himself in Louis’s path and didn’t seem to notice McCall.

“You’re late again?” Dunham demanded.

“Sorry, sir.” Louis’s cheeks reddened as he looked at Dunham’s shoes instead of his face. “I stayed late yesterday, so I thought—”

“You don’t get to make your own hours, Desmarais. You’re here when the sap’s flowing so you can oversee its collection. That’s your job, not staying in your office after hours playing some stupid game.”

Louis’s shoulders slumped, and he didn’t argue.

“If you’re late again,” Dunham continued, “you’re fired. And when you make your weekly sap report to Tate, do it in person. Quit delivering written reports and slinking off before he can ask you questions.”

“Yes, sir,” Louis whispered.

Dunham stalked away, bumping Louis hard in the shoulder as he passed.

McCall, realizing her fingers had curled into a fist, forced herself to uncurl them. This wasn’t her business, so she couldn’t butt in. Besides, if Louis felt he was being treated poorly, he could look for another job.

Except that it wasn’t always that easy. McCall thought of all the jobs her very smart and very talented sister had held over the years, unable to, despite her intelligence, “work well with others.” That was what so many of her termination reports had said in some variation or another. McCall was lucky that entrepreneurship was one of her passions, and she hadn’t minded learning how to market her services. She was also lucky the sys-net made it so she rarely had to do so in person.

“Are you all right?” McCall stuck her hands in her pockets as she walked closer to Louis, trying to appear non-intimidating, like someone he could trust, not some hired detective. Someone he could trust and talk to. If he had any dirt on Dunham, this might be the perfect time to ask.

Louis jumped, glanced at her, and jerked his gaze away. His cheeks were even redder now. Was he embarrassed because she’d witnessed him being berated?

“Fine,” he mumbled.

“He seems like an ass.” McCall waved in the direction Dunham had gone.

Louis shrugged. “I’m late more often than I should be. It’s my own fault. I have a hard time getting up. I wish I could work nights.”

“You stay late often?”

“Sometimes. The warehouse has a hard-wired sys-net line, so it’s really fast for, uhm, computer stuff.”

“Games?”

He shrugged again. “I guess. There are a couple I like that need a fast connection. I consulted on one of them. On the botany stuff. Jungle Conqueror. Do you know it? You have to build your colony before nature encroaches and wraps vines around your structures and spaceships. The vines are more aggressive than in real life, but only slightly. They used Arkadian kroyka vines for their jungle, and those can grow up to twenty feet a day. They have leaves more than six-feet long, and if you stand still long enough, they’ll wrap around you. They’ll wrap around anything. And then the leaves turn into pods that capture what’s inside. The kroyka is super long-lived. Botanists have found the bones of extinct animals that were caught up in the pods.”

“That’s interesting.” McCall groped for a way to bring this topic that he was clearly interested in around to his work. “Did you get paid for the consulting?”

“My name is listed in the game credits.”

“Sounds like a no.”

He snorted. “Yeah.”

“Is the pay here all right?” she asked quietly, aware of someone driving a forklift past, bringing fresh drums of syrup in from the sugarhouse. How many of the forklift operators were aware of that hole? She couldn’t see evidence of it from here, but someone had placed those drums there at some point. They looked to be stacked at least ten deep along that entire wall.

“It’s fine. It’s just… This isn’t what I wanted to do with my life, you know?”

Despite his passion for games, he didn’t appear that young. There was as much gray in his short hair as brown, so he was probably older than she was.

“Do you think a lot of people here feel that way?” she asked.

“Maybe. They don’t talk to me much. They don’t care about…” He trailed off with another shrug.

Kroyka vines and other botanical interests, McCall guessed. Or sys-net games.

“I imagine that’s lonely,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever considered getting an android?” She smiled, meaning it as a joke, though she was starting to think of Scipio as a friend.

His forehead wrinkled. “Androids are way too expensive for me to buy. Have you seen what they cost just to rent?”

She hadn’t paid for Scipio, so she didn’t know the exact price of an android. He’d asked to work for her of his own accord, and she considered him a free individual who could stay or go as he wished. If only the empire saw him that way.

“Maybe you could get a dog,” she offered as an alternative, thinking of her furry guest, whom she’d left lounging on a pile of blankets on the ship.

“My apartment building doesn’t allow it.”

“Ah.” She hadn’t managed to bring Louis around to what she needed to know, so she decided to be more blunt. “When you’ve been here late at night, have you ever seen anything suspicious?”

“Like when the syrup was stolen? I didn’t see that, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t think anybody did.”

“Except whoever did it.”

“True. Unless it was androids. Or robots.”

“Someone would have had to order them to do it,” she pointed out.

“Unless they went rogue and decided to take the syrup and buy their freedom from this backward moon.” His eyes lit, as if he could easily envision the fantasy.

“I think it’s more likely an insider planned the heist.”

Louis’s forehead furrowed again. “Like one of the guards? Or office workers?”

“Someone with intimate knowledge of the facility.” And the placement of the security cameras and their limitations of coverage, she added silently. “Does Dunham ever stay late?”

“I don’t think so. Tate, the manager, is more likely to stay if we’re behind or a buyer is coming in late.”

McCall had looked up Tate. He was a single man who’d paid off his condominium two years earlier and had been funding a retirement account religiously all of his working life. He was in a good financial position, so she hadn’t put him on her list of suspects.

She drummed her fingers, wishing she could use search queries on Louis’s brain to see if he knew anything more than she was sharing. She glanced toward the hidden hole in the wall, thinking she might get a reaction from him if he was aware of it, but he didn’t even notice. He was studying a crack on the floor.

“Do you know anything about the dog in the junkyard?” she asked.

If he went over there every night to feed the dog scraps, maybe he’d seen activity there and not realized what it was. It certainly appeared that the stolen syrup had been toted out that way.

“Junkyard? Not much.”

“That’s his name?”

“Some of the security guys call him that. He just showed up one day, and he’s been barking ever since.”

Actually, he had showed up one night. But given the hour that ship had come by, she doubted anyone in the warehouse had been around to see it.

McCall was tempted to ask Louis how long he’d been feeding the dog, but that would require admitting she’d been spying on him—on the entire complex—the night before.

“One day? Like what—a month ago? A year ago?”

“Last month, I think.”

McCall nodded. That synced with the date the ship had come by.

She was still mulling whether it was possible the dog’s appearance had something to do with the syrup theft. What if he’d been brought in specifically to keep anyone from peering into the junkyard? Such as while drums and drums of syrup were siphoned off and stored over there temporarily? Until a ship or a truck came to transport them to the spaceport.

She twisted her bracelet around her wrist. Was it possible the syrup was still there? She had assumed it had been removed already, but if the thieves had taken it and then realized security was heightened at the spaceport… Or maybe that Alliance bomb had gone off right as the perpetrators had been finishing up their theft, and they’d been forced to alter their plans.

But if the thieves had put the dog there to act as a guard, why had they dropped him from that height? He could have been killed.

“Kind of odd that he just appeared inside a locked junkyard, don’t you think?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Louis frowned at her, probably wondering about her seemingly random questions.

“Have you ever—”

“Desmarais,” Dunham barked, striding out of his office. “What are you still doing inside? That sap isn’t going to hop into the sugarhouse on its own, and we’re way behind on fulfilling this year’s orders now that we’ve lost all that syrup.” Dunham made a shooing motion as he stalked over.

“Yes, sir.” Louis hustled away, his head down and his shoulders hunched, and disappeared out the back door.

“He doesn’t know anything,” Dunham explained to McCall, then lowered his voice. “Look, has your android learned anything from interviewing all the security guards? Some of those men are pretty new. I was thinking someone might have applied for the job and had this in mind from the beginning. We just got Mahajan and Peck at the end of autumn. It’s no secret on this moon what maple syrup sells for and what it’s worth.”

“We’ll confer at the end of the day,” McCall said.

Dunham frowned. Did he expect her to be doing something more brilliant than wandering around and talking to people?

She decided to retreat to the safety of her ship and dig deeper on him. It was likely only in her imagination that his eyes were boring into her back like BlazTech rifles.

~

Part IV and the epilogue are up!