Orson Card - Earth unavare

No, he mustn’t use the word “attack.” That sounded incriminating and prosecutable. “Attack” implied wrongdoing and sparked headlines on the nets like: LEM JUKES ATTACKS FAMILY OF FREE MINERS. Or: HEIR TO JUKE FORTUNE ATTACKS CHILDREN. No, “attack” was far too aggressive a word. It painted a completely inaccurate picture of events. It suggested malicious intent and automatically put people into false categories. Good versus evil. Black versus white. And in truth, there were no good guys and bad guys in this scenario. They were just two parties after the same asteroid, which, let the record show, didn’t legally belong to anyone in the first place. Lem wasn’t taking something from the free miners because it wasn’t theirs to begin with. If they had possessed some deed perhaps or a bill of sale asserting them as the owners of said property, then yes, Lem would be in the wrong. But maneuvering someone away from an asteroid for which they had no right of ownership wasn’t a crime at all.

Maneuvering. Yes, Lem liked that word much better.

The PK in the video spun away from the laser again and struck the man. Lem froze the video at the moment of impact. The man’s neck was bent unnaturally to the side. Lem had never seen a broken neck before, but he was fairly certain that was what he was looking at.

“Mr. Jukes?”

Lem spun around, banging into two of the servers in the process. The archivist, a Belgian named Podolski, was floating at the end of the row of servers in his sleepsuit, looking at Lem with a confused expression. Lem felt panicked, though he worked hard to conceal it. The man should be sleeping. It was hours into sleep-shift.

“You startled me,” said Lem, smiling and switching off his holopad.

The archivist stared, confused. A moment of silence passed.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” said Lem. “I let myself in to review a few files.”

“The system alerts me when anyone accesses the core files without my authorization code,” Podolski said. “It’s a security precaution.”

“Ah,” said Lem. He hadn’t known that, or he would have figured out some way to circumvent the code. Lem chuckled. “How stupid of me. I’m so sorry. If I had known that, I would’ve come to you first during normal hours. I feel awful that I woke you.”

“You do know, sir, that you can access any files we have here in the archives using your personal terminal in your room.”

Of course Lem knew that. He wasn’t an idiot. But he didn’t want the ship to have a record of the files being transferred to his room-or to any other terminal on the ship for that matter. Nor did he want merely to look at the files; he wanted to erase the only copies in existence here on the main servers.

“I had some business to attend to in the mining bay,” said Lem. “So I thought I’d slip in here and check a few things. I didn’t know I’d make a stir.”

It wasn’t the best lie, but Lem had delivered it convincingly enough. And it could withstand scrutiny. The mining bay was close to the archive room, and in the days since the bump, the mining crew had been working long hours in the bay getting ready for the field test. It wasn’t implausible to suggest that Lem had been there.

Podolski nodded. “Is there something I can help you find, sir?”

“Very kind, but no. Just finishing up here. Thank you.”

Podolski nodded again, unsure what to do next. An awkward pause followed. “Well, if you need anything, sir, my quarters are right through that hatch over there.”

Lem made a show of straining his neck and looking at the hatch even though he knew exactly where it was. “Thank you. If I need something, I’ll let you know.”

Podolski drifted away, an uncertain look on his face.

Lem waited for the hatch to close, then began erasing files quickly, not even bothering to review them first. Earlier, when Lem had decided to go through with this and erase any record of the bump, he had briefly considered giving the chore to Podolski, who was obviously more familiar with the servers and thus better qualified. But then Lem had realized how unsettled that would have left him: He would have always wondered if Podolski had made his own copy of the files in the hope of blackmailing Lem in the future. Some of Father’s employees had tried such things over the years-their attempts had always ended in their own humiliation and never in Father’s, but Father had found the experiences exhausting nonetheless. Plus, giving the order to Podolski would only raise the man’s suspicions when most people on board, Podolski included, were still unaware of what had happened during the bump. No one but a few trusted senior officers knew of the incident with the free miner, and Lem thought it best to keep it that way.

When Lem finished erasing files, he checked and rechecked the servers and backups to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Then he ran a program that deleted any record of the erasing. The last step was patching up holes. There were now gaps in the video surveillance records, so Lem filled those in with random footage of space already on file. When he was done, every scrap of potentially incriminating evidence was gone.

Lem pocketed his holopad and made his way to the exit. He had hoped that by erasing the files he would also erase the sting of guilt that had been pecking at him ever since the bump, but as he left the archives room, he felt as anxious as he had before. He shouldn’t have watched the video, he realized. If he hadn’t watched the video he could have maintained the possibility in his mind that the man wasn’t seriously injured. He could have led himself to believe that no lasting damage had been done. That wasn’t an option now.

Why had the free miners been outside? It had been sleep-shift. You don’t spacewalk during sleep-shift. That was reckless. In fact, now that Lem thought about it, if the free miner was in fact paralyzed or dead, the free miner deserved more of the blame than Lem did. Well, perhaps not more of the blame but certainly a good portion of it. Lem shouldn’t carry all the blame.

Besides, it’s not like Lem had hurt anyone intentionally. He hadn’t even known the men were out there. The free miners had been working on the far side of El Cavador, obscured from Lem’s view, when the attack-no, maneuver-began. And by the time the ship did detect them, the Makarhu was already moving and the laser-firing sequence was already initiated. Lem couldn’t stop it. Not easily anyway. It was only dumb luck that the first target was the PK near where the three miners were standing.

And if you looked at the facts that way, if you chopped up the blame into portions, then part of the blame went to the free miner, part went to the computer, part went to dumb luck, and only a small part went to Lem. And even that portion shouldn’t be entirely Lem’s. It had been a group effort, after all. The crew was following Lem’s orders, true, but they could have objected, they could have said no.

Someone had, Lem reminded himself. Benyawe. She had filed a formal objection. Had he erased that as well? He must have.

He left the archives room and made his way to the mining bay to give credence to the lie he had told. Lem didn’t expect Podolski to investigate the matter-Podolski had no reason to disbelieve him. But what if Podolski mentioned in casual conversation to someone that Lem had been in the mining bay? No, it was best to play it safe.

The mining bay was a large garage where all the digging and mineral-extraction equipment was housed. Normally a ship this size would employ forty to fifty miners, with twenty to twenty-five WDs-or wearable dozers, the large exoskeleton diggers that most corporate miners wore for cleaning out mineshafts and pulling up lumps. Since this was a research vessel at the moment, the mining crew consisted of only ten men, whose only duties for the trip were to collect rock fragments from the field tests for analysis. The miners had intended to use the scoopers for this, which were long-armed diggers that could extend out from the ship and grab rocks in space. But since the engineers had only conducted a single field test and had not even bothered to collect the rock fragments from said test, the miners were insane with boredom. Lem had alleviated that a week ago when he had gone to them and told them of his intent to pull in as many minerals from the asteroid as the ship could hold. It would require modifications to the equipment, but the men were so hungry for an assignment that they had readily accepted the challenge. Lem could say his visit tonight was to check up on their progress.