Before he'd been on their ship five hours, Blunt knew he and Seto had been drawn into someone else's murky business. That someone may no longer have their longterm interests at heart, if they ever did.

He sat at the console trusting the automatic pilot, praying his hunches were wrong; trusting he and Seto would keep their jobs and more; staring at the Main Guy.

The Military Police Division was squeaky-clean to most of the solar system's citizens, under-worked and over-paid perhaps, but models of justice and exemplary behaviour. And the uniforms looked the part, just ask anyone!

However, as with any group of humans, politics and favouritism insinuated themselves from the outset. It was always who you knew which got you ahead in the Division. What you knew ran second, contrary to what the handbook said.

What you knew could find you trouble if you didn't have the kind of friends high up who might advance your cause and keep you breathing.

Such were Blunt's thoughts as the speck of their ship crawled towards Europa, the Cellini long gone.

Similarly, Seto was lost in thought on the other side of the cockpit. She glanced over at her boss occasionally and surmised there may be concerns there.

Commander Erika Dennis watched Blunt's ship push off, drift off and then fire up. It quickly receded into the blackness. Relief would be temporary, she knew.

“M.S.V.,” Tybol observed.

“Enough of the secret musings, Mr. Tybol. I don't have the patience.”

“Medium service vessel, Ma'am.”

“I know what the letters stand for, and I can see it's a medium service vessel,” her voice betraying a crackle of impatience. “What does this brilliant observation of yours tell us mere mortals?”

“It's most likely armed, high quality assets... listening, cameras, even X-Ray I'd say. Power gain engines, nuclear...”

“And?”

“It's total overkill for the operation they were sent here for. We're small beer.” Tybol cast the Commander a sideways glance. “Someone has sent us a message, perhaps a warning.”

Their return to Europa and Jupiter-1 Base was uneventful.

There was, of course, the subject of Blunt's cooking. How someone could fail with a microwave, large-print instructions and prepared meals, Seto failed to comprehend but she wasn't going to let him off the hook.

That was probably what he had hoped she would do, she felt. Gender demarcation of the day-to-day chores on a 2-man, or rather 2-person shuttle, died with the dinosaurs.

Blunt duly cooked when it was his turn and Seto made more-than-obvious noises of complaint as she chowed down on half-frozen or lava-hot excuses for food.

Alas, the good times came to an end as Europa grew rapidly before them.

“We'll receive docking instructions soon. We need to keep a close eye on the body.”

“Yeah, Sarge,” his partner scoffed. “What does anybody want with our dead guy?”

“I don't know at this stage. But I have to have Mirzol go over it again now that we have better equipment.”

“You're sounding suspicious again, Sarge. It's a body and from what we've heard no-one is going to miss it, or what it used to be.”

“I came away from the Cellini with more questions than answers.”

“I admit they were not too keen to see us.”

“Why? A piece of floating junk like that, performing some dodgy, antiquated task that would be done by a robot if anyone so much as cared. A crew of criminals and desperates. A commander with an axe to grind. Nothing's right with it.”

“Well, if you put it like that...”

“You've come this far; don't screw it up!” By long-standing agreement the screen was blank and the voice was electronically altered.

“Damn Mir! Why did he go and get himself killed?” Her voice was similarly encrypted. “I have no ears out here.”

“He wasn't a good choice in the first place.”

“He had his uses.”

“You'll have to recruit someone else or do the job yourself.”

“Like that's going to happen!”

“We confirm your message about the change of day.”

“It's been corrected now but somewhere 2 Sols went missing. Whoever it was overrode the computer alarm.”

“It could have been carried out remotely.”

“Don't tell me that. The whole place is smoke and mirrors.”

“Good luck.”

Seto kept close to the body bag, floated it onto the shuttle and escorted it down to Europa's icy surface and the travellers' hideaway that was referred to in formally as Earth Base Jupiter-1.

As they drifted gently to the base they cast their eyes over the familiar series of huge domes beneath them. Lights peeped at them - navigation beacons, safety spotlights.

There had been missions when Blunt had so welcomed this homecoming sight that he was forced to make an effort to hold back the tears and not make a fool of himself. This wasn't such an occasion.

He felt this was a temporary stay only and he'd soon be heading back to Adrastea and the Cellini.

Seto smiled at the domes and knew that that first beer would be nectar itself. It always was.

Zek was a creep. Argo wasn't much better. Tybol seemed okay, although she hadn't really spoken to him. Just office talk: a bit of technical stuff and then general comments or observations about places and people faraway. Always safe topics; nothing threatening or revealing.

A ranter she was not. Zek, the sleaze, was easily fooled. But it was exhausting playing the role at times, she admitted. What one has to do to get ahead!

The others were deeper; they were more “thinkers” for want of a better word. What they might think or see in her was harder to determine.

There was the skipper, Dennis. Pretty hard to read from the outset. What was she doing up here? She had had no time for that know-it-all cop from J-1. Acted dumb at the right times but showed him who was boss on the Cellini.

Argo had form. Hard and defensive if needled. Where Zek couldn't keep an idea to himself, Argo could be cold and silent until the cows came home.

“Where did that saying come from?” she interrupted her own thought. She knew cows had been used on Mother Earth for centuries for food production before the food revolution a hundred years ago, but why did she use such a saying? Perhaps it came from her grandmother... ?

Argo looked like he'd seen action on the inside and not always in the winner's seat, if appearances are anything to go on.

But Tybol seemed okay. He was quiet at the right times. He didn't use it as a weapon. At least not on her.

Lieutenant Mirzol was a qualified medical doctor with an interest in pathology. Being in the middle of nowhere, and being one of only three doctors on a base of three hundred and fifty live bodies – give or take twenty or thirty, depending on the complement of the latest visitor – she was forced to take more than a passing interest in the dead on a fairly regular basis.

When trying to impress all and sundry in the nosy media as they came snooping across the airwaves, or when addressing a barful of bloodshot, mumbling soaks should the occasion call for it, as it did most Friday nights, Sergeant Blunt was known to refer to Mirzol as a forensic pathologist. (Sometimes his barroom audience could even decipher his words!) However, she would never describe herself as that.

She stood stony-faced in the grubby room which passed for an arrivals lounge out there. She looked tired.

“Hettie, this one's important.”

There weren't any others she allowed call her by her first name. She allowed it now only because there were only the two of them present and she wasn't technically on-duty.

Seto had pushed through the room with a few others and was in the next room claiming their luggage.

“Aren't they all, sergeant?” she said flatly, reminding him of his rank.

“I wouldn't give it to anyone else.”

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“And I collapse at your feet thanking you over and over.”

“Please...”

“I'm here, aren't I?” Blunt nodded in agreement. He was grateful for that at least. “What's so important that I have to see the bag down here & not at the morgue?”

“Seto's with it now but she doesn't know, regardless of her high IQ and whatever else.”

“Well...?”

“I think the body has at least one implant, and the bag itself has a tracking device in place. Quite a sophisticated one. I don't know how to switch it off.”

“That can't be too hard to figure out.”

“Yeah, thanks for that. But it must be done down here.”

He waved her question away before she could ask it. “When you examine the body it will be best if time and place are secret.”

“Spare me the cloak and dagger. It's a dead body, for god's sake.”

“The method of death is not a big deal. Motive is the issue and of course, who gains from this is important.”

He looked around to see if they were alone. For all he knew there might be cameras and listening devices all over the place. He stepped closer to Mirzol and lowered his voice.

“We've just been on the Government Survey Ship Cellini to begin the investigation and everything was wrong from the start. I wouldn't be surprised if half the problem lies here on J-1.”

It's something you cannot do on your own. He always said that. Ask anyone. It takes teamwork to run a planet, a family, a ship. You could be a half-crazy tyrant and dish out beatings every other day but the moment your back is turned someone would either stab you or desert you: leave you abandoned and drifting in the black sky.

You have to be a longterm planner with something like a ship. And you have to listen to what's going on around you, have your finger on the pulse, or you won't survive past Monday.

Commander Dennis listens most of the time, Tybol thought. Then again he couldn't be one hundred percent on that. She looked like she did. She could certainly cut you down if she didn't agree with you or freeze your eyeballs if you tried her patience.

She didn't come over as the warm, cuddly type.

You had to watch Zek and Argo. Together they'd be trouble here-and-now but they're not friendly. They tolerate each other, that's all: entertain some bizarre and cruel streak within each other.

Tybol looked up at the second monitor. The uneven surface of Adrastea, its clumps and troughs, it's grey, bland landscape and deep black shadows rolled silently before them, filling the screen.

He could imagine an inexperienced hand voicing alarm at its proximity, but the two objects, moon and survey ship, enjoyed a symmetry, a slow dance together, one around the other, as quiet as death, with the huge striped surface of the Main Guy filling the background. It was the stuff of poetry he thought, and wished he could write a few lines.

Brikil's a funny little thing, he told himself. The thought prompted a smile. She's an odd choice out here: a long way from anywhere else a person would want to be. He'd engaged her in a few conversations but never got far. Everything pretty general, not wanting to open a door to anything deeper. He shrugged inwardly: c'est la vie.

Mirzol requisitioned a storeroom off an auxiliary passageway that ran away from the arrivals lounge to wherever. The tone of her voice inspired immediate compliance, more than the icon on her epaulettes.

Seto joined them there, ostensibly to guard the door, even though Blunt handed her a pair of medical gloves.

“It's a poor show indeed when you don't trust the personnel around you at your principal place of work, sergeant,” Mirzol quipped as she carefully unzipped the body bag.

Blunt ignored her jibe. “Feel along the seam, near the zipper.”

“Perhaps you've forgotten who outranks who here,” Mirzol came back.

“There, that small bulge...”.

Her fingers gingerly traced the outline of a bump in the seam.

She reached into her kit and retrieved a slender blade, deftly slicing open the seam to reveal a glass sphere the size of the nail on her little finger. Two fine wires protruded from one end.

“We took the bag to the Cellini. It was with us all the time.”

“Hmm... perhaps you were right to take the fortified M.S.V. after all.”

They searched the bag for another ten minutes and found two more devices.

“That looks like it,” Blunt said as he carefully tucked the three tiny trackers into a space he found on a nearby crate. “Should we find Sergeant Mir more suitable surrounds?”

They exited the storeroom quietly, pushing the body bag on a trolley.

There weren't many others around so they could move quickly, surreptitiously. Only one technician bothered to take note of the three strangers and their peculiar parcel.

Two floors up the three of them with the body bag on its trolley set off on the winding corridor which linked the surface domes of J-1. Here they could disappear into a labyrinth of dormitories, mess halls, bathrooms, offices, laboratories, clinics and assorted habitation spaces and carry out their investigation undisturbed. They would have two hours, three if they stretched it, without raising the departmental temperature beyond melting point.

Mirzol had phoned ahead. The x-ray would be available within the hour. Toxicology and blood readings from the first investigation had provided enough about the cause of death. Other considerations would be evaluated when they could look over the x-rays.

The other time would be for planning what to do next and who else to involve.

“Lieutenant Mirzol!”

The volume and power of his voice shocked Hettie. Her head shot up and she stood bolt upright, looking at the figure which strode through the clinic door.

Blunt and Seto jumped to attention at the sight of Major Cairo Hadid, fists rammed tight at his hips, his face a dark storm of disapproval.

The lieutenant came to attention with the others, even though she wore a plastic surgical smock and face mask.

“You have interrupted the autopsy, Major,” she said by way of obvious explanation, her voice shaky, uncertain.

“It seems so, Lieutenant. Is this the body of Sergeant Mir, late of the Cellini?”

“Yes sir.”

“I haven't seen any of the paperwork on this body. Neither the certificate of identification nor the permission to transport. In addition, I haven't seen your paperwork on this autopsy. Would you care to explain?”

“It was my idea, Major. I asked Lieutenant Mirzol to perform ...”

“Ah. If it isn't our friend, Sergeant Blunt, the master of the shortcut! If we ran this station like you run your … er... operations sergeant, we'd be a total and incoherent, ramshackle bloody mess!”

“I can explain, sir...”

“Quiet!” Blunt abruptly resumed his silent standing-to-attention, knowing well the menace Hadid's voice held.

“Your papers, Lieutenant.”

“I regret to say I don't have the requisite papers, Major.” Hettie's voice at once betrayed her defeat and sense of foreboding.

“And I regret to inform you, Lieutenant, that you and you cosy coterie are under arrest for gross dereliction of duty! Sergeant Plummer!”

Plummer immediately stepped into the room followed by a squad of four of Blunt's colleagues. All were armed.

“Arrest these three, sergeant. Take them to the brig on the first level. They will be questioned in due course. And organise this body up to the main morgue. We'll have Shepherd take a look at it.”

“Yes sir!”

Earth Base Jupiter-1 was purpose-built in stages twenty years before our tale takes up. You can see it was a government job: it displays no architectural flair and it was built to last.

Its structures, internal and external, are mere reprints of the original. Like a huge single-celled organism, it simply replicates itself, and continues to grow to this day as demand for space and services in that distant part of the solar system grow also.

With a fluctuating population of several hundred personnel – mainly men, a long way from anywhere any one of them would call home – there was sometimes (read “on a daily basis”) a need to house certain of the personnel who, for a variety of reasons, found themselves too drunk to walk, too drunk to listen and comply, too highly strung for other reasons (too numerous to list here) to enjoy the company of the majority of their compatriots.

Thus, throughout the sprawling, growing structures of J-1, brigs are dotted. It is by design they are not clumped together.

The planners, in having these lock-ups dispersed about the place, were possibly fearful that group singing could prevent others from sleeping, or that many unruly men in the one place could present management and containment issues. Whatever the reason, the cells were scattered high and wide, and Blunt quickly found himself separated from Seto and Mirzol.

Over the too many years of his service in this far-flung sector of the solar system, Sergeant Blunt had come to know this base like the proverbial B.O.H.H.

He knew that in the warren of J-1 spaces, the meeting rooms and dormitories were effectively sound-proofed. He knew that laundries, kitchens and bathrooms were basically large waterproof plastic boxes which could be sealed off in the click of a finger should a water leak occur. Similarly, the outer walls and dome roofs were generously covered with sensors to detect even the smallest atmospheric leaks.

And he knew of the steel mesh that lined the ceilings and walls, and the double concrete floors of those areas they called the brigs.

He sat on a bunk in a nine-bed cell he shared with three other men. There was little doubt it would remain so uncrowded for very long.

Surprisingly, he recognised one of his cell mates.

The Raptor – real name Ivor Mastavus - thought himself a bit of a wheeler-dealer round J-1. He'd like a potential client believe he could locate any equipment or service monsieur would desire given the right price and opportunity. Delays in delivery were sometimes a nuisance but life threw these challenges at even the most industrious.

In reality, he was no better or worse than the next shark who preyed on the naive and unsuspecting.

Blunt had caught up with him on a number of occasions in the past and such meetings usually ended with Ivor occupying the same real estate as he did now: prison. The other men Blunt didn't know and was fairly certain he had not helped lock them away before or now.

“Sergeant Blunt!” The other two cell mates took immediate notice. “Don't tell me you've been caught out taking a sweetener or turning a blind eye. You don't know how it disappoints me to see you here!”

“Ivor, what a surprise to find you here – not! What's it this time? Drugs? Absolutely-anything-you'd-care-to-mention but in counterfeit?”

“Oh sergeant, you haven't lost that cynicism, have you? However, I bet your story's more interesting by a long shot.”

“Agreed. It probably is.”

They sized each other up for a few minutes before Blunt spoke again.

“Tell me, Ivor, are you still the man who can acquire anything?”

“Acquire?” Ivor chuckled at the word. “Oh yes, I acquire and acquire... all you desire! Satisfied customers across the length and breadth of the whole solar system.”

Mirzol and Seto had their cell to themselves.

The drawback was an over-attentive gaoler offering preferential treatment for special attention.

“I could have you stripped of your crummy stripe for that,” Mirzol yelled. “I'm a lieutenant, you miserable piece of dirt!”

“And you think I care! You're a lieutenant out there, not here. Perhaps you like your coffee hot and perhaps tomorrow I can't guarantee that. Or maybe I can't guarantee what added extras it comes with!”

Mirzol shut up as his message sank in. She glowered at him but he merely smiled in return. He turned to her companion.

“What's your name, pretty one?”

Seto looked momentarily in his direction then gazed at the floor catching up with where this scheme had come undone.

“They've been arrested on Jupiter-1. We sent Hadid.”

“Our favourite attack dog.”

There was nothing but silence on the line for aching minutes before he replied.

“Who should we have sent? What did you expect us to do? Sit back & twiddle our thumbs?”

“The more you make a big deal of this, the more you'll draw attention to it. The more they'll have a reason to come after us. It's simple!”

Silence again. She let him stew for another minute and then added in her own quietly threatening way, “Why wasn't their ship hit by an asteroid after it left the Cellini and the wreckage crashed into Jupiter? Now you have them on J-1 and more people know about it. It'll be harder to make this thing go away, won't it?'

More silence. She felt she could even hear a heavy, frustrated exhalation.

Moving ahead now and erasing their tracks was suddenly very messy. Why couldn't she find intelligent people to work with these days?

“And since you've had Major Hadid swing into action, there'll be some sort of hearing, won't there? An inquiry? On what charge were they arrested?”

“Customs details … paperwork.”

“So, it's recorded and in the system. Great! That's just super!” Her sarcasm dripping down the line. “And the body? Where's the body? Tell me you have that!”

“Yeah. We have the body, okay?”

“Now, before you disappear the body you're going to have to retrieve the delos. Do you understand? The delos could sink us. After that the body must go and not be found by anyone. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes. Yes. It's clear already!” His voice fracturing with anger.

She gave it a few moments before she spoke. Time enough for his cogs to start turning.

“I trust you have reliable people over there. We have to get that delos without advertising the fact to the whole of humanity. Are you getting this?”

“Okay, I'm getting it. Yes, I understand. We'll get the delos and nobody will know.”