Chris Boucher [Boucher - Star Cops

STAR COPS

CHRIS BOUCHER

The year is 2027. When a swimmer is found drowned in a London park, the police computer rules the death as accidental. Chief Superintendent Nathan Springs natural instincts lead him to suspect otherwise, and he begins an investigation - despite the objections of his colleagues and superiors. To deflect him from pursuing this, Spring is manipulated into accepting a job that he does not want - as commander of the International Space Police Force, an organisation set up to enforce law and order on various space stations orbiting the Earth. The ISPF, disparagingly nicknamed the Star Cops, is an undistinguished force populated by undisciplined officers, concerned mainly with their own welfare and making money on the side, rather than upholding the law.

Arriving at the European space station Charles de Gaulle , Spring struggles to adapt to conditions in low gravity while working to mould his team into an effective force for law enforcement. Before hes even begun to adjust, he discovers that several crewmembers have recently died, following unforeseen spacesuit malfunction. Although these apparent accidents fall well within the limits of statistical acceptability, Springs instincts again lead to him to suspect the work of a saboteur. He decides to expose the culprit by taking a desperate course of action - gambling with his own life...

Elsewhere, Springs second-in-command David Theroux investigates an explosion on a distant space freighter that has knocked the craft off course and condemned its two pilots to death, the Star Cops are warned of terrorist attacks by a communications expert based on the Moon, a scientist disappears without trace from the American space station - with the crew denying his very existence - and rumours begin to grow of alien artefacts having been discovered on Mars...

Chris Boucher broke into high-profile television writing with three sets of scripts for Doctor Who in the mid-1970s: The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and Image of the Fendahl, each of which featured the character of Leela, his own creation. He was recommended by Doctor Who script editor Robert Holmes for the vacant script editors position on the then-embryonic BBC science fiction series Blakes 7, a role which Boucher occupied for the shows duration of four series. Having moved on to work on more mainstream BBC drama such as Shoestring, Bergerac and Juliet Bravo, he returned to science fiction with the creation of Star Cops - a troubled production eventually broadcast on BBC2 in 1987, now widely recognised as one of the BBCs most ambitious and well-written forays into science fiction. More recently he has returned to his roots, writing four Doctor Who novels - Last Man Running, Corpse Marker, Psi-ence Fiction and Match of the Day - for BBC Books.

STAR COPS

CHRIS BOUCHER

Contents

An Instinct for Murder

Crime Scene

There was a chilly breeze blowing. It chopped the surface of the reservoir into small, brisk waves, but the man did not seem to notice. He walked across the green-slimed shingle and into the water with none of the shivering hesitations of the average swimmer. He did not pause to tug at his shorts or adjust his goggles or check that his hair was completely covered by his swimming cap. He simply walked out until he was waist deep, and then launched himself forward into a smooth and unhurried crawl.

Somewhere overhead, in geosynchronous orbit approximately twenty-two and a half thousand miles out from the Earths surface, a construction engineer paused briefly at the access hatch of his living quarters to check the tell-tales on his suit. Satisfied that all the readouts were in the green, he cracked the airlock seal and with a practised push launched himself forward into space.

Like the swimmer, the engineers action was smooth and unhurried. Like the swimmer, the engineer had perhaps five minutes of life left to him.

In the middle of the reservoir, when his wrist-counter told him he had completed four hundred metres, the swimmer switched from crawl to backstroke. He was slightly more vulnerable now, though nothing he did could save him from the killers rising towards him from the green shadowed depths of the murky water. Even if he had been able to see the tell tale lines of needle-thin bubbles and to realize what they meant, escape was already an impossibility.

The engineer had used his jet pack sparingly, so that his float across the gap between the main complex and the construction area was no more than a controlled drift. He reached the spiderwork of new girders without a suit-damaging collision, and carefully adjusted his direction and slowed his relative velocity. Like the swimmer, the beauty of his surroundings no longer startled him. Lost in routine, he hardly noticed the high whites and deep blues of the Earth as he steadied himself against a cross-member on the latest section of the station to be completed. The quality control inspection he was about to start was standard, but it was necessary, and he was a conscientious man. Completely absorbed in looking for faults and fractures, he was an easy kill.

The attack, when it came, was too sudden for the swimmer to understand what was happening. It came from below the water, which gave his shocked senses nothing reasonable to work on. For a stunned moment when the hands grabbed him, he was surprised but not afraid. Then, as the two frogmen dragged him below the surface with splashing and bubbles echoing in his ears, fear came abruptly. He lashed and struggled. Suffocating panic held him in the darkness. He tried to scream, and only sucked sour water into his choking throat.

The engineer was just as disoriented. The first jarring contact was unthinkable. There was no logic to it. He should have been alone but then abruptly he was lurched into from behind as though he was on a busy street in his home town. Absurdly, his first impulse was to apologies to the two spacesuited figures who crowded in on him. Nothing in the situation was familiar enough to trigger his survival instincts, and he watched in a sort of daze, wondering at the bizarre deliberateness with which the two reached towards him.

Still he could not work out what they were trying to do. He made several attempts to speak to them, but his suit radio produced only static. Carefully, the two silent figures forced him against a stanchion and pinned his arms between them. His surprise gave way to anger, then. He bellowed at them, but the sound remained stubbornly trapped in his own small bubble of air. One of the figures reached across to his backpack, and for several moments worked on it with an adjuster. Desperately, he craned his neck trying to see what was happening. Then the air began to vent from his suit.