Nothing moved. I was about to relax and tell Merral there was no danger when Hunter's sharp “Siisss!” warned me to silence. He was in a frozen crouch, his ears swivelled up and forward, twitching slightly back and forth. One paw was gesturing for quiet.
Suddenly he leapt, sailing across the vast chamber in seconds. His target was the entry to an access corridor in the opposite wall. He flew through the opening with unerring precision, landed on a handhold and took off again, down the corridor and out of sight. I followed him awkwardly. I knew I could never have the big cat's reflexes, but I fervently wished I had at least Jocelyn Merral's easy grace in microgravity. I missed my jump by better than twenty meters and floundered down while she waited patiently. The access corridor was half a klick long. I swallowed my ego and let Merral hold on to me. She pushed off into a long parabola. A couple of kicks en route brought us to the end of the corridor. The pressure door to the next section was closed and Hunter was examining it intently. He turned to us as we arrived.
“I heard a sound, which I now presume was this door being opened and then shut. There is fresh scent in this tunnel of a human male. He must have fled when our container's lights entered the trackway.” The kzin showed his fangs and licked his chops with a deep-throated mrrrowl. “There is much fear in his sweat.”
I went to thumb the door open but the plate had been ripped open and bypassed. Not even an ARM ident would work now. Closer inspection revealed the locking mechanism. A hole had been cut in the door's plasteel surface and a simple lever and pivot engaged the securing bolts inside. A metal pin attached to a chain could be inserted to hold the lever in the locked position. With the pin in place the door was proof against anything short of heavy energy weapons. The holes rendered the door useless in a depressurization emergency, but the smugglers wouldn't be worried about that.
I tried the handle reflexively. It didn't budge.
“I have already attempted that,” said Hunter mildly.
“It's clear we're not going to get through. Let's seal this bay off and get the crime scene team down here.”
I grabbed the comm unit from my patrol pack and called Dispatch. I didn't get anything but static. No repeaters in this unfinished section. Our runner had made a clean getaway.
Merral noticed the problem. “There's a Port Authority comm on the control board in the container.” Hunter snarled in acknowledgement and launched himself back down the corridor, eager to be on with the chase.
I let him go, turning to Merral. “You know about this place?”
“Of course.” She gestured at the door and the pirated wiring the smugglers had used to power their floodlights. “Although evidently I didn't know everything I thought I did.”
“Tell me about it.” We turned back down the corridor.
“This bay was supposed to serve a whole new industrial subsector they were going to put in right after the liberation. Turns out they overestimated the requirements and they never needed the space, so they just sealed it off and left it.”
Her explanation made sense but there were other problems. “The tranship net doesn't even know it exists.”
We turned the accessway corner into the main bay. Hunter jumped down from the container. “The crime scene team and a detachment of Goldskins are on their way. They will open the pressure door from the other side. I will meet them there.” He leapt off again without waiting for an answer.
“Of course it does,” Merral continued.
“It doesn't.” I paused, decided to trust her. The smugglers already knew we were on to them anyway. “Miranda Holtzman's internal organs were found in a shipping container on Wunderland, along with a cache of stolen UN weapons. The container's point of origin was 19J2, but when I tried to punch up the data on it the system drew a blank.”
“You did a shipping trace to get that data, right?”
“Yah.”
She nodded. “When you do a trace, the net uses the billing system data because normally you're interested in who owns the shipment and who's paying for it. This bay isn't in the billing system because no customers are registered to it so it would never show up. But the routing software knows about every node around Alpha Centauri and that's the data set that gets used when a shipment is set up and verified.”
The picture became clearer. “Is there any way someone could swap the source and destination addresses without a Port Authority ident, or at least without logging it in the computer?”
“Too easy.” She laughed and tapped a few keys on a board at the base of the container racks. Its display came up with a duplicate of the inspection container's shipping panel. Another press brought up SRC and DST. She hit a final key and the readout flashed REJECTED for a moment and then, magically, TMU19J234C and TMUCA147A switched places from origin to destination. “You just refuse delivery.”
“What?”
“You refuse delivery. If you accept the shipment, you need a PA ident to accept the COD, clear customs control, verify the manifest and all that. If you refuse delivery, the tranship box just gets bounced back to point of origin still sealed so none of that matters, so you don't need the ident. The shipper's delivery bond is forfeited to pay for shipping the container back and the transaction is cleared out of the net. It's a user function.”
“A user function?” I couldn't believe my ears. “What happens if a refused shipment gets re-refused by the shipper?”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“What would happen?” I tried to keep my voice level.
She shrugged. “I don't know…” She paused, thinking. “Grounded at the originating port, I suppose. At worst it would go back to the recipient again. It couldn't get lost or redirected, only a PA ident can change the source or destination. Nobody could claim it unless they signed off with us.” She paused again. “Unless…”
“Unless it got shipped here.”
She nodded, understanding the problem. The tranship system had a couple of assumptions built into it—that the Port Authority was physically present at all the system endpoints, and that no shipper would refuse its own refused container. With dynamic encryption and multilayered security measures, the system was considered fail-safe. But a couple of reasonable assumptions made a security hole big enough to shove a twenty-meter container box through that wasn't defined as a failure. There were no hackers, no high-level corruption. The system just worked the way it was designed to. It was a brilliant setup, a sort of digital jujitsu. The smugglers were only caught because of human error. I wondered if they considered their system fail-safe too.
It would be a while before the crime scene team arrived. Merral scrambled up the container rack to call in her findings to her team. I took the opportunity to look into the cargo box on the loading ramp. I got a shock. The white crates were all clearly labeled. They contained high-tech drugs, each molecule assembled atom by atom in zero gravity. I recognized some of the names—Polyhalazone, Quadrol and Ricaline. Every case here was worth fifty thousand crowns at a minimum, at least triple that on the black market, and there were hundreds of cases. There was more in the container, stacked parcels of brown quickwrap a half meter on a side. I ripped one open. Brand new fifty krona wafers spilled onto the floor. I couldn't begin to guess how much was in the package. The next package yielded twenties. I ripped open a third. Hundreds. I picked one up and looked it over carefully. It gave away nothing to the naked eye although I knew it had to be counterfeit. I would have heard of a theft this big—the whole system would have. I was willing to bet it was a very good counterfeit. The Isolationists never did anything with half measures.