Kill Station Read Online Free PDF

should be able to stay. There were not hotels as such; there were never that many visitors to Wil-lans. The closest equivalents were domes or parts of domes that had been sectioned up as "rooming houses." The youngster had given them directions, and they had set off into the depths of the station, though Joss had had some misgivings about the whole thing. The directions had been issued at high speed, and were of the "third left, fourth right, turn south at Murphy's Bar" sort that assume you know your way around better than you actually do.
    It had turned into a long walk through domes and corridors that to Joss's mind were ill-lit, ill-kept, and dirty. He kept reminding himself that little outposts like this could hardly afford to have sweepers coming through every thirty seconds: that even mechanized labor was expensive (though having seen the way the domes were patched, he had his doubts whether the maintenance available here was sufficient to keep any cleaning robot working for long), and that people were busy making enough money to keep body and soul together. But at the same time, the place looked grimier than it needed to. There was litter in the halls—stuff that should have been picked up and recycled—and dirt that should have been swept up months back. Worse, in all this mess there were no graffiti, a sure sign of a sick place. Everywhere else Joss had been where there had been dirt like this, there had been scrawls on walls and doors, expressions of outrage or despair. It was as if no one here could get up the energy to complain—or worse, as if no one cared.
    The people they met tended to look furtive and nervous. Joss suspected that was probably due to the formidable uniforms he and Evan wore. Even their smile got no response from anyone. People slipped hurriedly away around a corner, or through a doorway, whether they seemed to belong there or not, and vanished. "Oh, well," Joss said after about twenty minutes of this, when they were finally SPACE COPS 25
    approaching the rooming house they had been heading for. "They'll get used to us soon enough."
    "Mmf," Evan said. He had been paying more attention to the people than their surroundings, but that was often his way: after a day of it, he always compared notes with Joss, and the details he picked up were sometimes surprising. It was one of the things about Evan that had most delighted Joss when they were first partnered: the acute observation, and the compassion, in this big hard-looking man with the chilly blue eyes. Most people who saw Evan immediately pigeonholed him as a thug, and probably a stupid one, equipped with big guns and too much inclination to use them.
    That misprision had cost various people very lucrative criminal incomes. It had cost some of them their lives, but not because Evan had encouraged them to throw them away. People will shoot at a suited officer, Joss thought, and then be surprised when he shoots back—and doesn't miss. . . .
    They came to the door of the rooming house, a small dome off one of the minor corridors. Just inside that door was a desk, and at the desk was a small, balding man with a pinched, narrow face and an expression that Joss would have sworn came right out of an eighteenth century woodcut of some grasping, greedy moneylender. He looked at Joss and Evan as if they were some new and interesting kind of bug: ones with money that he might manage to get before swatting them.
    "Help you?" he asked, in a tone of voice that made it plain helping them was the last thing on his mind.
    "Yes," Joss said pleasantly. "We'd like two rooms, please."
    "How long?"
    "Hard to say," Evan said. "We're on assignment, and it may take a while. Two weeks?"
    "Eighteen hundred creds."
    Joss looked at Evan incredulously. It was even worse than he had expected. Strangers could expect to be taken 26 SPACE COPS
    for three or four times the usual fee. But five was pushing it a bit. "Fifteen hundred."
    "You're on account," said the man, "and