A case of law enforcement vs. insurance investigators. The definition of barratry is a criminal offence concerning harassing prosecution or litigation…I guess it’s a part of the future, too.
They saw the wreckage as they circled low over the ice fracture called Baghdad Sul. The company had inflated a hab near the largest piece of fuselage, and there were suited figures moving across the snowdrift, one of them with crampons and a cheap, bright blue throwaway.
“And who’s that?” asked Eilidh, having expected to be first on site.
“Lloyd’s,” said the pilot. “Insurance.”
Mateo had suited up already and held his helmet in his lap. His badge hung outside the suit on a braided nylon lanyard. He shrugged his eyebrows when Eilidh told him about the adjustors crabwalking through the crash. “Did you think they’d wait for an invitation?”
She did. She fucking did think they’d wait for an invitation.
The lander completed its recognizance and descended onto the ice plain behind the hab, easing down with emergency lights. The UNEP technicians checked helmet latches before venting the rear cabin, and then they were free to climb down onto dirtied permafrost. The company had put up 360-degree tentpole LEDs, which were prohibited in protected environments like this, even though no amount of artificial light would refract down through kilometers of ice to the saltwater ocean beneath their feet.
“Hab first,” radioed Mateo. He was a decade older, but bounded across the ice with a natural cadence Eilidh lacked, and was waiting for her at the airlock, scraping ice crystals off the latch to reveal the oblique logo of Hycean Consumables, a Maltese corporation of convenience.
Hycean’s site manager was pouring coffee from a French press when they entered in sock feet. He lifted it inquiringly.
“This facility,” said Mateo, “is illegal…”
“It’s not a facility. It’s asset recovery.”
“…and any contamination is prohibited by law.”
“The company doesn’t consider it contamination if there’s nothing up here to contaminate.”
“And yet, here we are.”
“I’ve got twenty million gallons of particulates out there on the ice, and two dead men that need to be brought home to their families.”
“Do you have the flight recorder?” asked Eilidh.
“Take it.” The site manager pointed at an orange canister in the corner of the office. Mateo motioned for one of the techs to remove it.
“How about maintenance logs,” asked Eilidh, “for the past two years.”
“No idea. We just lease the tonnage.”
“So who provides the crew?”
“We do.”
“How many.”
“I told you. Two.”
“Pilot and copilot. No other hands.”
“We run lean.”
“I’ll need CVs.”
“Once the families are notified.”
“For now, are there prior incidents with either of them?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“But nothing while employed by you.”
“That I’m aware of.”
“I think we’ll examine the site now,” said Eilidh.
The site manager gestured magnanimously.
When they were alone on the ice, with the rest of the recovery crew somewhere out of sight and the giant crescent annulus of Saturn dominating the horizon, she toggled her radio to Mateo’s private channel. “Coincidence?” she asked, thinking of the filtering and desalination plant the company had proposed building a few years ago. It would’ve been near here, where the ice buckled and crenelated into cryovolcanic vents.
“Perhaps,” said Mateo, deploying the axonometric cameras.
#
Polk watched through the inch-thick pressure panes of the hab as the cameras rose into the night sky, using starfinders to orient themselves. They’d be up for a while, mapping out the debris field and identifying intact pieces of the hauler. Looking for the bodies.
In fact, Polk didn’t know the pilot or the copilot. They were contractors, like him, hired to do a specific job within certain very narrow parameters of success. Only the company knew exactly what they’d been told to do, but Polk wasn’t an idiot. He’d been given a terse warning last week that he might be needed on a recovery operation, one that wouldn’t exist if the vessel had followed its original flight path.
That something had gone wrong didn’t change his job. Polk had been hired for two particular skills. The first was recovery logistics, which he’d done successfully out beyond Neptune, and the second was planetary law. The trick would be to block with the second while punching with the first. He was reasonably confident the adjusters would go along. The company paid high enough premiums to offset any third-party claims. The challenge would be placating the owners of the vessel, but the adjusters would help with that.
As for the case law, it all arose from the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which struggled to regulate operations beyond the surface of the Earth, and the United Nations Environmental Programme, which held increasingly broad jurisdiction over protected environments everywhere. Polk had spent a decade at the UNEP before moving on to make more money on shorter turnarounds in the expanding private shipping sector, and what he’d learned during that time was that the law favored the status quo. Before boots touched the ground, the burden rested on industry to prove that an ecosystem was naturally sterile, but after the first piling was hammered into the ice, the scale tipped back to UNEP to prove that it wasn’t. He didn’t have strong feelings about the right or wrong of it either way.
As he sat down to draft a memo on his initial conversation with the two investigators outside, a camera drone weaved past his window, nearly clipping the extended lighting array.
“Watch the hardware,” he sighed to the empty room.
#
The debris field stretched from horizon to horizon. Eilidh was focusing on sampling the edges of the exposed hull and calculating the angle of descent from the depth of impact. Mateo let her work, and by the time she had filled her cargo case, most of the drones had returned.
“Let’s do the flight recorder next,” he radioed, and they loped back to the lander, where the canister had been pried open and cabled into a workstation.
“There’s telemetry,” the tech apologized, “but no cockpit audio or video.”
Mateo shook his head. The telemetry can show you an accident; the cockpit can show you a crime.
Looking at the flight trajectory, Eilidh could see the point of deviation, a hiccup of deceleration, and then the gradual portward drift that put the cargo vessel on a collision course with the moon’s orbit.
“That’s where this started,” said Mateo, tapping the screen with his finger. “That’s where we need to be.”
“They’re coming back,” warned the pilot, spotting the adjustors returning across the ice.
They donned their helmets again and made for the hab, cycling through an airlock which now smelled of sweat and aftershave. There were four men in the room; the one in the wrinkled pinstripe was clearly the lead insurer. “Lots of rummage, but no sign of the crew,” said the adjustor. “We believe they were lost in the explosion.”
“Who is this?” Mateo asked quietly.
“This is Brian. He represents the interests of the owners of the vessel.”
Mateo ignored the outstretched hand. “Brian, you have walked through our crash site in your cheap Kevlar mountain boots. You have contaminated a legally protected environment. And you have made my job enforcing that law much more difficult…”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Polk interrupted. “He’s doing his job. You’re doing your job. File your accident report, and Brian will get the money moving, and then we can bring in the rest of the team to get this cleaned up.”
“These boots cost thirty-five hundred dollars,” said Brian, “and I don’t know of any parasites that thrive at minus 300 degrees.”
I do, thought Eilidh, but she didn’t say it.
“How many do you have still doing recovery at Haumea?” Mateo asked, turning back to the site manager. “That was yours, I think.”
“It was.”
“You’ve had quite a run of bad luck.”
“Well, the universe is a very kinetic place,” said Polk, settling back in his chair. “If you haven’t had the privilege, there’s two moons to speak of, Namaka and…”
“Hi’iaka.”
“That’s it. And the reason those two particular moons even exist is that something hit Haumea a few billion years back. Just like something hit Earth and we got the moon. Things are hitting other things all the time. The only difference is now we have insurers like these gentlemen to help us manage the investment risk.”
“An insurance policy does not convey property rights.”
“I didn’t write the rules. Neither do I enforce them. I adhere to them.”
“I don’t think you could write yourself better rules if you wanted to.”
“Are we done then?”
The company drove the investigators out to the edge of the debris field in an electric halftrack. Eilidh did the math as they drove. “Which way?” asked Mateo. Eilidh pointed.
“Misfortune or misadventure?” she asked him on their private channel.
“Both.”
“Tragedy,” she asked, “or barratry?”
“Both,” replied Mateo. The insurance was there to cover both incompetence and guile.
In Eilidh’s mind, the cargo vessel was attempting to vector down at an angle steep enough to control the impact zone, but not so steep as to vaporize the crew cabin, and she could see it clearly enough in her mind that a mist of exosphere streaked the hull. It wasn’t just the angle that worried her; it was the early deceleration that made the crash feel like a scuttling.
The halftrack started climbing the first ridge, and when the grade grew too steep, they got out to search on foot.
#
“He’s pleasant,” Brian commented drily.
“Be nice,” suggested Polk. “They don’t work for me.”
“As I see it, you have three primary areas of liability,” said the adjuster, glancing at his notes. “You have the beast police out there. That’s your problem to manage. You have the owners of the vessel, which I’ll put on my plate. And you have the families of the crew. I’d recommend you nip that one before they take action, in which case you’d want to invoke coverage, and it’s back on my plate.”
“The UNEP isn’t going to be a problem. Their mandate begins and ends with endemic biology, which means they’ve got nothing.”
“The concern would be tangential findings. He tripped on the rifle while searching for the bear. If they assert in their findings that the owners of the vessel were deceived by the lessee, it becomes by definition barratry…”
“Yes, thank you, I’m familiar with admiralty law.”
“…which voids the coverage. Excellent. We’re on the same page then.”
“They’ll be gone in twenty-four hours.”
#
Eilidh was waving the beam of her belt-light around in the glittering darkness when she found the mound of snow on an ice ledge ten meters down. She ran a cable to the winch on the halftrack, waved back at the lander until it flashed its running lights, and then followed Mateo down into the crevasse.
Mateo knelt down beside the frozen corpse. “Perhaps there’s intent,” he said, finishing his earlier thought as he gently dusted a layer of snow from an exposed elbow, “and perhaps there’s just mutual interest. But it’s the same end. More people. More structures. Delays. Debates. In a year, we won’t be calling this a biosphere, and when we stop seeing a biosphere, we’ll see an economy. You should photograph these injuries.”
Eilidh used her helmet camera to capture the shredded flight suit, the upraised arm, the frozen gaze. She took DNA, zippered the sample bag into a shoulder pocket, and then tugged on the cable. The winch slowly retracted, and one by one, they resurfaced onto the ice, moving now in silence.
When the vibrations of the halftrack were gone and the light had begun again to dim, an oily invertebrate shape reached up for the corpse and gently tugged it closer to the edge and to the deeper darkness of the ocean vent, and in the morning it was gone.
END
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