The Rackham Files by Dean Ing Read Free Book Online

job, and I'd hate to try to guess all the ways a cargo can be falsified."
    Quent was silent for a time. Then, "I'd never get aboard without the rep's authorization, or the captain's. There goes one layer of our deniability but yes, I could try it. Or Harve could, in a pinch."
    We kicked the idea around a bit, and then she excused herself and walked off a ways to use her phone while Quent and I watched boats slice the lake's surface under psychedelic bubbles of sail. When she turned back, she was nodding. "You'll need to learn how to use it," she said.
    Quent said if it was anything like the one she carried, she could show us using the specimen I'd collected. She simpered for him and said she should've thought of that herself. We found a picnic table and, sandwiched between me and Quent, Dana pulled a grey, keyboard-faced polymer brick from her bag and opened my evidence baggie next to it.
    She stuck her forefinger into a depression labeled CRUCIBLE in the brick and pressed the CRU key. When she withdrew her finger its tip was covered by a filmy shroud, which she quickly stuck into my soggy tissue. Then she pushed the fingertip into another depression and pressed SAMPLE, and the brick whirred very faintly for an instant. Dana withdrew her finger, stripped the film off, and let it drop to the tabletop, an insubstantial wisp. Then after a silence, the brick's little screen began to print gibberish at a rate too fast to follow.
    "Essentially, a carbon ribbon wipes a bit of the specimen off the film—don't ask me why it's called a crucible—and analyzes it," Dana murmured.
    "What if you're testing the air," Quent asked.
    "Wave your finger around for a moment. They say the crucible has microscopic pores on its surface," she explained.
    "And how many of those little mouse condoms are inside," I asked, unrolling the discarded wisp for a better look.
    "Rackham, you are a piece of work," she said under her breath. Then more loudly, "A hundred or so. By that time the battery needs replacing." When the little screen quit printing Martian, it showed a line with several numbered pips of varied height. She showed us how to query each number, which could be shown as chemical symbols or in words.
    The biggest pip was for water, the next was for a ketone solvent, then cellulose, then something called Biopol.
    I put my finger out and touched the screen. "Bad actor?"
    "No. A polymer from genetically altered canola," she said.
    "How in the hell would you know that," I demanded.
    She let me stew for a moment. Then, "Customs. Biopol was the plant extract on the manifest. Quent would've figured that out and told you anyway," she added grudgingly.
    The trace of C 10 H 18 O, according to the screen, was eucalyptol. Dana pointed out that the heavily aromatic tree hanging over us was a eucalyptus. "So you see it's pretty accurate."
    I said no it wasn't, or it would've told us what the little condom was made of. She said yes it was and positively beamed, explaining that the analyzer knew to ignore the crucible's signature. I gave up. The damned thing was pretty smart at that.
    "At least we know the cargo was as advertised," Quent said.
    Dana nodded. "Including those pallets of wood. We 'scoped enough of it. So now we focus on the next cargo because no one has come ashore with sizable contraband, and the incoming cargo was clean."
    "Unless they'd already pumped it out into those trucks I saw," I said.
    "They didn't," said Dana. "One of the cleanout crew is one of ours. You don't need to know which one. The Ras Ormara crew are watching him carefully enough to make us even more suspicious."
    "I wasted my time then," I said.
    "You proved the wharf isn't all that secure," Quent mused, and checked his wrist. "If you're going to spring for a couple of those analyzers, ma'am, we should get to it."
    She reminded him that it was a loan, and there'd be only one. Thinking ahead as usual, he said as long as we were going to show our hand overtly as a P.I. team, he'd