Uh-huh, very funny. “No.” I didn’t want to talk about it, so I stared at the wall. I just wanted to get off this ship, back to the station, back to my regular job making sure no one killed Mensah. “My short-term contract is completed.”
“Is it?” Indah lifted her brows. “Do you know who killed Lutran?”
With everything else, I’d forgotten about the original objective of this whole mess. “No, who?”
Now she rolled her eyes. “I was asking you.”
Oh, right. “But the hostiles will know who they were working with in the Port Authority.”
“We questioned them briefly and they say they don’t. They were given some instructions to send to a scramble-coded feed address, and they have no idea who was on the other end. We checked and the address has been deleted. I don’t know if I believe they really didn’t know who they were talking to, but it’s going to take time to get them to realize that they can help themselves more by telling us everything.” Her mouth set in a grim line. “I don’t want to wait. I want to find that traitor before they do any more damage.”
Did I want that too? Yes, yes I did. And the parameters of the problem had changed, drastically, in a way that made it solvable. Our suspect pool had been a bunch of humans and augmented humans wandering around in the Merchant Docks mostly unobserved and not interacting with station systems, as we tried to identify an actor who could remove themselves from the few surveillance cameras at will. Now we knew it was a local, someone with legitimate access to Port Authority systems. Locals living on the station do stuff that leaves a trail, that generates records in log files. “You need a surveillance audit.”
Her frown turned confused. “A what?”
“You take all the data available during the time frame when the incidents occurred, not just from the Port Authority systems, but from StationSec, StationCommCentral, TransportLocal, the distribution kiosks, the door systems that allow people to enter their private quarters, anything that saves an ID that tells you what someone was doing at the specific moment when we know the perpetrator was active, and you compare it to the list of potential operators to start eliminating them. It’s going to be harder because your surveillance is crap, but it can still drastically reduce the suspect pool.” She didn’t react and I added, “If we know someone is in the station mall accessing a food kiosk at the exact time the transport suffered the catastrophic failure, then they can be eliminated as a suspect.”
Her gaze turned intrigued. “Some of those systems are under privacy lock, we’d need a judge-advocate to release their access records, but the others…” Then she shook her head. “We narrowed down the time of death, but it’s not exact. And the theory was that some of those actions, like using the cart to dump Lutran’s body in the mall, were prearranged. The actor could have been eating in the station mall when it happened.”
I explained, “But not when the transport was hacked. That can’t be done over the feed. When the transport went down, the actor was there, on board.”
Indah’s face did something complicated, which I think was an attempt not to show enthusiasm. “How long would this take you?”
“A few hours. And I’d need outside processing and storage space.” I’d have to pull a bunch of old company code out of archive storage, build the database, and write the queries.
She pushed off the hatch. “Then let’s get out of here and get started.”
Chapter Eight
WE GOT ON THE responder, which had collected the refugees and the hostiles, and was now ready to leave. A station tug had already arrived and was maneuvering into position to haul the hostile ship and the module to the impound bay so they could be checked for evidence. In light of the whole traitor in the Port Authority thing, Indah had ordered the tug to keep the ship and the module in isolation until Station Security cleared it. She hadn’t exactly lied, but she had implied that the ship might be contaminated with something. （Anybody who saw the galley wouldn’t have any trouble believing that.）
On the quick trip back to the transit ring, I checked my feed messages. Mensah wanted me to report when I had a chance, Ratthi wanted to know if I was all right, and Gurathin wanted to know if I’d used the life-tender and if it had worked okay. I also had a report from Tural, the combined forensic/medical report, which among other things identified the cause of Lutran’s death as a long “needle-like device” that had stabbed into his head, leaving no identifiable fragments behind. Tural also said the transport was being repaired, but the team hadn’t managed to pull any usable data off it. And Pin-Lee’s General Counsel report had arrived, which showed Lutran’s name came up multiple times in regard to cargo transfer on Preservation Station and on three other allied polities. Which meant Lutran had been funneling refugees for years, through multiple stations, as we’d theorized. And he wouldn’t be doing that anymore, so who the hell knew what would happen to all the other parts of the organization and the humans trapped at BreharWallHan. I sent acknowledgments/reply laters to all of them so they’d know I was still alive, because what I really needed to do was stand here and watch the beginning of episode 132 of Sanctuary Moon.