Havaer stared at her. It wasn’t often someone managed to wrong-foot him at the very start of an interview, but here he was. And that was the drawback of having a public ID under the same tagline as his spook work, certainly, but it was rare his two worlds clashed when he wasn’t personally bringing them together.
‘I moonlight,’ he said. ‘You can assume I’m wearing my other hat here.’
‘Oh, right.’ The woman still seemed entirely at ease, chatty, eager to help. ‘I like your stuff.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Havaer said automatically, shaking off a touch of the surreal. It was just the two of them and the recording rig, here in the heart of the Mordant’s Hammer. The interrogation room was intentionally spare, just metal frame furniture and bare walls adorned with only a little tracery of machinery. Enough to suggest the room might have other purposes than hosting a friendly chat. Almier didn’t seem to have noticed.
‘Mesdam Almier, you can imagine what I’m here to discuss. I’d hoped to talk to Captain Rostand, but I understand . . .’
‘Broken Harvest killed him.’
‘Yes. While you were retaking your ship from them. Some might say that was a little out of the league of a salvage crew.’
‘Some didn’t know Rollo,’ she told him with a hard smile. ‘Also, some might not have had a Partheni ship and soldier to hand.’
Havaer had the irrational impulse to school her in how to behave under interrogation. Play down the Parthenon involvement, or at least make me work for it. And she was a lawyer, wasn’t she? Accredited out of Scintilla, of all places. A very odd start, when you ended up working the spacer circuit. And he’d read her file, read all of their files – where they existed. Almier had more detail in hers than the rest, coming from a settled background rather than being born to the spacer life. A nasty business for her there, at the end. Expensive blood she’d ended up shedding, even if it was all legal under Scintilla’s ridiculous duelling codes.
‘What happened to the Oumaru?’
‘We stowed it. In the deep void. I mean, you could talk Idris into taking you there? Or we could nip back in the Vulture, and bring the whole thing back to you . . .?’
‘We have our own Intermediary navigator,’ he said. So don’t think you can just vanish. He was trying hard to be the bad guy interrogator, the looming shadow of Mordant House, but she seemed blithely unaware of it. He’d been minded to go in heavy-handed – with accusations of them selling out Hugh to the Parthenon, all of that. But it was hard to put the screws on when she was being so damned cooperative. Easier right now just to keep a regular police hat on and let her talk, see what spilled out on the table.
‘So why were this Broken Harvest mob involved?’ Something he had a personal stake in finding out, given the unpleasant interview he’d just managed to survive.
‘Said the Oumaru was their ship, or was carrying their cargo.’ She shrugged. ‘Or – maybe, I mean, just the wreck itself has a price, right? Who wouldn’t want the chance to go over an Architect’s leavings? That’s why we picked up Delegate Trine, after all. We wanted to know just what we had, now we had it.’
‘Recoup your losses?’
Her mildly reproving look actually made him feel bad about the words. ‘Our losses are three dead friends, Menheer Mundy. But we still have to make a living, and if we could sell the thing, to you, to the Parthenon, to some Hanni consortium? I mean, Architects are everyone’s problem, right? Even the Hegemony would be interested. Probably that’s where Aklu the Hook’s buyers are.’
He let himself blink at her without any sign of recognition. ‘Who?’
‘Oh, well.’ She flexed her fingers enthusiastically. ‘Agent, let me tell you about the Broken Harvest’s top dog, because that is really worth an opinion piece . . .’
*
He had tried to interrogate the Hanni, whose Colonial trade permits transliterated his name as Kr’k’ctahrr – although his human colleagues referred to him as Kit or Kittering. Havaer suspected strongly that the alien was leaning heavily on the species communications barrier to frustrate any kind of questioning. And although Mordant kept a few Hanni on the payroll, he hadn’t had time to requisition any. So: one useless suspect.
Delegate Trine turned out to be another dead-end. Not even a member of the Vulture crew, but an academic with a list of Colonial qualifications as long as a human arm. The problem was the ‘delegate’ in front of their name. Hiver Assets would have been fair game, under the reciprocal agreements between Hugh and the Hiver Assembly. Delegates were a different matter – a rank awarded sparingly by the Hivers, and only conferred upon individuals of particular significance and knowledge. Hugh had agreed not to prod one without going through slow official channels. This in return for the Hivers respecting Hugh’s own diplomats and, not to put too fine a point on it, their spies. It turned out that the Dark Joan really had been transporting someone with diplomatic immunity, but their credentials had been Hiver Assembly rather than Parthenon.