Which only left one interview to go.
Idris Telemmier was slumped in his seat. He had the same shadow of stubble Havaer remembered from Lung-Crow, the same inward-looking, flinching manner. Stripped of his friends, he looked as though he was waiting to be beaten with hoses or have wires clipped to his nipples.
‘Hell, man,’ Havaer said, sitting down across from him. ‘This doesn’t have to be that sort of conversation.’
‘You . . .’ Telemmier stared at him bleakly. ‘I said all I wanted to say to you on Lung-Crow. I don’t want anything to do with Hugh anymore. I did my bit. Nobody can say I didn’t.’
‘Look, Menheer—’
‘I stopped the war!’ Telemmier burst out suddenly, eyes wide. ‘I went into the mind of an Architect, me and the others. We stopped the war. We saved everyone. You. Cannot. Imagine—’ He clearly had more to say, but his teeth were clamped together now and he couldn’t get the words out. His wrists were pressed to the arms of the chair as though, in his head, he was shackled to it.
‘Menheer Telemmier. Idris.’ Havaer kept his voice very calm. ‘This . . .’ he indicated the interview room, ‘isn’t even about you.’
‘Sure it isn’t.’ Drawn-wire tension was pulling every part of the man taut.
‘You found the wreck of a goddamn Architect attack!’ Havaer snapped. ‘Why is it nobody’s focusing on that, exactly? We could get an Architect over Magda or Lief or even Berlenhof any moment. As we sit here, it may already have happened. Packet trade to Jericho space is pretty damn slow after all. A few billion people maybe just got offed, while I’m goose-chasing after your crew to ask some questions. Help me out here, maybe?’
And that was the right approach, yanking the man out of his self-made misery hole. ‘It’s not my fault,’ Telemmier told him. Aggrieved, but that was better than self-pitying.
‘Nobody’s saying it is,’ Havaer said. ‘Look, I’m not even starting on the whole Parthenon thing. Why you have a pet soldier aboard your ship.’ Not yet, anyway, though that is definitely on the menu for interview two. ‘Just tell me what you know about the Oumaru and what happened to it. I’ve got the facts from the others. Give me anything that’ll only have come to you.’
‘I mean, why would they?’ Idris burst out, the non sequitur taking Havaer’s train of thought and shunting it into a siding. ‘They attacked one ship. One Hegemony freighter. Since when was that how Architects did things? They take out planets. And even then, only ones we’re actually living on. A thousand rocks out in the void, and none of them gets special treatment. Only places that are someone’s home.’
‘The Oumaru had a crew, and they called their ship home,’ Havaer suggested.
‘But . . . it’s wrong. It’s not how they work.’ Because the war had been all kinds of trauma, for the Ints, but at least they’d thought they knew how the enemy operated. ‘And yet, and yet, we all saw the Oumaru had been just . . . Architected. And you’re asking why’s nobody focusing on that fact? Because the Oumaru was too small a disaster and people need something big to make them understand, Menheer Mundy. Everyone’s built new lives for themselves in the last forty years. I watched them do it.’ Shaking his head wildly at the foolishness of it. ‘At first, people were terrified to put down roots. They still had their bags packed and every ship had spare pods to carry refugees. You’re too young. You wouldn’t know. But year by year, when the Architects stayed gone . . . I saw people begin to realize they could live again. Build, settle, invest, have families. And now if they’re back, all that goes away. We go back to being doomed every day of our lives. So take it from me, nobody’ll focus on this goddamn fact – until some colony somewhere gets an extra moon all of a sudden, and then gets worked over.’ His shoulders hunched further. ‘I don’t want to believe it. I saw the wreck up close and I don’t.’
‘And so you came here to get confirmation, from this expert you knew from way back?’
‘What? Yes.’
The story’s still not right. He had the maddening sense of a missing piece, but they’d all told the same tale so far. If he wanted the hard truth that meant harsh methods – actual arrests, solitary confinement, serious interrogation at a secure Mordant facility. It also meant paperwork, expense and having to justify it to his bosses. Given the stakes, it wouldn’t take much justification, but still . . .