Jainan’s mind was still half in his calculations and half preoccupied with the panic of realizing he’d snapped at his partner’s aide. He couldn’t remember how to hold a normal conversation. He swallowed. “Good?”
“I should warn you, I left him trying to find a design you’d like at an almond-cake stall run by thirteen-year-olds. Do Theans eat almond cake?”
“Yes,” Jainan said. He cleared the desk as well and waved a command sign to wipe the filter he’d put over the windows, hastily getting rid of all signs he’d occupied the room. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Bel shrugged. “I’m space-born. Home baking makes my skin crawl. Think of all those hands that have touched it. Are you all right?”
Jainan’s head was still too full of equations for the question to really sink in. “Yes,” he said. “I was just working on … on Professor Audel’s project.”
“I’m going to get some paperwork cleared,” Bel said. “I’ll leave you to it.”
It was only when she disappeared into the study that he realized she had not objected to his use of the main room even though he’d snapped at her. Kiem probably wouldn’t mind if Jainan was using the space for the Imperial College’s project. Jainan’s clan flag took up half the wall here already. He felt an odd feeling of space, at that, and he wanted to stretch out his arms and marvel at the freedom of the empty room. He pulled up his files again.
After some more meticulous trawling, he straightened his back and sighed. The military had redacted swathes of every useful document. There wasn’t really enough here to put together a complete picture.
He idly pulled all the financial documents onto the table instead and ran through them: many of the suppliers had figures for their equipment listed on the open net, or he could make educated guesses. There was at least more to work with there.
Ten minutes later, Jainan raised his head and frowned at the wall in front of him.
What he was reading didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t an accountant, but he was numerate and used to reading closely for detail, and he couldn’t make any of this add up. There was a lot of funding money going in that wasn’t accounted for in the outputs, even by the most generous estimates.
Of course, there had been disasters. Jainan scanned the incident reports. He had seen Taam come home in a vile mood more than once after a bad day. Jainan had tried not to disturb him at times like that, but sometimes Taam let hints drop, and once, Jainan had seen a newslog report about a piece of rig that had exploded and set back work by months. But even the disasters wouldn’t account for this.
Taam had cleared every document.
Jainan brought some of the files onto the table and paged through them. Usually work was a distraction, a pleasant way to lose himself in something during his solitary hours. But now all he felt was underlying discomfort and something else, something like nagging curiosity. He caught himself looking over his shoulder—Gairad was right, it had turned into a tic—and made himself turn back to the table. Kiem was out. Bel was in the study, and Jainan was alone. He could read what he liked.
He set himself to track every credit he could. The space by his elbow filled up with notes and copied fragments of text. There was a peculiar, visceral appeal to working like this, with his heart in his mouth and bile at the back of his throat. He tried chasing different strands, specific funding allocations. Most of them petered out somewhere in the stack of documents.
The money wasn’t necessarily missing. It might have been classified. The military wasn’t required to hand all its secrets to academic engineers with bright ideas. But if it was missing, someone should have caught it.
Taam had been in charge of Operation Kingfisher. Taam should have caught it.
Jainan pushed back from the table and rose to pace across the room. There was a word for what he was doing right now, and that word was betrayal. He shouldn’t have agreed to scrutinize these files. The inner workings of the military were none of his business, even if it hadn’t been his own partner running the operation. And anyway, the military was huge and presumably run on a tight rein. What were the chances he could spot something from an incomplete pile of files that had never been seen before? He must be missing something.
He looked down at the slim silver band around his wrist. It pulsed with soft light as he worked. Bel had saved most of the data on his account, so Taam’s backup account was still there on his wristband, sat unobtrusively in a back layer.
Taam had never given him the passphrase. But Jainan had lived with him for five years, and—thinking this felt like more of a betrayal than the rest of it—Taam had not been an imaginative man. Jainan had a fairly good idea of what his passphrase might be. He tried it.
A stream of nonsense text covered the wall. Jainan recognized the format; it wasn’t a backup. It was a message channel. He stared at the garbled text, feeling simultaneously like a criminal and sick with disappointment. It was wrapped in its own layer of encryption, of course. Taam wouldn’t leave sensitive data in the clear. The only things that were even half-readable were the destination addresses, and they weren’t the neat form entries that might note which planet or organization should receive the message. They were strings of anonymous characters, which Jainan could only guess was some sort of encoded military relay.
“Not that I want to pry into your business,” Bel’s voice drawled from the study door, “but want to explain why you’re using Sefalan raider relays?” She folded her arms and gave him a smile that showed her teeth. “Your Grace?”
Jainan had let down too many of his protective barriers to hide his shock. “Raider relays?”
Bel frowned. “These aren’t yours, then.” She stepped farther into the room and looked over the documents on the walls before Jainan could pull them down. “Those are Taam’s messages?” She flicked one of the projections with the back of a fingernail. “Wonder why he was talking to raiders. Those are fence drops. Don’t suppose you saw any of his valuables going missing?”
Significant amounts of Kingfisher equipment had gone missing. Jainan sat back down abruptly. “I need to send this to the authorities,” he said. “Now. Yesterday. I—” He put his head in his hands. “You’re taking this straight to Kiem, aren’t you?” The files on the walls seemed to be closing in. Causing a scandal of that magnitude for the Imperial family, fifteen days before the Resolution treaty had to be signed, would be the most damaging thing he could possibly do. It would destroy Taam’s reputation, damage Kiem, and affect the chances of treaty renewal. Kiem would blame him.
“I’m not his enforcer,” Bel said. “I’m not your enemy either, so you can stop looking like I’ve got a capper at your throat. Are you seriously just going to send it all to Internal Security?”
Jainan lifted his head and swallowed down bile. “This is—” He couldn’t say embezzlement. That was a crime. He could feel Taam in the room beside them, incredulous and impatient. “This needs official attention.”
“That’s virtuous of you,” Bel said. “Listen, I know how law enforcement works. Think about it. And if you really have to do it, keep a copy.”