Aren’s silence left a gap open, and in it Kiem found himself turning over in his head what would happen if they were wrong. None of this chaos would help the Auditor decide that Iskat and Thea were voluntarily entering into the treaty. And even if they were right, they were no closer to an answer—embezzling or no embezzling, Taam was dead. If it hadn’t been an accident, then someone had killed him.
Aren shook his head. “You know,” he said, “this would explain something, as much as I don’t like it. Internal Security has been on my back for the past two weeks. I’ve had to turn over half my operational files—I thought they were worried about our flybug maintenance team. I’ve had unexplained cuts in my purchasing budget as well, several times. I just—” He looked up at the model gleaming in the shadows above them, as if it might have some answers, and sounded lost. “I just—Taam? I knew him.” He straightened his shoulders, pushed himself away from the rail and focused again on Jainan. “You want to look at our records.”
Jainan swallowed visibly. “I know as civilians we have no right of access.”
“I’ll waive that,” Aren said. “Internal Security combed through them already, so why shouldn’t you get a shot? I’ll set you up with a room in the base and get you permissions.”
Jainan was staring at Aren as if this was profoundly unexpected. It wasn’t the way he reacted to Kiem, as if Kiem was a puzzle, but instead the reaction of someone who’d put their hand into an ice-covered river and found it running hot. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know,” Aren said, waving a casual hand. “Thank me later. I want to know too.”
* * *
It was just a pokey meeting room with a plastic slab of a desk, but Jainan seemed to think it was adequate. All his attention was trained on downloading vast amounts of Kingfisher data and heaping it in abstract pools and graphic visualizations all over the desk. Kiem tried to help out, and not stand there watching the way research turned Jainan intent and whetstone-sharp.
Kiem wasn’t going to be a lot of use anyway. Jainan seemed to know what he was doing and dived into Taam’s files immediately, comparing equipment readouts and purchase orders. Kiem stared at a list of numbers under a code name until they blurred, then stood up restlessly and started to pace.
Jainan finally looked up. “Are you going to do that … continuously?”
“Sorry,” Kiem said. He propped the door open instead, which led onto the main open-plan room, and wandered out to see if he could find some coffee.
He found coffee—and some military rations, which he sampled indiscriminately—at the kitchen station. He also found a corporal to explain the code-named list of numbers, which was apparently a registry of flybug models, and brought her back to the meeting room so she could explain this to Jainan. Jainan, after a moment’s startled wariness, started asking her about fuel logging and maintenance schedules.
Kiem strolled back out among the bustling desks. The restful thing about soldiers was they didn’t ask awkward questions like: Why are you looking at our records? Kiem and Jainan had arrived with Major Aren and been given all-system privileges; that meant they were some sort of inspectors as far as the soldiers were concerned. Kiem hung around various desks and sent some of the soldiers in to Jainan if they seemed to know anything about flybugs or finance. He got some dartcar betting tips off a lance corporal.
The tinted base windows faded as the mountain sky turned toward dusk. Dozens of soldiers came in and out of the room as the day shift handed over to the evening shift. Jainan showed no inclination to move from his piles of data.
Kiem eventually found two box meals and two cans of something sugary and took them in to him.
“How’s it going?” Kiem said. “It’s getting dark. Shift’s changing.”
“Is it?” Jainan said vaguely. “I hadn’t noticed.”
Kiem put the meal at Jainan’s elbow. “Found anything?”
Jainan focused on him. “A lot of confirmation,” he said, sounding tired but blank, as if Taam were just a name rather than his ex-partner. “I’ve been sending it to Aren and Colonel Lunver as I go. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, you should,” Kiem said. “Trying to hide anything at this point would look really suspicious. Is there anything new? Like what Taam was, um, doing with the money? Or who might have…” He hesitated. Killed him sounded awful. “You know. Who might have been upset with him? What about the raiders he was selling to?”
“That would be a neat answer,” Jainan said without emotion. “Unfortunately, I can’t break the message encryption without the keys, and I can’t find those on any Kingfisher system. Though there are some oddities in system activity. Internal Security might be able to find out more.”
“Agent Rakal will be over the moon,” Kiem said. “What oddities?”
“I’m not sure yet.” Jainan frowned at something in front of him. “I don’t know where you’re getting these people that you keep sending over—”
“They’re right there,” Kiem said. “They all work about ten meters away.”
“—but can you find me a network engineer?”
“Probably,” Kiem said. “Systems team sits in the corner.”
“A network engineer? What for?” Aren said from the doorway. He leaned on the open door frame, apparently amused. “I come back to find you’ve flooded my messages and lured half my staff away from their jobs, Jainan. You never did that when Taam was in charge.”
Jainan tensed. “Don’t worry,” Kiem said, before Jainan could apologize. “We sent them back.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then,” Aren said, half laughing. Kiem could never figure out who the amusement in his voice was aimed at. “Sorry I’ve left you to your own devices. I was briefing Colonel Lunver. She’s going to come out to the base tomorrow. What’s this about a network engineer?”
Jainan’s focus had faded completely. He sounded more normal—diffident and circumspect—as he said, “Your system logs have been accessed from outside military networks. Someone was trying to break in. I think this has happened every few days since before Taam died.”
“Agent Rakal mentioned it when we met them,” Kiem said. Aren tilted his head to one side, quizzical. “Network intrusion. Did they tell you?”
“Oh, we get attempts like that all the time,” Aren said. “Usually it’s petty criminals or idealists who’ve bought cracking kits from Sefalan gangs. They don’t get through.”
Jainan looked down at his work. “Don’t they?” he said quietly. “I see.”
“Surely it can’t hurt to check,” Kiem said to Aren. “Taam obviously had something going on that you didn’t know about. This could be related. Don’t you have a Systems team?”
Aren’s expression cleared. It was something of a relief working with Aren after trying to make progress with Rakal, Kiem found. Aren at least wanted to cooperate and was more concerned with finding out what was happening than perfecting an impression of a stone wall. “Better than that,” Aren said, “I have a Systems night shift. I’ll tell them to look into it right now. But I came with a message from the palace—Kiem, they say you have a PR thing at Braska? If you need to get back, Jainan can stay as long as he likes to dig into this. We have spare quarters.”