“No!” Bel took a breath. They both had to step back out of the way of travelers hurrying to the immigration gates. “I just need to go. There’s a shuttle going to an Eisafan hub tonight, and I should be able to get a last-minute ticket if I camp out at the ticket desk. I can get to Sefala from there.”
Her face was even more strained than it had been when he’d arrived. Colors reflected off it from the gates behind them: blue for commercial travel, red for Imperial. Kiem felt helpless and slow. He held out his hand. “Well. Good luck.”
Bel clasped his hand. “Give my best to Jainan.” Her fingers felt chilled. She pulled away after a split second, all business. “You’ll need briefings for the rest of your appointments while you’re here. I put together a handover file. It has the current state of everything we know about Taam as well.”
“I don’t give a shit about my briefings,” Kiem said. “Your grandmother—all right, all right.” This wasn’t the time to start an argument about the relative importance of his schedule. “Give me the briefings.”
“Promise you’ll read them,” Bel said warningly. Kiem’s wristband beeped as she transferred the data.
“I’ll read them,” Kiem said. “Top priority.” He wanted to offer to book her a flyer, or something pointless like buy her food for the journey, but she would already have those in hand. There was no point telling her what they’d just learned about the remnants. The treaty would be signed, or it wouldn’t, but either way it would take a couple of years for the megapowers to move, and there was nothing either of them could do about that.
She gave him a mechanical smile and something halfway to a salute, and then turned and started walking to the blue commercial gates. The vacuum capsule bobbed behind her.
Kiem’s optimism had been well and truly punctured. He turned away just before she reached the gates.
The Imperial gate had a constant stream of travelers on treaty business. Even apart from the hundreds of guests, there were phalanxes of stressed-looking aides and organizers as well as a trickle of soldiers.
One of them was Colonel Lunver.
Her mind appeared to be on her own business, but she caught sight of Kiem and immediately slowed. “Your Highness,” she said, giving him a curt nod. “Leaving the station four days before the treaty? Where are you going?”
Kiem usually liked to be helpful, but something in him bristled at the question. “Seeing off a friend,” he said. “Why, where are you off to, Colonel? How’s the investigation?” he added, needling slightly.
It had an electric effect on Lunver. Her whole body stiffened, and she stepped in front of Kiem as if she could stop him from going anywhere. “What do you know about the investigation?”
“Your investigation,” Kiem said. He wasn’t going to be intimidated. “You were trying to find out if anyone in your unit was helping Taam embezzle. You told us you would, remember?”
For a moment Colonel Lunver looked more furious than anyone Kiem had ever seen. “This is unhinged,” she said. “You accuse Prince Taam—your cousin—” Words seemed to fail her, and she had to work her mouth for a split second before she found her voice again. “Where has this come from?” she said. “Why are you bringing it up now? You may think you’re above a treason charge, but I assure you that you aren’t.”
“Wait, what?” Kiem said. He stared at her. “You’ve known about this for days. We spoke about it in the flyer when your unit rescued us.”
“We spoke about nothing of the sort,” Lunver snapped. “I remember every part of that flight. I don’t know what you would gain from making up something as irresponsible as this.”
Kiem was used to the military overlooking unpleasant truths, but this took the prize. “You can pretend it’s not happening all you like,” he said. “If you don’t do the investigation, Internal Security’s going to. You can try and cut me and Jainan out of the loop. We’ll find out anyway.”
Lunver’s fury transmuted into something else, something that Kiem could have sworn was doubt. She narrowed her eyes. “You had better not be passing your theory around the station.”
“Not yet!” Kiem said cheerfully. “Good day, Colonel Lunver. Let me know how you get on.”
The wave of unaccustomed annoyance washed him back to the residential room they’d been assigned in the station proper. Jainan was out. Kiem couldn’t remember where he’d said he was going.
It was too early to dress for dinner, and he didn’t have any appointments. He could pay some social calls, but for once Kiem didn’t feel up to listening to the Minister for Trade talk about his latest longevity treatment. He was perfectly capable of operating without Bel. He just wasn’t used to it.
He sat at the cramped desk and grudgingly put up Bel’s briefings on the wall-screen in front of him. A collection of glowing circles unfolded on the screen, each spilling out text and data. He opened the most prominent, as Bel had clearly meant him to read it first, and realized belatedly what it was: she’d gone into the newslog archives to research Operation Kingfisher. Kiem frowned. He hadn’t asked her for this.
He skimmed through the newslog extracts in chronological order. Taam and the High Command had clearly managed to keep most of Operation Kingfisher secret. Even the extracts from Thean newslogs were mainly opinion pieces with no details, but there were snippets in technical journals that might mean something to Jainan.
Disappointingly, Audel’s name wasn’t mentioned at all. Kiem supposed that made sense, if she’d only been in the military for a short time and wasn’t a senior officer, but he’d hoped for something. Maybe something that would make him and Jainan feel better about Internal Security’s instructions.
There was a sudden flurry of material from two years ago, after the accident the adjunct at the College reception had mentioned. It was hard to cover up two deaths, though the military press liaison seemed to have done their best. Kiem started skimming faster, then stopped when he got to the faces of the two people who had died in the explosion.
They were both strangers: a young private in military uniform and a Thean civilian with long hair. The Thean had light eyes and a clan neckscarf tied in a way Kiem thought indicated a man; he was smiling for some kind of graduation photo. Kiem felt something in his chest twist. He didn’t have the knack of imagining disasters from reports. He hadn’t reckoned on being hit in the face with a real person.
Kiem summoned all the scraps of clan heraldry he’d picked up from Jainan and identified the scarf pattern as representing Deralli, one of the largest Thean clans. He scanned the attached text. The victims’ photos hadn’t been published at the time; Bel had dug them out of some archive. The young Thean man was listed as a civilian consultant, but it didn’t say anything about what he’d been doing on the mining probe or where the military had employed him from. Bel had managed to find some history from his name: his family, his clan lineage, his education. Kiem felt nauseous but kept reading. It felt like a duty.
When he’d finished, he pushed the chair back and stared at the corner of the ceiling. Two people had died. Two people not even connected to Taam, with lives ahead of them and families left behind to grieve them. Someone had let these disasters happen, if not engineered them outright. Someone had hacked into Kingfisher’s systems; someone had embezzled its funds. Someone had killed Taam.