It would be neat if it was all the same person. Kiem spun up a picture in his mind: an embittered saboteur, anti-military, anti-Iskat, looming in the shadows. The whole picture fell apart when Kiem tried to put Professor Audel in it, because he couldn’t believe Jainan was so wrong in his judgment of her character. Maybe it was someone else. Maybe someone Kiem didn’t know at all.
The thought came slowly, from some cold and distant part of his mind: Internal Security must want that cackling saboteur as well, especially now, four days before the treaty. It would be so simple to have an enemy.
He stared at the dead young Thean on the screen. This wasn’t really about facts, it was about people. People were many things, but by and large they weren’t masterminds. They always wanted something. They always had a reason for what they did.
Something uncurled in his head.
Kiem spun back through the Thean’s history. There wasn’t much more there: a handful of research papers, memberships of some political groups at his old university. Kiem wanted to go and shake some answers out of Lunver and Agent Rakal, but he’d tried that before and hadn’t got far. Perhaps, for once, he should hold off. For once he needed to think.
CHAPTER 22
Jainan ended up in Carissi Station’s outer control room. He hadn’t planned to. He had been thinking deeply about Gairad’s mass analysis and the remnants, and it had occurred to him: he was the Thean treaty representative. He was married to an Imperial Prince. Why not see if they would allow him into one of the control rooms? The assistant staffing the door had barely batted an eyelid.
Now Jainan was in front of an array of screens and viewports, watching the rest of the orbital cluster as each shining habitat followed Carissi Station in its slow, unending curve around the planet below. The refinery was the last of them, a stately mass of spheres following the smaller modules. He’d spent an hour here already. A shift change buzzer had sounded halfway through, but he’d ignored it, and nobody seemed to realize he shouldn’t be there.
It was aesthetically compelling, maybe, but the readings on the screens were more valuable. Gairad had put Kingfisher’s official mass readings in her diagram, then scribbled all over it with requests for Jainan and Audel to check her work because her calculations weren’t making sense.
She was right. Jainan had spent some time puzzling over the inconsistencies in the readings: Carissi Station’s instruments were much more accurate than anything from public sources, and Kingfisher’s official figures didn’t match what they were telling him. Operation Kingfisher had drawn up plans that showed their refinery as smaller than it really was.
Jainan took a quick look to see if anyone was watching him use station equipment without authorization—Kiem was bad for him—then tweaked the viewscreens to show the Kingfisher refinery in detail. Most of the unexplained mass was concentrated on the underside of the refinery, where the diagrams showed nothing but an outer hull. That was a storage module.
There was no reason to leave a storage module off your official diagrams unless you wanted to hide what was in it. Jainan found it suddenly harder to breathe.
Taam had been buying as well as selling. That was where the money had gone.
But buying what? Jainan stared at the viewscreens until his eyes watered. It gave him no answers. Whatever he was buying must have been significant, to distort the mass readings this much. Where had he gotten all the money? Surely not just from selling surplus mining equipment?
Jainan felt cold. General Fenrik had submitted the remnant they called the Tau field. It had been in military hands. Had Taam been in possession of the real one? Had he sold it?
“Sir?” a station official said. “Can I ask what you were doing on the screen—are you all right?”
Jainan moved away from the screen and turned, absently hearing the question like the buzzing of a fly. “I don’t need it anymore.” He began to walk to the door, barely seeing the rest of the control room. His mind was full of moving parts that ticked over every few moments and fell into new positions. It wasn’t only Taam who had something to hide. Kingfisher had something to hide.
He tried to call Kiem, but Kiem’s wristband was dead. There was no point leaving a message; Jainan needed to talk to him. This whole thing had grown too big for them to keep quiet about it. If he was honest, it was too big even for Internal Security.
Jainan screwed up his courage, activated his wristband, and sent off a brief, formal meeting request to the Emperor’s Private Office about discrepancies in Operation Kingfisher.
A cold sweat settled on him as soon as he’d done it. The audacity of it was beyond anything he’d ever attempted. But neither Internal Security nor the military had solved Taam’s murder, or what Taam had been doing at Kingfisher, or where the missing remnants were, and time was running out.
He had walked through half the station before he recognized where he was. His subconscious had been problem-solving without consulting him, and he realized his feet had been taking instructions from it just as it presented him with an unwelcome conclusion like a lump of plutonium.
He looked up at the closed door to the Auditor’s quarters, which had an ACCESS DENIED sign over it. The control panel glowed red beside it. Jainan reached out slowly and gave his skinprint and retina scan to request entry.
“The Auditor is not seeing visitors,” a Resolution staffer said, their face appearing on a screen midair.
Jainan had been prepared for that. “I am a treaty representative,” he said. He probably still was, despite the REVOKED status. It wasn’t as if they had an easy replacement. “I have information about the remnants.”
He had expected he would have to argue. But instead the staffer’s eyes tracked something on their eyepiece, and they said, “Enter.”
The screen disappeared, and the door opened. Jainan stepped inside.
The room was surprisingly small, even for the station. Like the temporary Resolution office on Iskat, they’d hung some of their odd textile-screens around the walls, but there was only one tiny desk, and all in all the room looked like an afterthought. The staffer was leaning back on a chair behind the desk, looking bored and uncomfortable. “Go on in,” they said, gesturing to the opposite wall. One of the textile-screens lifted itself aside as if an invisible hand had pulled it.
It was an airlock. Jainan realized they must be next to the hull of the station. The Resolution hadn’t installed themselves on Carissi; they’d just docked their ship and stayed there.
The airlock yawned open. The impression behind it was one of relative darkness; Carissi kept most public spaces brightly lit. Jainan cleared his face of expression and stepped through it.
The first thing he noticed was that the Resolution ship had dispensed with station gravity. Or no—not exactly. Jainan nearly overbalanced in his first step beyond the airlock, but managed to land his foot on the polished black floor and ground himself. Each movement felt supported, as if something had anticipated where he was going to go and was helping him. The air felt treacly around him.
Past the airlock, the passage sloped upward at a sharp angle. Jainan used the odd gravity to help him up, each stride much longer than it would have been on the station. The walls around him lit up gradually as he climbed, glowing a pale, featureless pearl. The slope seemed endless. Every few meters he would pass a closed, arched doorway. He could not see the end of the passage.