“I’m curious,” Kiem said. “And the reason I’m curious is because Internal Security wants to bundle this all up together. They’ll sacrifice both Professor Audel and Jainan if they have to.” It was supposed to be a lie. As Kiem said it, though, it felt close enough to the truth that his chest tightened.
Gairad went white. “They wouldn’t.”
“Jainan fought to keep you out of this,” Kiem said. “He thinks he has a clan obligation to you. I’m not Thean so bear with me—do you have one to him?”
Gairad was silent. She looked away.
There was a small, ordinary noise behind him: a door sliding open. Gairad’s eyes flicked over his shoulder. She wasn’t surprised, Kiem realized. She’d sent a ping he hadn’t seen.
“Your Highness,” Professor Audel said, “what an unexpected honor to find you here.”
Kiem turned in his chair. He started to get up politely, but Professor Audel waved him back down. “Professor. Not good news, I’m afraid.”
She didn’t seem to hear. She stood in the doorway, untidy in traveling clothes, with strands of hair coming loose from their clips and a vague look in her eyes. “Gairad, I think I’m going to have to alter the fish nutrients. Do you think she’s looking peaky?” She opened a screen that hovered above her wrist, showing a feed to some sort of aquarium.
“Professor,” Kiem said again.
“You must be here to find Jainan? I don’t know where he is. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to steal Gairad to look at—”
“Don’t bother,” Gairad said. “He knows.”
In the two seconds of silence that followed, Kiem’s tentative conclusions rearranged themselves with a swift lurch.
“Ah,” Professor Audel said softly. She didn’t sound vague in the slightest anymore. “What, exactly, does he know?”
Part of Kiem’s hindbrain noted that Gairad was on one side of him and Audel on the other. He stretched out his legs in his chair, smiling, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. “Internal Security never dropped their investigation into you,” he said. “I was just having a chat with Gairad about it. Informally.”
Audel stepped forward, closing her wrist-screen briskly. The door shut behind her. “Can I convince you that Gairad wasn’t involved?”
“Not really,” Kiem said apologetically. “I’d just convinced myself that you weren’t involved, actually. Did either of you kill Taam?”
“No!” Gairad said, with an indignation that rang true to Kiem’s ears. “What do you take us for, murderers? We’ve been trying to find out who killed him!”
“Gairad has a regrettable tendency to the dramatic,” Professor Audel said. “But she’s correct. I’m afraid we can’t help you with Taam. However—would you mind…” She pointed to her wrist.
Kiem looked down at his wristband. He hesitated for a moment, but Bel was in the shuttleport on her way to Sefala, and Jainan could use the station comm system if he really needed to get hold of Kiem. He turned it off. “I wasn’t recording.”
“Oh, I hope not, but I am admitting to criminal access of information,” Audel said, “so forgive me my quirks. How did you find out?”
“Internal Security has been after you for days now,” Kiem said. “Since you called us at Hvaren Base. They brought us in to help.”
“Tch,” Audel said. “They really haven’t dropped it, then? That makes the next step harder.”
“What are you trying to find?” Kiem asked.
“The truth,” Gairad said, failing to disprove Professor Audel’s character assessment.
Professor Audel didn’t answer immediately. She tapped the screen on the wall, where the young Thean smiled in his graduation photo. “Rossan was one of my student researchers. My first one after I left the army, as a matter of fact. When I came back to the Imperial College, I decided to carry on working on regoliths, because I thought it could be done so much better than the military was doing it. Rossan was on one of their mining probes as our first embedded civilian observer in Operation Kingfisher. We fought tooth and nail to get him there. His death was a catastrophe.”
“I’m sorry,” Kiem said. It sounded completely inadequate.
“It was also very convenient for Kingfisher’s officers,” Audel said. “But why go that far just to throw off some academic researchers? We weren’t a threat to them. That was when I started wondering what else Kingfisher was doing. I wanted to replicate their methods and improve them—of course I did, I’m an engineer. But I also wanted to know why they needed so many non-engineering soldiers on a mining operation.”
“Taam was using it as a personal credit source,” Kiem said. “He was selling off equipment. Jainan found the money trail.”
“Wait, that doesn’t fit,” Gairad said, with a quick look at Audel. “Stuff’s been coming in these past few weeks.”
Kiem raised his hands in front of him. “Hold up. Go back.” He looked at Audel. “You said next step, Professor. Does that have anything to do with Agent Rakal saying you planned to hack into the refinery while you’re on the habitat?”
Gairad gave his inactive wristband a suspicious look. “Are you sure you’re not recording?”
“My dear, making any kind of attempt now seems like a nonstarter,” Audel said. “Gairad and I suspected we had flags on our accounts. Yes, I had a plan to try connecting from a geolocal orbit and seeing what we could find. I used to work on the refinery plant equipment; I know some ways in. But that depended on Internal Security not tracking all our outgoing connections.”
Like Internal Security had done to Jainan. It seemed natural for Kiem to say the next thing. “So use my account.”
“What?” Gairad said.
“I don’t think mine’s flagged,” Kiem said, “and I want to know what’s going on.”
He didn’t let himself think too much about the implications. Of the three of them, he was probably the safest when it came to a real treason charge. It would be embarrassing for the Emperor to have a member of her family arrested. Of course, that might not stop her, but he could cross that bridge when he came to it.
“Well, in that case,” Professor Audel said, a gleam in her eye that Kiem had started to recognize in Jainan whenever he had a new data source. “If you’d link up your wristband, Your Highness.”
The atmosphere changed immediately. After a suspicious glare at him, Gairad started bustling around the screens, bringing up scripts Kiem didn’t recognize. Audel was totally focused on her screen. Kiem had thought it would be complicated, but once he’d linked up his wristband to the input sensors, Audel attached a data coin, and that was it. The screens flickered through interfaces too fast for Kiem to watch. Gairad kept cross-checking the displays with her own wristband and occasionally said things like, “Looks like they took Model 5 offline.” Audel just watched.
“Can anyone learn to do that?” Kiem said, forgetting that now was not the time to be fascinated.