Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  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.”

  “No, I don’t need to—” Kiem began.

  “Yes,” Jainan said, looking strained. “You should. If not now, then in the morning. I don’t want to disrupt your entire schedule. The school is expecting you, and I have embroiled you in this far enough.”

  Aren was looking between them curiously. Kiem, suddenly aware that they were in public, shut his mouth on a refutation. He was no judge of what was appropriate, but he could read a conversation that far, and it wasn’t as if he was much help at trawling through data. “Right,” he said. “Take your time. I’ll come back here after—or I can meet you at the palace. Whatever works. I’ll go in the morning.”

  “That’s settled then,” Aren said. He gave them a wave as he turned. “I’ll alert the Systems team. Jainan, send over your findings about the hacking attempts, would you?”

  Jainan turned back to his report the moment Aren left. Kiem dozed off in a chair, then unstuck his eyes and went to sort out their sleeping arrangements.

  All the base offered to house guests were tiny rooms with cots the size of coffins, so Kiem took one room for himself and another for Jainan. They were h
ours away from the nearest journalist: Hren Halesar never had to know. He eventually had to drag Jainan away from his work to get some sleep. He tried to do the same himself, but the cot’s mattress was hard and thin, and he slipped into an uneasy doze while hazy visions of soldiers and Internal Security went through his head.

  The next day, Aren pinged them both to his office before Kiem was properly awake.

  Aren’s entire demeanor had changed. Before, he had given off a bright energy, as if he still hadn’t quite processed that his previous commander might have been murdered. Now, he was sober, with a pale face and dark shadows ringing his eyes from lack of sleep.

  “I have had a bad night,” he greeted them. “Colonel Lunver’s on her way out here, and she isn’t happy. Apparently I shouldn’t have let you into our systems but, honestly, fuck that. I need answers.” He threw a screen up to hover above his desk. “Here’s the really bad news.”

  Kiem didn’t know what he was expecting to see, but it absolutely wasn’t a picturesque shot of the gates outside the Imperial College.

  “Please tell me this isn’t some kind of military joke,” Kiem said. Jainan looked as baffled as he felt.

  Aren gave him a humorless slash of a smile. “We traced the network intrusion,” he said. “We had to go fairly deep into the comms grid, but we found the identifiers. It came from the Imperial College networks.”

  “Nobody at the College would hurt Taam,” Kiem said. “He didn’t study there. He went to officer academy. Nobody even knew him at the College.”

  “Wish that were true!” Aren said. “That would make my life much easier. But there is a connection.”

  He made a sharp-angled gesture toward the screen, and something else appeared: a picture of a person. Kiem blinked.

  “Not possible,” Jainan said sharply, at the same time as Kiem said, “Isn’t that Professor Audel?”

  It was Audel. Kiem had only met her in person once but remembered her face: the engineering professor with straggly white hair who had watched Jainan sharply at the College reception then asked him to join her project. “Come off it, Aren,” Kiem said. “You’re looking for a student with too much time on their hands, not an Imperial College professor.”

  Aren laughed, short and sharp. “Am I?” He made a second gesture, and another photo appeared: Audel, only a few years younger. She wore the blue uniform and silver tabs of a military captain.

  “She was recruited as a technical expert,” Aren said. “We bring in people from various industries—she’s been in and out of academia and commercial mining for years. I found her resume. Her military career stops there, though. Because she made a complaint about Prince Taam, who was only just out of officer academy then, and he made a counter-complaint to General Fenrik. She was discharged as incompetent for her role.”

  “What?” Kiem said. He shot a glance at Jainan. “You didn’t know anything about this, right?”

  “This is absurd,” Jainan said, his composure showing rare cracks. “She mentioned military experience, but I don’t believe it was—she didn’t know who I was when she met me. She can’t have been holding a grudge against Taam. This is preposterous.”

  Aren slumped back in his chair and sighed. “Look at it from my point of view,” he said. “The Auditor wants some straight answers. Internal Security hasn’t found anyone to take the blame. It looks like this professor tried to illegally access the Kingfisher network, and it turns out she had a grudge against Taam. This is the only person we have real evidence against—and at least it’s not a Thean.”

  Kiem hadn’t been happy since they walked into Aren’s office, but his whole body recoiled at being complicit in that. “We’re not just looking for someone to turn over to the Auditor,” he said. “We’re looking for what really happened.”

  Jainan stared at the floor. “I don’t think she was involved,” he said. “I don’t have proof. I just don’t think so.”

  Aren looked at them both dubiously, then at his screen.

  “Let me have another look at your network logs,” Jainan said. “Please.”

  There was something defensive in it, as if he expected to be turned down, but Aren made an expansive gesture and said, “Carry on. Lunver’s not here for a few hours. Might as well knock yourself out.”

  Jainan was quiet as they left Aren’s tiny office. Kiem stopped himself from saying three different things, all inappropriate, and settled for “I should set off for the school.” He opened the door to their makeshift guest room. “I’ll just grab my trunk. See you at the palace.”

  Jainan blinked, as if he’d forgotten Kiem was going to Braska. “Oh—” he said, then looked down at his wristband, which was pinging, and went very still.

  “Who is it?” Kiem said, but Jainan was already opening the call, with an expression as if the prompt were a nesting bird about to attack.

  The face that hovered in front of him was familiar: Kiem had just seen it above Aren’s desk. An older female academic with clips holding back her graying hair. Of course. Kiem had seen Jainan talking to Audel and her students nearly every day.

  “Jainan,” Audel exclaimed in apparent pleasure. “I was trying to get hold of you.”

  Jainan swallowed and opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He nodded.

  “Good to see you, Professor.” Kiem stepped into view so Jainan’s wristband would pick him up. “We’re out in the mountains.” Was it urgent? he was about to say, but changed his question midflight, on a hunch: “Can I ask you a quick question?” he said easily. “Did you know Prince Taam?”

  Audel frowned. “Unfortunately,” she said. “Why? I suppose Jainan could have told you that.”

  “You don’t seem to have told him,” Kiem said.

  “Oh,” Audel said vaguely, “I thought I had. But of course—who do you think the project applied to for the data? It was all a bit awkward, of course, given my last job. I still don’t think the man could get drunk in a distillery—I beg your pardon,” she said, breaking off contritely. “I’m sorry, Jainan, I forgot you were there.”

  “You were discharged from the military,” Jainan said, his voice rough. “Why?”

  “Well,” Audel said, still looking uncomfortable. “Technically Prince Taam, you know. He questioned some of my results; they made his unit look bad. But Prince Taam wasn’t actually the root cause. I knew I wasn’t suited to it from about week two. A bad decision on my part, but they do have all the funding. I tried to resign several times. The last time was a month before it all kicked off.”

  “You … were trying to leave the military anyway?” Jainan said. “It wasn’t because of Taam?”

  “No, it was honestly quite a relief when they kicked me out,” Audel said. “I was more than ready to go. The military doesn’t nurture intellectual freedom; I imagine that won’t come as a surprise, but I was seduced by not having to write grant applications.”

  “Ah,” Kiem said, with a wash of relief. He didn’t particularly want to get one of Jainan’s friends in trouble. “Professor Audel. I don’t suppose you have a … copy of that resignation? Before Taam’s complaint?”

  Audel thought, frustratingly not seeming to give it much weight. “Yes, I suppose so, somewhere,” she said. “Why do you want it?”

  “It would be really helpful,” Kiem said. “Resolution business—don’t ask, it will do your head in, and I think it’s confidential. But right now would be good.”

  Jainan looked a little less ill when Kiem ended the call. He sat on one of the room’s two stools and raised one finger to his temple, rubbing a tiny circle. “I don’t like this,” he said tonelessly.

  This, Kiem was starting to recognize, was the equivalent of a less controlled person sinking to the floor with their head in their hands. “No,” he said. “I’m not a huge fan either. At least this stops Internal Security from going after you, I suppose. Or it will when Aren sends them the evidence. You didn’t try and hack into their systems.”

  “It absolutely won’t stop them,�
� Jainan said, his voice strained. “They will want to investigate both possibilities. And we have not been cooperative. They will find out I didn’t tell them about Taam’s secret message account. They will find out we have been here.”

  “Then what do you want to do?” Kiem said. “Just call up Internal Security and have a friendly chat about everything we know?”

  Jainan didn’t answer. His wristband flashed with a message, and Kiem’s did at the same time. Kiem looked down long enough to see it was Audel’s note, then looked back up at Jainan.

  “You do, don’t you?” Kiem said slowly. “You think we should do that.” He dropped onto the bunk mattress and swung his feet up onto the other stool. “Okay, let’s be good citizens. I’ll give Rakal a buzz.”

  Jainan raised his head, startled. “You will?”

  “Now that sounded like a dare,” Kiem said. He couldn’t quite believe he was at the point in his life where he had Internal Security on his regular contact list, but here he was. “Agent Rakal,” he said expansively, as their face flickered up on screen. Rakal, a now-familiar collection of sharp angles and hostility, gave him an impressively stony stare from behind their desk. “How are you? How’s the secrets business? Have we got some exciting things to tell you.”

  A few minutes later—Kiem had drafted Jainan in to explain the finer points of his research into Taam’s finances, which Jainan did in the sharded-glass voice that came out of him under severe pressure—Rakal unbent enough to give them a single nod. It was a lot easier to explain this stuff to someone easygoing like Aren, but Kiem would take any acknowledgement he could get. “You’ve done the right thing bringing us your information,” Rakal said crisply. “We were aware of significant parts of it. I would like to interview both of you.”

  Internal Security preferred to do things in person. Kiem assumed it was because it was harder to intimidate someone over a net link. “Great,” Kiem said. “Well, we’re kind of on a trip right now. I’m scheduled for a school visit this afternoon, and Jainan’s staying—”