The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  Jerry and Nadia hauled maps of communication-live areas into position. The industrial complex, the shuttle port, and Navigation’s offices on Level Two were live. The new tunnels went live as soon as they were carved out, conduit and camera mounts following the tunnelworm borers, as necessary as air.

  Helt sighed. There was more dark space in the Athens plaza than in any public space on Level Two. Industrial areas weren’t expected to be private; by design, places for hanging out on Level One left more room for private conversations. Industrial areas were monitored; inside buildings and outside where the traffic was both pedestrian and robotic.

  “What do we have on visual for Ryan’s work crew Wednesday afternoon?” Helt asked.

  Nadia sent him a capture of a woman and two men in civvies walking across the Nav lobby and entering the Athens elevator. After a moment, a text overlay showed up.

  Severo: Zaida Krupin, Jinhai Han, Dayhi Tung. They said Ryan didn’t ride up with them that afternoon. He was in the showers when they left.

  “Ryan isn’t with them and he doesn’t show on any captures from the Nav lobby Wednesday afternoon. We’ve scanned for him in the morning shots but there’s no definite ID. No facial captures,” Nadia said.

  Therefore, Ryan had been murdered in view of the Athens tower camera while it was blind. It was that simple, wasn’t it? Except he hadn’t died in the SM hour.

  “We didn’t get far with that,” Helt said. “I have some theories about motive. I’d like to hear yours.”

  “I don’t get the sense of it, so I’m no help,” Jerry said. “What’s a good reason to kill somebody who’s going to be out of the picture anyway?”

  “Heh,” Helt said. “One possibility is that the event was a rage reaction and completely unplanned. I don’t want to completely discount that. When we collect enough strands of information from people who knew Ryan and weave them together, we’ll find someone he could have goaded into temporary insanity, whatever that is. But that net is not woven yet. The list of people who admit to even having a conversation with him is…”

  “Sparse,” Nadia said. “At the lower limits of probability.”

  STALKED BY RYAN:

  SUSANNA JAMBEKAR, ELENA MAURY

  WORKED WITH RYAN:

  ZAIDA ARENT, JINHAI HAN, DAYHI TUNG

  POSSIBLE ACQUAINTANCES:

  ORIOL BRUGUERA, KELLY HALKETT, MASAKA UEDA

  BOSSES:

  DAVID LUO I, DAVID LUO II

  OTHERS:

  YVES COPANI?

  ELENA MAURY

  VENKAT RAGHAVA

  Elena’s name was a weighted presence among the list of people who admitted to knowing Ryan. Weighted because she had lived with him and weighted because of her ride down the elevator at 2006. Jerry or Nadia could have mentioned it. They didn’t.

  “Maybe we can add a little density to this, increase the numbers a little,” Helt said. “Zaida Krupin, the woman in his work crew, introduced Ryan to a group of women, and that’s where Susanna Jambekar thinks Ryan first saw her,” Helt said. “Severo talked to Krupin, but maybe she knows something more. Could you find out about that, Jerry? I’ll be questioning four Seed Bankers today. Make that five. I’ll be talking to one of them this morning. At eleven.”

  Helt looked at the time counter on his screen. He had time for what he wanted to do next.

  “Sure, I’ll check out Zaida,” Jerry said. “On the concept that Ryan had information no one else had, I don’t know. I mean, there’s no indication the guy was a genius, or in contact with the high and mighty.”

  “The only high and mighty person who admits knowing who he was is David I,” Helt said. “If he had time-sensitive information about Ryan, he would have done something long before now. Or he would have told David II to do something.”

  Helt looked at updates in the David II section of Navigation’s logs and found a call to David II from David I. It had come in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Helt played David I’s calm words as a voiceover; the list of Ryan’s work locations was not long, Svalbard, Kitimat. Nothing in Northern California, and Helt wondered how Ryan had financed staying close to Elena in those years.

  “… but of course at the time I believed he had spent more time at Svalbard and Kitimat than he had. He had nothing to do with building Kybele’s engines; they were pushed over from China station. He had physical access to them, but never alone, EVA was always in teams. We tested the control systems as we brought them online.”

  “Maintenance on the thrusters is always ongoing,” David II said. “Any harm he might have tried to do would surely be nullified by now.”

  The engines at the North and South Poles were housed at the ends of long cylinders, access tunnels to get in and out of Kybele. The engines sat on two-tiered platforms, turntables, oriented so they were motionless relative to Earth for now and kept that way by constant thrust against the spin of the poles. The tier closer to the body of Kybele made a stable, zero-g landing site for incoming vessels. The cage of the plasma shield spindle originated there.

  NORTH POLE ENGINE AND EXTERNAL SHUTTLE ACCESS TUNNEL

  SOUTH POLE ENGINE AND EXTERNAL SHUTTLE ACCESS TUNNEL

  David I was listing the locations where Ryan had worked on his first tour.

  “We were a thousand strong, no more, in those years,” David I said. “We worked remote as much as we could, driving the bots from where the Nav lobby is now, but usually one or two people were out on EVA.”

  SHUTTLEPORT OPERATIONS COMPLEX, INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL

  “The sun was suspended in Center before I came up. We had power, and enough water had been cracked so you could breathe up there. Center’s fused glass floor was covered with wet black sand. The rivers were filling Second Sea. We had air in Athens, but we were still living in bubbles in the space where the Athens agora is now.”

  ATHENS AGORA BUBBLE LIVING QUARTERS

  “And those are the only places he was?” David II’s voice asked.

  “There weren’t many other places to be,” David I said. “Stonehenge had a few Level One caves, sealed, to use for test plots. Petra canyon wasn’t roofed over. You’ve looked through the shift logs and you know who was where then, every day.”

  “I have,” David II said. He attached Navigation logs from those years to the conversation. “But they cover only the hours when he was on shift. Thank you for helping me fill in the blanks, sir.”

  The rest was polite good-byes.

  “David II has looked over those records but we haven’t,” Helt said. “At the psych autopsy, David I said he planned to work fast on this. He did. This list came in only hours later,” Helt said. And shortly after that, Doughan had found something more important to do than set up interviews with Seed Bankers.

  There it was. The Special Investigator had not been informed. Helt was out of the loop. David II hadn’t mentioned this information; he probably thought Helt had reviewed it before they had talked. Or David II was up to something. Something that involved Doughan, or maybe something on his own. It was possible that David II was protecting David I from something Cash Ryan had learned, something he would have done as soon as he got back to Earth. Something about why Petra canyon was such a deep, impressively deep, gash. It just broke that way, was the standard story.

  Helt cleared his throat, definitively. “So we still don’t have a motive we can count on, and the guy died somewhere cold, sometime before the SM hour, and we know he stalked two women but that little fact about him didn’t come to light until he was dead. That’s what we have for four days’ work,” Helt said. “That’s not enough. I can’t stand this. I’m going walkabout.”

  Jerry and Nadia looked at him to see if he meant it.

  “I need fresh air. I need chocolate.” He could hope they would play along. He very deliberately took his interface out of his pocket and put it on the desk, out of sight beneath the rubber chicken. “Come with me?”

  They did, and their interfaces didn’t come with them. Jerry and Nadia
flanked Helt, one on either side. Once outside, Helt aimed for Venkie’s cart. It looked different this morning. Venkie had put walls of transparent siding under his awning, ready for winter.

  Helt set a slow, ambling pace through the dead zones of the agora. The tables outside the cafés looked sad and abandoned. The air was too chilly now for morning coffee sippers.

  The plan was to leave the tables outside until after the good-bye ceremonies for the last shuttle and then bring them in for winter. That day would be warm by design. But Elena and Helt would be going back to Earth, where weather is not scheduled by request, unless he found the real murderer in the next three days.

  “And what else do you need besides chocolate?” Jerry asked.

  “I need your help. I need you to help me disprove some paranoid suspicions of mine,” Helt said. “If you think they’re probable enough to be worth disproving, I’ll be asking you to hide information, alter it, and perhaps do other things. And all I can offer you in return is that I’ll take as much of the blame as is possible, if any comes your way. You’ll be acting on my behalf, so some of the stuff that pushes the boundaries of legal comes under the Special Investigator umbrella. I hope.”

  Jerry looked highly amused. Nadia looked worried. As well she might.

  “Pushes the boundaries of legal, eh? Keep talking, Helt,” Jerry said. “Tell us what’s really on your mind.”

  “I’m pretty sure Doughan spent a lot of time this weekend doing hands-on, real-time checks on anything Cash Ryan could have touched while he was here,” Helt said. “He didn’t put up a single flag that he was doing it.”

  “Was David II with him?” Nadia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Helt said.

  “Do you think they think Ryan tried to kill the ship?” Jerry asked.

  “You got it. That’s my paranoid suspicion,” Helt said. “And leaving me out of the loop, which they did, leaves me in an awkward position. If I call them on it, and I will, I’m sure they have a cover story ready. I’m going to act like I believe them and I’ll try to do it with a straight face.”

  “Do you think you can do that?” Nadia asked.

  “I plan to try,” Helt said.

  “As paranoid suspicions go, yours is world class,” Jerry said. “So we’re not really going out to buy breakfast. We’re heading for the closed suit lockers in Navigation, so we’ll have enough oxygen to watch the world blow up.”

  “I’m not quite that paranoid,” Helt said. “I think we’re safe enough. If Ryan did anything potentially lethal and Doughan thought he couldn’t abort the process with two men—”

  “Meaning Doughan and David II,” Nadia said.

  “Right,” Helt said. “If Doughan suspected kill-ship sabotage, he would call a high-alert inspection of every system on ship. He hasn’t. But I want to know what he suspected and what he plans to do about it. So I need your help.”

  “On the quiet,” Jerry said.

  “On the quiet.” Helt watched Nadia and Jerry make their assessments and read each other’s intentions as best they could. Jerry looked thoughtful. Nadia looked like she was constructing a complicated theorem involving risk and gain. “What about Severo?” Nadia asked. “He might be in a better position to—”

  “Severo’s a careful, loyal, man,” Helt said. “He follows chain of command, and some of the things I need require stepping outside that. I think I could convince him to spy on his boss, but convincing him I have good reason for doing it means I show him information I don’t have. Yet.”

  “And you need us to get it,” Jerry said.

  “I do. I need you to help me keep some secrets. If you want to back away from this, I understand completely, and I’ll play this alone as best I can.”

  “I’m okay with it,” Jerry said. “Nadia?”

  Nadia tossed her hair and took a deep breath. “I trust you,” she said.

  She must have done the extrapolations. She must have factored Helt’s concerns about the ship, about the amount of leg work left to be done, about his assessment of the threat to the power structure of her world as she knew it, and added in other things that Helt didn’t have time to think about. She was fast, and she read straws in the wind, and Helt admired her.

  “Thank you,” Helt said.

  They had paused at the edge of the tables on the sunny side of the agora. “Tell us what’s first, Helt.” Nadia frowned. “I know it’s sunny, but I’m getting cold out here.”

  They started walking again. “I need you to walk by and plant a handful of bots near Archer’s and Doughan’s quarters.”

  “Egad,” Jerry said. “Tradecraft!”

  “You’ll think of a way to do it, or you’ll get caught. We’ll deal with that if it happens. I don’t think you’ll be too obvious there, but then there’s Mena’s offices in Stonehenge.” Where Elena was in and out daily. He’d do it the next time he went up there. And plant some in Elena’s lab, too. “No, never mind on that. I can cover it, and you two don’t go up there that often.”

  “Littering is a misdemeanor at most,” Nadia said.

  “But we won’t get caught at it,” Jerry said.

  “Mena’s house as well. First, we set up a Huerfano system for information I don’t want to go to the cloud.” Or to the execs, but Helt didn’t say that. “We’ll run it parallel with real info that goes to NSS and Biosystems, but I plan to add some fake data to that if I need to. While we’re in the offices, let’s keep the chatter going, and the work. Stay honest for everything we can.”

  Venkie waited at his counter. In the shadow of the cart, the air was warmed by his ovens.

  “Good morning,” Jerry said.

  “Good Monday morning to all of you. Seven?” Venkie asked. He had a sack open and his tongs at the ready.

  “You know it,” Jerry said.

  “That would be a wise choice for caloric restraint. However, I should tell you that this morning I made the usual breakfast samosas, and others filled with roasted pears,” Venkie said. “I think you will find them pleasant.”

  “I think, then, ten,” Helt said. “Five standard, five pear.”

  Venkie slid the pastries, steaming, into the bag. “I see you are still not able to announce that the murder of Cash Ryan is now a matter of history.”

  “Not yet.” Nadia’s words were not emphasized. They were simply a matter-of-fact statement.

  “You say that with such assurance that I am sure the ship, like this sack”—Venkie handed the sack to Nadia and offered her a little bow—“is in good hands.”

  Nadia smiled and returned the bow.

  “What are you hearing?” Helt asked. He pressed his thumb to Venkie’s screen and paid for this morning’s treats.

  “I am hearing of impatience to be on our way,” Venkie said. “I am hearing of sorrow about that as well. I am not hearing people talk about Cash Ryan.”

  “But if you do,” Helt said.

  “I will listen carefully.”

  “Thank you,” Helt said.

  Halfway back across the agora, Helt said, “We can’t spend the day walking back and forth to dead zones out here so we can talk. I’m going to be in Stonehenge and down on Level Two with Doughan today. If I call you for face-to-face, download the silences, okay?”

  “RSA?” Jerry asked.

  “Oldie but goodie,” Helt said. “With a letter macro for an access key. I haven’t made one up yet.”

  “Nidag,” Nadia said. “N-I-D-A-G.” She traced the letters in the air as she said them.

  “Okay,” Helt said. “Nine days. I can remember that.” It was norsk, and it sounded sorta like Nidhogg, the serpent who gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil. He supposed Nadia had read the bio of Helt Borresen at some point.

  He shrugged and followed Nadia and Jerry through the atrium and into the group office. Nadia went to the microwave stand, divided the pastries into groups of three plus one of four, and put the four into a sack. Jerry chatted with someone in Navigation and then called Zaida Krupin, wh
o had been on Ryan’s work team and had introduced him to Susanna Jambekar.

  “Noon?” Jerry said. “I’ll meet you.”

  Nidhogg translated as “gnawer of corpses.” Helt didn’t like the concept of necrophagia at all, even for the purposes of divination. Odin woke the dead, that was spooky, but he didn’t wake them to eat them. Only to question them. They cursed him and what they wanted most was to be at rest again.

  “We need to review Venkie’s Wednesday again,” Helt said. “List everyone who bought food before he closed, and then collate that with the list of people who went down the elevator to Level Two that day, minus the people who came back up before the SM hour.”

  “I’ll do that if you get out of here and let us work,” Nadia said. “Or maybe you’d rather be late to the interview you set up with Mena.”

  The time and date alert on Helt’s screen flashed red, courtesy of Jerry.

  “I’m gone,” Helt said. He pulled a handful of bots out of his pockets and laid them next to Nadia’s screen.

  “Wait!” Jerry said. “Don’t forget your interface.” Jerry rummaged for it under the rubber chicken and held it up.

  “Or your jacket,” Nadia said without looking up from her screen.

  His jacket was in his office. Helt grabbed his interface, doubled back for his windbreaker, and hustled to get to the station before the next train left for Stonehenge.

  24

  Kicking the Anthill

  Mena wasn’t in her office yet. Helt palmed the bots to the lintels of her door and turned back to look at the world. The air was chilly and the morning mist was turning into real clouds. From where Helt stood, with a good view of the dark slash of Petra canyon, he couldn’t see his private rock. A campground was going to be built anti-spinward of the little mesa someday. He’d seen the blueprints, the places where more shafts would be bored from Center to Level Two and fitted with elevators and staircases. He was glad they weren’t here yet. He didn’t need more ways into Center than he was dealing with already.

  He saw Kybele through a lens of time, its population grown to that of a medium-sized city, its climates and crops moving through periods of tropical heat and wet, and then, as the ship slowed to approach its destination, testing crop strategies, technical strategies, to try out on the new world. And he wondered if he ever saw anything for itself, as it was and not as it would be, as it was and not as a construct made of its past and its future.