by Sage Walker
“Or he could have thought it was a ploy by someone who really wanted his attention.” Elena leaned forward and got the unopened water bottle from the desk.
“But he didn’t know who.”
“Fingerprints?”
“When you walk in there, the workstation that’s closest is the center one. The commander’s position. Doughan had already used the keyboard; that’s how he found the glitch, so he’d messed up the fingerprints Cash left.”
“That’s where you sat down,” Elena said.
“Right.”
Elena drank some of her water and screwed the cap back on the bottle. “So Doughan saw what happened, and fixed it, and then he waited. He might have checked to see if someone who had access had pulled the stunt.”
“Archer.” There, Helt had said the other name he didn’t want to say. Archer fumbling through half-light, so fragile now. Helt hadn’t wanted to see it, and Archer was involved in this, at least in the Seed Banker misdirection, and that was bad. Very bad. “The first thought would be software. But I’ll bet he didn’t call Archer on it. The next move would be to see how long it would be before Archer got antsy, if Doughan thought Archer was yanking his chain for some reason. So he waited, for a little while, but not very long, because he wasn’t thinking about Archer, he was thinking…”
“He was thinking about everyone who had any business in the control room,” Elena said, “and if any of them could really be trusted, because they had to be trusted, but if they couldn’t…”
“If they couldn’t, then he didn’t know who to look for,” Helt said. “He had to wait for the culprit to contact him, and he had to reevaluate every security system on this ship. He had to walk in and out of that closed room and look at everything in it and wonder what else was compromised.”
“It must have been hell for him,” Elena said.
“It took a kind of self-control I can’t even imagine. Steel nerves. And then Ryan called him.”
Wednesday, October 18. The list of interface calls, every last one of them on Kybele that day, tagged for Cash Ryan/Wesley Doughan. The system had to find at least one, and didn’t.
No matches.
Not going to be that easy.
October.
No matches.
“Let’s be archaic,” Elena said. “Ryan slipped a note under the door for Doughan to find.”
“To find Wednesday morning when he came in.”
“A week. Seven days. It’s a symbolic interval,” Elena said.
“And Doughan read it and went to the changing room, Wednesday morning, and could have grabbed him by the ear and called Severo to take him away. But he didn’t.” From the brief, nondescript records on Cash Ryan, could Doughan have suspected the guy was a nutcase? “Doughan would have looked over Ryan’s record that morning, what there was of it. There’s no evidence of IT expertise in it, or of training by any agency that uses tradecraft. But Ryan entered the ship’s sanctum sanctorum and set off no alarms at all. Doughan wouldn’t have alerted Severo or asked David II, because…”
“Because?” Elena asked.
“Because he wanted to know what else Ryan might have done.”
Helt looked up and met Elena’s gaze. She was staring at him and past him. “And wanted to question him in a place where no one was watching.” She nodded, slowly.
“So Doughan told him to come to his office after he’d worked his shift.”
Elena shook her head. “Close. But what he told him was to come to the Athens stairwell.”
“Right. Because they aren’t on camera in the Athens lobby, those two. That leaves the problem of Cash wearing civvies, or a coverall with a busted heat pack,” Helt said.
“Doughan has a coverall rolled up under his arm,” Elena said.
“So he didn’t have to knock Cash out and carry him down the stairs. What about the food? The samosas? The drinks. Oops. There’s something I haven’t checked yet.” He looked for the list of faces pulled from Venkie’s camera that day. All day. Jerry or Nadia had run the list in alphabetical order. Doughan had been there, at lunch hour, Wednesday. Helt turned Doughan’s name red for Elena to see. “‘Here, put on this coverall, and we’ll have a snack and some booze, right here on the stairwell.’ Elena, that doesn’t make sense.”
“So they ate in Doughan’s office,” Elena said.
“That seems most likely,” Helt said. “But the cameras don’t show them in the Nav lobby, either.”
“They climbed up and over, like you did.”
“Not at that hour. Not from the changing room. There’s too many people around. Maybe from the control room. That’s private enough.” No way they’d had a nice social chat in the stairwell. They’d been in Doughan’s office, damn it. It was the only place that made sense. But they weren’t on video in the Nav lobby or on the train ride to Athens. Too many captures were missing and the SM had lasted only an hour. Something was terribly wrong.
“Elena,” Helt said. He got up from his chair and walked in a circle.
“What’s going on? What is it?”
“We have to go back to the tower. We have to see where you were.”
“We won’t see much. It’s dark, Helt.”
Elena’s deer had run the night Cash Ryan crashed down into the trees. “I mean we have to go back through it. Something went terribly wrong Wednesday night. Something is wrong with the timeline. You were watching the deer. They’re chipped. You track them. You said they moved Wednesday night, and you said they ran in the wind, and they don’t like wind.”
“Yes, but—”
“When? When did they run?” Helt sat down again.
Elena watched him. Her eyes didn’t leave his face and she shifted a little in her chair to get farther away from him. “I … I showed you as much as I could. It didn’t help.”
“I’m sorry,” Helt said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” It’s here somewhere, he thought. Please, he thought. Please. He pulled her chair closer and pushed a keyboard under her hands. “Show me where they were Wednesday.”
She brought up a terrain map of Center, then zoomed in on the area beneath Athens tower. He saw the creek, the meadow, the dark green of the trees that bordered it. The trees were overlaid with little dots.
“The dots are the deer herd?”
Elena nodded.
“You said the deer moved, that they’d been in the meadow and then went into the stand of ponderosa where the body came down.” Helt said. “I see them.”
“I told you the deer weren’t where we saw them on Tuesday. They stayed in the area most of the day Wednesday, but not in the meadow. Under the trees. Usually they come out to graze when it gets dark, but they didn’t, probably because of the wind. They had moved to the shelter of the ponderosa, but they moved again before I went up to the tower. They ran.”
The dots that marked the positions of the deer erupted from the ponderosa and ran anti-spinward, toward Petra, slowed when they found the scrub oak thicket Elena had pointed out from the tower, moved close to one another again. One by one, they found places to rest.
“They ran. Something spooked them and they ran.” Helt grabbed the keyboard. The wind, the evening wind. On Wednesday it had come up around 1700, was at max by 1800, gusty and strong enough to carry Cash Ryan’s body half a k. It had died down to a breeze by the time Elena got up there. “When did they run?”
“Around 1900. A little before. I checked on them a couple of times Wednesday evening. I looked for them again while I was waiting for the train. I backed up the timeline to see if I could figure out why they had moved so far, so fast. I almost didn’t notice when the train got there.”
Helt found the entry.
1852.
“They spooked right here. Eighteen fifty-two,” he said.
“Yes.”
He clicked through codes and found the train records from Stonehenge Wednesday night, the departure times, the location of Elena’s interface. “You were where you said you
were. Your interface shows you at the Stonehenge station.” He zoomed the time stamps from her herd records so they were huge on the screen. “Eighteen fifty-four Wednesday. That’s when you accessed this. At the Stonehenge station. But that’s not the thing. Not all of the thing. Elena, you found when Cash Ryan came down from the tower. That’s what spooked the deer. I’ll bet on it. And it wasn’t during the outage. It was eight minutes before that.”
She looked at the screen and at him, and past him, her eyes wide, focused on possibilities and then on his face. “And I wasn’t there then.”
FALL FROM ATHENS TOWER: 1852.
“You weren’t there then.”
Maybe it wasn’t real to her yet. Maybe it wasn’t real to him. There would be consequences when he did what he was about to do. Evans might see the clearance and put it together with the time of the SM hour. She might not. He wanted to enter the time of the fall and smattering of data they had gleaned this evening into the Huerfano, Doughan’s actions, the suspicions surrounding Archer like a thick cloud, but that needed a cautious hand, some explanations, even for Jerry and Nadia to see. And he had searches to do, hours of searches.
Even so. Helt flicked a few keys and brought up the colors, black letters on deep glowing gold.
ALIBIED
He scrolled the list, names rolling by in alphabetical order.
LE, GUIREN, SYSSU
MAURY, ELENA, BIOSYSTEMS
MIRIN, AKUA, SYSSU
“Better?” he asked.
Elena looked up at the screen. Her eyes narrowed and her face looked grim, not happy. “It’s real,” she said.
“It’s recorded, so it must be real.” Helt leaned over the arm of his chair and kissed her. Her muscles were rigid with tension. That there was no doubt of her innocence hadn’t come home to her yet.
It was a good kiss, but the chairs were in the way. He got to his feet and lifted her and held her close, so close. He stroked her hair. “It’s real,” he whispered. “It’s real.” In his arms, she began to relax a little. He expected sobs, and waited for them, but Elena didn’t do that. He held her, but he couldn’t stop thinking.
He would enter the data in the Huerfano and search the files and find when and where the camera records had been so carefully altered, because Cash Ryan had been hauled up that tower when the elevator camera was live, and that changed everything. “You’re just like your father,” his mother had said. He really was just like his father, but he was beginning to sort out that what his mother called cold and undemonstrative had been a mask over worry, or a way to distance himself. Helt wanted to bawl like a baby, to laugh until he cried, to share Elena’s relief and the fatigue that would surely follow.
After a time, she leaned back in his arms and looked him over in that clinical way she had sometimes. “It’s good. I’m good. Really I am. You want to keep working,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t sleep even if you came to bed.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Finish this in two hours so we can get back to our lives?” Elena asked.
She had heard Nadia say it, or Jerry, or Helt. She had spent so much time listening, hoping. If only he could let her, let everyone, get back to their lives. He wanted to tell her he regretted all the anxious hours she’d spent, the anger, the hurt, the stress. He wanted to lie to her and say, “Sure,” but that would be so unfair.
“I won’t be able to do that.”
“I know,” Elena said.
“I want you safe. Things could get dicey tonight, and I want you safe. I want you home safe. Someone from NSS is tailing you. Someone will follow you on the train. Someone will watch your house all night. Try to sleep, beloved. Please try.”
“I’ll try,” Elena said. “I’ll keep the interface on my pillow. I’ll feel better if I know I can hear you.”
“In that case, we should get it from Nadia’s office,” Helt said.
28
No There, There, Yet
Helt found it, a segment of time from the Athens elevator gone, deleted, vanished. It had been an easy fix; the camera’s state was null unless something moved. Only a few ticks in the timeline replaced whatever had been removed. The marker was right there. The SM time, the real one, ran from 1850 through 2000.
What he felt was anger, bitter anger. His beloved SysSu was full of incompetent idiots, people who didn’t look at what they did or why they did it, or the extension to the SM hour would have been spotted. SysSu and NSS had stayed inside the box of one hour and ten minutes, confined by that boundary like mice in a cage. And who the hell was he blaming for that?
Helt Borresen was the incompetent idiot he had in mind.
File it. Put it away. He would pay for it in the middle of the night, some night years from now when he should be worrying about something else.
We didn’t really stay there, he reminded himself. We’ve been looking for anything from the end of Ryan’s shift to the time he was found dead. It’s just that we sort of drew a box around the sacred SM hour.
Helt walked himself down the hall to the lounge and back again, went to the public version of the Murder Mess and increased the time frame from sixty to seventy minutes. He watched, with satisfaction, as Elena Maury’s name moved to its new location, way, way out in the Oort cloud.
He added the time of the fall and the place of death. The vault’s location exerted its force on the construct. A lot of Stonehenge and Petra dwellers joined Elena out in the periphery, well beyond reasonable suspicion. They were not close enough to the elevator. They had position locators on file before or after 1850 and couldn’t have made it from home to do the deed and get back again. A hell of a lot of other names from Athens went scooting, because an hour and ten minutes was the new, improved, critical time, and now all that was needed was to fill in who rode the elevator that night in that invisible space.
That’s not that different from where we started, Helt realized. Except now it feels different. Really different. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Evans said.
“Yeah,” Helt said. “There’s some other stuff coming at you. Documentation on where Elena Maury was during the time of the fall.”
He sent the data to the version of the Murder Management files that NSS saw, that the morning shift would see in here. There were a few minutes of satisfying silence.
“Congratulations! Congratulations to both of you! Does Dr. Maury know?” Evans asked.
“Yes,” Helt said.
“Oh, that’s wonderful! I was so worried about her.”
“So was I,” Helt said. He was grinning like an idiot, and glad no one could see him.
But he didn’t know who had killed Cash Ryan, not yet.
The hack came from someone in SysSu. One of ours. There were two techs here that night, maybe more people than that. You couldn’t run what they ran on remote; if they’d done the deed they’d done it here.
The access records said the techs left a trail that evening, like everyone else here and most of the population of Kybele. Not on a security camera in SysSu. SysSu had nothing so primitive. Interface use was constant on the premises. Chatter, appointment schedules, info searches, inside SysSu there was no way not to leave trails everywhere.
The techs had left trails Wednesday night. They were demonstrably in SysSu for an hour before the SM. The techs would have known if Archer was here, or maybe they wouldn’t. Archer came and went whenever he wanted and stayed sequestered in his office for hours without coming out.
Oh, shit. Archer didn’t have to be here that night. Archer had hardwired access to SysSu in his quarters. He was the exec. He’d built the network. An offsite location was a security precaution. He’d implied he was home eating galaktoboureko, and he probably had been.
Helt went to Archer’s office. He unlocked the drawer where Archer had stashed Cash Ryan’s home unit. He picked up the sack and hauled it back to Nadia’s office. His fingerprints were going to be all over the thing and he could have cared less. F
ingerprints, even Archer’s, would say so much less than a record of tampering, if there was one. Helt dug the innards out of the machine and hooked up the transfer cables that would strip everything out for review.
Split screen of the data that came up and the records Jerry had made of it that night matched all the way down.
Archer hadn’t tampered with it since it went in his drawer. Archer had messed with the Athens elevator timeline. But messing with timelines didn’t mean he’d killed anyone. It meant he’d helped Doughan cover up a trip up the Athens elevator.
Wait a minute. More than one trip.
The Athens elevator camera should have had very little down time at shift change Wednesday evening, and it didn’t. The captures were less frequent after that bulge, as expected. But they didn’t show Wesley Doughan, and David II said Doughan had gone to the bar that evening.
DOUGHAN, WEDNESDAY 18, THE LAB, 1630
The elevator didn’t show him going up or down at any time after noon. He could have taken the stairs. Cameras didn’t show him on the staircase, either. Or the staircase camera record had been nipped away, too.
Right there. Two little blips, neat little excisions of a time segment from the lobby camera that watched the elevator exit stairs. Any captures that might have been recorded between sixteen twenty and sixteen thirty-seven replaced by blank nothing.
It was objective. Doughan’s location was verifiable via David II. Therefore, Doughan’s travel had been erased that evening.
Helt added Doughan’s deleted stairwell trip and Archer’s likely role in hiding it to the factors in the Huerfano Murder Mess. The two execs hovered near Cash Ryan, flimsy wraiths, soap bubbles. But no one else circled him that closely.
Archer and Doughan were not stupid men. If Doughan had done this thing, he’d been convinced that the danger was so great, the risk so near, that he needed a quick answer from Cash Ryan.
Archer had covered for him after the fact; put that aside.
Transparency had been violated. Charges needed to be filed immediately, arrests should be made; crime was crime and justice must be done. Put that aside because Doughan was still prowling somewhere. That meant he hadn’t found out what Ryan had done yet and he believed, he was completely convinced, that it wasn’t something trivial.