“Nice place,” I said.
“It’s not bad for a remote outpost.” He smiled.
Not bad, indeed. It made me question the priorities of the colonial administration. But that wasn’t my job, and it would only serve to keep me at the party longer, so I let it go. “So, Governor, what can you tell me about the disappearance of Xyla Redstone?”
“Ah, yes. Straight to it then. Unfortunate business, that. Tragic.”
I waited once he stopped speaking. Surely, he had more to say. The silence grew awkward, until finally I said, “Do you have any thoughts on what might have happened?”
“I . . . ahhh . . . yes, well, the military did an investigation. I’m sure there’s a report.”
He hadn’t read it. He’d rejected the military findings and kept restrictions in place without even knowing what it said. “There is. It seems pretty open and shut.”
He nodded. “Perhaps. We felt it was best to let you look at it. There are a lot of people interested.”
“Like who?” He looked away and fidgeted, and I almost felt bad for pushing him. It clearly made him uncomfortable. But he was the governor. Sometimes when they put you in charge, you had to actually deal with things.
“Well, of course there are the authorities who sent you. They were very clear that you be given every deference. And there’s interest here, of course, too. Your arrival has been one of the biggest events of the season.”
Events of the season? I paused for a moment, trying to assess whether he was pulling my leg, but his demeanor didn’t shift. He appeared to be serious. What could I do? I played along. “Well, it’s an honor to be here.”
He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “Indeed! If there is anything you need from my office, you just reach out.”
“Thank you, Governor. I’ll do that.” By unspoken mutual agreement, we headed back out the doors and into the throng, which had fully broken down into small groups. The governor split off from me, greeting a large woman in white from across the room as if she was his long lost relative. I headed for the bar, unsure of what I’d learned or why he’d wanted to talk to me alone. It felt perfunctory—like he knew he was supposed to pull me aside, so he did. If I gave him more credit, I might have thought he did it for someone else’s benefit. He could tell people that he laid down the law with me, and nobody could refute him. He didn’t seem that shrewd, though, and I started to understand what Oxendine had said about him earlier.
I sat in a tall wooden chair and Fader took the one next to me just as my drink arrived. “I haven’t been able to get much more from the room,” she said.
“Tell me about it. The governor appears to be a dead end.” I sipped my drink. At least they had good booze. “How long do you think we have to stay to not create a political scandal?”
She pursed her lips, thinking. “Another half hour, sir. Maybe a little more. I can suggest that we’re feeling the effects of the space travel then.”
“Tomorrow I want you to come back.” I hadn’t planned on using Fader as part of the investigation, but my conversation with the governor changed that. Someone in his organization would be competent, even though it might not be him. Oxendine had mentioned Davidson, but I wanted a less-biased opinion. “Talk to the people in the governor’s office. Somebody here has to know what they’re doing . . . I’d like to know who it is.”
“Yes, sir. You want me to see what I can get from them?”
“If it’s not awkward. Mostly I want to know who’s calling the shots, who has influence, that sort of thing. We may not need it for the investigation, but it doesn’t hurt to know the lay of the land. If they know anything about the missing person, even better.”
“Yes, sir. So what do we do tonight?”
I lifted my glass. “Tonight, we drink.”
We left once others started to trickle out—early, but not the first to leave. I expected the night air to be cooler, but of course it wasn’t, since night inside the bubble was artificial. No stars twinkled overhead, but I couldn’t tell if the dome’s canopy had gone opaque or a cloud cover in the night sky outside caused that. The crowd that had protested my arrival had mercifully dispersed, so Mac headed across the compound to get our cart.
Someone bowled into me, almost causing me to lose my balance. I whirled, ready to fight, only to find a thin older woman rubbing her knee from where she’d scraped it on the step. A chubby man rushed over to us. “I’m so sorry. Lania, are you okay?”
“I’m . . . fineth.” She slurred her words. I almost laughed. I’d just had my fight-or-flight reflex triggered by a drunk woman falling on the stairs. I needed to relax.
He looked back to me. “So sorry.”
“No worries.” I helped him get the wobbly woman to her feet.
“Colonel Butler!” A voice called from up the stairs and I turned back to the mansion to find Cora Davidson hurrying toward us.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“The governor asked me to tell you that if you need anything at all while you’re here that you should let him know.”
I stared at her for a second, feeling like she was putting me on. “He already told me that.”
“He was very insistent that I tell you before you leave, sir.”
“Okay then. Consider me informed.”
“Sir . . . if I might suggest . . .”
“Spit it out, Davidson.”
“If you need anything from the governor, let me know, and I’ll make sure it happens.”
Ah. Now I had it. Davidson wanted to make sure I knew it was she who could help, either because she knew the governor himself couldn’t, or for more nefarious reasons. It felt like the latter, like she was either trying to control the currency of information within her organization or trying to curry favor with me by helping me. Maybe both. No wonder Oxendine had called her a snake. “Sure thing.”
“Bomb!” Mac’s distinctive voice rang out from the line of parked carts, and it took me just a split second to register him running toward me.
I reacted faster than Fader and reached for the drunk lady. “Help her up the stairs!” Her husband spun about in confusion until Fader grabbed his arm and pointed him up the stairs.
It’s hard to describe an explosion—so much happens at one time. The flash, the sound, the force—academically, I know they happen sequentially, but in practice, at short range, they’re so close together that they may as well be simultaneous. I’d almost made it up the stairs when the force of it threw me onto my stomach. I caught myself with my hands just before my face slammed into the stone.
Mac and Fader recovered quicker than I did and both made it to their feet. Mac had a pistol out, while Fader, unarmed, scanned the area, looking for additional threats. I turned to look for Davidson but didn’t see her. The couple we’d been helping stayed down, the woman bleeding from her chin and moaning but otherwise appearing unhurt.
I scrambled to my feet and looked up, worried about the dome that protected us from the outside environs, but a quick scan showed no cracks. That made sense—it would need to be strong in this environment. I ran down the stairs toward the source of the explosion. The smoking chassis of our cart sat on the ground, only one wheel remaining, wobbling on what remained of the back axle. The vehicle next to it lay on its side, heat radiating from the flames that danced at its insides. The acrid smell of frying electronics assaulted my nose and made my eyes water as I ran to another vehicle, looking for a fire extinguisher.
Mac appeared beside me, followed closely by Fader. “Sir, let’s get away from here, in case there are secondaries.”
“Right,” I said, a bit in shock, and I let him lead me back the way I’d come. People had started to stream out of the mansion, probably drawn by the sound. Somewhere in the distance an alarm wailed. It took four minutes and forty-five seconds for the military to arrive and only a few seconds more for them to secure the area. They forced the civilians who hadn’t been there for the attack to go back inside.
It
took several minutes more until someone in charge made the connection between my team and the cart, and they pulled Mac away to ask him some questions. They were a bit more hesitant to talk to me, but eventually a captain named Yolin showed up, and after consulting with the lieutenant previously in charge, made her way over. By that time, I’d recovered from my initial shock and moved on to anger at whoever had done this.
“Are you okay, sir?” Yolin stood a head shorter than me, which was pushing the limits for military service.
“My hands are scraped up a bit, but other than that, I’m fine.”
“No headache?”
“Not yet. It’s probably coming.” I held up my hands, which were shaking. Adrenaline dump.
“Did you lose consciousness?”
“No. Are you the medical officer?” She wasn’t. It was a dick question. The attack pissed me off, but Yolin wasn’t responsible for that. I needed to soften my tone, but I couldn’t.
“Just routine questions.”
“How about we get to the important ones?” She was asking easy questions to get me used to answering her before getting to the important ones, but I didn’t have the patience for that. “I’m not going to lie to you, so you can save the interrogation technique for someone else.”
She transitioned without a hitch. “Do you think you were the target, sir?”
“Is there another way to see it?”
“There are always different ways to see things.” She was good, not rising to my bait, which was still me being an asshole because someone had blown up my vehicle. She also didn’t call me on it, which would have made things worse. “Let’s try it another way. Is there anyone who might want to do you harm?”
“Half the galaxy?” I offered.
She cracked a smile at that, despite trying not to. “Anyone specific?”
“The obvious answer—the one you probably already have—is that there was a group of people protesting my arrival a few hours back. I’m sure they’re on camera. Did cameras catch anything around the vehicle while we were inside? It was parked right there with the others. There had to be coverage.”
“Our team is checking that, sir. I don’t have the answer yet.”
“The obvious answer is EPV. They don’t like me.” I left unsaid that the obvious answer wasn’t always the right one. She’d know that, and I was trying to dial back the asshole.
“Who knew you were here?”
“I’m pretty sure everyone did. The governor’s guest list was distributed wide enough that it might as well have been public.”
She made a note in her device. “I’d like to put a security team with you en route back to your quarters, sir, if that’s okay.”
“Absolutely.” I didn’t think someone would try again so soon, but I didn’t need to take chances.
Four soldiers joined us and we took two military carts back to our quarters. “I’m moving in with you, sir, unless you’ve got any strong objections,” said Mac.
“No objection. There’s plenty of room.”
Mac turned to the soldier in charge. “Can you have your people move the bed from my room into the colonel’s place? Just set it in the entry room.”
“Can do, Sergeant,” said the corporal. “But it’s not necessary. My orders are to keep a two-person team on the door until further notice.”
“You can do what you want on the outside,” said Mac. “I still want you to move the bed.”
“Roger that.”
Mac left the soldiers and planted himself at my side. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. The pissed-off look on his face said it all. Anyone who wanted to come at me right then was going to have to go through him.
Chapter Five
Mac, Fader, and I stood inside my quarters. Even with Mac’s newly delivered bed against the wall, we had more than enough space. I poured myself a drink and held up the bottle to the others as an offer. Mac shook his head, which didn’t surprise me. Fader said, “Yes, sir, I could go for one,” which did. To be fair, she didn’t drink at the reception. I had, and I still needed one to calm down after the botched attack.
I handed her a glass with a heavy pour and a few ice cubes. “To be clear, we’re all in agreement that we were the target of that attack, right?”
“I hate to rule anything out.” Fader considered her drink, watching the swirls in the liquor where the ice melted. “But in this case, I think we’re in the high ninetieth percentile for likelihood. There’s something off, though.”
“What?” I asked.
Fader swirled her liquor in its glass. “Why did the bomb go off?”
She had a point that I couldn’t answer. Once Mac noticed the bomb, there was no point in detonating it unless they thought he was still close enough that it would get him. I took a sip of whiskey, savoring the taste. “I don’t know. Mac, what did you see?”
“I was checking the vehicle, doing my walkaround like I always do before we use it. There was a rectangular thing below it with wires hanging out that hadn’t been there before. Not hard to spot, but I didn’t hang around long enough to get a look at the trigger mechanism. I ran.”
“I listened in when the EOD techs were discussing what they found,” said Fader. “It actually had two triggers: one GPS-activated and the other a remote.”
“Interesting,” I said. “I assume the GPS was the primary and that it would have detonated after a certain distance?” That wasn’t uncommon. A lot of missiles and rockets worked on the same principle. That way, if you dropped them, they didn’t blow up. Thinking about the attack clinically helped clear the emotion from it and relaxed me even more than the alcohol.
“It was probably tied to a specific location,” she said.
I considered it. “There was only the one way out of the governor’s dome that I saw. Every vehicle had to go through the tunnel. Maybe they tied the detonation to that choke point.”
Mac spoke up. “That would work if they wanted to get the explosion away from the mansion and avoid collateral damage. People were walking out, and it would be hard to predict who might be around when it went off.”
“That’s definitely a sign of a targeted assassination attempt rather than a terrorist attack,” said Fader. She was right. A terrorist would want more casualties, not fewer.
“Well, this certainly made things more interesting,” I said.
“Interesting?” Fader choked a little on her drink. “Sir, we could be dead.”
“And yet we’re not.” I noticed then that her hand holding the glass was shaking. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be flippant. You do get used to it, if that helps.”
“Get used to what?” she asked.
“People trying to kill you. It’s like anything else. It gets easier after the first time.” She probably thought I was trying to act tough, but what else could I say? You can get used to anything.
She downed her drink. “If you say so, sir. But I think maybe there’s some survivorship bias in there.”
“Probably. For now, let’s focus on what happens next. Obviously, the stakes are higher. We don’t know if whoever tried this will try again or if they’ll go to ground.”
“I’m planning for them to try again,” said Mac.
“You definitely do that,” I said. “But it will be harder for them, now that we’re expecting something. There must be cameras all over the colony. Let’s figure out where they are and how to access them.”
“I can work that tomorrow,” said Fader. “What do we think was the motive of the bomber?”
“Stop the colonel’s investigation,” said Mac.
“That seems most likely,” I said.
“Roger, sir. I agree.” Fader had stopped shaking. I didn’t know if it was the liquor or, like me, she did better once she had something to do. One way to get past a tough moment was to get on to the next one.
Now if only I could do the same. I had to try to keep the investigation professional, but I didn’t see how I could. I showed up to do an inves
tigation and someone tried to kill me to keep me from it. Farric had played me.
We didn’t do anything the next day because they wouldn’t let us leave our rooms. I raised a fuss—I even demanded to see the general—but an officer assured me that Oxendine had given the order for us to stay put while they investigated and that me running around would just make it harder. I concurred with her in theory, and probably would have made the same decision in her spot. That didn’t mean I liked it. They did let Fader come to my rooms instead of having to sit alone in her own, and she used the time to go through Xyla’s phone logs and emails, which she had requested the previous day. After a few hours, she gave me an update.
“She didn’t seem to have any relationships,” said Fader. “Not romantic ones, anyway. I didn’t have access to her work email. Caliber would have that, but I didn’t think to request it from them. But even her personal email is almost all business. She appears to be a loyal shopper, going with just a couple companies, but the things she ordered are all things you’d expect . . . clothes, boots, media. Nothing that gives a clue.”
“Well, we didn’t expect much, right?” I asked.
“Definitely a long shot, sir. The phone and text logs give us a bit more, though. There’s a long text string with someone named Mae Eddleston. I’d say they were business colleagues, but also friends. It’s really the only thing anywhere in the records that indicates that she even had a friend.”
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