Colonyside

by Michael Mammay

  Lawyer One started over, but he had the same asshole tone. “You asked about compensation for the families. Unfortunately, that’s beyond our control here on Eccasis. You’d have to take that up with corporate headquarters, and even then, they might refer you to our insurer.”

  “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.” At least not to me. Asshole. “As you know, my focus is on one specific presumed dead person, but I don’t think it’s too far out of my purview to look into the others as well, since it was a single incident and it seems likely that they all presumably died the same way.” Now I was being a bit of an asshole, but they deserved it.

  “We’re here to assist in any way we can.”

  I wondered if the other two would speak at all or if they had just come along for moral support. Despite his words, I didn’t believe the three of them were likely to help at all, but I did expect Caliber as a whole to cooperate. After all, Zentas had been the one who asked me to come. “Great. I’d like the full personnel file on each of the missing persons, records of all their communications on company servers, and I’d like a list of the personnel who were on the simultaneous missions. Additionally, I’d like their contact information here on Eccasis so that I can talk to them. And that includes Ms. Redstone’s emails and official company communications as well, please.”

  “I will pass the request for the emails to the IT department. The personnel records are a matter of privacy. We can’t release them without the permission of the subject of the record.”

  Of course they couldn’t. He confirmed my initial judgment that they weren’t here to help. “The subjects of the records are dead.”

  “Presumed dead. Our hands are tied here. As for the other personnel, I’ll have someone check to see which of them are still colonyside and find out if they are available.”

  He was stonewalling me, but I’d been given the brush-off by better men than him. I got the feeling that it was more a matter of habit than a legit cover-up, so I decided to call him on it. “For someone who said that he was here to help in any way possible, you’re not being particularly helpful. You know who asked me to do this investigation, right?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we have to follow the law.”

  Now he was being smug, and I wanted to call Mac in and let him punch the guy in the neck. Maybe he didn’t know Zentas had requested me. If not, I wasn’t going to inform him. I’d let Stroud deal with that. Let him embarrass himself. “And I’m sorry, but you’re pissing me off, and if you keep it up, we’re going to find out how malleable the law is when I report your recalcitrance to the authorities who appointed me. You’ve been apprised of my charter, yes?”

  Lawyer One looked like he’d bitten into something sour, and he glanced at the woman with him like he was hoping for a lifeline. He’d probably planned to BS me and make me go away with as little fuss as possible. Unfortunately for him, I didn’t mind fuss. Nobody would fire me over ruffling a few feathers. I don’t think the same could be said for Lawyer One. “We will do our best,” he said, finally, “to make the members of the other teams available at your convenience.”

  “That would be great. If they’re here, of course. I don’t want to put you through too much trouble.” I gave him my best fake smile. I’m no lawyer, but I’ve had a lot of practice being a dick. “We could start, say . . . tomorrow.”

  Lawyer One drew his lips into a fine line but nodded once.

  “Great. I’ll see you then.”

  I was halfway back to my quarters when my device buzzed. I checked it—Oxendine—and then answered. “Butler.”

  “It’s Ox. We’ve got the bomber in custody.”

  “That’s great—”

  She cut me off. “There’s a problem. Meet me at the governor’s office as fast as you can get there.”

  “Roger,” I said, but she’d already hung up. I turned to Mac. “You hear that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It was odd. What kind of problem?”

  “Only one way to find out,” said Mac. “I wish we’d taken a cart.”

  “I don’t know. The last cart didn’t fare so well.”

  Fifteen minutes later we reached the governor’s offices, which shared the same sub-dome as his residence. The blocky two-story building had small windows and a faux-stone exterior. An aide I hadn’t met before met us at the door and ushered me down the hall and into a conference room. Oxendine’s aide stood outside the door, and I left Mac with her.

  Inside the well-appointed conference room, Oxendine paced up and down along on the far side of a long polished-wood table with such vigor that I thought she might wear a hole in the expensive burgundy carpet.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “That motherfuc—”

  The door opened and Governor Patinchak entered, forcing Oxendine to swallow the rest of her epithet. Cora Davidson followed in the governor’s wake. “Please, have a seat.” He took the head of the table and Davidson sat to his right, nearest the door. Oxendine and I sat across from each other, two chairs down.

  Oxendine barely hit her seat before firing her opening salvo. “Governor, your people took the suspect in the bombing case into custody and won’t turn him over to my security team.”

  Patinchak glanced at Davidson, who nodded as if giving him permission to speak or encouraging him, which was weird but told me a lot about their relationship. “It’s a civilian matter. My security personnel are questioning him.”

  “There was a bomb,” said Oxendine, sounding calmer than I thought she was. “I have the trained interrogators, and this clearly falls under the umbrella of security of the colony, which is my purview. This is a military matter.”

  “We don’t see it that way,” said Davidson, stepping in for her boss, who looked flustered.

  A vein throbbed in Oxendine’s temple, and she glared hot death at Davidson. She looked like she might go over the table at the woman, and I considered whether I’d try to stop her. To her credit, she regained her composure quickly. “How do you not see a bombing as a security matter?”

  “It was an attack by a civilian on a civilian. That makes it a matter for civilian authorities,” said Davidson. Technically, she had a point, though it seemed a pedantic one. Oxendine had better interrogators than anything the governor could possibly have on staff. Taking jurisdiction on a technicality didn’t seem wise when the goal was to get information for all of us.

  Oxendine started to speak, reconsidered, then finally did. “At least let me send over an interrogation team. We can do it at your facility.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said the governor, apparently finding his testicles again now that his aide had made the case.

  “Carl, help me out here,” said Oxendine. “You’ve got a lot of authority with your charter.”

  “Colonel Butler’s charter is to investigate a missing person. This has nothing to do with that,” said Davidson.

  “You can’t know that,” spat Oxendine. She was losing her tenuous grip on her temper, so I stepped in to help her out.

  “Can I talk to the suspect?” I asked.

  “We don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Davidson. “You were probably the target, so giving you access might look like something personal. It might endanger the ability to prosecute the case down the road.”

  Very smooth, and it actually made sense. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t have a rational counterargument. I looked at the governor, ignoring Davidson. “Governor, if you would allow General Oxendine’s interrogators access to the suspect, I would consider it a personal favor.” The governor wavered. I could see it in his face. He wanted to make me happy. I had him.

  Before he could speak, Davidson interjected. “I’m afraid we can’t. We’ll send you a full report as soon as practical. Now, if you’ll excuse us, the governor has a meeting.”

  “This isn’t over,” said Oxendine, coming out of her chair. “As soon as I leave here, I’m sending a message higher to get orders to have you turn o
ver the prisoner.”

  “Of course, if that happens, we’ll comply,” said Davidson, a little too smugly. Now I kind of wanted Oxendine to go over the table at her.

  I thought maybe the governor would speak, but whatever flicker of courage I’d seen in his face a moment before had fled. He got up without making eye contact and left the room.

  Once they left, Oxendine slumped back in her chair. “Can you believe that shit?”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What do they lose by giving you jurisdiction?”

  “That asshole Davidson loses a chance to stick it to me. You saw how she railroaded the governor.”

  “I did. But why?”

  “Because she can. That’s how this whole organization works. They want to show you that they’re in charge, even if it’s petty.”

  I wasn’t sure I bought the idea of pure pettiness. I didn’t know Davidson well, but I always found it better to assume that other people have real motives. Given that, I had no idea what Davidson gained from antagonizing Oxendine. “Do we know anything about the suspect?”

  “We do,” said Oxendine. “Eric Bergman. Nominally he works as a cook in one of the dining facilities, but he’s full-on EPV. He participated in the protest at the governor’s the night of the bombing.”

  “So he used that for cover to get near the cart,” I said.

  “Seems likely. I don’t really care about him, though. We’ve got him dead to rights with a fingerprint on the bomb residue. I want to know who helped him. Who is still active and a threat? He didn’t do this alone.”

  “No, you’re right,” I said, but I couldn’t focus on it because my mind took off in another direction. EPV. They’d tried to kill me, and if they’d do that . . . I couldn’t rule out that they’d attack a Caliber team as well. Certainly EPV wanted Caliber’s expansion operations stopped. Maybe they wanted it badly enough to kill for it. That made the disappearance of Xyla Redstone seem a little less open and shut.

  Back at my quarters, Ganos was waiting, feet drawn up under her on the sofa, while Fader sat on the other side of the room, unrelaxed in an easy chair. I could almost feel the tension, and I’d have bet decent money that they’d been sitting there in silence. So much for the team getting along.

  I wanted to tell them about the prisoner, but I wanted to hear what they had found, and telling them would get us started in a different direction. “What did you find?” I headed over to pour myself some coffee. “Coffee?”

  “Never touch the stuff,” said Ganos like I’d offered her heroin. “I got a solid answer to your first question about the cameras. As you might suspect, someone hacked them. Both the shutdown and the restart came from outside the building. There’s almost no way the military doesn’t know that, by the way. It wasn’t hard to find.”

  Yolin had told me that much. “Any idea who did it?”

  “That’s where it gets weird. It looks to me like it came from the military.”

  I stopped with my coffee cup halfway to my mouth. “Come again?”

  “I can’t be sure. Someone could be trying to make it look like that’s where it came from. And with the fact that it was so obviously a hack . . . that’s not a bad play. Leave the tracks in the system so everyone can find them but make it a false trail.”

  Yolin—and Oxendine—had left out that part. I wondered if they didn’t know or if they did know and didn’t tell me because they didn’t want to advertise their own culpability. I leaned toward Oxendine knowing, since she seemed to have a pretty good handle on her organization. I’d have to decide whether to confront her or not. “Can you get more fidelity? Like where or who in the army might have done it?”

  Ganos untwisted herself and put her feet on the floor. “Not yet. The governor’s security is laughable; the military’s . . . not so much. I haven’t tried them yet. It’s going to take a lot of work and more time if I need to get inside their network. And there’s more of a chance of us getting caught, which I’m trying to avoid for now.”

  “No, that makes sense. This is good, Ganos. It will give me something I can use to press the military.”

  “Just be careful how you push, sir,” she said. “If they know I cracked the governor’s system, they’ll be more likely to watch out for me doing other things.”

  “Good point. I’ll figure out a cover story.” That did put me in a bit of a bind as far as what I could use, but I could always save the information and reevaluate later. “What else have you got?”

  “I didn’t go after Caliber directly, but I did take a quick look from a safe distance. It’s pretty tight there. They have a secure system that’s not connected to the public infrastructure. But some of their people do business on the unsecure side, and I got into some emails that were safe.”

  “Anything good?”

  Ganos shrugged. “Nothing damning. They’re worried about you poking around though. A lot of talk about controlling what you see, putting the right face forward, et cetera.”

  “That might be nothing.” Lawyer One had flat out told me that they considered my arrival significant.

  “Might be,” said Ganos. “I’ve built you a virtual safe space and dropped the files there. I gave the captain access, too. I figured you’d want that.”

  “Thanks.” I was glad that Ganos’s apparent dislike for Fader didn’t cross into professional territory. I glanced to Fader to catch her reaction, but she didn’t give any tells. “If you’d show her how to access it, that would be great.”

  “Will do. The other organization—EPV, the greenie types . . . that’s a bit more of a mess.”

  “How so?” I asked. “Because we’re going to need to look at them hard after what I just learned.” Both women looked at me expectantly. “The colonial government has captured the bomber, and General Oxendine says that the guy is connected directly to EPV.”

  “You didn’t want to lead with that?” asked Ganos.

  “I wanted to hear your stuff first.”

  Ganos rolled her eyes.

  “Have they gotten anything else from him in questioning?” asked Fader.

  “Not yet.” I gave them a brief rundown on the battle for jurisdiction between the governor and the military.

  “That’s pretty stupid,” said Ganos.

  “It is, but we can work around it,” I said. “Find me everything you can on Eric Bergman. He works—worked—in a dining facility. That’s about all I know.”

  “On it,” said Ganos. “EPV doesn’t have their own network. At least if they do, I can’t find it. That means they’re either using the public system or they’re communicating outside the network . . . face-to-face.”

  No surprise there. “My guess is that they’d use the net.”

  “Probably,” said Ganos. “Unless they were doing something big. They’d be fools to plan a bombing on the public net. Base security would have those kinds of key words flagged for sure.”

  “Could you check anyway?” I didn’t expect much, but you can’t rule out the bad guys making mistakes.

  “Already did. I ran a scan for on-planet traffic with certain words. Bomb stuff, your name, investigation, the governor and his reception . . . a bunch of parameters. The problem with that is that it returned a lot of hits, and there’s not much for it other than to go through it all and see what we’ve got. I can do some of it by algorithm, but it’s still four figures worth of documents. It would help if I knew who was part of EPV.”

  “I doubt they have a roster,” I said.

  “I could start going through some of the hits,” offered Fader.

  “Start with the ones that are flagged for Butler,” said Ganos. “I only did a quick scan, but I can tell you this much: The greenies hate the colonel. I even saw some stuff about a protest.”

  I snorted. Hardly a surprise. “We saw the results of that. But it’s still useful. Dig in a bit and see who planned it,” I said to Fader.

  “I looked into the Farric guy some,” said Ganos. “For the record, he seems to be p
retty legit. I mean, he hates you too, but he was mad about not knowing about the protest, and he was really mad about the bomb.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said. “Captain Fader, if you find any other names, feed them back to Ganos so she can dig deeper on them. If Farric isn’t causing problems, maybe we can find out who is. Ganos, once you get names, see if you can find leverage we can use against them.”

  “Can do. How dirty do you want me to play?”

  “Use your best judgment.” I hoped I wouldn’t regret saying that.

  “Also,” I continued, “I want everything you can find on Cora Davidson from the governor’s office. Both of you. Ganos, you do it your way, Captain Fader, you head back over there and try to dig up dirt in person. She’s got an inordinate amount of power, and something about it doesn’t ring quite right.”

  “Copy all, sir,” said Fader. “What are you going to do?”

  “I want to talk to Dante Farric, but I want your information and the report on what the prisoner says before I do.”

  “I can try to get info on that when I go over to the governor’s.”

  “Good call,” I said. “Meanwhile, I’m going to work on Caliber. They’re cooperating, even if it’s grudgingly. Tomorrow I’ll interview whoever they put in front of me and see what I find.”

  Chapter Eight

  Before I headed to Caliber for my interviews, I gave Martha Stroud a call. Her lawyers hadn’t been helpful, and I wanted her to address that, to let them know that her boss had put me on the case. It took a few minutes on hold, but they finally connected me.

  “I just wanted to let you know as a courtesy, your lawyers were stonewalling the other day,” I said.

  “I’m sure they were doing their job.”

  “They probably thought they were. I don’t think they know the real reason I’m here.”

  “The real reason? What is that?”

  “They don’t know that Mr. Zentas asked for me to come.”

  There was silence for several seconds on the other end of the line. “What are you saying?” asked Stroud.