Colonyside

by Michael Mammay

  “I can live with that.”

  She thought some more, glancing to her XO, who didn’t give any sign. I couldn’t read their communication—couldn’t tell if no sign meant okay or no sign meant no. I wished I’d done a little more research on the XO now, to find out if she was a by-the-book type or was more flexible. Oxendine would know, and that third person in the room might make a difference. On the other hand, Oxendine probably wouldn’t have had her in the room unless they were working on the same wavelength. “We have a deal on the information. I’ll share whatever we find with you. But the jurisdiction for the potential perpetrator remains with me.”

  “Happy for you to have it.” I meant it. She could have that nightmare. If the governor didn’t try to take it from her again.

  “That still leaves us with the issue of Ms. Ganos,” said Oxendine.

  “Ganos was never here,” I said.

  Oxendine looked perplexed.

  “Or she was, and she helped you solve the issue. You write the story whichever way you want.” I had to push this. It forced Oxendine to take ownership of part of the half-truth. It tied us together in it, and it gave her incentive not to flip on me later.

  Oxendine looked at her XO again. “What do you think?”

  “If we do it, ma’am, the story has to be that we brought her in. Too many people know about her to hide it.”

  “How do we explain her detention?”

  The taller woman considered it. “She’s not detained. She’s currently in a briefing room. I leave here and go talk to her alone. The information she found is so important, she needed to brief a senior officer directly.”

  I almost smiled. Brilliant. A good XO was worth her weight in silver, and it seemed like Oxendine had a good one. The corners of Oxendine’s mouth turned up a little. She knew it too.

  “That will work. Make it happen, XO.” Now that the threat of potentially charging me had passed, we didn’t need a witness anymore.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Oxendine turned back to me, smile gone. “You seem to have gotten exactly what you wanted. But we’re not done. I still want Ganos gone and you hot on her tail.”

  “I need her. But I’ll agree to keep her off any military network. If she has something that you need to look into, I’ll bring it to you directly.”

  She didn’t speak, so before she could make another counter, I decided to sweeten the deal.

  “To add something to the table, I’ll provide you with information that I found in the course of my investigation that might help you with another matter.”

  “What matter?”

  “The death of Dante Farric. If I don’t miss my guess, the governor is probably interested in the outcome of that one.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Do I need to get a witness in here again?” She implied that I might have done something illegal, which, the more I thought about it, I probably did. But neither of us was going to take it in that direction at this point.

  “Your call.”

  “What have you got?”

  I had her. “The day before he died, Dante Farric promised me a name of someone from the more radical side of EPV. Someone who might know something about the bombing. His implication was that the person might have been involved in the bombing.”

  “And you think he was looking into that when he got killed.”

  “More than that. The next day—the day he died—he gave me a name. Marko Hubic.”

  “We have the bomber. Or we did, before he got shipped off planet.”

  “I don’t think Bergman did it.”

  “You know this how?”

  “The governor’s aide wasn’t lying about lawyers on Talca. Expensive ones. Want to know who paid for them?”

  She thought for a minute, but declined to guess. “Who?”

  “A sister company to Caliber. Another Zentas business.”

  “Why would—” She let it trail off, making the connection herself. “Why didn’t you tell this to the investigators when they questioned you?”

  “Don’t make me lie to you,” I said. We both knew the answer to that question. I hadn’t wanted to.

  “You know, Carl, I’m tempted to let Ganos stay and throw you off the planet.”

  “I do have that effect on people.”

  She laughed. “Any other bombs you want to drop while you’re here?”

  “Drake Zentas offered me a job.”

  “No shit? Doing what?”

  “Whatever he needs me to do.”

  “What’s his angle?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.” The truth. I had ideas, but I didn’t feel like giving everything away. Oxendine and I weren’t friends, even though we’d come to a mutual understanding.

  “You taking it?”

  “I’m not sure. There may be a conflict of interest, right?”

  “Maybe. But you’re not in the military anymore, so maybe not. Do you want me to run with the Hubic thing or do you want to keep it?”

  “You take it. If it’s related to my case, it’s tangential.” I also had no leads and nowhere to go with it. “I’d love to talk to the guy if you catch him though.”

  “That might be tricky, legally, but I’ll see what we can do.”

  “Thanks.” I stood and shook hands with her. She could have made this a lot harder than she did. It’s nice when things go the easy way for a change.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I got back to my quarters and it was only a few minutes until Ganos arrived, escorted by Mac. He’d only let me go after I got a security detail from Oxendine, which I agreed to because I didn’t want Ganos walking around alone, and she’d have bullied anyone but Mac into letting her do it. For a small community, bad things seemed to happen to a lot of people.

  I greeted her when she arrived. “Hey, remember that time when I saved your ass from rotting in a military cell?”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “You don’t do it right, sir.”

  “No?”

  “No. Here, I’ll show you. Hey, sir, remember that time you were totally dead-ended on your investigation and I found the information that cracked open—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said.

  “You didn’t let me finish, sir. In the second verse, I become the hero, probably to the entire galaxy. I’m still working on that part.”

  “I’m glad to see your time in detention hasn’t dimmed your spirit.”

  “Are you kidding, sir? It all went according to plan. I found the hacks and forced the military to do something about them.”

  I laughed. “That was the plan?”

  “As far as you know.”

  “Well, keep it quiet. General Oxendine is telling a slightly different story, and as part of securing your release I agreed to let her.”

  “Roger that. What am I on next?”

  “Why don’t you take a day off? I want to let things cool down a bit, and I gave the search for Hubic over to the army.”

  “I could use a nap. I was working all night on that stuff. Can I get my earrings back? A girl needs to accessorize.”

  “I’m pretty sure those will turn up someday and be called government exhibit one,” I said. “Seriously, though . . . don’t we need to give that data to the military?”

  “I already shared it with them face-to-face. The tech I talked to didn’t have the same dim look in his eyes as everyone else, so I think he’s got it.”

  “Great. You go take your nap. And try to stay out of trouble.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  After she left, I poured myself a well-deserved drink, and before I finished it, Fader showed up. I’d messaged her as soon as I finished up with Oxendine and asked her to find Mae Eddleston. I had no idea how Fader had accomplished it so quickly, but she brought the young-looking woman in with her. Something that Zentas had said struck me the wrong way, and I wanted to look into it.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  She looked around. “You downsized since the las
t time I saw you.”

  “Yeah, they moved Mr. Zentas into my old place.”

  “They can do that?”

  “Apparently,” I said. “I wanted to ask you a few more questions, if that’s okay. Mostly about xenobiology.”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ve studied hominiverts, right?”

  “Absolutely. It’s been one of our top priorities.”

  “Something in a conversation struck me earlier today. Would you say that you’re trying to understand them better, so that we can cohabitate?” I didn’t think so, but I wanted to confirm.

  She snorted. “I’d say we were trying to understand them better so we could find a way to get them to move. I’m a scientist, but I work for Caliber. I know who hits send on my pay transfers.”

  “I understand. No judgment. Could you elaborate on how you get them to move? That would seem to be—”

  “Morally questionable?” she offered.

  “I was going to say borderline illegal, but sure. No offense.”

  “None taken. We work within the parameters of the law. Recently we were studying the effects of low-frequency noise and its ability to drive the hominiverts out of an area. There were some promising tests that indicated that we might be able to shift their territory via sound.”

  “You could move them with sound?”

  “That was the theory, yes. There are still tests to do—it’s not complete, but it’s promising. We would insert sonic devices in areas we wanted the hominiverts to leave.”

  “Would humans be able to hear it?”

  “Absolutely not. It’s below our natural hearing range. Under perfect circumstances, you might feel it as a slight vibration.”

  I paused. If they had the ability to move them out of an area, what would stop them from moving them into an area? I got a chill, and it had nothing to do with the air circulator. Suddenly the attack on my patrol—and possibly Xyla’s—took on a different hue. I didn’t share it with Eddleston, because I didn’t want to scare her and make her shut down. Plus, the less she knew, the better. “Do you have hominivert territories marked out?”

  “We have a rough map of part of the terrain, yes. We’ve been able to tag a few animals with radio trackers.”

  Whoa. That also changed things. If they could track them . . . I was pretty sure the military didn’t know that. But then, the military wasn’t even carrying the right ammunition . . . because someone had told them they couldn’t. There were too many coincidences. I hate coincidences. They have this ugly way of not being coincidences. “You don’t happen to have the map on your device, do you?”

  “Sorry, no. But I can go back into work and get it for you.”

  I considered it for a second before rejecting it. No way. Not this time. I wasn’t getting someone else killed. And if my theory was correct, Caliber wouldn’t want anyone sharing that information with me. Best to keep Eddleston out of it and find another way to get what I needed. “No, that’s okay. I can get it.”

  “If you’re sure,” said Eddleston.

  “Zentas offered me a job. This will be a good chance for me to look around the place.”

  “Sure. Send me a note if I can help.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  When she left, I picked up the remainder of the drink I’d forgotten when Eddleston arrived.

  “What just happened?” asked Fader. “You were going down a path with her, then all of a sudden you broke off.”

  “I wanted to keep Eddleston out of it.”

  “Out of what, sir?”

  “If they can move ’verts out of an area, why couldn’t they move them into one?”

  Fader caught my meaning immediately, but when she spoke, her tone indicated doubt. “You think it’s possible, sir? You think someone targeted the ’verts against the patrol?”

  Fader had a lot of positive qualities, so it was easy to forget how little experience she had. “I’ve learned to believe that everything is possible. That’s not the question.”

  “What’s the question, sir?”

  “The question is who would do that to a Caliber patrol?”

  She considered it. “The easy answer is EPV, but I don’t think you’re looking for the easy answer.”

  “The easy answer doesn’t make sense. The technology belongs to Caliber. EPV is opposed to Caliber. So why would Caliber help EPV attack their own patrol? If it had just been my patrol that got attacked, I could maybe see it. Common enemy, or something. Assuming Caliber sees me as an enemy, which is . . . I was going to say hard to see, but really I don’t know. Something is going on there. Regardless, though, the attack against Xyla’s patrol hurt Caliber.”

  “Maybe there’s a blurring of the lines between EPV and Humans First.”

  “Maybe. But they have almost diametrically opposed purposes.”

  “They do, sir—on the surface. But on the radical ends of both, they might dip into an element that’s more about the violence than the agenda.”

  “Interesting. That could make somebody like Hubic a potential player on both sides.”

  “Yes, sir. What if he’s just a contractor? Have bomb, will travel.”

  I thought about it. Once a guy made a bomb, it wasn’t a big step to working for the highest bidder. Not everybody working for a cause is a true believer. “It certainly makes more sense that way. But I have a hard time seeing Hubic involved in this latest thing. The hominivert attacks use technology that’s a lot different from a bombing.”

  “But the camera hack and the vehicle hack were a bit more sophisticated.”

  “Good point. If you’re right—if the lines are blurred with the people—we have to follow the weapons. Caliber has the sonic tech.”

  “I also got an answer from the Intel shop that they tracked the source of the explosives used in the bomb to a Caliber work site.”

  “Individually, I wouldn’t think too much about that, but when we combine the hacks and the bomb material? It might be more than a coincidence, and it’s worth checking out.”

  “It’s not like we can walk into Caliber and ask them about their tech,” said Fader.

  “I mean . . . we could. I could.” I had a plan. Well . . . part of a plan. The first kernel. But I’d gone into things with less.

  “Sir, please. You’re hardly going to fly under the radar.”

  “No. Not under it. Right through it. Drake Zentas offered me a job.”

  Fader’s eyes went wide. “Really, sir? Doing what?”

  “We didn’t really get that far.” I trusted her, but the look she had given me made me not want to share everything. It almost looked like fear, as if I’d actually take it. “But even without that detail, I could pretend to be considering it and ask to see their facilities. While I’m there, I look around and ask questions.” I was talking myself into it even as I said it. I needed a voice of reason. Caliber was a sophisticated company, and I should have learned by now that a simple ruse wouldn’t fool them. Fortunately, I had Fader, who had quickly recovered from her shock.

  “Sir, I think you showing up there would immediately be suspicious, job offer or not. Everything you do is going to be scrutinized, filmed, and scrutinized again. Plus, the idea that Caliber gave tech to radicals to use on their own patrol leaves out one critical factor: Xyla Redstone. More significant, Xyla Zentas Redstone.”

  “Who would name their kid Xyla Zentas?” I asked, not for the first time. What can I say? It bothered me. “Initials X Z. That’s just ridiculous.” Once more, Fader stayed stone-faced during my nonsense as I stalled to let my mind work. She was right, of course. How deep a conspiracy would I have to imagine for Caliber to be a part of the death of their CEO’s daughter . . . ?

  “Unless that’s why he’s here,” I said.

  “You lost me, sir.”

  “Pure conjecture, but what if he—Zentas—came because it was part of the plan, but he didn’t plan for it to involve his daughter. He’s got a lot of holdings. He wouldn’t be managing day-to-day oper
ations. What if he came here to deal with that?”

  She frowned. “Not buying it, sir. First, he was the one who sent you here. Why send you and then come himself?”

  “I don’t know. But he did send me and then come himself, so that’s a matter of record, regardless of why.”

  “Yes, sir. But if you’re right, why does Stroud still have a job?”

  Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. If she was responsible for the death of Zentas’s daughter, she’d be done. Zentas himself had called her competent. “Maybe she didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “She’s in charge. She’s responsible.”

  “But by that logic, she’s in charge and Zentas’s daughter is dead, regardless of the cause. In my meeting with her about the disappearance of the patrol, she said it was part of the cost of doing business.” I thought about it. The attitude fit with what I knew about Zentas as well. I just didn’t know what it all meant. There were too many permutations. “Maybe he’ll just fire her later, after I deliver the results of my report. It gives him cover.”

  “Does he seem like a man who needs cover?”

  “He doesn’t. Which brings us back to the same spot. Why is he here? If we solve that, I think we solve everything. He doesn’t do things by accident.”

  “Are we off of EPV as a suspect, sir?”

  “I don’t know. What I do know is that Caliber isn’t playing straight. Zentas didn’t even tell his own people that he asked for me to come here. They’re hiding something.”

  “Okay, sir. If you’re right, how do we figure that out?”

  “Zentas has an ego. We get him to tell us.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Despite the simple solution I’d presented to Fader, I didn’t move forward with it immediately because I didn’t know how to actually do it. Zentas would talk about himself. Of course he would. But I had to come up with a reason for him to do it publicly. And it hit me. The press. If Eccasis had press beyond the local news feed, I didn’t know about it, but a quick search would turn it up. I put Fader on that while I went to my go-to source for all press matters, Karen Plazz. She was big-time now, so no way would she work a story in a distant colony, but Zentas was news, so she might at least be able to put me in touch with someone who would. Either way, it didn’t cost anything to ask, so I sent her a message.