The Golden Way (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 3)

by mikel evins

Harken went back to pacing.

  “I really couldn’t say. It would be irresponsible under the circumstances. I don’t know whether I actually examined the artifact itself, and if I did, what I found. I—I lost my memory of the scans when I was killed aboard your ship, and I, well, I haven’t had the time to go over them in similar detail again.”

  “When can you give us an estimate?” said Zang.

  “Estimate?”

  “Of the artifact’s value.”

  “As I said—”

  Zang interrupted.

  “When can you properly examine the scans and compare them to whatever standards you normally use and then give us your best guess under the circumstances about the artifact’s value?”

  Harken stopped pacing and stared at her.

  “A day or two,” she said. “Perhaps. If I can spare the time.”

  “We’d surely appreciate it,” said Jaemon. “Esgar would be very grateful.”

  Harken stared at him, frozen for a lingering moment.

  “Esgar?” she said.

  “My brother. Doctor Rayleigh. I’m sure he’ll want to discuss your estimate with you personally.”

  Harken stared at him with one eye, then the other, then the first one again.

  “Yes,” she said. “Well. Let me get back to you on that.”

  14.

  “Did she seem right to you?” said Jaemon.

  We stood on the steps in front of the History Office, looking out over Biru Park. The white stone pillars stood in rows on either side of us. We could see the roof of the transit station peeking out above the trees. Jaemon seemed to have lost the dizziness that had plagued him earlier.

  “Who, Harken?” said Zang. “She was distracted and self-absorbed, but that’s the way she always is.”

  “You know her, then,” Jaemon said.

  “Sure. I’ve known her for years.”

  “She didn’t seem evasive to you?”

  Zang snorted.

  “She’s always evasive. If you ask her the time of day, she’ll hedge. She hates a straight answer. Why?”

  “Hmm,” said Jaemon, looking out across the park again.

  “Oh, come on,” Zang said. “You don’t suspect Harken?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Something about her seems off.”

  “I’m telling you,” said Zang. “That’s just what she’s like. She’s about as dangerous as a party balloon.”

  I said, “Someone must have told them where to find the artifact.”

  They both looked at me.

  “What do you mean?” said Jaemon.

  “The robbers,” I said. “Kestrel was only down for a few minutes. They had no time to search for the artifact. They had to know where it was before they entered the ship.”

  Jaemon and Zang exchanged a look.

  “How could they know that?” said Jaemon.

  “Someone must have tipped them,” I said.

  “Everyone on Kestrel knew where it was,” Zang said.

  “But who would tell them?” I said. “Who even had the chance?”

  “Angier?” said Zang with an evil half-smile.

  Jaemon snorted and shook his head.

  “He’s an asshole, but he’s not that kind of asshole. Besides, it’s like Lev said. When would he have the chance?”

  “Shore leave?” Zang said.

  “He hasn’t been off the ship,” Jaemon said. “I checked.”

  “Aha!” Zang said. “You thought of him, too.”

  Jaemon smiled and shook his head.

  “I checked everybody,” he said. “Nobody went anywhere.”

  “Covert channels?” Zang said.

  “Always possible,” Jaemon said. “But you’d have to know who to talk to. Who has contacts on Solomon?”

  “Well,” said Zang sourly. “I do, of course.”

  “Criminal contacts?” he said.

  “I was security,” she said darkly. “What do you think?”

  He grinned at her.

  “Got you,” he said.

  “Director Harken knew where the artifact was,” I said. “We took her right to it.”

  “So you’re saying she came aboard, found the artifact, and used a covert channel to tip the robbers?” Jaemon said.

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Zang. “They shot her dead along with the rest of us. Who deliberately gets themselves killed in order to pull off a robbery?”

  “She was archived,” I said.

  “Even so,” Zang said. “Would you get yourself shot to death on purpose?”

  “Remember who you’re asking,” Jaemon said.

  Zang frowned at him.

  “What?” she said.

  “Remember Autolycus?” he said.

  She blinked at him, then her face changed.

  “Oh,” she said. “That was different. There was no other way out of that.”

  “Maybe it was the same,” I said. “I blew myself up because it was the only way to get the others out safely. That was something I really wanted.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “You’re saying that if Harken wanted the artifact bad enough, she might do it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I guess. But get yourself killed to take an artifact? What makes this particular artifact so important?”

  “Well, she said archives of famous people were important,” said Jaemon.

  “She said they were popular with the public,” I said. “And we don’t know who’s in this one. Not yet.”

  “Besides,” said Zang. “Wouldn’t she have made a more recent archive if she knew she was about to get herself blown away?”

  “More recent than what?” I said.

  “A few weeks,” Zang said.

  “According to Harken,” I said. “We only have her word for how old her archive was.”

  “Hmm,” Jaemon said. “How did she know she studied your scans in detail?”

  “What?” said Zang.

  “She said that since she was reconstructed she hasn’t had time to study Lev’s scans again ‘in similar detail.’ Similar to what? If she lost the last few weeks, how does she know what kind of detail she studied it in before? She claims she doesn’t remember anything about it.”

  “Figure of speech?” Zang said.

  “Maybe,” said Jaemon. “Is there a way we can check her story?”

  “I don’t see how,” I said. “The time of her last archive is private information. We have to take her word for it.”

  He shrugged.

  “We could always just ask to see her archive. What have we got to lose?”

  “Come on, guys, really?” said Zang. “Harken? It’s like you said about Angier. She’s an asshole, but not that kind of asshole. Why would she help set up a robbery to steal an artifact she was planning to buy anyway?”

  “To save money?” Jaemon said. “Harris wasn’t going to let that thing go cheap.”

  “It’s not her money,” Zang said. “It’s History Office money.”

  “It’s her budget,” Jaemon said.

  Zang stared at him.

  “So she sets up a robbery and multiple murders to save on her department’s budget? Really?”

  Jaemon blinked at her.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s thin.”

  “It’s thinner than thin,” Zang said. She frowned.

  “What is it?” I said. “Are you reconsidering?”

  “No,” she said. “Something else is bothering me.”

  “What?” said Jaemon.

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  “It’s a little hard to put into words.”

  Jaemon said, “Let’s get across the lane and walk around the park. Maybe it’ll come to you.”

  The section of the park that separated the History Office from the transit station was only about a hundred meters across, but the green space expanded on either side of it. To our left was a pond. A few people were out on it in small boats. Ducks and
geese cruised around between them dunking their heads from time to time, raising their orange feet in the air, then shivering water onto their backs with flutters of their wings. We strolled along the shore. The effect of distant neighborhoods rising up and curling into a vault over our heads was surreal.

  “Okay,” said Zang. “Let’s say you know somehow that there’s this artifact aboard Kestrel, and you know where it’s being kept.”

  “Okay,” said Jaemon.

  “Let’s say you want to get a team aboard and grab it without being identified.”

  “Okay.”

  “How do you do it?” Zang said.

  “Ooh!” said Jaemon, “I know this one! You set off an electromagnetic pulse. It knocks out power on the ship and the docks around it.”

  “You know how to do that?” Zang said.

  Jaemon turned and blinked at her.

  “I guess you use a gadget that makes electromagnetic pulses.”

  “How do you get it into position without being seen?”

  He frowned.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Carry it in your pocket? What's your point?”

  “I checked the Fabric,” Zang said. “A device to make a pulse that big would have to be the size of a vending cart or bigger.”

  “Really?” Jaemon said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Something about the size of the element and the wavelength of the pulse. Or something.”

  “Okay...” said Jaemon. “So it was in a crate.”

  “So we check Solomon’s memories,” Zang said. “We look for a group of people moving a big crate close to Kestrel.”

  Jaemon nodded slowly.

  “That’s good thinking, Zang,” he said. He frowned. “Thing is, if that pulse was strong enough to knock Kestrel offline, then I bet it’s strong enough to knock out the local Fabric.”

  “It was,” I said. “It did.”

  “Did what?” Jaemon said.

  “Knocked out the local Fabric.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay. So Solomon won’t have any memories from our pier around that time,” he said. “The pulse would wipe them. Right?”

  “Unless they were archived,” said Zang.

  “Archived?”

  “Solomon copies local observations to a data warehouse every so often.”

  “What, all of it? From the whole ship?”

  “Yes,” said Zang.

  “Holy—”

  “He doesn’t keep it all forever. He sifts the public data for security problems, then purges it after a retention period.”

  “Hunh,” Jaemon said. “So we could ask him to look for a group of people moving a crate.”

  “I already did,” Zang said.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What did he find?”

  “Oh,” Zang said. “I just asked him. He hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”

  “That’s some solid investigative work right there,” Jaemon said. He pointed a finger at Zang.

  “Thing is,” Zang said, “I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”

  Jaemon stopped at the water’s edge. A squadron of ducks noticed him and drifted closer, eyeing him speculatively.

  “I see what you mean,” Jaemon said. “Maybe the pulse hit before the data was archived. Maybe there won’t be anything. It’s worth a look, though. Maybe we’ll get lucky. It’s good thinking, Zang.”

  “I don’t mean we might have bad luck,” said Zang. “I mean I really don’t think we’ll find anything.”

  Jaemon shot a look at her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it,” Zang said. “You’re this crew, planning to steal something from Kestrel. You mask yourselves. You somehow find out where the artifact is being held before you go aboard. You go to all the trouble of finding out how big a pulse you need to knock out Kestrel, and you come up with a device that will make it. You maneuver it into position.”

  “Okay.”

  “So the time comes and you set off your big honking device. What’s your exit strategy? How do you make sure you aren’t identified afterward?”

  Jaemon frowned.

  “Do you just hope you happened to pick a good moment?” Zang said. “That Solomon’s view of you didn’t get archived before the pulse? That you’ll be out before the next cycle?”

  “They wouldn’t have trusted to luck,” I said. “Not people like that.”

  “Bingo,” said Zang. She pointed at me.

  “They were too well-organized,” I said. “Their robbery was meticulously planned. They wouldn’t gamble with this one important detail.”

  “Yeah, okay,” said Jaemon. “I see your point. But what could they do about it?”

  “They’d have to time the assault just right,” Zang said. “They’d have to move in just after an archive cycle completed, set off the pulse, get the artifact, and get out again before the local Fabric came back up.”

  “Kestrel was back up in a few minutes,” I said. “The local Fabric was even quicker.”

  “Could they know that?” Jaemon said. “How long the recovery would take, I mean.”

  “The effect of a pulse and the expected refractory period can be precisely calculated,” I said.

  “So they would know,” Jaemon said.

  “But they would also have to know Solomon’s archive cycle,” Zang said. “They’d have to know when it was scheduled and how long between cycles to make sure they wouldn’t be caught.”

  Jaemon shook his head.

  “No way,” he said. “That’s got to be privileged information. Right?”

  “Right,” said Zang. “Solomon won’t tell you that unless you have the right authorization.”

  We were silent.

  “Oh,” said Jaemon after a second. “Sure. It was an inside job.”

  He thought about it, then nodded slowly.

  “They have somebody on the inside. In Solomon Security.”

  “Crap,” said Zang.

  “What?” Jaemon said.

  “I was hoping you’d tell me I was full of shit.”

  15.

  “So,” said Jaemon, “Who’s going to tell Erdos about it?”

  “Tell her about what?” I said.

  We were in another transit car, skimming through Solomon’s translucent tubes toward Kestrel’s berth at the docks.

  “About the inside man on her Security team,” Zang said. “Of course.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Zang.

  Jaemon was indeed looking at her.

  “Why not?” he said. “You know her better than anyone.”

  “That’s why,” she said. “She won’t hear it from me.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Look,” she said, “In case you didn’t notice, we’re not exactly best friends. We didn’t get along so well when I was still aboard Solomon. She didn’t miss me much when I was gone, you know? This inside-man stuff is going to seem like an indictment of her, anyway. You think she wants to get it from me?”

  “Ah,” I said. “Because the mole is most likely in Security.”

  “Of course e is,” she said. “Where else would e be?”

  Our car reached the place on Solomon’s main drive spine where our pier branched from the spine. We slid around the long curve, pressed hard into our seats by inertia, then floated again as the path straightened. My companions’ faces lost color and then regained it as the inertial gravity pressed down on us and lifted.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” said Jaemon. “She might feel like the mole calls her judgment into question.”

  “It does call her judgment into question,” said Zang. “It calls my judgment into question. It’s probably somebody I hired when I was Erdos.”

  “If you hired them, how does it reflect on her?” I said.

  Zang rolled her eyes at me.

  Jaemon said, “Because they used to be the same person.”

 
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t sure I really understood. All of my model run started out as the same person, but that didn’t make me responsible for all of the mistakes of my siblings. But it wasn’t the first or the last time that I was confused by biological concepts of personal identity.

  “So who’s going to tell her?” Zang said.

  “I still think you should do it,” said Jaemon.

  “Didn’t you hear anything I said?” Zang snapped. “She’ll stop listening as soon as she sees me. I won’t even have to open my mouth. You don’t want me to tell her about it. You don’t want me anywhere around when she’s told.”

  A smile played around Jaemon’s lips. Zang stopped in mid-rant.

  “You’re needling me,” she said.

  Jaemon grinned.

  “Guilty,” he said.

  Zang slugged him hard in the shoulder. It sounded like a hammer hitting a side of beef.

  “Ow,” Jaemon said. He rubbed his shoulder.

  “Anyway,” Zang said, “What you want is somebody that Erdos has no feelings about at all. It should be somebody bland and inoffensive. Somebody with no personality, if possible. You want the dullest, most uninteresting person you can think of to talk to her about it.”

  Jaemon looked at her for a moment, then slowly shifted his gaze and looked at me. Zang’s eyes followed his. She locked on my face.

  Jaemon grinned at me.

  “No offense,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  16.

  “Commander Erdos is here,” said Kestrel as we got out of the car. “She’s meeting with the Captain and Doctor Yaug.”

  We thanked the car and it sped away to hunt for other passengers. Kestrel slid her hatch open for us as we floated in through the cargo bay. Yarrow greeted us brightly. Angier grumbled his version of a friendly welcome.

  “I’m pretty sure Erdos won’t shoot you when you tell her,” Jaemon said in the lift. I rotated my cameras toward him.

  “Tell her what?” I said.

  “Oh no,” Jaemon said. “You can’t get out of it that easily. You have tell her about the inside man in her organization.”

  “I still don’t see why it has to be me,” I said.

  “Sure you do,” he said. “Zang already explained why she can’t do it.”

  “You could do it,” I said.