“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Threadley said unexpectedly. He snapped his fingers at the door.
It opened, and Viola Budgett came in.
★
Amid the chaos on board the Húludao, Cydney got a message from Aidan in LA.
“Well, huh. I would have said that workstation wasn’t fixable. The Chinese; go figure.”
Cydney had asked the Húludao’s information systems manager, a handsome and friendly man, to repair the astrophysics lab’s workstation. She hadn’t held out much hope, but after a few hours it had been returned to her, as good as new. Handsome had assured her the repair job had been purely mechanical: the Chinese hadn’t read the data. They couldn’t read it with their equipment.
Copying the workstation’s contents to Aidan for analysis, Cydney had warned him, “Don’t tell anyone it was the Chinese that fixed it. Don’t even mention that we’re on a Chinese ship. I mean it. This is diplomatically sensitive.”
“Don’t worry, Cyds, I haven’t breathed the C-word,” he reassured her now. “So. The data. I’m kind of puzzled here. We were expecting to find the dirt on the Vesta Conspiracy?”
That was what people were calling Dr. James’s Secret Project, now revealed to have been VA’s struggle with the Heidegger program.
“There isn’t anything about it. Zilch. It’s like the U-Vesta astrophysics lab wasn’t even in on the conspiracy. All we got here is a shit-ton of data about asteroids and neutrinos and so on.”
“Doggone it!” Cydney felt like crying.
“Well, there’s one thing. Remember the financial records you scraped from the university servers? Suggestive of some kind of scam? We found some more details on that. A spreadsheet authored by Viola Budgett, who I guess was one of Dr. James’s lab assistants.”
“Yeah,” Cydney said to the air inside her cabin. “That’s right. I saved her, too. And then the ISA came aboard when we got into orbit, and took her off. No one else. Just her.”
★
“You’re him,” Viola Budgett said, when Colonel Threadley introduced them. Kiyoshi had known her the minute she walked into the office. He made a point of doing background on people he was going to be scamming. So he’d known who Viola Budgett was and what she looked like for fourteen months.
She cringed against the door, staring fearfully at him, as if he were a monster that had crawled out from under her bed.
“Sit down, Miss Budgett,” Threadley purred. “Have some tea.”
“It was him. He sold us the thing. He only asked for fifty K, and it was an incredibly interesting object. Unlike any space debris any of us had ever seen. It was unlike, wasn’t it?”
Budgett started to cry. She sat down and put her face in her hands.
“When you feel able,” Threadley said tenderly.
“But—b-but—then he came back and asked for more. He said that on second thoughts, fifty K was too low. He wanted five hundred K. And of course we didn’t have it. But he said if we c-c-couldn’t pay, then he’d just have to go to the m-m-media. B-b-by that time, of course, we knew what it was, what he’d sold us. B-but by then VA had it. So we didn’t have the thing or the money. So that’s why I, I, I … that’s how I came up with the idea.”
Tears streamed down Budgett’s cheeks. This was not an accusation but a confession.
“Around that time, an UNVRP team arrived on Vesta. We were going to be collaborating with them, sharing our survey data. You know how UNVRP operates. They buy asteroids that fit their criteria, and if there are people there, they pay them to leave. So I thought, what if we could make sure there are people there … and what if they were our people? And then, what if their compensation from UNVRP, what if some of that could be ours? So that’s how I set it up.”
Kiyoshi interjected calmly, “Sir, this woman is slandering me. I have no idea what she’s talking about.”
“You—you liar!”
“Nice try,” Threadley said. “Your buddy Haddock has already confessed.”
“Oh yeah, I met him downstairs,” Budgett sniffled. “It was a surprise to see him here. But people like that always get caught sooner or later. Sir, I hope you send him and his gang to Pallas.” Her voice shook with vengefulness.
Kiyoshi’s whole body prickled with sweat. He couldn’t believe Haddock had confessed. But everybody confessed to the ISA, didn’t they? Everybody.
“I knew the Haddock gang from when I worked for Kharbage LLC,” Budgett said. “They were the ones who put us in touch with this sleazebucket. It figures, doesn’t it? All the pirates in the system know each other. It’s like this filthy, bottom-feeding subculture.”
“I’m sorry to hear you speak of your friend like that,” Kiyoshi said. “I’m referring to Alicia Petruzzelli.” He turned to Threadley. “Of course you know that Petruzzelli was part of the operation. She played a logistical role. I assume Budgett cut her in on the profits.”
Threadley shook his head. More than ever, he looked like that enka singer who’d died on 11073 Galapagos, with a fatherly twinkle in his eye. “Don’t bother. We won’t be going after Kharbage, LLC this time. Adnan Kharbage is too important a player in the recycling arena.”
“He’s a pirate,” Kiyoshi said, angered at the failure of his ploy to deflect the blame. “I’m not, and neither are Captain Haddock and his family. I resent and absolutely deny the insinuation that I or they would ever steal anything.”
“That cant of theirs sounds fairly piratical,” Threadley said.
“It’s a pose. A joke, if you’re familiar with the concept. They’re itinerant construction workers. Way I know them is I used to sell them splart, timber, plasticrete. You know: construction materials.”
“Ah, yes,” Threadley said. “Timber.”
He leaned forward. The movement caused him to rise slightly from his ergoform.
“Timber is an extremely valuable substance out here. Extremely rare. Yet it accounts for half of the purchases made by Loyola Holdings, Inc. You have clients on remote rocks literally growing the stuff for you, Mr. Yonezawa. Hybrid oak and poplar apparently do very well in zero-gee. Funny thing is, we have no record of timber sales by your company.”
“Some of those sales may have been conducted off the books,” Kiyoshi bluffed.
Viola Budgett wiped her nose on her sleeve. The movement reminded both men of her presence.
“Thank you, Ms. Budgett. You’ve been very helpful,” Threadley said.
She sprang up, but lingered for a moment. “Are you going to send him to Pallas?”
“Somewhere worse,” Threadley said. “You have my word on that.”
★
Cydney digested Aidan’s analysis. “So the mysterious messages to Gap 2.5,” she said aloud. “Those were just responses to blackmail demands?”
Based on Viola Budgett’s spreadsheet, that was how it looked. Dr. James had wired money to Kiyoshi Yonezawa from the Vesta Express, when he visited the de Grey Institute in connection with the conspiracy, so that he wouldn’t have to use the university servers. Of course, he hadn’t known Budgett was keeping her own record of the transactions. Nor had he been able to hide the holes in his department’s budget, which Cydney had found at the beginning of this investigative journey.
It had now ended in anticlimax, for her purposes. Compared to the ravages of the Heidegger program, a blackmail scam wouldn’t even rate a thousand views.
Aidan also pointed out that some of the signals apparently sent to Gap 2.5 had probably been Adrian Smith swapping movies with his friends on Triton, much further away.
Disappointed, Cydney nevertheless put together a squib. She speculated that the enigmatic Kiyoshi Yonezawa was a smuggler based in Gap 2.5. She sent it to Aidan to use when they next had a slow moment on the feed.
★
Kiyoshi gazed at the Unicorn on the viewport screen, willing it to vanish. If they arrested him, they’d also confiscate his ship. Go, he thought at Jun. Flee. Save yourself. These were the very words Jun had s
aid to him hours before the destruction of 11073 Galapagos. But this time, the thought was pointless. The Imagine Dragons made the Unicorn look like a pedal glider. If Jun ran, they’d overhaul him in a hot second and probably frag him.
Which might be preferable to the ISA finding out that the Unicorn was under the control of an illegally empowered MI.
Threadley startled him by saying, “Don’t worry, you’re not under arrest.”
“I’m not?”
“No.”
“You told Budgett you were going to send me somewhere worse than Pallas.”
“I am. That place you call home.”
Kiyoshi laughed. He scratched his cubital port through his sleeve.
“Seems like headquarters got a call from your boss,” Threadley said. “Bastard’s got thrust with a capital T. Specifically what was said to whom, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. It would be futile for me to speculate on your worth to the Shogun.”
The title hung between them, like a bad smell. Kiyoshi was stunned that the boss-man had come through for him, more stunned that the boss possessed the clout to spring him from the clutches of the ISA. He had known that the man called the Shogun had connections. Otherwise, 99984 Ravilious would have been history by now. But he hadn’t known the boss-man had thrust-with-a-capital-T, as Threadley put it,
“I’d really like to know what you’re doing out there,” Threadley said. “Timber …”
Kiyoshi did not say a word.
“You know, I wasn’t kidding, back on the bridge, when I said I’d like to nominate you for some kind of award. You’ve got the right stuff. You were the one who took Shoshanna down after she got infected. You took out a whole roomful of meat puppets. Secured the entity known as Little Sister and held the fort until we arrived. Didn’t even get the post-combat shakes, didja?”
A smirk fought to emerge on Kiyoshi’s lips. “I had God on my side.”
“And there I was thinking you had to be on go-juice. Anyway, what I’m getting at is this: you’re the kind of individual the ISA can use. I’m authorized to offer you a generous starting salary.”
Kiyoshi just managed not to laugh. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m flattered. Sincerely flattered. But all I want is to get back to my ship and go home.”
★
A while later, Cydney, monitoring her own feed, emailed Aidan: “What about my item on Gap 2.5? Might as well use it, after everything I went through to get that workstation.”
Aidan’s response came twenty-six minutes later. (They were already closer to home.) “What item?”
“Oh,” Cydney said, putting two and two together. Things did vanish in the ether … if the ISA did not think they should be known. Thoughtfully, she emailed back: “Never mind.”
xxxxi.
Elfrida floated out of her telepresence cubicle after nine hours, stiff and tired. She had the worst headache of her life. “Doggone asimov-class phavatar … Medibot!” A dalek-class bot rolled up before she reached the end of the corridor. “I’ve got a headache,” Elfrida said pitifully.
“Sorry!” the dalek-class said. “You have been receiving a synthetic opioid in your IV. I can’t give you any more painkillers at this time.”
“But that was for my feet!”
She’d suffered severe frostbite in four toes, and had had injections to regenerate the tissue.
“Sorry!” the dalek-class said. It rolled off.
That treatment was the height of friendliness compared to what she got from the crew of the Imagine Dragons. To a man and woman, they turned their backs when she bumbled into the mess. Screw ‘em. They lost this turf war. Do ‘em good, for a change. She felt very glad to see Mendoza sitting by himself with a cup of soup.
“Clam chowder,” he said. “Want some? It’s pretty good.”
Elfrida laughed. “That’s funny. I was on a ship once where ‘clam chowder’ was their code word for black-market liquor. No, thank you; I’ve got a headache, and the stupid medibot wouldn’t give me anything.” She held onto the edge of the table, her legs drifting out parallel to the floor. She wasn’t wearing gecko-grips, as it hurt her feet less to float than to walk. “Where’s Kiyoshi?”
“Yonezawa? He’s gone.”
“What?”
Mendoza looked surprised at her surprise. “He went back to his ship. Guess he had places to go, cargoes to deliver.”
“I wanted to talk to him.”
“You could always call him.”
“It’s not the same. I wanted to say …” Her legs gently descended towards the deck. This was the only indication that the Imagine Dragons had engaged thrust. “I wanted to say sorry.”
“What for?”
“And another thing. I never even thanked him for saving our lives.”
“I did,” Mendoza said. “He was like, don’t worry about it, I enjoyed it.”
“Ew.”
“Right? You had his number, Elfrida. He definitely isn’t on the level… but so what, right? We’re equally as alive, whether we were saved by a gangster or a priest.”
“Did everyone from the Unicorn go with him? Haddock, his family, the Amish?”
“Yup. But speaking of the Haddock-man, that reminds me.” Mendoza fished in the pocket of his jeans. “He gave me this for you.”
“An origami crane,” Elfrida said blankly. “That doesn’t seem very Haddock-esque.” Then she got it. Paper, who used paper these days? You might use it for communications, if you were on an ISA ship where every channel was guaranteed unprivate.
She unfolded the crane, cupping her hand over it to thwart the surveillance cameras. Across its creases were written a few words in Japanese script.
Fr. Thomas Lynch, S.J.—if you were wondering.
—Jun
She stuffed the scrap of paper in her pocket, wondering. Wondering. If she hadn’t been wondering before, she was now.
The mild thrust acceleration increased to a couple of tenths of a gee, pulling her feet down to the deck. “Ow,” she exclaimed. The ISA agents in the mess snickered.
Mendoza shot them an unfriendly look. “Sore losers.”
“My feet hurt. My head hurts. Everything hurts.”
“Poor you. C’mon.” Seeing that it would hurt her to walk, Mendoza scooped her up in his arms. He marched out of the mess with her, impervious to the mocking comments that followed them. He carried her down to the berth they’d given him on the residential deck. “Did they assign you a berth yet?”
“I don’t know. They probably won’t, unless I ask. I don’t know who to ask. I don’t want to talk to Threadley. I know he’s mad at me.”
“Sucks to be him. UNVRP won, the ISA lost. Booyah.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“You’ll have to tell me later how you did it.”
“I will. Oh, my head … This is a nice berth.”
“Yeah, they don’t stint themselves for comfort, although a bit of spin gravity wouldn’t go amiss. They probably could afford it, but they’re like Star Force: they think living in freefall makes them bad-ass.”
Elfrida lay in the feathery thrust gravity on a neatly made-up bunk. With the door closed, the bunk was the floor. Mendoza lay alongside her.
“How are you feeling?” he said, stroking her hair.
“Like crap.”
“Y’know, Elfrida …”
“Don’t say it.” She ducked her head into his shoulder. “Don’t say it, Mendoza, please.”
“John.”
“Huh?”
“My name.”
“John …”
He kissed her hair, laid a tentative hand on her waist.
“John.”
They discovered—and later agreed, giggling—that sex in micro-gee was wildly overrated.
When the Imagine Dragons increased thrust to the point that the ship was under one full gravity, it got better.
★
Like a handful of sand vanishing on the beach, the passengers from the Uhuru-Gene
va flight blended into the concourse of Geneva Centre Aerospatial. Elfrida took a deep breath. She smelled fresh bread, hot chocolate, cinnamon, apples … an olfactory blitz after breathing recycled air for so long.
Cydney was going to meet her here. The Imagine Dragons had got home before the Zhèngzhou and the Húludao, but it had dropped Elfrida and Mendoza off at UNLEOSS, the United Nations Low Earth Orbit Space Station. They’d spent a week getting debriefed by UNVRP, the Space Corps, and a bunch of other agencies. So Cydney had now been back on Earth for days. She’d emailed Elfrida: I’m coming to Geneva to meet you! Can’t wait, babe!
Elfrida had not dreaded anything so much since she was locked in that freezer, running out of air.
Mendoza looked nervous, too.
“What’s eating you?” she asked, not sure if she really wanted to know what he was thinking.
Finally he said, “That UNESCO thing. I can’t believe they’re really going to file a complaint against us for impersonating UNESCO agents.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. We can challenge their paperwork and get it held up for years. I’ve still got a complaint pending against me for allegedly saying something racist to a guy on Botticelli Station.”
“You said something racist?”
“No. But the point is, it’s been a year and a half and it still hasn’t got beyond the paperwork stage. The guy is dead, anyway.” And there went that topic of conversation.
They walked down to customs. Elfrida’s toes were still painful, making her limp. Mendoza bought an apfelküchlein on the way and munched it. Neither of them had any luggage. They submitted to the usual battery of scans. Then there was nothing left to do but go through the automated doors painted with a 3D mural of the Alps.
Two paces before they hit the mural, Mendoza grabbed Elfrida and kissed her deeply. His mouth tasted of apples. “I just wanted to do that,” he said. “I guess this is it. I mean, I understand. Except that I don’t understand.”
Nor did Elfrida. She’d never been this confused in her life.
The doors parted. A sea of faces slammed into her vision. She saw Cydney, jumping up and down, waving a bouquet of roses, shedding petals in her excitement.
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