Coren stopped before the large picture and watched the rectangles drift before and behind each other. It was a very expensive piece, Auroran, Coren thought, and he wondered if it were an import as well. He turned away after a few minutes and did a slow circuit of the living room.
A low table made from a sheet of thinly-sliced granite stood between facing setees. One glass stood in a drying pool of condensation, ice melted at the bottom.
One glass.
No clothes in the living room.
He entered the kitchen. Four glasses stood on the counter by the sink, all empty.
The place had been cleaned, he realized. While Damik had been tortured-four or five hours' worth, according to Capel-someone had gone through the apartment and tidied up.
Damik's office showed a little more disorder, but none of it appeared significant. A few papers scattered on the desk, disks stacked sloppily, a jacket draped over a chair back.
A few plaques decorated one wall. Coren smiled, seeing the Special Service certificate, and, beside it, a merit award for bravery. He did not recall the action, but he could look it up.
Damik had gone to university-Nestern in the Freno District-and graduated with a degree in art history. Coren grunted, surprised. He would never have guessed.
The frame rested crookedly on the wall. Coren brought a fingertip against the lower left comer and pushed up to straighten it. The hook on which it hung came loose and the entire plaque clattered to the floor.
It burst apart-frame, cover sheet, hook, and documents-and sprawled across Coren's feet. Damik had used the same display to hold several items, one atop the other. Coren knelt quickly. He counted half a dozen certificates, which must have strained the capacity of the frame, stuffed past its meager limits. Coren gathered them up.
More graduation certificates. Damik had taken courses in a number of unrelated fields: cooking, the history of paleoanthropology, astronomy, microcircuit repair. All them unexpected and, in their diversity, admirable.
Coren stopped at the last document. Damik's grammar school certificate, from the Holmer Foster Gymnas Cooperative.
Brun was an orphan…?
Something else about the name of the facility seemed familiar. Later, he decided; he could look it up later. He folded the certificate and tucked it into an inside pocket, then reassembled the frame. He found the hook and pressed it back into the wall and carefully set the display on it, which then listed crookedly to the left.
Capel waited in the living room.
"Anything?" he asked.
"Nothing obvious. You realize that the place was sanitized. "
Capel scowled. "They had time. Where can I reach you if I need to ask further questions?"
Coren fished out a card and handed it to Capel.
"So have you found Nyom Looms yet?" Capel asked.
"I'm still looking," Coren said smoothly.
Capel nodded again. "We'll be in touch."
"Even if you don't need me, let me know, would you? Damik and I did work together once."
Capel seemed to soften a little. "Sure."
"By the way, did he have any relatives?" It seemed likely that Damik would have been adopted, but Coren never heard him talk about anyone. That omission now acquired significance.
"I was going to ask you that. None we've found. He had a broker. We'll be talking to him."
"Hm. Too bad."
Coren left. He checked his watch. He had less than forty minutes to get to the Auroran embassy. Too little time, really, to sort out his thoughts, much less his feelings.
Brun Damik was an orphan…
He pulled out his comm. "Desk; connect to the public records of the Holmer Foster Gymnas Cooperative. Alumni."
While he waited, Coren teased at the reasons Damik had been killed. Because of Coren's visit? So soon? That implied a surveillance network of remarkable scope. Had Damik called someone, given himself away, or was this an unrelated matter?
"Connection complete," his Desk said.
"Access records for Damik, Brun."
"Located."
"List of kin or other relations."
"Parents, Evlin Mores and Rolsin Dynik, recorded as deceased. Institutional guardianship until age eleven. "
Mores and Dynik…sound familiar…Coren could not remember. "Then what?"
"Elective sponsorship.".'
"Name of sponsor?"
Under security lock."
"Hack it. I want that name."
"Working."
Damik's parents seemed so familiar, as if he had met them or seen their names
The list of people in Wenithal's investigation.
He needed to check it again and verify, but now that he remembered he was sure.
"Finished," his Desk reported. "Sponsor listed as Wenithal, Ree, agent with Eurosector police. "
Fourteen
A dinner?" Derec shook his head at the image on the comm screen. Ariel returned his cynical look. "I don't get this," he continued. "Two days ago we were all but persona non grata and now Setaris is inviting you to embassy soirees."
"It gets better," Ariel said. " Jonis will be there."
"Taprin…it occurs to me that you're being used here."
"Really?" Ariel intoned with mock dismay. "I asked Lanra to be my guest. One good surprise is worth another."
"Do you trust him?"
"Of course not. He hasn't told us half of what he's looking into."
"Fair is fair. We aren't telling him everything, either."
Ariel shrugged. "Do you want to take odds on whether the two lines of inquiry intersect?"
"I'm not sure I want them to."
"Well…Lanra asked me if Chassik would be there tonight. I asked him why, and he said it was something he stumbled on."
"Chassik. What could he possibly want with Chassik?"
"I have some opinions. Did you know that Solaria owns Nova Levis?"
"That hasn't come out in the newsnets."
"No, and it may not. They owned it before it was Nova Levis, when it was no more than a Solaria mining franchise called Cassus Thole. The colony-a Settler colony-is a lease agreement that was originally set up between Solaria and the Church of Organic Sapiens."
Derec started. "Looms' church?"
"The same, only back before they were so rabidly antispace. Now, just to heap coincidence upon coincidence, Gale Chassik was one of the initial investors in a biomed research lab called-are you ready?-Nova Levis, which was closed after having been investigated for infant brokering."
Derec whistled. "Convergence is imminent."
"So it seems. How's it coming with the robot?"
Derec glanced across the small workspace at Rana. She stared, rapt, at the banks of screens, calibrating the myriad details of Thales' link to facilitate a precise excavation. The robot itself remained where it had been left, on its pallet, now connected to Thales and Rana's console via several heavy cables.
"I'd say another half-hour, we'll have the interface running at an acceptable level," he said. A small icon in the upper left corner of the comm screen revealed Thales' presence in the exchange, monitoring security and running an encryption routine. Ariel saw the same icon on her end, otherwise she would never speak so freely on a commline.
"Speaking of things robotic," Derec said, "the director here is a man named Rotij Polifos. Do you know anything about him?"
"No. Should I?"
"He's been director for seven years. I was just thinking,, it's kind of unusual for an Auroran to stay in a Terran posting like this for that long. Don't they usually rotate out more regularly?"
"Usually. Maybe he likes it."
Derec frowned. "Maybe. "
"Is there a problem?"
"No, I just…it seems odd, that's all."
"Have Hofton look into it. Keep your mind on the robot, Derec. "
"Right, right. You know, Lanra wants us to prove a robot committed the murders. There's no way, Ariel. Not this one, anyway. It's just a standard DW-12 with a few added modules-nothing I don't recognize-and it's showing a nearly textbook collapse pattern. It couldn't even have made the crack in the cargo bin, not without some tools."