He crossed the bay to the cargo bin. No one stopped him as he entered.
Lights brightly illuminated the inside. He climbed up the scaffolding that supported the couches to the crack in the ceiling. The metal showed a clear curve where something had gouged it from the interior and pushed it out. Derec ran his hand over the surface and found a number of indentations on either side. A hand?
"Sir."
Derec looked at the entrance. A uniform stood there, sidearm out.
"I have to ask you to leave," she said. "You aren't supposed to be in here."
"Really?" Derec climbed down. "Why is that?"
"This is a crime scene, sir. "
He stepped past her. "It is, indeed. Thank you for pointing that out."
Derec entered the office-and walked straight into a full-blown argument between Palen and Harwol.
Harwol was fuming. "-what in hell you thought you were doing, but you overstepped you authority by a considerable margin!"
"This is my station, Harwol," Palen shot back. "It is my margin!"
"Excuse me," Derec said.
Everyone looked at him. Palen and Harwol both were breathing hard.
"I was wondering, " Derec continued, "if anyone had bothered to count the bodies."
"Of course we did, Avery," Palen snapped. "We counted them as we carried them out."
"Yes, but have you counted them since?"
Palen frowned at him, mouth open.
"I didn't think so," Derec said. "Maybe we should."
Nineteen
Coren almost reached for her, to pull her into Wenithal's apartment. Jeta Fromm tensed, looked left and right, then, with a harsh sigh of frustration, stepped forward.
"Shut the damn door, gato," she muttered.
She stopped halfway between Coren and Wenithal, who still held his pistol in her direction. Coren closed the door, the soft snik bringing her around to face him again. Her long, almost gaunt face showed anger and fear. She blinked nervously. Coren glanced at Wenithal, who now looked away, hands clasped in his lap.
"You've wrecked my life," Jeta said suddenly. "That's going to cost a bit more than my usual fee. "
"Where've you been?" Coren asked. "I tried to find you right after-"
"Right after you gave me away to the sanitaries? What happened, did they offer you more credits than your wildest imagination? Or did you just decide to piss on some warren rat for fun and see how long it took her to die?"
"The 'sanitaries'?" Ariel asked.
Jeta glared over her shoulder. "Who are you?"
Coren cleared his throat loudly. "Sanitaries are enforcers. They clean up things. Sanitation workers."
Ariel made a silent "Oh" and nodded. "How clever," she said. "I'm Ambassador Ariel Burgess from the Auroran Embassy. Pleased to meet you, Ms…?"
"This is Jeta Fromm," Coren announced. "The freelance data troll who found Nyom for me…then vanished before I could thank her for doing basically what she's accusing me of."
"Me?" Jeta shouted. "You vatdrip! Someone's tried to kill me twice since I talked to you, once right after you left with the data I got you. Second time was at the Lyzig tube station, morning after I took off."
"Did Cobbel and Renz tell you I was looking for you?"
Jeta frowned uncertainly, just for a moment, then looked away. "I was looking for you myself."
Coren caught Ariel's eye and gave a slight shake of his head.
"Who did you tell about the baleys?" he asked.
"You," Jeta said.
"Who else?" Coren took two quick steps toward her. She backed up only one. "They were all murdered, Jeta! Fifty-two dead baleys! Someone knew they'd been found, and killed any possible witnesses! If I'm the only one you told, then how did they know?"
"I'm asking you the same question! How did they find me?"
"I don't know who 'they' are. And if I'm one of them, why would I have to ask 'them'? You're not making sense."
Jeta glanced from Ariel to Wenithal, then back to Coren. "I didn't tell anybody."
"Then you were traced. "
She scowled. "I'm better than that, there's no way-"
"My system was compromised, and I can afford a hell of a lot better protection than you can."
Jeta shook her head. "Don't brag on it, gato-that's how I found you. "
It took Coren several moments to understand her meaning. "You broke into my system?"
She nodded. "It was hard, you've got a good one, but…"
Coren looked at Ariel. "But-"
"Someone piggybacked in with you," Ariel said. "Your system's still compromised."
"Who are they, Jeta?" Coren asked. "Who's trying to kill you?"
"Ask them, gato, I got my own problems!"
"I'd love to, but it could be fatal. Who are they?"
Jeta swallowed loudly. "All I know is, I handed over the data to you and went back to my hole! Two of 'em were waiting for me before I got there!" She looked at him narrowly. "I thought you'd had them standing by for after you got what you wanted."
Coren shook his head. "Then why follow me? If I set you up, this is the surest way to get yourself killed."
"I said that's what I thought. I thought it then, not now."
"What changed your mind?"
"I checked you out. It's not too often you find an honest cop."
"Then-"
"Good cops go bad."
"That still doesn't explain why you're here." He looked at Wenithal, who seemed to be pointedly ignoring them, drinking his coffee. "If I went bad-"
"I didn't know where else to go! All right? I don't trust any of my usual contacts! I thought I could make an arrangement with you. "
"If I were still a good cop, I'd help you. If I were bad, we could do business."
"Something like that."
"I've been trying to find you for over three days."
"I know. Why?"
"I thought you'd double-marketed the data."
Jeta's face hardened. "I don't do that."
"Then how did they know about the baley shipment?"
Jeta let out her breath slowly. "I'm a good troll, Mr. Lanra, very good, but I'm not the only one. If I could find out, so could a dozen others, easy. If I was you, though, I'd ask the people running the baleys to begin with. If anyone'd know…"
"I thought about that. I've been trying to find them. "
"No luck?" A mocking smile tugged at her thin lips, even though her eyes still showed fear. "Maybe you need to hire a professional. "
"Fine, then," Coren said tersely. "You're hired."
"My fee's doubled," Jeta said.
"I don't mind, I have an expense account."
"I have expenses, we're even. What you want to know first?"
"First? What are you doing here?"
"Following you."
"So you say. You want to tell me why? The truth this time."
Jeta looked around. "Do you mind if I put my stash down? Thanks." She set her pack on the end of the table by the sofa, then dropped into the cushions with a loud, relieved exhalation. "You botched my ride, gato. Then you almost got me killed. I thought that, anyway. I figured if anyone could solve my problems, it'd be the gato who caused them all to begin with."
"What do you mean, I botched your ride?" She gave him a guilty look. "Confession time: I found that data for you as fast as I did 'cause I already had it. I was slated to go on that shipment. I had a berth with them. " "I've been trolling for almost sixteen years," Jeta explained. "It's not a bad life if you don't mind the occasional hassle from police-public and private-and planning for the very long term. Some of us get good enough that we get hired as staff somewhere, go completely legitimate. Finding lost data is a full-time industry in some quarters. Can I have something to drink?"
Ariel went into the kitchen again and returned with a glass of water. Jeta sniffed at it, frowned, then shrugged and drank.
"Anyway, you have to understand how much data there is on this planet. I'm talking centuries of accrual. It never entirely disappears. Overwritten, archaic storage media, just plain misplaced, misfiled, or misremembered. It sits in layers, piling up, lumping together. Whole AI systems are devoted to sifting through it all, but it occasionally takes a deft hand, intuition, a lucky guess-human qualities you just don't find in a machine. There are specialists who do it, going through stuff that's really old. Some of them start out legit and move into freelance, but for most of us it's the other way around. There's a hardcore bunch that never go legit.