Aylen asked Target Five, “So you do know him?”
Target Five forced her expression back to blankness. “No.”
Target Two folded her arms and pushed back in her chair. “I’m finished talking. You go ahead and throw us in detent.”
Target Four said worriedly, “What about the others?”
Matif’s expression of borderline frustration snapped to calm and neutral, but he was probably lucky the scanner wasn’t pointed at him. He said, “I’ll check. Can you tell me their names? Describe them?”
Aylen and Soire both stopped to listen as Target Four described ten humans, three of them adolescents. Apparently his memory was terrible for lies but great for the truth, and I didn’t (and the scanner didn’t) think he was making any of it up.
Matif leaned forward, making sure his feed recording was getting all the details. “You’re saying these people should be with Lutran?”
“He was taking them home, to a home.” Target Four tapped the table earnestly. “We never saw him, you know, compartmentalize to make it hard for them to catch everybody.”
“Them?” Matif asked. “Who is them?”
Target Four said, “The Brehars. It’s Brehar something.”
I ran a quick public library query while the humans were fumbling to access their interfaces. “Possibly BreharWallHan. It’s a mining corporate…” I pulled more results, looking for connections. Oh, there was a big one. “It owns a system only one direct twenty-eight cycle wormhole jump from WayBrogatan.”
Indah’s whole face was scrunched in concentration. Tural whispered, “People. The Lalow was smuggling people.”
Soire was having Target Two taken to the holding cell, but Aylen’s face had gone preoccupied as she listened to Matif’s feed. Target Five watched her, frowning in growing consternation. “Miro’s talking, isn’t he?” she said in despair.
Indah relayed my info to Matif, who asked Target Four, “These people came from BreharWallHan?”
“Yeah, they were slaves,” Target Four told him. “They call it something else, but it’s slaves, right, dah? That’s what it is. Out in the rocks.”
Putting together Target Four’s story with what my library searches were turning up, BreharWallHan had a mining operation in an asteroid belt. The type of mining meant the contract labor had the ability to move around, to go from one asteroid to another, but they had no way to get anywhere else in the system, or out of it, and BreharWallHan controlled all access to supplies. But someone (Target Four either wouldn’t or couldn’t supply a name) had started an operation where contract laborers would make their way to the edge of the asteroid field, where a ship would slip in, pick them up, and take them away via the wormhole, to a point where the Targets aboard the Lalow would meet them and take them to a station where they would find the next step in their escape route.
“The corporates don’t notice?” Matif was fascinated but skeptical. “You taking out so many people at one time?”
Target Four was unfazed. “Cause we’re taking out their kids, dah. These people been out in those rocks so long they got kids older than me.”
Behind me, Tifany said, “What the fuck?”
“Wait, wait.” Matif was having a moment. “Are you saying these people were shipped to this belt as contract labor, but they’ve been there so long they’ve had families—children—and those children are being born into slavery? They aren’t allowed to leave?”
“I know.” Target Four spread his big hands on the table. “Penis move, right? That’s why we’re doing this, dah. Our grandperson was contract labor, like back in the back of time, before they got away and bought the ship.”
Aylen told Target Five, “Oh yes, he’s telling us everything.”
Target Five tried, “He has a head injury.”
Aylen was unimpressed. “He seems perfectly lucid.” Indah was subvocalizing again, talking to Aylen on her feed. “Even if you took payment to bring those people here, it’s not illegal, and it’s not illegal to be a contract labor refugee on Preservation. You can tell us where they are, we’ll get them proper help. But you need to tell us how Lutran fits in to this.”
Matif had just said, “But what did this have to do with Lutran?”
“He was the one, the plan person, right?” Target Four said. “He was supposed to handle what happened next.”
“What happened next?” Matif asked.
Target Four put his hands in the air. “I don’t know, that’s what I was asking you.”
Target Five slumped back in her chair, telling Aylen, “Lutran was our contact, he always meets us at the station, whichever one it is.” She added miserably, “If somebody killed him, they know about us.”
I said, “The perpetrator is a BreharWallHan agent.” I mean, probably. The chances were running over 85 percent.
Indah flicked her fingers at the display surfaces, and Aylen and Matif stopped talking. She said, “Not necessarily. We need to find out what happened aboard that transport. We know Lutran used it to get here, that it was involved in a cargo transfer contract with the Lalow, and that Lutran was killed aboard it. What does that tell us?”
Tural said, “I bet the refugees were meant to go aboard the transport, to be taken to its next destination.” They made a vague gesture. “The refugees either never made it to the transport, or they were killed as well, and… we just haven’t found their bodies yet.”
Indah was frowning. “Or the refugees killed Lutran? Because he demanded something from them, like payment?”
I said, “What did the review of the Merchant Docks surveillance video show?”
Yeah, it was a trick question. I knew from my drones still out in the main office area that the video had just been transferred from PortAuthSys to StationSecSys, and none of the humans working on the case had had a chance to download the files yet.
Indah looked at me, and I realized that she knew exactly what I was doing. She said, “If that’s your way of asking if you can review the video, then yes.” She nodded to Tural.
On reflection, I could have handled that better.
Tural got into their feed and gave my feed ID permission to download the video. I pulled the files while they were explaining how to access and play the material, and got to work.
Indah signaled for the questioning to continue, but there wasn’t much left to find out. Target Five gave in and supported Target Four’s version of the story, and they both insisted that they didn’t know what was supposed to happen after the refugees disembarked. All they knew was that Lutran would take care of getting them off the station to safety.
We needed to find out where the refugees were now, if they were either a) murderees or b) murderers. Concentrating on the video taken in the area around the Lalow’s dock, within 1.3 minutes I had isolated the moments when the refugees had left the ship. That gave us more to work with than just the descriptions Target Five had provided to Matif, though the camera’s estimates weren’t as good as full body scans.
The refugees were dressed in work clothes, and a few had small shoulder bags. They looked lost, stopping to check the feed markers frequently and moving slowly, as if they had never seen a station like this before. (Trapped in a contract labor camp spread out over an asteroid field, they probably hadn’t.) It didn’t catch any attention in this section of the docks, where ships from a wide range of places disembarked a lot of humans who had no clue what they were doing. And one of the regular-route merchants had just set a large noisy crew loose, plus there were three cargos being unloaded with varying degrees of efficiency and confusion. The Lalow had probably waited until the docks had gotten busy, to let the refugees mix with the crowd. The Port Authority personnel were obviously too worried about humans causing hauler bot accidents to notice the quiet group hesitantly crossing the embarkation floor.