His eyes went wide. “Are you serious?”
“Have you ever known me to kid around?” She’d never seen him look so confused. “They’re telling me I’ll be out of here in a few more days.” Reconstructive procedures would heal her quickly. “Meet me and I’ll show you.”
“Show me? Where is it?”
“We’ll have to rent a boat.”
They also picked up some diving gear. Matt didn’t swim a stroke, and he worried about what would happen in the event of a problem while Kim was submerged. He feared she wasn’t quite entirely recovered yet, but she assured him that she was fine. She needed only not put too much weight on the leg.
He’d drawn the only possible conclusion. “You’re telling me it’s in the lake,” he said, as they put out from the north shore.
“Of course.”
“Kim, even if it is, I’ll drown trying to get a look at it.”
“You won’t have to go down.”
“You mean it’s visible from the boat?”
“I hope not.”
“Then what—?”
“Just bear with me a bit.” She had a sensor. But in fact it took almost two hours to find the site she wanted. By the time she did Matt had lost all patience. “It’s small,” she told him finally.
He frowned. “How small?”
She held her hands a half meter apart. “Really,” she added. “It’s a microship.”
The sensor picked it up finally, and she slipped over the side, used the jets to take her down through water that was quite clear, and had no trouble finding it. She plucked it out of the mud, then returned to the surface and handed it over to Matt. He made a skeptical face, took it from her, and stared at it.
“Stop assuming,” she told him, “that the celestials have to be the same size we are.”
Gradually he came to accept the possibility. On the way back to Eagle Point, he sat with it in his lap, saying things like, It feels as if it could be. And Maybe it’s possible. “But, Kim, God help you if this is a joke.”
They bundled the microship in wrapping paper, stowed it in a carrying case, and put it in the flyer. “Okay,” he said. “First thing we’ll need to do is put together a team to look at it. We’ll want to take it apart, find out how it works. Maybe we can figure out what sort of crew it had.” He looked pointedly at her. The message was clear: If she was wrong, they were both going to look silly.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said as they lifted off.
“What is it this time, Kim?”
“You start bringing in experts and the word will be out within an hour.”
“You’re telling me that Woodbridge doesn’t know about this.”
“If he did, do you think we’d be sitting here with the microship?”
His jaw muscles worked. “Kim, there’s no way around that. He has to be informed.”
“Then kiss it goodbye.”
“I don’t—”
“Look, Matt, think about it. Once the Council finds out we have this, they’ll claim it. They’ll probably make it a security issue. You won’t have it long enough to get it out of the container.”
For a long time he said nothing. She watched him stare at the artifact, and then look out at the sky. “You’re right,” he said. “Okay. Let’s figure out who we can trust. We’ll keep it down to an absolute minimum number of people. Rent a lab somewhere, away from the Institute.”
“That’s better.”
“We can tell Phil.”
“No.”
“Kim, he’s a son of a bitch, but he knows how to keep a secret. We can trust him.”
“I don’t care whether we can trust him or not. There’s no reason he needs to know.”
They argued back and forth. In the end Matt caved in when she simply refused to go along with the idea.
He sat staring out the window all the way back to the hotel, clinging to the Valiant, not speaking, his jaw set, his eyes by turns exultant and wintry. “Kim,” he said, as they settled down onto the roof, “let me ask a question: Why are you so concerned about all this? The Council would recognize your part in the recovery; you’d become famous; you’d be wealthy before it was over. What more do you want?”
“I want to be part of the team that looks at it,” she said. “I want to be there when things happen.” She hesitated.
“—And?”
“I want to find out about Emily. How it happened that she was killed and dumped overboard. And who did it—”
The afternoon out on the lake had stimulated both their appetities. “The Blue Fin?” she suggested. It was a restaurant down on the mall, specializing in west coast cuisine.
“What do we do with this?” asked Matt.
“It’s starting already, isn’t it?” she said. “We’d better take it with us.”
They were early for dinner and the restaurant was almost empty. They found a table in a corner, and set the carrying case down on a chair against the wall. Kim asked for a shonji, which had a rum and strawberry base. Matt, who rarely drank, stepped out of character and ordered a Tyrolean Pistol. And they both went for the catch of the day.
Matt had a strong voice. It was a rich basso profundo, and when he got excited people could hear him at a considerable distance. So he made a conscious effort to speak low. “What do you think?” he asked. “What’ll the Council do about all this?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think the celestials are psychos. So Woodbridge is right to be worried. After we’ve been able to get the information we want out of it—” she glanced at the container, “—we’ll turn it over to him.”
“How are you going to explain it?”
“We won’t have to. We hand him the ship, and we give the public whatever advanced technology goes with it.” Their drinks came and they toasted each other. “I don’t think there’ll be much anybody can do. He’ll be annoyed that he wasn’t brought in. But he’ll know why, and it won’t matter by then anyhow.”
That night, in her hotel room, she connected with Shep and had him bring up Solly.
“You’re playing with fire, Kim.”
“I know.”
“I have no faith whatsoever in any of your experts to keep this quiet.”
“Solly, I don’t know what else to do. I’ve thought about talking to Woodbridge—”
“No. Your first instincts about Woodbridge are correct. You give it to him, you’ll never see it again.”
“So where do I go from here?”
“There’s no way to plan until you know what really happened out there.”
“You’re talking about the logs again.”
“Right.”
“I still don’t know where they are, Solly.”
“Who would? Somebody must know.”
“Yeah.” She looked into his eyes. “I can only think of one person who might.”
To Matt’s dismay, Kim reclaimed the Valiant when they returned to Seabright. She allowed him to hold it while they were on the train, and to ride shotgun with it when, on arrival, she took it to Capital University. There, she imposed on friends to get some private lab time, and took a complete set of virtuals, inside and out. Then she used a public phone to rent a United Distribution delivery box in Marathon under Kay Braddock’s name. “Not sure who’ll be collecting my mail,” she told the clerk, and asked for an ID number. She then inserted the microship into a plastic container with plenty of padding and shipped it off to her delivery box.
In the morning she reported for work and received an assignment to write a series of articles for Paragon Media on Institute activities. Matt was in and out of her office all day. Was the Valiant okay? He kept looking over his shoulder and referring portentously to the vessel as the bric-a-brac. Where was it? Was someone watching it? What was she planning to do next?
It was fine, she assured him, neatly stashed where nobody would find it. Ever. That might have been a whopper, but it seemed to have the desired effect, both soothing and disturbing him. Suppose something happens to you, he argued. What then?