“You cannot be fucking serious,” Sakai said for what seemed like the third or fourth time. The chief engineer’s face was red, his jaw set. He’d arrived at the security station a few minutes after Fred and Holden, and Holden was a little surprised Fred hadn’t had him thrown out yet. “I have eight ships inbound within the next week. What am I supposed to do? Tell them to match orbit and float until we decide whether we’ll let them in?”
“Seems like a good start,” Fred said.
“We have supplies due to ship on half a dozen contracts.”
“I’m aware of that, Mister Sakai.” Fred’s voice was no louder; there was no anger in it. The cool politeness made the hair on the back of Holden’s neck rise. Sakai seemed to feel it too. It didn’t stop him, but his voice went from accusatory to almost wheedling.
“I’ve got shipments on two dozen jobs due to go out. There are a lot of people counting on us.”
For a moment, Fred’s shoulders seemed to sag, but his voice was just as strong. “I’m aware of that. We’ll open up for business again as soon as we can.”
Sakai wavered, on the edge of saying something more. Instead, he made a short, impatient sigh and walked back out as the head of security came in. She was a thin-faced woman Fred called Drummer, but Holden didn’t know if that was her first name, her last, or just something she went by.
“How’s it going?” Fred asked.
“Nothing we can’t handle,” she said. Her voice had a crisp accent that Holden couldn’t place. She glanced at him, nodded curtly, and turned back to Fred. “Do we have any information we can give on how long we expect the lockdown to be in effect?”
“Tell them the interruption of service will be as brief as possible.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Drummer said, then turned away.
“Drummer. Close the door when you go, eh?”
Her eyes flickered, cut back to Holden, then away again. She didn’t say anything, but she pulled the door closed behind her when she left. Fred gave Holden a mirthless, tired smile.
“Sakai’s right. I just shut down the equivalent of a major port city because of one missing woman. Every hour I keep it like this, Tycho’s losing thousands of credits in a dozen different scrips.”
“So we’ll have to find her quickly.”
“If they haven’t already fed her into the recyclers and broken her down to water and a few active molecules,” Fred said. And then a moment later, “I have the sensor arrays sweeping the local area. If she’s been spaced, we’ll know it soon.”
“Thank you,” Holden said, leaning against the counter. “I know I don’t say it often, but I do appreciate this.”
Fred nodded to the door. “You see her? Drummer?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve been working with her directly for three years. Knew who she was for ten before that.”
“All right,” Holden said.
“If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have told you I trusted her with my life.”
“Now?”
“Now there is exactly one person on this station who I’m certain isn’t going to shoot me in the back of the head if I keep pressing on this, and that’s you,” Fred said.
“That’s got to be uncomfortable.”
“It really is. So what I mean to say, James, is that while I am glad that you appreciate all I’m doing for you, I’m also taking you on right now as my personal bodyguard. In return, I’ll try to keep anyone from shooting you.”
Holden nodded slowly. Something in the back of his brain was shifting, like a thought that wasn’t quite formed. A wave of vertigo washed over him like he was looking over a cliff. “Two of us against a deep OPA conspiracy.”
“Until I have evidence to the contrary, yes.”
“That really is an uncomfortable position to be in, isn’t it?”
“Not what I would have picked, no,” Fred said. “But someone knows how to circumvent my security systems, and whatever your reporter friend was doing was enough to spook them into action direct enough to tip their hand.”
“The missing ships,” Holden said. “There were a couple of people I mentioned it to.”
“That’s not something you do.”
“In retrospect, I wish I’d played it a little closer to the vest, but—”
“Not that,” Fred said. “When you’ve infiltrated the enemy security structures, you don’t do anything that shows that you’ve managed it. It’s basic information warfare. As long as the enemy doesn’t know they’re compromised, you can keep gathering intelligence. That’s not something you give up unless the stakes are unimaginably high or…”
“Or?”
“Or the enemy you’ve compromised isn’t going to be around very long anyway. I don’t know if those missing ships spooked someone into making a stupid mistake, or if my position on Tycho is so precarious that it doesn’t matter anymore whether I know.”
“You seem to be taking it all in stride.”
Fred hoisted an eyebrow. “I’m panicking on the inside,” he said in a deadpan.
Holden looked over the pile of Monica’s belongings as if they might have something to add to the conversation. The hand terminal blinked forlornly. The blouse hung loose and sad.
“Did you pull anything from her terminal?” he asked.
“We can’t connect to it,” Fred said. “All the diagnostics are disabled or sunk in third-party encryption. Journalists.”
Holden picked up the hand terminal. The shattered display was a mess of light scatter. The only sections that still had anything close to recognizable were a blinking red button in one corner and a few letters in a particularly large shard: NG SIG. Holden tapped the red button and the hand terminal flashed once. The button was gone, the letters replaced by something pale brown with a line across it, a single jigsaw puzzle piece floating in a sea of noise-light.
“What did you do?” Fred asked.
“There was a button,” Holden said. “I pushed it.”
“Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn’t it?”
“But look. It… I think I may have accepted an incoming signal.”
“From what?”
Holden shook his head. Then turned back to the pile of Monica’s belongings, the tiny half-thought that had been bothering him slipping into his consciousness with something like relief.
“Her video capture,” he said. “She has a little wearable interview rig. It’s intentionally unobtrusive so that the person she’s talking to sort of forgets they’re on camera.”
“And?”
Holden spread his hands. “It’s not here.”
Fred moved forward, his lips thin, his eyes shifting over the mess of light from the broken screen. Holden had a sense of movement, as if the image was shifting slightly. Voices came from the far side of Fred’s office door. A man’s voice raised in anger; Drummer’s calm, clipped reply.
“Are you sure we can’t get into this hand terminal?” Holden said.
“Positive,” Fred said, “but there may be another way. Come on. If we’re going to solve this, we’re going to need an imaging astronomer.”
Once Fred explained the problem, it took three hours to set up a rig that would capture the glow coming from the scattered screen and an hour more to get the computer to understand its new task. The properties of light coming off extrasolar dust clouds were apparently very different from a busted terminal display. Once the expert systems were convinced that the problem fit inside their job description, the lab went to work matching polarizations and angles, mapping the fissures in the surface of the display, and building a computational lens that couldn’t exist in the physical world.