“He said he’d had a message from the medical center,” said Amethyst.
“So he did. The one and only message anyone has had since we’ve been here. Because after that the computer that services the communications center went down. We lost outside contact, and many of the databases. Question number three: How did the breakdown and loss of data happen?”
“I think we may have done it,” Josh said. He looked defensively at Rick and Hag. “Well, we might have. It doesn’t matter now.”
“You didn’t,” Winnie said. “You smashed one backup data unit, but that had nothing to do with the general failures. What did cause it? Let’s go on. Question number four: What were Unimine ships doing near Solferino? You all saw one as you were first arriving. And Josh thinks he saw another one later.”
“I did see it. Dawn saw it, too—and she drew it.”
“I believe you. But what was it doing here? Unimine has mineral rights to Cauldron, but no rights at all on Solferino. Just a couple more questions, then we’ll look at answers. Number five: What were you really looking for, when you were doing plant tests around the Avernus Fissure? I didn’t accept for one minute that it was new alkaloids.”
“Nor did I!” Amethyst said triumphantly. “I told everyone that Brewster was lying when he said that.”
“Good for you. It wasn’t alkaloids, but you spent a whole day doing plant tests. Then Josh made his discovery. And after that Brewster switched to soil tests. Question number six: Why the changeover? In particular, why test on the brink of the Avernus Fissure, where plants won’t grow if you wait for a thousand years?”
“That was my question, last night,” Hag said excitedly.
“So you’ve all been wondering about things.” Winnie nodded. “I’m not surprised. You’re a bright bunch, and Brewster was crazy to think he could fool you for long with explanations he was dreaming up on the spur of the moment. All right, here’s the final question. What is it, number eight?”
“Seven,” said Amethyst.
“Good enough. Number seven. Maybe it would have been question number one, but I only heard about it from you much later. When you arrived on Solferino, Brewster wasn’t at the compound. He arrived later in the day, and he was very surprised to see you. Either Foodlines headquarters didn’t inform him that you’d be here earlier than the original date, or he was too busy doing something else to check for messages. I think it was the second reason. So here is question number seven: What had Brewster been doing, that took him away from the compound at the time of your arrival?”
“He had an answer for that,” Sig said. “He told us he had been with the other exploration team members to the medical center. We decided that sounded fishy. We agreed last night that not one of us ever heard about a Grisel system medical center in any briefing.”
“For a good reason. There is no off-planet medical center in the Grisel system.”
“So where did the exploration team go?” Sapphire asked. She put her arm around Ruby, as though she already had an idea what the answer might be.
“That was my number-one question. The answer also gives the answer to number seven: What was Brewster doing when you first arrived on Solferino? One thing’s for sure, he wasn’t off-planet, because when I arrived there were no vehicles capable of going off-planet. All you had was a cargo aircar, able to operate in Solferino’s atmosphere but not outside it.”
“That’s what he arrived in,” said Sig. “We saw it.”
“Yes, but there was no way he could have used it to come in from space. So when you first got here, he had been somewhere on Solferino. I hate to tell you what I think he had been doing, but I must. He had been disposing of the bodies of the Solferino exploration team. He killed all of them, maybe by poisoning them as I’m sure he was going to poison you.”
Ruby gasped. She shrank back closer to Sapphire, who held her sister tight and said, “Where did he put them?”
“I can only guess, unless Brewster chooses to tell us. But over there”—Winnie gestured in the direction of the Avernus Fissure—“is an environment where a human body would be completely gone in a few days. He had already been exploring in this area, and he knew it well. You arrived while he was busy disposing of the evidence. He wasn’t expecting you. He had to make up a story on the spot and get rid of Bothwell Gage as soon as possible, too. Gage is lucky. If he hadn’t been as keen to leave as Brewster was to get rid of him, I don’t think he would have survived his first night on Solferino. Gage wouldn’t have swallowed for a moment the story that Brewster gave you, about the healing effects of this planet—any more than I did.”
“We didn’t buy it, either,” Sig said. “Not completely. I guess we hoped it might be true. But why would he want to kill everybody?”
“I’ll get to that in a moment. First, I want to answer question number two. Why did he take us to the camp in the Barbican Hills, leave us there, and fly straight back to the compound? The answer to that is simple. Something you had found around the compound made him afraid there might be other evidence left behind. I’m talking about things that the exploration team would never have forgotten, if they had been alive when they departed from the settlement.”
“The bodger,” Josh said softly. “Rick and Hag found the bodger. Topaz insisted that no one would go away and leave a pet tied up to starve.”
Winnie nodded. “Topaz was right. And nobody did But when it was discovered, Brewster got scared. He realized that he had to get all of us out of the way so he could do a thorough search of the compound, inside and outside, without interference.”
Josh remembered how his personal belongings had been moved in the dormitory room, but he said nothing because Winnie was continuing: “Brewster also wiped out parts of the computer while we were away at the camp. Deliberately.” She glanced at Josh and the Lasker twins. “Brewster did it, not you. That’s the answer to my question number three. As to why, it was because some of the files held information that he dared not let us see. I spent a lot of time trying to find backup copies—I’ve not had a decent night’s sleep since I got here, that’s why I’m always yawning.”
“So that’s the two people I saw wandering around at night,” Josh burst out. “It was you, trailing Brewster.”
“Must have been—though I didn’t realize we’d been seen. But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t find out anything about the personnel assigned to Solferino, particularly their medical records. Brewster didn’t want anyone finding out that people here were as sick as people anywhere else. There were other missing files, too, that I didn’t think were significant at the time, but I do now. I couldn’t find files for the Foodlines charter for the exploration of Solferino, and I couldn’t find the interfaces for different groups working in the Grisel stellar system.”
Winnie looked at Sig. “Now it’s time to answer question number four: What was a Unimine ship doing buzzing around this planet, where it had no business to be? This will answer your question, too, Sig, as to why Brewster had to kill everyone on Solferino, including us. And it’s a simple answer: Brewster did it because he wanted to become one of the richest men in the known universe. He was an employee of Foodlines, but he had discovered something that made Solferino unique. It also made the planet far more suited to Unimine than Foodlines activities. Unimine has mineral extraction technology, Foodlines doesn’t. Have you heard of stable transuranic elements?”
“Bothwell Gage told us about them,” Amethyst said, “when we were coming through the Messina Dust Cloud on the way here. They are enormously valuable, he said.”