Tic stood beside me, looking down at the body. He cleared his throat. "Captain Cheticamp? I recognize the deceased."
Cheticamp blinked in surprise. "You do?"
"His name is Kowkow Iranu. You can check with the Freep embassy. Until his disappearance three months ago, he was a junior attache with their trade-treaty negotiating team."
"Shit," Cheticamp said. He spoke for us all.
The police began their death scene cha-cha: taking pictures, scanning the area for hairs/fibers/scales/etc. Eventually they’d get a vacuum servo to suck up everything in the room, but they did a manual search first so they could record the position of everything they picked up — who knew if the location of a fluff-speck might be important? The servo did a better job of sweeping, but it didn’t make note of where each feather of lint came from.
We so-called civilians kept out of the way and watched. Scrutinized the heck out of everyone… for a minute or two anyway. Festina scanned the corpse with her Bumbler. Tic kept himself moving, looking over shoulders, busy-busy-busy so he wouldn’t think about the claustrophobic screamy-weamies. As for me, I soon let my mind drift away from the meticulous-fastidious-tedious police work; and timidly, shyly, asked the world-soul for anything it could tell about this Kowkow Iranu.
Instant data dump… and I knew a bunch more than I did before, thanks to a missing-persons report filed by the Freep embassy twelve weeks earlier. Kowkow Iranu: age twenty-three Freep years = thirty Earth standard. Family connections to several corporate barons in the Free Republic. Ergo, stinking rich with some political pull. One of four dozen staff members assigned to provide background info to the three senior Freep negotiators working on the trade treaty. The embassy hadn’t stated Iranu’s area of expertise, what kind of background bumpf he was supposed to provide… but the missing-persons report said he had graduated from a Freep university with a top-rank diploma in archaeology.
Hmmm.
Maya Cuttack spent time at archaeology digs in the Free Republic; no great surprise if she met Iranu there. Suppose they stayed friendly. While Iranu was on Demoth, he might have taken a break from the treaty talks to visit Maya here.
Then what happened? Did she kill him because he learned something he shouldn’t have? Or was Iranu in on this too? Whatever "this" was. Perhaps he and Maya were working together on something shady and they’d got into a disagreement…
Wait now — go back. Why did the trade talks need an archaeologist on staff? To play devil’s advocate, I could explain it away: young Iranu indulged his interests by taking an archaeology degree, but found there was no money in it and fell into a government job. Lots of people study one thing, then get a job doing something on a whole other block.
But.
But, but, but…
Here’s the thing: Freep scientists weren’t noted for pursuing knowledge out of dainty love of learning. Most just wanted to cash in. For Freeps, archaeology was a commercial enterprise — grave-robbing and treasure hunts, where you might find anything from ancient art objects to alien technological wonders.
In a Vigil law course, my professor talked about a group of Freep archaeologists who’d been caught smuggling artifacts off Demoth: fiddly-dick trinkets, lumps of junk, probably intended for sale to some tico collector who’d pay top dollar just because the stuff was old. But the incident had blown up to a major pissing match between us and the Freeps… them howling in righteous indignation at wicked Demoth, cruelly jailing honest Freep citizens for exercising their right to engage in commerce. The whole kerfuffle had soured relations between our planets for ages. In fact, the mess had happened three decades ago, just a year before the plague; and it was only now that our two planets had cooled off enough to talk about trade treaties again.
So the Freep contingent had an archaeologist on their negotiating staff. Something important there… but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
"Tic," I murmured, "what does the trade treaty say about archaeological artifacts?"
"Not much," he replied. "Considering past history, no one wanted to address archaeology at length — if they had, both sides would have been obliged to start blustering about sovereignty versus nearsighted greed, and that argument might have devolved all the way into a discussion of real issues. Couldn’t have that: bureaucrats love to dicker about minutiae, but have aneurysms when you suggest they question first principles. So our negotiators took a low-key approach on archaeology in exchange for concessions on… oh, I think it was an acreage cap, how much agricultural land Freep citizens could buy on Demoth."
"What exactly is this low-key approach?"
"Archaeological sites are just another type of mine. Anything dug up will get taxed at the same rate as iron or copper, and Demoth won’t raise a fuss about ‘priceless artifacts’ leaving the planet. No one thinks there are priceless artifacts here anyway — certainly not the Technocracy’s Heritage Board. I’m doubtful myself; Ooloms have lived on Demoth nine centuries, and we’ve never found anything worth cheering about."
Time for a snort of derision. So the Ooloms hadn’t made any dazzling archaeological finds? What a thundering surprise. Tic might have been the first Oolom ever to come down one of these tunnels, and he was only staying out of bloody-minded determination. Blessed near his whole body had turned gray-blue now, and his ear-sheaths were fluttering like caffeinated butterflies. I could flat-out guarantee that Ooloms never tried a systematic survey of a single one of these mines, let alone the hundreds all over Demoth.
But I could imagine the Freeps doing it.
And what did they find? Before the plague, they were smuggling out trinkets… no, sorry, the ones that got caught were smuggling out trinkets. Who knew how many other secret expeditions might have been digging around? And who knows if any of those hit pay dirt?
Then the epidemic came to town. Explorers flooded in, searching the countryside for sick Ooloms. The Freeps must have been forced to scurry away before they got noticed.
After the plague, Demoth had laid down tighter controls over incoming spaceships, funneling all arrivals through a down-to-the-marrow medical exam to make sure they weren’t carrying alien microbes. That had mightily cranked off Freeps at the time; before, they’d been able to come and go without passing through any control authority. Away from urban centers, small ships used to be able to slip down to the surface without being noticed.
But postplague, Demoth bought state-of-the-art detectors to monitor the outer atmosphere. Had to keep out those germs, didn’t we? And even the best stealth countermeasures can’t hide a ship when it’s hanging all by its lonesome, nothing but near vacuum for a thousand klicks in any direction. Drop your radar profile to the size of a chicken, and people will still wonder what a chicken’s doing, flying through the Van Allen belts.
So: no more Freep archaeologists. Except Kowkow Iranu. And maybe Maya Cuttack — human, but on the Freep payroll.
What could they be digging for? Not knickknacks. Not the remains of old elevators, or the crumble-rust debris moldering on the floor all around me. Freeps would be chasing the Big Strike: alien tech. Whizbangs beyond the current knowledge of the Technocracy. With so many ruins on Demoth, you got rumors galore of high-tech gizmos, buried just out of sight, waiting to be discovered by the next idle spelunker who scuffed up a bit of dirt. It hadn’t happened yet… but that meant nothing. Who knew if Demoth had been hiding alien treasures for thousands of years?
Such as a machine for making peacock tubes appear out of nowhere?
Speculation, I told myself. But worth discussing with someone. With Tic? Not right now — he’d already scooted away to watch a ScrambleTac officer poke at a lump of dirt. Tic was not in a stand-steady, rational-discussion mood at the moment.