by Sage Walker
Helt got up and pushed his chair under the table beside Elena. “I’m going to be late to meet Severo if I don’t get out of here. I don’t know if this is an aha moment, but I think I want to see a man about an apricot first.”
“Is it important?” Elena asked.
“I hope so.”
“It’s a hunch, then. Good luck, Helt,” Mena said.
10
Cold Equations
Severo, pacing the platform at the Athens station, wore his NSS coveralls. He looked ready for inspection or ready to inspect anyone or anything. Helt straightened his shoulders as if to snap him a salute, realized what he was doing, and grinned.
“How were the ladies?” Severo asked.
“Fine. All three of them were just fine.” Helt reached into his pocket for an apple and handed one to Severo, and then he took off his windbreaker. Athens felt too warm after the cool morning of Center.
“Three?”
“One’s a horse.”
“A horse. You like horses?”
Helt thought about the question as he strolled with Severo toward the agora, thought about the twelve-year-old boy he had been, invincible and fearless until he hit the ground after an incident involving a gelding, a breeze, a blowing plastic bag, and a steep trail. His left hip sent him a slight twinge to say it still remembered.
“Yeah. I do.”
“You’ll like this, too. While you were out—”
“On business—”
“While you were out apple-picking, we cleared twelve minutes of your time during the SM hour. You’re on the surveillance camera at the Frontier Diner. An omelet and a salad, that’s healthy, but you could have had a burger with green chile fries.”
Helt didn’t argue about green chile. It was futile. He liked green chile, but Severo didn’t think he ate enough of it.
“Twelve minutes, eh? I think I have time and date markers in my SysSu interface from then on.”
“Yeah, you do. I’ve looked at them myself, and so has Doughan. You’re clear, but Doughan wants to know what your thing is with the Ferraris.”
“None of his damned business,” Helt said. “Severo, have you talked to Venkie?”
“The empanada guy? About Cash Ryan? No.”
“It’s worth a try.”
Severo and Helt walked toward Venkie’s kiosk. It looked deserted at this midmorning hour. The scent of spices and frying bread reached out to them as they bellied up to the counter. If there was a culture on the world spinning below that did not fry bread dough in hot fat and eat it with pleasure, Helt had never heard of it. This little kiosk smelled wonderful.
The proprietor was turning bell peppers into a pile of perfect little green dice with a very large cleaver. Cleaver in hand, Venkat Raghava met them at the counter, and nodded first to Helt and then to Severo. Venkie was dark, and lean, and taller than Helt. Helt was tall, and noticed when he was looking up at someone rather than down. He was definitely looking up at Venkie.
“I have food, if you wish. I regret that I am low on information, however, Chief Mares,” Venkie said. “Your officer Evans has exhausted my supply.”
“Evans. She had some questions, did she? I suppose she took your security camera records for review,” Severo said.
“She did. Even though everyone its eye has seen is with her, she continued her questions. She will give them back?” he asked Severo.
“She will.”
“I am relieved. There are some interesting accents on the voices in that record.”
“What’s for lunch today?” Severo asked.
“Samosas. Vegan or chicken?”
“Chicken.” Samosas, empanadas, pasties, Severo didn’t seem to mind what they were called. “I’ll buy Helt’s, too.” Severo pressed his thumb against the pay screen.
“You, sir?” Venkie asked.
“Chicken,” Helt said.
Venkie put the cleaver down on his worktable and retrieved two very fresh samosas from a hot box, triangles of pastry big enough to fill a man’s palm, nestled in folded paper triangles.
“Thank you. We haven’t met, I think. I’m Helt Borresen, from Systems Support.”
“Venkat Raghava. A pleasure, sir.”
“Mrrph,” Helt said, his mouth full of samosa. “Thank you. This is very good. I haven’t tried lunch here. I’ve had the breakfast ones, though, and I really like them.”
“I am not a purist in many ways. The addition of chocolate to a sweet eaten for breakfast is not traditional to the cuisine on which my foods are based, but people like them that way,” Venkie said.
Helt munched a mouthful of gently browned onions, sweet raisins, spices, and chicken, rich and meaty. He looked at the contents of the pastry crust and spied something orange. “Apricots?” he asked.
“No. Mango, but it is not fully ripe, so it has a firm texture. I use dried apricots in the ones I make with lamb. They add a bit of acidity to counteract the richness of the meat.”
“So Evans asked if you knew Cash Ryan,” Severo said.
“She did.”
“There’s so much to fill in about his death,” Helt said. “Biosystems found out, this morning, that he ate lamb and apricots and spices on the day of his death.”
Venkie’s eyes narrowed and he moved away from Severo, a millimeter of withdrawal quickly arrested. “Did he? Are you thinking I provided his last meal?”
“Perhaps,” Helt said.
“If so, I am distressed.” Venkie stepped back from the counter, cupped his hands together and stared at them.
His utter stillness made Helt wonder if he should offer some sort of reassurance, but he wasn’t sure what he would say.
Venkie dropped his hands. “Perhaps I should take it as a gift to this Cash Ryan, from me, a gift someone gave him on my behalf. I will do that. Three days ago, I made lamb samosas then, yes. But Dr. Ryan did not come here on that day.”
“Evans asked you about that,” Severo said.
“Yes. Repeatedly. The officer—Evans—showed me a picture of Dr. Ryan’s face. I did not recognize him. She put him in a Navigation suit, and I still could not be sure. She found a video of him walking, and then, yes, I knew him to be someone who has come to my kiosk.”
“You knew his walk?” Helt asked.
“Not until I saw him walking away,” Venkie said.
“Was there anything special about the way he walked?”
“No. But then I knew I had seen him, in his Navigation coveralls, yes. The parts came together? Yes.
“People live here in Athens, they walk by on their way to the train, they go to Navigation offices, engineering, to Stonehenge to work growing mangoes or almonds, wherever they go, and they pass by here. This Ryan man wasn’t a talker, and that’s really all I know about him. He came here, bought his food, and went away.”
“You picked this location because it’s a good place to sell food?” Helt asked.
“No. I sell food here because it’s a good place for people to walk by.”
“Your degrees are in linguistics, Dr. Raghava,” Helt said.
“Yes. The material! To record the beginnings of a unique language that will develop in centuries of isolation! There are little shifts in intonation, already, that are not present in the river of public speech that flows up from Earth. Vowels are shifting in their placement in the mouth. For the A, some hays have changed to hahs, but also the consonants, b, v. They are already shifting. And word usages are changing rapidly, how we speak of direction, of distance. Also we, here, are appropriating words from different languages at a remarkably rapid rate. There are so many accents, so many languages, all becoming one. So soon!”
Venkie’s face, in the shadow of the awning, glowed with the delight of the chase, with the excitement of evidence supporting theory.
“Will we become incomprehensible to Earth?” Helt asked.
“Except in written words, yes, almost certainly. Helt Borresen, humans are often incomprehensible to one another, even when we share the same langu
age. That has been one of our tragedies, I think.”
To put it mildly. “I would very much like to discuss tragedies with you, Dr. Raghava, and comedies as well. I would say over a drink, but you might not be a drinker.”
“Of course I am not a drinker, but I enjoy comparing the different flavors of Dr. Kanakaredes’s explorations in the fermentation of varietal grapes. I look forward to such a conversation.”
“As do I. Do you know everyone on this ship?” Helt asked.
“Not yet. Many of them, not well. I am, in my way, a miner. I mine my customers for narratives. For speech patterns. I admit it. It is, perhaps, devious of me. I have made it my goal to become acquainted with as many people as possible,” Venkie said.
“You’re also an excellent cook. Chef.”
Severo nodded agreement and stepped away from the kiosk.
“Thank you,” Venkie said.
Severo turned to scout the agora for safety and threat. Helt nodded to Venkie and caught up with Severo on the way toward SysSu headquarters. Students and shoppers glanced at Severo’s NSS uniform and responded, however minimally, in their various ways. Some glanced at him and then avoided eye contact. Some looked through him as if he didn’t exist. A few people caught his eye and smiled.
One was a dark-haired woman about the same height as Elena, a little less muscular. “Severo, could Elena Maury have picked Ryan up and thrown him over the guardrail?” Helt asked.
Severo frowned. “I dunno. I mean, I haven’t tested it. What are you thinking, IA? That we should ask her to try? You crazy? If she did it, she could fake that she couldn’t.”
“Sure. I’m crazy. But I’d still like to know.”
Helt had planted the idea and he waited for Severo to decide what to do about it. It was police work; it was Severo’s turf, and Helt’s job was to use what NSS found, not to direct what they looked for, unless it was something he needed to do. But Helt was going to stage a reenactment of what might have happened on that tower, if Severo didn’t.
Helt glanced back across the agora. Five people had lined up at Venkie’s counter by the time Helt and Severo entered the SysSu office building.
“So someone else bought Ryan’s lunch for him,” Helt said. “Or…”
“Or he had Venkie’s food in his fridge,” Severo said.
“Yeah. I’ll add the info to my lists, anyway.” Helt led Severo through SysSu and into Nadia’s office. Nadia’s office had become Jerry’s and Nadia’s office, at least for work on the “unexpected death” of Cash Ryan. A curve of tables and several more workstations had been added, all with good views of the wall screen, divided at the moment into columns.
TIMELINE | AUTOPSY | PSYCHIATRIC AUTOPSY | CONTACTS | ALIBIED PERSONNEL
Cash’s last samosa went into place on Day One of the timeline, and the information was cross-referenced under Autopsy, with its sub-column of biographical data. That list was only slightly longer than it had been yesterday.
Helt looked for remains of lunch on the tables in Nadia-Jerry’s office. There were none. He hoped they had eaten something, somewhere.
“Hi, Helt. Severo,” Jerry said. “What did you bring us?”
“Alibis for the Navigation crew that worked with Cash Ryan,” Severo said. He sat down and pulled a keyboard into position. “Where do you want the videos?”
“In the Cleared list, right, Helt?” Nadia asked.
“Sounds right,” Helt said.
Severo linked the records to the list. “Three people, and the clearance cost us eight Security hours,” he said. “Ryan wasn’t bad to work with, they said. Quiet. Did his job. This crew seems sociable enough but they don’t hang after work that much. It’s all on here.” Severo folded his arms and leaned back in his chair.
“Alibied for the SM hour, I take it,” Helt said.
“Alibied for the evening,” Severo said. “We cross-checked. That took another couple of hours.”
Venkat Raghava’s name flashed into view in Contacts, just beneath Wesley Doughan, David Luo I, and David Luo II.
Severo was going to need to multiply those hours of investigative time if the Seed Bankers went under 24/7 surveillance. But Doughan wanted to keep them as his secrets for now, so Severo might not know about them. The hell with that.
“Severo. Jerry. Nadia. It seems there’re some new suspects and they’ll need surveillance. Seven of them.”
“Say what?” Severo asked.
“Archer found seven colonists who have Seed Banker funds in their accounts. They’re in the Contact list now. Let’s keep that quiet; Doughan wants them interviewed before they know they’re in trouble.”
“I don’t have enough people who know how to do 24/7 surveillance,” Severo said. “It’s a skill set. You don’t get it from watching cops and robbers shows. The real stuff is different.”
“Not saying it wouldn’t be,” Helt said. “But I’m wondering. These people have jobs. If they are at work and doing them, it seems like we could just set tags to tell us when they move. Nights, too. If they’re in bed asleep, they can’t do much damage, and if they’re awake sending messages around, we can look in at those. We can do that from SysSu.”
“Meaning all I’d need is maybe … one or two live bodies to get out on the street per shift. Times three central locations, maybe. Athens and Petra, for sure. Any one of these suspects live in Stonehenge?”
“Two,” Helt said.
“We keep someone up there. Some one, I said.”
“Trains?” Jerry asked.
“We haven’t, but we could.”
“We could camera them full-time really easy,” Jerry said.
“Yeah.” Severo looked like he wasn’t happy with the new information at all. “So part of NSS is now over here,” Severo said. “I don’t know if I like that.”
“We could move the surveillance ITs to NSS offices,” Helt said.
“There isn’t room,” Severo said. “Not really.” He shrugged. “Okay. I’ll let it happen. But only if you set up how you’re going to do the handoffs from shift to shift and show me first. And show me that the system will let some of my people sleep once in a while.”
“I’ll do it,” Nadia said.
“Good. Anything to keep shaggy SysSu nerds out of my public space,” Severo said. “It’s not the image we need over there.”
Relief was the sensation in Helt’s chest, but he didn’t give an audible sigh. Severo was the best kind of macho there was, the real genuine article, the kind that could delegate authority and not fret about it.
“Anything new for the psychiatric autopsy?” Helt asked.
“The chiefs have sent the notice of death to Cash Ryan’s mother,” Nadia said. “Mena asked if I would copyedit it for her. It went out this morning.”
Mena hadn’t mentioned it.
“Ms. Ryan is not required to respond,” Nadia said, “but perhaps she will. If she does, we’ll send her response to Dr. Tulloch.”
“So says the Personal Assistant to the Incident Analyst,” Jerry said. “I thought that was my job.”
“It is. I’m helping you anyway.” Nadia aimed a kick under the table at one of Jerry’s feet. Jerry had his shoes on, Helt noticed, and he dodged the kick without looking up from his screen.
Severo was looking at her with a calculating eye. Nadia was noticeably smaller than Elena. “You’re strong,” Severo said. “I think I’ll deputize you.”
Nadia looked at him, startled.
“The thing is, Miss Tay, we need to find out how easy it is to toss someone about Jerry’s size over a guardrail.”
“Huh?” Jerry asked.
“You’re deputized, too,” Severo told him. “Maybe you should bring a parachute.”
* * *
This much closer to the sun, the air was hot. Nadia left the elevator first, and a breeze lifted her hair. She brushed it back from her face and it settled slowly, underwater hair, a swimmer’s hair.
The observation platform surrounded Athens tower, a sa
ucer tethered to a down-curved spray of transparent pillars. The pillars were made of glass fused to a steel core, massive ribs that supported the platform and the roof above it. Helt looked out and up across the glass brick guard wall to the matching platform on Petra tower, just visible through the water haze of midday. Its cover sparkled in the sun, a hollow dandelion puff held upside down, or maybe it resembled a frozen waterfall. As was true of most of the engineering in Kybele, there were more pillars than were needed to support the mass of the platform. Kybele was overbuilt, overengineered, as secure and durable as possible. The glass pillars were made of money, really, like everything else on Kybele. The platforms were money transformed into transparent, fused silica.
Severo walked toward a specific place on the spinward guard wall and gripped it with both hands. “From his trajectory, he went off somewhere about here.”
Nadia found a clip in a pocket and knotted her hair out of the way as she followed him. In this light g, it was four giant steps to the wall. Slight changes of timing and balance lent a dancer’s grace to every motion of her arms, her torso. Down was still down, this high on the tower, but barely so. Jerry glided like a big, lethal cat; Severo moved his considerable bulk with an economy of motion that made him look like a drone torpedo on a deadly mission. Helt watched the trio line up at the glass brick wall and walked over to join them. He realized that he moved with ease, that he no longer had to think about changing his gait or the flex of his knees or the force of his foot’s push against the floor. He was long past making a newbie’s unplanned kangaroo leaps.
The wall was solid and reassuringly thick, the width of his forearm from elbow to wrist, a cubit’s worth of reinforced glass brick barrier between him and the world below. Beyond the wall, the platform extended three meters to the sheer drop of the edge, and was transparent. From where he stood at the rail, you could see, high up the curve of the world, the ruffled surface of Second Sea at the far edge of the Athens wilderness.
Severo made a minuscule leap and positioned himself to sit on top of the wall.
“Okay, anyone can get up here.”
“He was drugged,” Helt said.
“Yeah, a little more than most people who work out on the skin,” Severo said. “Whole universe spins by once every seven minutes, and it’s hard to ignore. Ryan was used to working out there, but his stomach never adapted. That’s what his team told me.”
