by Sage Walker
That brought a few polite smiles, but even polite smiles lifted the grim mood in here, a little.
“But the thing is, if none of you killed him, you’re in danger from the people who did.” Severo leaned back in his chair again.
Helt could have hugged him. The goal had been surveillance, not protection, but the danger was real enough. Severo was, in a way, doing his best to cover Helt’s ass. And his own, and Doughan’s, for that matter.
“We’ve questioned some of you, one at a time,” Helt said. “We had planned to talk to each of you individually, but Jerry tells me you all showed up together.”
“We wanted to know what was going on,” Kelly Halkett said. “We wanted to find out why suspicion for this terrible crime was laid on us. You’ve told us. That was the question I was delegated to ask.”
Helt. Kelly named spokesman at the Frontier?
Jerry. Yes. btw, Doan, Halkett, Luseno and Shenouda checked their bank balances Wednesday morning.
It was interesting that Halkett had been picked out for leadership in that quick meeting. Helt had found him to be taciturn, even slow to catch conversational cues. Revise that; his slowness was more likely the effect of careful thinking, and the group must have found something solid to cling to in him. Andrea Doan, sitting beside him, had her arms crossed over her chest. Her neck looked distended, like someone was choking her. She looked like she was going to have a stroke.
“We’re looking for the source of those deposits.” Alerts should have flared for the accountants in SysSu and for Archer. They hadn’t. “All of you have my sincere apologies that we didn’t find that out before today.”
“This is an outrage,” Andrea Doan said. Her voice was a guttural growl. Jerry shifted in his chair and looked at her. Andrea’s eyes were on Helt. She made a sudden motion and Jerry caught her right fist. Helt felt, more than saw, Severo and Doughan decide not to go into attack mode. But he’d seen Severo glance down and plan his route under the table and across the empty center space to Andrea’s chair. Yves had put his arm around the back of Susanna’s chair. His right arm was in sight, palm curled, ready to become a fist.
“Easy, now.” Kelly Halkett’s Scots burr was thick in his voice. “Easy,” as if she were a skittish horse.
Jerry put Andrea’s hand on the table and patted it. She kept on staring knives at Helt but she stayed in her chair.
“Yes, it’s an outrage,” Helt said. “Again, you have my apologies. We made assumptions based on bad information. It was a mistake. We’re correcting it as fast as we can. Our assumption is that the hacker wanted attention directed to you. The question is, why?”
“We’re on a hit list?” Susanna asked.
“Or Cash Ryan knew he was in danger and wanted to point us out if something happened to him.” Benson Luseno spoke public school English, baritone, carefully modulated. Pitch perfect. Thank you, Professor Luseno, and all the mysteries you’ve read.
“It’s possible,” Helt said. “Looking at what Cash Ryan did in the past three years—we know he stalked Susanna Jambekar and Elena Maury.”
Not everyone in the room had known that, and their faces showed it.
Akila looked across the table and stared hard at Susanna’s face, searching for something, but Helt couldn’t sort out what it was she wanted to find there. Andrea closed her lips into a thin line that made her red lipstick vanish completely.
Helt. Nadia, look for e-mails Andrea/Odell Chalmers?
“One possibility is that he hacked your bank accounts in a way that would get you sent off this ship.” Helt had just told all of them they were on the off-list, or had been. Now they weren’t, as far as Helt was concerned. But Kelly Halkett’s and Benson Luseno’s actions on Wednesday evening were still not verified.
Assume innocence until someone’s proved guilty. But someone is, and that someone could be in this room.
“Susanna and Dr. Maury were unaware they’d been stalked until we told them about it. We know that Dr. Halkett had very little contact with Cash Ryan. The rest of you? However brief, if you had interactions with him of any sort, let’s put them on record.” He’d start with Benson Luseno. Akila Shenouda after that.
Doughan tapped his interface and stood up. “Pardon me.” The exec addressed the room at large. “Archer wants me. I’ll be just down the hall.”
To Jerry and Nadia. Helt??
Jerry. Doughan wants Archer, actually.
Helt wanted to talk to Archer himself, right now and not later. He wanted to see, up close and personal, Archer’s reactions to the deposit records Helt had just sent him. Obviously, Doughan wanted to do that, too.
Doughan’s departure put a different mix of energies into the room. The big boss was gone, and that lessened performance anxiety a little. Doughan’s interface traced him to the door of Archer’s office. He had gone where he said he would go. It was time for Helt to get back to work right here.
Helt. Okay. Akila-Ryan connections? Proximity captures?
Nadia. I’ll get them.
“Professor Luseno?” Helt asked. “Far-fetched speculation is welcome.”
Benson Luseno had seemed oblivious to Andrea’s outburst, to Doughan’s departure. He had been a quiet observer, but he seemed to be carrying on an interior monologue, as if rehearsing a speech.
“This morning’s message from Dr. Doan certainly led to plenty of speculations by me,” Benson Luseno said.
“Speculations about Cash Ryan, please, sir.”
Benson Luseno took a quiet, deep breath from the diaphragm. “Cash Ryan came to my office only once. He appeared at one of my Tuesday office hours. Two and a half years ago, as best I can recall.”
Heh. Well-modulated tones, volume just so, Benson Luseno stepped into the role of professorial authority.
“He brought a handwritten poem of his, on paper, and asked if I would critique it,” Luseno said. “I post reviews now and again.”
As self-promotion went, it was fairly inoffensive, but Helt didn’t think he wanted to read them.
“I told him I attempted such an exercise—and critiquing poetry is only that—only on published works, because budding poets can be so easily discouraged.”
Nadia. Akila works in Library, has an office there. Research for her dissertation on Chalcolithic metallurgy.
“But he persuaded you,” Helt said.
“He seemed so earnest, so naive,” Luseno said.
“And you read the poem.”
“I told him I would look at it and he could return on the next Tuesday. You’re going to ask me if I have a copy of the work. I don’t. The poem was blank verse, at least, no attempt at rhyme or meter. It described the daily life of a cyborg. One who performed boring, repetitive work, day after day, with precision and a troubled conscience.”
“Do you remember any of the lines?” Helt asked.
“No. I do not. I do remember I sensed a mingling of disgust and longing in it. It was quite disturbing.”
The professor stopped.
“Disturbing,” Helt said.
“The conceit was journal entries, one entry per year. Each year, different parts of the machinery of this cyborg were mutilated, quite graphically. The troubled conscience belonged to the cyborg as it sought ways to work around its disabilities.”
“What did you tell him?” Helt asked.
“I handed it back to him when he returned and asked him if he was familiar with My Last Duchess. He looked at me with an utterly expressionless face and left the office.”
“My Last Duchess,” Helt said.
“I find it odd, yes, that I chose an unfaithful woman as an example of a poem he might read,” Luseno said. “There was no specific mention of gender in Ryan’s poem.”
Helt found it odd that Luseno mentioned the victim of founded or unfounded jealousy but not her death-dealing husband.
“Did it cross your mind he might have been dangerous? A threat to you or anyone else?”
“I’ve read a great deal of stud
ent poetry, sir. One becomes less and less alarmed by it over time.” Said with the faintest trace of amused disdain. Luseno seemed to know it would be a closing line.
Helt nodded. “Thank you.”
Nadia. Six Ryan-Shenouda delayed-proximity captures two years ago. None since.
Andrea/Odell Chalmers, messages, yes. Flirting.
Akila tensed when she realized it was her turn. Arched black eyebrows guarded sloe eyes; her eyes were her best feature. She had long black hair.
“Do you remember any contacts with Cash Ryan, Dr. Shenouda?” Helt asked her.
“Miss, please. I’m ABD—I’m trying to recall if I did,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“Could he have contacted you about your work?”
Akila Shenouda looked at him directly for the first time. “I correspond with most of the experts in Chalcolithic archaeology. That’s five or six people on Earth. I get the occasional inquiry from a student, but no. My answer is no.”
Nadia. Shenouda captures ready.
Helt. Thx. He glanced at them quickly.
Helt. Expand #6?
Nadia did. The last capture was outside the Library, same location as several others, 1817 on a spring evening two years ago. Akila, shadowed under the portico, reached for Officer Evans’s hand. Officer Evans, Severo’s second-in-command. They walked away together. Cash got up from a café table and went in the opposite direction. Helt decided not to show the footage.
“Thank you, Miss Shenouda.” He looked toward the far end of the table, its empty seats with their backs to the darkening windows. He’d heard Susanna’s story, Halkett’s, Andrea’s, and now, Luseno’s and Dr. Shenouda’s, if only in part. That left the football-playing engineers. A usage check showed him that Ueda and Bruguera had been texting each other nonstop, in here, while the others were talking. “Kelly Halkett told us that Drs. Ueda and Bruguera played football with Cash Ryan.”
Oriol Bruguera looked at Halkett with surprise. Masaka Ueda shook his head. “That is not entirely accurate.”
“Please tell us,” Helt said.
“Birdy and I have been reviewing what we know of this man,” Ueda said.
Jerry. You want text? Nothing else in there.
Helt. Gimme.
Helt caught a glimpse of it and then nodded to the engineers. Their messages to each other in the past few minutes were reviews of where and when they remembered being around Cash Ryan, and nothing more, from the quick read he gave them.
“Between us, we came up with this,” Masaka said. “We were messing around the field one afternoon after work and Cash Ryan showed up and watched us for a while. We said hi, and he told us he had grown up in North America, and didn’t know football, and wondered how hard it was to learn.”
Birdy nodded agreement.
“So we said, well, it’s not easy, but if you want to try…”
“But it didn’t come to much,” Oriol Bruguera said.
“He showed up a couple of times and then didn’t,” Ueda said. “He could have learned to move the ball around, I think.”
“He was athletic enough?” Helt asked.
“Yeah, but you know how it is,” Birdy said. He drew a rectangle in the air and his hands zigzagged an imaginary ball across an imaginary field in it. “You tap the ball around, you’ve done it all your life. Someone who’s doing it for the first time, you have to be really patient, you know? You start talking about strategy and the need to study the field, know where your mates are likely to go, cooperation, passes.”
“Maybe Birdy’s chatter scared him off,” Ueda said.
If Ryan’s game had been to stay invisible by tending to the norm, a team sport would have helped. Jerry had mentioned that Ryan was a little too standard, that his presence in the records felt thin. Play a little in the intramurals, look like part of a team. If you have to learn human behavior by observation and you’re bright, and that was Jim Tulloch’s model of Ryan, you can mimic being normal really well. Up to a point.
“We told him to practice, every day, every day,” Birdy said.
“And that was it?” Helt asked.
Birdy Bruguera nodded.
“That was it,” Masaka Ueda said.
They had rejected him. It was too simple a theory, but there it was. So far, everyone here had rejected Cash Ryan in small ways. Elena’s rejection had been a bigger blow than anyone here had given him, but Cash hadn’t named her on the Seed Banker list. Helt assumed it was Cash’s list. Perhaps he had other plans for Elena. Perhaps someone else had made the list. Helt couldn’t rule that out. He’d hoped Archer would show up with an explanation of where and when it had been made, but he hadn’t, yet.
Helt’s eyes were tired. He rubbed them, because he wanted to, and because he wanted to look a little bit vulnerable, wanted to show some of his very real fatigue. Stagecraft.
“So,” Helt said. “Andrea, we’ve heard from everyone here but you.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know the man.”
“But you did exchange a few e-mails with someone named Odell Chalmers.”
He watched as she sorted through memories and set her jaw.
“Why is that important?” Her delivery of the question was dull and flat, an automatic challenge while she searched for a way to become the wounded party in this interchange.
“Odell Chalmers was a net name Cash Ryan used.” Helt watched her realize that SysSu was now familiar with her skill with expletives. Her last e-mail to Odell Chalmers had included some inventive insults in English and in Spanish, and some truly twisted emoticons that didn’t require translation.
Andrea’s reaction could have been anything, embarrassment, defiance, a useless denial. What she did was shrug her shoulders and smile at Helt, the smile of a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. He liked her better, seeing that smile.
To give her credit, Andrea hadn’t gone running straight to Giliam; she’d alerted the others on the accused list first. Find her a cause and she would divert her bitterness to defending the innocent. Helt would offer this newly made theory to Mena, and maybe Andrea’s life would be a little easier for her—and for those around her.
Helt looked away and stared at the windows, not at any individual face. The agora was lighted for night now; gold lamplight against a dark sky. “All of you see it, don’t you? The common thing in all these stories. Susanna and Elena and Andrea turned down Ryan’s invitations for sex. Akila, camera captures show he didn’t get close enough to you to even ask. You were well guarded. You can see the captures if you want.”
“I—would like to see them,” she said. Helt sent them to her screen.
“Birdy and Ueda didn’t want to play ball with him, in a very real sense,” Helt said. “Benson Luseno didn’t recognize him as the next Byron. And Kelly Halkett approved a transfer request from a crew that didn’t want to work with him. In one way or another, all of you rejected him.”
“He wanted to ruin our lives because we hurt his tender feelings?” Kelly Halkett asked.
“Maybe,” Helt said. “It’s a theory. I’d prefer facts.” Like facts about where Luseno had been on Wednesday night, and Kelly Halkett’s location that evening. Unanswered questions were still hanging in the air. “You know, none of you need to feel special. We’re building individual narratives for that single day on almost everyone on this ship. We have to, because this guy was so invisible to us. Information that’s been recorded is what we have to work with, and by design, there are large areas of everyone’s life that aren’t captured. We’re connecting dots about that.” Luseno, Halkett, you aren’t off the hook yet. And if Archer surprises me, none of you are.
To Jerry and Nadia. Helt. Can you herd them to The Lab? Give me a few minutes and I’ll join you if I can.
A few minutes, for Helt wanted to see what was going on in Archer’s office. Helt glanced over and watched a sotto voce interchange between Jerry and Severo.
“I’d like to stop here for now,” Helt said.
26
Cold Places
Archer’s door was closed and Helt didn’t hear Doughan’s voice as he approached it. He heard a solo cello. His tap on the door was answered by Archer grumbling something undecipherable, which probably meant “Come in.”
“The deposits were faked by someone in SysSu,” Archer said.
His room was as dark as the agora its walls reproduced. His face was striped green and yellow by the pool of screen light. “The telltales were blinking when I came in here after the exec meeting that morning. Thursday. Large deposits that in each case I could trace back to the dates and depositors, as if the inflated balances had been there through months of routine deposits and withdrawals.” He leaned forward to give his screen his under-the-eyebrow look. “It was well done, as if the system had fixed a glitch and was reporting it as clearly as it could. The companies that made the deposits are infiltrated by NCII, which is no surprise.”
Northern Coalition Intersystem Intelligence, Helt translated. It was tempting to build a conspiracy theory and it went like forces had shifted on Earth below. The Northern Coalition now wanted Kybele to stay home and was funding saboteurs to make that happen in a deniable way.
“I’ve checked in several ways,” Archer said, meaning, he’d crawled through files to which very few people had access. “NCII had nothing to do with it. The fake deposits came from one of ours.”
One of ours, Helt thought. One of ours, but I thought we’d scolded the mischievous long ago, and this was more than mischief. This was meant to hurt.
“It couldn’t have been Ryan?”
“No.” The cello, a recorded one, began a crescendo. Archer silenced it.
“How long was the play-money on view to the account holders?” Helt asked.
“Four hours,” Archer said. “Four morning hours. I saw it, looked it over, and we went down to see Doughan. I didn’t look again until Giliam got upset.”
