DAY 36

Vatta Transport’s courier Morningstar appeared on scan, one of a list of arriving spacecraft. Grace noted its arrival on the morning report, remembering Stella’s encrypted message and MacRobert’s broad hint. “Someone you should check out,” she’d said. “Claims to be one of Osman’s, but I doubt it.” Morningstar had priority routing—all Vatta ships did—and in much shorter time than any other could have done it, it was docking at Vatta’s own section of the main station. A Vatta shuttle brought it down safely; Grace watched the landing with grim satisfaction. Vatta shuttles did not fail.

By 1130, the car had arrived. From the surveillance images, neither passenger looked anything like Rafe Dunbarger. A tall skinny fellow, whose skin was an unusual shade for Slotter Key—yellow-brown, with brown freckles—and a plump florid man who minced along as if his feet hurt. She called MacRobert from his own office; he arrived before they did.

She had of course seen media images of Rafe Dunbarger—and for that matter, images of his father and the entire Board of Directors of ISC, plus a few others of their senior managers. It had been her task, when she was head of Vatta’s corporate security staff, to know a lot about any other corporation Vatta had dealings with, competitive or otherwise.

She looked now at the plump, prissy man mincing along the hall. He looked nothing like those images, except the dark eyes with their hard focus. A good disguise, for those who knew him only from images, but she wondered if he thought he could fool her. If he did, he had a surprise coming.

Once inside her office, however, he gave her a very different grin as he pulled a standard security cylinder from his pocket and set it on her desk. “I’m sure you know I’m really Rafe Dunbarger,” he said. “And with your permission I’ll take these uncomfortable appliances out of my face.”

“Don’t you think you should leave my office the way you came in?” Grace asked.

“Probably,” Rafe said. “But in that case perhaps we could talk elsewhere? Your gravity is heavy for me, and the rest of this weighs more here than it does at home. My feet really do hurt and my face is this red because I’m sweating.”

“Stella said you were absolutely convinced Ky is alive,” Grace said. “She’s also told me you two love each other, so why is this not hormonal wishful thinking?”

“Because it’s not my hormones but technology,” Rafe said. “It’s also technology that was—is—both very secret and very dangerous. Development was stopped, but as I had been the test subject—for a certain consideration—I was left with the prototype. It would have been fatal to me to remove it.”

“And it lets you know if your girlfriends are still alive?”

Rafe looked at her. Grace had heard about his stares, and stared back. She had her own weaponized gaze.

“She’s alive,” he said without looking away. “I am sure of that. I do not know how much longer.”

“Can you tell anything about her condition, her whereabouts, anything—”

“No. Not without getting closer and plugging the device in.”

“And you think our ansible needs tuning—how are you going to work there and here both?”

“I may be able to do some work on the ansible remotely,” Rafe said. “You don’t have good scan on that continent she was near when the shuttle went down.”

“Miksland,” Grace said. “We know something—” She looked at Mac, then at Rafe’s very silent—too silent—companion. “But before I tell you that—what about Teague?”

“Technical help,” Rafe said. “Electronics, on the one hand. Cold-weather specialist, on the other. He was involved in the rescue of my family.”

“Are you a killer? Is he?”

“Like Ky,” Rafe said. “Yes to both.”

Grace felt a glow she recognized as total satisfaction. She had been right all along when she’d told Ky’s mother that the girl wasn’t just a softhearted busybody—that underneath she was more like Grace than any of the others. Ky’s mother had recoiled in horror, insisting that her daughter was “normal.” And clearly Rafe—harmless as he looked in that fat suit—was of the same sort. Maybe, just maybe, Ky would have a partner suited to her needs while still young enough to enjoy it. She hadn’t been that lucky, for a long time. She glanced at Mac, who had met Rafe on Cascadia. He’d been right, too.

“How long can you stay?” she asked Rafe.

“Until we find her, and until we find out who did this,” he said. “Teague’s contract with me is for a year, but he might be willing to extend it.”

“Gary might not,” Teague said. His voice had an odd quality to it, reminiscent of a much younger man whose boy-voice was in transition to an adult timbre. She looked more closely at him. What was he?

“Transitioning, Sera,” he said, as if he’d read her mind. “Complete biosculpt. What I did was legal, but there was blowback from the other side.”

“Ah,” Grace said. Had biosculpt been available in her own time of blowback, she might have done that. She lifted her left arm. “I hope it doesn’t itch as much as this did.”

“I heard, Sera. Wondered you didn’t go for a prosthesis; it’s a lot quicker to full function.”

“Software,” Grace said. “Software can always be compromised.”

His attention sharpened. “Indeed, Sera.”

“Is your trouble likely to follow you here?” Grace asked. “Do they know where you are?”

“Shouldn’t, Sera, but I won’t say it couldn’t happen. I went straight into clinic, was declared dead, got a temp twenty-one-day on top of the biosculpt initiation, and ID to match the combo, and left Nexus with a different face, name, and bioscan data. They could track Edvard Simeon Teague to Cascadia, and maybe to here—but the name I was born to, and the body as well, are in Nexus records as dead, and the ashes scattered at sea. By the time I go back, I’ll be someone else, immigrant from somewhere far away. Not traveling with him.” He glanced at Rafe and then gave Grace another straight look.

“What should we be looking for, in case?” she asked.

He dug into a pocket and pulled out a data cube. “Any of these—it’s the data my boss has on that group, and I’m wanting to trade it for papers from somewhere other than Slotter Key. Assuming you have the capacity—”

Grace looked at Mac, who raised an eyebrow then nodded. “We can do that,” she said. Teague flicked his thumb, and the cube flew through the air. Grace caught it and handed it to MacRobert. Teague gave a brief incomplete smile and returned to his former expression.

“If I could have a quiet place and a power feed,” Rafe said, “I could use my device now and better define what needs to be done.”

Grace pointed. “There’s an outlet over there on the wall, and we can all be silent.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant alone.”

“Alone. Here? No, that won’t work. I know too much about you, and I’m not turning you loose unsupervised connected to our power supply. You can do that at home. Mac, can you get these gentlemen to the house for some good reason?”

“Certainly. And I’ll put these”—he waved the data cube—“on the scan list.”

“I’ll be home by 1500,” she said. “I’ve got that appointment at the clinic and threats from the doctors—again—if I miss it.”

“Your arm?” Teague asked.

“Yes. I re-injured it a few weeks ago, which is why I wasn’t on the shuttle up to meet Ky, and why I’m not either dead or wherever she is, if she is. I’ve missed a couple of appointments and they worry too much.”

Grace arrived home to find MacRobert in the dining room with Teague. Rafe was not in sight.

“He’s in the guest room,” MacRobert said. “Doing whatever he does. They’ve both had lunch. You?”

“I’m not hungry,” Grace said. “It’s healing just fine and I think they were disappointed. All they did was poke, prod, pull, and twist, so now it’s hurting but that will let up soon.”

A door opened somewhere in the house, and plumbing communicated where. Teague looked tense. “You have scan here, right?”

“Yes,” MacRobert said, before Grace could answer. “And we both know the house very well. Downstairs bathroom; I heard him walk from the bedroom down the passage.”

Teague flushed. “I’m used to being the one linked in.”

“Relax, Teague,” MacRobert said. “You’re not the one involved with her niece. Great-niece. Whatever she is.”

Grace ignored that, watching Rafe come into the room. He had shed all his appliances and changed into casual clothes that fit perfectly. His expression did not.

“I am able to confirm that she is alive. I could not communicate directly because she does not have a power source for the device she holds.”

“How do you know she’s alive if you can’t communicate?”

Rafe did not quite focus on her face, Grace noted, and as she watched, his face paled and he sagged; Teague caught him and moved him into a chair, then pushed Rafe’s head down between his knees.

“What’s wrong with him? Do you know?”

“No.” Teague kept a hand on Rafe’s neck. “But I know a man about to faint when I see one.”

“I’m fine now,” Rafe said. Teague stepped back. Rafe looked up, still resting his forearms on his thighs. “I have a splitting headache,” he said. “Maybe it was that. But Ky’s alive.”

“Could you tell if she was ashore somewhere?”

“Not without a better map than I’ve seen,” Rafe said. “I have direction, but not precise distance.”

“He does solve a problem,” Grace said to MacRobert.

“Who?” MacRobert looked at her, then at Rafe; Grace felt impatient. Mac was usually quicker than that.

“Rafe. You know that map anomaly we found, that you said would be dangerous to fix? He’s not us; he’s not from here; he can demand access to any ISC equipment by virtue of his title.” She turned to Rafe. “I don’t expect your system ansible can do close-in surveillance of Miksland, but don’t you have relay satellites between the system ansibles and a planet’s surface?”

“Indeed we do, and some of them are capable of fine-scale surveillance. But that’s your problem—what about the map anomaly?”

“Slotter Key’s own survey satellites quit recording data from Miksland several hundred years ago, and what should be the archived scans it did make are lost. We hadn’t noticed, because it’s uninhabited, near the south polar ocean, and nobody really cared. Terraforming failure has been the explanation for ignoring it completely.”

“And you now think it wasn’t ignored by everyone, just by those who wanted you to think it was.”

“Yes. Possibly.” Grace touched the projector controls and brought up a hologram of the planet. “We’re here.” She rotated the globe slowly. “This is the closest approximation to where they came down, and this outline of nothing is Miksland. This is what MacRobert found in the university library annex—deep in the archives.” Another touch, and a sketch, reproduced to scale with the globe, filled in part of the poleward coast and a little of the plateau. She zoomed in on that. “We think an unofficial explorer landed on Miksland a long time ago and sketched what he saw. Why he didn’t record it properly I don’t know, but his map ended up in a university library archive along with other old maps, including the imaginary lands found in some fiction. And now—overlay this very old scan—”

“It’s—what is that? Some kind of installation?” Rafe tilted his head back and forth, trying to make something out of the vague lines on the terrain the explorer had sketched.

“Could be a runway,” Teague said. “With some structure at one end.”

“A landing place for aircraft? Even shuttles?”

“We don’t know,” Grace said. “Because we can’t get the satellites that are over Miksland regularly to take a simple ordinary scan of it.”

“That we can manage,” Rafe said, with a glance at Teague. “Who’s your ISC rep here?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m an imperfect CEO; I’d have to call home to find out.”

“We don’t have one. One of the things Stavros—former Vatta CEO—had requested of ISC was an office here on the planet. We don’t have a crewed ansible platform, either. Turned out to be useful, when we turned it back on. Just a matter of flipping a switch, I was told.”

“And you haven’t flipped the switch to see what Miksland really looks like now?”

“We turned on the main ansible; nobody knows how to operate repeater satellites remotely. We’d have to send a ship and a technician. But if you, as ISC—”

“Teague,” Rafe said. “Not me. He won’t be recognized as me under any circumstances—he’s a good eight centimeters taller than I am.”

“Ten,” Teague said. “When I don’t slouch.”

“Teague can be an ISC system inspector: Slotter Key did unauthorized repairs and though we aren’t prosecuting systems for that anymore, we want to be sure you haven’t damaged the equipment. We know there’s something nonstandard. I—as myself and CEO of ISC, back on Nexus—asked Stella for the favor of a fast ride over here for Teague; Stella and I—as Bancroft—pretended I was another of Osman’s bastards and she shipped me here to be vetted by you.”

“But he’ll still be tracked, going out there—”

“Of course. It’s not clandestine. It’s ISC. I can mock up the right ID; I have access. That’s why he’s been here, talking to you, because you’re the one who authorized the repair—he’s been trying to get you to describe exactly who did what. Whoever you sent—you know who, right?”

“Of course,” Grace said.

“Well, Teague will spend a couple of hours talking to whoever that was, before boarding a Vatta ship to go inspect every one of our installations in this system. Including a look at our repeater satellites in low orbit, at which time he will see if they also have the lockout for Miksland. Because if they do, and no one here had tinkered with them before, then someone in ISC was involved in the original blackout of that continent. As well as someone here, probably in Spaceforce.”

“That far back?” Grace said.

“Has to be,” Rafe said. “And not for any good reason.”

DAY 37

The next morning, Teague, now in a serious dark-gray suit and carrying a black attaché case, arrived at Slotter Key’s Defense Department HQ with Grace, to be introduced to her staff as an ISC security inspector. He insisted on handing out a statement on ISC letterhead detailing ISC’s revised position on independent repairs of ISC-installed ansibles.

“But we’re sending and receiving with no problems,” said the communications chief. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“Nothing you can detect is wrong,” Teague said. “I assure you—I have been inspecting locally repaired installations since Ser Dunbarger the younger took over, on his express orders, to be certain that the equipment is fully functional, and to interview those who made the repairs, and see if they meet our standards for maintenance. If they do, then ISC will certify your system and your personnel, and you have the choice of performing all maintenance locally, or continuing to retain ISC to perform both routine and emergency maintenance for you.”

Grace managed not to let her brows rise. This was not the same Teague who had lounged around her house, draping himself over the furniture as if his skeleton were only loosely strung together.

“Well … if the Rector agrees …”

Grace lifted her hands. “I tried to talk him out of it, but we are still bound by our original contract with ISC—they have the right to inspect their equipment at any time. And he says he thinks something is lagging our system somewhere—possibly something we did in the repair, or connected to the original damage.”

Teague held up one hand. “In forty-seven percent of the inspections I’ve made, whoever first damaged the ansibles also damaged the repeater satellites, thus causing dropouts and slower transmission rates. Rector Vatta tells me that you have experienced intermittent slowdowns and at least two dropouts related to specific repeaters since your repair.”

“That’s true, but—”

“Then it’s imperative that all those repeaters be inspected, and—if necessary—repaired properly. This inspection incurs no charge; it falls under paragraph seventeen, line twelve of the original contract.”

“How long will it take?” And, with a glance at the slim black case, “How much equipment will you need?”

“A matter of days,” Teague said. “I requested Rector Vatta to arrange for that Vatta courier to transport me, when she said your own insystem ships were substantially slower.” He gave a prim smile. “ISC prefers that I not spend more time in one system than I must, as there are many yet to inspect. Use of private transportation is preferable in many situations; no insult is intended.”

“The Vatta courier Ser Teague arrived on, Morningstar, has been refueled and is ready to take him where he needs to go,” Grace said.

“And will you also transport him to his next system?” That with an edge of sarcasm.

“That is a matter that Ser Teague will discuss with Vatta’s CEO, I expect,” Grace said. “As far as I’m concerned, Slotter Key’s obligation is satisfied by ensuring Ser Teague’s work here is expedited insystem.”

Teague gave her a stern look; Grace glared back. Her chief of communications would interpret that wrongly, she was sure, just as she intended.

“And I expect a report, Ser Teague, of every change you make in settings, and an explanation of why it was necessary. If you expect Slotter Key to take over its own maintenance—”

“As I said, Rector Vatta, there is a choice. ISC is prepared to resume all maintenance functions—”

“As inefficiently as you did before?” the communications chief said.

“That was an act of war,” Teague replied. “For which, in our original contract, ISC is relieved of responsibility for the duration. We cannot guarantee service in such event. But in the amended contract, which I will discuss with your head of state, customers are freed to make their own repairs. Manuals are available; I have a copy with me, and will provide it when the new contract is signed. We can also provide training, at a fixed cost, should it be desired.”

“Which isn’t our concern,” Grace said to her staff, in a tone that conveyed she thought it should be. “That’s for the legislature and President. Though I’ve no doubt we’ll see a copy of the manual, as ansible service is a matter of security.” She turned back to Teague. “The Morningstar crew is ready; your transportation is waiting downstairs, Ser Teague.”

He bowed slightly and left her office.

Grace looked at her desk. “Time to get to work,” she said to the others. “I have plenty to do, and if you don’t, I’ll share.” They left, murmuring excuses. Grace touched her desk, transforming the apparent empty slab of wood into a screen full of tabs. But instead of touching one, she simply stared at it. Ky was intelligent, resourceful, determined—but Grace knew well that the planet had weapons Ky had never faced. Gravity. Cold. Time. Even given Rafe’s certainty that she had survived so far, how much longer could she? And what about the others, those who were her responsibility as well?