Chapter 13 The Tray

Emergency lights came up red and low, the way they did only when the main bus had been cut at the source rather than tripped at a breaker. Ilyse stood in the dark outside Braque's office with the disc cold against her ribs and listened to the corridor breathe. She went back in. The office was lit by the battery strip over the desk, and by that thin red glow she found Adem Braque on the floor beside the tray of recordings, one hand still reaching toward the door he had told her not to return through. There was a discharge burn at the base of his throat, the same tool, the same close range, the same shaking hand as Tobin Skarrow. Whoever had walked the centerline on deck six had learned to do it better since, and had needed to. She did not touch him. She did the one useful thing she could do in the dark, which was stand still and listen, and in the listening she heard the lift at the end of the diplomatic ring close with a soft sound, and she understood that whoever had killed him had ridden back up the spine, into the gravity, into the offices, into the centerline gait. The lift at the end of the ring had been called from the diplomatic corridor, which meant the killer had used the public lift and not the service one, which meant either confidence or carelessness or, most likely, a person who had never done this before and was now doing it for the third time at speed. She rode it in her memory: down the spine, out into the high gravity, into the offices, into the centerline walk. By the time Prell arrived, the trail was four minutes cold and the corridor cameras had recorded a shape that would take a better analyst than either of them to identify. Prell took one look at the body and one look at the disc and did not ask a single question Ilyse had expected. "You went to Quorin," she said. "How do you know?" "Because you are still alive and you are holding that, which means she let you keep it, which means she is not afraid of it." The security chief crouched by Braque and looked at the burn for a long moment. "Same tool. Same distance. Whoever did this learned the angle from Skarrow and did not enjoy learning it." She stood. "I am going to need everything you know, in order, from the first word, and I am going to need it before the administrator's office wakes up and files this as the suicide of a guilty man, which is what it is going to look like by breakfast, because a forger found dead after a confrontation with the one person who could expose him is a story that writes itself." "And the truth is messier," Ilyse said. "The truth is a man with a debt and a conscience who was killed in his office by a commercial liaison with a cloned badge, and the truth will take three weeks to prove and the lie will take three hours to file." Prell held out her hand for the disc. "Give me the copy. You keep the original." There was a second reason Ilyse gave up the copy without argument. A recording made by the dead man about his own crime was the best and weakest evidence on the station. It was the best because it was a confession, and the weakest because a dead forger's confession could always be dismissed as a dead forger's last forgery. If she wanted the accusation to survive Braque, she needed proof that had never passed through his hands. She needed Quorin to say it herself, on the record, in her own voice, to somebody she believed had no way to keep it. Prell found her there four minutes later, drawn by the power cut, and the security chief looked at the body and at the disc in Ilyse's hand and made a decision without being asked. "That disc is evidence and it is also the only copy, which makes it a reason for both of us to die tonight," Prell said. "Give me a second copy. Then neither of us needs to survive for the proof to survive." They made the copy in Prell's office on a machine that was not on the station network, and while it ran, Ilyse laid out the whole of it on the table: the two forged entries, the nine-minute window, the correct grammar in both tongues, the cargo terminal, the wiped drive, the man crushed under a drum, the offer of a berth, and the brokerage at the end of the route. Prell listened without interruption, which Ilyse was beginning to understand was the way honest people listened on Cerval Station, and when she finished, Prell added the one thing she had not known. "The junction footage," Prell said. "You told me the gait was wrong for a technician. You were right, and it narrows the field more than you think. There are four hundred people on this station and only sixty of them work the spine, in the high gravity, where you learn to walk the centerline. Of those sixty, forty-one have cargo credentials. Of those forty-one, exactly one cloned an access badge in the last month—from Braque's office, using a maintenance pass, through the commercial deck's badge printer." "Who?" "Cormick Delane," Prell said. "Commercial liaison. Works the trade deck. His job is to interface with the brokerages that hold the freight contracts on the closed route." She let that land. "His job is to interface with Quorin. He has dined with her eleven times this quarter and filed every one of them as a routine courtesy meeting." Ilyse sat back. A liaison whose entire function was to be the station's handshake with the brokerage that held the closed route. A man with the gait, the credentials, the badge printer, and the dinner schedule. A man whose name had been on nothing, because his name was supposed to be on nothing; his job was to shake hands and file it as a courtesy. "Can you arrest him?" "Not tonight." Prell's mouth was a hard line. "The power cut will be filed as a fault, and Delane will have an alibi for it, because a man who understands the badge printer understands the duty logs. If I put a liaison officer in a cell on the strength of a dead forger's recording and a gait I read off a grainy camera, his friends file a complaint, and the complaint lands in Solvig's office the morning we are all supposed to be signing a treaty." She looked at Ilyse. "I can hold him tomorrow. I cannot hold him tonight." "Then tonight is for the person who paid him." Prell was quiet. She was a woman who had spent her career in the narrow space between what could be proven and what could be done, and Ilyse watched her do the arithmetic twice and dislike the answer both times. "Quorin keeps an office on the trade deck," Prell said at last. "It is commercial, so it is not on the diplomatic ring, so it is not covered by the accords, so I have no jurisdiction in it and no warrant for it and no reason I could write down that would not end my career." She looked at Ilyse. "But a suspended translator has no career to end. If you go up there, I did not send you, I did not know, and if you come back with something I can hold, I will hold it." Ilyse put the disc copy in her coat and left the second copy on the security chief's unnetworked machine, and went up the spine toward the trade deck, where a brokerage paid to keep a blockade legal was waiting to talk to the only human on the station who could still read what it had done. She took the service lift, because the main one was being watched, and she walked the last hundred meters along the trade deck with her weight on the inside rail, the way a spine-walker walked, because she wanted to know how it felt to be the person on the camera. It felt like being exactly who she was. ---