第7章 The Charter Office

The auditor came down on the morning lander in a suit that had never been outside a dome, carrying two cases and the flat, unhurried manner of a person who had spent her life counting other people's water. Her name was Corrinne Deller, she was from the Charter Office, and she arrived exactly on the date the Charter Office had said she would arrive, because that was the first and smallest way the Charter Office told you who it was. Anseris had four such visits a year, one for each season, and each one followed the same liturgy: the auditor walked the domes, read the meters, compared the reservoir against the ledger, and wrote a report that the colony forwarded to Earth and mostly forgot. Delyth watched the arrival from the edge of the concourse and did not go down to meet it. She had spent the two days since the patrol logged wondering whether the auditor was her way out, and she had reached no answer she trusted. The colony had spent the same two days getting ready, and the readiness was its own kind of answer. The eastern pad had been swept. The reservoir gauges had been recalibrated. A notice had appeared on the crew boards reminding everyone that interviews with visiting officials were to be conducted in the presence of a department supervisor, which was a rule nobody had ever needed before and everybody understood at once. Delyth read the notice twice and understood that whatever the auditor was going to see, the company had already decided what it would be, and that a person who wanted to show an auditor the truth would have to do it sideways. Deller was three hours into her inspection when she appeared at the door of the survey lab, which was not on any route Delyth had been told about. "Doctor Amaral." Deller held out a hand, and her grip was dry and brief and exact. "I have read your sector reports from the last two seasons. You write them unusually well." "Thank you." "You also write them unusually carefully. There is a reading in your K-7 log for this season that does not appear in the consolidated data the company forwarded to my office." Deller's voice did not change, and her eyes did not leave Delyth's face. "I am required to ask you about discrepancies. I am asking." Delyth felt the moment open in front of her, wide and clear, and she made herself look at it before she stepped, because a person who had spent a season learning how this colony edited its ground would do well to look before she trusted an auditor. "I ran a drill in K-7 and found a void at forty meters," she said, and watched Deller's expression, and saw nothing move in it. "The consolidated data I'm told shows bedrock. The original Long Survey flagged the void and then struck the note out. I requested a full imaging program and was denied." Deller was quiet for a moment, and in that moment the lab hummed the way it always hummed, and the two of them stood in it, and Delyth understood that she had just handed a stranger the only lever she had. "An imaging program is expensive," Deller said at last, and it was the careful, deflating sentence of a person who had learned to be careful with other people's courage. "My mandate is accounting, not geology. I can compel the company to reconcile a water ledger. I cannot compel it to drill." "Can you compel it to answer a question under audit?" "If the question is about water." Deller set her case down on the bench and opened it, and inside were the paper ledgers she still insisted on carrying, columns of numbers in her own hand beside the printed ones from the terminal. "So tell me about water, Doctor Amaral. Tell me why a resource surveyor with a void in her log has spent two nights running a sled outside the maintenance grid." Delyth looked at the ledgers, and at the auditor's steady hands, and she decided, in the way you decide anything at four hundred days from home, to test the water before she dove. "The basin's aquifer is being recharged," she said. "Not drained. Recharged. Water is moving into the ground at K-7 and down into a cavity that predates the colony, and it carries a fluorinated tracer, which means somebody is tracking where it goes. Under a strict reading of the Charter, any water that enters the subsurface inventory has to be declared in the same ledger as water that leaves. If a charge is undeclared, the colony's net position is wrong." Deller's pen stopped. She looked at Delyth for a long, level moment. "If that were true," she said slowly, "then somebody is quietly moving the colony's water, one undeclared charge at a time, and filing the result as a public benefit. That is not a geology question. That is my question exactly." "Will you ask it?" "I will ask it," Deller said, "and I will tell you honestly what will happen when I do. I will file a discrepancy, and the discrepancy will be routed to the company's compliance office, and the compliance office will send back a reconciliation, and the reconciliation will be signed by a director and countersigned by counsel, and it will take ninety days to reach Earth. If the reconciliation is honest, we will never know. If it is dishonest, it will be dishonest in a way that is extremely difficult to prove from a ledger alone." "Then I need proof a ledger can't argue with." "Then you need to bring me something from inside the ground." Deller closed her case with a soft click. "A sample with a chain of custody I can sign my name to. A photograph. An instrument record with a time and a place on it. Bring me that, Doctor Amaral, and I can compel the rest. Until then, I am one woman with a pen and a mandate that stops at the edge of the rock." Delyth looked at the two of them in the dark glass of the hood, her own reflection and the auditor's, and made herself say the next part carefully, because it was the only part of the plan she had not yet worked out. "What if the thing inside the ground can be photographed but not moved? What if the only honest way to show you the cavity is to take you down into it?" Deller was quiet for a while. "Then I will have to decide whether an auditor is allowed to go where a surveyor is not." She turned to the door. "Ask me that question again when you have the photograph. It will be easier to answer with evidence in the room." She picked up her case and went to the door, and at the threshold she paused and did not turn around. "You should know that I asked for the last three consolidated data sets before I landed, and that all three were delivered to me with the same note attached. It said the K-7 corridor is under active modification and that readings in that sector should be treated as provisional." She opened the door. "In nine years of auditing, I have never once seen the phrase active modification attached to a piece of ground." She left, and Delyth stood alone in the hum of the lab and let the meaning of it settle. The company had told the auditor in advance, in writing, that K-7 was provisional. That was not a lie built to fool an auditor. That was a lie built to be defensible in front of one, and it meant the people running it had done this before, and it meant they were ready for her. ---