第7章 Ruled An Accident

The ruling came through at dawn, and it said what Prell had predicted it would say. Worksite fatality. Equipment failure. Investigation ongoing. Tobin Skarrow's body was scheduled for the morgue ring and then, in a note appended in the administrator's plain hand, for the recycler within forty-eight hours, which was station policy and also, Ilyse thought, the convenience of someone who did not want a corpse on the manifest while the accords were being signed. She read the ruling in the corridor outside the diplomatic ring, and she read it twice, and then she went to Solvig and put it on his desk. "Skarrow was murdered," she said. "Prell has an open file." "Prell has an open file and you have a closed one. Those are different documents and only one of them is the station's answer." Solvig looked at the ruling without touching it, and for the first time Ilyse saw something under the tiredness that she had not seen before: not guilt, but fear. A man can be tired for eleven weeks and still be honest. A man who is afraid stops being honest much faster. "Where did you go last night, Ilyse?" "Deck six." "I ordered you not to." "You did." She did not look away. "And a man who filed forty-one amendments under a senior colleague's credentials signed your ruling an hour after I came back from deck six, which tells me that the person I am chasing does not need to hide from you, because you are already making his paperwork easier." He stood up, and she thought he would shout, and instead he did something worse. He spoke quietly. "Braque came to my office at the fourth bell," he said. "He asked me to remove you from the floor. He said your mental state was unstable, that you had accused him of forgery without evidence, and that in his professional opinion you were no longer fit to hold the neutral chair." Solvig's voice was steady and awful. "I have not decided." "You are telling me the forger is asking you to fire the witness." "I am telling you that I have two senior translators, that the whole peace of the Cyrrha system rests on one of them signing its accords, and that I cannot tell which of you is lying." He sat back down. "The talks resume tomorrow. Vasko has filed a formal notice that if the archive is not certified clean by the day after, the Compact delegation will withdraw. If they withdraw, Tresh takes it to his fleet. Bring me proof by the day after tomorrow, Ilyse, or I will do what Braque asked, because at least then I will have one translator I can trust instead of two I cannot." She left his office with the deadline in her chest like a swallowed stone. Day after tomorrow. Two nights, and no warrant, and a murder the station had already decided to forget. She spent the afternoon doing the only work available to a suspended translator, which was the work she had been forbidden to do and could not stop doing. She compared Skarrow's access timestamps against the amendment log, and the comparison produced a shape. The maintenance tech had opened bay seven eleven times in the last month, always in the hour before a standardization commit, always alone. He had been in the bay because somebody needed the terminal, and the terminal needed a warm body with a key, and Skarrow was the warm body, and Skarrow had been paid, a small credit, deposited weekly, into an account he had opened eight weeks earlier under his mother's maiden name. Somebody had rented a maintenance tech the way you rent a room. The account's routing ran through the commercial deck and died the way all commercial routing died on Cerval, in a broker's relay that station law required to hold no records. But the depositor's name, before the routing, had been written once, at the account's opening, in the bank's own ledger, and the ledger was a station document, and a station document could be read. She read it. The name was not Braque's. It was a name she had seen a hundred times in a hundred manifests without ever once noticing it, because it belonged to a person whose job was to sign the manifests. Cormick Delane, commercial liaison. She sat back and looked at the name for a long time. It was not proof. It was a shape, and the shape had a gait, and the gait had walked the centerline on deck six. She did not take it to Solvig, because Solvig had already told her which way he would rule. She did not take it to Prell yet, because Prell had asked for evidence and a name on a ledger is only a name. She sat with it instead and let it do what a first translation does, which was to change the way every earlier sentence read. If the hand that moved the words belonged to the commercial deck, then the buyer was on the commercial deck, and the buyer's interest was freight. Nine years of a closed lane ran through the trade deck like blood through a heart. Peace would open the lane and make the brokerage ordinary. A treaty that failed after it was signed would keep the lane closed and the brokerage necessary. Everything she had seen for three days arranged itself around that fact like iron filings around a magnet. Taal Merith caught her on the ring, which was itself a statement, because the Iyreth aide had never spoken to her outside a session in eleven weeks. He fell in beside her, small and precise, and spoke in Iyrethi so quietly that she had to lean to hear it. "You know what the archive says." "I know it is false." "Envoy Vasko knows it too," Merith said. "That is what no one on your side of the ring understands. Vasko does not think the archive is wrong. He thinks it is right, and he thinks the Compact is about to sign away a claim because Envoy Ovask is too eager for peace to notice. He is going to walk out, and he is going to do it in a way that makes Ovask look like a traitor at home, and then the war-houses on Ovaresh will have the excuse they have been buying for a year." He stopped at a lift. "There are people on both benches who want this treaty dead, neutral. Yours is not the only species that profits from a war." He stepped into the lift and the doors closed, and Ilyse stood in the corridor and understood that she had been wrong about the shape of the thing. She had thought the sabotage was aimed at the Vurn, or at the Iyreth. It was aimed at the accords themselves—at the signing, at the table, at the whole idea that two languages could be made to say the same thing—and it had help on both sides of the room. She had started the week believing the sabotage was aimed at one delegation or the other. She ended it believing it was aimed at the accords themselves, which was a larger and colder design, and the coldness was the proof, because no government does anything this patient. Somewhere below her feet, deck six waited with one dead camera and a wiped terminal and a man the station had already begun to forget. Somewhere above her, on the observation deck, the envoys were watching Ossun turn and counting the hours until the deadline. And somewhere out past the ring, in the dark that the trade route had once crossed, something was moving that would make every one of those deadlines moot. It moved before the day was out. ---