“First, what’s the status of this investigation of yours?” Galler glanced at Heikki. “You see, I’m not entirely selfish. And what’s my status—ser?”
“Commissioner,” Max said affably. Heikki lifted an eyebrow. The change in title represented a considerable promotion since the last time she had seen Max. “The investigation is proceeding—though right now I’m more interested in why we were put on the job than in the trumped-up Violations’ we’ve been shown.” He smiled at Heikki. “Not at all your style, Heikki.” He looked back at Galler. “As for you, ser…. As they say, that depends in large part on how you choose to answer my questions.”
“I see.” Galler managed a wry smile, and reached for the last drink left on the tray.
Max seated himself on the largest of the chairs and leaned back, still smiling benignly. “Now, as I said, this all seems to make sense to you two. Why don’t you explain it all to me?”
Heikki looked at her brother, unable to keep an unholy joy from her face. “Galler knows so much more,” she said sweetly. “I think he’d better explain this one.”
It took perhaps half an hour for Galler to outline what he had found in Tremoth’s files and Slade’s reaction to his discoveries. When he had finished, Heikki spoke, explaining her contract with Lo-Moth and the work she had done on Iadara. Max sat quietly through it all, eyes hooded, leaning back comfortably as though he were listening to children’s tales. When they had both finished, he sat quietly for a moment, staring at nothing then shook himself, looking up with an abstracted smile.
“So sorry, but I was just thinking, this might explain a couple of bodies that turned up one one of the lower levels of EP10 last week—Tremoth employees who’d broken their contracts and gone underground. Or so their bosses said, even though the grieving widows claimed they were company men to the last molecule.”
“The hijack crew?” Heikki said.
“By coincidence, they were last seen on Iadara,” Max said. “Oceanic survey work, officially.”
Definitely the hijackers, Heikki thought, but said nothing. Iadara’s oceans were effectively useless for any of Lo-Moth’s products; they weren’t even terribly useful as a food supply. She shook the memory away, and said to Max, “So now what?”
Max shook his head. “You tell me. It might interest you to know, by the way, that Slade’s been giving money to Retroceder politicians and action groups.”
“I thought he was a Retroceder,” Heikki said, and Galler made a little noise of satisfaction. Max pointed a finger at him. “You claimed you had information from Tremoth’s files. Where is it?”
Galler made a face. “It was in my office, in the reader there.” Max raised an eyebrow in polite disbelief, and Galler said, stung, “Well, in my experience, no one ever looks at the tapes in the reader, they search the files and the strongbox and all that. It was the safest place I could think of on short notice. I was planning to recover them, anyway, take them back to my pied-a-terre, but things moved a little faster than I was expecting. I set things up so that Gwynne—”
“Gwynne?” Max said, chortling. Heikki waved him to silence, all too aware of the color mounting in her cheeks.
“—so that Heikki could collect them,” Galler went on, “but she didn’t do it.” He shrugged. “So I don’t have any proof. I have to admit, I wasn’t able to tell her they were there, but—” He broke off abruptly, staring at the circles of plastic Heikki was pulling from her belt pocket. Heikki allowed herself a single smile, one smile of triumph for all those years of rivalry, and leaned forward to pass the disks to Max.
“What’s on these, anyway?”
Galler closed his mouth, blinking. After a moment, he said, “You had them all along.”
Heikki nodded. “What are they?”
“Why—?” Galler began, then shook his head. “No. Not important.” He took a deep breath, focusing his attention on Max. “Those disks contain the information I pulled from our files on the original crystal project, including schematics. There are also records of Daulo Slade’s actions after I informed him of the overlap between the historical documents and Lo-Moth’s latest project.”
“Very nice,” Max said, tranquilly, and tucked the disks into his jacket. “But not exactly conclusive.” He held up his hand, silencing Galler’s automatic response, and looked at Heikki. “Heikki—your name’s really Gwynne?”
Reluctantly, Heikki nodded, and Max shook his head. “I was expecting something really awful, after all the fuss you made about not using it. Can you reconstruct the crystal matrix that Lo-Moth lost from the information on the tapes?”
Heikki looked at Santerese, who said, “It was pretty well fragmented, and the fragments were mixed in with a lot of other debris. It looked like they swept it down into the hold.”
“I remember,” Heikki said, softly. There had been a mass of wreckage, objects crushed almost to powder, a powder that glittered in the beams of their handlights…. She shook the thought away, said aloud, “I don’t know. It depends on how big the fragments were, and how many of them we can find on the tape. And, of course, how good the tape is.”
Santerese said, “We can try. But do you really want us to do it, Max? We’re—interested parties, to say the least.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Max said, with a smile that showed a disconcerting number of teeth. “Copies of your tapes are already in my main labs. But you are the best, Marshallin, you and Heikki. You’ll do it?”
“Of course,” Santerese said, with a quirky smile, and Heikki said, “I don’t see you’ve left us a choice, Idris.”
The tapes from the wreck site were already in the workroom. Heikki settled herself at her console, frowning, and called up the menu of tools she had available for this sort of job. At the console opposite, Santerese bent over her keyboard, reloading the raw data. “Was the composition of the matrix standard?” she asked, and Heikki shrugged.
“Galler?”
“What?” Her brother appeared in the doorway, Max looming behind him.
“Was the matrix of standard materials, do you know?”
“I think so,” Galler answered, frowning. “Why?”
Max laid a hand on his shoulder, drawing him away, “Let’s let them get on with it, shall we?”
Heikki was hardly aware of his departure. She stared at the list of programs displayed on the workscreen, tugging thoughtfully at her lower lip. She touched keys to load the restoration program—no question I’ll need that one, she thought—then added the more sensitive of the two modeling programs. After a moment’s hesitation, she added a second construction program, and leaned back to let the three spool into working memory.
“I’m sorting the debris by apparent composition now,” Santerese announced. “Or trying to, anyway. God, I hate working with tape.”
Heikki nodded her agreement. Even with the most sophisticated programs, you were still working with a computer’s best guess, and if that guess was wrong, it was usually catastrophically wrong, so that you thought you were looking at diamonds, and were actually dealing with ground glass. She put the thought aside. After all, the computers weren’t often wrong. Her eyes still on the filling screen, she said, “So what do you think of my brother, Marshallin?”
Santerese looked up from her screen in some surprise. “I’ve hardly seen enough to judge.” Heikki said nothing, waiting, and Santerese shrugged. “Got his eye on the main chance, hasn’t he?”
Heikki grinned. “That’s a polite way of putting it.”
“You don’t like him at all, do you, doll?”
“No,” Heikki said, “I don’t.” She became aware, tardily, of the disapproval in Santerese’s tone, and looked away. “I’m sorry if it bothers you, Marshallin, but that’s the way it is. It’s a little late to change.”
There was a brief silence, and then Santerese said, “I think you’re overreacting, just a little.” Her screen beeped before Heikki could think how to answer, and Santerese said, “I can flip you the raw feed now.”
This was not the time to discuss Galler, Heikki knew. She touched keys on her board, and said, “Ready to receive.” Numbers streamed across her screen, and she pushed the keyboard aside to make room for the more sensitive shadowscreen. The flow of numbers stopped at last, and a single icon pulsed in the center of the screen. Heikki took a deep breath, once again remembering the wreck site, and touched the shadowscreen.
The icon vanished, to be replaced with a strange, washed-out image. There was a scattering of brighter shapes along the bottom of the screen. Heikki frowned for a moment, then realized what she was looking at.
This was a processed image of the latac’s hold, looking down onto the field of debris that had been swept
