Haimo looked at Idina. She was pleased to see that he made a conscious effort to keep his expression as far away from hostility as he could manage.
“But if this soldier here is not happy with your degree of contrition, she will have that charge added after all. And then it becomes an Alliance matter. The judge may decide that the severity of the offense merits a term on Landfall.”
From the desperation that flashed up in his expression, Idina could tell that Haimo was familiar with Landfall Island. It was a penal facility off the coast of the mostly uninhabitable northern continent of Gretia. It had no walls or electric security fields because it didn’t need them to keep people in. There was a thousand-kilometer exclusion zone around it, and anyone who escaped would have to try to make it home across a frigid, mountainous wasteland with no life of any kind on it.
“Think about it,” Dahl continued. “One to three years at Sandvik. Family visits. You can even earn curated Mnemosyne access. Or three to five years on Landfall. That is a long time to spend on a frozen rock in the middle of nowhere.”
Haimo covered his face with his hands and blew a long, ragged breath into his palms. He slowly rubbed his eyes. When his hands came down again, all of his defiance had leaked out of him, and he seemed ten centimeters shorter than before.
“I will tell you about the gun,” he said.
“You are making a wise decision, Haimo,” Dahl said gently.
He nodded at her and sat up straight.
“But before you start, let me just tell you that I have been doing this for a very long time,” she said in the same soft and caring tone. “When you say things like ‘occupiers,’ or ‘no serfdom,’ I know I am not hearing you. I am hearing the person who put those phrases into your head. When you tell me the details about the gun, make sure I only hear you. Because I will know the difference.”
Haimo looked at the floor between his feet and nodded again.
“I bought it from someone I met, someone from work,” he said. “One of the technicians from the maintenance line.”
“What is his name?” Dahl asked.
“Vigi. His name is Vigi Fuldas. He is into all this military stuff. Collects it at his place. He has a workshop where he tinkers with it. The gun was not supposed to be able to fire, but he reprogrammed it so it could. I gave him a thousand ags for it.”
“How did you get to know Vigi? You were training to be a flight controller. You do not have any business at the maintenance line.”
“At one of the rallies,” Haimo said. “The Loyalists. We found out later that we both worked at the same place. If you go see him, please do not tell him I told you about the gun,” he said.
“That is not going to be up to me alone, Haimo. Now tell me everything you know about Vigi, please. Leave out no detail, even if it does not seem important to you.”
“You made that look easy,” Idina said when they had finished the interrogation and Haimo had returned to his detainment suite. “The kid is lucky he got you for an interrogator. The Pallas way would have been to bang his head against that Alon screen until information started falling out of his mouth.”
“It was easy,” Dahl said. “And I find that a little worrying.”
“You don’t think he was telling the truth?”
They were walking through the main atrium of the police headquarters. Almost every officer who passed Dahl gave her a respectful nod or spoke a greeting. In the middle of the atrium, a reflection pool showed a perfect image of the ceiling above, the surface of the water smooth as a mirror.
“I do not think he was lying to us,” Dahl replied. “But he was not telling us the facts from the right angle. He told us what he knew, but in the way he guessed we wanted to hear it.”
Idina knew that both the Gretian police and the Alliance intelligence service were already seeking out everything there was to know about both Haimo and his work friend Vigi Fuldas. If the story had holes, they would shine a light through them soon enough, and Haimo wasn’t going anywhere for a while. But Dahl’s sliver of worry had now transferred to Idina as well. Everything in the interrogation room had gone right as far as she could gauge, but Dahl had done this sort of thing a thousand times, and if she thought something was a little off, Idina had no cause to disagree.
They paused next to the pool and looked at their own reflections, which were almost perfect negatives of each other: Dahl’s white hair and light skin to Idina’s black hair and dark skin.
“Do you ever tire of it?” Dahl asked.
“Tire of what?”
“Being here. In a place that is not your home. Spending your days and your energy keeping the peace among strangers. Enduring the seasons.”
Idina considered the question.
“I get tired,” she said. “It’s strange, when I think about it. How much harder it is to keep your finger off the trigger than to pull it. I’ve been training to pull triggers all my life.”
“The Pallas way,” Dahl said, and Idina smiled.
“It would have worked on Haimo, beating the information out of him. And it would have been faster,” Dahl said. “This way is harder. But I am not sure I would want to be a police officer in a place where being a police officer is easy.”
The reflecting pool performed its function almost too well, like most things designed by Gretians. Idina could see all the lines in her face that hadn’t been there just a year ago, the furrows on her forehead and the
