“They found them in Triple Q Commercial Construction. They bought three-quarters of the company through assorted fronts, turfed the entire senior executive staff and put Lafrenz and what I assume were carefully selected allies in their place.”
Data on Triple Q was running across the screens as Killough spoke. Most of it was very high-level, the general information submitted to stock exchanges and suchlike around the company’s projects.
“So, if Triple Q built it, we need to find out which project they buried it in?” Roslyn asked.
“Exactly. Which is a problem, because Triple Q no longer exists,” Killough told her. “The files and paperwork that would give us those answers are locked behind a court filing in a secure judicial server.
“They appear to have overstretched themselves and failed to deliver a third of their projects on time or on budget. Penalty clauses wiped them out a year ago, tying up thirty-two construction projects in Nueva Portugal alone in debts and lawsuits.”
Roslyn winced.
“Lafrenz did that intentionally, I’m guessing?” she asked.
“Probably. At this point, the work crews have scattered to every other construction company on the planet, one by one. Any listing of staff below the executive level is in those confidential files the court won’t release.”
“What about the executive level?” Roslyn said. “They can’t all have been Lafrenz’s patsies.”
“Fifteen names listed in the last annual report,” Killough said after a moment. Those names floated in the air between them. “Obviously, we have failed to track ‘Roxana Lafrenz.’ I should have data on some of the others.”
“I’ll see what’s in the public files,” Roslyn told him. “Let’s see what we pull together.”
The answer was a litany of blatant lies, unexpected deaths and people who’d never existed at all. Five of the names joined “Roxana Lafrenz” as being aliases. Six of them had existed but had already been off-planet when they’d been listed as part of the final executive staff of Triple Q Construction.
The remaining six were dead. Two heart attacks, one cancer, three car accidents.
“Normally, I’d trust natural causes,” Roslyn said as she and Killough went through the results together. “Except that Lafrenz is a Mage-Surgeon and I have to wonder if she could give someone cancer.”
“Fucked if I know,” Killough admitted. “Though that is a terrifying thought.”
He shook his head.
“If the people aren’t the answer, the projects have to be,” he told her. “What I didn’t manage to pull together was a list of projects they completed. That’s what I wanted Huntress’s computers for.
“If we can search the public construction records and flag everything Triple Q was involved in over the last five years, that gives us a starting point,” he continued. “We can then try an analysis to see what was big enough for them to have hidden a lab of the scale we’re talking about.
“I’m assuming it’s underground, but to be honest, that’s just an assumption.”
“If they set it up right, they could just as easily hide it in an office or even a residential tower,” Roslyn agreed. “Or just in the basement of a tower.”
“Or bury it when they’re laying the pipes, power and pavement of a residential suburb,” Killough said. “There’s a lot of places and ways they could have hid this project, Commander. But I think Huntress has the computers and access to find all of their projects in a way that a rented console in a library can’t.
“The bastards swapped my analysis setup for a bomb, after all.”
“I’ll start the searches,” Roslyn told him. “You…” She sighed. “Can you take a look at what happened in the quarantine zone? We know that’s related, so I want to see what comes out of it.
“I’m just not sure I can bring myself to look.”
The construction permits and licensing of a midsized city were a massive amount of information that were rarely properly organized, scanned or stored. All of it was at least digitized, but the search Roslyn had set for Huntress’s computers was far from as straightforward as it should have been.
And that was before the fact that even a legitimate construction company would often bury their involvement behind numbered companies or subordinate contractors to keep competitors in the dark about what was going on.
Roslyn’s involvement as the computers crunched was wading through court files and legal filings to identify the other companies Triple Q might use to hide their involvement and adding those to the search.
It kept her mind engaged and away from the horror show they’d seen on the surface—at least until Killough stepped back into the room with her and sat down heavily.
She looked up at the newly tight lines on his face and swallowed.
“That bad?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he told her. “The quarantine zone is secure, though the locals still aren’t letting anyone out. One hundred and twenty-two Guardia officers are dead. About that again wounded.”
The Nueva Portugal Guardia had responsibility for five million souls. If they had the usual ratios of Protectorate police departments, two hundred and fifty casualties were over a tenth of the entire Guardia.
“And the victims?” she asked quietly.
“Current estimates are over four thousand dead,” he said flatly. “Current reports are that they managed to disable and contain about eighteen hundred, but processing them is being a nightmare.
“Most of the ones they’ve managed to get into bioscanners have… Well.” Killough shook his head. “Like the one you sent aboard Huntress, they’re in comas with mixed prognoses. Like her, though, they seem clean after the bioscan.”
“So, whatever we’re looking at is actively killed and dispersed by the radiation used in a bioscanner,” she said. “How did something that fragile survive an explosion?”
“Different stages in the life cycle?” the MISS agent guessed. “I’m not a bioscience guy. I’m a spy,
