List
“Umtane has to see it,” I told Nai. “Otherwise it’s going to look like I’m making up nonsense.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “I already think you’re making up nonsense.”
“Ha-ha…” I deadpanned. “You joke, but this is a classic back on Earth. Although, there’s a bit of a twist here…”
Apparently when the Vorak had first arrived, Chief Niza had let Umtane take over a small lounge on one of the upper levels to use for the investigation. All the other evidence Umtane and his group had collected was here, and hopefully this would add to the pile.
I held the pad of paper with both hands, pouring my cascade through my fingertips. The layers of pages unfolded in my mind as the wave of sensation washed over the paper and into my other hand, only to be pushed back into the pages again. The cascade bounced back when it met my other hand, shoving it further into the paper pad then into the other hand and back again. Over and over again.
It was a neat trick I’d picked up by accident, but as long as I could hold a thing, and only that thing, in both hands, I could hike the clarity of my cascade way up. Concentrating on any one detail enough to perceive it was still a ways off, but I couldn’t wait to try this trick with the phones.
For now I was staying in the twentieth century.
In almost every crime story I’d ever read or watched, at some point a savvy sleuth would find out what was written on a piece of paper based on the indentations left on the page below. It was a fun idea because it worked! Anyone could test it for themselves in just a few seconds.
What I was trying to do was a step or two past that.
Unlike the classic trick, I didn’t actually need to do any kind of pencil rubbing. I could just tactilely cascade the page, and with my new trick I was making out every tiny mark on multiple pages.
And that was what was so special about what I was doing compared to the ordinary version.
I wasn’t going for one or two pages.
Between the cascade and psionically reconstructing the layers in my head, I wanted all twelve pages that had already been torn out from the pad. It wouldn’t have been possible without an intermediate data point. The indentations just didn’t transfer that many layers down.
We already had exactly one of those pages, unfortunately one of the upper ones: third or fourth if I was sorting my results properly.
As I cascaded the sheets, the shallower indentations would have come from higher layers, the deeper marks from more recent ones. It took a bit of psionic skullduggery, and I wound up making a chart in my head to start grouping similar depths of grooves together.
It was slow work.
I hadn’t been this engrossed in my mental powers like this since solving Nai’s insomnia.
That…hadn’t been more than two weeks ago. Or had it?
Even with my psionic clock, this planet was messing with my sense of time too much.
But with every second, the picture got a bit clearer. I didn’t recognize the writing—most of it was written in a language I didn’t read, but there were a few short Starspeak phrases.
“…I’ve got it,” I said. The image in my mind was clear enough that I could reproduce at least part of all twelve missing sheets, five of which were definitely complete.
I materialized the sheets and their contents in the table where most of the documents were strewn about.
Tasser, Nai, and Umtane all leaned over to look.
“How sure are you that the writing is accurate?” Nai asked.
“Very,” I said.
“That’s concerning…” she muttered, casting her eyes over the extra notes we’d found. She turned to Umtane with an unsure expression.
“I know it might seem like he just pulled this stuff from nowhere, but there is—”
“I know what he did,” Umtane said. “I don’t think I could do it with Adept powers, but give me a few different grains of graphite dust and I could have found what that pad said.”
I was a little touched that Nai was willing to rep for me without telling him about psionics. But it was equally entertaining to see Umtane brush off my trick.
“It’s not that complicated,” he said. “Have you never seen someone do that with paper before?”
“No,” Nai said. “Why would I know that paper bleeds through layers like that?”
“Wow, you’ve really never worked in an office, have you?” Umtane said.
Nai tried not to let her frown show. “So what?”
“I just thought you would at least have to fill out carbon copy documents or something similar to this,” he said. “You’re a big shot Adept, surely you have to do at least some paperwork.”
“To be fair,” Tasser said, “I don’t have much paperwork either.”
“That’s because your commanders want your affirmation on as few documents as possible,” Umtane said wryly.
I had to do a double take when he said that because from the corner of my eye I saw Nai stiffen. She nearly punched him right there, but Tasser caught her fist before she could raise it in earnest. She glared at Umtane but composed herself after a heartbeat.
The Vorak wasn’t even looking their way when he’d said it. He was engrossed in looking over the notes.
She didn’t respond.
Tasser prompted her, “You said they were concerning? That’s not Speropi or I’d be getting more words than this.”
“It’s Murthian,” Umtane supplied. “I’m surprised your Adept spoke it. It’s not a common Farnata tongue.”
“You recognize Murthian?” Nai asked, her surprise being enough to disrupt her anger.
Umtane nodded. “I’ve reviewed financial records for more than just the military, I’ve looked at organizations and municipal work, even for Farnata.”
“Right,” Tasser said, “in your work as an ‘actuary’.”
Umtane nodded, still without turning around. “That’s right.”
“I only recognize the language though,” the Vorak said. “I have no clue what it says.”
“What, your eyes are only augmented enough to remember the symbols?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” he said honestly. “Aren’t you doing something similar?”
I ignored his question. The less he knew about my abilities, the better. Instead I asked Nai. “Can you read ‘Murthian’?”
“Well enough,” she said. “At least to get the gist of this.”
“By all means,” I said, gesturing towards the pages, “gist”.
“They’re instructions mostly,” Nai said. “Instructions on how to contact the Coalition without being discovered.”
“We already knew Pen had help,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else?”
“Yes,” Nai said grimly. “A timeframe. This part here...” She pointed to the top of one of the first notes. “These are timing windows to make sure a broadcast or delivery will be received properly.”
“That’s excellent!” Umtane said. “How specific does it get?”
“It gives specific times for certain days about four months ago.”
“That begs the question,” the Vorak asked. “Did the Coalition receive those calls?”
“…Yes,” Nai admitted. “But no one completed the follow up steps for contact. The next thing we heard from the Green Complex was an anonymous note saying there was a dead Coalition Adept inside.”
“This is good, very good,” Umtane said, diving into one of the stacks of paper. “Where…where…where… ah. Look, comm records for those three days. Notice anything?”
“There are deleted entries on all three consecutive days,” Tasser noted. “Same time on each day too.”
“Shouldn’t there be a way to find out who deleted them?” I asked. “An authorization code surely, unless anyone who wants can delete communications records.”
“It’s a very short list,” Umtane said. “Only Director Hom-Heg’s code would allow such.”
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “That didn’t strike you as incriminating earlier?”
“No,” Umtane said. “Because there’s dozens of broadcasts he’ll delete in any given month. It’s a compartmentalization and data security measure. Researchers looking to keep certain data proprietary or classified will file requests to purge their related comm records. The Director only approves them and carries it out.”
“So who can make a request?” Tasser asked.
“The section Chiefs and their deputies,” the Vorak said, pushing a personnel list toward us. “It’s about forty names.”
Eebat, Maburic, Mo, Mathu, Norgi, Berkha, Wester, Niza…the list went on. Nearly every single name was on my psionic list of aliens who’d poked or prodded me.
“I’ve met most of these people,” I said, trying not to show how disturbed I was.
“There’s a reason I have those names handy,” Umtane said. “They’re important figures here, the kind of people with the access to make a weapon.”
“They’re also the ones important enough to be at the front of the line to check out the new First Contact that just came in,” Tasser observed.
“It was always likely that the culprit was someone with some authority, but this is the first conclusive proof,” Umtane said.
“Forty names are still too many. But Pen’s autopsy should be finished soon, if we can narrow down when exactly he died that might narrow down this list,” Tasser said.
·····
We scratched six people off the list via alibi. Two of them were on extended leave from the facility, not even having been present in the weeks surrounding Korbanok. Three more of them could be conclusively located to be elsewhere at the time of all three of the deleted broadcasts. And the last one had died of natural causes.
The most shocking news of all came a few hours later with the results of the autopsy.
It had been difficult finding anyone qualified who wasn’t still a potential suspect, but Umtane and Nai had devised a clever solution. Since the culprit was almost certainly acting alone, if multiple people performed the autopsy, then no single person could alter the results.
Chief Niza personally delivered the autopsy to Umtane’s investigation room.
I wouldn’t know what I was reading, so I was trusting the aliens to pick out the important details. But that was nothing new.
“Cause of death,” Tasser noted, only moments into reading.
“Dehydration,” Nai breathed.
“Technically starvation,” Umtane noted. “He was so malnourished he likely didn’t have the strength to drink the water he had access to…”
My stomach twisted.
“There were traces of a catalytic food molecule on his fingers and hands,” Tasser read. “He did have food at some point…”
“But he ran out?” Umtane said.
“That probably means his body wasn’t moved,” Tasser said. “He died in there.”
“Then our Farnata was likely the one to connect that little chamber into the facility's water and air lines,” Umtane said.
“He couldn’t have wrapped up his own body,” Tasser said. “Our culprit still hid his death.”
“There’s no way he could have been sneaking out for food,” I said, trying not to imagine what he must have suffered. “How was he eating?”
“Do you know what a catalyst is?” Tasser asked. “In chemistry, specifically.”
“Sure.”
“We didn’t find traces of food on his body, but catalytic molecules are how he could have made some food,” Tasser explained.
Right, Dyn had been doing something similar for me.
“That particular molecule is used to turn non-Farnata food into a digestible form for us,” Nai said. “It’s not very nutritious, but it will keep you alive.”
“Then how did he die of starvation?” I asked. “If he wasn’t going out for food, then someone still had to be delivering him the food, or the catalyst he was using to make it, or both.”
“Catalysts aren’t consumed in a reaction,” Tasser reminded me. “But that doesn’t mean they’re always recoverable afterwards. Pen was probably losing a gram or two with every meal.”
My stomach sank as I realized what the first sheet had been for.
“[Oh God,]” I said, grabbing the one page of the pad I hadn’t recreated. “I know what this is.”
“How?” Nai asked.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
I didn’t understand the individual values of the numbers. But he had used Starspeak symbols for multiplication and division. That was enough to remind me of the same mathematical steps in the same order I’d gone through back on the ship.
“He was calculating his food supply,” I said, showing Nai. “I did the same thing on—”
I didn’t say anything further in front of Umtane. He didn’t need to know.
“I didn’t know how precise of an Adept he was,” Nai said. “His starting mass of food catalyst is calculated down to the third digit.”
“Here,” Tasser said. “Is this how many days he thought he had? We have an estimated time of death. Between those two things, we can calculate backward and get an idea of when he arrived.”
“And by extension exactly when his collaborator helped him inside,” Umtane said. “That might cross a few more names off our list. That is why your commanders should want your affirmation on reports.”
Umtane was eager about the new information, but I just felt sick.
He’d starved behind a wall he could have broken with a thought.
Could it possibly have been his own idea? Pen’s relationship with the culprit was still completely unknown. I wasn’t sure exactly how it might have happened, but couldn’t the culprit have killed Pen?
Spiking his food with a sedative, or maybe some kind of gas…
If something could have disabled the Farnata, then the culprit would need only wait for him to die. Then seal up the crawlspace to keep it from being discovered.
The ‘why’ was obvious. Nai’s impression of Pen was that he wouldn’t have condoned a bioterrorist any more than we did. He might have been desperate enough for help that maybe he didn’t look too closely about who was helping him until it was too late.
I didn’t want to think about the alternative, but it was hard not to.
I told her.
<…And the Director and Umtane would think the Culprit were trying to lie, create conflict to benefit from…>
<…Not completely. But that’s… Hivivi.>
she snapped.
I fought my reflex to look up at the Vorak immediately. I’d been standing off to the side of the room, a bit caught up in my mental conversation with Nai. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Nai at least had the good sense to pick up a document to pretend to read.
“Caleb,” Tasser said. “You there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just, lost in thought. I don’t have the strongest sense of what evidence you guys are basing most of this on.”
“Facility access logs mostly,” Umtane admitted. “That whole stack there is dedicated to them, divided by floor.”
He jabbed an otter claw at several boxes of documents shoved off to the side.
“So what do we know for sure about the culprit?”
“We know the culprit was in the communications room up in the public levels at least once per day on those three days in question. They could have prearranged their broadcast to occur hours after they were actually in the room,” Umtane said. “That doesn’t really eliminate suspects though.”
He continued, “they also got the log erased. We can still read the times of the broadcasts before and after, but we don’t know exactly when inside that window the culprit transmitted. We also know that only a certain level of clearance can even request to clear transmission logs.”
“…That’s not enough,” I said. “Nai said you were monitoring accounts that made the purchases that originally brought this to the Vorak attention. What made you start monitoring the accounts?”
Umtane gave me a thoughtful expression before he wrestled a box of documents out from the bottom of one of the oldest stacks.
“My office received this second hand,” he said. “So bear in mind this is some other Rak’s intelligence work. But it was a communication line at first. The Coalition knows this, but the Red Sails have surveillance outposts across the planet. They flagged a broadcast in the region and collected quite a lot of data on it, but they didn’t find the source of it. But the signal was encoded with a very obscure method, and it was found a handful of Organic Authority accounts were remotely accessed by some similarly encoded signals. Now this is a few weeks of bureaucracy and jockeying between the Coils and Sails, but the final conclusion was that someone had used the accounts to acquire materials for a bioweapon, and they were broadcasting fairly secretly as well. We see one plus one…”
“Ergo two,” Tasser said.
“You said the Sails collected data on the transmission right? If it was a phone call, and if the culprit was on it, if we decrypted it, we could get their voice.”
“That would involve contacting the Red Sails to share the raw signal,” Umtane said. “Possible, but not quick or a sure thing. It could just as easily be any other kind of transmission. There’s no guarantee we would get any audio.”
“So, in other words, you didn’t have any tangible evidence that the bioweapon exists until after we uncovered Pen’s body?” I asked.
“I appreciate the irony too, but yes. Before your Warlock found his body, I had thought we might leave the day you arrived. Everything we had until then was circumstantial and not very timely. We were going to hand it off to Director Hom-Heg’s people to investigate further.”
“If the security footage was archived for longer than four weeks,” I said bitterly.
Umtane looked at me skeptically.
“Do you have any idea how many cameras this facility has? How much trouble is it to record, much less store that much data?”
“On my planet, hundreds of hours of video can be stored digitally on one [server],” I said. “If my [phone] were charged, I could show you guys [television].”
That might have been satisfying, but the idea quickly soured.
I wasn’t about to tell Umtane, or even Nai for that matter, that most of my contribution to this investigation was based on media from Earth. They didn’t need to know.
In most crime shows I could think of, the events had already unfolded, more or less. They were investigative procedural stories.
But the more I thought about where we were, caught in the middle of this Organic Authority mess, the more it felt like we were in a different genre of mystery.
That’s because the crime in question was technically still in progress: the bioweapon hadn’t been used yet.
In fact…
“You mentioned that the bioweapon ‘had been’ or ‘was about to be’ made, right? I think we’re going to be too late if we focus so much energy on finding out what happened,” I said. “Assuming the bioweapon hasn’t been made yet, we should focus manpower on the things the culprit would need to complete it.”
“Even assuming it has already been made,” Nai said, “it can’t be stored that easily. It would have to be kept cool. There is room to get ahead of the problem.”
I nodded in agreement. “There’s too many moving parts to this facility, and not enough evidence that goes back far enough. If we can’t take the initiative, then we’re just giving the culprit all the time they need to figure out a plan. We’ll get all our answers, but not in time to do anything with them.”
“It’s not a bad strategy,” Umtane conceded. “Our primary goal should be stopping the bioweapon from leaving the facility, which doesn’t necessarily happen if we only find the culprit.”
“With the list we have, we can still exonerate key personnel one at a time,” Tasser said.
“I thought we had forty names,” I said.
“You really were spaced out,” he said. “We can clear more than half of them based on their access logs to their labs. A lot of the mid-level personnel stay in their sections for more than a whole day inside the broadcast window. Whoever did it had to visit the telecom room at least once on each of those days. It leaves us with nineteen names, all but one of them either a deputy Chief or greater.”
Tasser slid the revised list in front of me. It read,
1-Facility Director Hom-Heg
2-Director’s Aide Norris
3-Security Chief Niza
4-dep. Security Chief Rikonnam
5-Research Chief Maburic
6-Physical Medicine Chief Eebat
7-dep. Physical Medicine Chief Timot
8-Ecology & Biosphere Chief Mo.
9-dep. Ecology & Biosphere Chief Berkha
10-Virology Chief Drafun
11-dep. Virology Chief Mathu
12-Surgical Chief Ozuzon
13-dep. Surgical Chief Aloksin
14-Genetics Chief Kullo
15-dep. Genetics Chief Egras
16-Molecular Organics Chief Axa
17- Facilities Chief Wester
18-dep. Facilities Chief Tollin
19-Auditor Chief Norgi
I looked up at Chief Niza who was still conspicuously both in the room and on our list of suspects.
“You and the Director haven’t been cleared yet?” I asked.
“No,” he admitted. “Not because there isn’t evidence to, but because there’s no guarantee that it isn’t faked.”
“The first four names are the most critical to clear,” Umtane said. “If we can confirm that any of them didn’t make a broadcast for at least one whole day, then we can narrow our focus even more.”
“We could abuse volunteerism too,” Nai pointed out. “Nineteen suspects make a small enough pool that we can ask them to try and exonerate themselves, even if it’s only simple accounts of their movements.”
“If nothing else, it could let us catch the culprit in a lie,” Umtane agreed. “Your First Contact testing was cut short today with the allergies, so do you know how that will affect the scheduling?”
“[Shucks] Rak,” I said. “I didn’t think you valued my input that much.”
“I don’t that much,” he sneered. “But if a section Chief is busy presiding over your testing, they can’t be around to stop me from snooping through their circles…But how could you say that? I was the one who wanted you to help with this investigation. I’m hurt.”
“His testing shouldn’t be affected too much,” Chief Niza volunteered. “The initial schedule was written, knowing that it would have to change drastically based on what they found. But you should start with the security personnel, even before exonerating Director Hom-Heg. The sooner my deputy and I are cleared, the better.”
“You know,” I said, casting my eyes over the list. “The deputy Chief of Security is one of the ones I haven’t met yet. Rikonnam?”
“He’s Vorak,” Umtane explained. “I discussed it with the Director, and it seemed prudent to keep as many of us away from you as possible.”
“That was probably a good call,” Tasser said.
“I can see why you would,” I agreed. “But I’d be interested in meeting more Vorak who weren’t part of your war. Even Rak just from a different fleet than the Red Sails has been interesting.”
“Oh?” Umtane said. “And just how do I measure up?”
“Well you’re easily my favorite Vorak,” I said. “Because you haven’t tried to kill me yet.”
“Seems like a rather loose standard…” he muttered, but if I read his tone right, that expression was roughly analogous to ‘low bar’.
“Back on topic though,” I said, “is Rikonnam an Adept?”
“No,” Umtane said. “The only Adept on this list is Chief Axa. He leads the Molecular Organics department, but he’s an unlikely suspect.”
“Because he’s Farnata?” I guessed, judging by his name.
“Yes,” Umtane said. “I have a hard time imagining a non-Casti keeping a low enough profile.”
“Who are the other two Adepts on site?” I asked. That was one of the first things Nai had asked when we arrived, and my radar corroborated the number. Though, I’d yet to detect all of them at the same time, Director Hom-Heg had shared that the Green Complex currently employed three Adepts in total.
“One is a Vorak working in Neuroscience, but she’s very new. She only arrived about two months ago. Not a suspect. The other one is a Farnata, but…” Umtane trailed off, glancing to Chief Niza for support.
“The other Adept is a Farnata working off their criminal sentence with facility security,” Chief Niza said. “Esk is scum, but he’s not bold enough to be involved in this. He’s too risk averse.”
“Caleb, I’m going to be coming with you and Tasser tomorrow. You’re either visiting Dr. Mo in Biosphere science, or Drafun in Virology. The Rak can snoop around while you get checked out and I can talk with the Chief’s themselves,” Nai said.
“Chief Niza, while the four of us are occupied with that, you can talk to the Director and look for a way to exonerate the two of you. We can check back in tomorrow evening, agreed?” Umtane said.
“Seems like it would be a conflict of interest for us to exonerate ourselves,” Niza said.
“Well at least one of you has to be uninvolved,” Tasser said. “So even if one of you is guilty, they would have to contend with the other.”
“See, on a homeworld, there are professionals for this sort of thing…” Chief Niza complained. “Trained agents working under formalized investigative bodies. Not this renegade type of manhunt…”
“Unless you want to skip to the other side of the planet and get someone from Rasi borough…” Tasser said.
“No, of course not,” the Farnata said.
“Then let’s get some sleep,” Nai said. “Tomorrow is a big day.”
We all filed out of the office Umtane’s investigation had taken over, and I was pretty sure I felt him materialize something near the door—a tripwire maybe—in addition to locking it.
That was a smart call.
I went to bed tired and hungry for information. This bioweapon didn’t really have anything to do with me. But I was invested anyway. I had allies tied up in stopping it, and that was good enough.
My interest went further than that though. The kind of aliens that used bioweapons seemed like they would be the same kind to abduct people too.
For the first time I really thought about the Vorak…well, fairly.
Umtane was too hard for me to definitively nail down , but he didn’t seem like a cold calculating agent. He gave me a more social manipulator vibe. There was no chance he wasn’t a cunning bastard, but at least had the empathetic awareness to keep other Vorak out of my sight. Although even that was probably for his own ends.
I didn’t like thinking about it, but it was impossible for every Vorak to be involved, or even tangentially related to my abduction.
It should have been a comforting realization. The thought of the entire Vorak civilization being my enemy had been paralyzing at one point.
But now it just raised more questions.
After today, I was more aware than ever that I didn’t know who my enemy was.
Not really.