Spark and tether, p.26
Spark and Tether, page 26
It wasn’t like he had any other leads to follow.
He used the Bolis citizen token to schedule a transport, frustrated that it would be three more days of waiting, and reserved a room on the small non-COR station where the posting originated. He added the Meritor key and a transport schedule to his implant, just in case.
He was dressing for another morning of wandering the station halls when he saw his reflection clearly for the first time in days: dark circles under his eyes, hair shaggy and unkempt, skin patchy and dry under a rough beard. He looked haunted, which he found darkly amusing. He stopped himself from thinking about what Jin would say, and after a good long stare at himself, asked the station comms to find him a good skin and hair service. One that wouldn’t be too chatty.
Sacheri returned that evening after two solid meals and several hours being scrubbed and massaged and re-shaped. He returned to the mirror that had so harshly shown him to himself that morning. His skin glowed bright and smooth, his beard cleanly shaved. The short sides of his hair lay neatly under the waves falling to his shoulders. The stylist had lifted his red highlights; in the right lighting, they looked violet. The dark circles under his eyes had been gently rolled away with the aid of some expensive creams straight from Danae. He looked like himself, again, except for his eyes. They were heavy and dull.
Sacheri bowed his head and stared into the sink instead. Was Jin as miserable as he was? Would it matter? He had re-read the reports with Jin’s signatures over and over, looking for answers to questions he could not even articulate to himself. He fell asleep remembering their steady and calm presence beside him. He dreamt so often of their skin against his own that he woke most days reaching for them, only to be overcome with the memory of everything since.
He did not tell himself that it had all been a lie—the one certainty he had was that they had loved him as much as he had loved them. They had conflicting obligations that could not be resolved. It did not hurt less. He could not reconcile their name on the reports—years of hiding the truth from him—with the rest of their history together. Their kindness, however wryly delivered it may have been. Their low, loving voice in the dark, rendering him incoherent with desire. Their endless patience with him—which he had to have broken, finally, leaving in the night without a word, breaking every promise he had made. He could not return, and he could not imagine they would seek him out again, either.
It has to get better, he told himself. It’s just heartbreak.
Chapter 33
Sacheri arrived on a small unallied station in the Macinus system six days later. As soon as he secured his comms, he asked the room fai to send Adda a ping that he would like to speak to her.
She refused the ping.
Sacheri had expected that.
He was there as an investigator, he reminded himself, and investigators did not, as a rule, speculate or conjecture or imagine. They followed processes and procedures to bring some sense of order and consistency connected by observable, provable, verifiable facts to narratives that were anything but. Their responsibility was to take all sides, follow all sources to their beginnings and ends, and, after all information was gathered, determine where and how harm had been done in order to deliver resources to any needed repair and restoration.
It never worked that way, Adda had said to him once, because we only knew to start after the harm was done, and there must be some allowance for healing before gathering histories, and so you ended up here, following all the paths at once.
That conversation had happened during one of the earlier runs, before he’d known Jin and Umair were I&R. He had said it sounded like a good work for a syn, and she had answered they were too easily swayed by their internal experiences.
Sacheri considered what might convince her to see him anyway, and on the next ping, he sent only the message that he had new sources and an open travel token.
She must have considered it for hours before responding, but when Sacheri woke from his first post-travel sleep, there was a message: Send it, then.
He did so, along with a couple of record summaries, that the rest would best be delivered in person. And then he waited again.
He did not expect much of the local archive search results, given how few relevant items returned in his searches on the larger world archives. He ignored the COR data sets, and looked instead for those in the outlying areas of the Ring, worlds whose votes barely registered with COR, where alliances shifted and disintegrated and were reborn without making much of an impact in the news feeds of the larger worlds. He ran inquiries for anti-synchronist sentiment, fai citizenship initiatives, and merchant-run terraform corps, and then he reached for a drink, expecting the display to take some time.
The returns were immediate and enormous.
Multiple worlds, extensive documentation of protests and resistance, stories of suspected syns expelled from their home worlds, fai inactivated and disappeared, threats to leave COR en masse if Oversight was not contained. Accusations of forced participation in synplant experimentation.
Sacheri scanned record after record. He’d found none of this in Oversight archives as an apprentice, none in COR as he joined I&R, nothing he accessed on Bolis station. As if these histories had been pushed to the edges of the Ring, to worlds attached to COR by the thinnest, weakest threads, too small and too far away for major population centers to see or care, easily cut from the Councils if they became too unmanageable.
Sacheri collected the results and sent them to Paradis under her private channel with a note to read in private.
Adda sent him directions to meet her the next day.
Jin would have told him not to go, and absolutely not to go alone.
Sacheri considered the chances it was a setup, that there would be COR officials ready to drag him into indefinite quarantine where no one could find him. He paused at the steep ramp into the ship, and set up a ping to Paradis, alerting her to his last known location. He sent everything—his backup data, his latest findings, the rambling commentary he’d left himself about his intention to talk with Adda, his suspicions—to Paradis, and said: Just in case. See you soon. It wasn’t much, and COR could probably intercept it if they were paying attention, but at least he’d done something.
He tried to keep his pace even as he descended the ramp to the repair dock, but his vision was blurred and shaky and he stumbled, catching himself against the doorframe at the top. He did not look down to see if she had seen. It seemed unwise for her to see him so weak, but he did not know what better chance he might have to find some next step forward.
The repair bay was large and brightly lit and he knew as soon as he stepped off the ramp that it wasn’t a trap. Adda was visible at the far end, standing hunched over a worktable with a drone beside her, dressed in plain brown tunic and trousers with a tool belt hanging from her hips.
She’d called him here because it was impossible to hide, and anyone who caught the missing synchronist with the accused would have a clear view. She didn’t turn to him until he was no more than a few steps away.
“Thank you for seeing me,” he said.
She looked up with a blank expression. “You know this is a bad idea for both of us, right?”
“Didn’t see many other options.”
She didn’t respond.
“I picked up something on that moon. I’m trying to figure out what, and how to repair it.”
Adda turned back to the equipment on the worktable, gesturing to the drone to continue. “Nothing to do with me.”
“I was told you knew who could help.”
“You were told wrong.”
He wasn’t. But arguing that wasn’t going to get her talking. “I found records of the anti-synchronist groups and their co-conspirators who fought against fai citizenship. And I can’t tie the merchant corps to it yet, but I think that’s a matter of sorting through results. They weren’t careful about leaving traces.”
Adda continued to work on the mechanism in her hands.
“But there’s something I don’t understand.”
She passed the piece to the drone and reset the worktable, filing tools into a case and vacuuming the surface.
When it was quiet again, he said, “A few things, actually. If you were following the distress signal logs, how did you know which ones to prioritize? There were hundreds. But you knew which moons to risk full missions for.”
Another drone had appeared, this one with a tray Adda loaded with pieces from another bin. “You were certain enough to risk whole crews, even though COR takes that seriously and you were going to get caught eventually.”
She moved to the cargo door of the shuttle and waved it open. “What are you asking, Sacheri?”
“I want to know what you know. How you got into this.”
Adda crossed her arms over her chest and watched the drones move into place on either side of the door. “I was assigned as an apprentice. There was an entire team of us working on this, once. Seemed like a good path into Ops.” She glanced his way—and he waited for her to continue.
“We were promoted up, pushed out, run in circles until we collapsed, and when I went back to the beginning for the old records they were gone. I had my packets and that was all. When I could tie it to another COR job, I did.”
He remembered her concern about duplicating records and obsessively keeping backups, right from the first run. “But you kept going.”
“Someone had to.”
He wasn’t going to point it out now—she’d shut him out for sure—but there were a dozen violations of COR standards in that alone; investigations were group efforts, not solo. Not that he had followed those standards, either. “COR and Oversight tried a new program and Bolis maybe was a part of it until they decided to stop.” Something flickered across her face but he couldn’t read it. “Am I wrong?”
“No. Incomplete.”
“Bolis and COR hid the records, or erased them, or whatever. Oversight has them locked up tight, if they have them at all. But there are histories in other archives—”
“On the poorest worlds with the weakest resource chains, where the fai and synchronists are unwelcome at best.”
He fell silent again, calling up brief histories of the last several world archives he’d reviewed, the ones with the most vocal distrust of COR and its allies. Not all of those worlds had been closed to fai for their entire histories. And not all of them had survived the aftermath of the Storms. More than a few had been abandoned by their larger neighbors and by COR, left to fail or thrive by their own efforts. Some, like Repicus, had turned to piracy and smuggling; others—a select few—managed to achieve full sustainability on their own. “Most of those worlds were exploited and left to fend for themselves, and distrust any new attempt at collaboration.”
“The COR-SYN program was one more venue for bringing more smaller worlds onto the Council and yoking them to larger worlds that were content to see them used up and discarded. Their perspective is no less biased than COR’s.” Adda turned a set of connectors around and replaced it on the drone.
There were divisions of I&R that had focused their attention on repairing the damage done to worlds COR had abandoned. It required petitioning by local governing bodies and a dedicated contingent of bureaucrats able to bridge between hostile delegations. Repicus had been through it, and in the last several standard years gathered support for joining COR; the effort had stalled when the subject of returning stolen goods came up in negotiations.
Sacheri could not remember any other recent accounts of an outlier world joining COR.
But I&R was not only for uncovering truths. There had to be repair where harm had been done, and some divisions of I&R spent their resources on that repair whether or not any truths were revealed. They were supposed to fix what was broken, whether or not they could find the cause.
“What hope for restoration, then?” he asked.
Adda had leaned over one of the drones and was muttering to it about one of the open panels inside the door. The drone clicked to itself and returned to the worktable with a stabilizer in its grip.
“Not everything can be repaired,” she said.
She did not turn to him as she spoke. Her hands were full of cording and connectors from the bay door mechanisms. She fed them one by one to the repair drone on the dock, who held them steady as another drone whirred and soldered and snapped somewhere inside the door panels.
“It’s not a new story,” she said. “We create an exploitative system to further some selfish end, and then when we are faced with our own horrific misdeeds we try to hide them from sight and hope that will end it. But the truth will out, one way or another. We can acknowledge it head on, or we can leave it to rot and fester and turn everything it touches to dust and decay.”
“You’re trying to make COR own up to its own misdeeds.” She saw herself as heroic, a tenacious champion of justice—no matter who else was hurt along the way. How had she gone this long without being stopped by I&R? How much of this had Jin known? He pushed the thought away.
“COR and Oversight both.”
But what of the worlds themselves? What responsibility did Repicus have, or Bolis, in their COR-but-not-COR histories? COR was vast, and complex, and had a hundred hands, any of which might be tasked with cleaning the messes of another; how far could that go? Where did the debt end?
The violet was creeping through the shadows on the floor, into the crevices between panels of the workbenches, up the ramp to the storage bays. A tendril drifted over Adda’s shoe, blown there by a draft no one else could feel. Sacheri steadied himself on the ledge of the tool cart and refocused.
“To what end?” It was not quite the question he wanted to ask, but now that she was finally talking, he had to keep her going.
She sighed and spooled out another length of cording. “Restoration,” she said.
He ignored her sarcasm. “They’re long dead.”
“Families, then. Communities. They wouldn’t have left descendants, but others may have. Acknowledgement. A corrected record, new safeguards to prevent anything like it happening again.”
Sacheri did not say he’d spent the last few days on records that were plenty correct and had been so all along, but no one—including Adda—had bothered to take them seriously, because they were from worlds on the edge of the Ring, disregarded by their more powerful neighbors. She had to know as well as he did how difficult it would be to get COR to admit any of those archives for certification.
And then there was the debris in his own system. “So now there are records. What next?”
“We make COR acknowledge them?” Adda said, still sarcastic. The last of the connectors dropped from her hand and disappeared into the bay door.
Sacheri stared at her as she straightened, stretched, and turned to him. “They will, or they won’t. But at least someone did something.”
He could not read her expression, her eyes, or her tone of voice under the sarcasm. Her hands were twisting and pulling her ash blond waves into a bun behind her neck, one hand holding tight at the base while the other smoothed pieces into place. She had a musician’s hands, he noticed: nimble, calloused, stronger than they looked. We have no reason to trust each other, and plenty not to. But who else would do it? Where else would he find answers? They stared at each other for another breath, and then Sacheri said, “Let me help.”
She stared back at him, going so still it unnerved him. “What do you propose?”
“I have records to back your assertions and busted synplants as evidence of sabotage on the dead moons and—”
“Do you think they care about one damaged synchronist? They lost a whole generation—and then they erased them from history.”
She pitied him. Pity and dismissal. He’d been useful enough, but now he was a liability to be discarded. He wondered if she saw the irony in it. “They have us both sequestered on a pending inquiry, don’t they?”
“Do you really think that’s going to come to anything?” Her laugh was bitter, and he remembered she’d had at least one inquiry before—Jin’s. “I tried to keep you out of this, Sacheri. I really did.”
“I have a talent for trouble,” he said. “They can’t ignore us showing up on the same side, Adda. Please.”
“You have to stop thinking of COR and Oversight as your friends,” she said. “It’s going to get you into trouble you can’t get out of. People can’t keep protecting you when you insist on making the worst possible choice in front of you.”
Sacheri clenched his mouth shut, not sure what would come out next. A wisp of violet curled at the block stands holding Adda’s ship in dock. He focused on her eyes and tried not to see it. “At the very least, I can tell the review committee you’re not to blame and I’d like to continue the investigation with you.”
“Your partner might take issue with that.”
“I don’t have a partner,” he said.
Adda’s brow twitched. “Don’t they know you’re here?”
“No. We haven’t spoken in several cycles.”
Adda scanned his face, and he suspected if his synplants had been working, he would have caught her scanning those, as well.
It annoyed him that she would care, or that it would matter, that his grief could be another point of manipulation. What was he trying to convince her of? Shouldn’t she need him more than he needed her? He stayed silent and met her eyes, and flushed with relief when he saw her shoulders relax. “You think you have enough in the records to pass COR certification standards?”
He had no idea. “I do.”
Something he had said had convinced her; he could see ease settling over her posture, reminding him of the casual, competent lead he’d first met. He relaxed with her.
