Bitter Angels (40 page)

“You must forgive me, Field Commander,” Barclay said, ushering me into the sitting room. He was wearing civilian clothes rather than his uniform, and they were rumpled. “I am the only one here to make you welcome. My wife and the children are…not home.” He picked up a red-and-orange stoneware jug and poured liquid into a matching cup, handing it to me.

He did not look at me. “Yes. Yes, it has.”

I set the cup down without drinking. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No, thank you. It’s my problem. My fault, actually.” He wiped his palms against his black trousers. “But I expect you did not come here to find out about my troubles.”

“No,” I said softly.
What have you done?
“I am trying to find out what’s happened to Captain Amerand Jireu.” The fact that I knew was immaterial. If I didn’t look for him, it would seem strange. After all, if I was an honest actor, I would want to be working with my assigned liaison.

“I don’t know,” said Barclay.

I raised my eyebrows. “I find that surprising.”

“Yes, I rather imagine you do.” Then he added very softly, “You’ve never been in a situation where it was better not to see what is going on around you.”

“Will I be assigned a new liaison, then?” I asked, pretending not to hear.

“I imagine that will be taken care of.” He continued to stare at his fingers where they rested on the tabletop. The look he gave me was supposed to be one of sympathy—as one person caught in the bureaucracy to another—but it was far too hollow-eyed to achieve its intended effect.

“Where’s your family, Favor?” I asked.

The corner of his mouth twitched, and he lifted his head. “Shall I tell you a secret, Field Commander?”

“If you want.”

He leaned close in a cold parody of intimacy. I smelled the sour moonshine on his breath. “The Security is currently
undergoing a reorganization. It happens now and again. Especially when the water smugglers pull off a coup.”

“And
have
the smugglers pulled off a coup?”

He lifted his cup. “Your near kidnapping.”

It made sense. I didn’t believe a word of it.

“You may have noticed we have been removed from Up-sky Station,” he went on. “We are being redistributed about the city as we are cleared of corruption charges.”

“And have you been cleared?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Why else would I be able to speak so freely?” He gestured around him, and I saw what else wasn’t there. There was no Clerk.

Another man with no minder. Another piece that had become irrelevant in the power play. He knew it too. This was the reason for his despair.

This was bad. This was very bad. But it did mean I could be direct.

“Tell me who Amerand Jireu is, Commander Barclay,” I said. “Tell me why the Clerks are using him.”

Barclay’s hand jerked back, and the cup dropped toward the floor, spilling out its contents in thick, sparkling arcs. I swooped my hand out and caught the cup before it hit the floor.

“Thank you,” he murmured as I handed the cup back to him. His hand shook as he set it down. Stone rattled against stone.

“I am sorry, Field Commander,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do for you until I have been confirmed in my new position. Whatever it is to be,” he said bleakly to the tabletop.

“I see,” I said out loud. “Can I ask one more question?”

“If you must.” He made a small gesture with his hand.

“Why are you still here?”

He poured a fresh measure of whiskey into his stoneware cup and shot it down with a shudder.

“I needed to be able to cover my own family’s retreat, just in case,” he said.

I nodded as if I understood. “Thank you.”

I bowed to him and he bowed to me. He walked me to the door and closed it behind me. As I walked back up the corridor, past the woman and her baby, the snip-snip of her handmade scissors made a counterpoint to the clack of my bootheels on the floor.

I arrived back at the Common Cause house as the lights were sputtering their way toward twilight. The courtyard was empty except for the birds and the snakes, and one hopeful, mangy cat. Even sunk in my own increasingly frustrated thoughts as I was, I couldn’t miss the sight of the tall, scarred man slouched next to the main doors.

I was so startled, I stopped and stared, forgetting to dissemble. Fortunately, Vijay didn’t. He straightened up.

“I know, I know,” he sneered. “I’ve got it coming. Are we going to do this in the street, or you wanna keep our business private?”

In keeping with his thug persona, he didn’t wait for my answer, just shoved his hands in his pockets and stork-walked through the door on his long legs.

I followed, mouth agape. He was not supposed to be here. We were not supposed to have any contact at all. Vijay paused at the foot of the stairs and gave me a snide, quizzical look.
There were only two private rooms in the place: Liang’s office and Siri’s listening room. I opted for Siri’s room and strode inside. Fortunately, she wasn’t there. She’d said she’d set up a meet with some engineers to try to get a team together to work on the lights. I didn’t want to have to dress Vijay down in front of her.

I slammed the door shut and shot the bolt home.

“What are you doing here!” I demanded.

The thug mannerisms vanished, and I was facing Vijay Kochinski. The scars, the bald head, and the skin color ceased to matter. I recognized his stance, his eyes, his voice.

“Something’s wrong with Siri,” he said.

I swallowed my first plan, which was to chew him out, then write him up for breach of protocol. With everything that was going on, I couldn’t blame him for being as close to the edge as I was. “She’s wound pretty tight…”

“Pretty tight!” he cried. “Are you blind?”

“Watch your mouth, Captain,” I snapped.

His shoulders jerked to attention. “I’m sorry, Field Commander. I’m sorry. I’m just…something’s really gone wrong with Siri.”

A cold knot settled into the bottom of my stomach. “Tell me.”

I listened as Vijay described what Siri had told him—and how badly she’d tried to make a joke of it—how he’d followed her, just to make sure she was all right, and watched her walk down into the space under the stairs.

Abruptly I remembered how I had gone down there and heard someone run from me. Could that have been Siri?

The knot tightened. This was not possible. It couldn’t be what it seemed. Siri could not be losing her mind.

I nodded.

“Took’s been reminding me of that at least twice an hour since the meet, but I’m telling you, I know when she’s being serious, and she was dead-cold serious—at least until she tried to tell me it was a joke.”

“So, what are you thinking?”

He gestured helplessly. “Is it possible something’s gone wrong with the balance between her and Shawn? Like, I don’t know, some local infection that’s gotten in and is changing her responses to her Companion?”

The Companion balance was a sturdy thing, but it did respond to its environment, just like the rest of the brain architecture. I thought about the particolored funguses around us, and the badly ventilated air full of spores and dust. Dr. Gwin had said one of their main health problems was a local variant of hantavirus spread by the mice and the rats. Who knew what else we were all breathing in? There might even have been some damage from the head injury Siri took.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that. I suppose it’s possible…”

The bolt rattled, and slid open. We turned together in time to see Siri open the door and walk in. She looked from Vijay to me, to Vijay again.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

I decided to be straight with her. I’d had enough of being forced into contortions by Erasmus.

“Vijay was telling me about your last meet.”

Whatever I had been expecting, it was not for Siri to sigh impatiently and whack Vijay on the arm.

“You idiot! I
told
you! That was for the Clerks.”

“Look, Siri…” began Vijay.

She didn’t let him get any further. “Did you even get around to telling her the important part? That you’ve got a berth on a smuggling ship and it’s heading out to the habitats?”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. “You do?”

“Yes,” Vijay said to me, but his attention was on Siri.

“When do you go?”

Vijay’s jaw worked itself back and forth. His scars stood out ghostly white against his darkened skin. “Tomorrow. First thing.”

I nodded. “Okay, then. You’d better get yourself out of here. We don’t want your new employers to think this was anything but a dressing-down.”

“No. I guess not.” He turned around, his shoulders slumped, not in his thug walk, but in defeat.

“Vijay?”

He turned back toward me.

“Take care of yourself, okay?”
I’ve heard you
, I tried to tell him.
Believe me, I did hear you
.

“Yes’m.” His shoulders straightened minutely, and I knew I’d gotten through.

He paused next to Siri. She looked up at him and smacked his arm again. “Get!” she said. “Go on!”

Siri sighed and shrugged. “What’re you gonna do? Clearly, my acting skills have improved.” She dropped into her lopsided chair and pulled her glasses out of her pocket. “Was there something else, Field Commander?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve just got to do the rounds and try to get this investigation onto some kind of coherent track.”

“Good luck.” She waved at me with one hand and slid her glasses into place with the other.

I watched her as she plugged in and slid into her own world. I left, and hard as it was, I closed the door tightly behind me. I kept on walking, down the stairs and out the lobby.

Orry, his timing perfect as ever, was there to meet me, leaning against the banister at the bottom of the stairs.

The paranoia that had been lurking just beneath the surface of my thoughts rose in a mighty wave. I strode up to my friend and looked him right in the eye.

“So,” I said. “Is Liang asking you to keep watch on me, or is it your own idea?”

Orry, opened his mouth, closed it as he considered lying to me, and changed his mind.

“I told him I wasn’t very good at this.” He smiled sadly. “Sorry.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “It’s all right.” I couldn’t decide whom to trust, why should Liang be doing any better? I needed to move, I needed to get out of there. I needed to be able to pretend I was out of doors, away from doors. I needed to find some way to think straight and I didn’t know how. “Since you’re keeping an eye on things, keep an eye on Siri for me, will you? If she tries to go anywhere, tell her I
asked for her to wait. We need to go back over some of the old reports.”

“Will do,” said Orry, and I all but ran out of the lobby.

My head was so full I couldn’t shift a single one of my thoughts. I stood there and watched the people of Dazzle pass by me.

There were too many threads. I couldn’t hold on to them all.

I had come here to work out if and how the descendants of Jasper and Felice Erasmus might be using the old jump gates as a means of attack on the Pax Solaris. I had come expecting to find that Bianca Fayette’s death was connected to her discovery that Erasmus was a hot spot.

Now I knew Bianca had decided to single-handedly take Erasmus apart. Why? What had driven her to it? It was bad here. It was foul. But we’d seen worse. All right, we’d seen at least as bad. What had driven her over the edge? Bern said he didn’t know. If Liang knew, he wasn’t interested in telling me.

She had been hanging out with smugglers. Was that because she was going to use them to take the place down or because she wanted to know about the runs to Oblivion and the habitats? Had she been trying to find the war or arrange the takedown, or both?

She’d said nothing at all about her time with the Grand Sentinel. Any mention of Torian was missing from the tattered remains of Jerimiah’s memory.