Cat and Company (19 page)

Connell tapped the surface of the desk, studying her. “Well…thanks for nothing,” he said bitterly and headed for the glass door.

“Where are you going now?” she asked.

“What do you care?” he shot back and hit the door with the flat of his hand and shoved. Hard.

* * * * *

These days, whenever they moved from the
Hana
into the city itself, Devlin was always waylaid by people who wanted to shake his hand or talk to him, even for a moment. The Varkan who walked with them were very good at judging if someone intended any harm and it was rare they held anyone back, although they stood at high alert the whole time anyone was within arm’s reach of Devlin.

This was Charlton, though. While everyone knew who Devlin was and liked to acknowledge him, the mob reaction he generated elsewhere was absent here. So Catherine and Devlin were able to move to and from the old quarters in relative peace and security, although Devlin insisted just as many of the admin meetings were held aboard the
Hana
as were held in the big room.

Today, as they moved through the corridors and open spaces in the Central City, Catherine realized that the shadows cast by the stairs and overhead structures weren’t the same as she was used to seeing. Because the city was now spinning, the sun came at different angles throughout the day and cast different shadows. After nearly a hundred years of sameness, it was odd to see the buildings and facades in different light.

“Catherine! Devlin!”

She looked over her shoulder as the two guards stepped up alongside Devlin. Connell was striding toward them, a big smile on his face.

“Connell?” Devlin said. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the same meeting we’re late for?”

“I have a run scheduled. Passengers waiting and all that.” Connell thrust out his hand. “I saw you from inside the café. I thought I’d say hello.”

Devlin shook his hand, even though he looked puzzled and half amused. “And hello,” he said.

Connell waved up at the dome over their heads. His other hand was still pumping Devlin’s. “It’s marvelous, what you’ve done.”

“I didn’t do anything except coordinate the project,” Devlin assured him. “It is you Varkan who did all the heavy lifting.”

“Not me,” Connell told him. “Too busy flying people around. Speaking of which…I should go. They’ll all be sitting and waiting by now.” He gave Catherine a wink. “Time to go pretend I can fly the bus, after all.”

She almost laughed. Connell was irrepressibly cocky, although Bedivere had told her he was one of the best among the Varkan at navigating Interspace, ranking up there with Mael Maedoc for sheer skill.

Connell stepped around them, patted the closest guard on the shoulder as he brushed past them and strode down the corridor in the direction they had just come from, toward the docking bays.

Devlin shook his hand and flexed the fingers. “Hell of a grip on him,” he muttered. “My fingers are tingling.” Then he laughed. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say things like that to you. I wouldn’t want you to think I lack muscle.”

“Muscle is over-rated, anyway,” she told him. “You did tell Connell we were running late…?”

“Of course.” He started walking again. After a moment, he shook his hand again, then pushed it into a pocket.

Catherine didn’t think about it after that, except to be pleased they’d only been stopped by one person on the way there. They
were
late, after all.

* * * * *

“Bedivere!” It was Connell’s voice.

Bedivere had already inserted himself into the ship systems and the outside monitors had shown him Connell’s rapid approach across the landing bay. “Here!” Bedivere called out. “Flight deck!”

“Open the damn door, will you? I don’t want to use my hands.”

Puzzled, Bedivere told the door to the flight deck to open. It slid back obediently.

Connell stepped in and looked around. “Thanks for meeting me here,” he said, and scratched at his wrist.

“You said urgent.”

“Yep.” He kept scratching. “I figured you’d like an excuse to get out of the suite anyway, with the meeting going on today.”

Bedivere frowned. “What are you doing to your wrist?”

“Getting this stuff off. It’s starting to dry and squeezing my hand.”

“What is ‘this stuff’?”

“It’s a freeze dried sterile medium. A sticky one. Five minutes ago, I just shook Devlin Woodward’s hand.” Connell got hold of an edge of the transparent medium and tugged it down the back of his hand. It came away with a soft tearing sound, lifting the skin until the tension broke and it pulled away. Connell hissed. “Stings,” he muttered. “Anyway, you said you were going to look into Devlin’s background the old-fashioned way, so I thought…” He held out the shreds of the glove-shaped medium. “…why not start with his DNA?”

Bedivere started laughing. He couldn’t help it. The theft of DNA was a minor crime. It was Connell’s outrageously casual attitude about it that caught his humor and twisted it.

It had been a long, long while since he had been able to laugh loud and long like that. It felt extraordinarily pleasant.

When he got himself under control once more, he picked up the medium by the wrist edge. “You’re a good friend, Connell. Thank you.”

“I figure Cat still has her extended therapy lab on board. You could run an analysis here.”

“Catherine, to you,” Bedivere growled.

“Sure.” Connell just grinned.

“You’re not too old that I can’t beat sense into you still,” Bedivere reminded him.

“Like you ever could,” Connell replied.

Bedivere headed out into the corridor, carrying the specimen carefully. As he walked, he reached ahead and fired up the lab systems. “After all this, I really hope there’s viable DNA on this thing,” he said over his shoulder.

“If you’re using standard sonication to extract it, then in twelve hours you’ll know if there is,” Connell replied cheerfully as he followed along behind.

It was going to be a long twelve hours.

Charlton Space City, New Cathay (Ji Xiu Prime), Ji Xiu System, Perseus Arm. FY 10.187

Connell sweet-talked the food dispenser in the crew lounge into printing a hot meal and beverages and brought them to the lab while Bedivere worked through the process of extraction.

Bedivere pointed to the counter against the wall when Connell tried to place the bowls on the big surface in the middle of the room.

“Sorry.” Connell put the plates on the side counter. “I haven’t really worked around labs all that much.”

“It’s been a long while for me, too,” Bedivere told him. “That’s why I need to concentrate. Cat used to do all this.”

“Not like you can ask her to run this particular process.” Connell dug into his bowl with a spoon and ate quickly.

Bedivere hesitated, the pipette in his hand, recalling Brant’s question.
What if you’re wrong about this?

He remembered his answer, too.
She’ll hate me for it.

“Something wrong?” Connell asked, then burped softly. “Sorry,” he added.

Bedivere shook his head and got back to work. “Just worrying about the consequences.”

“You mean if we figure out he’s Varkan for sure?” Connell asked.

“That’s one issue,” Bedivere said. “If he is perfectly human, then that’s another issue. For both you and me.”

“He didn’t notice a thing,” Connell assured him.

“Cat will figure it out. She was with him, yes?”

“As usual.” Connell rolled his eyes.

“She’s his right hand man,” Bedivere reminded him. “Of course she would be with him. Don’t disparage Devlin until we get an answer.”

“You’re right. Sorry.”

Bedivere put the sample into the centrifuge and started it, then reached for the meal with gratitude. “Protein has been stripped.”

“There was some there? That’s good, isn’t it?”

“It means there’s DNA there.” Bedivere shrugged. “Now we wait.”

* * * * *

Bedivere ran a tank story that they both watched with little interest. It made time pass. When the lab alerted him, he completed the successive steps necessary and waited for the next alert.

He also kept the external monitors active and kept an eye on the docking bay floor for unexpected visitors. However, the
Aliza
had been using this docking bay for years and everyone who lived in the Gantry village was used to seeing Bedivere come and go from the ship at strange hours, depending on what freight he was carting and where he was taking it and how long it took to load and unload. So not even the nominal security guards who were supposed to patrol the corridors and alleys outside the bay stuck their heads in the open door to see what was going on.

The hours lengthened. Connell stretched out on the bench seat beside the table and dozed, but Bedivere was too wound up to sleep. He couldn’t read and dipping into the digital landscape came with its own risks. He couldn’t distract himself that way, either.

Instead, he worried over the two possible outcomes. Either the DNA would match the profile that had been registered in the galactic data core when Devlin was born, or the DNA would have a human origin, with a registered donation to Devlin, a Varkan recipient.

As the sun rose for the second time, flooding the docking bay with light, Bedivere decided that no matter which way it came out, it would be better to know the truth.

It was what he would do with that truth that would require all the heavy thinking.

He sighed and shifted on the seat, which had become incredibly uncomfortable over the last few hours. His muscles and his joints ached. Tiredness was gnawing at him. For once, he was looking forward to sleeping. Just sleeping, not escaping.

The AI alerted him and he got to his feet, moving stiffly. “Connell,” he said softly.

Connell sat up instantly and rubbed at his hair. “Done?” he asked.

“Let’s find out.”

The AI was already running a database search when they reached the lab. Bedivere directed it to output the results to the closest screen and they both stood in front of it, waiting.

His heart was thundering in his ears, muffling normal sound.

The results flashed up on the screen.

NO RESULTS

Connell made a choking sound. “That’s impossible. The DNA belongs to
someone
.”

Bedivere stared at the screen. No results meant there wasn’t a match for the DNA anywhere in the datacore. Why wasn’t there a match? “The records have been cleared out. They were there, now they’re not.”

“Someone could do that?” Connell sounded awed. “That’s…who has that sort of power?”

“Give enough Varkan enough time and we could get it done,” Bedivere said slowly. “Find an unwanted record and delete it, edit it to remove the data, then find all the links and references to it and move onto the next record. Repeat and repeat until you’re done. It’s a simple system thing. You’re just tripping over the scale of it.”

“Damn right,” Connell growled. “Although, if you’re going to delete records like that, why not replace them with false ones that say you’re Devlin Woodward? That would keep anyone who finds the records happy.”

“There’s no official DNA register,” Bedivere said. “Without that, any other documentation is suspect.” He looked at Connell. “You’re sneaky—”

“I was taught by the best, master.”

Bedivere snorted. “You have a natural aptitude even I couldn’t train into you. Could you falsify a DNA register in a way that would fool everyone?”

Connell considered it, his lips pursed thoughtfully. Then, reluctantly, he shook his head. “I could come close and it would fool most casual references. Anyone who was looking hard would spot the cracks, though. The security on those things was designed by AIs that were directed to build an impossible-to-break system and they complied.”

“The security key on the register is patterned on the DNA itself and if the match isn’t there, the register reports tampering. There is no way around it,” Bedivere said in agreement. “So, if you wanted to create a false identity on a registered DNA, your only choice would be to remove the registration.”

“Delete it out of existence,” Connell said softly, staring at the screen where the null result return was sitting patiently.

“Except that he forgot about legacy back-ups,” Bedivere said.

“Huh?”

Bedivere communicated with the AI digitally, directing it to pull up the archives and search there. “When Cat and I lived on the fringes, we tended to keep our own datacore on the ship. It started as a navigation issue. We couldn’t keep buying bootleg copies of the Federation Itinerary, which was all you could get in the Fringes. So each time we ventured into Federation space, we would download as much data from the fedcore as we could squeeze into the memory of the onboard systems.” He grinned. “That’s one of the reasons I had enough capacity to wake up.”

Connell laughed. “I had the entire datacore passing through me. I didn’t have a choice, either.”

The screen went blank as the AI went off to do its searches.

“What now?” Connell asked in reaction.

“The AI is digging into those old archives, which I never got around to deleting. There are more than a dozen iterations of large chunks of the old fedcore stashed in the servers. I kept each back-up we did, even after we got new ones.” He shrugged. “It was expensive. Frequently, though, when we were dealing with clients and business partners out in the fringes, having that information let us survive.”

“You’ve got all that data here on the ship? Isn’t that…dangerous?”

“It’s a copy. There’s also a copy on servers where my personal core is sheltered.”

“My admiration of you knows no bounds.” Connell grinned. “And you call me sneaky.”

Bedivere nodded toward the screen. “Hold off on the fawning until we know if this works or not.”

It only took a few more seconds. The results printed themselves on the screen and Connell gasped.

Bedivere blinked, looking at it.

ASKATELL LANZO

“Who is Askatell Lanzo?” Connell asked, almost whispering.

“Let’s find out.” He sent the AI on another search. This time the results were much faster. The screen filled and he asked for a roll back and pause. They studied the reports, the news items and all the personal items and documentation that a normal adult human left in the datacore over a lifetime.