Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Scar
The door opens, revealing a great deal of bare human skin.
It’s a shocking visual.
Well, a lovely, shocking visual. I’ve ignored the skin of all Xylan and humans before but this once it looks so…delectable. Soft. Touchable.
She wears a shirt that leaves her arms and shoulders exposed.
The whole long line of her legs and her bare feet are visible on the floor.
That shiny brown hair is loose and crushed flat on one side.
The blue eyes look half-shut with sleep.
Her hands are bare to the wrist with no gloves on them anywhere.
Mara whimpers and her cheeks flush pink. “Oh my gosh, Scar. I was taking a nap and I thought you were Andrew. Come in, come in. I’ll go and change. I’ll be right back.”
She waves me through the door with both of those tantalizing bare hands and then rushes away through a narrow doorway at the back. I hear a drawer bang. “I’ll be back soon,” she shouts.
I come inside and let the door close behind me.
Employee housing still remains acceptable.
My brother and his bride as well as their offspring, live in their own housing unit across the hall.
Their apartment is much larger than this one, but the location set aside for Mara is obviously still comfortable.
She’s on the third floor with an expansive view of the other colony buildings and the surrounding jungle vegetation.
Her quarters have plenty of comfortable furniture and a small kitchen with a food dispenser.
Her tools are laid out on the table. There are three different tablets nearby.
Mara returns and this time she’s not in uniform but in soft blue, civilian, human clothes, which are loose and comfortable.
Her shoes are slides that half cover her adorable feet.
Her hair’s been dragged back off her face.
She’s got her green gloves on though, tugged to the wrist. “There,” she huffs.
“Regulation. I promise I do not normally answer the door half-dressed and behaving like a criminal.”
“You weren’t criminal.”
She places her hands on both hips. “Scar, I was extremely criminal. I was literally breaking the Scales of Xylan Law. I’m just lucky that you seem to be completely mellow about the whole situation. Thank you.”
I find myself gazing again at her perfect lips. She is the most beautiful female I have ever seen.
“Do you mind if I make coffee instead of traq?” she says over her shoulder as she strides over to the small kitchen.
“I need some to wake up. I mean, I can of course make traq for you if you like, it’s no problem.
But I’ve found a way to get my favorite human-style coffee from our original planet.
It’s so very black market, but I love it so much, I take it everywhere with me.
This isn’t something I can make with the food processor.
I am going to make it using this coffee press I’ve brought with me. Would you like to try it?”
“I’ll take it.”
She smiles. “Brave male. Go ahead and take a seat. I’ll make this for us while we talk.”
I take a seat at the table and set down my tablet. “You were sleeping,” I note.
Her back goes very slightly still. “I was.”
“It’s midafternoon.”
“It is.” She grinds something and then shakes the dust into a container. “I’m a woman of leisure. It’s part of my mystique.”
“Miners don’t nap.”
“Well, as you can tell, I’m not a miner.”
“What is this human coffee made of?”
“Oh, it’s from a plant that grows on Earth, which is the original planet of my species.
As you must know, New Earth isn’t where my species originated.
The Hurlians stole thousands of humans from our original home planet, Earth, over millennia and made us slaves, leaving us on a different planet we now call New Earth as sort of our cage, to pluck us off at their leisure, when they wanted to use us for something.
But the Xylan rescued us from the Hurlians, when you discovered they were enslaving us.
Thank you, we still consider the Xylan heroes for doing that for us to this day.
That’s another reason why I’m happy to be working here, helping out this Xylan outpost. Unfortunately, none of us are able to return to our home planet, because of the Indigenious Species Act.
Our arrival would mess up their evolution at this point.
So we’ve made New Earth our planet. But all humans love, love, secretly watching from afar what’s happening on the original planet and getting what we can from it for our own use.
I’ve discovered I enjoy Earth’s favorite hot drink, coffee.
It’s made from these dried beans. I grind them up and steep that in hot water and it creates a really good drink similar to traq.
” She pours the dark, hot drink into two separate cups. “Do you like sweetener?”
“Yes.”
“Here you go.” She walks over and hands me the cup, then takes the chair across from mine.
I take a sip, pleased at the taste. “This is good,” I admit. “I know that the humans drink this often, but I’ve never understood or tasted it and continue to drink traq. But now, I can see why they enjoy this drink.”
“Good, I’m happy you like it, just let me know if you want more.”
I nod. “Do you feel well, now that you’ve slept?”
“Yes. I nap every day since arriving on Timbur, around fourteen hundred. The climate here is a big change for me.” She points at my tablet. “Are we going to look at these records, or would you like to keep discussing my sleep schedule?”
She’s lying. Not about the sleeping, but about the reason.
Heh. I take the drive out of my pocket and set it on the table between us.
“That’s the pre-upgrade schematics?”
“That’s more than the schematics, it’s everything I have. Forty years of load histories. Every failure ever logged in this mine. The surveys, the manifests, the shipping records, the transporter logs going back to before I was born. And eight years of my own work on top of it.”
“Scar.” She sits back. “That’s not an audit file. That’s your life. Why are you handing it to a contractor you met five diurnals ago?”
“You’re the first being to understand their importance, beside me.”
“Right. Then we’re going to do this properly.” She slots the chip into her tablet without ceremony.
“I have looked at this data the way you look at a crime, finding who was on-planet and who came through the transporter. Who had reason and who might’ve benefited, tracking beings where they went, who they spoke to, what they touched, what they carried.
I have built an entire architecture in my head made of beings, and I know it the way I know my own hands. ”
“Ah, and there’s the problem. I’ll be able to simply look at the grid,” she explains.
“I’ll want to know what the grid was doing.
Not who was standing near it — what it was doing, in the hours and days before it went down, the way a physician would want to know what a body was doing before the heart stopped. ”
She goes through the data carefully and asks insightful questions. “What was the load balance in the fortnight before the first cascade?”
I write down a note to myself to find this.
“Did anyone bring the grid down deliberately in that period? Scheduled outage, maintenance window, anything where they’d have taken sections offline on purpose?”
“There was the upgrade.”
“Right, the upgrade, the thing everybody blames.” She waves it off. “But that’s at the failure. I’m asking about before. Weeks before. Was anything else brought down?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Different question. Who was supposed to be touching this thing?”
I look up. “Say that again.”
“The grid is forty years old, it runs an entire planet, it has to be maintained constantly or it degrades. So somewhere there’s a maintenance schedule.
Names, dates, sections. Who was down in the guts of that thing, on which day, doing what.
You have the failure logs. You’ve got every single moment this system fell over, going back forty years, and you’ve got them beautifully.
But that’s the moment of death, Scar. I want to know who had their hands inside the patient in the weeks before it.
” She frowns at me, faintly, because I haven’t said anything.
“It’ll be a Minecorp record. Facilities, probably, or whatever they call it here.
It won’t be classified — it’s a work roster.
It’s the most boring document in the mine. ”
“I have gone through every manifest, every transporter log, every security recording, every personnel file of every being who ever set foot on this rock,” I explain.
“I have tracked killers across four sectors. I have followed Kryzon of Twenty-Two. And I have never once pulled the maintenance roster because I have been hunting murderers. A work schedule is not a weapon and a facilities tech is not a suspect, and it never occurred to me to ask who was legitimately allowed to have their hands in the machine. Therefore, I don’t have it. ”
She blinks. “What do you mean you don’t have it?”
“I mean I don’t have it. It isn’t on the drive. It isn’t in my office. It’s never been part of the file.”
“Nobody ever pulled the old maintenance roster to cross reference?”
“No.”
“Why?”
I think for a moment. “I always assumed the perpetrators would be Royal Pigment assholes or being who arrived from off planet. Why would anyone who was a Margol Minecorp employee, attuned to Illibrium, do this?”
“Okay. I hear you, I can see how that would be a stumbling block for you. No maintenance roster from before the new upgrade. Hmm…”
And then she puts me to work. “Right. I can pull the current facilities schedule myself, I’ve got access to that through the audit. What I can’t get is the archive. That’ll be sitting in some Minecorp records vault behind a door I’m not cleared for and you are, Special Advisor.”
My lips twitch. “Don’t.”
“I’m going to say it every day for the rest of the contract.
” She doesn’t look up. “So, you need to get the maintenance roster, going back as far as it exists. Every section, every date, every name. Second, I want the same thing for the comms array, because the comms went down in both events and everybody keeps treating that as collateral damage instead of asking why the backup channel died in the same second as the primary.”
“The backup channel is on a separate feed.”
“Is it?” She turns around. “Is it actually? Or does the paperwork say it’s on a separate feed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Excellent. Third. Personnel. I know you’ve got every masked male who ever came through the transporter, and honestly, Scar, that file is a work of art, I want you to know that, it’s genuinely the most thorough intelligence workup I have ever seen and I’ve read some classified garbage in my time.
What I want is everybody who had legitimate access to that grid, at any point, for any reason.
Techs. Contractors. Facilities. Admin. I want every being who was there and had a badge. ”
“I’ll pull the rosters.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Good.”
Mara’s tablet chimes.
She glances at it and her whole face softens into something warm and exasperated at once. “It’s my brother, Andrew,” she chuckles. “He’s been adopted again.”
“Adopted?”
“By a crew. He does this everywhere we go. He’s the type who makes friends easily. He’s been on-site for only five diurnals and a crew of miners has decided he’s theirs and they’re feeding him.”
She turns the tablet so I can see his message, Dinner w/ the level 900 crew, they’re insisting, you come? They want to meet you, I’ve been telling them stories.
“He’s telling them stories? Ugh. He’s always telling beings stories. He’s the reason we get invited to things.”
“Are you going to have dinner with them?” I ask, surprised to find myself annoyed at the thought of her spending an evening with the 900 crew. I’d rather she was spending her evening with me, and the Fever Brothers crew.
“Nah, I’d rather stay here and have a quiet evening.” She taps a reply and then tosses her tablet onto the table. “What do you do for dinner?”
“I eat at the compound. With my family.”
“That’s where you live?”
“Yes.”
“That’s nice.” She reaches up and twirls a strand of her shiny hair. “Um. I’m feeling hungry, actually. So. Do you want to cut this off, pick it up tomorrow, or…”
And she leaves the or sitting there, out in the open.
“I wouldn’t mind staying here,” I find myself responding. “Eating with you.”
She smiles, her blue eyes twinkling. “I’d like that too.”