Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Scar
The compound is pleasantly loud when I come in from shift, the way it always is now.
It didn’t used to sound like this. For a lot of years this place was depressingly quiet, with nine bereaved males and not much else.
Now there are seven Brides and a rising tide of young offspring, and the noise of it comes down the hall to meet me before I’ve taken my boots off and removed my gear.
A baby cries and a child shrieks with laughter.
“Dinner will be ready in an hour and a half,” Jana calls out.
Our collective domicile is filled with life now and I’m glad to be living here, which is all the more reason I must protect this family. The Fever Brothers have survived all that has been thrown at us and we will continue to thrive, find justice and take down our enemies.
I leave to find Ines.
She and Trunk have quarters down the east hall, and I hear the baby before I reach the door, the thin cry of a newborn infant, only one moon cycle old. I knock once and Trunk opens the door and waves me inside. My brother holds his daughter like she’s made of delicate crystal.
“She won’t settle, Ines fed her. I don’t know what she wants.”
I glance down at the infant, noting again how I like the features of all the half Xylan, half human, offspring in our family.
The features of the two species blend well together.
I also have grown very comfortable around humans these last few years.
Rook told me, prior to him scenting Hallie, that he assumed the fact that the rest of our brothers has mated with humans, was simply a weird anomaly.
He planned on requesting to be signed up again to the Xylan Mating Database so he could find possible mates to clasp hands with on Chronos.
He never thought he’d also find a human bride. And yet he did.
Will I find a human bride someday too? Or, will I be the only brother to either never find a bride, or, find a Xylan bride? I have no idea.
“She just needs her diaper changed too, she’s wet.
And then she needs lots of snuggles from her daddy.
” Ines comes out of the bathroom, drying her hands on a cloth.
She is exactly as sharp as she was the day she talked her way onto this planet with a fake assignment and a real agenda.
“Scar.” She smiles at me. “Good to see you. Do you have news?”
“Yes, I have a new lead.”
“Mm-hm.” She hands Trunk the diaper bag. “We’ll get to the lead. First, I want to know more about the new Engineer you had dinner with last night.”
Trunk chuckles. “I wasn’t me,” he explains. “I didn’t say anything. They’re all talking about it amongst each other.”
I should have known. Hook told the crew, and the crew told their brides, and the brides tell each other everything.
Trunk changes his daughter’s diaper.
Ines places her hands on her hips. “You had dinner with Mara Wilson, alone, in her quarters last night?”
“It’s the investigation. She’s working the grid. The grid is the case.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She’s useful.”
“Useful.” Ines says the word the way she’d hold up a piece of evidence that doesn’t fit the story she’s being told. “Right. And you stayed until twenty-two hundred, being useful. And you had lasagna.”
“…Who told you it was luh-zaun-yuh?”
She waves a hand. “Did you tell her everything we know about the case last night?”
“Not everything,” I grumble.
“Scar.” Her voice gentles, but only a little.
“You didn’t tell me the whole thing for three moon cycles.
You made me sign a list of rules before you’d let me interview anyone.
You recorded nothing, I recorded nothing, I couldn’t so much as take a note in a room without your permission.
” She tilts her head. “And you barely know this woman and you’ve told her everything? Trunk, are you hearing this?”
Trunk is finishing up the diaper. “I’m hearing and I’m just as stunned as you are.”
“Scar, why would you do something so irresponsible, when normally you’re the most secretive amongst us?”
“We all thought it was because she was his future bride,” Trunk offers.
Ines nods. “That has to be the reason.”
“No,” I shake my head. “I scented her last night and it came back negative.”
Surprise flashes across her features. “Huh.”
A growl rumbles in my chest. “Trunk already gave me the speech about the two of you and what happened at the med lab. How he originally scented you and it came back negative too, until after the med lab it wasn’t negative anymore.
I don’t think it’s the same. She’s just simply not my bride and instead a good friend. ”
“Hey, I’m not giving you a speech.”
“We’re just friends,” I repeat. “Coworkers.”
“Okay.” She grins. “If you say so.”
Trunk takes the baby out to the front room after that and gives us time to work alone.
The reporter and the watchman.
“Okay,” Ines says, settling in, all business now. “Bring me up to speed. All of it.”
So I tell her everything, except the fact that Mara is pregnant, but I give her everything else, down to the last detail.
“Start with what’s new,” she says. “You got a look at something different and something cracked open?”
“The rosters.”
“Rosters?”
“First we were looking at the rosters and maintenance schedules. Who was supposed to be touching the grid, physically, in the walls, on which day, doing what. I’d built a map of everyone who ever wished my family harm and it never once occurred to me to ask who was supposed to be down there.
” I look at her. “A facilities tech isn’t a suspect.
A work schedule isn’t a weapon. I never thought to look. ”
She shrugs. “If it makes you feel better, I didn’t think of that either. So, what changed?”
“Checking the maintenance logs was Mara’s idea.”
Ines makes a sound low in her throat, pure professional appreciation. “She is useful.”
“Exactly.”
“I like her already. Keep going.” She waves a hand. “So you pulled the rosters. What’s in them?”
“Gaps.” I lean forward. “Access that shouldn’t exist and beings who logged into sections they had no business in.
And the failures themselves, Mara has pointed out that when the grid went down — both times, eight years apart — it didn’t fail the way a system fails.
There was no cascade. No stagger. The primary died, and the backup died, and the comms died, and the emergency channel died, all in the same breath.
The same instant. No sound, no warning, no sparks.
” I spread my hands flat on the table. “And then hours later it was back, everything at once.”
“Like a switch,” Ines says slowly.
“Mara believes someone reached in and turned it off and then turned it on again. She’s going through everything, to prove there was nothing wrong with the new grid and even the old grid. And now we’re going through the maintenance log too.”
“So you’re finding out who had access when these things went down?”
“Yes.”
“Good. And where does the backup channel actually run? Could it be automated, could it be remote, could it be someone…off world running this?”
“That’s what we’re going to discover. And there’s more,” I say. “And I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Andrew?”
I look at her, startled.
“Scar.” She almost smiles. “Of course I’ve already got questions about the brother. Tell me. What is he like?”
“He’s charming,” I explain. “Every crew adopts him inside a day. Beings like him.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“No. But Mara told me he went through a phase where he couldn’t hold a job and every time it was somebody else’s fault. Finally, she stopped asking why and just brought him on as her assistant, to keep him employed.”
“And?”
“He’s been steady ever since. Eight years. Not one missed day. He couldn’t hold work anywhere, Ines, right up until the exact moment he attached himself to a sister with security clearances and access to restricted systems in every sector he’d care to reach. And then, suddenly, he could.”
Ines’s eyes narrow. “Hmm. I’ll look into him.”
“You’re on maternity leave.”
“I’m on leave, I’m not dead.” She waves a hand. “I’ve got a newborn who sleeps four hours at a stretch, a tablet, and every contact I ever made on New Earth.” Her eyes sharpen. “I’ll just look and if it’s nothing, I’ll be the first one to say so.”
“Good, thank you. Your contacts on New Earth will be helpful. And there’s something else I noticed today, while I was going through all those lists. I believe there’s a witness to the old grid and who was there for both of the cascades.”
“Really? Who?”
“His name is Ordek of Six. He was on the maintenance schedule the fortnight before the first cascade, and again two moons ago before the second, and he’s the only being still alive and still on this rock who was down in the guts of that grid on both days. Everyone else is dead or off-world.”
“This is someone you’ll need to gently interview.
You can’t just walk in and ask him who sabotaged the grid.
He’s old, he’s wary, and if he did see something, he’s spent years not thinking about it, maybe on purpose.
You go in hard, he closes up, and you lose your only witness. So we come at it sideways.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Bring him something. Food, ideally — the old ones always talk more when they’re being fed, it puts them at ease, it makes it a visit instead of an interrogation.”
“Jana’s cooking. He always loved Jana’s cooking.”
“Perfect.” She’s lit up now, the tiredness gone out of her face.
“Perfect. So it’s not an interview, it’s a visit.
You brought an old friend some good food.
You let him complain about his knees. You let him tell you three stories you don’t care about, and you don’t rush him, and you don’t take out anything that looks like a recorder or a notepad, because the second an old male thinks he’s on the record he’ll clam up or start performing.
And then, slow, when he’s comfortable, you get him talking about the old days.
The work. Not the cascades — the work. Who he worked with when he was down there on the grid.
Let him wander. The thing you want, he won’t know it’s the thing you want.
It’ll be buried in a story about somebody’s bad wiring twenty years ago. ”
“And if he doesn’t have it?”
“Then he doesn’t have it, and you’ve spent a pleasant afternoon chatting about old times with an older male who could use time with a friend.
” She looks at me. “Nobody ever interviews the facilities tech. He might have been carrying a piece of this for years without a single soul ever thinking to ask him what he saw.”
“This feels like the first solid lead I’ve had since Hallie arrived.”
“Yes, go soon.” Ines nods. “Leads like this don’t stay warm. And Scar be careful, if Ordek matters to you, he mattered to them too.”
“I’ll be careful,” I promise.