Chapter 13
DHOMHES
The packet looked disappointingly innocent.
Cream paper. Program seal. A slight dent at one corner where someone had pressed a thumb too hard. It lay on the examination table between Dhomhes and his operations lead, beside a report confirming it contained neither a device nor a hazardous substance.
“Where was it?” Dhomhes asked.
“Common table. Exactly where she said.”
“Any objection to collecting it?”
“The lady Roemary wanted a receipt.”
“Give her one.”
“She has one. She also wanted the name of whoever would open it.”
“Mine will do.”
His lead glanced up.
Dhomhes drew the chair closer. “We're checking every outgoing delivery. I am quite willing to be blamed for my own order.”
On the comm beside his hand, a new message appeared.
I'm in the room. The guard waited until the door locked.
Then, a moment later:
There is only one bedroom. I'm finding that an excellent feature.
He smiled before he could help it.
His lead looked at the comm, then very carefully at the packet.
“Have you something to say?” Dhomhes asked.
“About the seal, sir?”
“A wise choice.”
He answered Sereya first.
I'm glad. The packet has been collected. You don't need to do anything else with it.
He sent another question.
Have you eaten since the reception?
Yes. Have you?
Not yet.
Across the table, his lead broke the seal under the examination recorder. Dhomhes set the comm aside.
The outer sheet was a request for temporary relocation arrangements. Roemary's name appeared beneath a paragraph offering assistance through her father's office.
Beneath that sat a second form asking for advance notice of any further changes to the volunteers' accommodation, including arrival times and the entrance through which their belongings would be taken.
Dhomhes stopped smiling.
“Who approved this?”
“No current approval attached.”
“There is a program mark.”
“Copied from the arrival paperwork. Look at the edge.”
His lead enlarged the image. Part of another word had been caught beneath the mark, a clipped fragment belonging to a different line.
Someone had taken an old acknowledgment and placed it beneath a new request.
Graecey's name was still on it. The organizer from the Galactic Alliance.
For a moment he remembered her in the landing crowd again, occupied, impatient with some small delay.
A living female with work to finish. Just before the first explosion.
Fiviel was there.
He caught her.
I thought he had her.
Dhomhes put his hand flat on the table.
“An acknowledgment isn't an authorization,” his lead said, drawing him back to the moment.
“Then the office can explain why it's being used as one. We won't supply the information.”
The addressee was Vessik, third window, east administrative annex. The requested reply would go to a private comm address rather than through the program's ordinary correspondence channel.
“Preserve the original. Send a copy to the security commander. No room assignments, movement times, or access instructions are to leave through this request.”
“And Vessik?”
“Find out what he actually does before we decide what he has done.”
His lead gathered the pages.
“One other thing,” Dhomhes said. “Sereya's name doesn't go on a delivery record. She didn't deliver it.”
“It will show collection from Roemary's suite.”
“Good.”
After his lead left, Dhomhes fetched the meal from the next room.
The cook would have disowned it by now, but he finished it.
I ate.
Her reply was a single word.
Finally.
He laughed, alone in the borrowed office, and for a few breaths the room felt less airless.
Ruthak's inspection unit had barely resumed its search when the first order arrived.
Withdraw from the sector pending hazard recertification.
The operator called his own supervisor instead. Dhomhes was brought onto the channel in time to hear wind dragging across the field pickup and a male asking, with commendable restraint, who had found a hazard that his instruments had somehow missed.
The readings showed the same heat pockets and unstable debris, all within the unit's working limits. Before Dhomhes could answer, a second order reassigned it to the southern pans.
“They've given me a different reason to leave,” the operator said. “And the southern station hasn't requested equipment. I checked before I called.”
Dhomhes brought both orders onto the display.
An earlier attempt to divert the search had used a lie about an instrument. Another had borrowed an old audit reference. His lead sent the verification for these orders. Both carried valid emergency credentials.
Someone had stopped pretending to have authority and begun using it.
“Can you identify who issued them?”
“The office, yes. The person, not from this copy. Several staff can work through the same emergency authorization.”
“Get the original access records preserved. Through the commander. Before anyone corrects a mistake.”
His lead was already moving.
On the field channel the operator cleared his throat. “Gol-Vett? Shall I stop?”
“Keep the unit in a safe position.” Dhomhes put the conflicting orders before the search supervisor and security commander. “I need a confirmed instruction.”
The commander checked with the teams responsible. No new hazard report. No request from the southern station. He suspended both instructions, and the operator returned to work.
Only then did Dhomhes let the ridges along his forearms settle.
His lead watched the last field image disappear.
“They knew which unit to move.”
“They had its registration. Its location. The time it started.”
“A response-office employee could see all of that.”
“So could someone using an employee's access.” Dhomhes stood. Whoever was behind the orders, they knew which patch of ground to keep him from searching.
“Copy everything to my father,” he said. “And arrange a flyer. I need to see Head Hawn.”
Fiviel's father was holding a practice blade when Dhomhes entered the hall.
For one painful instant, hope came into his face.
Dhomhes hated that he had brought it there.
“We haven't found them,” he said before the old male could ask.
Head Hawn lowered the blade.
“All right.”
It was not all right. The words were only a way of getting to the next breath.
He dismissed the attendant at the far door and set the weapon on a side table. Not in its place on the wall. Close enough to take up again.
Dhomhes told him about the orders. He kept to what he knew: the valid credentials, the missing hazard report, the equipment assignment no receiving team had requested. The search was continuing. The records were being secured.
Hawn listened without interrupting.
When Dhomhes finished, he asked, “Does whoever sent them know where my son is?”
“I don't know.”
“But you think there is something there.”
“I think someone wants us to stop looking. I can't yet tell you why.”
Hawn turned toward the wall of weapons.
His gaze found Fiviel's place as readily as Dhomhes's own had. The empty space beneath the hanging ju-nak seemed indecently ordinary. Stone and shadow. Room for a male who ought to have been standing there, objecting to both of them discussing him so solemnly.
“He would have gone back for her,” Hawn said.
Dhomhes swallowed. “The guard saw him catch her.”
“Yes.”
The old male reached for the practice blade again. His thumb traveled along the worn grip.
“I used to make him repeat a hold until he hated me for it. He thought strength should be enough. Why bother with his fingers if he could simply pick his opponent up?”
“That sounds like him.”
“He was six.”
Despite himself, Dhomhes smiled.
“He's improved his argument since then. Very little.”
Hawn's mouth moved. The resemblance to his son hurt worse when he almost smiled.
“I keep thinking about those hands,” he said. “How much he could hold.”
Dhomhes had no answer worthy of the confidence.
He stood beside him instead.
After a while Hawn set down the blade, carefully this time.
“When you know who has been doing this, I want the name,” Hawn said.
“You will have it as soon as I can stand behind it.”
There was anger in Hawn now, and Dhomhes was relieved to see it. Anger gave him something to do with his hands. They had stopped trembling.
“I can send males to the search supervisor,” Hawn said. “Experienced ones. They won't need someone carrying them away from a slope.”
“Let me have their names. The supervisor can assign them where they'll help.”
“Today.”
“Today.”
Hawn gripped his shoulder before he left. Hard enough that Dhomhes felt it through his jacket.
“Come again even if you have nothing.”
“I will.”
This time he made himself look at the old male when he promised.
On the flight back, Dhomhes called Ruthak. His father had the suspended orders open in front of him.
“These orders failed,” Dhomhes said. “The next attempt may not be an order.”
He had warned the supervisor to check approaches and keep the operator with the assigned team. No one would go out alone to inspect a convenient fault.
“Give me what you know as you learn it,” Ruthak said. “Have you been to Hawn?”
“I've just left.”
His father looked away. “Don't make him ask every time.”
Dhomhes thought of his mother. Of the questions he had been too young to know how to ask, and his father answering the few he could manage.
“No,” he said. “I won't.”
Dhomhes sat back, suddenly tired in a way no amount of sleep would have fixed.
His comm held a message from Sereya.
I'm in the lower garden with your brother. He says you owe him an apology for an incident involving a training rope. I have promised nothing on your behalf.
Another message followed.
If you have time, come and defend yourself.
He looked out at the gardens again.
Tell him I have witnesses.
Then he told the pilot where to land.
Tivek's voice reached him before he could see the bench.
“I'm saying the rope was badly placed.”
“Across the practice shaft?” Sereya asked.
“Precisely.”
“Where you were supposed to use it?”
There was a pause.
“You sound remarkably like him.”
Dhomhes rounded the turn in the path. His brother sat with a practice sling looped around one knee, both hands raised in an argument he was plainly losing. Sereya had turned toward him, smiling, her small bag tucked beside her feet.
One of the residence guards stood where the path joined the main walk. Farther along, a family attendant waited near the office entrance.
Dhomhes had checked them out of habit. Then Sereya looked up, and his attention stayed with her.
“You came.”
“You offered me a chance to defend my reputation.”
“I may have left it rather late.”
“Cruel female.”
Tivek looked between them.
“Oh, this is going to be unbearable.”
Dhomhes ignored him. There was space at the other end of the bench, but Sereya shifted a little toward Tivek, making room beside herself.
He sat where she had invited him.
For a moment her shoulder brushed his sleeve. She left it there. Heat spread beneath the contact, and he pressed his heel into the path to keep from shifting closer while his brother sat on her other side.
“How is the room?” he asked.
“Quiet.”
“Good quiet?”
She looked at him, and the humor softened into something that made him want to take her somewhere without anyone else's questions waiting.
“Yes,” she said. “Good quiet.”
On the other side of her, Tivek sighed with great suffering.
“About the rope.”
Dhomhes leaned back.
“Tell her how far you fell.”
“It isn't the distance that matters.”
“The height of one step,” Dhomhes told Sereya.
“It was a very humiliating step.”
She laughed, and this time Dhomhes was close enough to feel the movement of her shoulder against his.
He stayed.