“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 yourlife.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 ofbeings, 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 wasdoing, 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’satthe failure. I’m asking about before. Weeks before. Was anything else brought down?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Different question. Who wassupposedto 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 thefailurelogs. 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 Minecorprecord. Facilities, probably, or whatever they call it here. It won’t be classified — it’s awork 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 huntingmurderers.A work schedule is not a weapon and a facilities tech is not a suspect, and it never occurred to me to ask who waslegitimatelyallowed 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?”
