Jana comes two steps into the room. “That’s so sad. He just recently retired.”
“You knew him?” Heavy asks.
“Yes, of course. He loved my stew and always asked if he could take some home for dinner.”
“How did it happen?” Chief questions.
“He fell down a service stair on level two hundred, alone, sometime after third bell last night. It’s been ruled an accident and already signed off. And there’s nothing wrong with it, I looked. There’s nothing at fault to find.”
“Then why,” Chief says slowly, “are we sitting in this room?”
“Start by telling them about the grid,” Ines says. “Not the case. Just the grid. Tell them what happened to it.”
I nod in agreement. “Both times the grid failed in the past we were told it was a cascade, but Mara says that’s wrong.”
“Meaning what?” Chief says.
“Meaning that there was no order to it, nothing went first.” I look around at them. “And then hours later it came back, also all at once. No partial restore, no sections coming up one at a time the way a system does when you bring it up. On. Like nothing happened.”
“And two moons ago?” Rook asks quietly. He’s the only one in this room who was bleeding on the floor of that med wing.
“Identical.”
Nobody says anything for a moment.
“That’s not a system failing,” I say. “That’s a hand reaching in and turning it off. And then reaching back in and turning it on.”
“You’ve said this before,” Claws says. Not unkindly. “Two moons ago Security told you that — “
I shake my head. “Security told me the network is complex and complex things fail in ways we don’t expect and I thought that was that, but Mara has helped me to understand that it was more than that. She believes that there was something wrongwith the old grid and that possibly someone did this, twice, on purpose. This wasn’t just random failures but instead both times were certainly sabotage, just as we’ve always thought.”
“So somebody turned off the power to the mine,” Chief says slowly. “Twice.”
“Yes.”
“Then how did they reach it?”
“I thought the way to find out was to look at every being who came through that transporter. Every manifest. Every off-world credential, every clearance, every arrival and departure for eight years. I built a map of everyone who ever had reason to want my family harmed.”
“And?”
“And it dead-ends. Every path. Every time.” I open my hands. “Because I have been looking for a being whobroke in.Somebody who came onto this mine and did a thing he wasn’t supposed to do. Which was the wrong question. Finally, Mara Wilson asked the right question.”
“Whis was?”
“Who was supposed to be touching it.”
The room is quiet.
“Say that again,” Chief says.
“The maintenance schedules.” I sit forward. “The grid is forty years old and it runs an entire planet, so it has to be worked on constantly or it degrades, which means somewhere there is a record of every being who was physically inside that system, on which diurnal, doing what. Names and dates. It isn’t classified. It isn’t hidden. It’s awork roster, it’s the most boring document in this mine, and in eight years of hunting murderers it never once crossed my mind to pull it.” I make myself finish. “Because I was looking for the beings who broke in, and I never thought to look at the beings who wereletin.”
“Gods,” Trunk says softly.
“To her it was obvious. She’s an engineer. She doesn’t look at who might have wanted to hurt the machine — she looks at the machine, and at whose hands have been in it. But there’s one name on that list twice.” I look up. “Once in the fortnight before the first cascade. Once two moons ago, before the second.”
Jana’s hand comes up over her mouth. “Ordek?”
