“But theycan’t.” I look around the room. “Can they? If the crystal picks who mines it, and it’s been picking Margol for four hundred rotations — they could remove every single one of you from this planet tomorrow and the mine would go dark. Not slowly. Not as a production dip. It would juststop giving.Do they know that?”
“They know the production charts,” Chief says. “They’ve had them for sixty rotations. Whether theybelievethem if another story. You met the male this afternoon. What do you think?”
“He thinks it’s a management problem. So the Illibrium fought back.” I’m sitting up straight now. “Eight rotations ago somebody starts a plan to hand this rock to beings the crystal won’t work for. And in those eight rotations the grid fails twice, in ways that are physically impossible for a grid to fail. Twice, Cayzor. And both times it comes back on in the same instant, all at once, which no system does.”
“That was sabotage,” Trunk says. “That was a hand reaching in.”
“You cannot switch off a crystal-powered grid without the crystal’s participation. It’s not a wire you cut. It’s a power source that has tostop delivering.
“You’re saying itstagedthem,” Ines says. She’s got her tablet up and she hasn’t written anything on it, which for Ines is unheard of.
“I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“The rest of it is Andrew.”
“He shouldn’t have been able to do any of it,” I say. “That’s the thing that’s been sitting wrong with me since the diurnal you told me. My brother is a good grid tech, Cayzor. He’sgood.He isn’t brilliant. And he walked onto the most valuable installation in the Four Sectors and got clean access to forty rotations of Minecorp facilities records, and nobody stopped him, and nothing flagged, and no system anywhere raised a single alert for six moon cycles. He hadmycredentials and a contractor’s badge, and I have worked classified installations for nine years and I am telling you that is not how it works.” My throat’s tight. “Systems like that scream. Constantly. About everything. You look at a file you shouldn’t and somebody’s tablet lights up in an office four levels away. He should have tripped something in his first fortnight and he never tripped anything at all.”
“And he passed the attunement test,” Trunk says quietly.
“What?”
“Andrew Wilson attuned.” Trunk’s watching me. “He went in that room with the crystal and it warmed for him and they signed him off for full mine access. Same as you. Same as everyone.”
“That’s what I keep — “ I stop. Start again. “He’s athief.He was already bought when he stepped off that disk, he’d taken House money before he ever saw this planet, and the crystal that supposedlychooseslooked at him and said yes.”
“Yes,” Cayzor says.
“So either it doesn’t choose — “
“Or it chose him,” says Chief.
“It let him in on purpose,” I say.
“That’s what I’ve wondered,” Cayzor says.
“For eight rotations.”
“For eight rotations.” He turns the crystal over in his palm again. “I’ve never said it out loud. Not to Ines, not to Chief, not to anyone. Because it sounds like a male who lost his parents deciding that a rock is on his side.”
“But you thought it.”
“I thought it every time this went warm in a corridor when I had no reason to be in that corridor.” He looks at it. “The diurnal you crossed that gallery on four hundred and spoke to me, it was so bright I put my hand over my pocket so nobody would see.”
I stare at him.
“The night I came to your quarters with the drive,” he says. “The morning you asked me for the rosters. The diurnal I found Ordek’s name.” He shrugs, very slightly. “I have eight rotations of it. And every single time I’ve told myself it’s an ordinary crystal doing an ordinary thing, because the alternative is that this rock has been quietly walking me toward something and I have been the last being to notice.”
“It couldn’t stop them,” I say.
Everyone looks at me.
“The crystals are not all-powerful. It’s not abeing, it doesn’t have hands or a voice, it can’t file a complaint or testify or name a House. It can go dull. It can pull back into the rock. It can decide who it works for.”
“And?”
“Andthat isn’t enough.You said it yourself, they could pull every Margol off this rock tomorrow and the mine would go dark, and Vaszneth would just call it a production failure and spend sixty rotations trying to fix it with better equipment. It can refuse. But refusing doesn’t stop them. Refusing just means everybody loses.”
“So it needed something else,” Ines says slowly.
