Final Inquiries Read online

  Five more minutes. He would give them five more minutes, then, absurd or not, he would leave. It had been a long, hard day for him, as well, and he wished devoutly to get out of the clothes he had been wearing since the day before, to get himself cleaned up and into his proper bed for a proper night's sleep.

  He glanced over at the embassy ship and felt a pang of guilt. If he was suffering from cabin fever, what must all of his people be going through? Under the protocols he had agreed to with the Kendari, he couldn't even send them any sort of update on the status of the situation. They were to remain incommunicado until such time as Brox 231, Wolfson, and Mendez jointly agreed to let them go. And then, there was a whole other supply of locked-down diplomats just across the way. He couldn't help but wonder, a trifle maliciously, if Wolfson and Mendez had realized yet that they might have to contend with interrogating the Kendari as well as the humans.

  Perhaps it wasn't worthy of an ambassador with such heavy responsibilities, but he couldn't deny a small flicker of pleasure at anticipating their reaction when they got that news. But then, he had not enjoyed his little chat with them. Not one little bit. Petty of him, perhaps, but any career diplomat who managed to elbow his way up to the rank of ambassador did not do it because he or she liked being pushed around. And the Vixa were pushy enough customers that he certainly didn't need it coming from another angle.

  He took another peek down at Mendez and Wolfson. It looked as if they were planning to settle in for the night down there. Maybe there was some sort of paperwork he could still get done, even in his present state. He went back to his desk and sat down smoothly and gracefully. Even at this hour of the night, with no one else present, it paid to keep the habit of always looking poised and in control. No plopping heavily into the chair with a theatrical grunt for him.

  They still called it paperwork, though of course the vast majority of it never left the computer systems or datastream. But it was still the same old routine of approvals, authorizations, memos for the files, cables to be drafted--and how many centuries had it been since the messages sent by that name had been sent over a cable! Those and other such minutiae seemed to be the fate of the diplomat. No one element of it was vital, or perhaps even all that important--but taken all in all, these bits and pieces of trivia were the lifeblood of the whole operation. Stop dealing with them, let them pile up, and the whole embassy would rapidly grind to a halt.

  There was something almost soothing about working his way through the accumulated collection of routine matters. Even once he heard the two BSI agents finally stand up and walk away, he couldn't resist staying where he was to finish up two or three last items. His office was usually a bustling place, with subordinates coming and going, one meeting scheduled on top of another, his assistant popping in every five minutes with another new item. There was an odd sort of luxury in having the place entirely to himself, with the chance to concentrate on one thing at a time without interruption.

  It didn't last. The chime on his commlink went off, loud enough in the quiet of that moment that he nearly jumped out of his skin--though he managed to repress his reaction well enough that anyone watching wouldn't have noticed it at all. He pulled the link out with a sense of irritation. Who could possibly be calling at this hour, with the embassy in lockdown?

  He figured out the answer in the split second before he saw it on the commlink's ID display. "Zhen Chi," he said into the phone. Of course. There was no one else available who could call. "A good evening to you, Doctor."

  "You've got a funny idea of good, Mr. Ambassador. But I do have some news for you. I've been searching all the sources I have access to that talk at all about Kendari medicine and postmortem phenomena. I'm sending it through to your datapad now with the key items highlighted. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. I'm going to bed. Zhen Chi out."

  Ambassador Stabmacher often felt annoyed by Zhen Chi's abrupt manner, but the moment he reached for his datapad and started reading what she had found, he was ready to forgive everything. He reached for his commlink so he could call Wolfson and Mendez--but then he stopped. They were no doubt headed for bed as well--and there was nothing they could do about it before morning, anyway. Everything was locked down. It could wait until morning. If they could even deal with it then. They were bound to have their hands full for a long time.

  And besides, after what they had just put him through, he wasn't going to feel particularly guilty if his perfectly reasonable decision to hold off on this a bit made the two BSI agents sweat a little.

  Or even more than a little.

  It didn't take long for Jamie and Hannah to get their sleeping bags and ground pads out and get ready for bed. It took even less time for Hannah to fall into a profoundly deep sleep.

  It took only a little bit longer for Jamie to realize that he wasn't going to sleep any time soon. Too many things were running through his head--and there were too many things they were going to have to handle in the morning.

  Might as well deal with some of them now, Jamie thought. Muttering to himself, he fumbled his way back out of his sleeping bag, found his handlight, and got up, being careful to avoid making too much noise--but not too careful. He knew from experience how hard it was to wake up Hannah when she was under this deep.

  He made his way outside and stood there in the dark for a minute, savoring the cold, fresh air and admiring the view. The domes of the Grand Warren glowed on the northern horizon. To the south, the Stationary Ring arced across the sky. The Vixa might be strange and scary as hell, but they sure knew how to build big, impressive ships, buildings, and structures.

  But to do big things, you had to start with little things--even if that just meant clearing the ground clutter out of the way. He switched on his handlight and walked over to the main building of the embassy. He punched in the entry code and found his way to the BSI's office area. He turned on the light and dropped heavily into the chair behind the desk closest to the door.

  Since the far-off and ill-fated day, lost in the mists of time, when some fiend had invented the in-box, office workers everywhere had learned to dread getting back to their work after being away for any length of time. Paper messages, voice mail, e-mail, commlink echoes, and all the rest accumulated whenever people were away--and made the return to work a dreary slog through whatever minutiae had rained down during one's absence.

  All of that would be especially true for the BSI office at this particular embassy, as the BSI office had been designated the local security liaison office. And with all three BSI agents locked down, it was obvious that(a) Jamie and Hannah were bound to get stuck covering for them and (b) there was bound to be a lot of clutter accumulating already. And, just by the way, it was at least possible that (c) there might be some sort of report or message that would have some bearing on the case. And if I deal with it now, he told himself, I won't have to deal with it in the morning. Besides, maybe plowing through the reports will be boring enough to let me get to sleep.

  Jamie powered up the comm system and started chugging his way through it all. He quickly decided that possibility (c) was going to be a washout. Fortunately, the comm system included an artificial intelligence system that was competent to listen to audio messages, read through text messages, and evaluate nearly all the other sorts of messages, then categorize them and present their contents in a standardized form. That allowed him to work through it all much faster. Nearly all of what he saw amounted to police-blotter reports from the human groups Stabmacher had told them about. It would seem that the human settlement had improvised some sort of self-policing system that could deal with most minor incidents but their system automatically copied all reports to the embassy. Sensible arrangement.

  Jamie scanned the list of incidents. Domestic dispute--wife vs. husband, crockery thrown. Tashland, Franz reported drunk and disorderly, particulars as follows. Abe, Sezio drunk and disorderly, particulars as follows. Tashland, Franz, D&D for the second time on the same night. Reading between the lines,
old Franz didn't listen the first time someone told him to stop singing at the top of his lungs and go home. Trash fire extinguished. Missing person report on Weldon, Linda, age eighteen. Description as follows, notation: reported missing and returned safely on three previous occasions. Someone had a mother or father who worried too much--or maybe, not enough, if she kept managing to sneak off like that. He wouldn't want to be the boyfriend when Daddy finally caught up with them.

  A broken window. A scuffle with a pair of Kendari, scratches and bruises. A teenage male took a sting from a Vixa security guard, treated and released.

  Or, to sum up, isolated human settlement displays all the symptoms of boredom and frustration, Jamie thought. He scrolled through the rest of it, but there was nothing that had anything to do with the embassy and nothing that rose to the level of requiring a BSI response.

  He yawned mightily. Enough. He had been hoping to find something from the Kendari embassy, or some report directly connected to one of the BSI agents at the human embassy.

  Something that might provide an alibi, or at least document someone's movements. Something written, date-stamped, firm and certain that could confirm or contradict some fact in one of the statements they would have to start taking in the morning. But there was nothing there.

  Which sort of summed up the whole case, so far.

  He powered down the system, shut the office down, locked up, and went back to collapse into his sleeping bag.

  ELEVEN

  SUSPECT BEHAVIOR

  Diplomatic Xenologist Flexdal 2092 lashed his tail back and forth and paced angrily across the length of his office. "This is intolerable," he half snarled at Brox 231. "It has barely begun, and yet it has already gone on far too long. The case against the human spy-agent Milkowski is obvious and strong. I want him named as the murderer and in custody by the end of the day."

  "Very well, sir. And would you like the subsequent war with the humans to start here, or would the Pentam System be more convenient?" Brox asked, placidly sitting back on his haunches with his arms folded over each other. He glanced around the office in a casual manner, as if the matter under discussion were of no great importance to him. He found himself glad to be back inside architecture that was properly proportioned for Kendari--but also found himself, for the first time, noticing how very much the same everything was. This long, low, dimly lit office could be any office of any person of moderately high status, on any Kendari world.

  "Do not dare to speak to me in such a manner!"

  Brox went on in a conversational tone, as if he had not heard Flexdal. "Seizing one of their officers on insufficient evidence on Vixan territory might well be enough to tilt the choice of who gets Pentam toward the humans, so that might be more appropriate on the whole."

  "Blast you to atoms!"

  "And they will likely blast you as well, My Superior. And all the rest of us. Of course, who 'they' would be is not yet certain. It might be the Vixa, it might be the humans, it might be some other alien race--or it might be your superiors, if they judge that destroying this embassy might mollify those you enrage. But whoever it is, there will be violence enough to engulf us all."

  "Insolence! How do you dare speak to me this way?" Flexdal demanded.

  "Because you are wrong," Brox said coldly. "Because if I follow your orders, disaster will follow. Because Family Number 2092 is a remote and low-ranking offshoot of Family Number 231, and, whatever your political and professional rank, however lowly and insignificant a mere Inquirist might be, my social rank is far above yours. I pause to note that I would not inject my family status in this matter if I did not believe it was essential that you listen to me. And I dare to speak because it was my espoused one who was killed, and I will not be involved in the massive dishonor of blaming the wrong being for her death, simply because it will save a few hours of your time."

  "You claim the spy-agent Milkowski is innocent?"

  "I claim nothing of the kind. I grant the obvious, that the first evidence points toward it being one of the BSI agents," he said, careful to pronounce the three-letter abbreviation in the manner that the humans did, and not, as was fashionable in Kendari government circles, as "spy." The human's pejorative term for intelligence agent was one of the few English loan-words that had come into use in Maximum Kendari.

  "What I do not grant," Brox went on, "is that the obvious is always, or even generally, correct. While the BSI Agent Milkowski is not well-disposed to us, and while he is belligerent and aggressive, he is not a fool. It seemed unlikely to me from the start that any police officer would arrange matters so as to commit what was obviously a deliberate murder--how could a poisoning case be anything else?--so that the victim's corpse is found at the killer's place of work, with what might as well be the killer's identity document left at the scene."

  "The beverage container? There is proof that it was his?"

  "Not proof, perhaps, but evidence. You do not read English characters. There is a faded inscription on the bottom of the container--four characters that correspond to the first portion of the name 'Milkowski.' There is at least one other possible interpretation of that inscription, but it is at least highly suggestive."

  "Yes! It suggests--it shouts out--that the spy agent Milkowski is the killer."

  "It shouts it at such deafening volume that I have trouble believing it. We are talking about a professional investigator leaving his name at the scene of the crime. Either he is, in some way, insane--perhaps in a way that is unique to humans and is not known to us--or the actual killer has manufactured evidence that points to him. I see no plausible third explanation."

  "A trap by the humans, then. We accuse the wrong human, they prove his innocence--and do it in a manner that makes it impossible for us to make a second accusation without losing face."

  "If that is the case--though it seems a wildly risky plan for the humans to try--then, moments ago, you were demanding with great violence that we fall for it."

  "Well perhaps then the spy agent Milkowski did do it--though there is something in what you say."

  "Quite right, My Superior," Brox said with sarcasm as thick as half-melted tar. "We can be absolutely certain that Special Agent Milkowski is either guilty--or innocent." He rose to stand in a position of respectful submission. "Give it time, My Superior. Give it just a little time, and we will plow our way clear of this field overgrown with muddle and uncertainty, and move forward to better-tended pasture."

  "Time," said Diplomatic Xenologist Flexdal 2091, "is the item that is in shortest supply. Do your job then--but do not expend a single needless duration unit of that precious commodity."

  Hannah's eyes snapped open, and she found herself staring up at a ceiling she had never before seen in daylight. Fear flickered through her mind, but she shoved it aside. She had been on too many assignments on too many planets, experienced the same sort of thing too many times before to be thrown off by it. It took her only a few seconds to go from where am I/what am I doing here and utter disorientation to getting herself fully grounded back in the facts of the case and her own situation.

  They had bedded down in the main entry hallway of the embassy ship. They had chosen the spot for a number of reasons, not least of which was that it was also the main access hatch for the ship and the only hatch at ground level. Any of the people in confinement who decided to leave the ship for whatever reason would have found themselves unexpectedly stepping over two BSI agents, one on either side of the inner air-lock door.

  She peeked through the locked door and into the lock chamber itself. There was Jamie, as dead to the world as she herself must have been little more than sixty seconds before. Hannah decided to play a little game with herself and started to count silently.

  Before she got to thirty, Jamie's eyes came open, and it was plain from the look on his face that he knew exactly where he was and why. No frown of puzzlement for him.

  "Good morning," she said to him through the open air-lock door. How he always managed to
wake up within one minute of her when they were on a case was beyond Hannah, but he always did.

  "Morning, anyway," he said. "We'll have to go and check before we find out how good it is."

  She heard something of the fierce, innocent courage of a six-year-old out to chase the imaginary monsters in the backyard in his voice, and saw it on his face as well. That's my boy, Hannah told herself, not certain if she felt more motherly or big sisterish just then, but knowing for sure to keep her feelings to herself. Hannah was careful to hide her affectionate smile from Jamie as they both wordlessly got up and went through the routine of stowing their gear. It was a matter of reflex for both of them to step out of view of the other and turn their backs on each other as they got up and got ready for the day.

  "Tell you what," said Jamie. "I'm just about ready to go. I'm going to wander outside and give you a little time and space for getting organized."

  "Okay," Hannah said, being careful not to thank him. It might embarrass him to bring too much attention to his attempt to prevent her embarrassment.

  Working in a split-gender partner setup with a partner who sometimes seemed almost young enough to be her son wasn't always easy. There were times when it required a certain amount of dancing around each other to keep embarrassing sights and emotions from being displayed. But it was a dance they had both gotten pretty good at.

  Jamie shouldn't have been surprised to see Zhen Chi outside, working in the embassy garden. After all, she was formally released from confinement--and keeping Earth-based plants alive in this place had to be a job that required constant attention--especially with all the very reasonable and proper precautions that were imposed to keep the Earthside plant life from escaping and establishing itself in the wild.