“We don’t know if he did,” Olivia pointed out. “This is just some stupid hunch. But –“ she bowed her head to Dr. Delecta, who looked like she was about to yell “– on a mining colony this size you can never rule out petty grudges and deranged power plays. Maybe he had some half-baked scheme that we interfered with.”
“Is there any way to confirm?” Al Hamra asked. He opened his tabula, being careful to wipe his fingers so that none of the salad dressing smeared over it, and flicked information onto the wide screen at the forward end of the room. Pictures of Aslam, Ilthid and the other lover, Denira, appeared on the screen, along with a schematic of the station with their residences marked out.
“He has a whole rock to himself?” Siladan exclaimed, pointing at the schematic, which indicated that one of the five asteroids connected to the central asteroid was reserved for Aslam.
“Yeah I found this out this morning,” Al Hamra told them. “Apparently the four founding families had a whole rock each, and they’ve always been reserved as the personal estates of the founders. When the fourth family disappeared they converted that area into a leisure sector and accomodation for the leaders, but the other three rocks stayed reserved. Apparently Aslam’s family are now mostly off-site, and he was for a while as well, but he came back and now he’s the only family member living here.”
“In that whole rock?” Siladan continued, still incredulous. The rock in question was a rough obloid, perhaps a kilometre long and a half a kilometre in diameter at its centre.
“That is quite preposterous,” Olivia agreed. “In some mining colonies the entire community would be stacked into a space that big. These guys are really pampered.”
Dr. Delecta looked at Olivia in disgust at the idea that anyone would consider this life pampered, and was about to say something sarcastic and pointless when Al Hamra added more information about Aslam’s economic privileges. “He also has his own spaceship,” he told them, flicking his fingers on his tabula to make a new screen appear. “The Foundation. Class 1. Big enough for him and one or two lovers to fuck their way around the system.”
“It’s not a luxury yacht though,” Siladan observed, possibly sounding slightly jealous and trying to claw them back some dignity in the face of this man’s many inherited advantages.
“Could that have been his scheme?” Dr. Delecta asked. “Abscond with his boyfriend on that ship, wait for the entire community to die, and then claim salvage rights as the sole survivor?”
“That,” said Olivia, “Is too cynical even for me to contemplate.” Then, after a pause to think. “He might come out on top though if he did that. The colony’s in debt, but the dispensation of the debt after a complete catastrophe would depend on the clauses, and presumably as the heir to the financiers he knows what those clauses are. So he could –“ then she stopped. “No! That’s too nasty. No one would do that to their own community.”
“If his scheme depends on communication, maybe he was sending messages from his ship?” Siladan suggested. “I searched through all the comms I could this morning and I didn’t find anything incriminating. So if anyone had a get-rich-quick scheme they weren’t talking about it using the station’s communication systems. But that ship…” He broke off, rubbing his badly-trimmed beard contemplatively as he stared at the screen.
“Could you get it?” Al Hamra asked. “Without actually touching his ship?”
“Now I know it’s there, with a bit of time, if it’s connected to the station electronically, should be easy enough.”
“If his scheme is like Banu said you won’t find anything though,” Adam pointed out. “There’s gotta be another way to track him. Olivia, how was the sabotage done?” He asked the colonist.
“Explosives,” Olivia replied shortly. “Not a lot, but enough to do the job and well placed. Since it’s a mining colony there’s a lot of people who know how to blow things up, and because it’s a workers cooperative everyone has the schematics. Bit of a dead-end if you ask me.”
“But now we know who to look for,” Al Hamra pointed out, “We can narrow it down. He doesn’t have reason to use explosives, does he? He’s a spoilt rich playboy, I assume he doesn’t go out on mining expeditions. And on a space station explosives have to be locked down, so there should be a record of accessing the explosives lockers.”
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“You could get that, couldn’t you?” Siladan asked him. “From Abrahan or Inge. Maybe some surveillance video too. Then we can scan it from the time just before the sabotage. I can set up a facial recognition sub-routine, and we’ve got his picture.”
They set to work as soon as they finished their lunch, moving all their activities back to their luxury apartments in the central rock. Al Hamra contacted Inge, who quietly gave them access to the systems they needed, and pulled a large amount of video footage and access records for them, which Siladan sorted and set about organizing. While they began searching through the surveillance footage Siladan began slicing into Aslam’s ship.
“This is harder than I thought,” he said after a few minutes, when he was still not into the ship’s sub-systems. “Some kind of unorthodox security software.”
“Suspicious,” Al Hamra replied, “But keep working. It’s gonna take a lot of time to get through all this footage, so take it patiently.”
They worked quietly throughout the afternoon, piling the room up with coffee cups and troubling Lavim Tamm twice for lokum and a water pipe. Midway through the work Siladan had to return to the Phoenix of Hamura to get a more powerful tabula, and it was heading to dinner time before they finally made a breakthrough.
“That’s him isn’t it?” Dr. Delecta asked finally, freezing a film and flicking it onto the bigger screen on the wall of their apartment. It was grainy video footage from a surveillance camera in a tunnel behind the mining ship docks, where serried ranks of dispensers something like vending machines held the explosives that miners would sometimes load into their ships. The camera was at an odd angle and it was difficult to discern his features, but it looked like Aslam. She set the footage to run backwards and forwards a few times, at full and half speed, and they all agreed it looked like him.
“That’s sneaky,” Al Hamra complained. “I’ve been searching records for access to the central stores, but he could have got explosives from those dispensers.” He flicked his own tabula to project to the big screen, broadcasting a list of access requests. “See those big ones? I didn’t understand, but I’m guessing they’re refills of the dispensers in the docks.” He fiddled around a little more, and soon they had dispensing lists from the machines at the docks, which he scrolled through as everyone except Siladan watched.
“Got you, kahlet!” He exclaimed finally, as an access request for Aslam appeared on one of the lists. They hastily conferred, cross-referencing the video’s time stamp with the access request, and confirmed they matched. “So he grabbed a stock of explosives two days before the sabotage happened,” Al Hamra concluded. “Then I guess he moved around the station planting them. Icons-cursed dog!”
“Let’s see if we can find out why,” Dr. Delecta suggested. “But if we’re going to visit him we need to arm up.”
“I’m in!” Siladan declared, and a sudden array of communications logs and ship data appeared on the big screen. “There!” He isolated the Foundation’s communications for the last day, and brought them to the front. “He’s been talking to a ship in the system –“ he began, and then fell silent as they read the name of the ship he had been communicating with: The Host of Avernum.
“There is no way that name is a coincidence,” Al Hamra asserted, after they had all taken in the content of the communications, which read like a confession of a crime.
Foundation: Message to Host of Avernum. Where were your guards? A delivery arrived here.
Host of Avernum: Response confirmed. Please explain.
Foundation: You promised no interference. A ship arrived yesterday, damaged from battle. They brought all the supplies the station needs. You are too late.
Host of Avernum: Please confirm? Supplies were delivered?
Foundation: Yes, all the supplies. The whole plan is fucked because your goons couldn’t do their fucking job against a fucking yacht. Repairs are under way and there are guards on everything that’s worth blowing up. You’ve fucked it.
Host of Avernum: Calm down. We will simply move to our backup plan.
Foundation: What is that?
Host of Avernum: Invasion. We are one day out. Stay out of the way when we arrive, and make sure no distress signals are broadcast.
Foundation: How do I do that?
Host of Avernum: That’s up to you. You wanted this, now you have to work for it. If they broadcast distress signals we withdraw and leave you to deal with the fallout. Is that clear?
Foundation: Maybe we should call it off now? Your backup plan sounds too dangerous.
Host of Avernum: Too late for that. You wanted this, now you have to see it through. We came in-system for this, at a great cost in lives and money. We aren’t leaving without a result. Confirm you are in.
Foundation: What if I back out? Can’t you just leave?
Host of Avernum: We have a full record of our conversations, little boy. Our organization does not like to be crossed. Do your part or face the consequences of your involvement in this. Stick with us and your reward does not change.
Foundation: Fine. Don’t fuck this up again though.
“He sold the station to pirates, didn’t he?” Dr. Delecta said finally, when they had a chance to absorb what they had read.
“Looks like it,” Olivia agreed. “Looks like he cut a deal with these Avernum people to sabotage the station and have them ride in with replacement parts. Somehow he must have thought this would help him. Then we fucked up his plan, and now he’s on the hook for it. Sounds like they’ve made him their bitch.”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer man,” Dr. Delecta put in sarcastically. “But what was he going to get?”
“Let’s go see him and find out,” Al Hamra suggested. “Maybe he can tell us what’s on the Host of Avernum. Then we’ll know whether we should stick around, send a distress signal, negotiate, or evacuate.”
“They’ll be here tomorrow,” Siladan pointed out. “Plenty of time. But we should get weapons.”
Al Hamra put in the call to Adam, who was over from the Phoenix of Hamura shortly after, carrying armour and weapons for everyone. They suited up and set off for Aslam’s compound, armed and ready to confront a traitor.