Holden nodded slowly. Something in the back of his brain was shifting, like a thought that wasn’t quite formed. A wave of vertigo washed over him like he was looking over a cliff. “Two of us against a deep OPA conspiracy.”
“Until I have evidence to the contrary, yes.”
“That really is an uncomfortable position to be in, isn’t it?”
“Not what I would have picked, no,” Fred said. “But someone knows how to circumvent my security systems, and whatever your reporter friend was doing was enough to spook them into action direct enough to tip their hand.”
“The missing ships,” Holden said. “There were a couple of people I mentioned it to.”
“That’s not something you do.”
“In retrospect, I wish I’d played it a little closer to the vest, but —”
“Not that,” Fred said. “When you’ve infiltrated the enemy security structures, you don’t do anything that shows that you’ve managed it. It’s basic information warfare. As long as the enemy doesn’t know they’re compromised, you can keep gathering intelligence. That’s not something you give up unless the stakes are unimaginably high or…”
“Or?”
“Or the enemy you’ve compromised isn’t going to be around very long anyway. I don’t know if those missing ships spooked someone into making a stupid mistake, or if my position on Tycho is so precarious that it doesn’t matter anymore whether I know.”
“You seem to be taking it all in stride.”
Fred hoisted an eyebrow. “I’m panicking on the inside,” he said in a deadpan.
Holden looked over the pile of Monica’s belongings as if they might have something to add to the conversation. The hand terminal blinked forlornly. The blouse hung loose and sad.
“Did you pull anything from her terminal?” he asked.
“We can’t connect to it,” Fred said. “All the diagnostics are disabled or sunk in third-party encryption. Journalists.”
Holden picked up the hand terminal. The shattered display was a mess of light scatter. The only sections that still had anything close to recognizable were a blinking red button in one corner and a few letters in a particularly large shard: NG SIG. Holden tapped the red button and the hand terminal flashed once. The button was gone, the letters replaced by something pale brown with a line across it, a single jigsaw puzzle piece floating in a sea of noise-light.
“What did you do?” Fred asked.
“There was a button,” Holden said. “I pushed it.”
“Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn’t it?”
“But look. It… I think I may have accepted an incoming signal.”
“From what?”
Holden shook his head. Then turned back to the pile of Monica’s belongings, the tiny half-thought that had been bothering him slipping into his consciousness with something like relief.
“Her video capture,” he said. “She has a little wearable interview rig. It’s intentionally unobtrusive so that the person she’s talking to sort of forgets they’re on camera.”
“And?”
Holden spread his hands. “It’s not here.”
Fred moved forward, his lips thin, his eyes shifting over the mess of light from the broken screen. Holden had a sense of movement, as if the image was shifting slightly. Voices came from the far side of Fred’s office door. A man’s voice raised in anger; Drummer’s calm, clipped reply.
“Are you sure we can’t get into this hand terminal?” Holden said.
“Positive,” Fred said, “but there may be another way. Come on. If we’re going to solve this, we’re going to need an imaging astronomer.”
Once Fred explained the problem, it took three hours to set up a rig that would capture the glow coming from the scattered screen and an hour more to get the computer to understand its new task. The properties of light coming off extrasolar dust clouds were apparently very different from a busted terminal display. Once the expert systems were convinced that the problem fit inside their job description, the lab went to work matching polarizations and angles, mapping the fissures in the surface of the display, and building a computational lens that couldn’t exist in the physical world.
Fred had emptied the lab and sealed it. Holden sat on a chair, listening to the tick-tick-tick of the scanners recording photons and watching the image on the display slowly cohere. Fred hummed to himself, a low, slow tune that seemed melancholy and threatening at the same time. The empty stations and desks highlighted how alone the two of them were in a station filled with people.