When she finally managed to evade the others—having chivvied them out of the second hut so she could inspect it, then turn off the power, to save fuel, it was the thirty-ninth day, by her count, since the shuttle crash. Six since they had made it to this shelter, days filled with one nagging problem after another. She thumbed the door latch so no one could come in, checked that the stove was off, turned off the lights, and then connected the cable. Her implant overrode the ansible signal momentarily with a BATTERY LOW warning, then BATTERY CHARGING, and finally the familiar smell made her wrinkle her nose. Would he be in range?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Vatta Transport’s courier Morningstar appeared on scan, one of a list of arriving spacecraft. Grace noted its arrival on the morning report, remembering Stella’s encrypted message and MacRobert’s broad hint. “Someone you should check out,” she’d said. “Claims to be one of Osman’s, but I doubt it.” Morningstar had priority routing—all Vatta ships did—and in much shorter time than any other could have done it, it was docking at Vatta’s own section of the main station. A Vatta shuttle brought it down safely; Grace watched the landing with grim satisfaction. Vatta shuttles did not fail.
By 1130, the car had arrived. From the surveillance images, neither passenger looked anything like Rafe Dunbarger. A tall skinny fellow, whose skin was an unusual shade for Slotter Key—yellow-brown, with brown freckles—and a plump florid man who minced along as if his feet hurt. She called MacRobert from his own office; he arrived before they did.
She had of course seen media images of Rafe Dunbarger—and for that matter, images of his father and the entire Board of Directors of ISC, plus a few others of their senior managers. It had been her task, when she was head of Vatta’s corporate security staff, to know a lot about any other corporation Vatta had dealings with, competitive or otherwise.
She looked now at the plump, prissy man mincing along the hall. He looked nothing like those images, except the dark eyes with their hard focus. A good disguise, for those who knew him only from images, but she wondered if he thought he could fool her. If he did, he had a surprise coming.
Once inside her office, however, he gave her a very different grin as he pulled a standard security cylinder from his pocket and set it on her desk. “I’m sure you know I’m really Rafe Dunbarger,” he said. “And with your permission I’ll take these uncomfortable appliances out of my face.”
“Don’t you think you should leave my office the way you came in?” Grace asked.
“Probably,” Rafe said. “But in that case perhaps we could talk elsewhere? Your gravity is heavy for me, and the rest of this weighs more here than it does at home. My feet really do hurt and my face is this red because I’m sweating.”
“Stella said you were absolutely convinced Ky is alive,” Grace said. “She’s also told me you two love each other, so why is this not hormonal wishful thinking?”
“Because it’s not my hormones but technology,” Rafe said. “It’s also technology that was—is—both very secret and very dangerous. Development was stopped, but as I had been the test subject—for a certain consideration—I was left with the prototype. It would have been fatal to me to remove it.”
“And it lets you know if your girlfriends are still alive?”
Rafe looked at her. Grace had heard about his stares, and stared back. She had her own weaponized gaze.
“She’s alive,” he said without looking away. “I am sure of that. I do not know how much longer.”
“Can you tell anything about her condition, her whereabouts, anything—”
“No. Not without getting closer and plugging the device in.”
“And you think our ansible needs tuning—how are you going to work there and here both?”
“I may be able to do some work on the ansible remotely,” Rafe said. “You don’t have good scan on that continent she was near when the shuttle went down.”
“Miksland,” Grace said. “We know something—” She looked at Mac, then at Rafe’s very silent—too silent—companion. “But before I tell you that—what about Teague?”
“Technical help,” Rafe said. “Electronics, on the one hand. Cold-weather specialist, on the other. He was involved in the rescue of my family.”
“Are you a killer? Is he?”
“Like Ky,” Rafe said. “Yes to both.”
Grace felt a glow she recognized as total satisfaction. She had been right all along when she’d told Ky’s mother that the girl wasn’t just a softhearted busybody—that underneath she was more like Grace than any of the others. Ky’s mother had recoiled in horror, insisting that her daughter was “normal.” And clearly Rafe—harmless as he looked in that fat suit—was of the same sort. Maybe, just maybe, Ky would have a partner suited to her needs while still young enough to enjoy it. She hadn’t been that lucky, for a long time. She glanced at Mac, who had met Rafe on Cascadia. He’d been right, too.
“How long can you stay?” she asked Rafe.
“Until we find her, and until we find out who did this,” he said. “Teague’s contract with me is for a year, but he might be willing to extend it.”
“Gary might not,” Teague said. His voice had an odd quality to it, reminiscent of a much younger man whose boy-voice was in transition to an adult timbre. She looked more closely at him. What was he?
“Transitioning, Sera,” he said, as if he’d read her mind. “Complete biosculpt. What I did was legal, but there was blowback from the other side.”
“Ah,” Grace said. Had biosculpt been available in her own time of blowback, she might have done that. She lifted her left arm. “I hope it doesn’t itch as much as this did.”
“I heard, Sera. Wondered you didn’t go for a prosthesis; it’s a lot quicker to full function.”
“Software,” Grace said. “Software can always be compromised.”
His attention sharpened. “Indeed, Sera.”
“Is your trouble likely to follow you here?” Grace asked. “Do they know where you are?”
“Shouldn’t, Sera, but I won’t say it couldn’t happen. I went straight into clinic, was declared dead, got a temp twenty-one-day on top of the biosculpt initiation, and ID to match the combo, and left Nexus with a different face, name, and bioscan data. They could track Edvard Simeon Teague to Cascadia, and maybe to here—but the name I was born to, and the body as well, are in Nexus records as dead, and the ashes scattered at sea. By the time I go back, I’ll be someone else, immigrant from somewhere far away. Not traveling with him.” He glanced at Rafe and then gave Grace another straight look.
“What should we be looking for, in case?” she asked.
He dug into a pocket and pulled out a data cube. “Any of these—it’s the data my boss has on that group, and I’m wanting to trade it for papers from somewhere other than Slotter Key. Assuming you have the capacity—”
Grace looked at Mac, who raised an eyebrow then nodded. “We can do that,” she said. Teague flicked his thumb, and the cube flew through the air. Grace caught it and handed it to MacRobert. Teague gave a brief incomplete smile and returned to his former expression.
“If I could have a quiet place and a power feed,” Rafe said, “I could use my device now and better define what needs to be done.”
Grace pointed. “There’s an outlet over there on the wall, and we can all be silent.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant alone.”
“Alone. Here? No, that won’t work. I know too much about you, and I’m not turning you loose unsupervised connected to our power supply. You can do that at home. Mac, can you get these gentlemen to the house for some good reason?”