“Certainly. And I’ll put these”—he waved the data cube—“on the scan list.”
“I’ll be home by 1500,” she said. “I’ve got that appointment at the clinic and threats from the doctors—again—if I miss it.”
“Your arm?” Teague asked.
“Yes. I re-injured it a few weeks ago, which is why I wasn’t on the shuttle up to meet Ky, and why I’m not either dead or wherever she is, if she is. I’ve missed a couple of appointments and they worry too much.”
Grace arrived home to find MacRobert in the dining room with Teague. Rafe was not in sight.
“He’s in the guest room,” MacRobert said. “Doing whatever he does. They’ve both had lunch. You?”
“I’m not hungry,” Grace said. “It’s healing just fine and I think they were disappointed. All they did was poke, prod, pull, and twist, so now it’s hurting but that will let up soon.”
A door opened somewhere in the house, and plumbing communicated where. Teague looked tense. “You have scan here, right?”
“Yes,” MacRobert said, before Grace could answer. “And we both know the house very well. Downstairs bathroom; I heard him walk from the bedroom down the passage.”
Teague flushed. “I’m used to being the one linked in.”
“Relax, Teague,” MacRobert said. “You’re not the one involved with her niece. Great-niece. Whatever she is.”
Grace ignored that, watching Rafe come into the room. He had shed all his appliances and changed into casual clothes that fit perfectly. His expression did not.
“I am able to confirm that she is alive. I could not communicate directly because she does not have a power source for the device she holds.”
“How do you know she’s alive if you can’t communicate?”
Rafe did not quite focus on her face, Grace noted, and as she watched, his face paled and he sagged; Teague caught him and moved him into a chair, then pushed Rafe’s head down between his knees.
“What’s wrong with him? Do you know?”
“No.” Teague kept a hand on Rafe’s neck. “But I know a man about to faint when I see one.”
“I’m fine now,” Rafe said. Teague stepped back. Rafe looked up, still resting his forearms on his thighs. “I have a splitting headache,” he said. “Maybe it was that. But Ky’s alive.”
“Could you tell if she was ashore somewhere?”
“Not without a better map than I’ve seen,” Rafe said. “I have direction, but not precise distance.”
“He does solve a problem,” Grace said to MacRobert.
“Who?” MacRobert looked at her, then at Rafe; Grace felt impatient. Mac was usually quicker than that.
“Rafe. You know that map anomaly we found, that you said would be dangerous to fix? He’s not us; he’s not from here; he can demand access to any ISC equipment by virtue of his title.” She turned to Rafe. “I don’t expect your system ansible can do close-in surveillance of Miksland, but don’t you have relay satellites between the system ansibles and a planet’s surface?”
“Indeed we do, and some of them are capable of fine-scale surveillance. But that’s your problem—what about the map anomaly?”
“Slotter Key’s own survey satellites quit recording data from Miksland several hundred years ago, and what should be the archived scans it did make are lost. We hadn’t noticed, because it’s uninhabited, near the south polar ocean, and nobody really cared. Terraforming failure has been the explanation for ignoring it completely.”
“And you now think it wasn’t ignored by everyone, just by those who wanted you to think it was.”
“Yes. Possibly.” Grace touched the projector controls and brought up a hologram of the planet. “We’re here.” She rotated the globe slowly. “This is the closest approximation to where they came down, and this outline of nothing is Miksland. This is what MacRobert found in the university library annex—deep in the archives.” Another touch, and a sketch, reproduced to scale with the globe, filled in part of the poleward coast and a little of the plateau. She zoomed in on that. “We think an unofficial explorer landed on Miksland a long time ago and sketched what he saw. Why he didn’t record it properly I don’t know, but his map ended up in a university library archive along with other old maps, including the imaginary lands found in some fiction. And now—overlay this very old scan—”
“It’s—what is that? Some kind of installation?” Rafe tilted his head back and forth, trying to make something out of the vague lines on the terrain the explorer had sketched.
“Could be a runway,” Teague said. “With some structure at one end.”
“A landing place for aircraft? Even shuttles?”
“We don’t know,” Grace said. “Because we can’t get the satellites that are over Miksland regularly to take a simple ordinary scan of it.”
“That we can manage,” Rafe said, with a glance at Teague. “Who’s your ISC rep here?”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m an imperfect CEO; I’d have to call home to find out.”
“We don’t have one. One of the things Stavros—former Vatta CEO—had requested of ISC was an office here on the planet. We don’t have a crewed ansible platform, either. Turned out to be useful, when we turned it back on. Just a matter of flipping a switch, I was told.”
“And you haven’t flipped the switch to see what Miksland really looks like now?”
“We turned on the main ansible; nobody knows how to operate repeater satellites remotely. We’d have to send a ship and a technician. But if you, as ISC—”
“Teague,” Rafe said. “Not me. He won’t be recognized as me under any circumstances—he’s a good eight centimeters taller than I am.”
“Ten,” Teague said. “When I don’t slouch.”
“Teague can be an ISC system inspector: Slotter Key did unauthorized repairs and though we aren’t prosecuting systems for that anymore, we want to be sure you haven’t damaged the equipment. We know there’s something nonstandard. I—as myself and CEO of ISC, back on Nexus—asked Stella for the favor of a fast ride over here for Teague; Stella and I—as Bancroft—pretended I was another of Osman’s bastards and she shipped me here to be vetted by you.”
“But he’ll still be tracked, going out there—”
“Of course. It’s not clandestine. It’s ISC. I can mock up the right ID; I have access. That’s why he’s been here, talking to you, because you’re the one who authorized the repair—he’s been trying to get you to describe exactly who did what. Whoever you sent—you know who, right?”
“Of course,” Grace said.
“Well, Teague will spend a couple of hours talking to whoever that was, before boarding a Vatta ship to go inspect every one of our installations in this system. Including a look at our repeater satellites in low orbit, at which time he will see if they also have the lockout for Miksland. Because if they do, and no one here had tinkered with them before, then someone in ISC was involved in the original blackout of that continent. As well as someone here, probably in Spaceforce.”
“That far back?” Grace said.
“Has to be,” Rafe said. “And not for any good reason.”
The next morning, Teague, now in a serious dark-gray suit and carrying a black attaché case, arrived at Slotter Key’s Defense Department HQ with Grace, to be introduced to her staff as an ISC security inspector. He insisted on handing out a statement on ISC letterhead detailing ISC’s revised position on independent repairs of ISC-installed ansibles.
“But we’re sending and receiving with no problems,” said the communications chief. “Nothing’s wrong.”