"Of course not-and if I did, you'd be perfectly justified in kicking me clear back to Old Earth," Ben Belkassem said cheerfully. "It's your shop. You're the proper person to run it, and your people know you'll have to be looking very closely for possible leaks. They'll expect a certain amount of that, and I couldn't simply take over without undercutting your authority. I'd say your chances of finding whoever it is are probably about as good as mine, but if I stick in my oar in the role of an officious, pig-headed, empire-building interloper-a part, may I add, I play quite well-I can do a lot of your dirty work for you. Just tell them Justice has stuck you with an asshole from Intelligence Branch and leave the rest to me. Who knows? Even if I don't find a thing, I may just scare our hare into the open for you."
"I see." McIlheny examined Ben Belkassem's face intently. The inspector had placed an unerring finger on his own most private-and darkest-fear, and he was right. An outsider could play grand inquisitor without the devastating effect an internal witch hunt might produce.
"All right, Inspector, I may take you up on that. Let me run it by Admiral Gomez first, though." Ben Belkassem nodded, and the colonel frowned.
"Actually, something we hit here on Mathison's leaves me more inclined to think you have a point than I would've been," he admitted unhappily.
The inspector quirked an eyebrow, but the colonel turned to Keita.
"We owe it to your Captain DeVries and her family, Sir Arthur. I'm sure you've read my initial report on the affair at the DeVries Claim?"
"I have," Keita said dryly. "Countess Miller personally starcommed it to me before her henchmen shoved me aboard Banshee and slammed the hatch."
McIlheny blinked. He'd expected his report to make waves, but he hadn't anticipated that the Minister of War herself might get involved.
"At any rate," he shook himself back to the affair at hand, "we still haven't been able to figure out how she happened to survive, and I'm afraid she's a bit … well-" He broke off uncomfortably, and Keita sighed.
"I said I've read the report, Colonel. The questions you raised are the main reason I got sent along with Major Cateau's medical team, and I understand about Ali-Captain DeVries' … mental state." He closed his eyes briefly, as if in pain, then nodded again. "Go on, Colonel."
"Yes, Sir. We got a couple of intelligence breaks out of it. For one thing, she's been able to identify the assault shuttles-or, at least one type of shuttle-these bastards are using. It was one of the old Leopard-class boats, which is the first hard ID we've gotten, since none of the other survivors who actually saw the shuttles were military types. A Leopard tends to confirm that we're dealing with at least one capital ship, of course, but Fleet dumped so many of them on the surplus market when the Bengals came in that anyone could have snapped them up. We're running searches on the disposal records to see if anyone out this way was stupid enough to buy up a clutch of them and leave us a paper trail, but I'm not very optimistic.
"But, more importantly, she and her father and grandfather took out the entire crew of the shuttle which went after her family. We've picked up a few dead pirates before, but they never told us much. Whoever's running them sanitizes his troops pretty carefully, and we haven't had a lot to go on for IDs, aside from the obvious fact that they've all been human. In this case, however, Captain DeVries nailed the assault team commander. He didn't have much on him, either, but we ran his retinal and genetic patterns and got a direct hit."
He still wore his synth-link headset, and the star map disappeared, replaced by an unfamiliar red-haired man in a very familiar uniform.
"Lieutenant Albert Singh, gentlemen." McIlheny's voice was light; his expression was not.
"An Imperial Fleet officer?!" Keita exploded. The colonel nodded, and Keita glared at the holo, teeth bared. Even Ben Belkassem seemed shocked.
"An Imperial Fleet officer. I don't have his complete dossier yet, but what I've seen so far looks clean-except for the fact that Lieutenant Singh has now died twice: once from a fourteen-millimeter slug through the spine, and once in a shuttle accident in the Holderman Sector."
"God!" Keita muttered. One large, hairy hand clenched into a fist and thumped the table gently. "How long ago?"
"Over two years," McIlheny said, and glanced at Ben Belkassem. "Which, I very much fear, lends point to your suggestion that there has to be someone-possibly several someones-on the inside, Inspector. That shuttle accident happened, all right, but when I poked a bit deeper, I found something very interesting. Singh's personnel jacket says he was aboard it and killed, but the original passenger manifest for the shuttle-which was, indeed, lost with all hands-doesn't include his name. Sometime between then and now, someone with access to Fleet personnel records added him to it as far as his jacket was concerned, which gave him a nice, clean termination and erased him from our active data base."
"Very good," Ben Belkassem approved. "How did you find him, then?"
"I wish I could take the credit," McIlheny said wryly, "but I was exhausted when I set up the data search, and I didn't define my parameters very well. In fact, I requested a search of all records, and I was more than somewhat irritated when I saw how much computer time I'd 'wasted' on it-until the search spit out his name."
"Never look serendipity in the mouth, Colonel." The inspector grinned. "I don't-and I'm afraid I don't give it credit for my successes, either."
"But a Fleet officer," Keita muttered. "I don't like the smell of this."
"Nor do I," McIlheny said more seriously. "It's possible he did it himself, and I've starcommed the Holderman Fleet District for full particulars on him, including anything he might have been into before his 'death.' I'm also running a Fleet-wide personnel search to see if any other bogus 'deaths' occurred in the same shuttle accident. I hope I don't find any, because if Singh didn't arrange it, someone else did, and that suggests we may be looking at deliberate recruiting from inside our own military."
"And that whoever did the recruiting may still be in place," Ben Belkassem murmured.
Alicia looked up as a shortish woman stepped through her hospital door. The newcomer moved with the springy stride of a heavy-worlder in a single gravity, and Alicia's eyes widened.
"Tannis?" she blurted, jerking upright in bed. "By God, it is you!"
"Really?" Major Tannis Cateau, Imperial Cadre Medical Branch, turned her name tag up to scrutinize it, then nodded. "So it is." She crossed to the bed. "How you doing, Sarge?"
"I'll 'Sarge' you!" Alicia grinned. Then her smile faded as she saw the shadow behind Tannis' eyes. "I expect," she said more slowly, "that you're about to tell me how I'm doing."
"That's what medics do, Sarge," Tannis replied. She crossed her arms and rocked on the balls of her feet, surveying Captain DeVries (retired) very much as Corporal Cateau had once surveyed Staff Sergeant DeVries. But there was a difference now, Alicia thought, noting the major's pips on Cateau's green uniform. Oh, yes, there was a difference.
Five years, she thought. Has it really been that long?
"Sarge-Alley," Tannis said, "you know how sorry I was to hear about your mom, Clarissa, Stevie -"
Alicia flinched. She held up one hand, half-shaking her head, and Tannis stopped. She gazed at the friend she hadn't seen in so long, and then she inhaled deeply had nodded.
"So," Alicia said after a moment, her conversational tone sounding almost natural, "how am I?"
"Not too bad, considering." Tannis accepted the change in town and cocked her head judiciously. "Matter of fact, Okanami and his people did a good job on the repairs, from your records. I may not even open you back up to take a personal look."
"You always were a hungry-knifed little snot."