Mike waved it away politely. "Please, go ahead. I was never a fan of whiskey."
Blair held out the jar to Rebecca, who also shook her head. "Your loss," he said with a shrug. He uncapped the jar and tossed the little ball into his mouth.
For a moment he floated there with an odd look on his face. Then, carefully but very quickly, he bounded in the direction of the cache's small bathroom.
Rebecca hung in midair with her hands on her hips, watching. "I guess it's not mature yet," she said.
Rue stifled a laugh and flipped herself down through the hatch. "Hi." She realized she should say something more and added, "Have you had dinner?"
"I ate before I came," he said. "I'm not good at eating in freefall, I'm afraid. Despite having done it a thousand times."
"Coffee?"
"Sure."
Rebecca shot Rue one of her annoyingly smug looks and went to make it, leaving her alone with Mike at the cache's standup table.
"What can we do for you, Mike?"
He grimaced. "I'm not sure I should be here at all. Admiral Crisler suspects me of being the saboteur, so he's made me wear this…" He pointed to his ear. Rue had noticed the little adornment there earlier, and had thought it odd that the austerely dressed Michael Bequith should wear jewelry.
"You're bugged?" She let go of the table in astonishment, then caught herself before drifting away.
"Yes, I thought you should know if I was to come aboard your ship." He looked Rue straight in the eye, and his expression held eloquent pleading.
"Give me that!" Rue reached out quickly and rolled the little bead off Mike's ear. She held it up to eye level. "Admiral, I should have been informed of this. Since I wasn't, I'll take it you were willing to let Dr. Bequith be your spy in my terrain. But the Envy is my ship, and I will not permit such devices to remain aboard. Rebecca!" She tossed the bead to her doctor. "Put that out the lock, will you?"
They watched as Rebecca cycled the lock. When that was done, Mike turned back to Rue, grinning apologetically. "Thanks. I—"
"I do not like being manipulated, Dr. Bequith," she said as icily as she could. "You came here to get me to do that, didn't you?"
He frowned, apparently tamping down on some anger of his own. "I can't go back to the Banshee now," he sat at last. "They'll arrest me. I came here to ask you for asylum."
"Oh, I like this less and less," she said. "You'd better have a good explanation for this. Otherwise I see no reason why I shouldn't let them arrest you. How do I know you aren't the saboteur, after all?"
He looked her in the eye again, quite confidently now. "I discovered something," he said. He didn't elaborate, just let the words hang there.
Rue hesitated. Behind Mike, Rebecca started to open her mouth; Rue waved her silent. "Tell me," she said.
Mike brought out a large black datapack and clipped it to the edge of the table. "It's about Blair's photos of the Lasa habitat," he said.
Blair had been watching from the door to the bathroom. Now he jumped over. "What's wrong?" he said, a bit indignantly. "I did a complete photomosaic last time we were here. I was very thorough." He hooked his feet into the floor loops under the table.
"Yes, I know. But I have reason to think your photos have been tampered with."
Rue was surprised, but not as much as she might have expected. As Mike's words sank in, she realized she had been waiting ever since the sabotage for something to happen— for some sign that the uneasiness about this expedition she felt was well-founded. Well, here it was.
"Ah, do you have a holo card?" asked Mike. "I can show you."
"Just a sec." Blair raced away to get one. When he returned, Mike put his hand on the card and downloaded something through its galvanic interface.
Some pictures appeared in ghostly transparency above the table. Blair squinted at them. "Yeah, those are mine."
"Do you have original copies of this data?"
Blair made a sour face. "I didn't have enough storage units to leave backups here when we went to Chandaka. The originals of all our data ended up in Crisler's hands— as partial payment for our rescue."
Mike brought up an annotation layer and pointed at the circled stars. "What does this mean?"
Blair examined the photos for a few seconds, then blinked in surprise. "Holy tholin, you're right. Somebody's screwed with my data."
Mike showed the extent of the changes and showed that they were connected somehow to Linda Ophir. Blair, the reporter, was visibly impressed by his detective work. Rue was pretty impressed herself.
It didn't add up, though. "But why…" she began.
"Because there's something written on the missing part that we're not supposed to know."
"We can just look at it through the telescope," said Evan, who had come up behind them silently.
"I thought of that," said Mike. "The problem is that the Lasa habitat's north pole is pointing at us. The missing stuff is on the south pole. But, we're going out to explore the habitat tomorrow. I came here to ask you to bring some cameras that aren't connected into the expedition's inscape system. We should insist on doing a new photomosaic then."
Rue nodded. "But what are we looking for?"
"Not sure. More Lasa writing, maybe."
"But we can't read Lasa, can we? And anyway, if this stuff has been deliberately hidden, won't we give away that we know about it? That could be dangerous, depending on who did the hiding…" She didn't mention Crisler's name, but then, she didn't have to. "Remember, Dr. Bequith, the Envy may be my ship, but it could be taken away from me at any time."
"Maybe we can find a more subtle way of taking the pictures," aid Blair. "We could throw a little mirror past the habitat, and aim the camera at that."
"Anyway," said Mike, "You're right that we can't read Lasa writing— not with the resources we have here, anyway. So until we get back to civilization, whatever's written on the hidden part of the habitat will remain obscure. Whoever hid it in the first place will know that."
"Why can't we read it?" asked Rebecca.
"Our AIs aren't smart enough," he said. "We could figure out the writing in denotative terms, but that wouldn't get us anywhere."
Rue raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean, denotative?"
"Surface meaning— dictionary meaning. The problem is, most meaning is carried through context and implication; it's connotative. In the case of the Lasa, the context is so alien that even when we translate the words and know what they mean, we, well, don't know what they mean." That was a pretty thick description and it must have shown on her face, because he immediately said, "Imagine an alien trying to figure out what a Haiku poem means.
"If we had a context-switching AI we might be able to do it, but the nearest one's on Mars as far as I know. So, no, we don't really know what the writing means. Even so, somebody's gone to great lengths to hide a piece of it. Since you did such a good job with your photomosaic," he said to Blair, "nobody planned to do another. There didn't seem to be a need."
Rue leaned back, examining the ceiling. She was relieved that her worries had finally taken on a tangible form. "You suspect Crisler, don't you?" she asked.
He shrugged. "Not necessarily. However much I detest the man…"
"It's more than that," she said. "I don't know why he's here. Do you?"
Mike looked puzzled. "Surely, if there's a multispecies civilization nearby…"
"Isn't the fastest way to find it through FTL?" She watched him intently through the diaphanous panes of holo light. "Don't you think he'd have a dozen ships scouring the nearby lit stars? What if one of them found the alien homeworld while he was stuck out here? It doesn't make sense. I'll bet he'd already completed a search of those stars before he even hired you guys."