Chapter 13

Investigations

Mrs. Gravane was not happy.

“Our deal is done, Mr. Grey. Pack your things and leave the Academy. If my agent informs me you are still there at this time tomorrow, I will exert my considerable influence to ensure your life is a hell equal to the one you have put me through.”

“Of course, Mrs. Gravane.”

“And if your actions have cost my son his life…”

I should have bit my tongue. “They didn’t.”

She bolted to her feet, the camera’s pan didn’t follow quickly enough. When it caught up, she was staring death at me with red-rimmed eyes. “How dare you?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gravane. Perhaps I should have...” I squared my shoulders. “No. I stand by my choice. It was the right thing to do. They never had any intention of sending your son back, I’m sorry, but it’s true. They didn’t bring him, didn’t bring any evidence he was alive, even. They must have known I’d ask. They could have shown a video, even a fake one, but they didn’t even bother.”

The iron in her spine wavered. “How can you say such things?”

“You would say the same if we were talking about anyone but your son.”

“I…”

“I understand, I do. I wanted Mirabor back, too. But I doubt he ever got within three jumps of the Academy. In a weird way, I think it makes it more likely they are keeping him alive though. They must know the next time they make demands they will have to provide proof of life that we didn’t get this time.”

“There will be no further payments.” Her voice was cold, unbending. “A Gravane does not treat with people who so easily renege on a deal.”

“Then think of it this way, we bought six months to find him.”

Her mouth tightened into some terrible approximation of a smile. “We?”

“Of course. I want to help if I can. I know that some of this is my fault.”

She lowered herself back into her chair, closed her eyes and lowered her head in contemplation. “Perhaps we will make a true Gravane of you yet,” she said at last.

“Very well, Mr. Grey, I rescind my earlier demands. You are correct, we have bought time to act. And to act freely, the galaxy must continue to believe my son is safe and sequestered at the Academy. It seems your performance continues. If you are willing?”

“Sure. I mean, yes, I am.”

So, again, a member of the Gravane family asked me to pretend to be one of them. They were a strange family.

# # #

I stood outside the Grapnel classroom the next morning, staring out of the window. Across campus, Tartarus’s energy shield shimmered in the morning light, but for the first time since I arrived at the Academy, I had no reason to fear it. Even if my act was uncovered, I had a legitimate reason to be here, an actual job, no less. Which was weird, on several levels. But they wouldn’t send me to Tartarus for it.

In fact, for the first time since I spoke to that drunk on Meanwhile, as far as I could figure, I was… safe? That couldn’t be right. There must be something I was missing.

A group of students came through the doors from the stairwell, at the back, Lucy followed them.

“Morning, Lucy,” I said with a grin.

She walked straight past me, went to stand by the far side of the door to class. She turned her head away from me.

I crossed over to join her. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

That was not the reaction I’d expected. In the Gamma Bomb, I’d thought… “Did Dez say something?”

“Grey, just don’t. I don’t want to do this, not here, not at all, really. I thought… but then you couldn’t get away fast enough. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh.” What could I tell her about why I left? Nothing. And an evasion would be worse.

“I’m fine. I just don’t want to talk right now.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Well, there we go, start feeling safe, start feeling cheerful, life had a way of disappointing you. Now would be a great time to move to the next planet.

Instead, Tom the Avenging Spider arrived with the keys to the class, and we all filed in behind him.

# # #

That wrinkle aside, life at the Academy fell into a routine.

As good as her word, Mrs. Gravane’s money for my tuition came through like clockwork. My salary too. I’d never had so much free cash, and I put most of it away for rainy days I knew were coming.

At first, Mrs. Gravane called every few days. I’m not really sure why. I imagine she thought she was maintaining the illusion, but I think the truth was a little more complicated than that. She would ask me to go over my meeting with her son again, or the confrontation with his kidnapper or she would update me with the progress on the search for him. As time went on and leads dried up, she called me less, and when she did, the conversation would turn to my classes, or Gravane business affairs, or how the family was getting on.

I think for all Gravane’s opinion of his mother, she missed him very much.

But the calls tailed off. Days became weeks, then became months. I think we both knew that her son was gone. Each time we spoke, I started to raise the issue of how much longer she wanted me to keep up the pretence, but each time I stopped myself. For her part, she never mentioned it.

# # #

I rated high in Criminology and Clue Analysis classes. Professor Craft told me I had a remarkable insight into the criminal mind; I thanked her for her kind words but didn’t explain why I thought that might be.

To my surprise, I also began to excel in the combat classes. I hadn’t really thought that sort of thing was for me after I spent most of the Bantus fight getting rescued. But I kicked butt, particularly at the unarmed disciplines. Despite that, I was going to drop them; I had no interest in fighting, and hopefully, when this was all over, I wouldn’t need it.

But when I raised it with Professor Red Ninja, he said “Dunno if you’ll be a hero, don’t matter.” He looked like his name suggested but didn’t sound it. “Way I figure, if you’re rich as a Gravane, people’ll always come for ya. Reckon it’ll be good t’ know yer way around a scrap whatevers.”

I had to concede, so I kept in the class. And as the months passed, I think I even earned some grudging respect from Sunbolt.

We were called up to play Power Ball half a dozen times, and as a team, we slowly got better, though we were never in danger of troubling the league leaders. Seventhirtyfour was our leader and cheer squad all in one, but from time to time, when chips were down, and we needed a clever last-minute play, they’d all turn to me. My ideas worked more often than they didn’t.

“If we can beat the Glory Engines,” Dez told me, “I’ll even forgive you for not taking me to Bantus.”

Two goals later, and I was back in her good books again.

# # #

The winter break came. As one of the two long breaks in the academic year, most students took the opportunity to travel home to see families. I got offers from both Seventhirtyfour and Pilvi to visit with them, but I opted to stay on campus.

I spent the first week studying. There was a chance I’d still be at the Academy come exam time and I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

The next week I spent going over every inch of the Academy. During term, I’d toed the line, but now I opened every ‘no entry’ door, explored every maintenance corridor and access hatch. Found some places that I didn’t think anyone else had been in years. I filed those away as useful nuggets. It was strange to think a school that taught building infiltration still had such places, but it was the difference between learning a subject and living it.

I was musing that very point, hanging upside down over a tenth-floor lab when two students crashed through the door below me.

The Winged Knight, an armoured Polifan, stumbled backwards, shoulder-mounted flares erupting randomly, throwing the scene into sharp strobe light. Lady Psion, a human telekinetic, followed him in. She was laughing, shielding her eyes from the explosions of light.

In staccato, Winged Knight stabbed buttons on his wrist control until the flares suddenly stopped. He extended his wings, sheathed in the same metal as his armour. “Just stop it, okay? Funny joke, ha-ha, but leave off!”

Psion just pointed at him, and Knight’s wrist-mounted fire extinguisher engaged, gushing foam all over the floor.

I realised, slower than I should have, that Psion was telekinetically pressing buttons on Knight’s control panel, firing off random gadgets. An obnoxious prank and there was no telling what Knight packed into his arsenal – sooner or later Psion was going to stumble across something dangerous.

I let myself drop to the floor, careful to land outside the foam zone. “Morning chaps,” I said.

The Knight turned to me. “Step off, Phooey, this doesn’t concern you.”

That phased me for a moment. “’Phooey’? Oh, like the advert, because I’m a Skills student. I get that, that’s clever.”

The world twisted. Something grabbed my ankles, pulled them up, and I was caught, suspended in the air like some groundsider messing up in zero gravity.

“Like the Tech head said, Phooey, there’s nothing here for you, move on.” Lady Psion crossed her arms and smirked.

If Lady Psion hoped hanging me upside down would bother me, she was disappointed. “I would, but I seem to be floor-challenged right now. Look,” I said “I can see you guys have a whole thing going on here, and that’s cool. I guess. But flares and jets and fire extinguishers... somebody has to clean all this stuff up. If you want to aggravate each other over which is better, powers or tech...”

“Powers.”

“Tech.”

“Nice. Sure. Really grown up. If you want to argue the toss, then fine, but either tone down the collateral damage or take it to the gym. That’s set up to handle this kind of thing.”

Psion rolled her eyes. “Ugh. I was having such a good time, too.” She flicked her wrist and propelled me in a loop around the lab, accelerating me towards the back of Winged Knight’s knees. Knight realised too late what was happening and while he tried to sidestep my flight, it just put him skidding in the middle of his fire extinguisher foam.

I struck with bone-jarring speed, pain bursting in my left side as I clattered against the back of Knight’s legs. If he’d been planted firmly, the impact would have cost me broken bones for sure, but off-balance as he was, instead we both clattered to the ground, sliding through the foam. Bruises, stiffness and embarrassment, I could deal with.

I slipped and slid, trying to get upright again, ignored Lady Psion’s laughter, as she stood in the doorway, recording my efforts on her wrist pad.

“You look ridiculous,” she said. “Come on, Techs, you going to let the Phooey get upright first? Flap those wings.”

“Not going to give you the satisfaction,” Winged Knight said, and folded his arms, lying back in the foam, unmoving.

“I’m off to post this on the campus info stream. Laters!” She put her back against the door to open it, and spiralled out into the corridor, laughing all the way.

Finally, covered in foam, I managed to right myself. I planted my feet and stretched out a hand to Winged Knight. “She’s gone now.”

But the Polifan didn’t move. “I had that under control, Phooey.”

I pulled back my hand. “I was just trying to help.”

He stabbed buttons on his wrist control, and a micro-drone detached from his chest plate. It hovered in front of my nose, and as Knight prodded more buttons, it started making an electronic noise like a baby crying.

“Fine,” I said, “I take your point. Next time I won’t help.”

“You better hadn’t!”

The drone followed me around for twenty minutes before I finally managed to trap it in a supply cupboard. But Winged Knight seemed reluctant to let my attempt to help go unpunished, and over the next week, I’d occasionally encounter the wailing micro-drone again.

# # #

By the start of the third and final week of the winter break, I knew every inch of the Academy buildings (except Tartarus!) and had nowhere left to explore. I found myself with time on my hands that I had no obvious way to fill. For the first time in my life that I could remember, I experienced boredom. In times past, long before I could reach that point, I’d have been away onto another ship to find another station. But that wasn’t an option this time, for all sorts of reasons. But mostly, because I knew in only a week, things would be back to normal and I could distract myself again.

I spent the first morning stomping around campus some more, but it’s hard to maintain a proper sulk when avoiding screeching micro-drones.

In the afternoon, I applied to campus supplies and spent some of my savings on three tins of paint. The next day I painted my dorm room, a rather pleasant yellowy-brown colour. I found it really soothing. But it hadn’t filled as much of the week as I’d hoped.

By day four, I had to find something to do or go out of my mind. So I dug out all of the information I had about Gravane’s disappearance. All the stuff I remembered that his mother had told me, all the information I could find on the net, the rumours and conspiracy theories that had surfaced when he was kidnapped. Mrs. Gravane had had the best investigators that money could buy look into all this already, with the advantage of being able to follow leads on the ground, but this puzzle had never faced the nascent skills of a super-bored student criminologist.

So. Treat it like a class project. I requisitioned supplies and went to work. I made charts. Time-lines. I used up two boxes of highlighters and did that thing with pins and strings I’d seen in drama vids, though it wasn’t a technique we’d covered in class, so wasn’t entirely sure how it was supposed to help me. It killed a day but didn’t get me any closer to finding anything useful.

I went back to first principles. In my meeting with him, what had he said, how had he said it. Was there anything there? The one thing that stood out as odd, and this wasn’t a new revelation, I’d told Mrs. Gravane too, but when Gravane had been talking about why he had to go somewhere else, he had said that being sent to the Academy would take him away from “friends and... friends.” That pause had suggested something more than just friends and it wasn’t family, I was sure of that, so... a girlfriend? Or boyfriend? His mother had claimed not to know but given their relationship that was hardly surprising.

I scoured the tabloids and society papers that might cover Gravane and his circle of friends. Gravane was from a rich family; he had his share of stalkers and gold-diggers. I constructed a list, cross-referenced with people who were mentioned more than once. That pause, that pause was important and spoke to a connection. The list was long, but not impossibly so. I programmed a search tool to cross-reference the names on the list with their activity before, during and after Gravane’s disappearance. I left that running, it would take a while to return results.

What else did I have to go on? The only other stand-out point for me was something that Mrs. Gravane had asked, about Gravane’s bodyguard... Hordburg? No ... Hauberk, that was it. She had asked about him and seemed surprised when I said he was supposed to be reassigned when Gravane came to the Academy. Mrs. Gravane had never spoken to me about it again, but she’d clearly seen something in that. Did she suspect an inside job? It seemed obvious that the best person placed to kidnap a person was his bodyguard. I set another search program. It was a big universe, and I didn’t have much to go on, a last name and a general physical description. His association with the Gravanes seemed the most obvious ‘in’, so I added that as a factor to the search. Could I find where Hauberk was now?

Mrs. Gravane had never shown me the messages the kidnappers had sent her, and there was obviously no way to find those on the net, but they seemed to me like the third avenue of attack. I racked my brains for anything I could remember about them, from the little Mrs. Gravane had told me. It wasn’t enough to do anything useful with, not yet certainly. Still, I filed it and pinned it to the case board.

The first of my searches pinged up its initial findings, I paged them to the room console, projected them onto the wall so I could see them, literally big picture. I went through the output line-by-line.

At some point, Seventhirtyfour popped his head around the door and asked if I wanted to come down to dinner. I waved away the distraction with a grunt and cross-referenced the latest output of the first search with the output about Hauberk. There was something there. I pinned that to the case board as important.

And then, after what was probably an hour, I realised that Seventhirtyfour must be back on campus. And it was probably dinner time, or it had been.

Stiffly, I stood up. My bones seemed to creak in protest. I was exhausted, and ravenously hungry. What time was it? I checked the pad clock and blinked in surprise. What day was it?

Good grief. I must have worked on this for 36 hours straight. No wonder I was tired. And hungry. Too late for the canteen now. Perhaps it had been more than an hour since Seventhirtyfour was here. Still, the dorm kitchen had supplies. I opened my door to head across the hall, and there was a micro-drone staring me in the face. A light on it beeped, recognising me, and then it started up that awful screeching noise, which felt like a drill to the brain. I stared at it for a long few seconds while I processed this development. Then I closed the door on the drone. Couldn’t... face...

Suddenly was... unbelievably tired. Couldn’t... think. I staggered across to the bed. Sat down.

And was asleep.

# # #

By the end of the first week of term two, I was feeling more myself again. I’d caught up on my sleep, the micro-drone stalking seemed to be tailing off, and while I didn’t stop thinking about Gravane’s kidnapping, I was able to contain it to my back-brain and my search programs for the most part.

I was enjoying my expanded curriculum, Rescueology, in particular, proved to be a pretty awesome course, covering practical tips for getting innocent bystanders out of all manner of traps, tricks and ambushes. At the back of my mind, I wondered if it might someday come in handy to rescue Gravane.

Seventhirtyfour and Dez had both signed up for the class too, and we’d managed to get into a team for the group project; we had to plan a three-handed rescue of a ten-year-old girl in a simulation scenario. The simulation had been designed to our specifications, so there was an established solution using our skills, we just had to find it, or something better. We held a lunchtime summit over a communal bowl of chips.

“Well the obvious solution,” Dez said speculatively, dipping a chip in the ketchup “would be for Grey to keep the villain talking, while I sneak around the back and untie the girl. You saw how I did in that ropes and knots session. Mad skills.” She flourished a chip to make the point.

“Maybe,” rumbled Seventhirtyfour, “but if the girl is drugged, or uncooperative, you wouldn’t be able to carry her away. I could, but I can’t sneak up there to her. Grey may make a great distraction, but there are limits.”

“Well okay,” I countered, “maybe we can create some sort of diversion, pull the villain out of the room with the girl, then Seventhirtyfour doesn’t need to sneak anywhere.”

Dez nodded enthusiastically. “I like it! So, we just need to work out something that would call him away from his victim. Oh! Perhaps the simulation knows about my singing ability, does it say he has a favourite song? Check the file!”

Seventhirtyfour looked dubious but pulled up the villain file on his pad all the same. “Maybe I can find something non-musical too.”

I went back to poring over the scenario blueprints, and Dez worked her way through the food, distractedly people-watching the canteen around us.

I was trying to work out which me the simulation was designed to work with. Mirabor Gravane and I had different skill-sets, and while I didn’t think tax law was the solution here if the puzzle was designed to his strengths, not mine, we might actually be in trouble. That said, I’d spent enough time here, sat enough pop-quizzes and had enough evaluations that if it was actually now playing to my strengths instead of Gravane’s... there was a tempting looking access shaft right above where the villain was holding the girl. Could I make use of that somehow? It seemed almost too well placed...

“Oh hey, that’s a cute little drone,” said Dez.

“Ugh. Ignore it, it’s just the Winged Knight playing one of his hilarious jokes. He’s an idiot. If it starts making a noise, just throw something at it, that usually works.”

Dez shook her head. “Doesn’t look like one of Winged Knight’s designs...”

Seventhirtyfour’s head snapped up, eyes wide. With his upper arms, he reached across the table, grabbed Dez and me, and yanked us over to his side. Meanwhile, his lower hands heaved up and tipped the table over. It happened so fast, I just had time for a surprised yelp... and then the drone exploded.