SEVENTY-THREE

 

 

TÉTREAU CAME WITH the bad news, but Gaschel had already heard it. Dauzat was with her, sitting on the other side of the big desk. At first Tétreau almost retreated. They were sitting so still, he thought he’d interrupted an argument. No one signalled him in, but finally, he entered, closed the door, and sat beside Dauzat.

“Monsieur Labourière isn’t here, so I drafted a statement for you, Madame la Présidente,” he said.

Gaschel’s eyes locked on him from the first word. She checked her pad, where the draft was already in her files. As she read it, Dauzat looked at him inscrutably. The statement lamented the loss of life and the valued advice of Marthe D’Aquillon in l’Assemblée. It also minimized the loss of the Causapscal-des-Vents, an old habitat that had already been slated for recycling.

“It’s fine,” Gaschel said. She put down her pad. “Not true, but it’s fine.”

“The Causapscal-des-Vents?” he said.

“More than forty tons of materials,” she said. “And Marthe gave no valued advice. Ever. She never understood the decisions that needed to be made for four thousand people.”

“At least it wasn’t sabotage,” he said after screwing up his courage.

“You know something we don’t?” Gaschel said in irritation.

“Marthe D’Aquillon wasn’t stupid. She was trying to save it until the end, long after she should have given up. And she died for her trying. That’s not the sign of someone committing sabotage.”

Gaschel regarded him for a few moments, and he thought he’d overstepped. Then she waved her hand.

“And the radioisotopes,” she said. “Woodward probably already reported the radiation to her superiors. They’ll be pressuring her for answers and closure.”

“The radioisotopes are really strange,” he said. “Uranium and thorium, along with decay products like polonium and radium, but all of them as salts and oxides. They haven’t been refined at all, or even purified. The different radioisotopes have been pressed together in a jumble.”

Gaschel frowned. “That doesn’t sound like anything a Bank would provide.”

“It sounds like what someone might have found on the surface or in a mine,” Tétreau said.

“Against the odds, someone found a vein of radioactives in the crust and has been mining it,” Gaschel said. She looked into the distance, at the cloudtops. “That’s good news for our credit rating with the Bank. Now we have to find our busy little miners. Get to it, Tétreau.”

His chair scraped on the floor. “Oui, madame.”