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ROWENA TILTED THE GLOSSED piece of metal sheeting she was using as a mirror and compared the image to the one she’d downloaded as a reference for Tarrin business clothes. The shirt was a stretchy, ribbed material cut with a high collar, no sleeves, and dyed a color called Deep Cranberry. The slacks and jacket were cut like the suit from her first encounter with Dr. Keen, but this time dyed a deep hull-metal gray with metallic accents threaded in.
On the grounder model it looked elegant and intimidating. On her it looked... Rowena glared at her reflection. Well...
It was clothes.
It wasn’t a uniform. It didn’t allow for the same movement her coveralls did. But the jacket did hide the knife sheath hidden under her belt at the small of her back.
She tried letting her black hair down and grimaced. Too easy to grab.
Even if they were meeting at the doctor’s office and not in the morgue, it was too risky.
Her implant pinged with a distress code, a bright red flare and Aronia’s signature image of a bowl of black berries and white flowers.
:What’s wrong?:
:I need you here for a few minutes.:
Rowena tagged the Enclave shield as she teleported to her sister’s house in the university district of Tarrin. She landed in the small living room with a tiny beige couch and a faded green blanket from the Danielle Nicole’s ship stores with a metal rattle she’d fabricated for her nephew. The off-white walls were bare except for a layer of dust.
Aronia hurried toward her down the hall, the only thing delineating the living space from the kitchen and dining space, and shrugged apologetically. “Thank you for coming. Ki isn’t sleeping well these days.” She held up the nearly one-year-old baby as proof.
Ki glared as best as a child could from under a thatch of dark hair, his pudgy cheeks and lips chapped from drool. Aronia had told her about teething babies and it looked as horrific as it sounded.
“I can take him later this evening,” Rowena said. “I don’t know who’s scheduled for family duty, but he can come play with me while I run diagnostics. Couldn’t you?” She held out her hands to the baby.
Ki’s lower lip trembled as his eyes filled with tears.
“That’s not the problem,” Nia said. “I need you to check on Yunjin.”
The mention of the name brought up Rowena’s file on the cadet. “I saw her this morning. Her shields need work, but she’s doing all right in class.”
“It’s not class I’m worried about. Hoshi has started handing out assignments for the cadets. Their first training berths.”
Rowena blinked. How had she missed that? “It’s a bit early for that. They aren’t near graduating yet.”
Nia lifted a shoulder in a tired shrug. “You know how he is.”
“I know there’s only one Lee in my class, and that’s Yunjin. Who else is he giving assignments to?”
“Some of the kids on his side.”
“Ones who didn’t make it past the fleet screening tests to get a slot in the Academy classes?” Rowena asked in disbelief. “What kind of cre—” She cut off her sentence. “I told him that I would work with those cadets on crew time and help them. A few weeks working with me and they could pass the next round of evaluations. Catch the next training cycle.”
Nia nodded. “Hoshi has been training them.”
“Idiot.” She looked at Ki. “Sorry, I shouldn’t bad mouth a captain in front of a future officer.”
Nia tucked her son’s head under her chin as she held him close. “Tay is upset. So am I. We’re...” Nia blinked back a tear and Rowena caught the emotions she was hiding behind a tight shield. “We’re thinking of handing in our commissions. Both of us. We can raise Ki here in Tarrin, away from the fleet.”
“What?”
“I’m a lieutenant, but no one listens to me,” Nia said. “I haven’t been promoted in four years. I don’t have my squad’s respect. I can’t even get a meeting with my captain for anything. Not even an officer evaluation, and I’m supposed to have those yearly.”
Rowena sucked her cheeks in.
There was still time before her meeting with Tyrling.
Killing Hoshi wouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
“Don’t,” Nia said, seeing her expression. “Don’t even think about it. Tay’s family is still on board.”
“Then tell them to get off board!”
“Yunjin is a good officer!” Nia’s voice cracked with emotion. “She’s so bright, Ro. So sweet. She’s going to make an outstanding officer, if Hoshi just lets her try. And she wants it so much. Tay’s family has never had a senior officer in their line.”
Rowena perched on the back of the couch. “We can get her into another crew. I have friends, a few favors I could call in... The Carylls need junior officers aboard the Persephone.”
“She’s a Lee!” Nia said. “She shouldn’t have to give that up.”
“Then what do you want me to do?” Rowena looked at her sister, emotions bubbling across the family link. She’d do anything for Nia. Anything.
Nia looked guilty. “Could you... can you talk to Hoshi about giving her a good berth?”
“Me? What alternate reality did you come from and where’s my sister? Hoshi Lee isn’t going to do anything I want!”
“Couldn’t you get your own ship?” Nia asked. “Start a new Lee crew?”
Her sister had been reading the fantasy nishu books again. “How? I don’t have time to rebuild a hull. I don’t have the resources to trade for it.”
“You have the Danielle Nicole as dowry.” Nia said, cheeks blushing. “If you married someone you could—”
“M-marry?” The word filled her throat, choking her. “Aronia Shiyang Lee! Have you lost your hull-cracked mind?
Nia looked away, holding her son tight. “We can’t afford an internal war and no one wants to break away.”
“What poor person were you going to sacrifice to be my spouse?” Rowena tried to keep her voice level, but it wasn’t working. “Spouses expect things. Like... touching, and comfort, and love, and all those things I am no good at.”
Nia grimaced. “I was hoping you’d outgrow some of that.”
“I haven’t.” Rowena rubbed a hand over her eyes. “Look, I need to go meet with the grounders. I will do what I can for Yunjin. Talk to some of the sub-captains at least. They’re all waiting on repairs and I can trade expedited repairs for a request to Hoshi for Yunjin.” She took a deep breath. “Are you really going to resign your commission?”
“I might,” Nia said. “I don’t want to, but the fleet’s made it clear there’s no career for me there. There are good engineering firms here on the ground. I have an internship with the hypertram company next month.”
“Lethe?” Rowena asked in surprise. She shook her head.
“I know what you think, but it’s local stuff. Nothing to do with the Lethes. Or Sonya. Or whoever is in charge.”
“Still...”
“I’ll be fine,” Nia promised. “And I’ll wait a bit longer. Finish the schooling here at least, before I leave the fleet. But, Rowena, I can’t wait forever. And I don’t want to leave you. If you can’t find a way to get promoted, I want you to come with me. I want you to leave the fleet.”
The cold of vacuum squeezed Rowena’s heart. What was she supposed to say? Nia needed her. Baby Ki needed her. What she wanted didn’t matter. “Okay.”
There were more important things than her dreams.
Doctor Keen’s office was divided into a visitor section with couches and low, stone table, and her work area with diagrams of human bodies and red stone desk piled with books. It all felt very... organic.
Tryling had been waiting for Rowena outside with one of his junior officers, a thin young man with close-cut brown hair who looked too young to be at this meeting. Maybe it was seeing baby Ki. She was feeling old.
Rowena sat on one of the short couches listening to the doctor explain how the rest of the autopsy had gone. Names of muscles and surgical cuts droned past without needing her attention.
“This is the only possible cause of death,” Keen concluded as she lay a small silver and blue orb no larger than a hazelnut on the table between them.
“Interesting design,” Tyrling said before passing it to his second.
The Jhandarmi officer passed it to Rowena and her implant pinged off the telekyen and orun. She held it up to the light. The central part was a blue glass of some kind, with something inside cradling the sliver of orun. Plasma possibly. Or a liquid. The metal caps on the orb were silver in color, cold to the touch, and veined with nanite wiring.
“The materials are ones we use in fleet,” Rowena said. “But the design isn’t anything I’ve seen before.”
Her implant could find nothing similar in the records. Which didn’t rule out some sort of priority tech, or expunged and redacted tech. But there was something else. “It feels... grown? Fleet likes to make things symmetrical. If I made something like this, I’d start with the innermost layer and work out. The outer layers would be the newest. This feels like the outer layer is the oldest.”
“How could you possibly tell?” Keen asked. “Unless the center was replaced, it was all made at the same time.”
Rowena rolled the orb in her hand, testing the weight of it, felt the heat of the orun and energy inside. It was heavy for its size and still generating more heat than the orun crystal could account for. “There are techniques for measuring age.” And a process. Her implant brought up engineering techniques of the Third Wave of Colonization. “The metal flowers of the Arborian Moons.”
“The what?” Tyrling looked at her in confusion.
“It’s an old story that came with the Marshals, the old Fleet Marshals. One of their ships was from the Arborian System, the Willow Bough, and it had a garden of growing metals. The ship was destroyed in one of the early wars, but the lore says they could manufacture telekyen objects the same way a plant pushes out blossoms.”
The Jhandarmi officer held out his hand for the orb. “Could it be that old?”
“Sure,” Rowena said. “There isn’t a hull in the fleet that is younger than a thousand years. The Malik System is metal-poor. Ninety-seven percent of the metals you see every day were shipped in while we were still in contact with the Empire. Everything has been made to last. Retro-fitted, repaired, but never wasted. Never lost.”
“It doesn’t explain what it was doing in my patient’s body,” the doctor said. “It was molded around his heart. Flattened out somehow. I tried squeezing it, but...” She gestured towards the hard metal sphere.
Rowena nodded. “It’s telekyen, which means it can be manipulated.”
“By someone with a fleet augmentation?” Tyrling asked.
She hesitated; that was sticky political ground. “I could do it. Most officers could. But there are other ways. Before we adopted standard augmentations, the fleet and colonists used telekyen for a number of things. There are machines that could manipulate it.”
“But, how would a native find the machine?” the Jhandarmi officer asked. “It’s not like they’re common.”
“Every print and shipping office should have one,” Rowena said. “Those shops where you order something and the machine prints the item or pieces for you? All of those can manipulate telekyen. Any shipping office would have a fabricator that morphs telekyen to create specialty-sized shipping containers.”
Tyrling grimaced. “That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”
“Sorry.” She shrugged apologetically. “If you give me some time, I might be able to break it down and figure out how it works.”
“Time is something we have in short supply.” Tyrling exchanged glances with his officer. “We’ll do it the old way. Send people to track down what Briceno was doing before he died. Talk to friends, family, co-workers. Check the cameras and retrace his steps. Lee?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Can you find a way to track devices like this?”
Rowena checked the satellites available to her. “I could do it right now. That’s a matter of coding. But if you want a way for the Jhandarmi to do the search without me, that will take some time. I would need to find a way for you to use a fleet scanner without triggering the shields over Tarrin.”
Taking down the shields and doing a quick sweep would be the easiest solution, and also the most obvious.
“No one knows we have this yet, do they?” Rowena asked.
Dr. Keen shook her head. “I found something with a similar density and slipped it into the decedent. It’s inert, but the family was planning to bury him at sea as part of one of the living reefs. It’s unlikely anyone would notice the difference.”
“Unless this is a way of smuggling data,” Tyrling said. The Jhandarmi were still reeling from the loss of priority information the year before, and it had sensitized them to the ways data could be stolen and smuggled
Rowena took the orb back and scanned it. “If there was data, it’s not there now. All I can find is an instruction code for protein releases. And... this is still active. It’s operational.” Too late she realized that by dismissing it as a grounder device she’d ignored the potential threat. The whole mission would be compromised if this were a listening device. She put a heavy shield over it to block any further transmissions.
“What kind of protein releases?” Dr. Keen asked. “Could it trigger muscle movement?”
Rowena nodded. “This could be as simple as an experimental heart monitor. Or something meant to regulate an irregular heartbeat.”
“Something to ask the family,” Tyrling said. “They didn’t mention a cardiac condition when we spoke, but people can be notoriously tight-lipped about that sort of thing.”
“Experimental medicine isn’t shameful,” Dr. Keen said with a fierce glare that made Rowena smile.
“But being too proud to use the standard healthcare would look bad, politically,” Tyrling said.
The doctor frowned. “Was Briceno looking at a political run?”
“There are rumors,” Tyrling said. “But, at the moment, those are only rumors. We need facts before I can dismiss this case as medical negligence. Besides, heart monitors don’t generally get corpses moving again.” His tone suggested that he doubted it was medical at all.
Rowena was inclined to agree. From what she knew of the grounder scientists, she couldn’t picture them letting a patient die and not following up. Dr. Keen should have had calls from the patient’s attending physician within hours of the death announcement.
The silence was damning.
“There is another possible method,” Rowena said slowly. “I might be able to track the movement of the device. If we compare that path to Briceno’s, it would at least tell us where he picked it up.”
Tyrling raised his eyebrows. “How could you do that? I was told telekyen was untrackable.”
“Telekyen is too common to track, but orun isn’t. Each orun crystal has a slightly different pattern of vibration. It causes disruption patterns at a quantum level that allow you to track the path of crystal. The problem is that the disruption pattern lingers for decades. In space, it’s useless. The ships have crisscrossed the solar system so many times that there’s too much noise. But on the planet?” She shrugged. “Orun is rare. Theoretically, I can re-task a satellite to track the crystal’s movements.”
She’d have to beg a favor from Titan and sweet talk the Persephone into listening to her. Loop him in on this. Risky, but of all the people she knew, Titan was one of the few she could trust. He wouldn’t let word of orun mining get around fleet.
Tyrling nodded. “Get on it. Report in as soon as you have anything.”
Rowena acknowledged him with a smile. “I will.”