“I’m sure we’d have found it, sir. But we weren’t looking at the logs. We have additional data in Operations,” Kasik said. “And I’ve requested technicians for more analysis.”
Singh realized his daydreaming of the high consul’s patronage had stretched into an awkward pause. Before he could reply, something shifted at the edge of his vision. Someone walking toward him with the purposeful stride of a messenger making a delivery. Except that the person striding toward him was Langstiver. The man who’d brought him the news of the new and glorious discovery. A small group of Belters were following him. He assumed Langstiver was coming to demand a reward for his information.
“I don’t want—” Singh began, but his Marine guard had put one hand on his chest and shoved him back. Kasik nodded at him sharply one time, then spit berry-colored saliva all over his face.
The Marine yanked Singh to the ground, hard, then knelt over him, shielding him with her body. Her knees pressed into his spine until it hurt. Singh heard her shouting orders, muffled by her helmet, to the rest of her detail. And then he heard nothing but the deafening ripping-paper sound of multiple rapid-fire weapons opening up. His guard was sitting on top of him and blocking his view, but the space between her thigh and calf as she crouched created a small triangular window on the carnage.
Langstiver and half a dozen other people were dancing backward as four Laconian Marines cut them to pieces with streams of high-velocity plastic safety rounds. It felt like the firing went on forever, like the bullets were keeping the assassins from falling. In reality it could only have lasted a few seconds. He experienced a little discontinuity in his consciousness, like he’d fallen briefly asleep, though that was impossible, and his Marine had yanked him to his feet and was shoving him back toward the administrative offices. The other members of her fire team slowly backed toward them, weapons at the ready.
Lieutenant Kasik still stood near the carts, not having moved during the entire firefight. He looked like he’d spit raspberry pie filling onto his lips, and he was twitching like an epileptic experiencing a grand mal. Singh understood something that had been eluding him.
“Kasik’s been shot,” he said. The pie filling on his face was the ruins of his lips from where the bullet had exited. The spray of red on Singh’s face and uniform wasn’t spit, it was his aide’s blood.
“Medical has already been alerted,” his Marine said, thinking he was talking to her.
“But no,” Singh said. She didn’t understand. “He’s been shot.”
She shoved him through the admin-building door and slammed it shut behind her. Just before it closed, the shocked silence that had followed the gunfire ended, and from a hundred voices outside the screaming started.
Kasik died on an operating table three hours after the attack. According to the report, he’d been shot in the back of the head, the bullet fracturing the occipital lobe of his skull and nicking his medulla oblongata. It then passed through the back of his throat and nearly severed his tongue, before shattering five teeth and exiting through his lips. Singh read the surgeon’s section of the incident report half a dozen times. Each time felt like the first.
None of the Marine security detail had been harmed in the exchange of fire, though several civilians had received minor injuries from bullet fragments, and one boy of nine had broken his arm while attempting to flee down a short flight of steps. All seven of the Belter radicals who’d attempted the assassination were dead. The intelligence people were digging into their past associations to see if the rebellion had roots that spread farther.
Rebellion.
The word felt wrong to Singh. The most Langstiver and his accomplices could have hoped for was his death. It would have done nothing to hand control of the station back to the Belters who’d once run it. Trejo would simply have assigned another officer to fill his place until a new governor could be dispatched from Laconia. It was all so short-sighted. So wasteful. Seven people had decided to toss their lives away on a symbol.
These are people who have a history of resisting centralized authority, Colonel Tanaka had said. He hadn’t understood. He did now. They weren’t rational. They weren’t disciplined. They valued their own lives less than the prospect of his death.
What struck him most—what offended him as much as the still-implausible idea that he’d watched Kasik be murdered—was the monstrous ingratitude of it. The hubris of believing that Duarte’s path for humanity’s future was worth killing innocent people to resist. And after Trejo had been so generous with them.
He tapped the monitor lying on his desk, and the comm officer in security replied with a crisp, “Yes, sir.”
“Please have Colonel Tanaka report to me in my office immediately.”
“Sir, yes sir.”
Singh killed the connection almost before the officer finished speaking. He looked around his office, not to take in anything new so much as to judge his own mind. He wasn’t feeling the shuddering in his hands anymore. His eyes were able to move from the door to his desk to the little ferns in their planters beside the wall without jittering back and forth of their own accord. He’d been in shock. Only a little. And only for a short time. It was normal. Natural. Expected. The physiological effects were only the consequence of being an animal in a stressful situation. There was no reason for him to feel ashamed.
And yet, when Tanaka entered the room with that little half smirk on her lips, he had to rein his anger in. Is this funny to you? He didn’t say it.
“Sir,” she said, bracing. “You wanted to see me?”
“I was almost murdered today,” Singh said. “I found your silence on the matter disturbing.”
Tanaka’s expression shifted. A little chagrin, maybe? It was hard to tell with her. Her voice didn’t have the crispness he’d expect of someone being dressed down. “I apologize. After your safety was established, my focus was on the response and investigation. I should have reported in sooner.”
“Yes, well,” Singh said. “Are you ready to make your report now?”
Tanaka gathered her thoughts visibly, then nodded to the chair across the desk from his, silently asking his permission to sit. He waved a hand. She sat, leaning forward, her elbows resting on her knees.
“The basic facts appear straightforward. The attempt was instigated and organized by Langstiver. He was the head of security before we came, and his co-conspirators were drawn from the ranks of the local security force.”
“Why weren’t we monitoring them?” Singh asked.
“We were. But it appears that Langstiver wasn’t using the station network. My team is still digging into it, but it looks like he did his coordination and planning on an encrypted network set up in the power conduits. Physically separate from the main system the way the Storm is from Medina. Air-gapped. From what we can tell, it was put in by criminal elements in Medina Station. Langstiver also had relationships there.”
Singh leaned back a centimeter in his chair. “Criminal elements? You mean he was corrupt?”
“It’s not unusual on this side of the gate,” Tanaka said. “And it makes the investigation more complicated than I’d like. Add to that, he appears to have purged several caches of data he still had access to and inserted false entries into what we have got. And Langstiver and his little friends aren’t going to be questioned by anyone but God at this point.”
“But you’ve found the network they were using.”
“One of them,” Tanaka said. “There may be others. Part of the problem is that Medina wasn’t run as a military installation. There were—and probably still will be—competing levels of culture and infrastructure. Controlling the official channels is trivial, but even the officials were using additional undocumented frameworks. It’s not like the locals have to create ways to get around our surveillance. All those ways were built in before we showed up.”
She lifted her hands in a shrug. Singh had a stark flashbulb memory of Kasik, and with it a powerful, all-pervading dread. In his imagination, Nat and the monster were looking at a picture of him with blood spilling down his chin. It wasn’t the prospect of his own death that brought the flush of rage. It was how cavalier Tanaka was being with them.
“Well, we’ll have to address that directly, then,” Singh said. “Mandatory curfews and roaming checkpoints will be a start. And restrict the station security forces to quarters until they can be interrogated and evaluated for service. And I’ll want a list of anyone who might pose a threat moving forward for precautionary monitoring. And … hm. Yes, and coordinate that through the Gathering Storm. If we can’t be sure the local system’s clean, we should use our own. The most important thing is that the systems on the Gathering Storm not be compromised.”