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Chapter Six


Spin One


Mara “Bruce” Lee and Naliryiz were already in Interview One’s observation room when Murphy arrived. The latter did not meet his eyes immediately.

Mara, on the other hand, joined him near their side of the one-way mirror, jerked her head at the figure behind it. “So this is the ‘ringer’?”

Murphy studied the handcuffed man: a medium build that had been raised in full gee. His severe features were probably fairly attractive to women, although they were mottled by fading bruises: reminders of the beating he’d taken after being pulled off Vat. “I believe that’s our man. Won’t know until I talk to him.” He glanced at Naliryiz. “I take it you are here as witness for Primus Anseker.”

“I am.”

“And Legate Orgunz?”

Mara raised an eyebrow. “He replied to the invitation with—and I quote: ‘I do not need to send an observer if Murphy is the source of the report.’” The chopper-jockey raised her other eyebrow. “No surprise?”

Murphy shrugged. “Most of the people about to get spaced a week ago were RockHounds.”

Mara shook her head. “That doesn’t wash, Murph. This kind of trust . . . damn, what did you do? Summon the Sea of Galilee and then walk on it?”

Murphy smiled at her. “You’d have to ask Orgunz.” Which was no less than the truth; even if the RockHounds’ visit signified a big uptick in his popularity with their Legate, it still wasn’t prudent, or safe, to reveal.

Naliryiz joined them at the observation panel. “Why is this Kulsian a ‘ringer’?”

“Well, it’s not him exactly. But I believe he’s the key to getting accurate information out of Yukannak.”

“I do not understand.”

Murphy nodded. “After we destroyed the inter-system transmitter and the coursers scattered to find refuge with the satraps, we started looking for any of them who’d be sources of accurate information about the surveyors and the Harvesters. Problem is, most of the coursers are just raiders; plenty of violence and energy, not much in the way of brains. We found only one who was useful.”

Naliryiz nodded. “Yukannak. Who betrayed the team that seized the lighter from Downport.”

“Yes. But from the start, it’s been difficult to tell just how much disinformation he mixes in with the intel he shares.”

Naliryiz studied the man in the austere interview room. “So he may be able to tell you when Yukannak is lying.” Her violet eyes returned to Murphy’s; he forgot where he was for a split second. “But why would he be any more reliable than Yukannak? Why would he be willing to betray his own people?”

Murphy nodded. “That’s what we’re here to find out.” He turned his sidearm over to Mara. “Major, we do this by the book.”

“Then you should have Janusz or other dedicated security here, not me.”

“There’s a problem with that: nothing the subject says can leave this room. I’m making an audio recording, but that’s it.”

“Why all the skullduggery, Murph? It’s not like there’s anyone waiting to get word of his whereabouts and send in an extraction team. And good luck to them, if there was one.”

Murphy smiled. “All true, but I’ll sleep better knowing that the only people who are aware of this subject’s value are people who I know personally and who have a history of being able to keep secrets. So humor me, yeah?”

Mara shrugged. “Knock yourself out.” Naliryiz started. Mara rolled her eyes. “Just another of our stupid expressions. Go ahead, Colonel; I’ve got your back.”

As Murphy entered, the Kulsian drive tech looked up warily, then looked away: sullen and resolved.

Murphy recognized the expression from Mogadishu and a few other less well-advertised places where the US brought prisoners of particular interest. There, the process was typically one of wearing the prisoner down, asking innocuous questions to get any responses at all. That typically proved to be the edge of the wedge that split a subject’s silence wide open.

But in this case, time was very limited. The three individuals in Interview One could not routinely gather together without being missed elsewhere. And the more frequent those absences became, the less easy—and less plausible—any false explanations would become. So the only way to keep the debrief—and its subject’s importance—confidential was to act quickly. Consequently, rather than wearing him down, Murphy had to use the equivalent of shock therapy.

He crossed his arms. “Lanunaz, I’m not here to talk about you. I’m here to talk about Benreka.”

The drive tech started violently, then became panicked. “Why do you all want to know about Benreka? Is she in trouble? Is she safe? I swear: if any of you bastards have hurt her—”

“Lanunaz.” Murphy said it loudly but calmly, as if he was passing down a sentence on a murderer.

Lanunaz’s mouth snapped shut.

“Lanunaz,” Murphy repeated more casually, “let’s start with the obvious. You are in no position to make threats or demands. Yes, we are interested in Benreka. More importantly, like you, we want to ensure that she remains safe.”

The Kulsian frowned, fretted, started to reply, stuttered into silence. Clearly out of his depth. “It’s all a trick,” he finally muttered, looking away.

And thank you for the opening, Lanunaz. “Let me prove that the last thing I want to do is trick you, Lanunaz. Not because I’m a nice guy—I’m not, although I’m not a bad guy, either. But I do have a goal. And I’m pretty sure it’s very similar to yours.”

“And what is my goal?”

Murphy shrugged. “To be with Benreka. Of course.”

Lanunaz swallowed.

“The only thing I have in common with your first interviewer is that I’ve read all of Benreka’s letters to you, Lanunaz. And it’s clear that you have very serious feelings for each other. That—and only that—is why you’re useful to me.”

As was often the case, frank and pitiless admission of the interviewer’s interests had a very sobering effect upon the subject. The exchange had just become faintly transactional. It baited over eighty percent of prisoners out of the deepest holes of silence, and Lanunaz was clearly not a hardened criminal who knew the ropes. Better still, Murphy had told the unvarnished truth, which subjects usually detected.

“What do you want?” Lanunaz asked.

Murphy heard that question as if it was a deadbolt being thrown back. “We want you and Benreka to read some documents.”

Lanunaz frowned, tilted his head as if he suspected something had obstructed his ear. “Read documents?”

“Read documents,” Murphy confirmed. “I’ll explain.”

And, like a suspicious but eager schoolchild, Lanunaz leaned forward, attentive but uncertain he would understand what came next.

“The first interviewer revealed that we have control over a significant slice of R’Bak’s surface, particularly in the Ashbands, the Hamain, and the Greens. You know where those are, I presume.”

Lanunaz nodded cautiously.

Of course you do, since Benreka is a scouting surveyor. “During the campaign to control those regions, we captured a relatively high-ranking Kulsian prisoner: a wa’hrektop who’d been made a silci by the J’Stull satrapy. He’d fled to Imsurmik just before we seized it. He has provided us with general information as well as revealing your forces’ communications and operating protocols.”

Murphy was careful to appear unattentive to Lanunaz’s expression, but peripherally saw what he had hoped to: utter disinterest. No hint of outrage or even disdain that a fellow Kulsian had decided to help the Overlords’ enemies.

“Unfortunately, this informer is not entirely reliable. That’s where you and Benreka come in. From now on, we’re going to pass any of what he tells us through the two of you. We want you to simply tell us where he’s speaking the truth, lies, or has left out important caveats or additional facts. Do you understand?”

Lanunaz nodded. “What I don’t understand is why you think we won’t mislead you, too.”

“Well, firstly, you and she won’t be together when you go over his reports.”

“What? You said—!”

“Lanunaz, I said we want to ensure Benreka’s safety. I said nothing about the two of you being together. At least, not until we have secured control of this system.”

“Then how—?”

“Lanunaz: just listen.”

Lanunaz seemed to swallow his lips.

“Our informer is from the less privileged classes of Kulsis, but he still hopes to ingratiate himself with the forces of the Overlords. He believes that by misleading us, he can claim he tried to remain loyal to them. That way, they may at least allow him to live, maybe even reward him.” Murphy paused and studied Lanunaz carefully. “But you don’t have any such hopes, do you? In fact, you have every reason to hope that we come to control this system—since that’s the only possible way for you and Benreka to be together, isn’t it?”

Lanunaz’s mouth had sagged. “How do you know?”

Murphy shrugged. “What she didn’t write in her letters to you is there between the lines. And it’s in line with what our informer told us about Kulsis: a lot of arrogant people with immense prejudices.”

Lanunaz looked away; not just his face, but even his neck had become a bright red. He was silent for three full seconds. “How do I know we can trust you?”

Know you can trust us?” Murphy shook his head. “I have no way to prove that. All I can do is be as forthright as possible. That’s why I won’t paint any pretty pictures for you. We obviously don’t trust you; that’s one of the two reasons we’re keeping you and Benreka apart. Each one of you is leverage to ensure the cooperation of the other.”

“And the other reason?”

“Without any way to coordinate what you report to us, we’ll know if one or both of you are lying as well.”

“So, when you’ve got all the information you need, how do we know you won’t just kill us? Cover up your tracks?”

Murphy sighed. “Look, this is going to be a long process. Even once you and Benreka are reunited”—Lanunaz sat up sharply—“we’ll still need insiders’ views of Kulsian society, habits, and thought.”

“By then, you’ll probably have others with new information, so you could just kill us, at that point.”

Murphy shook his head. “But why would we? Besides, we want to minimize the number of sources we have to manage, hide, and protect. Also, the more we recruit, the greater the odds that one of them will have a change of heart, escape, and alert the Overlords to all the information we’ve been gathering about them.”

Lanunaz glanced away. “What you say is convincing, but it’s not a guarantee.”

Murphy just waited and let him do the math. Unable to trust his captors and without any leverage of his own, he had only two choices: accept or decline. And given what life on Kulsis had taught him to expect, he probably assumed that choosing the latter would incur swift and grim consequences.

Lanunaz sighed. “How do we start?”

“Two things. First, you help us get Benreka to safety.”

“What? She’s in danger?”

“No, she’s in the field with other surveyors.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Not yet, but that will be changing. Very soon. That’s why we need you to tell us her current unit or location. Either will do.”

Lanunaz swallowed, pushed back from the table. “No. You’re just trying to scare me, to get me to tell you where you can grab her. Kill her! Maybe that’s what you’re really trying to do!”

Murphy told himself that in Lanunaz’s place, he might not be thinking very straight, either. “I’m not trying to scare you, but yes, of course we have to have her in our custody. But killing her?” Murphy shook his head. “Benreka is a low-level survey officer without any special clearances. Why would anyone go to all this trouble to kill her?”

“Ransom,” Lanunaz snapped without doubt or hesitation.

Murphy, who’d thought the deal was sealed, started—and damned himself for dropping his guard. “Her parents are . . . are that wealthy?”

Lanunaz studied his “interviewer” with surprise and then a bit of malign satisfaction—before realization softened his expression. “So you really didn’t know her parents are rich. Which means—”

“Which means we are doing this for the reasons we say.” Although if Benreka’s family is that well connected, she could prove a better intel source than we dared hope for.

Lanunaz nodded. “Okay, I can help you find her. You said there was a second thing?”

“You were a technician on one of the most advanced Kulsian corvettes.”

The most advanced,” he corrected proudly.

Murphy nodded. “So you clearly have considerable knowledge about your ship and the surveyor flotilla in general. So we want to know if, when the Harvesters enter the system, they’ll follow similar protocols.”

Lanunaz put up his hands. “I was just an engineer’s mate on the nuke drive. I wasn’t around for any meeting with the bastard officers. Fate and filth: they didn’t even want me in the same room with them.”

Murphy nodded. “That’s fine. We’re not looking for specific plans, just day-to-day operations and anything that came up in conversation. And in the pre-mission brief.”

Lanunaz frowned but nodded. “What do you want to know about first?”

* * *

Murphy waited for Timmy Uggs to close the office hatch behind him before resuming his perusal of the highlights from the transcript of Lanunaz’s review of Kulsian space operations. Given what he’d revealed about Harvester fleets, Bowden’s production and battle planning would become much more focused and, if not easier, at least less tentative.

Normally, there would still be a two-year window before the Harvesters arrived. That agreed with what the Families had observed and Yukannak had reported, but Lanunaz was unable to speculate on how much recent events—the unexplained loss of the coursers and now, a prize corvette—might accelerate their timetable.

The actual mission time between Kulsis and R’Bak—or more accurately, the primary star Jrar and its binary second Shex—varied based on where planets of both systems were in their orbits. Being a drive tech, Lanunaz was able to speak confidently about the transit time given the current distances: just over one hundred days. That included plenty of margin for errors or mishaps, as well as lots of extra reaction mass for unexpected maneuvers. However, if the Harvesters were launching sooner, it was also logical that they would want to travel faster; Lanunaz estimated that, at best, they could cut the travel time in half. However, that would come at the expense of reserves and flexibility.

That, in turn, was likely to impact where and how they refueled, but Lanunaz confessed ignorance of how that might change given the exigencies of the present situation. Typically, the Harvesters had plenty of time to array themselves as needed throughout the Shex system, the long, ponderous cargo frames and larger vessels setting up automated fuel gathering facilities that they would tap before returning to Jrar. But if they were coming sooner and faster, they would probably not be able to follow their standard procedures, some of which required considerable time.

One reason was that although Shex’s two outermost planets—gas giants, both—were excellent fueling stops for typical Harvester fleets, they were unfriendly to hurried efforts. Apparently, as the gas giants came closer to the punishing rays of Jrar—a much larger and brighter F-class star—their atmospheres became supercharged tempests. More importantly, the frozen volatiles on their satellites either liquefied, or—in case of the farthest orbit—vaporized. This was not limited to surface ice: any water bound beneath a moon’s rocky surface outgassed, sometimes explosively and always unpredictably. Ironically, scraping or mining the ice that reformed toward the end of a Searing was far preferable to risking the impact of hull-crushing chunks spewed out by geysers.

The same timing impacted skimming gaseous hydrogen from the upper atmospheres of the gas giants themselves. Perilous even during the most quiescent conditions, the constant heating generated wild, immense storms that made any attempt at fuel scooping not merely more difficult, but almost suicidal.

Neither system had asteroid belts but retained dense ecliptic disks that could not accrete into planets due to the binary pair’s frequent and close periapses. Despite the doubling of debris, actual collisions remained rare even at the height of the Searing, but the abrupt increase in gravitic forces initiated a period of increasing meteor showers. It also explained why, according to the Dornaani who had carried the Lost Soldiers to 55 Tauri, there were unusually high concentrations of debris at almost every planet’s Trojan points.

Lanunaz had also remarked that there were a surprising number of wrecks at the far edges of the Shex system on what he called “long-cycle vectors.” He explained that these were so-called death ships: craft that had likely been on outbound trajectories but were damaged before they could fully escape the star’s gravity. Typically, such ships lost internal pressure, temperature, or both, killing the crew before they could effect repairs.

Murphy set aside the collection of bullet-pointed sheets. Bowden could make good use of them, and more in the weeks to come. But unfortunately, the most pressing question was one that no one, probably not even the Kulsians themselves, could answer with certainty:

How many weeks before the Harvesters arrived?


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