Page 12 of Tracked and Taken

“Sixteen of them are wallpaper.” Tael hasn’t moved. Legs extended, eyes on the display, the voice doing the working-register thing. “I ran the elimination before you walked into the bay. Didn’t need three hours; I had every signature on that deck in my overlay by the time your boots stopped behind me. Sixteen of those names left the pattern a shift leaves. Shift, shift, shift. One left something else. Trace at the camera array that doesn’t sit on any shift, and the same signature is on the loading clamps, right where the tool marks are.”

“Which one.”

“I don’t have names, Torres. I have a nose. Give SPROUT the seventeen and the array timestamps and I’ll tell you which one is lying.”

“Running cross-reference,” SPROUT says. “Cross-referencing access timestamps against the Bay 7 diagnostic modification window and the Draelith’s trace location. Processing. Please hold while I attempt to keep my commentary to a minimum. Held. Processing.”

“How’s that going?” Petra asks.

“The commentary minimization? Poorly. Thank you for asking.”

Flossie makes a sound. It might be a cough. It is not a cough. Her pen is moving again, and from my angle it’s moving too fast to be notes on the briefing. It’s moving the way a pen moves when it’s recording a date and a question mark, and I decide, firmly, not to ask what the question is or who it’s about.

While SPROUT works, the room does something I don’t have a reference for: it waits. Xor doesn’t fidget. Flossie writes. Petra picks up her bear and puts it down and picks it up again. Tael, three feet to my left, which I know without looking, is quiet.

The quiet is the problem.

His voice, when he’s working, does a gravel-register thing that lowers my shoulders by half an inch whether I authorize the movement or not. The silence does something worse. The silence makes me aware of the absence of his voice, which is a category of awareness I did not know existed before this morning and am furious to have encountered.

I keep my eyes on the datapad.

“One match,” SPROUT announces. “High confidence. Tomas Harkin. Maintenance tech, Level Three. Eight years on Junction One. Accessed the camera array maintenance protocol at 0314, seventy-two hours before Torek vanished, logged as routine calibration update. I have compared the calibration schedule attached to this entry to the master schedule maintained by Head of Station Security Torres. The schedules do not align. The entry was manufactured.”

“And the trace at the array is his,” Tael says. Quiet. “Same signature as the clamps. He didn’t just open the window. He was on the dock when the ship came through it.”

My stomach drops.

Not analytical recognition of evidence fitting a pattern. The physical, gut-deep revulsion of someone I trusted, someone whose hands have been in my infrastructure, using that access to help take a male from under my cameras.

My system. My vetting. My trust.

“Harkin.” I say it out loud because saying it out loud means I have to deal with it. “He fixed a ventilation issue in my office. He brought his own tools.”

Petra is off her desk. The bear, goes on the chair she’s abandoning. She crosses to the notice board with a speed that is not a stroll and not a run, and somehow covers the distance before I register her starting.

“What are you looking at?”

“Classified security data.”

“Really?” Petra’s eyes flick from my face to the briefing table. To Vosk. Back to my face. The grin sharpens into something with teeth. “Because from over there, it looked like you were looking at something way more interesting than data.”

“I was reviewing the access list.”

“Mm-hmm.”

She is no longer looking at me. She is looking past my shoulder, at the briefing table, with the expression of a woman who has just confirmed a hypothesis and is about to enjoy every consequence of the confirmation.

“Vosk.”

“Don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“You’re about to.”

“I am about to do what any concerned colleague would do in a situation involving a chair angle and a biological response I am not qualified to diagnose.”

“Petra.”