Chapter Twenty-four

RULES OF EVIDENCE

CANYONCITYGLEANEREXPEDITION
THEPLANETGLISTER

Jay Verlant stepped carefully through the shattered doorframe of what he’d been using for an office and out into the sublevel one main corridor of the ruined habitat. As he headed for topside, he had to sidestep Clan and Lenay Fortlan, who were hauling some oversize pieces of gear into the one working freight elevator.

Jay took the emergency stairs up to the surface, climbing over the last few pieces of uncleared rubble. Things looked vastly different than they had when he and Bol had first peered through the miniflyer’s camera view. The surface had been picked absolutely clean of smaller debris. Bol and his team had repaired all but two of the vehicles, and the two beyond repair had been hauled away as well, to be stripped for parts in future. Nearly all the other large gear was gone and the topside area cleaned up and put to rights, both for reasons of safety, and to make sure they didn’t miss anything of valve.

There were still a few pieces of lower-priority wreckage topside, neatly stacked to one side, but for the most part topside didn’t even look like a wreckage field anymore. Nor did it look to be heavily defended, although it was. They were now ready to hold off any uninvited guests. Up until that day, the site had been bristling with weapons set in plain sight. Now they were carefully hidden, as only a diehard could hide things. They had an invited guest due, and Jay did not want her to see all of their defenses. She might be invited, but that didn’t mean they trusted her.

Their visitor was, so far, merely a voice on the radio, a loud, clear signal cutting in on the command circuit. Exactly once before in his life, he had seen and spoken to outsiders—but he had been a little boy, and they had just been representatives of another diehard settlement, coming to talk with Jay’s father. This was different. A person from off-planet, a person from outside the Glister system altogether—this was an outsider in the truest sense of the word. It got him nervous.

Jay checked the status of the clear-out operation on his brand-new (only about a hundred years old, and only a few scratches on the display) datapad, and nodded in satisfaction. Things were going well. So well he wondered if he had been wise in dealing with that voice on the radio that had claimed to be Chrono Patrol. Canyon City was richer than it had been in generations—possibly richer than it had ever been. It could well be they didn’t even need what that voice had to offer.

But she was, after all, offering a power supply, a portable unit with more output than their whole solar array even when it was working, and—or so she claimed—a source they could switch on and off at will, and which could provide that level of power without refueling for fifty years. They could take the solar power system off-line and rebuild it, top to bottom, at their leisure.

Bol was standing at the top of a nearby hillock, running his newly improved miniflyer from a newly improved portable control pack. Jay went over to him. Bol was wearing his heater suit with the helmet open and a breathing mask on, just wearing the helmet liner to keep his head warm.

“What have you got?” Jay asked as he reached the top of the hill.

Bol looked around to acknowledge Jay, then returned his attention to the control pack. “Well,” he began, his voice muffled by the breathing mask, “a lander brought her in about an hour ago, dropped her off, and left.”

Their visitor had taken the precaution of keeping the lander out of reach. In other words, she wasn’t taking any chances that a salvage crew would jump on it the moment she was away from the ship. Not that diehards wouldn’t do just that, if things were desperate enough to risk taking on the Chronologic Patrol. “Go on,” Jay said.

“She’s where she said she would be, and she’s alone, and she’s standing next to something that’s the right size and shape for the power supply.”

Bol handed him the control pack, and Jay looked at the screen. It showed a view from the miniflyer, twenty kilometers due west of their present location. The flyer’s belly camera was tracking on a point on the ground in the center of a half-kilometer-wide circle, the camera swiveling constantly to keep that spot in view.

And there, in the center of the camera’s view, was a figure in a pressure suit and a white packing crate about two meters long, a meter high, and a meter wide. The figure was standing by the crate, arms at its side, all but motionless. The helmeted head looked up toward the flyer now and then, but that was all. She wasn’t leaning on the crate to seem casual, or pacing to seem anxious, or constantly checking a comm device to let them know she was still in contact with her ship.Neutrality . That sent a message all by itself. She was who she was. She didn’t need to prove anything, or ask anyone’s permission, or act in any particular way.

“We could really use that power supply, Jay,” Bol said.

“Yeah, Bol, I know.” He hadn’t wanted the job, but the council had given Jay the final go/no-go on dealing with their visitor. If he didn’t like the look of things, he could walk away. And he was tempted to, sorely so. Diehards rarely did well for themselves by dealing with outsiders.

But, on the other hand, their visitor didn’t want much in exchange. And, after all, she probablywas just what she said she was—a Chrono Patrol investigator.Something strange and violent had happened here, and in space. Jay didn’t have any problem believing that someone would want to investigate.

Furthermore, if she was CP, that meant a CP ship in orbit—and Jay knew just what sort of frightfulness such a ship could rain down. If they didn’t give her what she wanted, she could take it—quite literally over all their dead bodies.

No. They were safer now than they had been in Jay’s whole life. It wasn’t time to take risks they didn’t need. No one knew better than diehards that staying alive was much harder than dying.

Jay handed the control pack back to Bol. “That power supply is heavy. Send transporter three,” he said. “But you don’t drive it, or get anywhere near her. Just in case.”

“But what could she—”

“She could kill you, or kidnap you—and we need your training and talent to get all this new gear up and running. Send someone else. Two someones—one to drive, and one to watch her. Tell ’em not to answer any questions she might ask.” He thought a moment longer. “Tell them to pick her and the power supply up, but don’t drive both back here.” He pointed toward a nearby rise. “Park the transporter on the other side of that hill, say a kilometer from here, and leave it there with the power supply on it. Bring her here in a terrain car. Leave the power supply right there until she’s gone—and until you can check it out very carefully and we know it’s not a bomb.”

“Abomb ?”

“Think it through. She gets the information she needs from us, leaves, we take the shiny new present she gave us back to Canyon City, and boom! Suddenly she doesn’t have any loose ends. There were two sides to this fight. If someone from theother side comes asking questions, we won’t be here to answer. And after she’s gone, we still play it safe. The power supply stays out of the city. We can build a structure for it on the surface, on the other side of North Slope Ridge. Run cable from there back to the city.”

“We’ll lose power efficiency,” Bol said doubtfully.

“And the city won’t be vaporized. That’s the way we do it. She doesn’t get near anyone but me, the transport driver, and the watcher, and the power supply doesn’t get near here or the city. And I’m going to order everyone here to stop work and leave. Clear the site and keep it clear while she’s around.”

“Clear it? We’ll lose half a day’s work, at least. Why?”

Jay laughed grimly. “You start thinking differently when you draw a job like the one the council handed me today. We give her the information she’s paying for—but not one bit more if we can help it. If she can’t see us, she can’t count us and know how many people we have. If she can’t talk to our people, there’s no chance one of our people will talk to her and tell her something she shouldn’t know.”

“But she already knows all about us, from the nanoprobes that got into our system.”

“Why do you assumeshe’s the one who sent them? Why not the folks who ran this place instead? Besides, it’s not just information I want to protect. If we’re not all here, she can’t wipe us all out with a suicide bomb,” he said.

“But where will we send all the workers?”

Jay shrugged. “Back to the city. For once, we actually have enough transport.”

Enough. A strange word for a diehard to use. What was more, they had enough of practicallyeverything . And Jay was nervous about losing it all.

 

Two hours later, Kalani Temblar found herself bouncing along in an impressively decrepit terrain car, wedged into the cabin between the driver—a closemouthed young man in a grungy heater suit—and his companion, who found ways to say even less.

As last, the car came to a halt near the half-disassembled ruins of a habitat dome, plainly the one they had spotted from orbit. The driver and his companion both got out and simply walked away from her, the car, and the dome, leaving her alone in the car. Kalani climbed down out of the cab and looked around. She started walking toward the wreckage of the dome. Even from a hundred meters away, she could see that she wasn’t going to be able to gather much direct evidence.

The place was deserted. Or at least, so it seemed. Somehow, a suited figure materialized behind her and came up beside her. Being careful not to betray her surprise, she turned to face the newcomer—a man with a young-old face and the pasty white skin of a life lived mostly underground, his right cheek cut by a slashing scar.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Lieutenant Kalani Temblar, Chronologic Patrol.”

“I know,” said her host. “The site is ready for you to examine.” He walked toward the dome, leaving her with no choice but to follow.

“Nice to meet you too,” she muttered at his back.

It took very little time for her to establish that while the impact crater itself was still there, dominating the landscape, everything else that might have told her something was gone. She could not even be sure if the crater had been caused by an explosive device or by force of impact.

“What happened to the wreckage of the attacking missile?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

“Salvaged,” her host said.

“Some of it must have been buried by the impact. What about those parts?”

“Dug up. Salvaged.”

“Right,” she said. “Fine. Look, you’ll let me know if giving me such long detailed answers is wearing you out, okay?”

“I will,” he said, and kept walking.

All right. If they wanted to try pushing her around, the hell with them. She’d let them know she could push right back. She stopped and called to her host. “Hey, you!”

He stopped and turned around.

“You have a name?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Very clever. I think I learned that one when I was twelve. I’ll ask another question. Did you know that my ship could drop a kinetic kill vehicle on that nice new power supply on five minutes’ notice? It would take out that nice transporter truck, too, of course,” she went on. “I don’t like to pay for something and then not get it. The deal was access, information,and cooperation in exchange for the power supply. So tell me your name, and start helping me out—or else you might as well start figuring out how you’re going to explain losing a fifty-year reserve power supply just because you were rude to the nice lady who came to visit.”

Silence for a moment longer, then he spoke. “Verlant,” he said at last. “James Verlant. Mostly they call me Jay.”

“Good,” she said. “Very good. Now help me out, cut me some slack, and I’ll be out of your way before you know it.”

 

She examined the surface facilities just well enough to confirm her suspicion that there was nothing left there that would tell her anything. She concluded almost as quickly that the underground levels were just as much of a dead loss.

What she was looking for was evidence—more than evidence,proof —that Oskar DeSilvo had been there and been killed there. What she found was at best ambiguous. There were papers, datapads, designs scattered everywhere, tossed aside by Canyon City scavengers in search of more useful loot. Quick glances through them made it plain they came from DeSilvo.

Kalani pulled copies of the text of every datapad she could and filled her suit’s carry pockets with whatever paper texts looked to be of the most interest. Of the documents she examined quickly, then and there, there wasn’t a one of them that couldn’t have been forged and planted there. The same would be true of whatever documents she missed.

Nor did she see the hardware she should have. She had walked the aisles of the Dark Museum. She had seen what DeSilvo had taken away, gotten some idea of what he was after. None of it was there.Might as well not have come here, she told herself as she came up out of the underground levels. But even that absence was ambiguous. The impact had collapsed tunnels, sealing off sections that might hold anything.

She glared at the surface wreckage in annoyance, as if it had been deliberately arranged as it was to make her job harder—as perhaps it had been.

That was the nub of the thing. Everything she had seen was either solid proof of what would be most convenient for her to believe—or it was all tricks and forgeries. It didn’t even have to fool her to work. As Burl had said, maybe all DeSilvo needed to do in order to win was make them unsure, make them have to check, make them move slowly.

“Bodies,” she said, turning to Verlant. “There weren’t any survivors here when your people arrived, right?”

“No, none,” Verlant agreed. “Everyone was dead.”

“So there were bodies, right?” she asked.

“Yes, of course. I saw several corpses myself.”

“Where are they now?” she asked. “Buried somewhere? On ice?”

“Salvaged,” Verlant replied, and his face turned hard and expressionless.

“Ah. Of course,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. Her stomach went cold and tied itself in knots. “Of course.” If they didn’t hesitate to convert Aunt Minnie into nutrients for the hydroponic tanks, why would they be squeamish about total strangers? Diehards didn’t wasteanything.

Right at the moment, Kalani felt as if she had wasted everything—especially the one thing she had least of. Time.

 

Jay could tell his visitor was disappointed. It was plain to see that she hadn’t gotten what she came for. Jay walked her back to the terrain car and even carried a second bag full of datapads and papers for her. Jay Verlant had not expected himself to feel bad about his behavior in front of an outsider. Outsiders didn’t count. And this Kalani Temblar person was areal outsider, from off the planet. Her reactions, her behavior, should have mattered not at all to him.

And yet, they did. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” he said as they approached the car.

“What? Oh.” Plainly distracted by her own worries, it took a moment for her to look over at him. She smiled sadly. “It’s that easy to tell, huh?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. He opened the rear hatch of the terrain car and dropped in the bag of documents. He hesitated a minute, then turned and waved off their two silent companions, still trailing along behind. “I’ll drive you to the pickup point,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said as she dumped her bag in next to his. “I’d appreciate that.”

They got into the vehicle. Jay got behind the controls and started driving. They bounced along in silence for a time. It occurred to Jay that he’d never see this stranger again, ever. Somehow that was a more disconcerting idea than the notion ofmeeting a complete stranger.So anything you have to say, anything you could tell her or ask her, has to happen right now, he told himself. Another strange idea.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t know the first thing about what all this is about. Maybe if you told me something about it, I’d know something that would help.”

She turned her hands palms up and shrugged, exaggerating the gestures a bit to make them noticeable through her pressure suit. “It’s a very long, very complicated story,” she said. “What it boils down to is that there was a man named DeSilvo who stole a lot of very powerful and dangerous equipment. We tracked him as far as Glister. It seems very likely that he caused the explosion that knocked out your power. It’s also clear that he used that abandoned habitat we just left forsomething . Ithink he set it up and staged the attacks here and in space just to attract your attention and get you to take a look at the site. You’d go in and, ah, salvage everything, and in the process you’d disrupt all the evidence that might tell me for sure whether or not DeSilvo was there.”

“Was there anything you saw thatproves he wasn’t there? Any evidence that it was a fake?”

“No,” Kalani conceded. “And the only way I can think to prove he was there, was killed there, would be to identify the body. I have lots of images of him—”

“I saw most of the human remains,” Jay said sharply. “The bodies—and body parts—weren’t recognizable. Photos of what they looked like before wouldn’t help.”

“Then I guess I’m out of luck. The unidentifiable bodies could have been planted. Plenty of frozen corpses on Glister.”

The terrain car creaked to a halt back at the site where her lander had dropped her off, well away from the actual touchdown point. “Do you call in now? When will they come and get you?”

“I’ve already signaled. The lander will be here in thirty-five minutes.”

“Might as well wait here in the car, then, and stay out of the wind.”

“Right. Look, as long as we’re here. There’s one kind of evidence I haven’t really dug into yet. Eyewitness accounts.”

“I told you before you got here, when we talked on the radio, about what happened on the day of the attacks.”

“Well, maybe we should go through it again. But there’s something else. It might be a rude or awkward question—that’s why I haven’t asked it before.”

Jay chuckled. “But now that the visit’s almost over, you’ll take the chance of insulting me?”

She smiled back. “Something like that. And I was hoping I might get the answer some other way, from seeing or hearing something that would tell me.”

“All right,” he said. “Go on. Insult me.”

Another smile, a lovely one. “All right, then, I will. It’s this. The wrecked habitat was only a bit more than two hundred kilometers from Canyon City. How could it be that you didn’t know about it before?”

“Not much of an insult there. Well, we had maps and so on that showed an abandoned habitat there, and we have records of gleaner parties doing sweeps through there—but it was picked clean long ago. We don’t have any record of anyone from Canyon City being there in the last fifty years.”

“All right—now we come to the insulting part. As I understand diehard culture, one of the most common patterns is for you to, well,hide from each other?”

Jay shifted in his seat and drummed his fingers on the control panel. “Yes,” he said. “We do. It’s best for everyone.”

“But you must try and keep an eye on each other as well.”

“We have detector systems of one sort or another, and sometimes gleaner parties spot settlements, or clues that point to settlements.”

“But each group settles in one spot, and those spots are usually existing facilities you take over. So mostly, youcan’t hide from the other diehards, because they have maps and records too. What really goes on is that you know where the other groups are and you stay out of each other’s way.”

He shifted again, very uncomfortably. “We, ah,check on each other every so often. If, ah, something has happened to a nearby settlement, then you send in gleaner teams. Before someone else does.”

“So if there had been a lot of activity at this wrecked habitat over an extended period of time, wouldn’t you have spotted it?”

“Probably. Maybe.” He hesitated. “You’re right. We knowwho our neighbors are, andwhere they are. We watch each other—some. Not a lot. We never have resources enough that we can waste them on patrol flights or expeditions. If there had been a lot going on at that site for months on end, well, yes, we should have spotted it. But this site is just outside our usual two-hundred-kilometer sensor perimeter. And there’s no other settlement in this direction for a thousand kilometers.”

“So—you should have noticed something going on, but you could have missed it.”

“Yeah. Easily. The first we knew about anyone being around was the nanoprobes.”

She looked startled. “Nanoprobes?Whatnanoprobes ?”

He laughed. “That’s just about the first thingyou’ve toldme, ” he said. “We thought your people might have been the ones who sent them. But you weren’t, were you?”

“No. We’re trying to work fast. No time for anything subtle or sneaky. When was this?”

“We found them just about three months ago, and Bol doesn’t think they were there long. Relaying historical data, and engineering data, mostly. Then we started getting flyovers—that first one from the northwest, that made us get our detection systems back on full power. Then the ones coming from over in this direction.”

“Why do something as hidden as nanoprobes, then something as obvious as flyovers?”

It was Jay’s turn to shrug. “Ask this fellow DeSilvo when you catch him, if he isn’t dead. Maybe the first flyover was part of a crisscross search pattern that happened to spot us on a southbound leg.”

“But the nanoprobes got there first,” Kalani objected. “Those would have pinpointed your location.”

“Two sides got killed in the fight. Maybe the ship in orbit dropped the nanos on every active settlement, to have them sniff for DeSilvo. DeSilvo detects the nanoprobe’s transmissions and sends flights out to search for the source.”

“Could be,” Kalani conceded. “It seems thin, but it could be.” She leaned back in her seat and stared straight ahead, at where her lander was going to put down. Jay couldn’t read her expression all that clearly through the helmet, but it looked as if she were thinking.

And thinking hard.

 

She kept thinking on the flight back to theBelle Boyd XI, as she gave Burl a somewhat distracted debriefing, as she ate a dinner she didn’t taste, as she laid her head on her pillow.

The same sequence of thoughts kept cycling through her mind, over and over, though she never quite seemed to reach a conclusion. It was like a dream where she had to go through some long involved job she never quite understood, only to have it all come apart on her just as she was finishing, so she was forced to start over. She hated the restless, fretful mood of those dreams. Lying awake in bed, staring at the overhead bulkhead, only made the feeling ten times worse.

Some endless time later she gave it up, swung her feet out of the bunk, and switched on the lights. She was so wide-awake she might as well be working. She moved over to her worktable and started to reach for the datapad that held all the data she had copied. But no. It would be a waste of time. The documents were just part of the diversion, the misinformation. Studying them would just tell her how good a forgery DeSilvo could manufacture. She shoved the datapad to one side.

She no longer had the slightest doubt that it was all a fake. The very absence of proof was, in a sense, proof all by itself. The ambiguities were all so elaborate and complete that it was impossible to believe they had not been deliberately manufactured.

She sat there, staring at nothing for a moment. There was something Verlant had said.The sight and sound recording from my pressure suit camera and mike, she reminded herself.All that data should have been copied out of my suit’s memory store into the ship’s log as soon as I came aboard.

She reached for the datapad again, linked into the ship’s comm system, and brought up her suit’s sight and sound. Kalani skipped ahead in the playback, almost to the end, and stopped it on an image of Verlant sitting in the cab of the terrain car. She ran playback at normal speed for a moment, as Verlant said. . . .just outside our usual two-hundred-kilometer sensor perimeter . . .

She stopped it, skipped ahead a little bit, and ran it again. Verlant spoke again.“. . . we started getting flyovers—that first one from the northwest—”

The plan never works perfectly,Kalani told herself.There’s always a hitch, a flaw, a breakdown, a surprise. Someone doesn’t do what they’re supposed to—or someone does something unexpected. If you were smart, if you were experienced, if you had been through this sort of thing before, you took that into account. You made the plan flexible. You watched events carefully. You came up with ways to work around. You improvised. You found ways to hide the mistakes.

All right. Good. Assume all that was true. Assume there was a mistake. It would be whatdidn’t fit in with the rest, the thing that broke the pattern.

So let’s say that someone off theDom Pedro IVcauses some trouble, or a machine breaks down. Something breaks the pattern, and makes enough of a mess that DeSilvo needs to patch it over.

Everything was secret, hidden, out of sight or over the horizon—until the first flyover of Canyon City. The only flyover thatdidn’t come from the direction of the wrecked habitat she had just visited. All the later flyovers had come from almostexactly the opposite direction. Like a magician gesturing wildly with his left arm to make you forget the card you had spotted, tucked up the sleeve of his right arm. And then, the flash in the sky to get them looking, the blast down to the south to tell them where—and the EMP burst to make sure they felt threatened enough to act. All of it designed to get the diehards—and, ultimately, one Kalani Temblar—looking at DeSilvo’s left hand.

But what about hisright hand? She brought up a map of the surface on the datapad. “From the northwest,” she muttered. “And outside their sensor perimeter, so more than two hundred kilometers away.”

She stared at the map, willing the answers to spring forth.