The deposition began on time, punctual to the second. Tamza Drayer had been called back to Hellenia only twice before in his fifteen years as an investigator for Caroll Endline. Just as before, there was a living court officer and an attorney for the company, and, he was well aware, the testimonials were configured not only to record official testimony but also to detect the truthfulness thereof, using infrared and other camera technology that measured pupil dilation, skin temperature and perfusion, heartrate, head movement and body language, and if the physical signs weren’t sufficient, the AI could detect deception in the vocal patterns of even the coldest psychopath.
Tamza Drayer had no intention of lying. Still, though, he was nervous, and it showed.
“First time?” the attorney asked him.
“No,” he answered. “Nothing like this, though. A couple of large volume cases, but nothing where anyone got hurt. You’ll forgive me if I’m a little on edge. I don’t suppose I’ll still have a job after this.”
“The company officers may surprise you, Inspector Drayer. For the record I must tell you that the deposition has begun, that you are under oath, and that you are being monitored for truthfulness.”
“I’m aware, thank you. I swore that oath to the magistrate. I was there.”
The company attorney, Mr. Cole, returned a slight grin. “Please begin with your full name and your position.”
“My name is Tamza Drayer, Lead Inspector for Caroll Endline, LPD-I.”
“No acronyms, please.”
“Well, that would be short for Loss Prevention Division, and my area would be the Indies, or, I guess, the Independent Systems if we’re being formal.”
“We are. Thank you, Inspector. I’m Attorney Cole, as I mentioned before we began, and this is Yarmit Osso, the court officer. She will clarify matters of law if they come up, and she will bear witness to these proceedings. I am here neither as an advocate nor an adversary but as a representative of the company. You may ask for representation at any time if you feel you need it. Otherwise, I would like you to simply tell your story as directly and truthfully as possible. I will only interrupt you if I feel like there are points that warrant clarifying. Do you understand all that?”
“I do.”
“Very good. Please begin at the very start of the incident in question.”
“The outset?”
“Yes, from when you got pinged.”
“It was the middle of the night. The dates and times are all in the logs, I’m sure, but I remember it being sometime around three when I was woken up by the ping.”
“That’s unusual for you, Inspector?”
“Very unusual, yes. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been woken up like that. I’m in loss prevention, but I’m on the investigation side after cargo gets lost or, in this case, stolen. Calling me can almost always wait till the day after. Should I go on?”
“Please. Just keep talking. Maybe begin with why this case was so unusual—why the division thought it was necessary to call you.”
“Okay, sure. Well, there was some question on one of the biweeklies—the Eden to Hellenia, the 314, that’s the route number—but there was an insurance claim for one of the inner carriers, and the division officer was concerned that there was a body on board we may have lost.”
“A dead body? A corpse, you mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Whose body was it, Inspector?”
“Her name was Cillian Murthy. She was the daughter of a Mr. Manara Murthy, a wealthy businessman from the cylinders here, and her mother, Amina Murthy, is one of the representatives to the Hellenian People’s Chamber for the cylinders. Cillian had died suddenly and unexpectedly while visiting relatives in Tomsport Bay.”
“I presume she got out there on one of the commercial carriers?”
“Yes, but Tomsport is such a small population at that outpost you either have to take the bi-weekly shuttle out from Eden or charter a private flight, and they couldn’t get one in that timeframe. The shuttle wouldn’t take on a body as cargo, and the Murthys were afraid about the number of days she was there in Tomsport. They were flying her back here for an autopsy, and I don’t know—I’m not a medical examiner—but apparently it was a situation where the sooner they got the body back to Hellenia, the more likely they could determine what had happened to their daughter. I’m not entirely sure on that point, though, medically speaking.”
“That’s an unusual circumstance, is it not?”
“Do you mean in general or with respect to the company?”
“Well, Inspector, the company doesn’t usually take on human remains as cargo—at least that’s my understanding.”
“It’s not a unique circumstance, but it’s a pretty rare case.”
“And who made the decision to take on Ms. Murthy’s body?”
“I don’t know, sir, that’s not my end of things. I was only called when there was a question about whether the carrier with the container transporting Ms. Murthy’s body was stolen.”
“A question, Inspector? The body was or wasn’t stolen, correct?”
“I’m sorry.”
The company attorney waited. Inspector Drayer paused and took a deep breath. He balled both his hands into fists as they were plainly shaking.
“Inspector, please take your time. My understanding is that your role in this incident is not under suspicion. There’s no reason for you to be so nervous.”
“It’s not an incident,” Drayer snapped, shaking his head. “It’s not an incident at all. My partner got shot. Do you understand that? We lost a body! I have been doing everything I can to impress upon people here that the Murthys, Shaia—they’re real people, but all everyone keeps telling me is to relax about it. Relax. Relax! The whole reason any of this is allowed to happen in the first place is that people in this building are too relaxed. Lose a 4 million L-Cr inner carrier? Relax! It’s insured, Inspector. What are you so upset about? As though our premiums had nothing to do with sixteen lines being discontinued into the Letters last quarter. It’s infuriating.”
“I can see.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how angry this attitude makes me.”
The Inspector shook his head and took a deep breath.
“Actually,” Attorney Cole said, “it’s kind of refreshing to know there’s at least one person out there who cares about the well-being of the company.”
“It’s less about the company than the people. They get hurt, lose their jobs, important things go missing they can’t ever get back.”
“I see. But please. Don’t hold back, Inspector. I’m sure something in your story warrants that passion. Let the company heads see it. I suspect it will help them to understand.”
“Perhaps.”
“No, definitely. Everyone around here kisses their asses. Now and again, maybe they need someone to grab them around the throat and shake their heads a little—figuratively speaking, of course.”
“It’s just that attitude that gets me—write off the loss. As soon as that possibility becomes part of the equation of doing business, it all but guarantees that eventually it’ll come to this. Missing bodies. Accountants getting shot.”
“That’s fair. Please, though, continue when you can. You said there was question about the body going missing. Can you explain that for the record, please?”
The Inspector grimaced. “I’m not great at explaining the nuances of the freight industry, but I’ll do my best. You may want to consult an expert witness who can explain the different types of freight fraud. Shaia could explain it better than me.”
“How about start there, then. You got the call from the home office in the middle of the night. Did they assign assets to you right away?”
“I was told to pull in an accountant and a clone to assist on the case. I requested Shaia as well as a Saraswathi clone I’d worked with before.”
“Can you state their full names and record number for the transcript.”
“By Shaia I’m referring to Ms. Shaia Ta-Nûn, who is a junior forensic accountant, one of the few cross-qualified as a field investigator. I’d worked with her twice before and found her to be diligent and capable—I’d even say dogged. She was great to work with. The Saraswathi clone is number 814,359.”
“An embodied AI clone?”
“Walking and talking, yes. I picked both of them up on the way to Troia.”
“Your first order of business, Inspector?”
“We needed to determine if the carrier was actually missing. That Eden line has six stops on it including Eden and Hellenia: Troia, Redfall, Parkaway, and Tomsport Bay. Logistically, it’s a nightmare in terms of timing. An incident like this was just waiting to happen, because the cargo often sits in port for days because of the transfer schedule, especially at Parkaway. It was three days in this case.”
“The ship was in port for three days at Parkaway?”
“Yes, that was the gap in the schedule, awaiting transfers from other carriers.”
“Okay, I’m still hung up on the idea that you didn’t know whether the body was stolen or not. Can you explain that for me, please?”
“Well, there are different types of loss that afflict the company, Mr. Cole. Actually most loss cases don’t even involve theft. Even most cases of theft don’t involve anything being stolen, if you can believe it. The most common type of fraud on cargo is insurance fraud, where somebody tricks the company into thinking the cargo has been stolen in order to trigger an insurance payout, which is far easier to steal than the cargo. The thieves can predict the payout because they triggered it in the first place, and they know the recipients and can intercept the insurance payout. The really good schemes generate a payout before the cargo has even arrived, and we don’t even realize we’ve been defrauded until a delivery code comes back to us on an insurance claim that’s already been paid out.”
“So you mean we deliver cargo to the client and pay the thieves for the same stolen goods?”
“Correct. And the client is usually blissfully unaware that their goods had theoretically been stolen in the first place. In the Parkaway case, an entire inner cargo carrier was logged as missing, which we didn’t find out about until the inner carriers for the freighter were scanned again at Redfall, and the missing unit just happened to be the carrier with the container Cillian Murthy’s body was being transported back to Hellenia inside.”
“I see.”
“So my first order of business was to pick up Shaia and Saraswathi so we could fly out to Troia, catch the freighter in transit, and see if we could lay eyes on the correct container, hopefully locating Ms. Murthy’s body in the process.”
“Was the family aware yet?”
“Good question, Mr. Cole. You’re catching on. No. They weren’t likely to find out definitely for another two weeks when the ship came into port at Hellenia. They were the ones to flag it to the home office, though. Understandably, they were tracking the freighter’s progress carefully and pinged the home office when their tracking number flagged back to them as an error. The home office reassured them that it was just a tracking glitch, told them it would clear up in the system, and that there was nothing to worry about.”
“So they lied to the family?”
The inspector shrugged. “The home office couldn’t have known either way. What they told them was the likeliest outcome. They probably believed what they were telling the family. It just wasn’t correct.”
“What did you three find at Troia?”
“Not the container, obviously. That’s for starters.”
“Okay, take it from there, please.”
“Our first order of business was to try and set eyes on the inner carrier housing the container in question. So we headed directly to the ship, myself, Shaia Ta-Nûn, and the Saraswathi clone.”
“And by ship, again for the record, you’re referring to what ship?”
“It was the Nei-Bat Olly, flagged out of Alpha-Merced, but it was one of the regular workhorses on this route—the 314 out of Eden. And the company put a hold on the ship until we could clear it, obviously with a body going missing, especially in such a potentially high-profile case, our investigation took priority. So we had all the port’s resources at our disposal to check the ship, and as soon as the inner container numbers came up empty, I ordered the entire ship to be unloaded there at Troia so that we could run every tag number on the vessel. Full inventory.”
“That must have caused quite a fuss.”
“That would be an understatement. It’s a blessing our loading assets are mechanized, Mr. Cole. The complaints I got from the support staff and logisticians were about as abusive as anything I’ve ever experienced. Even Shaia got her share of blowback, and she was just making inquiries.”
“What was she doing there while this was going on?”
“The same as all of us—inventorying the cargo. She and Saraswathi were also checking entry points for compromise.”
“Explain that a bit further please.”
“Every system has touch points—places where interaction with the sorting infrastructure happens—for example, where a bot moves a crate: it could move it left or right, to this ship or that. In such a case, if that bot is vulnerable to hacking it could be influenced by an outside element to affect its choice to move a piece of cargo in a certain direction. When the system is working perfectly, it reads the cargo’s ID tag, looks up the flow sheet, and moves that tag in the direction indicated. If someone were clever enough and got into the system, they could steal cargo that way, by misdirecting at multiple touch points. It’s sophisticated but not impossible.”
“I see.”
“Shaia and Sara were reviewing the readouts on the ship at Troia. I was mostly flying around the cargo dock, double checking as many of the tags as I could to make sure our deck crew and dock units were reading true. It took about eighteen hours to completely inventory the Nei-Bat Olly. Unfortunately, we found the entire inner carrier in question had gone missing.”
“What did you do next?”
“I reported our findings obviously. As much as misplacing Cillian Murthy’s body was by far the largest mistake in this case, we’d also either misplaced or had an entire inner carrier stolen, insured total value at 3.68 million L-Cr. I’m not a finance specialist or an executive in the B-division, but even I could tell you 3.68 was nothing compared to the financial hit the company was going to take if word got out we’d lost that girl’s body. I could have made a tidy sum shorting Caroll Endline through a third-party. I didn’t, for the record. I’m not a crook, as the tech reading my testimony will show.”
“Did you consider that as a possible motive?”
“Corporate fraud is a different division, but Shaia and Sara flagged it to Corporate immediately. So anyone within the company with knowledge was monitored—their portfolios, family members. Yeah. We thought of that. And their division looks at the public side, too. Anyone shorting CELH on the major markets who could have a tangential connection to inside information like that.”
“Did the finance team find any suspicious activity that you’re aware of, Inspector?”
“Not to my knowledge, but it might be worthwhile for you to follow up with them for the case file. I’ve had other concerns.”
“Fair enough. What did you do next?”
“I was in Troia already, so I had to interview the human crew of the ship—four flight officers, four on the deck crew who managed the cargo, the captain and the first officer. Those interviews are all in the records in their entirety.”
“Did you find anything suspicious? Anything notable or relevant?”
The inspector shrugged. “I asked the Captain, Shan-Fon Leiau how he would do it. I’d already cleared his account through the tech. He read clean, so I asked him what he thought—the ways he’d do it if he were trying to steal an inner container. You know what he said?”
“I can’t begin to guess.”
“He said he didn’t know, that he’d never steal from the company. He was being honest. ‘How would you do it, though?’ I asked him again. And again he just told me he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t steal, not for any amount of money. Even if that answer wasn’t particularly helpful, I found that uplifting. There are honest people, Mr. Cole. Most people are. It’s important to remember that when your livelihood is chasing people who steal millions of cronors and anything else that comes in the package—even if it’s a dead body.”
“What next, Inspector?”
“Right. So I sent Shaia and Saraswathi to Redfall to run all the logs and review the security footage for the port and the ship. And I jumped back to Hellenia to meet with the Murthys. I needed to look them in the eye and tell them what was going on with their daughter’s body.”
“But you didn’t know yet.”
“I knew no one at the company knew where the container was, and I knew I wasn’t going to do anything else except eat and sleep until I brought their daughter back to them personally. If the company had tried to conceal the truth, it was possible the news could get out and then get back to them the wrong way. I wasn’t going to be a part of that, so I went there to tell them myself.”
“Did you have authorization from the home office to do that?”
“It was the right thing to do.”
“Again, Inspector, did you ask for advisement on whether to notify them?”
“I thought about it. Lawyers protect the company first. I figured at worst, even if it wasn’t initially best for the company, doing the right thing was the right thing. If I did that, then no one could say we didn’t at least to the right thing. How badly could doing the right thing reflect on us versus getting caught trying to hide it?”
“I see why you were apprehensive to interview, Inspector.”
“It wasn’t like I was trying to out the company—make myself look good or make the company look bad. I did think about it—as many different angles as I could envision.”
“That’s fair. A tough call. Maybe you could have recovered the body before anyone found out, though? I’m sure you considered that?”
“I considered that, Mr. Cole, but how could I have known what would happen? I’m not clairvoyant.”
“Of course. How did the Murthys take the news? Not well, I’d imagine, a tragedy like that and then the loss of their daughter’s body on top of it.”
“You imagine correctly. They suspected something was wrong as soon as I pinged. I insisted on meeting them in person, and I told them the company had not been able to locate their daughter’s body. I didn’t give them odds. I told them I didn’t know enough about how the container had gone missing at that point. But I told them I wouldn’t stop until I’d exhausted every possible avenue. They were upset, of course, but I think they appreciated my directness. Manara Murthy offered to supplement our investigative team: his business obviously has considerable resources; and Amina Murthy proposed drawing on the resources of the Hellenian government.”
“How did you answer them, Inspector?”
“I convinced them that it would be better to keep the matter quiet while we solved it. I convinced them that if there were thieves the greatest chance of recovering Cillian was to quietly approach the thieves with an offer, and I assured the Murthys that the company’s interest in keeping the situation quiet would offer the best chance to broker such a deal. They agreed as long as I promised to keep them apprised of our progress.”
“Was there anything else notable about that interaction?”
“Mrs. Murthy made it clear that they would not keep the issue quiet indefinitely. There was no melodrama or tears or raised voices, but her tone was certainly serious. Their expectation was clear and the same as mine, that I would bring their daughter home.”
“Where did you go after you met with the Murthy’s, Inspector Drayer?”
“I flew out to Parkaway, which was the next stop on the 314 route. I had been keeping in touch with Shaia and Sara, who’d finished with the forensic auditing of the bots and logistics files at Redfall. They didn’t find anything there, but Saraswathi developed a theory about the carrier vanishing. They were waiting for me to join them at Parkaway to delve into it further, but the short version was that Saraswathi believed there wasn’t any other port on the line where it was possible to steal an entire inner container. I’ll elaborate, Mr. Cole, but I think I should give a bit of background to the port at Parkaway for the record. Not so many people know it.”
“Please do.”
“Well, the port’s name is intended as ironic, I think. The surface of the planet is entirely liquid water. There’s no land above the water line, and the oceans are quite deep—thousands of meters as I understand it. It’s a significant gravity well, .94 G, so the spaceport itself sits atop a sizeable space tower that enables excellent access to the planetary settlements. Most of those either float on great interconnected barges, or the larger cities are propped up on stilts that lift the lowest levels about two hundred meters over the water’s surface. The city of Parkaway is one of the settlements on a platform high above the water line, right at the base of the space elevator. Several million people live on the planet, most of them miners who work in that area. The mining outfits actually use the lower levels of the space elevator to lift payloads up from the sea floor to sea level, where much of the mined material gets processed before being sent up to space for distribution. So that entire area is more of a complex environment than we’re used to working in.”
“Sounds like it’s not an ordinary port,” Mr. Cole commented.
“That’s a fair statement. It’s also true that a lot happens there out of sight of the people passing through. Even the people who do go down to the port city itself have little idea what’s happening at sea level and no idea what’s happening below sea level at Parkaway, and that’s to say nothing of the other cities or floating outposts. That’s not to say it’s lawless, but it’s an Indie, so issues that would be clear here in Hellenia aren’t always so easily navigable out there.”
“What types of issues do you mean, Inspector?”
“Issues of law, corporate liability, even land ownership—especially since the planet is water. And in our case, what we believed happened was that our entire inner container was stolen, flown down, and submerged at some point during the Nei-Bat Olly’s berth at Parkaway.”
“Under the water?”
“That was Sara’s theory. Anywhere in space would be difficult to hide a regular object like that, and then it would require ships in plain view to go unload it if they wanted to steal the cargo. Sometimes it can be difficult to say whether the target is the cargo itself or the insurance on it. In this case, we thought it might be both.”
“I can’t imagine how they could get away with stealing an entire inner container, Inspector.”
“Our lack of imagination is a large part of what emboldens such thieves, Mr. Cole, though it is still yet to be said the degree to which they’ll get away with it.”
“But you believe the cargo is there now?”
“I’m fairly certain it is. We were confident when we met at the Parkaway Spaceport that the cargo was still there somewhere in the system. Again Saraswathi was embodied in her typical android shell, so Shaia and I were a little concerned about how conspicuous the three of us would be once we descended. We don’t exactly look the part of Parkaway maritime miners, and we don’t sound like it either, as you can well hear.”
“Can you elaborate on that, Inspector? What type of population is it out there?”
“Pretty rough people, to put it bluntly. I’d say the biggest chunk of the population moved out there over the past fifty or sixty years from mining families around Dreeson’s. You’ll hear a lot of Iophan accents out there. Apart from that, it’s a lot of wanderers passing through, trying to make a quick cronor to get them on the next leg of their journey to who-knows-where.”
“Understood.”
“Shaia especially talks a little too pretty to pass out there. Anyway, we stopped in the city itself, checked into our rooms, and sent Saraswathi on walkabout to figure out where our cargo had come through while the Nei-Bat Olly was docked at the spaceport above. We have warehouse space there as well, and we have a handful of regular human employees. My first order of business was to interview them individually. As far as I was able to determine over a couple days, our people didn’t have the faintest idea why we were out there. They knew we were out there for the Olly and that something had gone wrong with it, but all the numbers on Shaia’s end checked out, which meant that they’d checked out for the dock workers too. I didn’t detect any signs of deception or evasiveness in them. So we began working under the assumption that the thieves didn’t have inside help. But there was a lot of data that had to be altered in order to pull off a theft of that magnitude—fraudulent flowsheets, lading records, even video files of the spaceport.”
“Sounds more like a hack than a heist,” Mr. Cole stated.
“Anything that rises above pilfering requires such,” Inspector Drayer agreed. “I put Saraswathi to work on all that data, scouring the records to find whatever signs of tampering she could dredge up. Shaia and I were trying to see if we could locate any unusual patterns in ocean traffic coming into the city. We suspected the cargo the thieves were after was a large amount of pressed metals. It made sense, because a lot of those elements were mined at Parkaway, and being in the business, miners could move it, wouldn’t need to do any refining, and nobody would be overly suspicious of a mining outfit putting large amounts of metals on the market in a short span. It was also something they could keep hidden down there in the dark of the ocean where only they knew about it, wait a few months or a few years, and then put that same metal back on the market.”
“Are you of the opinion that this is the first time a scheme like this has been employed, Inspector?”
“On this scale, I’m inclined to think so, but I’m not certain. We’re vetting similar loss cases over the last decade or so, but it was one of the company’s first questions as well. My team was focused on Ms. Murthy’s recovery. As soon as we flagged this scheme as a possibility, the home office assigned another team in Shaia’s department to probe the books for that route over the past five years.”
The Inspector paused, seeming to have lost his train of thought.
“You mentioned the ocean traffic?” Attorney Cole asked. “Were you able to find anything out of the ordinary.”
“Ah. No, nothing came up initially. It was a strange situation, because we could feel that we were close to something, but we had no tangible leads to follow. And all of Shaia and Sara’s modeling pointed to Parkaway, so I decided we should talk to some locals. I directed Shaia to dress down a little, did the same myself, and we went to a local bar in the city proper that a couple of the company employees had mentioned during their interviews. There are quite a few places to drink in the hospitality district, near the hotels. A lot of the deckhands came through there regularly.”
“The name of the establishment please, Inspector, for the record?”
“I’d prefer not to say.”
Mr. Cole paused to allow space for Drayer to elaborate, but he didn’t. Nearly ten seconds passed in silence.
“That’s your right of course,” Cole stated.
“There’s good reason for me to hold to that, Mr. Cole.”
“Another case of doing the right thing, Inspector?”
“Time will tell, I suppose.”
“Please continue then.”
“Of course. It might be a little difficult to explain to someone unfamiliar with the Indies. But when someone in structured cities like Gracia or any of the cylinders—anywhere in Dreeson’s or the Eastern Battery really—they go out into the Indies and can easily walk right past borders that mean something. I’m well familiar with the phenomenon, and I didn’t even see it coming out there except in hindsight. Our contact at the bar told us, ‘Be careful down there, you two,’ which was more or less a polite way of saying don’t go down there to a pair of soft, cosmopolitan inner-system management types. That warning and the state of the elevator should have given it away, just a feel, you know—the lighting, the dirty floor. You don’t know where the cameras stop. That’s the thing. Parkaway at the base of the elevator—the city—that place is well run. The corporations that do business there need it to be run that way, or at least appear to be run that way.
“Down at the water level, when Shaia and I stepped out of the elevator, we had no idea there weren’t cameras running. The people down there have to want them. I should have felt it. Shaia did, I think. Even as she professed her comfort with proceeding, having a look around, I could see the apprehension in her body. She carried it in her shoulders, but I think she wanted to impress me. Maybe it was that or that she was so inexperienced in the field she just didn’t have a gauge on when a field investigator should pull back.”
“When do you pull back, Inspector?”
Drayer shrugged. “Certainly if we know we’re entering a dangerous area like that alone, overextended, making an obvious target of ourselves. And, I would say, any time our gut tells us something isn’t right. Shaia’s did, I think. She just didn’t have the confidence to call it out to me. I’m fairly certain I’d have listened if she had.”
“I did wonder about the absence of video. There’s documentation in the files of all the critical aspects of the case, yet I didn’t see any video records of the incident itself. There’s no monitoring at sea level?”
“I’m sure there is, Mr. Cole. I bet every second we were down there is on video somewhere. We’ll just never see it. As I said, we crossed a border, and we started walking around looking in doors and down corridors we shouldn’t have been poking around. I think I thought we might find a friendly person or two down there to help us get a lay of the land. Instead, as we walked, we got uncomfortable stares. People looked at us funny when we greeted them. I didn’t see anyone obviously following us, but I’m sure it was clear to most of the people we saw down there who we were.
“We made two passes along one of the main docks. The atmosphere is breathable at sea level on Parkaway, but it’s pretty tough, so most of the docks aren’t exactly open to the water. The gangways aren’t properly sealed, but they’re enclosed. Similarly the crane access is run on a grid along the ceilings above the piers. I’m sure it’s mostly automated, but we didn’t get a chance to get into the logistics of how all the ships got loaded and unloaded, how everything flowed down there.
“We’d been down on the docks probably an hour or so, and we were about to head back. Shaia wanted to take a look at the water from the end of one of the piers. She’d never seen an ocean like that before. I guess we’d gotten comfortable enough walking around to think we were going to be left alone.
“We were walking down the fifth pier from the elevator we’d descended, maybe about halfway down the corridor that ran alongside the pier. That entire section was managed by a company called Dial 10 Maritime. I’d say we were maybe a thousand meters from the base of the elevator. It was fairly open, and we didn’t see anyone down there, so it didn’t strike me as the tactically stupid place it proved to be.
“There was absolutely no warning. I can’t speak for Shaia’s experience, but I didn’t see anything. I heard shots first, almost simultaneous shots from several positions, maybe five or seven in the span of a couple seconds. We both tried to dive for cover.
“I ended up landing on top of Shaia, who screamed. In the moment, I was afraid I’d hurt her. I hadn’t meant to land right on top of her. She was faster to the ground, whether it was her instincts or the reaction to getting shot, I don’t know. I don’t know all that much of what happened really. But I didn’t realize she was shot until a few seconds later. She was breathing too fast. I rolled to the side of her, and I pulled out my sidearm, more out of instinct than any strategic thinking. We were obviously outnumbered, and two of us carrying small arms like that, sitting on the bottom of an open space getting fired down upon from multiple positions above, no cover. I didn’t even get a sight of a single shooter.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I suspect hitting Shaia was a mistake. That many shooters missing us from that range when we were out in the open with no forewarning? Nobody’s that lucky. It might have been a ricochet.
“In any case, I shot back a few times, mostly aimlessly. I didn’t have a good read on any of the shooter’s locations. I think it was maybe thirty bolts exchanged. I’m almost certain I didn’t hit anything before I noticed the initial burst had died down. It wasn’t until the noise settled that I realized that Shaia was badly hurt. Initially, I’d thought it was the shock of the moment that had caused her to hyperventilate.”
“It must have been hard to process what was unfolding, Inspector?”
“Process, Mr. Cole? No, not hard. Impossible. You can’t process something like that until after: you have to just react. I confess I couldn’t even think. It wasn’t until they stopped firing and I saw how bad off Shaia was that I understood that we were probably dead. I think, in that moment, they were probably trying to figure out what to do with us, and the conclusion I suspected they were quickly coming to was that finishing off both of us and tossing us in the ocean was going to be the easiest way to deal with us. That was the first moment I had a real chance to take a breath and assess our position. I don’t even think the partition we were huddled behind was genuine cover from several of the angles above us. It was a death trap, so I stepped out, my hands up, and I set down my weapon in plain view.
“I didn’t have time to think about what I was going to say, but I knew the only way Shaia and I were getting out of there alive was to negotiate. I just started talking.”
“Do you remember what you said?”
“Verbatim? Maybe not exactly. I could give you the gist of it, though. The next thing I did was set down my eyewear and swatch, so they could see I wasn’t going to take any hard evidence out of there with me. Shaia did the same as I was speaking—tossed her gear. Anyway, as best I can recollect, I said the following:
This isn’t about the metals. The company writes off sums like that all the time. You wouldn’t have tried to take that much metal if you didn’t think there was a good chance we’d write it off entirely. You know that much. What you don’t know was that there was something in that container we can’t write off and we can’t replace. We’re here for the body of a young woman from a prominent family from Hellenia. The casket is in a sealed container in the inner carrier. That’s the only reason we’ve come down here. This can still end here; you have my word on it. All we wanted was the body.
My partner is hit. No doubt you’re thinking about what to do about that. If you let us get her medical attention before it’s too late, we can forget this ever happened.
“I stopped talking and waited. The longest thirty seconds of my entire life. I was waiting, Shaia was waiting. Nothing.”
“After maybe another thirty seconds without any response, only the background hum of the ship docked across the pier, Shaia called out to them. She was weak. All she could say was ‘Please.’
“I’ve never heard anything like it. One word. One precious word. A beautiful person like her begging for her life with no idea whether there was anybody even there to hear it.
“It occurred to me that they’d already run off. But they’d heard.”
“What did they say, Inspector?” Mr. Cole asked.
“Not a word, actually. I was surprised by a movement in my periphery. I actually put my hands up, thinking somebody was approaching, showed my open palms. It turned out to be a cart—a type of mag-lev autoloader that they used down on the docks, I guess. The whole pier was built with a magnetic floor, and it just floated up to us. They were thinking a whole step ahead of me, because I hadn’t even begun to think about how I was going to get Shaia out of there. I couldn’t have very well carried her on my shoulders a thousand meters with a bolt fixed in her torso, but it was easy enough to slide her onto the cart. I just told it to take us to the lift. I took off my shirt, trying to slow the bleeding, but she was in a bad way. About halfway up the elevator, she passed out.
“Thankfully, there was competent medical support in the city above. Saraswathi met Shaia at the medical facility when she came in, adding her expertise to the surgical team out there. Sara has quite a long memory file for emergencies like that.”
“I understand you visited Shaia before reporting here, Inspector. It’s not a subject of this deposition, but the reports I’ve received indicate Ms. Shaia Ta-Nûn is stable and expected to pull through?”
“It has been a long road already and will be an even longer one yet. She is conscious again and in fairly good spirits, though she’ll likely never rejoin me in the field. Of course, that outcome is secondary to the far more fortunate outcome that she is still with us. Her quality of life matters to me, though, and I will not stop being an advocate for her, assuming my voice still carries weight within the company. I suppose time will tell about that, though.”
“The degree to which you prove forthcoming on the details will have far more bearing than time, to put it bluntly, Inspector.”
“It’s the specifics, I know.”
“Primarily, the company would like to know how you negotiated the return of Ms. Murthy’s body following the firefight. Specifically, did you have direct contact with the thieves? If so, they would like you to divulge everything you know that will lead to their apprehension. If not, they would like to know the identity of your intermediary so that person can be interrogated.”
“Regarding Ms. Murthy’s body, I was able to make the request myself, as I still had the magnetic cart. The critical care response team came to us at the top of the elevator. My presence was not required to help save Shaia, so they left me in the concourse near the main lift. I left a message on the cart’s interface and sent it back down the elevator to the spot it picked up me and Shaia. I gave them the container number, and the ID label for the box with Ms. Murthy’s remains, as well as the shipping number. I suggested an intermediary for them to contact when they had the body in hand. I also gave my assurances that my division would not come after them once we had Ms. Murthy back, that Caroll Endline would write off the loss in its entirety.”
“You had no contact, then? They used your intermediary to deliver the body?”
“Correct.”
“And?”
“And I will not reveal that intermediary’s identity. My recommendation is that this investigation end here. The inner container was insured. Ms. Cillian Murthy’s body has been returned to her family. Ms. Shaia Ta-Nûn is alive and recovering. The company would be very foolish, in my opinion, to press our luck any further.”
“You probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that many within the company don’t share that opinion, Inspector, especially within the ranks of the company officers.”
“No doubt, Mr. Cole. No doubt. I’m familiar with that viewpoint. I’d have shared it before this ordeal. Lest anyone forget, I’ve dedicated my entire career to loss prevention, and I’ve always believed that we make our own luck, in that organisms and organizations alike who project weakness will be treated accordingly.
“But then there’s the matter that I am alive today to give this deposition. There’s the fact that Ms. Shaia Ta-Nûn lives and will recover. There’s also the fact that Cillian Murthy’s body was returned to her family. People can attempt to read into the motivation of the thieves all they want, but all three of those facts are facts only by the good graces of the people in that hallway whom I never spoke with directly and I never set eyes on. I gave my word to them, and they upheld their end of the agreement. As far as I’m concerned, this matter is closed. I’ll do everything in my small power to ensure that is so.”
“Thank you, Inspector. I understand your position. I have no further questions for you for the moment. Unless you have something you’d like to add to your testimony, I’ll have the court officer, Ms. Osso, conclude the proceedings.”
“Further questions for the moment you say, Mr. Cole? For the moment?” Inspector Drayer’s tone sat right on the cusp between professionalism and rudeness. “But you do have another question, don’t you?”
“I’m sure they’ll come up as Legal works through the matter on their end.”
“Yes. Yes. I see. Dismiss the recorder so you can ask the question that matters to Legal off the record.”
“You have something to add, Inspector?” Yarmit Osso, the court officer asked. “You are free to add it to the record, of course.”
“Do you know what question he wants to ask me, ma’am? Can you guess?”
“I wouldn’t presume to guess such things, Inspector. I take an accounting of the facts as required by Hellenian corporate law.”
“It’s not a matter of fact or law, at least not a legal matter yet. Do you know why I was nervous to give this testimony, Mr. Cole?”
“I’d give you the same answer as Ms. Osso, Inspector. I wouldn’t presume to know more than the facts you’ve revealed. Your state of mind is not for me to know unless you care to share it.”
“When we started, I was afraid I would care to share, that it would cost me my job, and I was afraid that if I really said what I wanted to say it would mean I’d never find another job in my field. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hold my tongue.”
“Then I would say you’re still in a similar position to your thieves, Inspector Drayer,” Attorney Cole stated. “I would say you’re at the point it need go no further. You may step off the stand before you say anything regrettable.”
“The answer, Ms. Osso, is that Mr. Cole has been instructed to ask me off the record about the disposition of the Murthys. It would look bad for the company if he asked me that question on the record. And I understand why the company wants to know. That’s their real point of exposure. They can deal with the port at Parkaway in the future. Legal wants to know if I have a sense for Mr. and Mrs. Murthy’s state of mind.”
“That bothers you, Inspector?” Mr. Cole said. “Surely in your line of work pragmatism can’t be all that shocking? The company looks out for our interests the same way your thieves didn’t let you and Ms. Ta-Nûn live out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor did they dredge that girl’s body off the bottom of the Parkaway Sea out of respect for poor Mr. and Mrs. Murthy, but out of self-interest.”
“The difference is that they don’t pretend they’re any better than they are, Mr. Cole,” Inspector Drayer said. “Would you like me to answer the question? I’m not going to do it off the record if I do, but I’ll answer it willingly in the presence of the magistrate.”
Reluctantly, Mr. Cole made a gesture for the inspector to continue.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Cole?” Inspector Drayer asked. “Did you have a question for me?”
There was a long silence as Cole looked over at Drayer angrily, shaking his head.
“How were the Murthys, Inspector Drayer?”
“In the moment, as the reality of their daughter’s death was hitting them, seeing the sight of her coffin for the first time, you know, I just didn’t think to ask whether they intended to sue us. I had the sense at that moment that they preferred to be left alone to grieve. That seemed like the right thing to do.”
When Drayer finished speaking, Attorney Cole was silent for nearly ten seconds. Drayer glared at him through the silence.
“Any further questions, Mr. Cole?” The court officer, Ms. Osso, asked.
“Not at this time.”
“Anything further you care to add to the record, Inspector Drayer?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then I call this deposition to a close at the marked time. Inspector Drayer, Mr. Cole, you are both excused.”
Yarmit Osso nodded to both men as she stood and excused herself from the room. Cole looked over at Drayer but didn’t open his mouth. After a moment, Drayer stood and walked out.
Inspector Tamza Drayer filed out of the court offices and into the wide western causeway that led down to Gracia Crossing. The main exit from the court was about thirty stories up from Hellenia’s ground level, and that western causeway flowed directly down to Gracia’s great hub, which was particularly striking from that height—far enough up that the view still inspired the type of awe one had of perching from a grand height, far enough down that one still got the humbling impression of gazing up at a magnificent architectural spectacle like a great cathedral vault.
Drayer found his feet almost moving him there automatically as he reflected on the deposition. He was angry. He was exhausted. He was thinking that no one else in the crowd around him knew a thing about Shaia, about Cillian Murthy, about shipping loss.
He stepped out to an observation vantage—an open balcony crowded with people looking down on Gracia Crossing, gazing up at the lights, following the birds in flight, marking the perfection of their design, nearly as perfect as the real living thing.
Drayer found himself marveling at the sight as well, tracking the most colorful of the bots as they took flight, alighting on the railings surrounding the crow’s nest, only to drop off again and circle back around the grand carousel. He found himself wondering how long it would take him to learn to build a bird.
“It’s quite a sight,” a woman’s voice seemed to be addressing him.
Drayer turned to see Yarmit Osso, the court officer, standing to his left. Somehow, she looked different now that they were outside the court, but it was the same woman. She smiled at him. He returned a puzzled look.
“Relax, Inspector, I didn’t follow you here. I’ve been working as an assistant magistrate for thirteen years now in those same offices. People from Gracia usually go straight home when they’re done testifying. Everyone else walks here. Like clockwork.”
“What about you, Ms. Osso? You live here in Gracia?”
“I do, but I came this way because I knew you’d walk this way. I wanted to talk to you off the record.”
“That seems …?”
“Irregular? Not in keeping with regulations?”
He nodded, betraying some frustration at her accurate reading of him.
“Maybe it is,” she said grinning. “Maybe I also thought it was the right thing to do.”
“Funny.”
She smiled. “I promise to be honest with you if you promise to be honest with me.”
He shrugged. “I’m not a liar.”
Yarmit Osso looked back at him probingly and then gestured to the vast open space—the air above the courtyard below. “They’re beautiful, don’t you think?”
“The birds?”
Ms. Osso nodded. “One of the parrots was designed and built by Saraswathi herself—the prime.”
“Is that so? A machine building a machine for fun. That’s something.”
“If you’re lucky you might see it. A red parrot.”
“I’ll keep my eyes out for it.”
“There’s another funny thing about working for the court for thirteen years. It’s probably similar in your line of work too, Inspector Drayer, but I can tell when someone is lying to the court.”
“So can the equipment, Ms. Osso.”
“It sure can, yes, when a lie is explicit. Funny thing about the gear, though, is that it has a difficult time picking up other types of lies.”
He looked back over at Ms. Osso again, trying to pick up on her intentions. She smiled at him slightly.
“Your testimony was impressive, and from the look on your face, you seemed to have convinced yourself as well as Mr. Cole.”
“Is this a conversation we should be having, Ms. Osso?”
“My conscience is clean, Inspector.”
“As is mine. I acted honestly, and I spoke honestly.”
“Now you’re lying,” she said. “A lie by omission is still a lie, and it may not be relevant to the outcome of the case, but it’s relevant to you, and it’s relevant to the girl. So which is true: either she’s married, you’re married, or you care too much about company regulations to tell her you love her?”
Drayer shook his head.
“That look! God, Drayer, the shock! Really? How many times have you visited her in the hospital?”
“She’s my partner, a junior investigator—my responsibility.”
“And you’d never have forgiven yourself. Blah-blah-blah! Go back to the hospital and ask her for it, then. We’re always harder on ourselves than the people who love us. And after she forgives you, tell her you love her, Drayer. You’re probably getting fired anyway. Might as well make it worth something.”
“Is this …?” Drayer looked back at Ms. Osso totally flummoxed. “I mean, do you end all your depositions with life advice?”
“Only the ones where something so painfully obvious is tearing somebody up inside for no good reason. It was the right thing to do, don’t you think?”
Drayer shook his head.
She smiled at him again. “Think about it, Inspector. Then forgive your own thick-headedness. Sometimes we’re the last to know.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Then don’t say anything. Enjoy the birds. And good luck with Shaia.”
He didn’t say anything. Tamza Drayer looked over at Ms. Osso curiously as she smiled and turned and slowly walked away.
He elbowed his way up to the railing and looked out, straining his eyes as he followed the streaks of color over Gracia Crossing again and again.
Drayer smiled and watched the birds, turning it all over in his mind one more time. All the same information. All different now.
Whether spoken aloud or not, truth is truth, Drayer thought. Sometimes, we are the last to know.