“How hard is this going to be?” she asked. Her irritation was already fading, and her mind was turning toward what needed to happen next. Planning for violence. When the old man spoke, his tone was lighter than she’d expected.
“I don’t know. He’s a tight-ass, this one. I mean, it seems like these Laconians all are. Not a big surprise. You take a bunch of Martian Congressional Republic fanatics and interbreed them for a few decades, it’s not going to tend toward a greater mental flexibility. I’ve got a few ears in place. We’ll see how he reacts.”
“Electronic?”
“Nope. Just people who like gossip and drinking. They’ll do.” The old man ran a metal finger around the rim of his glass, his mouth pulled into something that was almost a smile. “This guy. He’s… hungry. I just don’t know what for yet.”
“Does it matter?”
He drank down the rest of the ouzo in a gulp. “Of course it matters. Hungry pays our bills.”
“No, I mean, why do we care what he wants or needs when we’re going to kill him? Sure, maybe he’d look the other way if we got him a lot of exotic talcum powder and a bottle of whiskey, but that’s not going to matter much when he’s dead.”
The old man shook his head slowly. “I’m not killing him. Not yet anyway. We start knocking off governors, maybe we get a little time to breathe before the next guy comes, but the next guy’s going to be even more of a shithead. Better if I figure this guy out.”
“Permission?” Agnete said.
The old man waved his metal hand in a slow circle, inviting her to speak her mind.
“You already made the call,” she said. “He joins up by taking the bribe, or he turns it down and we kill him. He turned it down, so now we kill him. Those are the rules.”
The old man scratched at his hairy, white chest. Outside the window, a local pigeon—six compound eyes and bat wings covered with feathery cilia—landed, chittered, and flew off again. The old man smiled after it as if the interruption had broken his train of thought. When he spoke, she knew it hadn’t, and that the conversation was over.
“The rules,” he said, “are what I say they are.”
* * *
Mona Rittenaur’s office was on the top floor of the northwest corner of the Xi-Tamyan building. It was twice as large as her cabin on the Notus had been, with intelligent glass from floor to ceiling that not only adjusted the level of light as Auberon’s sun sped across its wide blue sky, but corrected the color to give the landscape below her a sense of greater constancy. She knew from her briefing that the illusion was supposed to make the transition to Auberon’s unfamiliar daily cycle easier, but after the first few days, she disabled the feature. She wanted to see the world around her as it was.
“Dr. Rittenaur?” a woman’s voice said from the doorway, and then, belatedly, a soft knock. “You wanted to see me?”
Veronica Dietz was her liaison with the workgroups. Mona had been coming to the office for a week now, and apart from being the living symbol of how anxious Xi-Tamyan Agricultural Concern was to have a solid relationship with the new Laconian government, her role in the research had been nebulous.
She was ready to define it.
“Yes,” Mona said, “I heard about some research on amino acid array translation. I’d like to see the records on that.”
“I don’t think it’s a live workgroup,” Veronica said. “We had some preliminary work a few years back, but the powers that be thought the microbiota compatibility work had more potential.”
“I understand,” Mona
said with a smile. “Just bring me what you have on array translation. It doesn’t need to be complete.”
“You got it. Anything else?”
“Not for now,” Mona said, and Veronica vanished back behind the door.
Dr. Carmichael’s tipsy, weeping voice had stuck with Mona since the reception. Biryar was focused on the incident, the threat, whatever euphemism he and Overstreet were using for it. The criminals and terrorists who saw Laconia as something that could or ought to be resisted. That they’d made a threat on the same day the Notus arrived bothered her, but she couldn’t do anything about it directly. This, she could.
The records appeared on her system a few minutes later with a tagged note from Veronica offering to bring in some tea and one of the apple pastries from the break room. Mona thanked her in text but turned the offer down. Veronica’s job required that she be solicitous and friendly, but it didn’t cost Mona anything to treat her nicely.
The records of Dr. Carmichael’s work were preliminary, as Mona expected. They also weren’t quite as impressive as she’d been led to believe. There was good, solid work in it, though. If it had been done on Laconia, Carmichael would have had more tools for the experiments. And she might still, if Mona pushed to have her transferred back home. It tickled her a little, the prospect of swooping in and rescuing a languishing career just because she could.
The microbiota compatibility workgroup that had been funded instead was headed by a broad-faced man with brown eyes and hair as thin as mist: Dr. Grover Balakrishnan, previously from Ganymede, one of the oldest and most respected agricultural centers in Sol system. His plan was essentially harnessing evolutionary pressure to develop soils that supported both Sol and Auberon trees of life. Start a few hundred samples of mixed microbes, then part out the most successful ones. Iterate a few dozen times, and let selective pressure do the work.
It was sloppy. And, to her eyes, less likely to get replicable results than Dr. Carmichael’s work. That didn’t mean that there had really been a conspiracy to quash the array translation project. It might just have been a bad decision. She went back to look at the funding committee reports. It took her most of the morning and well into the midday darkness before she found the smoking gun.
Deep in the patent payment agreement that covered any products derived from the microbiota compatibility studies, a new name appeared. Only it wasn’t really new at all.