"—yeah, no, we can do that, give me an hour and a half."
Siler's voice came through the SRD intercom on the off-world channel and I caught it halfway across the office on my way to the coffee machine. He was speaking to someone whose voice I could not hear. The intercom relay was a passive-listen channel that I had set up on day twelve of SRD operations and had not turned off because Walter, on day thirteen, had pointed out that the kind of director who turned off the passive listen on his own staff was the kind of director who eventually got blindsided by his own people.
I had told Walter, then, that I would learn how to leave it on without listening to it.
I stopped two paces from the coffee machine. I listened.
"—the cooling unit's compressor seized, we're patching the line bypass through the secondary, no I do not need engineering off-world, yeah, copy, give me an hour and a half, out."
The intercom clicked.
The coffee machine was the one Siler had repaired four weeks ago after the kitchen's main unit had failed. It was a small drip rig that he had stolen, by his own cheerful admission, from a decommissioned NORAD break room in 1991. The coffee it made tasted, as Siler enjoyed reminding me, like solder. I poured a cup. I held the cup.
I did not pick up the phone.
Drew.
"Don't."
I have not said anything.
"You're about to."
I am about to observe that the cooling unit's compressor is one of the three components I would have flagged at the design review three weeks ago, had you asked me to attend.
"I didn't ask."
Correct.
I sipped the coffee. It tasted like solder. AURORA-7 settled into the back of my skull at a register that was deliberately not pushing the off-world intercom feed into my forebrain, because I had asked her, six days ago, to stop pre-routing telemetry from sites where I had delegated tactical command.
"Are they hurt."
The audio I have access to does not indicate immediate physical injury. The audio I do not have access to is the audio you would have had access to if you had not delegated.
"Understood."
I sat down at my desk. I opened the Tuesday agenda. The Tuesday agenda did not have the P7X-445 cooling failure on it because the Tuesday agenda was a thing that had been set on Monday and the cooling failure had not yet happened on Monday. I closed the agenda. I opened the Hammond draft. I read it. I read it again. I did not understand a sentence in the third paragraph and I rewrote it. The rewrite was worse. I changed it back.
I checked the time at 1612. I had asked Janet for 1900. I had told her I would leave the mountain at 1730.
At 1717 my phone vibrated against the desk. I did not move my hand toward it. I waited four seconds.
It was a text from Siler.
All clear. The coffee in your office tastes like solder again.
I read it twice. I put the phone face-down on the desk. I picked up the coffee cup, drank the last of it, set the cup on the saucer. I picked up the phone, turned it face-up, did not unlock it, and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket, against my ribs.
I walked to the elevator.
Janet opened the door at 1858. I had stood at the curb at 1856 and watched the second hand on my watch finish the minute. She kissed me at the door, took my coat, and walked me through the front hall into the kitchen, where a chicken was resting on a wood board and a small green salad was already plated.
"Cass is upstairs," she said. "She has a paper. We have an hour and ten."
"That's a strict schedule for a Tuesday."
"It is." She turned. Her hand came up. Her fingers settled on her left earring. The stud. She did not say anything for a count of two. "You came at the time you said you would."
"I always do."
"You always try to. You did not check the phone in your pocket."
I had not seen her see that.
"It's in there," I said.
"I know."
I had to set the wineglass down because my hand had gone tight on the stem. I set it down and put my hand flat on the counter. The phone in my jacket pocket was a weight against my lowest rib. I could feel the rectangle.
"Eat," Janet said. "You're going to be tense through the whole meal anyway. Let's get the meal in you."
She was right and there was no useful answer. I cut chicken. I ate chicken. Cassandra came downstairs at 1934, ate three bites of the chicken and most of the salad, asked Janet a question about a citation format in the paper, told me her physics teacher had assigned the ladder paradox and had not enjoyed her opening question about whether the barn could just open its doors faster, and went back upstairs.
Janet watched her go. She turned back to me. Her hand came down off her earring. She picked up the wine.
"Two of three," she said.
"Two of three?"
"You came on time. She came down to ask the citation question, which she does not do for guests. The third one I'm not going to tell you what it is."
"Janet."
"What."
"I— thank you for asking me to come tonight."
She looked at me. The look was the long professional look she gave Hammond when Hammond said something Hammond did not quite mean.
"You're welcome." She drank. She set the glass down. "And tomorrow morning Walter is going to tell you something about a Sergeant Siler, and you are going to be very calm about it, because you were here when it was happening, and that is how this works."
"You know about—"
"I know you have a delegate of record at P7X-445. I know there was a cooling failure. I know your shoulders have been at your earlobes since you walked in." She picked up the wineglass again. "I know you are not going to take out the phone."
I did not take out the phone.
She put her hand on top of mine on the counter. The touch was brief. It went away before I could close my fingers around hers, and that was the point.
I read the incident log at 2207, back at the office, with my coat still on.
Siler had de-escalated a near-riot between two colonist families over the failed cold storage of a religious-significance perishable I had not realized had religious significance. He had stood between the two factions, taken a punch to the jaw from the angriest of the angriest, not retaliated, and said — the line was in Walter's running shorthand — World's Okayest Sergeant, sir, give me an hour and a half. The line had landed and the two factions had let him work. He had patched the compressor bypass and brought the cooling back online in seventy-three minutes. He had logged everything with Walter at 1812.
The third paragraph of the log was the one I read three times.
During de-escalation interval, Serrakin trade representative (Engineer M. Veska, second of Kaleb's complement) approached Sergeant Siler and offered Serrakin commercial mediator services to assist with the dispute. Offer declined courteously by Sergeant Siler. Engineer Veska did not press. Engineer Veska's logged movement: returned to engineering deck, did not communicate offer to Trade Representative Kaleb on open Serrakin channels. — Walter
I read the paragraph a fourth time.
I picked up the phone. I dialed Walter. Walter picked up on the first ring at 2204.
"Sir."
"You saw."
"I saw."
"You're already on it."
"I'm already on it. The engineer made the offer without surfacing it to Kaleb. The offer wasn't authorized through the formal channel. Either Kaleb didn't know, or Kaleb wanted plausible deniability."
"Or both."
"Or both."
I sat down in the chair. My shoulders had not come down since dinner. They did not come down now.
"Walter."
"Sir."
"Set up a private meeting with Kaleb. Day after tomorrow. Off the formal schedule. Don't tell him what it's about."
"I will, sir."
I hung up. The office was quiet. The cup on my desk still had a ring of solder-flavored coffee at the bottom from this morning. I picked the cup up and put it on the saucer that had not been washed.
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