Chapter 2

Chapter 2

GDAT 3235.011

V ellek keyed the control to launch the flying camera array. The set was old but still good enough to get comprehensive and detailed three-dimensional recordings of the corpse and the surrounding area.

While the cameras sent their images, he stole occasional glances at Katalin. She sat on the floor, elbows resting on her bent knees, her expression shadowed by her oxygen mask. She didn’t seem to be in distress, but no one on the station he could think would be comfortable sitting vigil with a corpse.

When the composited image began to assemble on his tablet’s display, he was glad Katalin hadn’t gotten any closer to Jensuradi’s body. The back of the man’s head wasn’t nearly as intact as his face. Something had left a horizontal dent and a lot of blood. She didn’t need a memory of that for the rest of her life. If she wasn’t a filer, a minder with perfect recall, she was damn close.

Nothing nearby looked like it could have caused the dent, but in half-gravity, an injured man could have crawled a significant distance before dying. For that matter, the dent might not have been the primary or only cause of death.

There was no getting around the fact that they’d have to call in the Lumen Roca law enforcement officers. His security department could handle general policing and peacekeeping. They had neither the expertise nor the resources to investigate the unexplained death of a CPS agent. The same was true of the regular military medics. Only the Lumen Roca LEOs had the jurisdiction to keep the CPS from swooping in and causing chaos.

However, calling in the planetary LEOs was a double-edged sword. Even the better investigators would focus on Katalin and Sierrho first. In his experience, too many of Lumen Roca’s LEOs preferred neat and easy. If an obvious scenario closed a case quickly, they’d be inclined to quit investigating and focus on confirming their foregone conclusion, regardless of the truth or who got hurt.

After the cameras finished and returned to their case, he stowed it in the gravcart’s cab and began the process of collecting strict-protocol samples. Revealing that skillset could link him to his former career, but he’d have to take that risk. Starlane Crossroads had become his sanctuary. He couldn’t let down the people who welcomed him into their fold, no questions asked.

He especially couldn’t let Katalin down again. She was his second real friend on the station, and he’d already hurt her. When she’d confided in him about a troubling directive from Okebaan Corp, he’d seen a pattern and that meant none of their jobs would be safe for long. Losing his friends was bad enough, but the thought of losing Katalin had stunned him into retreat. It had taken weeks of self-examination to recognize that his friendship with her had evolved into something more complex, at least on his part. It was a new experience, and one he didn’t know how to handle. His former life had made relationships next to impossible.

However, now was not the time for the apology he owed her. The sooner he processed the scene, the sooner they could get out of the bone-chilling emptiness of the maintenance skin and the annoying half-gravity. After pulling on clean overgloves, he unpacked the sterile probes and got to work.

Intense focus was usually his ace, but not today. And, as he’d recently discovered, withdrawing into his own little universe didn’t always help him think. He tapped his earwire to ping Katalin rather than have to shout at her. “Do you want the bad news or the worse news first?”

She snorted with amusement. His imagination supplied her half-smile that usually accompanied that sound. “Bad, I guess.”

“Something hit Jensuradi on the back of his head, or he hit something. The bad news is that we’ll need a forensic autopsy to find out if it killed him.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that when I saw how carefully you’re handling those samples. Our medic center doesn’t have the credentials, and I don’t trust the military medics or the CPS.” She sighed. “Which means we’ll have to tell the Lumen Roca LEOs to bring a full forensic evidence suite, or at least forensic techs and shippable stasis box for the body. Plus, we’ll have to tell Okebaan Corp how to fight the extra charges that the Lumen Roca planet gov will try to levy, or it will come out of our budget. We’ll have to notify the residents fast or the rumor engines will explode. And all that will be a stroll in Hydro Park Rain Day compared to what the CPS will do.” She made a frustrated sound. “And to think I used to believe we were lucky to get saddled with the most dysfunctional staff of CPS agents in the galaxy.”

Vellek admired the hell out of her for keeping all those threads straight. Starn Tigurini might have been the charismatic, gregarious, and crafty station manager that everyone knew, but, as Vellek had determined within his first days on the job as a low-level security specialist, Katalin was the unsung hero who kept the station running.

“So, the worse news is that the CPS will have to call in their Office of Internal Inquiry. They’ll interview CPS staff and take statements because minders can’t be handled by non-minders. However, if Jensuradi’s death wasn’t an accident, the OII will make sure the LEOs look elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere, as in Sierrho and me?”

“Yes. Sorry.” The bitter truth of it galled him. Especially since he’d spent a lot of years on the wrong side of that.

“Not your fault. I appreciate you sharing your experience.”

Her phrasing made him wonder if she suspected some of the past he’d put diligent effort into burying. But on brief reflection, he realized wasn’t feeling worried. More like… relief? An unexpected response to think about later. Sometimes his own emotions seemed to be independently owned and operated.

With the last sample collected, sealed, and tagged, he put away the instruments and latched the kit’s lid. The next part wouldn’t be pleasant.

He slid the anti-grav stretcher off the flat bed of the gravcart and placed it next to the dead man. After one more look around, he crossed to where Katalin was now standing, hands in her pockets. Wisps of her dark hair curled around the sides of her oxygen mask.

“I can move Jensuradi by myself. But if you can stand it, I could use your help in stabilizing the stretcher.” He looked down into her softly angular face, trying to read her expression. In his former life, he’d have used his minder talents to sense what was going on with her. That wasn’t him anymore. “The last thing I want to do is re-traumatize you with this, but the second-to-last thing I want to do is drop the body in the dust before I can get the canopy over him.”

“Let’s do it and get him out of here.” She gave him a wry smile. “We’re lucky the maintenance and hull bots that are working on the breach didn’t already find him and try to ‘repair’ him, too.”

“That would be unhelpful,” he agreed with studied solemnity.

After a small struggle to get the semi-floppy body on the stretcher, the canopy raised up and sealed smoothly with a soft snick . Within minutes, they had the stretcher secured to the gravcart bed and climbed into the tractor cab for the trip back to the airlock port. He was happy to let the tractor’s navigation system glide them through the maintenance skin and smoothly retrace the route back to the double airlocks near the central core of the station. To be honest, he found the environment unnerving and envied Katalin’s apparent ease.

She cleared her throat. “I don’t know about timetable for the OII, but we’ve got four, maybe five standard days before the LEOs arrive. If it was just a routine criminal or orphan pickup, we’d have weeks, but death will motivate them. You probably won’t be happy about this, but I’m going to do my level best to investigate Jensuradi’s death before they get here.” A tight frown crossed her face. “I’m not the owner, or even the permanent station manager, but Okebaan Corp isn’t here to stop me. Too many people depend on Starlane Crossroads.”

“Funny, I was about to say the same thing to you.” But with a lot more words, so he appreciated the brevity.

“Oh, good. You know this could get us both terminated under about eight or nine different clauses in our employment contracts, right?”

Her gloved fingers hovered over his forearm but pulled away before making contact. When he’d first arrived on the station, he’d made it clear to everyone he didn’t like being touched. It had been one of the many lies he told out of self-preservation, and one he’d since come to regret. Especially with her.

He folded his hands together to stop them from reaching out for hers. “Yes, investigating on our own is a risk, but I’d rather start the fire than be in its path.”

***

Vellek had a love-hate relationship with the station’s security manager office. Its location at the center of the station gave him an excellent birds-eye view of Crossroads Hall, except it was too close to the wide and very popular Promenade Balcony to give him the quiet privacy he preferred.

Not that Vellek had many visitors. The office’s ornate, expandable all-purpose table was large enough to comfortably seat twenty people for a formal dinner, as Octavi Patabarro, his former boss and mentor, had often proved. Vellek’s talents did not include scintillating social skills, so he hadn’t held any dinners, but he missed them almost as much as he missed Patabarro.

The office’s spacious size, ocean-patterned sculpted carpet, and the high-tech security console and desk decorated with a seashell and starfish motif were too ostentatious for his tastes. The original abstract paintings adorning the sand-colored walls reminded him of rice noodles in cloudy broth. However, as Patabarro had pointed out, the overall effect impressed some visiting VIPs and made others underestimate how seriously they took security on the station.

At the desk where he sat, the colorful visual representations of data morphed and blinked on the panorama displays before him. His staff found them incomprehensible, but to him, they provided a holistic overview of the station’s status, currently good and “green go,” to use the common military term. Leaning back in one of his few contributions to the office, a utilitarian adaptable chair that fit his narrower frame, he cradled the mug of kaffe against his chest and let it warm his hands. The slightly sweet and mild stimulant would fend off the mid-afternoon energy dip and the steamy scent felt good to his perpetually dry sinuses.

Jensuradi’s corpse was sealed in stasis and the samples safely secured with extra monitoring measures. He told his staff about the death and gave them a brief description of the circumstances, with firm orders to direct any inquiries to him. The next notice went via priority to Lumen Roca’s law enforcement with an official request for investigation. He provided them with visual recordings and a description of the evidence he’d collected.

For the CPS and the military, he provided the same information via the station’s official communications channel. Taking a lesson learned from Katalin, he’d included a subtle reminder that, per the station’s unique status with the Central Galactic Concordance, Lumen Roca had jurisdiction.

Most space stations in the CGC were considered to be an extension of the planet they orbited. Starlane Crossroads was in the small set of exceptions. Owing to the station’s history that predated the dawn of the CGC government, the shrewd Tigurini family got it grandfathered in as an independent, self-supporting scientific research station under special license. When the more mature CGC later tried to terminate the license and take over, the family sued, successfully pointing out the “in perpetuity” term in both the charter and CGC license, and won the right to be a quasi-independent station forevermore.

Starlane Crossroads was originally built to study a rogue not-quite-dead planet, Helmi 9670, and was geolocked in high orbit above it. Massive flux-fueled system engines fired periodically to maintain the correct position and distance. Therefore, the station contracted with Lumen Roca, a CGC membership planet that was at least three transit days away via the fastest interstellar starship, for judicial, administrative, and law enforcement services. The military leased space on the station and had no more contractual rights than any other leaseholder, a fact that had galled the deceased Agent-in-Charge to no end.

Military Commander Doseki had quickly responded to Vellek’s notice with a brief acknowledgment and request for any updates. He respected the way she ran her command and her pleasant, no-nonsense attitude, both of which were hard to find in the more hidebound halls of the traditional military.

Not long after, he received near-simultaneous pings from the CPS. Agent Rikenna replied with a new title of Acting Agent-in-Charge and an immediate summons to the Agent-in-Charge’s office for an in-person briefing. Agent Perlabeaux sent a similar imperious demand for him to come to her office, citing her position as Head Security Officer for the CPS unit, the responsibilities for which she usually avoided. Though he was tempted to tell them both to suck flux, he settled for politely referring them to the station manager. He would have felt bad about throwing Katalin off the sky skimmer, except they’d agreed to use the station license and lease terms as a shield, which meant following their provisions to the sub-sub-subparagraph.

Katalin’s announcement to the station residents and businesses about Jensuradi was a blend of dignified respect for the dead and deft misdirection as to the cause, citing privacy for the lack of details. That would probably put a damper on the amateur info brokers, also known as gossip mongers, but the frenzy would start once the LEOs arrived.

Now that he’d cleared his schedule for the next hour, he found himself reluctant to do the next task on his agenda. As much as he’d like to stall because they didn’t know what killed Jensuradi, he knew the next logical step was to assume it was murder and go down that path. However, that threatened to bring up old memories and old guilts that he hadn’t resolved so much as shoved in a closet and deliberately lost the key. It had been much easier back then to dissect suspects and motives when he didn’t care about the people involved. Of course, thanks to that unasked-for career, he’d had zero friends or relationships to begin with.

As far as he could tell, Agent-in-Charge Jensuradi hadn’t had any, either. But he had no shortage of enemies. He regularly interfered with station operations, forcing Katalin to regularly rein him in and clean up the chaos. For reasons Vellek couldn’t fathom, the agent absolutely detested Sierrho and her rescue operation and went out of his way to make trouble for her whenever he could. His coworkers despised him. While agents Rikenna and Perlabeaux were already making power grabs, the rest of the CPS contingent was probably already celebrating at High Glide Chems, the station’s hardcore pub for getting seriously warped.

Jensuradi was no better liked by the station’s tenant businesses and residents. He tried very hard to seem like a friendly, non-threatening, sympathetic person, but he smiled too much and delivered repetitive one-liner innuendo jokes like looped recording. More importantly, he collected gossip and used it as a weapon to extract favors and compliance with the CPS’s agenda. His favorite tactic had been to imply he'd stumbled across someone's secret past in CPS records and see who reacted to what.

Now that Vellek thought about it, he suspected Jensuradi’s actions all stemmed from the fact that he seemed deeply and personally offended that Starlane Crossroads had a live-and-let-live attitude about minders. To Jensuradi, all minders were inherently volatile and needed to be under the watchful eye of the CPS. That, despite the fact that he was himself a mid-level multi-talent minder.

Vellek knew the man had telepath, sifter, and shielder skills, and probably a finder talent as well. None of them were strong, but the combination should have made him a useful CPS employee with plenty of upward mobility opportunities. Instead, he’d been shunted off to the back of beyond, career-wise, for the last eight years. In retrospect, Vellek wished he’d done a more thorough background check on the agent to learn why.

Well, no time like the present to remedy that. While he was at it, he would do the same for the other three ranking agents assigned to the station. The long-term administrative staffers had all been there for a decade or more and passed Patabarro’s security checks, but it wouldn’t hurt to re-check them as well. In his more visible acting position, Vellek been reluctant to risk attracting the CPS’s attention, but Jensuradi’s death guaranteed their interest, so he may as well do his job.

He could start that after he finished his afternoon checks. Or he could follow his intuition — a feeling he still sometimes distrusted as wishful thinking — and check in with Katalin. Finding Jensuradi’s corpse had to have affected her, even if she wouldn’t show it. And if she needed comfort or a sympathetic ear, she wouldn’t ask because she thought people would disrespect her position. Guilt about ghosting her had been prodding him, but fear that she wouldn’t want those things from him kept stopping him from offering.

The observer part of his mind pointed out that at least he was getting better at acknowledging his feelings, even if they were stupid ones, which made him smile at his own absurdity. Giving into impulse, he sent her a quick ping, inviting her to dine with him in his big office that evening at nineteen hundred.

Doubt pounced almost immediately. She had only come to Patabarro’s dinners when Starn was around. Another reminder of what she’d lost wouldn’t be welcome. He should have invited her to a conference room or-

A flash of brown startled him, and suddenly he had a lap full of a ten-kilo striped cat, purr-meowing at him as she kneaded his thigh, her claws making little pinpricks in his flesh. Warm liquid soaked the front of his black undertunic where the kaffe had spilled.

“Cyrene,” he complained, as if it would do any good. He reached around over her to set the mug on the desk. That was when he noticed the cat was distinctly damp and dripping onto his gray pants. “Thank you so much.”

Cyrene purred louder, clearly pleased with herself as she draped herself across his legs, sharing more of the moisture, and likely some of her loose fur. He’d finally learned that heathered grey pants were better at hiding the fur he often wore.

“I suppose there is no point in asking whose fountain you were playing in this time.” He really didn’t know why he spoke to the cat, except that it had become a habit. She had an amazing ability to get into anywhere she wanted to go, such as the elegant fountains in private lobbies or his supposedly access-controlled security office.

His desk comms unit sounded with Katalin’s tone.

Reaching around Cyrene again, he touched the comms control. A holo of Katalin sprung to life. She was still in the conservative workaday clothes she’d worn that morning.

“Hello. That was fast. If you-”

Barking arose from outside his closed office door.

“Hang on,” he said to Katalin.

He waved a hand over the door control to let the hound in, then turned back to the holo. “If you’re accepting the invitation, it doesn’t have to be here. We could-” Norby made a beeline for Vellek. “Don’t you dare!”

Too late. Norby shook himself with determined vigor, showering both him and Cyrene.

The sound of Katalin’s laughter filled the room. “Dinner in your office sounds great. I’ll bring food from Nebula Spire. And towels.”

***

Vellek reached for a decanter. “I told her I’d never been around animals, then somehow, I'm fostering this bonded cat and dog pair. I still don’t know how it happened.”

He poured the last of the tangy fizz water into Katalin’s glass, then put the decanter back on the catering cart. Their empty plates, helpfully licked clean by a certain hound, were stacked on the cart’s lower shelf.

Katalin chuckled, looking more relaxed than he’d seen her in a handful of ten-days. The boldly bright gauzy tunic and loosely-tied hairstyle suited her. “I bet half the people who got pets from Sierrho had similar experiences. That’s how I got Froggie. The day after Starn left with Temelle on her first supply run in her new ship, Sierrho tells me the shelter is overflowing and begs me to keep this improbably-named cat in my office just for a few days. I couldn’t just leave her there at night with just a makeshift crate, food, and water bowl, so I took her home. Best bad idea ever. And now I have Sky and Paru, and wouldn’t give them up for anything.”

“Same here.” He wouldn’t admit that to anyone else. His gaze flicked to the far corner of the office, where Norby and Cyrene dozed together in the pet bed he had provided for them. They’d been very polite in their begging for scraps. Katalin had anticipated the issue and ordered treats for them along with the meal.

It was tempting just to drift in the peaceful feeling of the evening, but he couldn’t put off the real world any longer. “If I may, I’d like to talk business for a minute.”

“I suppose we must.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Thanks for waiting until after dinner.”

Tilting his head toward the cart, he returned her smile. “Thank you for ordering dinner in the first place. You always seem to know what I’m in the mood for better than I do.”

In the first standard months after their mutual losses and being thrown into unlooked for leadership positions, he’d often forgotten to eat or sleep. She’d somehow known and made it a point to send catered food carts to him. Guilt poked him because he couldn’t remember if he’d ever thanked her.

She stroked the decorative edge of the table with an idle finger. “Starn and Octavi would be happy their table is being used again, even if it’s just us. They designed it together. Argued about it for months. Octavi wanted a stunning, fully adaptable table to host high-level negotiations or dinner parties of any size. Starn wanted to sync it with the displays” — she tilted her head toward the wall behind her with the mural-sized shallow holoscreen — “and make it a another one of his masterpieces like the dome over Crossroads Hall. Octavi told him he wanted it built sooner than the next millennium.” Her head shook as she smiled. “It finally got done when I gave Starn a deadline and Octavi a budget.”

Vellek swallowed his last sip of kaffe. “I’m planning to go after CPS data. CPS employees often use commercial dataspaces for things they don’t want in official military records. Because we’re so small, it should be easy to identify the threads, though it might take a few days to hunt down the encryption keys.”

She frowned. “We don’t have time for that. I’ll get you access and tell you where to look.”

At his raised eyebrow, she continued. “Starn hired me away from the CGC government to fix the station’s comms. They were about to collapse under the succession of patches and add-ons they’d made while trying to keep antique equipment going. After we married, I redesigned the entire comms structure from the bottom up. I know where the backdoors and sidegates are, and I’ll give you the cryptogons.”

Vellek felt his eyes widen as he realized what that meant. “Thank you for trusting me. I’m not sure you should.”

She waved away his objection. “I am. Starlane Crossroads seems to attract people with hidden skills or dark pasts. I don’t ask what or why because it’s not important. We’re all just people trying to get along as best we can. Troublemakers usually transit elsewhere because they can’t get traction. You could have exploited or abused anything you wanted in the five years since you’ve been here.”

He didn’t think he’d earned her loyalty, but again, that was one of his failings. Some days, he felt like a stray dog being offered a full meal when he’d been hoping for scraps, and not trusting the hands that offered them. “I want to apologize for being distant the last couple of months.”

“No need.” Her expression smoothed into blandness. “I know you’ve been busy.”

“Yes, there is a need. I’ve been a bad friend, and I want to be better.” He resisted the urge to expel his creeping nervousness by fidgeting. “When you told me about Okebaan Corp’s reorganization notice, I, well, panicked. It made me realize I had much more to lose than just a job. This is the first real home I’ve had. The first long-time friends, too. Kind of like with Norby and Cyrene — I had no idea what I’d been missing until I had them in my life. If I’m right about the pattern I’m seeing in Okebaan’s policies, all the employees and contractors are in line to be terminated and evicted.” He gave her a small, self- deprecating smile. “You may have noticed that I like privacy and don’t exactly have an open personality.”

A snort escaped from her. “You were the most closed-off person I ever met. But underneath your security shield, you are kind and compassionate, and have a sly sense of humor. Patabarro told me he’d been training you so he could retire. That’s why I asked you to help me run the station after the accident. I was so stunned I could barely remember my name, much less that you’d lost a friend, too. I should probably apologize, except I’m not sorry. I will be forever grateful you stepped in.”

Vellek blinked in surprise. “You never told me that about Patabarro.”

“He swore me to secrecy. Said didn’t want to scare you off.” She swiveled her chair a bit so she could put her glass on the cart behind them, then stayed facing him.

After a moment’s consideration, he nodded. “A fair assessment. I’m still learning to deal with surprises. My default reaction is to withdraw into my shell like a turtle and figure out where my planning went wrong and what to do about it. That’s what happened with the reorg notice. I don’t want to leave the station. I can’t promise not to do it again, but I promise to let you know what’s going on with me.”

“I appreciate your honesty. I didn’t know if it was me or the notice that made you disappear.”

He couldn’t find the courage to tell her that, for all that he’d miss the station and his new friends, it was the thought of leaving her that had torn open his heart. He took the coward’s way out. “Speaking of Okebaan, has there been more correspondence since that notice?”

“Yes. Several more policies.”

“Would you be willing to send me everything they’ve ever sent?”

A wary look crossed her face before she smoothed it away. “Maybe. Why?”

He didn’t blame her for her obvious reluctance, considering how badly he’d taken the notice. “I feel like there’s a pattern that I’m not seeing. I’m hoping to either find the missing pieces or convince myself it’s my overactive imagination.” It was more like that one of the many three-dimensional wireframe constructs in his mind was wobbling in its orbit unexpectedly, but he’d long ago given up on trying to explain it that way to anyone.

“Okay. But just so we’re clear, it’s station confidential and not for sharing.”

“I understand. May I also have access to Starn’s records, under the same conditions? I’m looking for clues as to why it took Okebaan two years to suddenly started acting like owners.”

“Yes,” she answered, but a frown settled on her face.

“Never mind. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” He’d done enough of that as it was.

She shook her head. “It’s not that, exactly. It’s just a reminder that I have yet to really do anything with them. They’re hopelessly tangled with all the station’s records, so it’s a lot. Starn was just as likely to apply a business tag to an interesting recipe for a tubers and squash as he was an invoice for the backup batteries for the station’s defense systems.” She blew out a loud breath and waved her fingers like seaweed in a current. “His organization methods usually made sense to him, but not to me. When he started traveling more, I built an A.I. to dive into the rabbit hole and locate what was needed. That’s what I did after the accident to get the files for the estate lawyers.”

Once again, Vellek was certain the station would have fallen apart decades ago if it hadn’t been for Katalin. He wondered if Starn ever truly appreciated her for it. “May I ask a personal question?”

“Yes, but I reserve the right not to answer.”

He couldn’t very well be offended by her guarded tone. It was his own bad behavior that had eroded her confidence in him. “Why didn’t you inherit at least part ownership of the station? I remember you said you never expected it because Starn made it clear that the Tigurinis were all about genetic family keeping control of family assets. Did your daughter have the same ‘DNA rules’ philosophy?”

“No. Temelle was an adult, but she was young didn’t expect to need to make inheritance arrangements. Besides, she didn’t have any assets in her name, not even her namesake starship. Starn had a will, but his major assets are gone. The ship was unsalvageable after the accident, and station itself is now tied up in family corporations. I think he truly enjoyed his black-sheep status. He once told me he maneuvered them into giving him the station to sideline him from a business succession he never wanted in the first place. Unfortunately, ‘full ownership’ didn’t mean ‘free of encumbrances,’ so here we are. My estate advocate on Lumen Roca tried to track down the Tigurini clan and their legions of companies, but their legal feuds rival multi-planet lawsuits against inter-galactic pharma companies. I couldn’t afford the fees for a comprehensive search of two hundred years of business records on hundreds of planets.” She sighed. “For what it’s worth, I asked my advocate to look into Okebaan Corp, but they haven’t found anything to counter the ownership claim.”

Something in her words sparked his intuition. “The timing seems odd.”

“How so?”

He made a face, then swallowed the last of his kaffe and put the cup on the cart. “I don’t know, yet. That’s part of why I want to see all the records.”

“When you go through Starn’s, you’ll probably find his journals. He kept a lot of them. I have a few boxes of stuff, including paper notes, from when I cleaned out his several studios. You’re welcome to read them — and I wish you luck — but I don’t want to hear about his hot-connects with other people, or where he complained about me or Temelle. I can’t afford the bandwidth to be mad at him right now.”

“I can respect that.” He shook his head. “Frankly, I’m not sure what I would put in a journal.”

“Me, either.” She gave him a wry smile. “The grief therapist I worked with after the accident asked me to keep one, but I didn't know what to say. I ended up writing fake weather reports.”

He chuckled. A yawn ambushed him, to his dismay.

She laughed. “I remember how you used to hide your exhaustion from everyone until you simply collapsed.” She rose to her feet, brushing her front to smooth her tunic. “You need rest, and so do I. It’s been one of those days.”

He pushed back and stood up, too. Before he could logic himself out of it, he held open his arms. “Would you like a hug? I worry about how you’re holding up.”

Worry assailed him, since for him, physical contact with people wasn’t wise. His observer brain disagreed. They’d hugged three times before, once after viewing the bodies of her family and his friend, once after the Lumen Roca police interview during their accident investigation, and once at the stationwide memorial service. The right moment to do so again hadn’t presented itself. Until now.

Her eyes widened in surprise. A slow smile stole across her face. “Yes, I would like that.”

She stepped into his embrace. Her arms wrapped comfortingly around him. The feel of her head on his chest radiated warmth as he gently enveloped her. He caught himself inhaling the scent of her and refused to stop himself. He had promised himself to notice and savor these moments.

When she stirred in his arms, he reluctantly let her go, with no idea how long they’d been standing there.

“Thank you. I needed that.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll send the cart back to the restaurant. If I send you the records access tonight, will you at least try to get a couple hours of sleep before diving into them?”

He allowed himself to smile as he nodded. “You know me too well.”

“Oh, right.” A short laugh accompanied her words. “I only know what I see. I don’t even know what you like to do in your down time, or if you like to dance, or would like to travel.” Her hands waved upward in apology. “Not any of my business, either. I’m stupid-tired right now.”

Norby took that moment to walk around the cart, his nose working overtime, on his way to the office door. In the pet bed, Cyrene stood and stretched, her front half low and her rear half high.

Vellek checked for any forgotten dishes, then accompanied her as she guided the elegant grave cart to the office door, which he opened.

She steered the cart out, then waved. “Let’s connect tomorrow morning after morning fires suppression.” By which she meant dealing with the half-dozen minor crises that errupted overnight. That had been her routine for as long as he’d known her.

He nodded. “Sounds good.” The office door closed silently between them.

He would have given a lot to know how she was feeling just then, but he was no empath minder, who lived and breathed the world of emotions. Not that he was much better understanding his own feelings, but he was trying.

When Norby saw that he was standing in the middle of his office, he sat at Vellek’s feet and looked up expectantly. Vellek dithered.

He needed sleep, but storms were brewing and time was slipping away. The puzzle-loving part of him was thrilled to have data to dive into. There was so much to learn.

Norby barked once. When Vellek looked down, Norby stood up, tail wagging, and started for the door. When Vellek didn’t move, the dog circled around and barked twice. Clearly, Norby’s believed it was time to go home. And when Vellek looked toward the door, Cyrene was already there, drilling him with her determined feline stare, willing him to get it through his dumber-than-any-kitten brain that it was time to go.

“Okay, okay.” Giving in to his pets was easier than arguing with them. He double-checked his desk to make sure everything was locked down, then headed toward the secure vertical lifts. Norby followed close behind. Cyrene had demanded to be carried, so he obliged her. She wasn’t as warm as Katalin’s head resting against his chest, but no one else could be.

While he would respect Katalin’s request not to tell her about Starn’s personal journal entries, he lost some respect for the man. From what he’d observed, Katalin had zero interest in any quick sexual liaisons or long-term lovers besides her husband. Or, pointed out his annoying precise inner observer, she hid it extremely well. But perhaps his opinion was influenced by his own requirement for an exclusive intimate connection with one person. And by his admittedly very sparse track record in achieving that.

He had never understood Katalin’s marriage. It hadn’t been his place to ask. However, he never doubted that Starn loved Katalin, or he wouldn’t have stayed after the birth of Temelle, who he introduced to everyone as his greatest artistic triumph. She had been so very like her father. Starn would have wanted his family protected.

Agent Jensuradi barely deserved the respect from others he’d be getting after death, as he’d certainly had none to give them in life. Faceless, greedy acquisition corporations like Okebaan came and went. But to Vellek, the question of what Starn had done to ensure his family’s future was the biggest mystery of all. He sent a rare wishful thought to the capricious gods of chaos that the records would provide an answer.