But Derek just changed the subject again. “And you’re taking Adrian with you?”
Kevin sighed and looked back down at his screen. “Yeah, Adrian will be with me in Scarab Five. Charlotte and Bailey are taking down Fourteen.” The problem, he decided was that Shelby wasn’t used to the idea of human backup for computer records. He’d come from a fully automated and fully profit-making environment.
Just have to take him aside and teach him the importance of counting those beans….
“I don’t envy you, Kevin.”
“I don’t envy me either,” muttered Kevin before he realized Derek was not talking about correcting Shelby’s accounting behaviors.
“You expecting problems?” Derek was working hard to make the question sound like idle curiosity, and he was failing miserably.
At least now I know what you wanted to talk about. Kevin leaned back with a sigh. “Actually, Derek, I am, and you should be too.”
Derek shook his head and dropped his gaze, smiling a little. It was an old gesture, a little-boy gesture Derek had picked up when trying to put one over on teachers, and principals, and pretty girls. “Well, we’ll just all have to do our best, won’t we?” he said brightly. When he looked up again, all he saw was Kevin’s blank expression.
“I guess so,” Kevin ran one finger along the edge of the desk. “Dr. Meyer talk to you lately?”
Derek nodded, relaxed. “Yeah. She doesn’t mind the pause. She’s got lots of new data to correlate, she says, especially with the biologist they sent up.”
Kevin met his brother’s eyes. He saw all the uneasy trust in them, all the shaky confidence that everything was still going to be okay because not only was one of the big shots in on this, his big brother was too. A thousand things jumped into Kevin’s mind all at once, all of them needing to be said. Hell, begging to be said.
Derek slapped his hands down on his thighs and got to his feet.
“Derek…” started Kevin.
“What?”
And if I say anything, then what? He won’t stop. I’ll just scare him, and if he’s scared, he’ll give it all away. It’s not just Michael we’re dealing with now. We’ve got the U.N. here. “Never mind.”
Derek shrugged. “Okay, then. I won’t.”
“Okay.”
Derek walked back out into the main hangar. The door swished shut behind him. Kevin rested his elbows on his desk and stared at the screen. The rows of dollar figures and time signatures made no sense. They were just numbers, tidy sets of numbers that didn’t mean anything at all.
What had ever convinced him that they did?
“We were ready to make the recording, Ms. Cleary,” called Phil through the open door.
“Thank you, Mr. Bowerman,” Angela shouted back. “I’ll be right there.”
Philip and Angela had requested adjoining suites on the grounds that they’d have to be doing a lot of screen work together and they didn’t want to have to monopolize a conference room. Angela wasn’t entirely sure Dr. Failia believed them, but she wasn’t sure she cared either.
Angela pulled out a chair from under Phil’s dining table and swiveled it to face the wall screen. She sat down and flattened her screen roll on her lap. As she did, Phil pressed the Record key and started talking to the wall screen.
“Good evening, Mr. Hourani. This is preliminary report you asked for. We’ve had several conversations with Michael Lum, the chief of security here. He’s cooperative, if not terribly enthusiastic. We’ve established a monitoring approach on com traffic to and from Mars that everybody can live with….”
“We’re monitoring transmission levels, just for the past six months as opposed to the previous couple of years, seeing if we get any jumps,” put in Angela.
“We’ve also checked dips into known stream hot spots,” Philip went on, ticking off a point on the screen roll he had spread out on his lap. “There’s a few Venerans who like to talk separatist politics, but they’re all in the shallows, nothing going on down in the depths.” He glanced at Angela. Your turn, he mouthed.
Angela found her next point on her own roll. “Bennet Godwin was late to the U.N. reception tonight, but we got in a face-to-face. My impression is that he seems more sour than serious. If he’s doing anything other than being sympathetic to the Bradburyans and being annoyed at U.N. interference with his schedule pad, he’s doing a tremendous job of hiding it.”
“In short, sir,” said Philip, “so far so good. There seems to be nothing going on here but science and general good clean living.” He reached for the Send key, but Angela frowned, and he hesitated.