Score one. “Would it at least keep you from telling Stykos and Wray about all this?” he pressed.
There was a long pause, and then Vee nodded.
“Okay, then.” Josh unbent himself as far as the room allowed.
“Josh?” Vee’s whisper stopped him.
“What?”
Her face was lost in shadow, so he could not make out her expression, but he heard the weight of her words. The anger, the flippancy had left, and all that remained was honest feeling—tired and a little worried. “I am not doing this to show anyone up. I am not doing this because I’m angry at Helen Failia. The Discovery has been falsified and whoever did it deserves whatever they get.”
“We’ll see.”
He left her there and returned to the analysis nook, shaken and confused. She couldn’t be right. But what if she was? Surely somebody had already investigated everything to make sure all was in order. But what if they hadn’t?
His stomach tightened. It’s happening already. The idea’s taking hold. Nothing to do but clear it out, one way or the other.
Josh got his case down from its bin and brought it back to the analysis table, setting it down next to his half-finished beer. He jacked the case in, turned it on, took another swallow of beer, swore to himself, or maybe at himself, and started typing.
Chapter Eight
MICHAEL RUBBED THE HEELS of both palms into his eyes. When he lowered them, he blinked hard and read Josh Kenyon’s note again.
Dear Michael,
Sorry I can’t do a v-mail, but this has got to be kept quiet. I spent the day working with Dr. Hatch, and she spent the day getting convinced that the Discovery is a fake.
I want to laugh at the idea, but I can’t. She’s making some good points, especially about the fact that there is nothing down here a human couldn’t have made, given resources and time. There’s also the fact that some facets of this laser we’re studying don’t make sense.
I know I’m not a Veneran, and I’d never tell you your job, but can you let me know you’ve checked everything out? The money’s good, the logs are good, and so on? If I don’t get something to tell Dr. Hatch, she might just go straight to the media drones.
Thanks,
Josh
Michael could picture Josh in the scarab, hunched over his case, swearing as he typed, not wanting to believe, but not being able to dismiss a reasonable premise without checking it out.
A hazard of the scientific mind.
And the security mind.
Had they checked for the possibility of fraud? Of course they had checked. That was the first thing they did after the governing board had come back up from the Discovery while the implications still made them all dizzy. Helen had run the money down. Ben had done the personnel logs. Michael had checked their checking, and everything looked fine. In the meantime, Helen had sent their best people down to the Discovery to start cataloging and looking for any sign of human intervention.
They’d turned up nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
Only then had Helen called the U.N.
So what was Veronica Hatch seeing? What possibility had they left open? Or was she just playing for the cameras? She might be the type. She certainly acted like the type.
It didn’t make any difference, though. If this went into the stream, the accusations were going to fly, and everything Venera did regarding the Discovery would be called into question.
Michael stared out at the world beyond his desk. Administration was Venera’s brain, even if the Throne Room was its heart. Unlike most of the workspace on the base, administration was not divided up into individual offices and laboratories. Each department had an open work section with desks scattered around it.
The arrangement made this one of the noisiest levels on Venera, second only to the education level. The idea was to keep everybody out in the open, so the left hand always knew what the right hand was doing. It met with limited success, but by now everyone was so used to it, no one really worked to change it.
As always, the place was a hive. A noisy hive of a thousand competing conversations, some with coworkers, some with residents or visitors who had complaints. His people wore no uniform, but they all had a white-and-gold badge pinned to their shirts to identify themselves.
He had forty people working for him right now, counting the U.N.’s contribution of Bowerman and Cleary. Since it was the day shift, about half of the security personnel were at their desks, dealing with complaints or paperwork or helping Venerans fill out forms for passports, marriage licenses, or taxes.
Only a handful of those people knew exactly how close they’d come to losing their home.