This section of the simulation showed a “scoop-and-chute” drone next to a pile of dust and rubble. Its shovel-tipped waldo shoved into the pile and came up with a sample of dirt. The sample ran through the chemically sensitive filters in the drone’s body, and everything except what was needed got shaken out of its belly.
“What about the delicate work?” asked Angela, without taking her gaze off the screen. “Shaping the ceramics? Making the lenses in the lasers?”
“A lot of that could be done with lasers,” said Vee. She skipped the simulation ahead to a neat row of three separate measurement drones, each of which had its array of small lasers and waldos, so delicate they looked more like insect pincers than human hands. “Take your pick. These are just the three most likely.”
Angela folded her arms and hung her head down. “You know, there are days I hate my job.”
Vee shut the simulation off. “It’s a fraud.” Why are you, of all people, missing the point here? “I don’t care what was about to happen to their precious base; they don’t get to perpetrate a fraud.”
Angela just shook her head. “So you’re enjoying this?”
Vee threw up her hands. “Why does everybody think I’m doing this to get my ya-yas?”
“Because I saw the playback of you at the Dublin gallery opening when you called the arts minister a bribe-taking nationalist pig, in front of every major news service in the stream,” replied Angela evenly.
“Oh.” Vee cocked her head from side to side. “That was probably not my best day for P.R.” She’d frequently wished she really had been drunk, which was the cover story Rosa worked so hard to put out for months afterward. “My only excuse is I was right then too.”
“Yes,” Angela admitted. “But you have this tendency to be right in public, loudly. It’s not reassuring.”
A powerful image of Rosa leaning against the rail in U.N. City flashed in front of Vee’s mind. “Be careful what you pretend to be,” Vee muttered.
Angela nodded. “You hear that one a lot in my business.” She slapped her hands down on her thighs. “I’m going to need a copy of your drone file so Philip can confirm the inventory.” She straightened up. “And I need you to be ready to testify to the truth of your findings and that you created this without help or interference.”
“Of course.” A few more commands and Vee shot a copy of the simulations out to Angela’s contact code. “It’s got to be Derek Cusmanos then, doesn’t it? He’s the one who has access to all the drones.”
“That would be the logical conclusion based on what you’ve seen so far,” said Angela.
Vee glanced at her and knew she was not going to get any more of an answer than that. They were investigating her accusations inside Venera, but Angela had wanted Vee to remain independent of any kind of suggestion. “If we can show we arrived at this from separate angles,” Angela had said, “it’ll be even more convincing when we have to go public with it.”
“Well, glad I could help,” said Vee.
“I’m sure.” Angela headed out the door, leaving Vee sitting alone with her simulated evidence.
Vee had tried to understand. She tried to imagine what it was to have your life shut down, to have to move to a strange new world with such things in it as Earth at its craziest could surround you with. She felt sad, she felt sorry, she wished there was something she could do, but they did not get to lie about this. They did not get to lie about life on another world. The hope of finding that human beings weren’t alone was such an old, precarious hope. To one day discover that there was somebody else out there who asked the same questions and dreamed the same dreams. Every time she thought about somebody playing on that venerable dream…again, again, rage shot through her veins.
This was supposed to be real. This was supposed to be her one real thing, to make up for the tantrums and the farces and the pretty veneer she had made out of her life.
And what did they do this for? For money, again, like the worst of the Universal Age frauds. Was it really all that different? Was she the only one here who didn’t see that it wasn’t different at all?
Except, maybe it was. This one was built for love and worry, not just greed. This was done to fill, not to drain. Maybe it was different. But that just made it sad, in addition to making it wrong.
Vee sighed, closed her case, and stowed it. She looked at the hatchway and decided she didn’t want to face the rest of the team. She’d munch on some leftovers later. Her stomach was all in knots. Instead she curled up in the couch, hugging her knees. In the silence, she mourned the loss of a dream, again.