I kept part of my attention on the negotiation, and went back to the public feed. I started pulling historical data, looking for any irregular activity around the time of my contract here.

While my clients were talking, and while I sorted through the data with ART peering over my shoulder again, I was watching the security cameras. I noted two more potential threats enter the area. Both were augmented humans. I had noted three potential threats already sitting at adjacent tables. (All three exhibited a curious lack of attention toward the confrontation occurring near the center of the seating area. The other humans and augmented humans in the immediate area had watched it with open or surreptitious curiosity.)

ART poked me. I see it, I told it. The search had turned up a series of notices posted around the right timeframe. They were warnings that changes in shipments of raw materials and supplies to outlying installations would cause diversions in the passenger tube routes. (The tube was a small-scale transit system that took passengers around the port and service centers and had private lines going out to the closer mining installations.) Later notices mentioned a new route that had been constructed to compensate for the diversion.

That was it. Reading between the lines, you could see that the service contractors had had to build a new tube route to bypass the tunnels that had led to a mining installation that had abruptly closed. That had to be the site of Ganaka Pit.

Other pit closures had been accompanied by local interest articles and excessive social feed interest in bankruptcy filings and the effect on the associated service companies. There was nothing like that about this closure. Someone had paid to have those postings deleted from the public feed.

The conversation was concluding. Tlacey stood up, nodded to my clients, and walked away from the table. Rami’s expression was a grimace of doubt. Maro looked grim and Tapan somewhere between confused and angry.

I closed the search and stepped over to the table. Watching Tlacey and her bodyguards leave, Rami said, “It was a bad idea to come here.”

Tapan protested, “She said tomorrow…”

Maro shook her head. “It’s more lies. She isn’t going to give us the files. She could have done it here, if she was going to do it. She could have done it over the comm while we were on the transit ring.” She looked up at me. “I wasn’t sure I believed you about the shuttle, but now…”

I was keeping track of my potential threat list on the security cameras. “We need to go,” I told them. “We’ll talk about this somewhere else.”

As we left, one potential threat got up to follow us. I tapped ART to keep an eye on the others, just in case they weren’t innocent bystanders so deep in their feeds they really hadn’t noticed anything.