Taam had been in charge of Operation Kingfisher. Taam should have caught

it.

Jainan pushed back from the table and rose to pace across the room. There was a word for what he was doing right now, and that word was betrayal. He shouldn’t have agreed to scrutinize these files. The inner workings of the military were none of his business, even if it hadn’t been his own partner running the operation. And anyway, the military was huge and presumably run on a tight rein. What were the chances he could spot something from an incomplete pile of files that had never been seen before? He must be missing something.

He looked down at the slim silver band around his wrist. It pulsed with soft light as he worked. Bel had saved most of the data on his account, so Taam’s backup account was still there on his wristband, sat unobtrusively in a back layer.

Taam had never given him the passphrase. But Jainan had lived with him for five years, and—thinking this felt like more of a betrayal than the rest of it—

Taam had not been an imaginative man. Jainan had a fairly good idea of what his passphrase might be. He tried it.

A stream of nonsense text covered the wall. Jainan recognized the format; it wasn’t a backup. It was a message channel. He stared at the garbled text, feeling simultaneously like a criminal and sick with disappointment. It was wrapped in its own layer of encryption, of course. Taam wouldn’t leave sensitive data in the clear. The only things that were even half-readable were the destination addresses, and they weren’t the neat form entries that might note which planet or organization should receive the message. They were strings of anonymous characters, which Jainan could only guess was some sort of encoded military relay.

“Not that I want to pry into your business,” Bel’s voice drawled from the study door, “but want to explain why you’re using Sefalan raider relays?” She folded her arms and gave him a smile that showed her teeth. “Your Grace?”

Jainan had let down too many of his protective barriers to hide his shock.

“Raider relays?”

Bel frowned. “These aren’t yours, then.” She stepped farther into the room and looked over the documents on the walls before Jainan could pull them down.

“Those are Taam’s messages?” She flicked one of the projections with the back of a fingernail. “Wonder why he was talking to raiders. Those are fence drops.

Don’t suppose you saw any of his valuables going missing?”

Significant amounts of Kingfisher equipment had gone missing. Jainan sat

back down abruptly. “I need to send this to the authorities,” he said. “Now.

Yesterday. I—” He put his head in his hands. “You’re taking this straight to Kiem, aren’t you?” The files on the walls seemed to be closing in. Causing a scandal of that magnitude for the Imperial family, fifteen days before the Resolution treaty had to be signed, would be the most damaging thing he could possibly do. It would destroy Taam’s reputation, damage Kiem, and affect the chances of treaty renewal. Kiem would blame him.