Aren shook his head. “You know,” he said, “this would explain something, as much as I don’t like it. Internal Security has been on my back for the past two weeks. I’ve had to turn over half my operational files—I thought they were worried about our flybug maintenance team. I’ve had unexplained cuts in my purchasing budget as well, several times. I just—” He looked up at the model gleaming in the shadows above them, as if it might have some answers, and sounded lost. “I just— Taam? I knew him.” He straightened his shoulders, pushed himself away from the rail and focused again on Jainan. “You want to look at our records.”

Jainan swallowed visibly. “I know as civilians we have no right of access.”

“I’ll waive that,” Aren said. “Internal Security combed through them already, so why shouldn’t you get a shot? I’ll set you up with a room in the base and get you permissions.”

Jainan was staring at Aren as if this was profoundly unexpected. It wasn’t the way he reacted to Kiem, as if Kiem was a puzzle, but instead the reaction of someone who’d put their hand into an ice-covered river and found it running hot.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know,” Aren said, waving a casual hand. “Thank me later. I want to know too.”

It was just a pokey meeting room with a plastic slab of a desk, but Jainan seemed to think it was adequate. All his attention was trained on downloading vast amounts of Kingfisher data and heaping it in abstract pools and graphic visualizations all over the desk. Kiem tried to help out, and not stand there

watching the way research turned Jainan intent and whetstone-sharp.

Kiem wasn’t going to be a lot of use anyway. Jainan seemed to know what he was doing and dived into Taam’s files immediately, comparing equipment readouts and purchase orders. Kiem stared at a list of numbers under a code name until they blurred, then stood up restlessly and started to pace.

Jainan finally looked up. “Are you going to do that … continuously?”

“Sorry,” Kiem said. He propped the door open instead, which led onto the main open-plan room, and wandered out to see if he could find some coffee.

He found coffee—and some military rations, which he sampled indiscriminately—at the kitchen station. He also found a corporal to explain the code-named list of numbers, which was apparently a registry of flybug models, and brought her back to the meeting room so she could explain this to Jainan.

Jainan, after a moment’s startled wariness, started asking her about fuel logging and maintenance schedules.

Kiem strolled back out among the bustling desks. The restful thing about soldiers was they didn’t ask awkward questions like: Why are you looking at our records? Kiem and Jainan had arrived with Major Aren and been given all-system privileges; that meant they were some sort of inspectors as far as the soldiers were concerned. Kiem hung around various desks and sent some of the soldiers in to Jainan if they seemed to know anything about flybugs or finance.