He stared at the dead young Thean on the screen. This wasn’t really about facts, it was about people. People were many things, but by and large they weren’t masterminds. They always wanted something. They always had a reason for what they did.

Something uncurled in his head.

Kiem spun back through the Thean’s history. There wasn’t much more there: a handful of research papers, memberships of some political groups at his old university. Kiem wanted to go and shake some answers out of Lunver and Agent Rakal, but he’d tried that before and hadn’t got far. Perhaps, for once, he should hold off. For once he needed to think.

CHAPTER 22

Jainan ended up in Carissi Station’s outer control room. He hadn’t planned to.

He had been thinking deeply about Gairad’s mass analysis and the remnants, and it had occurred to him: he was the Thean treaty representative. He was married to an Imperial Prince. Why not see if they would allow him into one of the control rooms? The assistant staffing the door had barely batted an eyelid.

Now Jainan was in front of an array of screens and viewports, watching the rest of the orbital cluster as each shining habitat followed Carissi Station in its slow, unending curve around the planet below. The refinery was the last of them, a stately mass of spheres following the smaller modules. He’d spent an hour here already. A shift change buzzer had sounded halfway through, but he’d ignored it, and nobody seemed to realize he shouldn’t be there.

It was aesthetically compelling, maybe, but the readings on the screens were more valuable. Gairad had put Kingfisher’s official mass readings in her diagram, then scribbled all over it with requests for Jainan and Audel to check her work because her calculations weren’t making sense.

She was right. Jainan had spent some time puzzling over the inconsistencies in the readings: Carissi Station’s instruments were much more accurate than anything from public sources, and Kingfisher’s official figures didn’t match what they were telling him. Operation Kingfisher had drawn up plans that showed their refinery as smaller than it really was.

Jainan took a quick look to see if anyone was watching him use station equipment without authorization—Kiem was bad for him—then tweaked the viewscreens to show the Kingfisher refinery in detail. Most of the unexplained mass was concentrated on the underside of the refinery, where the diagrams showed nothing but an outer hull. That was a storage module.

There was no reason to leave a storage module off your official diagrams unless you wanted to hide what was in it. Jainan found it suddenly harder to breathe.

Taam had been buying as well as selling. That was where the money had gone.

But buying what? Jainan stared at the viewscreens until his eyes watered. It gave him no answers. Whatever he was buying must have been significant, to distort the mass readings this much. Where had he gotten all the money? Surely not just from selling surplus mining equipment?