Kiem raised his hands in front of him. “Hold up. Go back.” He looked at Audel. “You said next step, Professor. Does that have anything to do with Agent Rakal saying you planned to hack into the refinery while you’re on the habitat?”

Gairad gave his inactive wristband a suspicious look. “Are you sure you’re not recording?”

“My dear, making any kind of attempt now seems like a nonstarter,” Audel said. “Gairad and I suspected we had flags on our accounts. Yes, I had a plan to try connecting from a geolocal orbit and seeing what we could find. I used to work on the refinery plant equipment; I know some ways in. But that depended on Internal Security not tracking all our outgoing connections.”

Like Internal Security had done to Jainan. It seemed natural for Kiem to say the next thing. “So use my account.”

“What?” Gairad said.

“I don’t think mine’s flagged,” Kiem said, “and I want to know what’s going on.”

He didn’t let himself think too much about the implications. Of the three of them, he was probably the safest when it came to a real treason charge. It would be embarrassing for the Emperor to have a member of her family arrested. Of

course, that might not stop her, but he could cross that bridge when he came to it.

“Well, in that case,” Professor Audel said, a gleam in her eye that Kiem had started to recognize in Jainan whenever he had a new data source. “If you’d link up your wristband, Your Highness.”

The atmosphere changed immediately. After a suspicious glare at him, Gairad started bustling around the screens, bringing up scripts Kiem didn’t recognize.

Audel was totally focused on her screen. Kiem had thought it would be complicated, but once he’d linked up his wristband to the input sensors, Audel attached a data coin, and that was it. The screens flickered through interfaces too fast for Kiem to watch. Gairad kept cross-checking the displays with her own wristband and occasionally said things like, “Looks like they took Model 5

offline.” Audel just watched.

“Can anyone learn to do that?” Kiem said, forgetting that now was not the time to be fascinated.

Audel blinked, coming out of a trance. “This?” she said. “Sad to say, Prince Kiem, we’re doing very little. Most of this is a Kingfisher admin script I took with me when they discharged me. You’d need a Sefalan systems breaker to do this manually. Ah. Here we are.”

Kiem looked up at the screens as they began to fill with the square branches of a data map. Gairad handed Audel another data coin, which must have had another script on it, because the data started to flicker and Audel muttered.

Gairad was scowling.

“Well, we can’t get what we wanted,” Audel said, looking up at the screen.

“They’ve rotated the keys.”

“But that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Gairad said, pointing at a string of numbers that meant nothing to Kiem. “That’s a commanding officer. Who is it?”