Page 31 of Enthraller

“Yeah.” Banks shifted in his seat. “That’s what he does.”

12

There wastension in the common room, but Ed didn’t much care when he first arrived.

All he and Hatch wanted was food, and as usual, Wren had come through. She’d sent a message through to Bailey that they had to see to themselves as a group, and coordinated the timing with when they came off the line.

They had caught four freighters with illegal loads, although nothing that looked too dangerous. More in the line of undeclared goods, more crates than the manifest showed, and other efforts to reduce the transporter’s excise bill.

The administration had most assuredly been robbed blind since he and Lily had stopped using the Guan scanner.

He would have to remember to ask Hyt when Lily had last used it, and whose idea it had been to send her to Hathr.

He and Hatch had cleaned their plates and got up for another serving before he felt like he could hold a reasonable conversation.

“This is really good, Wren,” Hatch said.

Bailey had been watching them with amusement, but she nodded in Wren’s direction. “Agreed. Thanks for taking first shift.”

“That was a long time out on the line.” Juller spoke as he passed the table. “I thought standard procedure was two hours max.”

“We’ve all got our higher level certs.” Bailey leaned back in her chair to eye him. “Six hours max.”

“Six hours?” One of the women in the academic team who’d was on cleanup duty in the kitchen put a bowl down. “I didn’t realize it went that high.”

“That’s the SF for you,” Banks said. He didn’t sound enthusiastic. “Top of the food chain, right Ed?”

Ed glanced at him. Wren had told Bailey via her hidden ear comm that Banks had seemed unhappy to hear he was on the observatory, and that both Juller and Banks got nervous when they heard the team was walking the line.

After hearing that, Bailey had spent the whole time they’d been on the line nervously looking through all the technical safety mechanisms in the control room for a potential issue.

So far, nothing. But Wren hadn’t been overestimating the nerves here. They were clearly on display.

“It’s been, what? Two years since I was last up here? I see you’re head of maintenance now, Banks. Congratulations.” Ed scraped the last of his second helping up and savored the stew Wren had made.

“I thought you’d left the teams, Ed.” Banks wrote something on the schedule and then turned back to them. “Heard you’d quit.”

“No.” Ed smiled at him. “Just took a break. Polished my tech skills and took it a little easier for a while.”

Banks jerked a nod, but he was deeply unhappy.

Ed tried to remember what had happened the last time he was up here, other than the situation that had ended his career. An administrative manager had told him they had a tip that an incoming ship was smuggling in a criminal, and sure enough, he’d found a tiny room that could well have been a hidden compartment with the scanner, along with a heat signature that was roughly the size of a person.

He’d been up at here on the observatory with the usual team of three to support him, and they’d boarded the ship on his order, kicked down doors, only to find out the person in the compartment was a rare wildcat, extremely sensitive to shock, held in a padded cage, on its way to Demeter to be given a full medical. It belonged to the ambassador from Rnnali, one of the handful of non-VSC planets that did business with the Verdant String. Those planets had set up a loose coalition of their own, but it was bound by trade and security concerns, rather than a shared common ancestry, like the VSC.

The wildcat had died a day later, and Planetary Services declared it a critical incident.

Ed hadn’t been worried. He’d received notification from someone on the SF admin team, and he didn’t think he could have done anything differently, given the information he’d had.

Until the manager concerned denied ever talking to Ed.

His official comms device showed no such communication, and the SF comms installed on the station hadn’t either.

Unfortunately for the manager, the maintenance staff on the observatory had been conducting a full tech scan at the time of the call, and it had been recorded on the obs station’s main system.

It had taken nearly two weeks to get the information, and during that time, fingers had been pointed and voices had been raised. The fallout had led to two resignations and the prosecution of the manager, who couldn’t or wouldn’t say ifanyone had in fact given him the tip-off, and whose motivations for the whole incident had never been uncovered. Neither had they found the person who’d erased the comms on both ends of the SF comm system.

Ed had walked away.

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