Page 72 of Skinwalker's Bane
“A name,” Haydn repeated, his voice firmer.
Corin bent over. “I don’t know his name. He keeps all the tankball players supplied. The Dreamhawks players—I don’t know about the other teams. That’s where I find him. In the Dreamhawks administration office. Short, with big teeth and twinkling eyes. Skinny.”
Devin stared at the screen, her heart squeezing to a halt. Her breath gasped out of her.
Adam bent around the screen to look at her properly. “Devin?”
“Bishan,” she said. Her voice was strained. “He’s talking about Bishan Frost.”
* * * * *
Peter took Corin to the Esquiline clinic, which was only five minutes’ walk away from the Beehive. Haydn came back to the terminal and Devin increased their volume. “We know who Corin was talking about,” she said stiffly. Her lips felt thick and uncooperative. “If I’m right, then it’s Bishan Frost.”
“Isn’t he your employee?” Haydn asked, puzzled.
“Contractor. He works for the Dreamhawks on a part-time basis. That’s why I hired him—for his connections,” she added bitterly. “I had no idea how he’d developed all those connections.”
“I don’t think anyone has,” Haydn told her. “Let’s confirm it’s him, first.”
“What are you going to do?” Adam asked.
“The Bridge needs to hear about this. It’s escalated beyond the Institute,” Haydn said. “You heard what Corin said. Whoever it is, they’ve been supplying the Dreamhawks players, too.”
“How could this be happening on the ship and no one know about it?” Devin demanded. It was the overwhelming question, pushing at her to be asked. “It’s as if there’s a whole different world existing just underneath the skin of the ship.”
Haydn scrubbed at his hair. “That’s…well, I’m not going to claim responsibility for it the way Peter did, only something I did ten years ago made this possible.”
“The scoops,” Adam said.
Haydn nodded. “Yes.” He sighed. “Adam will explain it to you. For now, I need to go disturb even more people tonight.” Then he grinned. “Magorian is used to us doing that, so it should be business as usual. Adam, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” He disconnected and the screen turned to the silvery gray that meant there was no feed leading to it.
Devin dismissed the screen. Adam was looking at his hands.
“The scoops?” she repeated.
He nodded. “When they first knew that they had to reskin the ship using goofygel sandwiches, there was a lot of arguments among the physicists that they would be straining the limits of the closed energy system on the ship. You know what that is, right?”
“I haven’t heard anyone talk about it since I was being schooled,” Devin admitted. “The ship runs with a neutral energy balance. It creates as much as it uses.”
“Except we haven’t run with a closed system for ten years. The goofygel sandwiches take enormous amounts of energy and raw materials to build. So Haydn proposed that the ship offset the drain by adding scoops to the front end of the ship.”
“They scoop…what? I thought there was nothing out there?”
“There is, in miniscule, often microscopic sizes. Even the little space rubble that gets through the shields can get ground up. Hydrogen is particularly abundant in space, if you scoop up enough matter. So the engine drain was addressed. The raw elements that get sucked up with it are also used to build the goofygel sandwiches—the skin of the ship.”
Devin nodded. It made sense. “Okay, so why does that mean people can get away with using something like Bellish?”
“Two things,” Adam said. “One, the stuff is incredibly expensive. They can charge anything they want for it, because the addictsmusthave it and will pay to get it. However, money was introduced to the ship after the monitoring systems were built, so they don’t notice the economic drain. They don’t even look at the flow of money. That’s how Lincoln was able to run up debts that would keep a dozen of us working for decades to pay them off.”
“All that money…just for Bellish?” Devin asked, appalled.
“That’s why he sold off and recycled everything of value, too.”
Devin thought of the one thing Lincoln had held onto. Her gift. “And the second thing?” she prompted Adam.
“When the ship was a sealed system, the ship’s AIs used to keep a critical eye on the levels of, well,everything. Waste, recycling, water, air…it’s all forms of energy, that they juggled for hundreds of years. They’re still monitoring, although now, the system could be in positive balance one day and negative the next. Neither of those is the disaster it might have been before the scoops came along. Before that time, the vanishing of minute amounts of energy into somewhere unknown, say, the production of a compound, would have been noticed. Thetrendwould have been noticed and someone would have been alerted to investigate, long before now.”
“You said the AIs are still monitoring.”
