Chapter 38 - The Missing

The drone was precise, he would give it that.

Four hours and twenty-two minutes, not four hours and twenty, Eric correcting himself in the margin of his notation card with a small mechanical pencil he kept capped when not in use. Nathaniel knew the correction had been made because the card came out of Eric's jacket, got opened, got marked, and went back in, all without Eric stopping his explanation of why two minutes was significant.

"The patrol units run on a fixed interval algorithm," Eric said. "The base interval is four hours. The twenty-two-minute differential is a route extension, which means the corridor outside our module is not the primary rotation anchor. We're on a secondary loop." He put the card away. "Which means someone specifically added our corridor to an existing patrol route."

"Who adds routes."

"Security Operations Division. Or someone with SOD-level administrative credentials."

They were in their module, eating the breakfast the dispenser had calibrated. The food was correct in the way their food was always correct: optimal protein ratio, micronutrient balance, temperature maintained to within one degree of the recommended consumption window. Nathaniel ate a piece of something that was designed to taste like toasted grain and thought about Jazmine's level and the smell of whatever her neighbor three doors down always had going on the communal burner, something with actual oil that hung in the corridor for hours and had no nutritional documentation whatsoever.

"SOD," he said. "That's Seiko's division."

Eric's fork paused. Just briefly.

"Yes," he said. "That's Seiko's division."

They ate for a moment. The dispenser hummed. The module's light was perfect: a soft white precisely calibrated to the morning cycle, designed to support natural wake state without triggering stress response. Nathaniel had grown up under this light and it had never occurred to him to call it what it was, which was an intervention. It was just light. It was just how light was.

"I want to look at the access log for our junction," he said.

"I already did."

"And."

Eric set his fork on the plate with a deliberateness that was not about the fork. "The log shows standard maintenance traffic for the last thirty days. Verified badge entries, verified badge exits. Nothing flagged." He looked at the plate. "The junction hasn't been touched by SOD query. But the drone route was extended, which is an administrative action that doesn't appear in the maintenance access log." He paused. "The two systems don't talk to each other."

"But the timing."

"The timing is circumstantial." Eric picked up the fork again, considered it, put it back down. "The drone route was extended four days ago. We went below for the first time two months ago. The two events could be unrelated. They could be correlated to something else I'm not modeling. The model isn't certain."

"But the model has a direction."

"The model has a direction," Eric agreed.

The conversation had been running in this register since Nathaniel had come back from Anastasia's, which was the register of two people who were being careful because the drone might or might not have a listening function and they did not know its technical specifications and Eric had three-quarters of a card of notes about things they needed to learn before assuming anything.

Neither of them had said the word surveillance, in the module, with the drone active.

They did not say it now.

Nathaniel stood and brought his plate to the reclamation slot and stood at the viewport. The corridor outside: white, calibrated, empty at this hour except for the resident from two doors down who ran the morning circuit in her training kit, the same circuit at the same hour she'd been running since before he could remember her doing it. He watched her pass. She did not look at their module. She had probably never had a reason to.

"The missing residents," he said. He was watching the corridor.

"I've been looking." Eric's chair shifted. "There's no report. No filing in the governance council documents I can access. No family communication to secondary residents that I can find." He paused. "Two people from Deck 4. Unrelated households. One of them had an appointment with the housing allocation office that they didn't keep. The other had a scheduled maintenance observation on Deck 6 that was logged as completed by a different technician."

Nathaniel turned. "They covered the appointment."

"Someone did." Eric's voice was careful. "Or it was a coincidence. The model is not excluding coincidence."

"The model doesn't believe in coincidence."

Eric looked at him. The slow blink.

"No," he said. "It doesn't."

The corridor outside was empty again, the woman from two doors down somewhere around the bend in her circuit. The light held its calibration. The dispenser maintained temperature. Everything up here was functioning exactly as it was designed to function, and it had been functioning this way since before Nathaniel was born, and it would go on functioning this way, and that was, he was realizing, the precise problem.

He thought about the word Anastasia had used. Taken. She had known where they were taken, she had said, and where they were taken and where they went were different coordinates. He had not asked her to explain this, because she had said it in the tone of something she was placing rather than disclosing, and he was learning to read the difference in her between the true statements she offered as access and the true statements she placed as a boundary.

He had also not asked because he had been naked in her bunk alcove at the time and his cognitive resources had been unequally distributed.

He would ask.

"Seiko," he said.

Eric looked at his cards.

"Security Commander Seiko," Nathaniel said. "That's who runs SOD. Her family's been in that seat for thirty years. She doesn't answer to the full council; she answers to the security subcommittee." He stopped. He was thinking about something. "My father is on the security subcommittee."

A beat of quiet.

"I know," Eric said.

"Did you model that."

"I modeled it when I found the drone." Eric put the card away. "I didn't raise it because it's a long chain of inference and I don't know what it means yet."

The ship ran its systems. The air moved through the filtration with a sound below the threshold of conscious hearing but present in the body as a baseline hum: the ship's respiration, the thing you only noticed when you'd been below long enough that your body had recalibrated against a different set of sounds.

Nathaniel stood at the viewport. He was thinking about a governance meeting, one of the ones he'd attended in the observers' gallery, one of the ones where he'd been doing something other than listening. He was trying to remember if the Security Commander had been in the room. He thought she had. He thought his father had spoken directly to her and that they had had the easy cadence of two people who talked regularly, who talked about things that did not require the full meeting's presence.

He had not been listening. He had been twenty years old and bored and in the second row of the observers' gallery and it had not occurred to him that anything in that room was applicable to his life.

"We need to know what the charges were," he said. "For the missing residents. If there were formal charges, there'll be a record somewhere in the SOD filing system."

"Below the governance council access level."

"Yes." He turned from the viewport. "Which is why we need someone with access to the SOD filing system."

Eric looked at him, eyes narrowing a fraction. He did not answer at once. One thumb pressed along the edge of the card still in his hand before he said:

"Leila," Eric said. "Not directly. Through Anastasia."

"Anastasia has access to the maintenance access corridors between eight and sixteen. She might have access to the security zone filing architecture if those systems share infrastructure."

"She might have access to a lot of things." Eric was quiet for a moment. "Nathaniel. She knows more than she's told us."

"I know."

"I'm not saying that's bad. I'm saying we should factor it."

"I am factoring it." He said it without defensiveness, which was itself something new. Three weeks ago he would have defended Anastasia reflexively, because he would have read Eric's assessment as skepticism to be countered. Now he heard it as data being offered, the way Eric offered data, cleanly and without agenda. "She's protecting something. She's told us we're inside the operation, which means she's decided we're more useful inside than outside. She told me about the missing residents voluntarily." He paused. "She's also told us there's a conversation we need to have when we're ready to have it."

"What conversation."

"She didn't specify." He looked at the window. "I think she's waiting for us to ask the right question."

Eric considered this. He turned a card over. The motion of someone running a structural assessment, but gently, not with the urgency of a building on fire: with the patience of someone who is checking load-bearing elements in a structure they plan to inhabit for a while.

"We should go back," Eric said.

"Yes."

"Both of us. Not just you."

Nathaniel looked at him. There was something in Eric's face, in the careful economy of his expression, that was not quite the risk-assessment mode. Something personal. Some part of the situation that Eric had been carrying in the part of himself the cards didn't access.

He did not ask. Some things in a friendship of this length operated below the level of things that required asking.

"Both of us," Nathaniel agreed.

The dispenser ran its maintenance cycle. The light held its calibration. Outside, the corridor was empty and clean and exactly twenty-one degrees, and in forty minutes or so the drone would come back around and run its sweep, four hours and twenty-two minutes from the last one, extended route, someone with SOD-level credentials having decided that this particular corridor was worth adding to the list of things worth watching.

Nathaniel had spent twenty years not being worth watching. He was adjusting to the shift.

"Eric," he said.

"Yes."

"What did you model. About my father."

Eric was quiet long enough that the question filled the room and settled there. He turned a card over, looked at the notation, put it face-down.

"I modeled the chain," he said. "From Seiko to the subcommittee. From the subcommittee to the two residents. From the pattern of those two residents to what kind of lower-deck contact would qualify for a Security action at that level." He paused. "And from the type of action to what kind of intelligence operation would justify it."

Nathaniel waited.

"The model," Eric said, "requires someone feeding the Security apparatus. Someone with access to the lower-deck network who is providing information about upper-deck contacts in the restricted zones." He set the card down. "If that intelligence operation is the reason for the missing residents, then someone inside the lower-deck group has been talking to Seiko."

The air moved through the filtration. The drone was somewhere in its circuit.

Nathaniel thought about the schematics on Anastasia's wall. Twelve deck levels. Her own notation system. A watch marker at J-7 Sub-2, six months before anyone asked her to watch anything.

He thought about the conversation they needed to have. The one she had said she would have with them when they were ready.

He was beginning to think she was waiting for them to ask her directly. She had already put the question in front of them once and left it there.

He thought about this.

"Eric," he said.

"I know," Eric said.

"You haven't finished the model."

"I'm almost finished the model."

"When you finish it."

"I'll tell you." Eric looked at him. "I promise I'll tell you."

This was not reassuring. It was honest, which was better than reassuring, and he had spent enough time in lower-deck air by now to know the difference.

He went to get his jacket. The corridor outside was waiting, and the drone, and whatever the model said when Eric finished it, and below it all, the lower decks, running their older systems in the amber light, breathing air that nobody had decided to improve.

He put on his jacket and thought about going back.

Neither of them suggested stopping.