"There's one more thing," she said finally, "and I'll tell you now because I think you'll find out regardless, sooner rather than later, and I'd rather you hear it from someone who's already decided to trust you than stumble into it cold, from a stranger who doesn't wish you well. You're not the first people to come asking around the edges of this file. Not through any channel that would ever reach my desk officially, mind you. Word travels in an annex like this the same way it travels anywhere people are bored and underpaid and stuck three relay rings out from anything that matters: quietly, sideways, through favors and rumor and the particular boredom of long shifts with nothing to do but talk. Six weeks ago, maybe seven, I had a supply broker come through here on entirely unrelated business, the kind who deals mostly in salvage rights and scrap contracts, the kind of man who'd sell his own mother's teeth if the price was right, and in the course of an entirely different conversation, over a drink he insisted on buying, he mentioned, almost in passing, that there were people paying very well for anything solid on old Forge legends. Not Fleet people. Independent buyers. The kind who don't care whose flag they're offending, only whose credits are good and whose questions don't come with strings attached."
Swan glanced at Taisen, then at Camaro, gauging how much weight the room was actually putting on a word neither of them had said with any real certainty yet.
"Krell," Camaro said, flat.
"I didn't ask, and he didn't say," Holt said, and permitted herself, for the first time since they'd sat down, something close to a wry, tired smile. "I've been doing this job long enough to know that the fastest way to lose a useful source is to ask him a question he'll have to lie to answer. Better to let a man like that talk himself into telling you more than he meant to, over a second drink he's paying for, than to ask him anything directly and watch him decide, right there in front of you, exactly how much of the truth he's willing to spend on a woman he'll never see again. He wasn't Krell himself, mind you, near as I could tell. Just a broker who deals with whoever pays, and doesn't ask his buyers many more questions than I asked him." "which in my experience means yes, means it plainly, the way a man who won't name a name is usually protecting a very specific reputation from being connected to his own mouth. I want to be clear that I told him nothing, Commander, not then and not since, not so much as a hint of what sits in this drawer. But I'd be doing you a disservice if I let you walk out of here thinking you're the only interested party circling this particular fire. Whoever took your Fleet Marshal wants what's in his head. Someone else entirely wants what's sitting in that vault for an entirely different reason, and neither one of those parties is going to wait politely for the other to finish, or for you to catch up to either of them."
Aboard the Arctic, in the hours the shuttle was gone, Osei found his own reason to be glad he'd asked to hold the whole hull rather than just Venemis's door.
The ship felt different with Taisen gone, even to a man who had served aboard her only a few short weeks. Quieter in a way that had nothing to do with the actual decibel level of anything, the particular hush of a house with its owner away, every ordinary sound (a hatch cycling, a duty rotation changing over, the low murmur of the mess hall two decks down) landing slightly wrong in his ears, slightly too loud or slightly too careful, as though the whole crew had unconsciously agreed to hold itself a degree more alert until the Commander's shuttle came home again.
The visitor came through the aft cargo airlock on a standard courier transponder, requesting a routine parts exchange, a common enough occurrence for any ship running long patrols that a junior rating might have waved it through without a second thought, logged it, and forgotten about it within the hour. Lyn, occupied with keeping the Arctic's cover holding steady at a careful remove from the station, one eye on the plot and the other on the ship's own outward-facing sensor sweep, had authorized the docking on the strength of the transponder code alone, trusting the routine of it the way any commander trusts a thousand small routine things a day simply because checking each one personally would leave no time left over to command anything at all.
It was Osei, standing watch near the cargo bay for no reason he could have fully justified to anyone who asked, some instinct he'd learned to trust more than he trusted his own reasons for trusting it, who noticed that the courier reciting the standard exchange protocol got the confirmation phrase wrong.
Not wildly wrong. A single word transposed, the kind of mistake that meant nothing to anyone who hadn't spent the last several weeks standing guard duty memorizing every small procedural rhythm this ship ran on out of simple thoroughness, the kind of drilled repetition that made a wrong note stand out sharply, audible only to the one person in the room who'd rehearsed the whole piece a thousand times before.
He said nothing to alert the courier. He simply moved, unhurried, into the space between the man and the cargo hold's inner hatch, broad and immovable and entirely without threat in his posture, hands loose at his sides, the way a locked door doesn't announce itself as locked until someone actually tries the handle and finds it doesn't give.
"Wrong parts manifest," he said, pleasant, quiet, almost apologetic in tone. "You're looking for bay four. This is bay two."
The courier's eyes flicked, just once, toward the inner hatch behind Osei rather than toward any door that might have actually led to bay four, a tell so small that a less patient man might have missed it entirely, gone in under half a second, and then, smoothly, the man apologized for the confusion, blamed a garbled dock assignment, and withdrew, transponder still broadcasting the same routine code all the way back through the airlock, unhurried, professional, giving nothing away in his walk or his voice that would have told a less attentive observer anything had gone wrong at all.