Allison winced. “I’ll bear the likely audience in mind, I assure you.”
Turning to look at her AI tarantula, she frowned. Tulla displayed a floating page, colored lines marking something I didn’t understand.
“For heaven’s sake, Harmon, how much recording do you think you have to do in one day? Well, I’ll boot you out for a few minutes and you’ll just have to live with that.”
She turned and hurried toward the station, and this time we didn’t rush to catch up. Molly leaned into me and spoke softly. “I don’t think it’s her, but it could be any of the others, right?”
I grimaced. “As far as I can tell, yes. But we can work on eliminating suspects. Whoever the traitor is, they have to have enough free time to get their goods down to the fence. They need to be willing to take the risk and have a motive. Is there anyone who couldn’t have done it?”
We reached the door to the station and paused our conversation to wordlessly appreciate the warm air inside. Molly whispered a prayer of thanks and we hurried down to the maintenance bay, wanting to be alone for this discussion.
And perhaps for other things, but those would have to wait.
As soon as we arrived, I flopped down on the marvelous piece of furniture that the humans called a ‘bean bag’ and grinned at the ceiling. I’d done it. I’d brought my khara back home safe. That we’d discovered useful intelligence was merely a bonus.
Molly went to her chair, looked at it for a moment, and then shrugged as if to say fine, I know where this is going.
Instead of sitting down, she jumped into my arms and held me tight as I grasped onto her. The beanbag made an alarming crunch, but the seams held.
“So the top suspect would be me,” she said, snuggling into my shoulder. “I’m technical staff which means I have access everywhere, so I can steal the stuff. I work all hours, so I can get stuff down to the fence while no one’s watching. Logically, I’m the best choice.”
I laughed, squeezing her gently. “Is that a confession? I would be the better suspect: all the same advantages apply to me, and I’m a Prytheen. If this is a competition to look most guilty, Molly, I’m afraid I have the advantage.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t here when the ghost started stealing things,” she pointed out, resting her head against me. “Can’t be you. Could be me.”
“Tsk, well that gives us somewhere to start,” I said, smiling and enjoying the pressure of her body against mine. “Who else hasn’t been here that long.”
Molly’s grin lit up my soul. “Good question! Let’s see, Alf is too new, anyone else? Glitch?”
The hologram coalesced overhead and hung there for a moment before letting out a yeowl and tumbling down to land on me. He hissed but unfurled the requested data with a wounded pride.
I’d have sorted it out given a bit of time, but I didn’t even try. This was Molly’s data, and she tore through it, sorting and refining. “Okay. Alf’s out, so is Zeng. Neither of them were here when the ghost started.”
“I assume you tried monitoring the stock?” I asked. Glitch separated into two halves, drifting apart and howling in distress. I winced at the noise, something like an aggrieved siren, while Molly spoke soothingly to him. After a few heartbeats, he pulled himself together and licked himself clean.
“Sorry, he’s not usually so distracting.” I waved off Molly’s apology, gestured for her to continue. “Well, yes, we set up cameras to watch the stores, but they never spotted anything. Which would be a decent reason to blame Alf, he’s the visual effects guy, if anyone could fake the video it’s him. Other than that, I had access, and Allison has access everywhere. I don’t know who else could have pulled it off.”
“I do not believe it was Allison,” I said. “But that might only mean that she’s a good liar.”
Molly frowned and reluctantly shook her head. “I can’t see it, can you? She always looks perfect — at least if you like bubblegum pink. Imagine her rolling a cable spool down the slope to trade it for whatever.”
It seemed unlikely, though sometimes people went to extreme lengths to cover their tracks. Between Molly’s objections and my own, though, Allison seemed too unlikely a suspect. So who else was more likely?
A loud hiss snapped my attention down to floor level, and Molly tensed in my arms as we looked for the source of the sound. It didn’t take us long to see Glitch chasing his tail.
Many animals do that, so why shouldn’t Earth’s cats? But I’d never seen it done this way before. His tail swam majestically through the air, always one move ahead of the rest of Glitch as he chased it around the room.
“What’s gotten into him?” Molly wondered, frowning. “It’s like he’s looking for attention, but he’s not that much like a cat. Or at least he never has been.”
With a jarring shudder through his simulated body, Glitch vanished for a second and then reappeared floating in front of us. With his limbs tucked in under him, Glitch looked more like a loaf of bread than a mammal.
“You are trying to get our attention, aren’t you?” Molly said, leaning forward. An irrational feeling of jealousy came over me as she focused her full attention on the cat and examined the data he presented.
I will not show this weakness, I promised myself. Of course she loves the little beast, he’s a wonderful companion. I like him too, even if he steals Molly’s attention away from me.
Stroking her back, I tried to turn my thoughts to the mystery at hand. Having an enemy agent in our small pack would take the fight from difficult to impossible. So which of the remaining humans could it be? I almost regretted spending so much of my time with Molly now, because I didn’t know any of the others well. Almost.
“Motherfucker,” Molly said in a quiet, intense voice. She sat up straight, almost vibrating. “No wonder.”
I straightened too, looking over her shoulder. Whatever caused my khara such distress, I hoped it was a problem I could punch.
A floating display showed an interwoven chain of data of which I understood hardly anything. There were names, there were ID numbers, a timeline… I couldn’t make sense of it.
Molly’s fingers danced with the data, pushing it this way and that until various bits lined up. The result must have made sense to her. “Got you.”
“Got who?” I asked, shaking my head at the incomprehensible lists of data. Molly grinned, twisted around to kiss me on the lips, and then explained.
“It’s the booking system for the studios. All of it’s meant to go through Allison, so most of it’s booked by Tulla — but look, Studio Two gets booked in these long slots, like six hours, and if we line up those with time of the thefts…”
I saw it now. Room bookings, the thefts, fence ‘failures’ all on a timeline. And, yes, looked at together they fitted like a glove.
“So, who’s booking the studio?”
Molly smiled. “Allison, it looks like, for her weather reports. But that’s bullshit, right? Her reports aren’t that long, and you saw how annoyed she was about Studio Two being booked out.”
“Yes. So if that’s not her…”
We finished the sentence together: “… it has to be someone with access to her system.”