"We're lucky," Ryland mused, "that the victim was a member of the Administration."
"I'm not sure I follow."
"The police are part of the military chain of command, which means that the Administration is likely to be closed-mouthed about any special projects Braden was working on. Most milipol officers are dedicated to their law enforcement duties, but chain-of-command issues do arise."
"They don't have any real reason to disclose secrets to us, either," Lyon pointed out.
"Yes, but as hunters working for a private, nonmilitary client—and especially given Principal Tyrell's pro-Hunter's Guild stance—they're more likely to be willing to let something slip. The Administration is going to want this case solved, after all. The victim was one of their own. I think that should be our starting point, since it's the angle of investigation best able to point not only to the who, but the why."
"All right. Who is your Administration contact?"
Ryland looked over at the fish tank.
"I...don't really have one."
"You're kidding," Lyon marveled. "You always have contacts." Whether it was an underground computer hacker or one of the power brokers of corporate finance, Ryland had always been able to come up with someone who could give them needed information.
"I know, and you have no idea how much it annoys me not to in this case."
Lyon's own network of contacts was not so well-developed, a natural result of her barely being older than the Pioneer 2 expedition, but in this case she thought she could help.
"I'll handle that part, then. You can approach our fellow hunters, instead. Many of them would be more receptive to an organic asking questions, in any case."
"True...but why would we be asking about Braden with the Guild?"
"Not her." She turned the dataplate back around to face Ryland, though she knew from experience he could read upside down almost as well as she could. "The person who sent the package in the first place."
"Nils Vandsen," Ryland read. "A registered member of the Hunter's Guild, identified as a male human Hunter, age thirty-two. The milipol investigated him as a possible suspect, but he denied all knowledge of the bomb."
By law, hunters enjoyed complete extraterritoriality within the Guild. This meant that they could not be forced to disclose details about a Guild Quest, and that any testimony they might freely offer was inadmissible in court or even to provide grounds for probable cause to open an investigation. The point of this was to protect the clients, so that they in turn would be willing to entrust hunters with sensitive jobs, insuring that the Guild could survive as part of society rather than being forced to sink into the underworld.
This privilege, though, did not prevent hunters from being arrested for any crimes they might personally commit, whether or not they did so on a client's behalf. Since Vandsen had the best opportunity of anyone to tamper with the package, he was an obvious suspect.
"The milipol couldn't push the point, because they couldn't even explain how the bomb could have passed through Diamond Drive's security checks. Without that evidence they couldn't make anything stick and obviously Vandsen knew it."
Lyon tipped her head to one side, a mannerism designed to indicate curiosity.
"You sound like you think he's guilty."
"Well, again, it's the most elegant solution. He was the one person who knew that a package would be sent, so that would give him a reason to try and figure out how a bomb could be hidden in one. Otherwise, the bomber would have had to be waiting on the possibility that Braden would be sent a package."
"That doesn't sound likely," Lyon agreed, "not unless the bomber had a reason to expect a package would be sent."
"No, or unless the bombing wasn't a targeted murder but a random act."
"Terrorist violence? But it's been two weeks, now, and there's been no public statement or any mention in the report of any group trying to claim responsibility."
Ryland tapped his fingers together.
"The Administration could be covering up to prevent a panic if the act were political, or it might be a blackmail plot, in which the killer would keep his or her demands private to increase the chance of a payoff so the government wouldn't lose face."
"I don't think that's likely, Ryland. This is a closed society. Where would the bomber go with the payoff money?"
"Good point," Ryland admitted, "and it took intelligence to commit the crime in the first place, so doing something that stupid would be out of character. We can probably scratch that idea off our list."
Concurring, Lyon flagged the hypothesis as a negligible probability and adjusted her deductive-reasoning algorithm accordingly.
"There's one other possibility," he told her. "It could just be a maniac, an insane killer committing the crime for a thrill. That type might try to claim public responsibility for the ego boost, but might also keep quiet to savor the public's fear and confusion."
Lyon thought that over.
"Yes, that works."
"So we start at both ends and push towards the middle." Ryland glanced over at the aquarium again. "I'm glad you brought me here after all."
"Why?"
He pointed to the tank.
"That's kind of like this case, isn't it? We wrap it all up in our net and see what fish we come up with." He glanced at his discarded cup. "I just hope it goes down better than the coffee."
~X X X~
"I can only offer you a minute," the neatly composed blonde woman said.
"Arca Braden."
She tapped a fingertip against her cheek, then smiled, not at the subject but because she appreciated what Lyon had done.
"Perhaps more than a minute, at that."
Her name was Irene Seda. She was somewhere in her mid-twenties, was reasonably pretty and immaculately groomed, wearing one of her trademark green-and-white skirt-suits. The word Lyon most often used to describe her was crisp; even Irene's emotionalism—and she could be emotional—fell within the neat outlines of what would be expected from her. She was the very best in the world in filling her role, in being what she was.
What she was was the executive secretary to the head of the Pioneer 2 Principal Government, Tyrell's right hand.
"Who are you working for?" Irene asked.
"Diamond Drive Deliveries. They want to know what happened to cut the damage to their bottom line," Lyon said. There was no point in holding the information back; it wasn't secret. On the contrary, Krone probably would have been happy to hold a press conference, to put across the idea to the public. We're as concerned as you are! We're not waiting for the milipol but taking our own steps to find the truth! Trust us with your money!
"Very sensible of them."
A brightly-colored orange bird flew by, silhouetted against the bright blue sky. It was a holographic simulation of a species from Ragol; Lyon had seen one on Gal De Val Island herself. That was the whole point of TropicPark, after all, to present a recreational setting as similar as possible to a tropical seaside. It was a joint project between the Lab and Pioneer 2 Enterprise, the former providing first-generation versions of the VR tech they used in their own systems and the latter the corporate funding.
To someone like Lyon, who had experienced both TropicPark's real-life analogue and the Lab's high-grade VR environment and viewed things with an android's precision, the differences were obvious. The problem wasn't really the equipment, but the processing power of the computers creating the VR sim. The Lab's VR system used Calus, their core AI, to run everything, allowing the designers to create fully interactive environments. TropicPark wasn't like that; the plant and animal life didn't "live" and interact with each other but followed specific programmed routines. In another 1.03 beats, the orange bird would fly by again in exactly the same path, each wingbeat precisely identical to the one the last time.
Still, for organics who yearned to feel the sand between their toes and trade winds ruffle their hair, it was a reasonable facsimile of the seaside, even to the point that one could swim in the aquamarine salt water of the lagoon. Reasonable facsimiles were a lifestyle standard on Pioneer 2 anyway, from neomeat to synthetic leather to...androids.
Though one might note that some of the facsimiles are actually improvements on the originals, Lyon said to herself, moderately uncomfortable at her chain of associations.
"So what can you tell me about Arca Braden? We can't have you wasting your entire lunch hour, after all."
"Some days I wish I was an android," Irene said. "There's far too much to do each day and too many periodic biological interruptions. But yes, Arca Braden. Her official title was Resource Oversight Director."
"So she was involved in overseeing city maintenance? Power, water, food, that sort of thing?"
Irene nudged a rock with her foot.
"Actually, no. That's Resource Distribution. Resource Oversight is something different entirely."
"Wouldn't it be more efficient to have more distinctive titles?" Lyon wondered. That was the largest problem in organic memory—they tended to remember bits and pieces, not entireties.
"Yes, which is why they don't."
"Um...do I need to run a diagnostic on my language-processing subroutines, or did that not make any sense?"
Irene laughed.
"Neither. The point is to try to make Resource Oversight sound like it's another boring bureaucratic agency, when its job is in reality to deal with the Administration's external contracting."
"Oh?"
"She hired hunter teams for various Administration projects."
"I thought that was your job."
Irene shook her head.
"I work directly for Principal Tyrell, but he isn't the Administration as a whole. I only act when the project is under his personal oversight or in an emergency situation. Besides, there's no way that I could handle the workload. Remember that Principal Tyrell is using the Guild to handle the investigation of Ragol as well, and that project includes dozens of hunters. He takes a personal interest when key information is gained, of course, but for the most part it's the Resource Oversight Director who manages the day-to-day connections between the Administration and the Guild."
"I suppose that involved her in any number of sensitive projects that might be compromised by her death."
"Well, yes and no. I mean, she certainly was involved in a wide variety of projects, and some of them are classified, but assassinating her isn't likely to impact any of them. It's not like killing a snake by cutting off its head. In a government bureaucracy, there's always someone else ready to take over, and given the structure of the bureau, it's very unlikely that Ms. Braden had possession of some secret data that wasn't already disseminated to others in the Administration."
"So why kill her?"
A trio of seagulls squawked noisily, their calls startling a Newman child building a sand castle into dropping his bucket.
"That's the question, isn't it? It seems like it ought to be a military police matter, but with politics between the military and the Administration the way they are, suspicion keeps getting in the way of getting things done. I believe that some of the investigation team was actually military intelligence trying to get a look into Resource Oversight's subnet."
Lyon had met Inspector Laleham, the milipol's chief homicide investigator, and knew that on the one hand he would be grinding his teeth in frustration at having his investigation used as cover for a covert operation, but that on the other he would follow chain-of-command orders and let the spooks do their work.
"It's sad," Lyon said. "Here we are, light-years from home, stranded in space, and we're still engaged in political infighting when we should all be working together to try and make some kind of future for ourselves."
"It is sad," Irene agreed. "But the problem is, we all have different dreams for what that future should be."
~X X X~
A/N: I find it mildly amusing that I wrote this story back in 2007, with Irene's comment about wishing that she was an android because it would make her more efficient as a secretary...and then in Phantasy Star Zero, the Mayor's secretary, Ms. Lindow, actually is a CAST!
