Chapter 38: The Stranger

After inspection teams had gone over the flooded buildings and grounds the Akadem Committee announced its official decision: classes would resume in seven days; until then, every effort was to be made to clean up interiors and begin removing debris accumulated outdoors. A repair crew had been at work from the instant the rain ceased, to put up a temporary dam. The small river that had carved its bed through the terrain downhill from the dam would be left alone for the present and the makeshift dam was supposed to divert some water from that stream into a tiny new lake away from any of the complexes.

Meanwhile, of the forty-six people missing the morning after the flood, thirty-one were found in an old faculty housing unit between Science and Social Science complexes, a house with aged innards, whose communications and power had been wiped out as soon as the old walls got wet. It had been used all along as a meeting place for the "Alexander's Anachrons", a group of ancient history devotees who held Greek-style philosophy seminars there without benefit of personal electronics…The students and three faculty mentors had been trapped by the weather during one of those sessions and had spent the entire crisis happily arguing about the Politics of Aristotle while Security worried about their whereabouts. Others, not so sheltered, had been rescued during the day from the debris to which they had been clinging, or had washed up on higher ground, or had been able to get to shallower water to wait it out. That made eight more. Five were rescued from trees.

But there were, according to the news vids, three fatalities related to the flooding. Security discovered a fifteen-year-old Deltan boy buried in debris between an Arts complex building and a shed; apparently he had been injured by tree limbs and had no doubt drowned while unconscious. An elderly faculty member had been found dead, floating in the water behind her residence flat near Science; at the infirmary Dr. Saines had attributed her death to a myocardial infarction, a heart attack.

A third body provided one more unexpected link in the chain of events that had held the attention of most of the planet's students for so many weeks. It had turned up beside the monocar line, not near any of the stations but out in the country. The corpse – a human male – bore no visible identification, but when taken to the infirmary for a bioscan the Akadem employee records showed a "hit", and several nurses and other employees knew the dead man's face.

"That's your Harry Umberto, the guy you were trying to find, y'know, after they found that Brucker in the anatomy lab last week," a nurse told the Security team that rushed to the scene. "Check your holos again, you can't miss it." Cal Tanner slogged through the mucky mess from Science Beta and made a positive identification of his former co-worker.

"Haven't seen him since we let him go. I thought he'd gone off-planet; he always did want to go back to Secunda Indi or some cheap retirement place like that." All this, however, did not go very far towards solving the essential questions: Did Harry Umberto place Steven Brucker into the deep stasis in Science Beta, and why?

With the flood already two days into history and the prospect of several days off from mental labor, most of Akadem's students pitched in to work, indoors and out. Saavik and Luine returned to their quad to be fussed over briefly by Carinne, who claimed that she had not been too worried about them. Still, Saavik sensed obvious relief in her manner and her greater than usual motherliness. Neill was nowhere in sight; she had spent the flood in the library and was doing her cleanup duty right there. She called in to tell her quadmates this; Luine stared at the screen after she had signed off and made only one comment.

"Too bad that nothing but work means anything to her." Somehow, Neill seemed a smaller threat to her now. Carinne had noticed a change in her, and had been lavish in praise upon hearing of her young quadmate's part in the Grub rescue.

"We'll be going to the cleanup stations as soon as we eat," Carinne told them, pulling her friends back to the present. "Jaime wants all of us on this level to work on cleaning downstairs with the sonic scrubbers and the other floors are supposed to help over by the boat pavilions. But you two deserve a rest… unless you want to work!"

"Certainly I do." That was a strange question; Saavik could not conceive of lounging around while work needed to be done. Luine also anted to get outside into the sunshine. They joined a group of students from their dormitory and the faculty and staff who had come to help, greeting acquaintances whom they had not seen in days.

Tesat went with a work gang to Science Gamma and found her roommate Rufia there as well. Tor and T'Lemmi and most of the premedical students were released from their emergency medical duties. By the second day, there were only eight casualties still in their infirmary.

Someone had wisely remembered that children and adolescents need to eat, especially when they are doing physical labor. Although there were food synthesizers in each building, Akadem provisioners designated the infirmary in each complex as a central meal station. Students in the Science area were glad for the break, and soon adopted their infirmary as a social relay center as well. It would never replace the Grub, of course… but Gobie had already had it straight from the horse's mouth: Brownie was planning to rebuild.

Mentioning the Grub started off the subject of the rescue, which had not yet failed as a topic of interest. As knots of students grouped themselves around the tables and the synth machines and the counter (where real cooks from Provisioning were dispensing real food), the drama on the treacherous waters was played and replayed. Some had been in the Science Alpha and Beta buildings and had been having a reasonably cozy time, even opening the windows to let rockvid from their portables blast out into the stormy night. There had been no boats for them, and no need for any, and they had been stranded without being in danger. But they admitted now that they had turned off the music and watched with anxiety and curiosity as the four boats bearing the Grub refugees passed between the buildings. "It was weird," one remarked. "I guess I didn't believe it was all that serious, until I saw how exhausted those guys looked under our lamps. I thought that some of the people in the boat were dead, actually. Talk about getting the creeps."

Corvei Marchese held the floor in his work group, being the only one among them who had actually participated. "They came and got us out at just about the last minute; those boats were the best thing I ever saw in my life!" He retold the dramatic appearance of the student volunteers, setting off a new discussion of Akadem Security's screw-up in not sending an adequate number of skimmers. But everyone wanted to know about Dibrat dei Haxrash, now that his hatred for his half-Tellarite companion had manifested itself in such evil fashion.

"I talked with Paul; they'll let him out right after they make sure he isn't getting pneumonia. He's not saying anything about Lefty, but he knows what happened," Corvei recounted. "He says he was just about to give up when he was grabbed, and then he doesn't remember anything else."

"Tesat knocked him out! That's what Ted says," Charley Zoromir declared. His clutch-sisters nodded in tandem. "She was having trouble with him and just hammered him a good one and heaved him into the boat. Ted said he'd never seen anything like it."

"That Tesat. She's pretty good, huh…." There was general agreement.

Corvei added, "Even if Paul will never appreciate how awesome it is to be knocked around by a really strong woman…" Some of the girls around him were less amused than he would have liked, so he dropped the subject.

Naturally enough, from the topic of Tesat the group moved on to talking about the sensational find of the day, the body on the monocar line. "Do you suppose he killed that Brucker guy and put him on ice?" Abe Davits asked. "I knew Umberto when he worked in Bio, but he never looked really dangerous to me."

Geneva Zoromir shook her head scornfully. "Nah – I'll bet whoever killed Brucker killed Umberto, too, and we haven't heard the last of it." She and her sister Nadine reveled in mysteries when they weren't collecting trashy romance vids. "Why, I'll bet that –"

"- that everyone has a different entertaining speculation about all this, and half of that is way off course." This cheerful interruption came from Cran Pike, who had just come along, wearing ordinary clothes but still with his head bandage and infirmary scan badge. Someone drew up a chair for him and all waited for the point of his interruption.

"As you may know, I've been stuck with lots of time on my hands, and consequently have memorized the vid news for the entire planet, verbatim, and probably most of the galactic news, too… So, I just heard it."

"Heard WHAT? This is maddening!" screamed Nadine. Cran, knowing her as an accomplished gossip, drew out the suspense on purpose, teasing her. "Never mind!" she smoldered, "I'll just go and log in to the –"

Pike held up his hand in surrender. "No, no, I'll tell you. About Harry Umberto. Security made some more inquiries: what he was still doing here after he was fired from the bio lab, where he was living, all that. They found that he'd moved to Kelath, on the other side." This was one of the two townships located on Akadem that were not part of the school; they were inhabited mainly by retired or temporary employees, as well as some outsiders not connected with the institution. "He had a small flat and the neighbors never saw much of him. They said he hadn't been seen for several days, since before the flooding, and recently there had been a couple of visitors nobody recognized."

"More unidentified characters," Charley muttered. "Any more stuff like this goes on around here, some parents won't want to send their precious babies here anymore." There was laughter and a command to shut up, while Cran Pike continued.

"So, Security went through his place this morning and found a couple of interesting things." Pike leaned back and accepted a beaker of Kentaur. "Thanks. Anyway, Umberto left a letter disk behind – something he meant to send to someone, or maybe use as leverage. Supposedly it gives information about Brucker and some other things from the Tesat case. I guess we'll find out later. And – it turns out our friend Harry was a busy little guy, collecting guess what? - exotic weapons."

"Well, everybody has to have a hobby."

"Sure, Gunnar, sure, but what weapons? Romulan weapons, among others… are you catching on?"

"I suppose there was one missing?" Gaaru the Mominat ventured. "I suppose, I suppose that the little item that dispatched Gien Kai-Mekelen into the alternate galaxy will be found, will be found to complete a dinner set of eight?" The joking was macabre and a bit forced, but disguised the relief felt by all of them. The unresolved parts of the murder/espionage sequence really might fall into place at last.

Cranston Pike shrugged. He was getting tired, like his doctor had said he might. "So far, nothing said specifically about that, but that's what you have to think about, right?"

"Still leaves the question about who gave the first orders, who was behind Umberto… and also, how come he conveniently died after recording it all for posterity?" Corvei had the salient question there; each of them found that he or she had become much more skeptical and suspicious over the past weeks.

--

By evening, the Akadem authorities had released the content of Harry Umberto's last letter. They had also announced that the post-mortem on the former employee showed nearly toxic levels of corumadine, a sense-distorting rec-drug, in the man's blood, and enough buildup in the internal organs to indicate long-term use. The assumption was that Umberto had been caught by the flood waters while drugged, and had drowned while unable to flee to safety in that state. Why he had been on foot between the Science and Arts complexes, so far from where he lived, no one could guess.

However, the letter itself was enough to whet everyone's curiosity, and to resolve some remaining questions. In it, Harry Umberto confessed to having killed Steven Brucker after he came to believe that the latter was planning to go to the authorities with the part both of them had had in the recent crimes. Brucker had helped fabricate the case against Tesat with his help, and had killed Gien Kai-Mekelen using one of Harry's knives. Umberto spoke of substituting Brucker's body for a legitimately obtained anatomy specimen already in stasis, and of disposing of all of Brucker's effects along with the lab cadaver in an unattended flash furnace in the Arts complex.

What caused the greatest sensation was Umberto's identification of Kenyon Malevan, a notorious interstellar racketeer operating out of the Orion sector, as the moving factor behind the plan to pass Federation "secrets" through Gien to the Romulans. He also described the mobster's displeasure at Brucker's unwise choice of Romulan agent; apparently, Tesat's refusal had not been planned for. Umberto in turn feared that Brucker might spill the truth about the murder and the espionage attempt. When Tesat's nemesis Sarader Komack accepted Brucker's self-serving help in her own schemes, this had brought the real plot a little too far out into the open. Even though there had been little chance of the confederates' identities ever being discovered, Malevan had not taken kindly to the undesirable publicity.

According to the letter, Dr. Komack had been trying to locate Steven Brucker since the last session of the Inquiry Board hearings. She had a pretty good idea who the man's contacts on Akadem might be and had, possibly, also figured out Umberto's own whereabouts. And someone with Sarader Komack's information-gathering instincts might even have had a hint of the ultimate connection with Malevan of Orion. So, Brucker had to go.

The letter confirmed a suspicion held by many, that Dr. Komack had readily accepted Steven Brucker's tale of Tesat's complicity in espionage, because she had been planning her own move against the Romulan student for quite a while. There was no comment from the Akadem Committee about further action against Komack, however. But the students who heard, saw, and devoured the news were in no doubt whatsoever. A fine smell of victory, of let-justice-be-done, was in the air; hardly a student stayed out of the speculation mill.

Tesat received the news with little comment, but with a great, undisguised relief. After the flood and this trial, she was ready for an ordinary, boring rest of the year.

Luine Kai-Mekelen had come to her quad to apologize for her persistent suspicions. Tesat had not been prepared for this, but remembered that humans had a hard time with the task of apology; gracious acceptance was the proper response on her part. Luine was young; and maybe, if suspicion towards Romulans and other alien beings was obliterated early in life, it might be worth Tesat's effort – and that of other young Romulans – to learn to live with those of the Federation.

As for Luine, she walked back from Cochrane House to Jenner in thoughtful quiet. There was still time…

--

At the Faculty House offices, there was a considerable chill when Sarader Komack arrived to do some much-needed catching up. What with the damned flood, and Shulamith's quitting, there had been a sorry lapse in the routine lately. And while few of her colleagues had ever been over-friendly before, now that the little weasel Tesat was a damned planetary hero, the faculty were acting as if their dear associate Sarader Komack had leprosy. Well, she should not have been surprised.

On her terminal she quickly scanned her messages, and then called up the Current Contents file, tagging the articles she wished to save: a major review from Annals of Military Science and several more from the Arcturan Tactical Quarterly, Section B. If there weren't going to be any classes, and her fellow-professors weren't speaking to her, she might as well do some reading. Damn them, anyway. She'd heard the rumors abut another hearing, this time for her dismissal, but Sarader Komack didn't believe it for a moment. They should just try. With what she knew about some of them, they would quickly learn what an Admirals' daughter was made of!