Page 37 of Reformation
“Processing. Complete.Substantial investments in all three companies under the name of Evan Hardwick, Haven Alexander’s brother. Evan Hardwick has been deceased for twelve years.”
Haven was Foster Alexander’s last wife and had died at the same time he had. Her brother had passed away the following year in a shuttle accident, but before that, he had run his own investment corporation. There had been a lot of dark money flowing through those channels, but it all should have ceased on Evan’s death. He had no children and had kept a much lower profile than his sister. To use his name meant whoever was behind this—and Sigurd didn’t have to wonder too much about that—hadn’t been in a position at the time to act without it buthadbeen in a position to hide the illegality. Interesting.
“List all available monetary actions by Evan Hardwick in the past twelve years.”
There were over a hundred actions listed. Sigurd flagged them to be sent on to Garrett later. “Correlate actions with any associations with Orwell.”
It didn’t stop at the three companies the computer had found before. If what he was looking at was true, President Alexander had been bankrolling Orwell ever since his discharge, and a lot of that money had gone into subtly veiled construction. Some of those contracts had even gone through the military—bits and pieces of things, little threads to pull that might lead to the revelation of an entire fleet of ships made by a thousand different hands, all of them pulling their creations into a dark void of secrecy.
Well. That couldn’t be allowed to stand. “Bundle this information and send it to Peacock. Use the highest-level encryption and recall my staff. I’m going to pay a surprise visit to the construction docks this afternoon. We’re going to get some records pulled.” The docks’ accounting system had a private server that he couldn’t access from here. Once he was on-site, though, he should be able to get his hands on their raw data. A surprise inspection should do the trick, and if he had his staff run interference for him, a few minutes alone was all he needed.
“The docks are off-limits to all visitors without prior authorization by the admiralty.”
“I’m an admiral, I think I qualify.”
“You will be challenged.”
“They’ll let me through if they don’t want to be court-martialed.”
“Your time there will be limited.”
“I know.” Sigurd smiled. “It’ll be a race.”
Chapter twenty-one
Cody
“This is ridiculous.” Ten stared at the three-dimensional model of the ship that Cody had helpfully projected in their quarters and shook hir head. “Completely ridiculous. I can’t believe that while I’ve spent the last week being dragged through fifteen levels of sanitation—fifteen levels! Like they can’t settle on a central location and route everything to be processed there, becausenooo, that would be too easy—you’ve managed to just … justspyyour way across a third of the ship, with no one fucking wiser!” Ze turned to glare at Cody. “Since when did you get good at being covert?”
“I’m not being covert,” he said. “I’m walking around in an engineering uniform and fixing things. Most people are happy to see me. It’s amazing what you can get done with a molecular bonding wand and a little conversation.”
“You should bring me with you next time.” Ten reached out and flipped the hologram around, peering into its corners.“You’re missing a few deep pockets here and here; we should go back and fill those in. And two of us would be a lot faster at mapping out the rest of this thing. You’ve got the ports and engineering and a lot of the housing section, but there’s a plethora of secondary and tertiary piping that it would be good to get a handle on, especially if we want to be able to estimate how things will react with each other in unpleasant circumstances.”
Cody didn’t bother trying to correct Ten about any future unpleasantness. Ze was probably right, after all. Still … “I’m not the one who’s been whisking you off on projects every day without giving me a second glance. Livia, right? Chief sanitation engineer?”
“Chief pain in my ass,” Ten muttered. “She looks over everything I do after I finish it. Everything! Like I need supervision or something! Like I’m not the best welder on this whole stupid ship, because it’s a skillset anyinfantcould pick up. Like I don’t know how to connect pipes carrying disparate acidities and have no idea how to manage basic chemical interactions, mygod. It’s like being with Symone again. I’m so sick of it.”
“Not sick enough of it to tell her no.”
“We’re supposed to be making ourselves useful, right?” Ten shrugged. “I recall that being shoved in our faces by the bitch that runs the place. I’m trying not to give her an excuse to make a nuisance of herself. But if youaskedfor me to go with you instead, I bet Livia would say yes.”
“Maybe.” Cody leaned back against the wall behind their cot. “And then maybe she’d bring it to Grandma’s attention, and instead of me being able to slip away unnoticed because no one wants to work with me, we’d be watched and followed and everything would be reported back to her.”
“Everything is probably reported back to her anyway.”
“Yeah, probably. But she hasn’t—” The comm unit on Jack’s ship sounded, and a second later they heard his voice.
“Corva wants to talk with you, Cody.” He didn’t sound happy about that fact. “There’ll be someone waiting outside the shuttle to escort you to her audience chamber. Don’t … don’t stall, okay?”
Ten arched an eyebrow and looked at Cody. “She hasn’t what? Kicked us off the ship yet? Clapped us in irons? Summoned us to her fuckingaudience chamber, who the hell does she think she is, queen of the universe?”
“I guess I spoke too soon.” Cody hesitated, then reached out and took Ten’s hand. “You don’t have to come. You could stay here and—”
“Yeah, no, crazy, you’ve got to be ill to suggest such a thing; are you ill?” Ten pressed the back of hir free hand to Cody’s forehead. “Don’t be stupid.” Ze leaned in and kissed Cody, then toppled forward onto his lap as Cody tugged at hir hand. “Mmmno, we—”
“Have to go, I know.” Cody knew he should feel nervous about it, but the truth was he was having a hard time feeling much of anything lately.
It had been a week—a little more than that, actually—since he’d found out about the attack on Pandora. He’d spent the first part of that time feeling so much, worried and afraid and angry, so, so angry at everyone even obliquely involved. Angry at his dad for being there, angry at Garrett for not stopping it from happening, angry at Darrel and Grennson and even Ten for not being as affected as he was. It was stupid, and exhausting, and he’d felt guilty over it even as he’d indulged himself.
