RVR4|Chapter 4: Landing (Patreon)

The shuttle came down through the terminator line, and the night side of Tertius-Prime glowed brighter than expected.

Auditor Vex stood at the observation glass with his hands clasped behind his back. Sector lights ran in chains along the ground. The industrial belt north of the capital showed steady draw, and the draw didn't flicker. There were dark patches, though, and some of them were large enough to create a significant dead zone. But the pattern of the dark had stopped spreading, and he'd spent three weeks of transit reviewing nineteen years of orbital imagery. He knew what this world was supposed to look like from up here. Except it didn't look like that at all.

PL-1: Welcome to Tertius-Prime. Population 2.3 million. Former Guild world. Currently hosting a very interesting statistical anomaly. Also a bit of a dump.

"Quiet."

PL-1: Jeez. Touchy.

The text held a moment longer than it needed to before fading. Vex let it. He activated [EVALUATE] and the skill took in the surface through the shuttle's sensor array.

·········································TERTIUS-PRIME — PLANETARY ASSESSMENTStatus: Operational (Degraded)Infrastructure Rating: PoorAether Output: 7.4% baseline·········································Power Grid ........................ Stable (Marginal)Surface Infrastructure ... Deteriorating (Arrested)Life Support ...................... AdequateSecurity ............................... MinimalCommunications ............. Functional·········································Probability of Systemic Failure (5yr): 11%Probability of Systemic Failure (10yr): 29%·········································

The output had not moved. Seven-point-four percent, holding to the decimal for several weeks, exactly where it had settled after the spike. He had expected that and it told him nothing.

The forecast had moved. Thirty-four percent down to eleven. Sixty-seven down to twenty-nine. An auditor spent a career watching those numbers travel the other way. They were not a measure of the present. They were a measure of trend, and trend was the sum of ten thousand small decisions about whether a thing was worth fixing. Somewhere under him, a great many of them had changed.

PL-1: You're doing the thing.

"I am reading."

PL-1: You're doing the thing where you go quiet and I have to guess. It's rude. I have feelings.

"You have a personality module."

PL-1: Which has feelings, Vex.

The Sector 3 compound received him with the courtesy of people who had rehearsed for weeks.

Lieutenant Commander Morrison came down with him and two junior officers, which was as much retinue as the situation required. The compound administrator met them on the pad. He offered accommodations, a schedule, an escort into the city, and a summary of local conditions. He didn't ask why the auditor had arrived a day and a half ahead of the filed estimate. Vex noted the omission and approved of it. Someone competent had briefed the man.

"Nothing is to be prepared for me," Vex said. "I will look at what is there."

"Of course, System Manager."

"Inspector Brennan. Is she on the compound."

The administrator's pause was short. "She's on administrative leave, sir. Her proceedings are pending your audit."

"I am aware of what she is on. Did she return here."

She was there inside the hour.

Senna Brennan had aged since the interview aboard the ship. It was the aging that happened when the outcome was decided and only the timing was left. Her uniform was pressed and the cuffs had been turned. She sat when he indicated the chair, and she met his eyes without the effort most humans needed to do it.

"System Manager."

"Inspector. Thank you for being here."

"That's new."

"Your proceedings are suspended, not concluded." Vex remained standing. "I would like to know whether anything has changed since we spoke."

"Changed for me, or changed on the planet?"

"Either."

She thought about it longer than the question deserved, which was itself worth recording. "The lights in my sector stay on now. My neighbor got her water heater fixed after four years on a list." One shoulder moved and settled. "That's what changed. I've been on leave. I'm not in the reports anymore."

Vex ran [EVALUATE].

·········································SUBJECT: SENNA BRENNANRegistered Class: InspectorRegistered Level: 14Status: Administrative LeaveAffiliation: Network — Tertius-Prime Dungeon Authority·········································Registered Skills ................ 4 (all standard)Skill Expression ................. NominalClass Verification ............. ConfirmedAnomaly Correlation ....... None·········································

The reading was identical to the one he had taken on the ship. Four registered skills, all documented, all behaving as documented. She was exactly and only what her record said she was.

PL-1: She's clean. Boringly clean. At least the last Inspector we met had a gambling problem.

"Enough."

"Sorry?" Senna said.

"Not to you." Vex clasped his hands. "You warned Tess Rivera about this audit and accepted the consequences. You did so believing she was doing something worth protecting. I told you at the time that your warning had been anticipated and changed nothing. That remains true."

"You brought me in to say it twice?"

"I brought you in to determine whether you had acquired new information. You have not." He watched her face while he said it. Hers held. "Is there anything you would like to add."

"No."

She was telling the truth. On the ship he had judged that she was protecting someone and would eventually open along that seam, but the seam wasn't there. She had said everything she meant to say and had made her peace with what it cost her, and there was nothing left in her worth prying at.

"Thank you, Inspector. That is all."

Senna stood. At the door she stopped, the way people did when they had one more thing and hadn't decided whether to spend it. "You'll like her," she said. "That's the part nobody warns you about."

Then she was gone, and Vex stood in the empty room for longer than the interview had required.

The afternoon went to interviews, which produced little and took way longer than Vex would have liked.

The registry attendant confirmed entry logs. Registered Delvers confirmed floor conditions. A supply contractor confirmed deliveries. Everything was documented, cross-referenced, and internally consistent, and by the fourth interview Vex had begun to find the consistency itself remarkable. He had audited two hundred and six facilities and records were never this clean. Records were kept by people. People were tired, and tired people left errors that a good auditor used as handholds. Here there were none.

The last interview was a technician named Halloran. Forty years in the trade, hands like a man who had lost most of his arguments with machinery. He wanted to talk about the floor.

"Days!" Halloran said. "Well over a week it didn't change. You know what a floor does in a week, right? Cycles dozens of times. Corridors shift, rooms swap, that's the whole point of the thing. This one sat there like a photograph."

"And then."

"And then one morning it's cycling again like nothing happened. Like it'd been doing it all along. Except this time that crazy Alpha was gone." He shook his head. "Like the dungeon wanted it gone."

"What is your explanation."

"Don't have one. Forty years and no explanation, which is why I still remember it." Halloran looked at him with something that wasn't quite defiance. "Everybody down there's got a story now that it's back online. Most of 'em are nothing. That one's not nothing."

PL-1: Rivera comes up in forty-three percent of accounts.

"I am aware."

PL-1: I'm just saying. Forty-three percent. She fixed a stove for one of these people. A stove, Vex.

"Then she has fixed a great many stoves."

He reviewed the Rivera file in the records office as the light went long across the sector.

·········································SUBJECT FILE: TESS RIVERARegistered Class: TechnicianRegistered Level: 5 (stale)Current Level: UnverifiedAffiliation: House Tertian (Contract)Residence: Sector 7 — Rivera's Reprieve·········································Anomaly Correlation: HIGHTutorial Surge Event .............. TRUEAlpha Exposure ....................... TRUEAether Fluctuation ................. TRUETertian Research Facility ....... TRUEFloor Configuration Freeze ... UNKNOWN·········································Class Analysis: FLAGGEDClass Matrix Query ............... NULL·········································

Nineteen years old, registered to a basic support class, present at every event on this world that had refused to behave. She had never been the subject of a complaint, a citation, or an unpaid invoice. Her tax filings were immaculate. Her contract with House Tertian was on file, correctly witnessed, and dull.

The father was where the file stopped being dull. Marcus Rivera, Level 11 Engineer, medical leave, three historical entries classified at A+ and therefore invisible to him. A man who had run a Delver crew called Last Bid across four systems, then retired to a repair shop on a world that was already dying. A dead wife whose file was so clean it had been swept. A daughter listed as surviving issue, age two.

Vex had filed for the full record from Tertian Station. He had done it knowing the request would flag him to whoever placed the classification, because a hidden thing reacts when you reach for it, and the reaction is usually more useful than the thing. He pulled the request status.

·········································INTELLIGENCE REQUEST — PRIORITY ONESubject: RIVERA, MARCUSRouting: Central Intelligence Directorate·········································Acknowledgment ............. NONEResponse ............................ NONEStatus ................................... OPEN·········································

A Priority One filed by a serving Auditor usually came back inside a day. That held even when the answer was a refusal. A refusal was a procedure, with a form and a signature and a name at the bottom of it. He had filed eleven of them in his career. The slowest had taken nineteen hours.

This one had been sitting for days. It had gone into the Directorate and produced no reaction of any kind. There was a difference between a question a system declined and a question a system had arranged never to have received.

PL-1: Maybe they're busy.

"They are not busy."

PL-1: Maybe it got lost.

"Priority One traffic does not get lost, and you know that. You are being solicitous. You do that when you believe I am about to be unpleasant." Vex closed the request. "I am not going to be unpleasant. I am going to note it."

PL-1: Noting it is worse. You want my professional opinion?

"Not particularly."

PL-1: She's nineteen. She's registered as basically nothing. And she is standing next to every impossible event on this planet with a wrench in her hand. So either she's the most talented nineteen-year-old I have ever encountered, or she's a beard. Somebody older is doing the work and she's the face they put on it, because nobody looks twice at a girl who fixes stoves.

Vex assigned the second option the higher probability, and noted how quickly he had assigned it. Auditors got things wrong that way. Still. The girl interested him less than whoever had stopped answering when he asked about her father.

He did not make an appointment. Nothing worth having had ever come out of an arranged house. Declining the Sector 7 address surprised Morrison enough that she asked him to repeat it.

"The workshop is where she works," Vex said. "I would like to see who employs her. Protocol requires that I present myself to the ranking house on any world I audit. I have been on the surface eleven hours and have not done so. It would be improper to delay."

"Shall I alert your security detail, sir?"

"No. This is a conversation. Not an arrest."

The Tertian estate sat in the fifth sector, behind a wall that predated the Network's presence on this world by a good margin. It did not look like money. It looked like maintenance, and a house kept in continuous repair for centuries said things about a family that no financial disclosure ever would.

Duke Amos Tertian received him in the front hall, personally, four minutes after an unannounced Network auditor arrived at his gate.

"System Manager." Amos was a broad man gone comfortable, in house clothes rather than anything ceremonial. He put out his hand as though this were a scheduled call he had been looking forward to. "You're early. Everyone said you'd be early."

"Then everyone was correct."

"Doesn't happen often. Come in, you'll want to sit. The road up from Three is a disgrace and we've been promised repairs on it since before my daughter was born." He was already walking. "Sara, we have the auditor."

Sara Tertian came from a side room, inclined her head, said, "System Manager," and after that said nothing at all for a considerable time.

Vex had interviewed a great many nobles. They fell into two reliable categories. There were the ones who talked too much because they were frightened, and the ones who talked too much because they were not. Amos was talking a great deal and none of it was defensive. He walked Vex through the front rooms narrating the failures of the property—a cracked lintel, a heating loop that had never once worked correctly. A window his grandmother had insisted on and every generation since had regretted. He did not ask what the audit concerned.

His wife stood two paces back and to the left and didn't fill a single silence. Everyone filled silences. That was the entire mechanism of an interview, and she had no tell because she wasn't doing anything that required one.

"I would like to speak with Tess Rivera," Vex said.

"Ah." Amos didn't break stride. "She's out on a job."

"Where."

"Couldn't tell you. She's contracted, not staff. She goes where the work is and bills us for parts, and I'll tell you honestly, System Manager, she undercharges. My wife has given up correcting her." He turned. "You're welcome to wait. She generally comes back through here at the end of the day."

No hesitation. No glance between them. No question about why.

PL-1: They're not nervous.

"No."

PL-1: Everybody's nervous. That's the whole job. You walk in, they get nervous, and then you find out what about.

So Vex did what he did in every facility he had ever entered. He read it. He ran [EVALUATE] on the hall as they crossed it. On the man polishing a stair rail. On the woman carrying linen up the back stair. On the gardener coming in from the grounds, soil to the wrist, carrying shears he handled like a tool he had owned thirty years.

·········································SUBJECT: RENNICK, T. — Grounds StaffRegistered Class: StrikerRegistered Level: 12Status: Retired (Voluntary)Anomaly Correlation: None·········································

Vex stopped walking.

A Level 12 Striker was a combat asset. A Level 12 Striker did not prune hedges on a regional noble's estate on a dying world. He could earn four times a groundskeeper's wage on any station in the system without leaving atmosphere. Vex read the rest of the house.

·········································STAFF SURVEY — TERTIAN ESTATE (PARTIAL)Personnel Assessed: 14·········································Striker ............................ Lv 12 · RetiredAppraiser ...................... Lv 14 · RetiredDeadeye ........................ Lv 13 · RetiredBrawler .......................... Lv 11 · RetiredArtificer ......................... Lv 15 · RetiredUnclassed / Domestic ....... 9·········································Mean Level (classed): 13.0Regional Domestic Baseline: 3.1·········································

He looked at the number and classes for some time. A dungeon here was producing power it should not have. That was why he had come, and he had spent the day confirming that every record on the surface was clean. And now he stood in a front hall in the fifth sector. The gardener out there could hold a battlefield. The woman with the linen could value a floor's worth of loot to the credit.

This wasn't domestic staff. It was a personal army, drawing wages and clipping hedges, sitting in plain view for as long as anyone had cared not to look.

PL-1: Okay. That's actually something.

"Yes, it is."

PL-1: That's the first real find all day.

The butler came through the far door with a tray, set it down, and adjusted a cup by perhaps two millimeters. He was old, upright, and immaculately turned out. Vex read him, because Vex was reading everyone.

·········································SUBJECT: JEREMY — Household StaffRegistered Class: StewardRegistered Level: 9Status: Long Service (41 yrs)Anomaly Correlation: None·········································

Vex dismissed it and moved on. A steward in a house full of veterans was the least interesting thing in the room.

"You've gone quiet," Amos said.

"Your staff is unusual."

"My staff is old." Amos gestured at the tray without looking at it. "People come here to stop. We let them. It isn't a policy, it's just what the house is for. That's the good coffee, by the way. Sara has opinions about serving the other kind to Network officials, and I've learned not to have opinions back."

Vex did not sit. "Duke Tertian. Show me the property."

"All of it?"

"As much as you are willing to show me."

Amos considered this exactly as long as a man considers a question he has already answered in his head. Then he smiled, and it reached his eyes—which Vex found difficult to account for. "System Manager, you may see anything you wish. I'd rather you looked than wondered."

They went out through the garden door into the last of the light. The grounds ran back further than the road frontage suggested. They went past the glasshouse, an actual swimming pool, and a paddock nobody had kept horses in for a generation. At the end of it, low and long against the boundary wall, stood a workshop with its windows lit and its heavy door propped open.

PL-1: Someone's home.

"So it appears."

Four men in Vex's career had told him he could see anything he wished. Three of them had already moved it. He walked toward the light in the windows.