The data unit’s display suddenly changed from opalescence to projected text. Moments before, about twenty percent of the document had been garbage; now less than half of that amount remained as a blur beyond analysis and reconstruction.
The day after the death of Captain Tyrfing, I left the camp and proceeded north as best I could judge by the sun. Any navigational materials for this godforsaken place had perished with the ship’s computer during the crash. . . .
The attic was musty, which was actually a good thing from the standpoint of this document’s survival. It was written on leather, and now that she’d read much of it Adele had begun to wonder about the source of that leather. The ink came from the berries of what the writer called the Finger Bush. Adele couldn’t match the writer’s cursory description . . . the height of my forearm, with branches like fingers and fruits of a sullen yellow on the tips thereof . . . with any plant in her database, but she knew she wasn’t competent to direct the search for botanical answers.
The attic had a line of resistance lights in the ceiling, but the only two still working were on the far side of the big room. That didn’t matter enough for Adele to get the bulbs replaced since she had a handlight and the data unit’s display was self-illuminating. It did mean that when someone’s body filled the square opening of the trapdoor, the dimming light attracted her attention as the squeaking of the ladder moments before had not.
Adele jerked suddenly alert, her left hand slipping down to the pistol in her pocket. That wasn’t a reflex I used to have. . . .
“Yes?” she said in a carrying voice.
“Ma’am?” Dorst called. “Officer Mundy, I don’t mean to bother you but Lieutenant Mon was wondering . . . ?”
“Yes, come on up, Dorst!” Adele said, knowing that she was being snappish because of the way she’d reacted to the surprise. “Wondered what?”
The midshipman climbed the last three steps and squatted down to face her. His head would clear the ceiling if he kept it between the rafters, but then he couldn’t look at Adele.
“Ah, Lieutenant Mon was wondering if you’d heard anything from the captain, ah, Adele,” Dorst said. “He hasn’t reported in to the ship, and the guy who loaned him the car, da Lund I mean, he says he hasn’t heard anything either.”
“I’ve been here all day,” Adele said, wondering how she felt at the news. Her normal reaction was to shut down all emotion so that it didn’t get in the way of accurate analysis. That was still the correct reaction, but this time it felt . . . odd. “I don’t care to be disturbed while I’m working.”
“Yes ma’am,” Dorst said, straightening abruptly and thumping his head into a beam of reinforced concrete. He winced and stumbled forward, then knelt on one knee so he could keep his spine stiff while facing Adele.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Lieutenant Mon didn’t want to interrupt you, but just on the off chance . . . And I said I knew where you might be even if you weren’t answering calls, so he told me I could come. Ah, Midshipman Vesey’s with the expedition and . . . but it’s probably nothing, they were just too busy to report when they landed.”
Adele had already suspended the document analysis and was checking message traffic. Rather than looking at communications addressed to the Princess Cecile—the on-duty personnel were certainly capable of having done that—she coded her search for the time the comsats of Sexburga’s low-orbit constellation were over South Land. It was just possible that a message had been received by a satellite which had failed to pass it on, or that—through some electronic hiccup between the local system and the corvette—the central communications node had swallowed the information.
The individual satellite logs showed no private messages coming out of South Land. The continuous broadcast from the navigation beacon on the northern headland was logged, providing Adele with proof that the satellites were working properly.
She paged Tovera through the transponder on the corvette—Meet me at the ship ASAP—then shut down her personal data unit and stood. The attic’s contents were a shadowed jumble about her. Early on somebody had made an attempt to keep this overflow organized, but for the past several decades—judging by the dates of the documents Adele had unearthed—boxes had been piled on filing cabinets and into the aisles the initial planners had left.