A short time later the portal pinged. Micah gestured it open and Ron entered. He was Terran, of course—as was nearly everyone on this station other than Micah—and his impossibly blond hair brushed the top of the doorway as he entered. “You alone?”
Micah spread his hands melodramatically. “As you see.”
“I mean, really alone?”
So we’re going to act like we’re running a spy game. Okay. He directed his headset to sever all connections to outside systems. Ron waited in silence, one foot tapping impatiently on the floor. Such an overt sign of anxiety was unlike him. “All right,” Micah said at last. “We’re isolated. Now can I ask what all this melodrama is about?”
Ron looked around the room suspiciously, as if checking it for hidden eavesdroppers. At last he seemed satisfied. “Dragonslayer was your baby, wasn’t it?”
“If you mean, was I part of the twenty-person project team that developed that game—my primary job being to keep everyone else from wandering off on tangents? Yes, I suppose you could say it was mine. Why?”
“You heard about the explosion on Harmony Station?”
He shrugged. “Just the basics. I haven’t been following offstation news much these days. Some kind of accident, yes?”
“Actually, they’re thinking it was sabotage. A deliberate attempt to damage the life support systems.”
“Shit. Seriously? No, I hadn’t heard that.” Given that everyone in the outworlds was dependent on artificial life support systems for survival, there was no worse crime in the eyes of the Guerans than to attack one. And no limit to the punishment that might be meted out to someone who tried. “Is everyone okay?”
“Yeah. Air quality in that ring will be affected for at least another hundred hours, and I hear it’s cold as hell in some sectors, but the backup systems got online fast enough to prevent any casualties. Other than the two who were responsible for the whole mess. There was barely enough left of them to identify.” He drew in a deep breath. “Micah . . . the guys who did it were playing Dragonslayer.”
He exhaled sharply. “That’s not possible.”
“Whether they were actually role-playing at the time is anyone’s guess. But they were at least streaming the game. That’s been verified.”
“Dragonslayer has locational restrictions built in. It would have directed them away from that part of the station, and if they insisted on going into restricted space the game would have shut down. I should know. I coded that failsafe myself.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it didn’t work very well, because I’m telling you, investigators checked the guys’ activity logs, and it looks like they were running the game when they died.”
He exhaled sharply. “Ron, it’s just not possible—”
“Just listen to me, okay?” He glanced back nervously at the door. “They’re going to be inspecting the Dragonslayer code. Your code. They want to find out how the game might be tied to all this.” His expression tightened. “Did you put a back door in that program, Micah? Some way that you could sneak in new code after the game was inspected and released? I’m told all designers do that. They hate to give up control of their work. If so—” He held up a hand quickly. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I just came to warn you. Tridac’s going through that code line by line, right now. And if they find anything suspicious—anything at all—they’re going to start asking you questions, and you’d better have answers ready.”
A chill ran through Micah. “Tridac is doing the investigating?”
“That’s right.”
“Not Dobson?”
Ron shook his head.
“You sure?”
“Would I have come here if I wasn’t?”
Shit. Tridac was a Terran corporation, a monstrous company whose influence stretched across the outworlds like an unholy web. Normally it relied upon local subsidiaries such as Dobson Games to oversee its day to day business, but if the mothercorp was pulling rank this time and handling the investigation itself, that suggested they didn’t trust Dobson’s people. And Micah was one of those people.
This is terrorism we’re talking about, he reminded himself. If Guera decided that Tridac was responsible for the explosion on Harmony, it would cut off the company’s transit rights. Oh, Tridac’s people would still be able to travel to neighboring stations, but transportation between nodes—the intersections of the ainniq which defined deep space territories—required a Gueran pilot. No company as vast as Tridac Enterprises could function properly if the Guerans refused to transport its goods and people from one node to another. Micah could just imagine the other megacorps descending upon Tridac’s stranded holdings like vultures on a corpse. No, the megacorp would be desperate to find out what had happened on Harmony before the Guild did, and woe betide any virt designer who bore even a faint scent of guilt.
“They won’t find anything that leads to me.” He was trying to sound more confident than he felt. Yeah, he’d inserted a few special surprises into the game—all designers did that—but nothing that should cause him trouble if they found them. Nothing that he could remember, anyway.
Even if I did do something Tridac would have issue with, there’s no way to fix it now. The game is active on too many worlds. It would take an army of sniffers to find every copy.
Suddenly the room felt very warm. PULSE INCREASING, his wellseeker observed. ACTION? He hesitated, then flashed the icon for NOT NOW.
“Look,” Ron said. “You didn’t have anything to do with the explosion. Right?”
He muttered, “Right.”
“So there’s nothing to worry about. Just think about what kinds of questions they might ask, and be ready.”
Yeah, Micah thought, on a regular Guild station that might be enough. But as long as we’re on this station we’re subject to Earth Corporate Law, which isn’t known for either justice or compassion. And Earth has no love for Variants.
Seeing the look on his face, Ron sighed. “I’m sorry to have to bring you such lousy news. I just thought you should know.”
Micah forced himself to nod. “Hey, I appreciate the warning. Really.”
“Let’s talk about something else, okay? What are you working on?” Ron walked over to the desk and looked down at Micah’s drawing. He frowned. “Looks like a pile of shit.”
With a sigh, Micah turned the drawing toward him. Be grateful for the distraction, he told himself. “It is a pile of shit. I’m trying to decide what insects to add to it, to increase the revulsion factor.” He picked up a game chip and offered it to Ron. “Here, try this.”