19

Balfour-Douglas Petrochemicals Offshore Drilling Station #47

Oilfields Coast

Northwind

January 3134; dry season

Ian Murchison spent the rest of a sleepless night thinking hard about the task Anastasia Kerensky had assigned to him, and about what he had seen and heard that late night on the observation deck. The two were not necessarily connected—a man’s behavior could have many reasons—but someone who was looking for a single bent needle in a bin full of straight ones could do worse than to start out by examining the first specimen that looked off-true.

When Star Captain Greer missed breakfast as well as the morning head count, his absence—and subsequent failure to appear—caused a certain amount of disturbance. Ian Murchison soon found himself being questioned by one of the other Steel Wolf officers, a Star Captain named Jonath. Murchison couldn’t remember if he had ever seen him before or not.

The interview seemed to be mostly a formality; Jonath came up to Murchison’s office in order to ask his questions, rather than dragging Murchison down to the drilling station’s one-cell brig. As an acknowledged Bondsman of Anastasia Kerensky, Murchison had more or less free run of the oil rig in any case. There were some places, such as the communications room, or the access points for the motor whaleboat and the emergency life rafts, that had guards posted, and he was routinely barred from those. But otherwise… this far out from land, where could he run?

In keeping with this general attitude, Star Captain Jonath’s questions were the routine inquiries of a man seeking to round out an already established picture.

“Where were you between”—Jonath consulted his data pad—“1830 and 0600 last night?”

“Here. Finishing up the day’s paperwork.” It sounded as if dinner the night before had been the last time Star Captain Greer was on public view. Murchison had been there as well—it seemed that the Wolves found it less trouble to allow a Bondsman to eat with the general mess than to treat him as a prisoner and feed him separately—which gave him a bit of protective coloration for the lies he was telling now. It was just as well, he reflected, that his habit of taking a late-night stroll up on the observation deck to clear his mind before bed had never become general knowledge among his captors. “Then I closed up the sick bay and went to my quarters for the night.”

“Did you see Star Captain Greer during that time period?” Jonath asked.

“No,” said Murchison.

He waited for a follow-up question about being called back to sick bay to patch up Star Colonel Darwin, but none came. It looked like the Star Colonel had not reported his fight with Greer to anyone, which Murchison found more than a bit odd. Based on his admittedly limited experience with Steel Wolf Warriors and their fights, under normal circumstances Darwin would have been far more likely to tell the whole story to the first person who would listen, and the second and third persons as well.

If, that is, the altercation had been a legitimate fight, by whatever rules the Clans used to determine such things. The fight itself had undoubtedly been fair—Greer had been the bigger man, as well as being armed when Darwin wasn’t, and had made the first aggressive move. However, Murchison remained more than half convinced that the killing of a fellow officer done by night and kept secret afterward qualified as murder or something like it even by Wolf standards.

“It could be death by misadventure,” he volunteered to Star Captain Jonath, thinking that he might as well throw some general confusion into the air.

“What do you mean?”

“Accidents happen, and this isn’t a forgiving environment. People can stumble in the wrong place, or fall at the wrong time, and go over the rail into the water and not come back up.”

Jonath looked a bit disconcerted. “Bodies float, surely.”

“Not for long,” said Murchison. “The big hungries come and get them.”

“Big—I see.”

“If you check the drilling station logs, you’ll find that a worker named Ted Petrie vanished the same way back in February of ’32.” Murchison didn’t add that fifty feet of heavy chain had vanished the same night, or that Petrie had had a record of sexual harassment and petty theft and was not beloved of his workmates. Nothing had ever been proven, after all.

“I will check that.”

Jonath closed his data pad and left. Murchison stayed at his desk and waited until enough time had passed for the Star Captain to have left the managerial level entirely. Then he retrieved a data pad of his own from a desk drawer and wrote in it for some time. When he was done he left the office, locking it behind him, and went in search of Anastasia Kerensky.

He found her, as expected, in the main operational control room of the oil rig. Several other Steel Wolf officers were present as well—not Darwin, though, which Murchison considered was probably significant. If he didn’t want his injury to be discovered, he would have needed to find an excuse to absent himself from the Galaxy Commander’s company.

The Steel Wolves had transformed the rig’s control room into a military command center. Not much effort had been required—mostly, they had moved in a number of portable communications and data consoles, and had covered the main work table with a large tri-vid field map of the Kearney continent. Murchison glanced at the map in passing and recognized the Oilfields Coast, with what looked like Balfour-Douglas #47 picked out in red. The presence of several other red dots, not far away, puzzled him for a moment, since Balfour-Douglas had no oil rigs in that area that he could remember. He put the question aside; he had, for the moment, other and more pressing thoughts.

Anastasia Kerensky looked up from the map as he entered the control room. “Bondsman Murchison. Should you not be in your sick bay?”

“I have the accident and casualty reports you requested, Galaxy Commander,” he said, and proffered his data pad.

She raised an eyebrow. “You work fast.”

“It’s nothing conclusive—I don’t have the personal resources to follow up on a lot of the things I’ve listed—but some of the data might be worth looking into further.”

“Your work is not unappreciated, Bondsman Murchison.” She took the pad. “I will look into the matter myself—careless accidents should not be allowed to hamper our operational efficiency, and those responsible will be punished appropriately.”

The comment, Murchison thought, was as good as a dismissal. He gave what he hoped was an appropriately nonservile but respectful response and made a quick and silent exit. He wanted to be well out of range before Anastasia Kerensky read his report, in case the Galaxy Commander was the sort of person who liked to shoot the messenger.