Migration Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sol’s system, or on Earth herself, hadn’t been part of the Ministry’s jurisdiction.
    Until aliens came to live and work here as well, and that jurisdiction began to blur. For who better to forestall any interspecies’ confusion, than the component of Human government accustomed to dealing with it daily?
    Mac had been brought home on a Ministry ship. On the journey, as her arm had healed, as she’d grieved, as she’d answered their interminable questions and received few answers to her own, she’d made a pact with herself. She’d think the best of those who’d taken control of things, do her utmost to believe they meant her well and could do their jobs—at least until there was clear evidence to the contrary.
    On those terms, Mac tolerated guards on her door and accepted ’Sephe as staff—assuming the woman’s work as a scientist measured up to Norcoast standards—even though that acceptance meant ignoring the other aspect of their new statistician.
    Mudge’s complaint, however, was another matter.
    He appeared uneasy. Perhaps he hadn’t believed her assurance of privacy. Mac wasn’t sure she believed it either. She watched Mudge pace around her office, pausing beside her rebuilt garden—presently receiving an overdose of chill mist which made the floor nearby somewhat treacherous. Its weather mirrored that of Field Station One: last to feel summer, first to freeze again. Of course, since the floor near the garden consisted of fist-sized hunks of gravel embedded as if the bottom of a river, walking with care was a given. Her staff had worked hard to restore what the Ro—and, to be honest, the Ministry’s investigators—had torn apart. The reconstruction had been a pleasant but unsettling surprise upon her return, Mac remembered. Unsettling, because she could look over there and believe nothing had changed.
    Almost . Mudge didn’t glance up at her collection of wooden salmon, swaying on their threads below the rain-opaqued curved ceiling. If he had, he would have seen that not all were carvings. Between the stylized Haida renderings, the realistic humps of pinks and the dramatic hooked jaws of coho and chum, hung slimmer, more nondescript fish, fish with hollow bodies filled with motion sensors and alarms.
    It was likely Mudge also missed the significance of the reed curtains beside both doors into Mac’s office. At night, she pulled them across. Not for privacy: the walls themselves could be opaqued at will. No, like the false carvings, the reeds were hollow and contained metal chimes. When touched they made, as Tie bluntly put it, “enough noise to wake the dead.” Low-tech security, perhaps, but comforting nonetheless.
    Everyone else might want a visit from the Ro. Never again, vowed Mac, with a restrained shudder.
    Did her staff and friends consider her obsessed by her midnight visitor? Maybe. For Mac’s part, she was appalled by how completely everyone else had accepted the Ministry’s version of events: that she and Emily had surprised vandals planning to sabotage the pods; that Emily had seen too much, and been taken to keep her silent, that Otto Rkeia, career thief and presumed ring-leader, had met his death by misadventure during that sabotage.
    As if “death by misadventure” could somehow encompass being glued to an anchor of Pod Six, thirty meters below the surface of the Pacific .
    Not only had everyone at Base let Emily Mamani slip from their lives, they actually believed they themselves were safe. That anything was safe.
    What was she thinking, Mac chastised herself, bringing Mudge here, hinting she’d reveal secrets others had died, were likely dying, to protect? “A threat to the species . . . where on that scale . . .” She refused to remember the rest of that voice.
    Heedless of her inner turmoil, her unwelcome visitor stopped to point at a shoulder-high folding screen of black lacquered wood, presently perch to three gray socks, a large lumpy brown sweater, and a pair of