He leaned forward. “Ms. Wheatstone—”

“Maddy.”

 “—I feel sure that you and I have never met. Actually, I don’t even know why I’m meeting with you now.”

It was a cue, and not a very subtle one. But Bruno Colombo picked up on it before Maddy could. “I did send you a message, Hyslop, when you were out on the shield.”

“If this concerns the new simulations of shield performance and shield failure, then I agree that the problem—”

Maddy wanted to hear his next words, but Colombo broke into Hyslop’s reply as though an impending shield failure and the consequent collapse of civilization were of no great interest.

“This has nothing to do with simulations. It concerns the unfortunate—” Colombo paused, considering his next words. “—the unfortunate series of events that has occurred here over the past few months. More to the point, it concerns the consequences of those events as they are apparently being perceived on Earth. Hence the presence of Ms. Wheatstone.”

Hence. Hence what? What in the name of heaven had Gordy Rolfe told Bruno Colombo? And why had no one bothered to inform Maddy?

An old axiom: When you are totally confused, don’t make things worse by talking. Maddy kept her mouth firmly closed, and after a few moments Colombo went on, “I should explain to you, Ms. Wheatstone, that although I have followed the problems at a general administrative level, my duties as director of Sky City and chief implementor of the space shield program prevent the day-to-day detailed involvement that Hyslop, as my assistant, has been able to enjoy. We admit that progress has been slow.”

Buck passing was nothing new to Maddy. She had watched it happen many times during her nine years with the Argos Group, as that organization burgeoned from its original role as a provider of unique electronics to a worldwide deal broker and powerhouse. But John Hyslop seemed decidedly unhappy. Presumably he knew where he had failed to make progress, even if Maddy didn’t.

The problem was Colombo’s habit of talking in language designed to stifle any transmission of information. What events was Colombo talking about? The deaths?

That might be it. Through all the desperate years of space and shield development there had been deaths on Sky City and on the shield, hundreds and hundreds of them. They were inevitable in any construction program in a new operating environment where speed was more important than safety. No one back on Earth had ever offered criticism, or done anything but cheer the space workers on to greater efforts. But there had been nothing like this.

“The murders?” Maddy began, and paused when John Hyslop raised one eyebrow at her.

It was that, it had to be. And she was paid to make things happen, not to watch them happen. She gave Hyslop the hint of a smile and turned to the director.

“If I may, Dr. Colombo, I would like to express our concerns in my own words.” She swiveled to face John Hyslop directly, making it clear that her question was addressed to him alone. “You alluded to the new simulations, and I assume that you have had a chance to review them. What do you think of them?”

He paused for a long time before he answered. If Colombo had done that, Maddy would have assumed that he was posturing, but John Hyslop actually appeared to be thinking. “The simulations are terrifying,” he said at last. “But I need to know what new data the Earthside team put into the analysis before I can give you a real assessment. For example, were the latest Sniffer data included?”

“No. The main new information was the rate of progress on shield construction and the efficiency of general in-space operations for the past seven months. You know the schedules better than I do. And you know how poorly things have been going.”

Bruno Colombo was sitting to Maddy’s right. She saw the director’s lips tighten, but he said nothing. That was odd. His reputation said that normally he wouldn’t sit quietly in a meeting, no matter who was present. What had Gordy Rolfe been up to?

“You are right, Ms. Wheatstone,” John Hyslop said.

“Things have slowed down. One reason is the uncertainty and fear here on Sky City. We are more than eighty thousand people, and we grow in numbers every month. We have more technical training per head than anywhere since the first atomic bomb was developed at Los Alamos, more than a century ago. But in many ways we are like a small town. Risk of death in adult work is one thing. Risk to the children is quite another.”

Not his own kids, Maddy knew that. Her briefing documents said that Hyslop was unmarried, without children or current partners. But he was continuing, “It’s likely that the teenage murders are affecting everyone. I know they’ve had an effect on me, because I was forced to move one of the bodies from her place of death to where her parents could view the remains. And my assistant, Lauren Stansfield, had a cousin who was one of the victims.”

Bruno Colombo was glaring. Maddy had seen his official statements to the Earth authorities. He insisted that Sky City security was close to capturing the killer, but also that the Sky City murders were having no more than a trifling effect on work schedules.

Clearly, John Hyslop didn’t believe that, though what he said stayed close to the official line. He was affected, since he personally had been forced to view the bodies. Lauren Stansfield was affected, because she had lost a relative. But workers without families could see the murders as little more than a nasty news item. And so far as capturing the killer was concerned, no one had a clue.

John Hyslop seemed paler. His left eye was developing a tic and his voice was strained. When neither Maddy nor Bruno Colombo responded, he said, “We are looking for any help that we can get. If you yourself are with any kind of investigative group . . .”

It was open fishing, but Maddy approved of that. She smiled and shook her head. “Far from it. As Director Colombo mentioned, I do not work for any particular government. I also know less than nothing about criminal investigation methods. I am vice president for development of the Argos Group. I assume that you know of us?”

It was a rhetorical question. The Argos Group wasn’t government, but Gordy Rolfe claimed, at least internally, that it was more powerful than any government; the Argos Group provided the technology that allowed governments to run. Maddy wondered about a new connection, one that she had never heard about. Could that be what was making Bruno Colombo so subdued?

She saw an easy way to find out. At John Hyslop’s nod, she added, “We had early advance warning of the simulation results, and we have been able to study them more than you have. The deaths here have had an effect on morale and efficiency, but they are not the main reason that the project has fallen behind.

“The Argos Group has done its own simulations. The critical path for finishing the shield on time is the availability of construction materials in space. The Aten class of asteroids all have orbits that cross the orbit of Earth, and the Argos Group has during the past eight years contracted with Sky City for the transfer of two of them from their original paths to stable near-Earth orbits. We have also led the mining of those asteroids for metals and volatiles needed in shield construction. The transfer and material extraction went without difficulties, but deadlines were missed. We learned of problems only after the fact.

“If we are to make up for schedule slippage, then the third Aten-class asteroid must be brought to Earth orbit and processed more quickly than proposed. Certainly, the deaths on Sky City must end and the murderer must be caught, but we regard that as a subsidiary problem, one that we are already taking steps to deal with. The central question for the Argos Group remains: Can we rely on Sky City to deliver the third asteroid as required, or will we be forced to examine other alternatives?”