Alex put his earpiece in and tried not to think about what Tristan was going to do to Emil. He could go to the door an listen, but what was the point? He wouldn’t be able to do anything for him.

He felt sick, but he pushed the feeling away. He hadn’t felt like this since the first time he’d killed someone. He didn’t remember the details, only that it had been an accident. He’d only intended to disable him.

Fuck, a child shouldn’t get caught in this. What kind of man was Masters to do this to his own son? He’d find what they needed and then he’d make the man pay, but first there was something he had to do.

He glanced at the door then the screen. His earpiece had made contact with the ship while he was lost in thought. “Talk to me,” he spoke softly, terrified Tristan would overhear him.

“Hello,” came the digitized voice, and Alex almost ripped the earpiece out. It had sounded just like Tristan. It wasn’t him, he reminded himself.

“Do you mind if we talk?” with a few keystrokes he removed the interface and looked at the code. He was just looking, he told himself. It would be suicidal to make any changes to this computer. Tristan would know and he would kill him for this.

“I do not.”

“I’m wondering if we can be friends.” Tristan might not use an earpiece, but he knew how to program and coerce. He looked at the code, fully regimented, each line in its place, not space for even hints of a personality. Did the ship even have free will?

“What is ‘friends?’”

He so didn’t have the time to explain that concept right now. He had to get the information Tristan needed. “I’ll explain later.” He moved through the code, there was no deviation, no indication of chaos. How the hell could he coerce such a system without Tristan finding out? Any changes he’d make would stand out.

Unless he was able to imitate the Samalian’s syntax?

That was insane. He’d know. But Alex thought that here, this deep in he might be able to do it, an insignificant change, just rewrite this snippet of code. It wouldn’t change any of the computer’s function, and it would be hidden by all the other layers.

He backed out of the code. Tristan would know. He’d just be able to sense that Alex had tampered with it.

Masters, that was who he had to work on, not Tristan’s computer.

He went back to the banks. He had eight of them, and he might have exaggerated when he’d told Tristan he could get in them from here. Masters didn’t just do business with any banks. These were well-protected vaults.

He drifted through the public side of them, collecting what little information he could without triggering any alarms. He was impeded by remaining silent. He fully expected such computers to be watched by multiple Law groups, corporate, the banks’ and most certainly SpaceGov. He wasn’t certain to whom the group that had almost caught him years ago belong to, but he was pretty sure they’d work out his signature. Alex was certain his speech patterns when he coerced had been mapped.

He just talked too much.

Even without saying a word, Alex managed to make it through the first layer of security. From there he could get names of the bank’s clients, and see the back and forth of information between the accounts and outside contacts.

He jumped when A datapad clattered before him. ‘Vertix Industries’ was written on it.

Alex looked up as Tristan sat in the pilot’s chair, but he didn’t ask. This had to be something he’d gotten from Emil. He glanced at the closed door and his heart sank. He should go check on him, comfort him. Was he even a—no. Alex refused to believe even Tristan could kill a child in cold blood. And they didn’t have Masters yet, they might still need Emil.

He had started getting out of his seat when Tristan looked in his direction. He didn’t have any expression on his face, but Alex knew what would happen if he stopped what he was doing. He sat back down and went looking for Vertix Industries.

It was a mining company. It owned a few hundred mines, which made it a fairly minor player in that industry. Its revenue was in line with other companies in that bracket. So what was the link between it and Emil?

He wrote a tracing program, set it to self-multiply and sent it to trace every connection and look for anything that involved Emil or Masters. That would take a while, so he went back to the bank. Because he already knew how Masters communicated with it, it was simple for him to find the account he used, or, as it turned out, accounts.

Masters had six accounts at this bank. Not unexpected, with working for SpaceGov, he had to have a lot of money and he’d want to keep that safe. The best way is to split his fortune among multiple accounts.

He set his tracing program on the connections between those accounts and the outside world, but he modified it. He couldn’t have it reproduce without reason, if the antibodies noticed it here, things would turn bad very quickly. It could only reproduce as the connections split, one trace per connection, no more, and it couldn’t go through any security. That would limit the program’s efficiency, but he’d prefer that to being caught.

That could work on its own so he focused on Masters directly. Who were you, Masters.

Infiltrating SpaceGov was out of the question. He’d need Luminex’s system to even have a tiny chance of getting through that security, but Masters dealt with people outside SpaceGov in the course of his work. Actually, Alex quickly found that the man spent very little time within SpaceGov itself.

He traveled a lot, which meant he spent years in cryo, and he always used the same company for his shuttles. Using that, he was able to go back sixty-three objective years to the first time he’d rented a shuttle from them.

Compiling the trips, they were mostly short, he stayed in the higher density population worlds, so subjective he’d been doing this for what? Fifteen? Twenty years?

What did he do before that?

A quick search brought up more Thomas Masters then he could keep track of, but when he added the picture from the news vid in the filter, only one remained. And he’d appeared within the ID computers two years before the first rental.

Had his appearance changed too much? Clearly it had, and Alex suspected he’d also changed his name. Thomas Masters hadn’t been himself until he joined SpaceGov. So who had he been?

The Vertix trace program let him know it had a result. Vertix was connected to Masters through a chain of eight different persons, five men and three women. He had their names and images put in individual search programs to get as much information as he could on them, and almost went back to looking into Masters when one of the names caught his attention, Gregory Rithal.

He had to look back to the contract to confirm that was Emil’s last name. So that was his ‘father’ he could see the resemblance, but that Identity was most certainly fake, put in place to protect Emil. Unless that was Masters’ real Identity?

A quick manual search negated that idea. Gregory’s life looked real enough, but Alex had set up enough false identity to recognized the signs.

He went back to Masters and accessed every publicly available scrap of information on him. He had a lot to work with. Thomas Masters was very public in his work to promote security in space. Speaking out loudly against mercenaries and pirates and other swindlers who use the fact that no one could coordinate their Law organizations outside their borders to prey on the innocent.

Through the news vids he confirmed that Masters had joined SpaceGov sixty-five years ago, which coincided almost exactly with the first appearance of the Masters identity.

He’d worked within the Security Division of SpaceGov, quickly going through the ranks as one superior after another retired or transferred to another department.

Alex had to smile. Such a rapid climb indicated that Masters wasn’t above using underhanded methods. Such as hiring a well-known criminal to kidnap his own son and then use that outrage to cement his position as a champion of the Law in Space.

He confirmed that Masters was still in space, somewhere. His last sighting had been when he’d been interviewed. Unfortunately he couldn’t locate him. The shuttle had a beacon, but SpaceGov didn’t advertise the frequencies.

Looking at the people linked to Vertix, they all turned out to be fake identities, and he was able to link them to banks Masters did businesses with. So most probably they served to hide more of his money.

He stood and took off the earpiece. He drank some water and leaned against the wall, working out how he could get more information.

Tristan stood before him. “Well?”

“I can’t find him. I found eight identities, a lot of bank accounts, and I was able to piece together his history at SpaceGov, but the last time he was seen was when he gave the interview. Everything after that was voice only, sent over the network, from temporary nodes.”

“Does he have any properties?”

“Nothing under his name. If I could get into the bank where he holds most of his money I could probably find something, but the only one I was able to get in, he uses for meaningless things.”

“You said you’d be able to get in them from here.”

Alex didn’t look at the Samalian. “I thought I could, but the station’s computer was so weak I couldn’t get a sense of how well protected the banks were. They’re fortresses, every communication lines are watched by a dozen programs, and certainly a coercionist.”

He drained his glass. “If I were in the same solar system as the bank’s central processor, with a more powerful setup than this, I could possibly get in. From there I could access everything he has and work out what he’s up to. I mean, he looks to be very hands-on, so they’ll be records under one of his identities. With that information, I’m sure you could get him to come to you.”

He sighed. “The other options is for me to into SpaceGov’s systems. I could find his shuttle’s beacon and we could track him down, but I don’t know if I can manage to explain the kind of setup I’d need to accomplish that. I know of one, one of the ships I worked on. I’m confident the captain would be willing to help, if we paid him enough, but there’s no telling what the bounty would do to the rest of the crew.” Alex knew without a doubt that for that kind of money Anders would have no problem going mutineer. It would be one way to get rid of him. Let him try to take on Tristan and die as a result.