The team has returned to the station.
The upper half of the station, the one suspended between the rocks, has an elevator leading up to the roof, and then to the helipad. The team took the other way in or out, which is a crane system used to lower the inflatable boats to the ocean’s surface.
As they re-enter, they study the system with new eyes. If there are smugglers, how would they get in or out? There seem to be three ways: the helipad, the crane system, and the underwater airlock. Of the three, underwater feels like it would have been easiest to keep secret. Charlotte does not have the extensive knowledge of her more worldly and/or technical teammates from the Menagerie, but this seems like a logical enough conclusion.
Maury is already inspecting some of the crates laying around, taking measurements, and comparing the real things against her video record of the lonely island. Even over her shoulder, Charlotte can see that they match up.
She relays her thoughts to the journalist. “Oh for sure,” Maury grins. “It makes perfect sense.”
“So the smugglers would have a submarine, or a, er, a ‘mini-sub’, I think…?” Charlotte asks, but Maury cuts her off.
“No need. These containers are water-tight and are probably buoyant, depending on what you pack in 'em. Remember, these guys aren’t mass-producing weapons or anything, so it’s probably gonna be rare samples, little vials, light and portable stuff. Just put the crates in the airlock. Nobody will notice. Later, someone buzzes up in one of those dinghies. A diver goes over the side, cycles the airlock from outside, the crates float to the surface, they lash 'em to the boat and go unload 'em at the island. These islanders love their electrical stuff. Remember the airport where we asked directions? No regular airplanes, it was all that bladeless fan hover-shit. Even the boat we took had an electric engine. The noisiest part of the process would be the airlock cycling, and you’d have to be like five feet away to hear that. And on that note, you’d go charter a hover-thingie from that airport, fly around during the weekend, then drop down and pick up the crates while nobody was watching.”
Charlotte smiles. “You are a very creative thinker.”
Maury laughs at this. “I’m a journalist, I know who to interview and how to ask questions. Thank Manny for most of this speculation, I just put it together in a coherent package.”
Charlotte’s smile deepens. “He has always been a voice of wisdom, in his own particular way.”
Franklin Unnarsson has consolidated his position as replacement leader in the team’s absence, and he is the one to make contact with them as they clean up, dry off, and feed themselves.
His voice is full of worry and fear. “What have you found out?”
If there is a murderer here, let us have no more secrets, Charlotte tells herself. Unless they are all murderers, in which case…
“This is for the entire staff to hear,” she says. “Please call a meeting.”
Back in the conference room, everyone is physically present except the roboticist, Rakel Rósbergsdóttir. Charlotte lays out some of the team’s findings. She omits all mention of the smugglers. Instead, the story she suggests is that the entity of the lonely island has been awakened by something - perhaps the station’s presence, perhaps by adventurous travelers, it’s impossible to know - and is now lashing out.
She also knows what killed Dr. Evan Ellason, but says nothing about that. Instead: “We think that there are creatures called draugr who are serving this entity.”
“Rural superstition,” Kristjana mutters in annoyance. Good manners demand that Charlotte ignore the outburst, and she does.
More importantly, this is the moment where she springs her trap. Foul play means that someone will want to dispose of the body before a proper inspection. If she can take care of it, have it turned over to the authorities, she can ensure that doesn’t happen.
“It is possible the entity reanimates corpses. For that reason, the body of Dr. Evan Ellason–”
“Ahh,” Franklin says. “We already arranged for transportation. Bakki Airport was good enough to send over a craft. His remains have already been airlifted off the station.”
Charlotte frowns. She isn’t sure that he’s quite out of the draugr’s clutches, and more mundanely she isn’t sure she trusts where the body is really being sent.
She sets her face in as stoic a fashion as she can manage, and continues in a noncommittal tone. “Very well. I have only two other questions.”
“First, we must somehow either exorcise the entity, or at least lull it back to sleep and seal it away again. Even if this station is being shut down, we must ensure the safety of the village nearby. For that reason, we should like to study your surveillance system in more detail, perhaps to learn more about the entity. Who is in charge of the system?”
Her eyes are halfway turned toward Rakel, staring out from the video screen, when Franklin’s answer again catches her off guard. “Like many things, that is a communal task. Similarly, we are all cross-trained to a certain extent on each other’s specialties. None of us are nuclear physicists, but we can at least see to the safe shut-down of Evan’s nuclear experiments.”
His expression grows more smug. “Documenting safe procedures was my suggestion. This will allow us to proceed as expected, even with his loss.”
For a moment, Charlotte had hope that she could spot the killer. Whoever goes to the nuclear lab and wears a badge will die of the same poison - unless they know to disable the trap. But she remembers Maury’s explanation, and grasped enough of it to realize that the real killer could also have changed the badges out in the day or so the team was absent, then shut off the radio signal that armed the trap.
There’s one other avenue she can pursue. “My compliments on your foresight, Doctor. That answers my other question. Perhaps we can ask Dr. Rakel Rósbergsdóttir to help us with the surveillance system?”
The scientist’s half-lidded eyes turn away from her camera and her face scrunches the slightest little bit, the clear sign of someone who’s been asked to do something distasteful. Nevertheless: “Sure. Come to my lab any time.”
Charlotte gives orders privately. “Manny and Vermillion, please stay in the lower half of the base. Bodark, please stay in the upper half. Daph, can you patrol outside? Maury and I will interview Rakel.”
A chorus of affirmations rises, and the team splits up to perform its duties.
Charlotte finds Rakel’s lab at the end of one corridor.
The physical lab is a mess. The woman at the center of it is dressed sloppily. She sits reclining in her chair, sipping tea from an ornate mug while small wheeled robots move about and conduct their business. Charlotte must move around some, and in a couple cases step over others. Maury, in her chair, seems content to simply plow through the ones that don’t make room for her. If Rakel takes offense at this, she doesn’t show it.
“Surveillance, eh?” the woman asks at last. She looks toward Maury. “Guessing you are the technologist here.”
Maury grins. “Closest thing this team has, anyway. So what can you tell me?”
Rakel looks baffled and bothered, and spreads her hands wide in a shrug. “What do you wish to know?”
Maury’s smile grows predatory, if Charlotte has to put a name to it. The journalist senses a reluctant target, and is now on the hunt. “You’ve got a surveillance system for security, I take it. In case anyone breaks in here - or anyone goes rogue - or an accident happens - you’ve got a record.”
“Yes.”
“Which has clearly been tampered with. We all saw it.”
“Yes.”
“These systems are made here at home, by Icelandic people, Icelandic science, all that?”
“No.”
Maury blinks, and gestures for elaboration.
Rakel seems unwilling or unable to make the effort to volunteer information, but when invited to speak she does. “We are definitely ahead of you in mechanics and power systems. You don’t have anything like our laufblað system - the propulsion system for our flying vehicles. But you are ahead of us in computers and optics. Since formalizing relations, we’ve been buying and learning about your computer and video technology.”
Maury grins and gives a brief patriotic thumbs-up. Then her questions resume. “Do you have off-site backups? You know, periodically, someone makes copies of the tapes, takes them to some other storage facility, just in case something happened here?”
“Yes.”
Maury leans forward. “So if someone damaged those tapes before the draugr started coming around, those off-site backups would show it.”
Charlotte watches Rakel’s face. She isn’t sure she would have tipped her hand as quickly as Maury, but the woman’s reaction should make the gamble worthwhile.
The half-lidded eyes open only slightly, and a slow smile creeps across the woman’s face. “You think someone here is guilty of crimes,” she says finally.
“Could be,” shrugs Maury. “I like considering all angles.”
Rakel hums to herself. “Well. You came by permission of the crown. You can ask them to follow up on the backups, yes? Confirm your suspicions?”
Maury glances at Charlotte, who nods in understanding, and returns her attention to Rakel. “Yeah, we can do that. Meanwhile, how about your robots? Is that another ‘community responsibility’, or do you run all those? I mean I’d feel possessive of my creations in your place.”
Rakel smiles indulgently. “They’re just tools to me. My field jumped ahead twenty years when we got access to some of your modern computers. It is very interesting now. Of course what we do officially here is work on weapons. But there is so much potential for labor-saving devices. Mobility aids, like you sit in now. What ought we do with all this if we weren’t at war, eh? Take care of our own people, that’s what. But everyone here finds the robots useful, so everyone should use them as they wish. Which is the point of my work.”
The pair have left Rakel’s office and now loiter near the lift to the roof.
“What do you think?” Charlotte whispers.
“I think if she did it, they’re gonna try to off us fast,” Maury concludes, just as quietly. “She’s got the means. She might have a motive - smuggle stuff out to the rest of the country, get it out of military hands. But she just doesn’t feel like she’s hiding anything, you know?”
“I concur,” Charlotte says at last. “I can’t say I won’t consider her a suspect. But I do feel it prudent to continue the search.”
Maury grins suddenly. “Don’t you have some kind of awesome guilt-detecting spell or something? Or truth compulsion? Come on, magic up a solution.”
Charlotte sighs. “The truth is, I’m worried that any overt uses of power will just draw the attention of the entity still further. I encountered an entity in Albania, called a Maw, and I wonder if the thing here might be similar - if not in nature, perhaps in strength.”
Maury chuckles. “Well that’s fair. That’s why I’m not saying to hand this off to mundane authorities as a murder case either. We’d still be here, doing cleanup on this whatever it is.”
Charlotte nods, and looks Maury in the eye. “Beyond that, imagine what it will do to matters if a foreigner comes here and uses strange magic to force peoples’ minds. There are perhaps ways, to be sure, and magic is a versatile tool, but not always the right one.”
She sighs. “I won’t say that I don’t feel pride in myself, and in this team’s abilities. We may call upon the Grail Knights if the entity becomes an evident threat. We may call upon the crown prince and his authority if the murder investigation demands it. And right now, I admit that I’m a bit short of ideas, barring another attack from the entity.”
Maury snaps rigidly to attention, and pounds a fist into her palm. “Of course! The surveillance!”
She wheels her way urgently back to the main conference area and calls up Rakel on the video system.
“Yah?” asks the scientist.
“I want to review all the surveillance footage. All of it,” Maury says urgently.
“Okay?”
“Where can I do that?”
Rakel directs her through the process of using the conference room’s video setup to call up the footage. And once the call ends, Maury turns and grins gleefully at Charlotte.
“The thing about cleaning up the evidence is that you have to clean up all of it. So our working theory is that someone is helping smuggle stuff out, and they doctored the tapes to cover that up, right?”
Charlotte is following along, and nods to show it.
“So anyone who was operating robots to carry stuff to the airlock below, or to the lift above, they’d erase themselves from the tape.”
“Right…”
Maury points at the screen. “But would they erase what everyone else is doing? There was only like seven people here. If we look at the tapes and six of them are accounted for during such a time, we know we’re looking for.”
Charlotte frowns. “Won’t that take a long time to establish? Keeping track of everyone’s movements?”
Maury shakes her head. “The footage of the lift, the crane, and the airlock are super boring. Nothing happens. I’ll fast-forward through those moments until I find a discrepancy and note the time stamp, lather rinse repeat. Then I’ll look through the tapes around those times.”
Charlotte’s frown becomes a smile as she grasps the answer. “Wonderful. I’ll leave you to it.”
“Still gonna take hours,” Maury admits. “What are you gonna do in the meantime?”
Charlotte thinks about that, and realizes something.
“I need to talk to Vermillion, and ask him about vampires.”