23 June, WY602 – Demeter, Whistler

Princeton asks Dirk why Benny’s going so easy on them. He observes that the local authorities will show up after the storm, find the foreign crew with motive, means, and opportunity to kill Basil, and likely lock the lot of them up. Considering the crew’s recent exploits on Myrr, they’re unlikely to be supported by the Council. The musings go largely unremarked.

While Aiden finishes up his program, the crew conducts a cursory search of the hotel to try to find the two missing persons. Besides Andrea Cargill having printed dossiers of those members of the crew who had served on Indomitable, there was little of note.

At one point during the search, both Cara and Benny seem to receive the same notification that Dauntless has accelerated and is now due in orbit in twelve hours. There’s a brief exchange, Benny understanding the crew’s concern.

The hotel staff opens the kitchen and prepares breakfast for everyone while the search is finishing up, and the crew gathers in the bar to eat and discuss their next steps. During this time, Benny has been doing a local records search and discovers that Marlon Hollabaugh, the missing housekeeper, had just been hired by the hotel three weeks ago and has a “well-put together, but fabricated background”. When he shows the crew a photo of the man, Cara immediately recognizes him as Lieutenant Roger Daniels, a Grove national who attempted a mutiny nearly twenty years prior on Indomitable when she was a young officer and Jack had just been promoted to XO. When Benny researches that name, he finds numerous intelligence reports (from both Jericho and The Bureau) tying Daniels to numerous acts of terrorism for both Grove and Foxglove in the intervening decades.

While everyone is pondering the unlikely coincidence of Daniels being hired by the hotel three weeks before Cara was a guest, Aiden’s software notifies the crew that Din’s room door had been opened. Everyone (except Dirk) rushes up to investigate. They take a moment to lock the hotel’s one elevator to the ground floor and Roland and Daniel make a point to keep the stairwell monitored.

Through lucky chance, Angelica notices that Din’s door had been booby-trapped in the hour or so since they had searched the rooms. After some investigation, they find that Cara and Angelica’s rooms are similarly rigged. Din attempts to disarm the trap on his door, but fails miserably and causes an explosion, suffering significant wounds in the process. After Tomoe and Aiden put him back together as best they can, they don’t find any particular evidence that his room had been tampered with in any other way. Testing their luck further, Ronald successfully disables the trap on Angelica’s door and they find her room similarly undisturbed. They also note that the electronics of the door lock had been tampered with, presumably in ways preventing it from reporting to the hotel system that it had been opened. They decide to leave the explosive on Cara’s door alone and settle on placing warning signs on it.

As Din is recovering, Aiden receives a curious phone call from Florence. When he answers, it sounds like her phone is in a pocket, and they hear her say in a terrified voice, “What do you want?”