Cold as Ice by Charles Sheffield

for Battachariya's work on transport planning, ignoring all jibes or distractions. Apparently he had found nothing out of line there, since that heap had been checked off and placed to one side, but now a final thick stack was being placed in front of him.
    Magrit winced. The stack contained Battachariya's discretionary account. Or what, in her mind, she thought of as his in discretionary account. It showed the items of expenditure for which no budget had been allocated. It had not been audited for nearly five years. It was, when Magrit Knudsen descended to the reality level, the reason she had come here. She had approved every item on that list, at least in principle. Her signature was on them. In practice, she had no idea of what most of them were, but she could guess.
    That was apparently not true for Inspector-General Gobel. He was frowning in perplexity at the tables of expenditures and at the entries that sat beside each.
    Finally he raised his head and stared at Rustum Battachariya. "Most of these purchases and requisitions do not correspond to anything on the chart of accounts for the Transportation Department. They appear to be for—" the expression on his face changed, to one that Magrit had never seen before "—for Great War relics , and for war records ."
    It was not an explicit question, so Bat chose to be awkward again and treat it as a statement. He stared very hard at the inspector-general's face and said nothing. There was a long silence, until Magrit could not resist jumping in.
    "There is a supplementary list of approved expenditures specific to Coordinator Battachariya's department. I'm sure that all of the items you are looking at are covered by that set."
    Gobel turned his chilly attention to her. "Then it should be obvious to you that I need that list. And I also require the memoranda that show how such an anomaly came into existence."
    "The list is on the computer here. The original memoranda are over in my office. I can go along and get them if you like. Naturally, we are cooperating fully."
    He nodded slowly. "I am sure you are. But while you are finding the memoranda, Mr. Battachariya and I will review the materials described in these documents. In detail. "
    The two men stared at each other, ignoring Magrit. She sighed and headed out of Bat's office toward the suspension tube that would carry her five hundred meters up to the main department. How much explanation would be necessary—or sufficient—to satisfy Gobel? Some of those data and equipment requests had seemed strange even to Magrit's tolerant eyes. Only Bat could justify them. All Magrit could do was to look for her written records and hope that they were accurate enough and complete enough to satisfy a nitpicker like the inspector-general.
    The discretionary account went back such a long way. Long ago, even before she brought the genome-stripper back from Ceres, Magrit had learned that there were other deeps within the brooding mind of the Great Bat. His office might appear to her and others as a random junk heap, but to him every item in it had its own place, value, and significance.
    Half of Bat Cave was devoted to relics of the Great War. Battachariya was a war buff, although of a curious kind. The general Ganymedean view of the war was that it had been a disaster of enormous cost, but also that it had served as a pivotal event necessary before the move from Earth-centered to system-centered human psychology could take place.
    Bat cared nothing for nostalgia, philosophy, or historical imperatives. He saw the war differently. Although the Inner System had suffered far more casualties, in his mind it was the Belt that had sustained the greater, and perhaps irretrievable, loss. The war had arrived at a time when Belt technology was bursting out toward a period of incredible fertility of invention. All of that had been blown to bits. Many Belt discoveries had been destroyed, along with their creators. But not all of them were necessarily