Thirty-Three Minutes Early

The login list on Captain Rourke's tablet had eleven lines, and only one of them mattered.

"Earliest login of the day, 7:31 a.m.," she read. "The crew room scanner at gate 14."

Malhotra nodded. "The approval on the reseat order says 6:58."

"Then it says something that didn't happen." Her voice stayed level, but her knuckles had gone white on the orange case. "At 6:58 I was in the crew van on the Kennedy Expressway, with this tablet locked in its pouch in my bag. That load sheet stayed closed, and no reseat got my approval. In twenty-six years I have never moved a passenger out of a seat I hadn't looked at."

"Lucinda," Vandermeer said, all sympathy, "we've all tapped things from our phones in traffic. Maybe it slipped your mind."

"Not from a phone, Hugh. The approval key lives on this tablet and on the flight-ops server. Not on a phone."

"Then somebody approved as you," said Malhotra slowly. "Thirty-three minutes before you existed to this system."

The cabin got quiet the way it does before a storm.

A Junior Flyer flag stripped at 6:41. A reseat order at 6:58, with a captain's name on it. Whoever did this hadn't just wanted my seat. They had wanted a captain to hold the blame if anyone ever looked.

Malhotra was typing. "IT can name the workstation that removed the flag. Ten minutes."

"We don't have ten minutes," said Vandermeer. "Our departure slot expires at 10:15. Lose it and two hundred and eighty people get rebooked. Let's not turn one bad morning into a hundred."

He said it to the whole cabin. He said it in the voice of a man being reasonable. But every passenger up front was watching the captain, and the captain was staring at her own name on a page as if it belonged to somebody she'd never met.

"I never signed it," Rourke said quietly. "Somebody signed for me."