"You are drunk."
Moss nods. "That explains what I’m doing here. Now, what’re you people doing here?"
Reaper, not quite as intoxicated as his captain, leans toward me. "I tried to tell him about Amadeen―"
The waiter brings my tea and places it on the small table to my right. I forget to thank him as I look at Eli Moss’s smirking face. "What we are doing here is trying to stop a war."
"A war?"
"That’s right." I sip at my tea, noticing from my increasing anger that I have not quite achieved the ideal of Timan reserve.
Moss frowns as he looks at Brandt. "That’s what you said, Reaper." His eyebrows go up and he wags a finger at me. "What war? There hasn’t been a war here for hundreds of years."
"Amadeen. We’re here to stop the war on Amadeen."
Moss laughs out loud. "Amadeen?" He lurches to his feet, looks at the timepiece strapped to his wrist, then turns around and points toward a potted imitation tree. "Amadeen’s that way."
Davidge and Kita come up to the cubicle, and before they can say anything, Moss points again at the fake tree and says. "Amadeen is thataway." With that Captain Moss finishes off his beverage, puts down the glass on a table, and brushes past Davidge on his way to the quarters wing.
Kita looks down at me and says, "The good captain appears well medicated."
"He needs something to do," says Brandt finishing off his own beverage. He puts down his glass, wipes his mouth on a napkin, and looks around at all of us. "What the captain was saying is that if this expedition of yours ever gets moving toward Amadeen, he would be pleased to assist you in whatever capacity he can."
Davidge points with his thumb toward the entrance. "What’s he know about why we’re here?"
"Everything," I answer.
Kira sits in the chair vacated by Eli Moss and Davidge takes the chair to my left. "What do you mean, everything?"
"It, all of it, the works, the whole enchilada." I look at Reaper.
"It’s true. In between manuscripts, notes, link records, receipts, and so on, I’ve pretty much put together that you’re working a talma to bring an end to the war on Amadeen. The captain and I think it to be a worthy goal."
"No kidding," says Davidge.
The big man nods. "How you are to go about it is something I couldn’t figure out. I’m guessing that’s because you folks haven’t figured it out either."
"Well, hell. Welcome to the club." Davidge rests his elbows on his chair’s armrests and clasps his hands across his belly as he looks at me. "Ro, are you tired of Timan?"
"You said it yourself, Will. The war feeds off itself. The rest of the universe could vanish and the fighting on Amadeen wouldn’t pause for an instant. Whatever answer we are looking for, it is not on Timan. It is on Amadeen."
The waiter heads in our direction but Davidge waves him off, glances at Kita and me, then faces Brandt. "Okay, we’ve reached a dead end with the investigation. Timan Nisak has put incredible pressure on every government, public, and private institution on the planet. If there is anything, it should have surfaced by now. Just in case something was overlooked, Ty has been running Timan Nisak’s records, seeing if there’s a money trail of some kind from Timan Nisak leading to IMPEX, Hill, or someone else. When I left Ty, it was on the link working with the line’s bank on Friendship doing a quadrant-wide search. Ty’s sure it can come up with something, although it may take months." He nods at Kita and she faces me.
"Sanda got in touch again. Aakva Lua managed to track down a hovercraft capable of firing the marker missile that almost took you out. The owner is a Drac, as is the pilot. Sanda found both of them dead. Suicide, Sanda thinks. The hovercraft is a charter out of First Colony. Ty is running the charter service’s financial records, as well."
I hold up my hands. "Michael Hill, after he made his attempt, he fell to his death." I lower my hands and face Davidge. "We assume he just made a wrong turn in the dark. What if he, too, committed suicide? What if all three were under the influence of some sort of mind control? Between that neural amplifier that they use in mind fusion, and the Timan variety the Ri Mou Tavii uses in instruction, all kinds of things could be planted in an individual’s mind. What if whoever is behind this used Hill and those two Dracs like self-destructing robots?"
Davidge snaps his fingers as he fixes his gaze on a point in space. "Maybe that’s it," he says quietly. He moves his eyes slowly until he is looking at me. "Ro, what was it that changed you?"
"Changed me?"
"From what you told me, one minute you’re cutting up Front soldiers with an energy knife and the next you’re letting some human female run off with a Drac baby. What changed you?"
I think back to that moment when I first saw the Drac baby in the woman’s arms, both of them hiding beneath a bed in the smoke and filth of that shattered bunker. "It’s not human," I said to her. She answered by saying, "No. It’s mine."
"For a moment I saw the pain, the loss, the desperate fear of another." I look up at Davidge. "For a moment I could not think of humans and Dracs. I caught a view through her eyes. We were the same: frightened beings in the center of a firestorm. After that I could no longer carry a weapon for the Mavedah."
"Maybe that’s it," repeats Davidge once more. "Maybe we’re supposed to mind fuse everybody on Amadeen, give everyone a peek into the other guy’s skull, turn everybody’s enemy into just another frightened being. Maybe that’s what we’re here to learn how to do. Where’s Falna?"
"I don’t know, and how are you going to mind fuse an entire planet?"
"Details." Davidge gets to his feet. "Falna can tell me if what we want to do is possible."
Kita reaches out a hand and touches Davidge’s arm. "What about the investigation?"
"Let’s see if the mind fusion can be done, first. If that’s the way to go, though, you’ll have to continue here on your own―unless you want to come with us."
"To Amadeen?" she asks.
As she reaches out a hand to take Davidge’s, the waiter comes up to us carrying a tiny black comm link in his hand. "Mr. Davidge, there is a call for you."
"Thanks." Placing the link to his ear, he says into the speaker plate, "This is Davidge." His mouth splits into a wide grin. "Hey, Falna, we were just talking about you. Where―" He frowns, then his face becomes like stone. Without looking at Kita, he releases her hand. "We’ll be right there."
He closes the cover on the link. Turning to us he says, "That was Falna. Jeriba Ty is dead. Nisak security found Ty in an airlock, no suit, the place filled with Timan air."
"Suicide?" I ask, my voice more cynical-sounding than I intend.
Davidge tosses the link on his chair, nods once, then turns to head for the quarters wing.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Jeriba Ty sits slumped against the bulkhead near the airlock’s interior control panel looking as though it were asleep. There are no signs of struggle. A human Timan Nisak security officer gives us a report on the playback from the airlock control panel. The open command was given from the oxygen side of the hatch, the hatch opened, the close hatch command was given from inside the lock, and the hatch closed. The open command was then given from inside the lock to the Timan side hatch. An automatic caution warning requiring special gear to enter the Timan section went on, the cancel warning command was given, and the oxynitrogen atmosphere pumped out and replaced by Planet Timan’s mix of ammonia, carbon dioxide, and several other disagreeable substances. By the time the Timan side of the lock opened, Jeriba Ty was certainly dead.