"Why did you need it?"
Because that stuff sets like reinforced concrete and it will provide additional sealing and structural reinforcement to the damage on the patched windshield on the Adler. I don't want to try a transit-jump with just our spit-and-chewing-gum repair holding it all together. But I'm not going to tell you that, you interfering old buzzard. "Our craft, the Bartholomew Sholto, experienced some minor hull damage just before departure. A hold-down cable attached to another vehicle snapped and banged into our craft. The broken cable was not discovered for some time, and we were not made aware of the incident or the damage until we were well under way. There is no immediate danger, but we felt it prudent to take precautions. We plan to make temporary repairs to our hull before we depart."
"Our experts tell us that the damage to your hull would only be significant during an atmospheric entry. Do you plan to make such a maneuver? To land on our world, perhaps?"
"We have no such plans. When we have done our work here, we are expected to fly directly back to our base, which is in vacuum and in free orbit. Still, we deemed it wise to take precautions. Surely you would agree that it is only prudent to keep one's vehicle fully capable?"
"We will ask the questions here," Yalananav said. "You ordered and received a far larger quantity of the material than would be required to repair the observed damage to your ship."
You people certainly have been snooping, thought Hannah. Checking our manifests, doing an external exam of the Sholto. What else have you been checking out?
"As I said, we were not made aware of the damage until we were well under way. We used the ship's onboard cameras, but we couldn't be sure of the extent of the damage. Better to order too much repair material than too little."
"You did not even examine the damage to your ship upon arrival."
And you watched as we disembarked. Why are we so interesting? "As you said, the damage would only be of consequence during an atmospheric entry. The matter was not urgent--and we were eager to enjoy your splendid hospitality." Lesser Trade Speech did not lend itself to sarcasm, and she very much doubted that Yalananav had a sense of humor, but if a snide remark served to deflect his attention, that would suit Hannah. And why the devil were they interested in the repair compound?
"There was another, and stranger, discrepancy," Yalananav went on. "You accepted delivery of a twenty-four-day supply of Metrannan-digestible emergency rations. What possible use did you have for them?"
"I know nothing of such rations," said Hannah, quite truthfully.
"I do," said Jamie. "Though I know very little. It seemed such a minor point at the time, I did not bother mentioning it to my colleague. The packing lists for the two containers we accepted were printed in Metrannan Script, Greater Trade Writing, and written English--rather poor written English, with several mistakes. However, we were in a hurry, and as it was the language most familiar to me, I read over the English listing. There was one item with a garbled description. It was something like 'Made for/by Metrannan Meals Twenty-four Daily.' I took it to mean there were twenty-four mealpacks made by Metrannans for us, for humans. I gather they are in fact meals for Metrannans, which were somehow mistakenly delivered to us."
"If you were uncertain of the meaning of the listing," Yalananav said, "you should have compared it against the other languages, or else opened the package and examined the contents directly."
Jamie frowned. "If what we got were rations that a Metrannan could eat, but not a human, I was not uncertain. I was mistaken. I failed to understand a garbled notation properly. I note that you did not say that we ordered the rations--just that we accepted them. Correct?"
"That is correct."
Good for you, Jamie, Hannah thought. You got them to answer a question. A small start--but a start.
"Then at worst I am guilty of misunderstanding a poor translation done by some automated system in your resupply service. There. I have confessed. Why don't you arrest me for that? Except--excuse me. Haven't you done that already?"
"I do not understand."
"Arrested. Are we arrested? Held against our will under suspicion of committing a crime?"
"You are not arrested."
Jamie stood up. "Then we are free to go?"
A guard stepped forward from the rear of the room. "You are not free to go. You must remain."
Jamie sat down. "Then I must insist that you clarify our situation."
Silence. Plainly they had no intention of clarifying anything.
Hannah used the quiet moment to try to think. Jamie had just done a good job of using his own anger to push back at this gang of bullies. And bullies they were--all sly threats and leaning on people weaker than they, and doing it because they were scared themselves.
What worried her was that scared and inexperienced leaders in a crisis often spent a lot of time looking for someone to blame. If she didn't know better, she would have guessed they were toying with the idea of choosing humans for the role. Never mind that it made no sense. Never mind that it was, in fact, completely irrational. There they were, picking at minor oddities in their packing list, looking for--even manufacturing--evidence of conspiracies.
She could almost see the gears in their heads turning. Jamie and she were only a few inferences away from being accused of a plot to land on the planet, and either kidnap someone, or else collect some fiendish Metrannan traitor who would fly off to conspire with his evil human allies. They had already scraped together just enough nothing to build into a nearly plausible story.
Hannah's gut instinct was that the Metrannans couldn't clarify the situation because they weren't sure of it themselves. This session was a fishing expedition, an attempt to rattle them. Jamie, in effect, had called their bluff. Good for him--but now it was time to defuse things just a bit. "Let us not argue over terms and definitions," she said. "I trust we have answered your questions satisfactorily. We have cooperated. Now we seek your cooperation."
"First one or two questions more, if you please," said the one on the end, speaking for the first time. Fallogon, that was his name. "Are you familiar with the term 'maneuver-masking'?"
"I believe I have heard it in passing," Hannah said, trying to sound casual. "I don't know what the precise definition might be." That was a flatout lie, but her internal alarm bells were going off, and this didn't seem the moment to reveal knowledge of covert piloting techniques.
"I am surprised that a spacefaring police officer wouldn't know the term intimately. It refers to various techniques whereby one ship is interposed between a detection station and a second ship, in hopes that the energy field generated by the first ship's engines would conceal any maneuvers by the second ship. Ship two hides behind ship one so the detection station cannot see it."
"I understand," said Hannah.
"It is a matter of simple geometry to demonstrate that this trick would conceal nothing from a second detection station, if it were any significant radial distance from the first, as seen from the point of view of ship one."
"I quite see that, yes."
"Can you explain the intermittent detection of a ship under thrust on almost precisely your own heading but several billion long scientific units of linear measure behind your own ship during its arrival deceleration?"
"In a word, no," said Hannah, keeping her voice as cool as she could. "There are a lot of ships out there. I have no control over them and can't be called to account for what they do."
"Just so. Thank you for your answer."
Hannah hoped that the Metrannans were no better at reading human expressions and reactions than she was at reading Metrannans--but it was obvious there was something going on among the four beings behind the table in front of her--if the Xenoatric, the Unseen One, was in fact there at all. She hadn't seen it move a millimeter since their arrival. It could be a statue of a Xenoatric, or an empty carapace, for all she could tell.
The Metrannans were another story. She was nowhere near being able to understand what was
happening, but it was clear there was a complicated dynamic at work. But who was headed up? Who was heading down? Tigman and Yalananav were obviously in some degree of alliance against Fallogon. But for how long? And how were the lines drawn, and why? And it seemed as if Fallogon was the one asking the tough questions--but offering them up soft and easy, almost like a defense lawyer trying to lead his witness without getting caught by the judge. Any halfway-decent interrogator could have made a lot more out of the maneuver-making angle--for the very good reason that there was actually something there. Instead he made it seem like a loose end to tie up after the other two had finished with their paranoid fantasies.
Hannah glanced at Jamie, then spoke again. "Unless there is anything more," she said, "I would like very much to make a start on getting your help with our problem. Our colleague, Trevor Wilcox, boarded his ship, left your world--and vanished. We come in search of any clue to what might have happened."
"You come very belatedly," Fallogon said. "It was roughly half of one of our local years ago that he departed from our world."
"But he was not listed as officially overdue for some time after that," said Hannah. "As for the rest of the delay, we are a small service, stretched thin, dealing with investigations on many worlds. But honor requires that we search, once our other duties permit it."
"What do you know of his mission here?" Yalananav demanded.
"That Learned Searcher Hallaben requested a human courier for an--item--a message or document of some sort--to be transported to the human world Center to another agency of our government. Trevor Wilcox was sent. For the sake of security, he was not told what he was to carry before he departed, nor was any other person in our service. So far as I am aware, no one in our service even knows if anyone in our government knows what the item was to be. The plan was for Special Agent Wilcox to be briefed when he arrived. We do not know if that happened."
Hannah paused, giving the Metrannans a chance to chime in, but none of them took the bait. "We do not know anything of what happened after his departure. We need your help to find out more."
"Your story is not plausible," said Tigmin. "Why would your service agree to act with so little information? There must have been a briefing."
"With respect, to the best of my information, there was not. Nor did our service--the Bureau of Special Investigations--have much choice. We were not asked to provide the courier. We were ordered to do so."
"You are saying that your people--your government--were willing to do this task without explanation?" Tigmin asked. "That no human ever learned what the, ah, 'item' that Special Agent Wilcox was asked to transport was? Or why it was being entrusted to humans?"
There was something oddly eager in Tigmin's tone and expression. It was almost as if he saw the message's being lost beyond hope of retrieval as good news. Hannah decided to feed him a bit more of the same, just to see what would happen. Tell him the truth, but tell it the way he wanted to hear it.
"The arrangement was that Wilcox was to be briefed on arrival," Hannah said again. "It is my understanding that no other human was ever fully briefed. I could be mistaken or even deceived in that. When the point is to limit knowledge, one must also limit knowledge of who has knowledge. However, it is my belief that no human alive knows what the 'item' was--other than that it was clearly very important. As to why we were asked to do this task, except for the very general purpose of keeping the item safe, I doubt any human knows--for knowing why would likely reveal the what, if you see what I mean."
Yalananav frowned and drummed the fingers of all four hands on the table. "Why would your--what do you call it--Unified Human Government--UniGov?"
"That is the short and informal term, yes. UniGov."
"Why would this UniGov agree to such a request?"
Hannah decided to tell them what they wanted to hear. "Because we are the younger of the two Younger Races, and we are small and weak, surrounded by a Galaxy full of Elder Races of great age and wisdom and effectively unlimited power. We need friends. We need acceptance. It is to our benefit to be useful, trusted, reliable."
Yes, we're just poor lonely little puppies with big brown eyes all alone in the big scary woods. The words she had spoken were all true enough, if more than a little exaggerated. But if pretending humans were weaker than they were made the Metrannans happier and more relaxed, maybe they would let their guard down and let something useful slip.
"What is it you want to know from us that could help you in your search after your colleague?" Fallogon asked.
"Technical information," Jamie said.
"Such as?"
Jamie pulled out a notebook and started writing in longhand as he spoke. "The full maintenance records for his ship. Everything that was done to and for his ship while it was here. Complete tracking data for inbound and outbound flight. Recordings of all voice and data transmissions from his ship." He finished up his written list with a quick scribble of BSI shorthand. He gave Hannah the briefest of glances at it before dropping his hand over it. It read let f. use that to keept. & y. chasing own tails. make 'em happy. sumthing going on. "Can you think of anything else, Agent Wolfson?" he asked out loud.
"No, I think you've been quite thorough, Agent Mendez. Well done." She was distinctly relieved to know Jamie had spotted the same odd dynamics at work that she had. "Except, of course, for one other point," she said. "Presumably, someone at this end knew what the 'item' was." All the Metrannans, even Taranarak, seated silently to one side of the room, froze up, as motionless as Bulwark of Constancy. And what is a Xenoatric doing sitting in on this very high-level hush-hush meeting anyway? But that was a puzzle for later.
"It is at least possible that there was something about the item itself that directly or indirectly caused or contributed to the disappearance of Agent Wilcox and his ship," she said. "Can you perhaps tell us what the item was, or anything at all about it?"
Again, silence, lasting three, four, five, six heartbeats.
Hannah suddenly found herself thinking of the off-duty seven-card-stud poker games in the back room of the BSI Bullpen. Now and then you'd get dealt the last up-card and it would be something that would make everything else fall very obviously into place. If you got dealt the fourth card to the straight flush, it would make your hand almost unbeatable--if you had the fifth card to fill the flush in your down cards. But either you had the right card or you didn't.
If you did, you would know instantly and know how to bet at once. If you didn't have it, but were ready with your bluff when the bet got to you, ready to pretend, that could be just as good. Make the other players believe you had the straight flush, and you'd rake in the pot on the strength of the cards you were acting like you had.
But if you hesitated, if you had to pause, compute, calculate, for a split second longer than it would have taken you to make the obvious choice of how to bet the real thing, then it was all over. No bluff would be believable after that. There was nothing that could help you recover from that brief-but-fatal hesitation.
"I am sorry," Tigmin said at last, after a quiet that lasted far too long to be believed. "But that knowledge died with Hallaben. We were not in our present positions of authority at that time."
And Hannah knew from one look at the expressions on all the Metrannan faces in the room, knew beyond all possible doubt, that Tigmin was lying.
Hannah struggled to repress a smile and hold her own poker face in place. Maybe, just maybe, Jamie and I can win this hand after all.
TWENTY
REVEALED IN DARKNESS
After two hours spent slogging through all the pointless technical information they could possibly have needed for their cover story, if they had actually cared about their cover story, Fallogon agreed to take mercy on them all and declare the session at an end.
Jamie and Hannah rode back in their aircar, stumbled back into their gondola, were sincerely grateful to watch the hatch close shut behind them, and even happy to see the guard posted outside. For a time
, at least, until Tigmin, Yalananav, and Fallogon decided what to do next, they would be left to themselves. Hannah found herself understanding why the circus lions in the old stories were glad to get safely locked back into their old familiar cages.
"Man, oh man, oh man," Jamie said, dropping into a chair. "Getting back into one standard gee feels very good indeed. Why didn't that blasted database just tell us to put on black-and-white stripes or orange jumpsuits with numbers on the back? And you said it might not be us on trial."
"I'm still not sure it was," said Hannah. "It's just possible that the whole show was about Taranarak. Otherwise, what was she doing there?"
"I don't know. Playing along to distract us? We only had about ten minutes to talk with her back on Free Orbit Station," he said. "Not exactly enough to judge her character and motives or knowledge."
"How do you think they felt about it when we told them we didn't know what was in the message?"
Jamie glanced around the room, tapped a finger to his eye and ear, and looked quizzically at Hannah.
She shrugged. "What use can it be to them, knowing that we're wondering about their reactions? Do they think we won't be trying to figure out what all that was about? Besides, I'm too worn-out to play charades."
"Okay by me," Jamie said. "They can't be expecting us to have a real high opinion of them by now."
"So? How do you think they felt?"
"Relief. Very, very obvious relief. Those three seemed glad to know their secret was safe."
"Three?" Hannah wasn't so sure Fallogon was happy about it.
Jamie cocked his head at Hannah. "Hey, I'm not that tired. I'm not going to start analyzing who's on-first and who's dating whom and who's just broken up in plain English. And I hope that was cryptic enough for realtime purposes."
"I think it was. Anyway, I barely followed it. Let's talk history instead."
"Huh?"
"You had the same training courses I did. Same theory. Human history can offer insights and parallels to what goes on with the xenos. So what do you think? More like the French Revolution or the Russian?"
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