Heat

“Don’t salute,” the Magistrate said, looking pained. “Formalities would be grotesque, all things considered. I’ve seen your record. I imagine I got you out of bed. Were you alone?”

The question caught him off guard. For a moment, he wondered if she were flirting with him. “Yes,” he said warily.

“You have no personal obligations tying you to Jota at this time? No adoption procedures underway? Are you breeding?”

Short of asking him if his death would inconvenience anyone else, this was as straightforward as could be. “No,” he said.

The Magistrate flicked her eyes at the man accompanying her. “This is vey Venekus, from the Human Studies division,” she said, and sat down. She did not bother to introduce herself. “There has been an incident.”

Tagen took his place at the table and folded his hands atop it patiently.

“I’m sure you know who Kanetus E’Var is,” the Magistrate said. She passed a hand wearily over her eyes and then takked her claws hard against the table. “You may not know that he was arrested several days ago.”

“I did not.” But he had known that E’Var had not been captured when the Yevoa Null was raided, which put him head and shoulders above many of his colleagues. If the ‘incident’ involved E’Var, it was going to be a scratchy one. Leaving aside the simple danger of the man, most of the public believed him already imprisoned. Of course, since the Magistrate had just admitted E’Var was in custody, Tagen couldn’t imagine how anything serious enough to qualify as an ‘incident’-

“His ship never arrived at Tyuk station. Our initial investigations prove his ship never came through the Far-Point Gate.”

Ah. Tagen leaned back in his chair and considered her. “Do we know how the escape was managed?”

“I have not said there was an escape.” The stiffness in her words belied the frustration evident on her face. She looked away. “The council’s official stance is that his transport vessel broke up mid-Gate. Even now, the Fleet is searching for his wreckage, but…” She trailed off, lifting and dropping one hand to show the futility inherent in that effort. Space was wide and wreckage from a mid-Gate explosion could materialize just about anywhere. “I just want to be sure.”

Tagen considered the wisdom of asking his next question, but ultimately decided that truth would serve him better than tact in this situation. “Why so much interest in E’Var’s whereabouts? He has no ship. The rest of the Yevoa Null’s crew is safely imprisoned. His father’s reputation may afford him some protection for now, but smugglers have short memories and little loyalty. He’ll turn up.”

“Perhaps.” The Magistrate continued to glare at the far wall.

“What makes you think he’s gone to Earth?” Tagen asked finally.

She answered like a bureaucrat, with another question. “Did you know that the council has agreed to decommission Earth’s Gate?” Without waiting for an answer, she stood up and began to pace around the small room, her magistrate’s robe flapping around her ankles. “It’s going to come down next season. Part of the new government’s self-proclaimed ‘war’ on drugs. Ha. As if there weren’t enough humans hidden away in breeding facilities all over So-Quaal space to keep the Vahst trade alive and thriving for another thousand years.”

Tagen waited.

The Magistrate shot another glance at the scientist who had accompanied her, and then returned to her seat, “What I say now is never to leave this room.” She stared Tagen down for a second or two in silence, and then said, “Uraktus E’Var was constructing his own Gate.”

Tagen rocked back, genuinely shocked. “How?”

“With money, I imagine.” She bared her fangs at the wall and began to tak her claws on the table again. “But that’s the meat of the matter, and the whole reason we devoted ourselves so unremittingly to taking him down. We believe we stopped him before he could complete his Gate and it’s unlikely he shared its location or the secrets of its construction with anyone else. With the possible exception of his son.”

Tagen felt his jaw tighten. “Who has gone missing,” he concluded.

“Who is probably—” She stressed the word carefully and then turned to face him again. “Dead. But in the event that he is not, I assure you, he has gone to Earth. As you say, he has no ship, no crew. His resources must be limited. There is only one place he could go to strengthen them. It is, in all likelihood, a fool’s chase.”

Right. And Tagen knew exactly the fool she had in mind.

“You are going to investigate the matter,” the Magistrate told him. “I have written orders, if you require them.”

Tagen wanted to bare his teeth, but this was a ranking female. Instead, he said, “I do not. Your word is enough to satisfy me.”

“I’m pleased to see you appreciate the delicacy of the situation.” The Magistrate showed her own fangs in a hard smile, but then, Tagen was only a male, and a sek’ta at that. She didn’t have to be nice. “The quarantine has never been officially broken…and it never will be. You understand?”

She was disavowing him right to his face. “I do,” he said.

“Good. You leave immediately.” She stood again and turned, her robes snapping out behind her as she made for the door. “The council is watching you, sek’ta Pahnee. Success in your mission will be most favorably rewarded.”

Of course it would be. Because failure would probably end with death. And even if it didn’t, it would still end with him as a damned sek’ta.

The doors hissed open and shut, and Tagen was alone with vey Venekus.

“I am so jealous,” the scientist said.

Tagen glared at him.

Vey Venekus cleared his throat and began again. “Do you speak any human?”

“Panyol.” He was quite fluent with that one. “Some N’Glish.” It was more than enough; Tagen’s duties as a fourth-rank Fleet officer rarely brought him into contact with humans, and the ones he did encounter were often muted and seldom responded to words anyway.

“Only some? Most of the slaves E’Var trafficked spoke N’Glish. It’s likeliest his son will go back to hunt in the same place. Here. I have—” The scientist put his pack on the table and turned it so that he could display its contents to Tagen. “I have language discs. You can study them on your flight. Once you’ve mastered the basic rules of speech, it’s all about vocabulary. What do you know about Earth?”

“I know it’s quarantined,” Tagen retorted, and then heaved a mental sigh. “Earth was the first planet the Far-Reacher program contacted that was inhabited by a sentient species,” he said. “I’m not sure of the date. Some five hundred years ago. I would have studied if I’d known there was going to be a test.”

“That’s good enough,” vey Venekus said mildly. “All of the information we have comes from the Far-Reacher’s reports, before Earth was quarantined. It may be a little out of date, but it should still be workable. You can find most of them in these debriefing programs, but it makes pretty dry reading. And it’s nothing but a contingency plan, really. The human populations are widely scattered. It’s unlikely you’ll encounter any of them, but even if you do, they shouldn’t give you any trouble. They’re aggressive in large numbers, but they’re hardly dangerous. I assume you’ve seen one close up before.”

“Yes.” In his first deep-space tour in the Fleet, Tagen had been involved in a raid on a mining facility that used humans as laborers. They’d been a sorry lot, hobbled, muted, and half-starved, but Tagen remembered them well enough. They were eerily similar to a Jotan in structure and features, but smaller and less durable overall, like a reflection in some freakishly warped mirror. Most of them had died before they could even be taken to a preserve. In the years since, Tagen had seen many humans, but nothing quite compared to that first sight.

“Then you know how easily they can be subdued. Your greatest problem is probably going to come from Earth’s atmosphere. They burn a lot of carbon there.”

Tagen frowned. “They can breathe that?”

“No.” The scientist laughed shortly. “They die from it, but they burn it anyway. They don’t seem to be capable of making the co

“In passing.”

“Then you might know we’ve never been able to keep one in captivity for very long. Under our direct supervision, I mean. They’re too…” Venekus raised a hand and rolled it through the air as though groping for the next word on an invisible set of shelves. “Unstable,” he said at last. “But put them by themselves and they do just fine. To a point. If it wasn’t for the filters we have in place, the entire moon would be practically uninhabitable by now. They have an unca

Tagen takked his claws on the tabletop.

Venekus took the hint and returned to business. “In any event, you’ll have a full medical kit, and I encourage you to take daily scans and anti-toxins whenever necessary. You’re up to date on your vaccinations, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“Humans catch everything, so if you do come into prolonged contact with one, you might want to scan and inoculate it as well. We wouldn’t want to start a plague the same day the quarantine is broken. However, all I have are basic immuno-boosters. No one knows what E’Var’s been using all this time, but we can’t come close to duplicating it, so keep contact to a minimum. What wouldn’t I give,” Venekus muttered, “to have had just one day to pick that man’s brains. What a waste. If only you people weren’t so eager to see the color of his blood.”

“Twenty-five officers lost their lives in that raid,” Tagen said.

Vey Venekus glanced up, but he didn’t look terribly apologetic. “That’s tragic,” he said. “But let me tell you something. One of the humans recovered from the Yevoa Null showed evidence of massive internal reconstruction. Closer analysis indicated that its liver had been damaged and then regrown. Now Uraktus E’Var had enough knowledge to recognize the organ’s failure and enough skill to repair it. I don’t even know where the liver is in a human body.”

“That’s tragic,” Tagen said coolly.

The scientist’s eyes narrowed and his voice grew steel. “Yes, it is. Because at this moment, there are more than a quarter-million humans in preserves, and no one has any idea how to take care of them. Hundreds of them die every day. Hundreds more are being born because they breed like bacteria. The average age of the humans in a preserve right now is twenty-one years and that number is dropping.”

Tagen’s simmering outrage fell away and he stared back at the scientist, openly appalled. “I had no idea.”