Killer

RyRelee thought carefully before asking: "You say, they attempted escape? One assumes they were therefore either captured or destroyed."

"Utterly destroyed," the Coran said. "They attempted to land using their stardrive, and the result was the predictable catastrophic failure."

There was a power in the universe greater than the Cora after all, thought RyRelee, and it had just preserved him. "I could not wish for fellow citizens of the Federation to be vaporized, of course," he temporized. "But in this case, the accidental result may have been that of justice. You perhaps would like me to make a reco

"Actually, we've taken care of that sufficiently, RyRelee," said the Cora. "As you will see."

RyRelee did see the events recorded next, but the images were received directly by the visual centers of his brain without being transmitted through his eyes. A landing shuttle spiraled out of a bay in the starship's hull. The image was superimposed upon that of the chamber in which he stood. It was not a purely visual effect-a hologram projected across the chamber. The blue light and the rippling Coran were no less clear than before, but the outlines of the shuttle were a stronger presence. The scenes were in his mind-a recording transmitted directly through the communications nodes affixed to his skull. RyRelee stood very still as images tumbled and the Coran waited for him to assimilate the data.

It was a blue world, a water world, he saw as the shuttle approached, passing over the oceans to focus on an arid landscape. Abruptly the image concentrated on an area of limestone hillside. The russet stone was blackened and fused to chert in a long scar whose outlines blurred like those of a rope of seaweed. The point of view held at a constant but indeterminable height as it followed the line of destruction. RyRelee had no certain scale, but they must have tracked the scar for at least a mile. Plants with fleshy, dust-colored leaves were shriveled to either side of the blackened stone, and there were occasional highlights where molten metal had splashed and coated the rock, leaving a shallow depression in the hillside. There was no sign of any artifact. The point of view rose, pa

"Their stardrive envelope began to collapse from the stern forward." RyRelee spoke in part to organize events in his own mind, and in part to reconstruct the situation that he sincerely desired to have transpired. "Friction eroded the hull and everything within it. They could not possibly have launched a lifeboat under those circumstances."

He paused to clear his throat before he concluded: "There is nothing here to affect the development of a world without stardrive. In fact, I don't suppose you yourselves can be sure of the identity-for that matter, of what race the smugglers were." His lips sucked in in a gesture that he would have suppressed had he been aware of it.

"Only in the second assumption are you correct," said the Coran. Its voice was made dreamlike by the other events going on in RyRelee's mind. "We did proceed to determine the opinion of the local inhabitants about the event. One ca

The images the emissary saw this time were kaleidoscopic. They were still fully comprehensible, but muted through the sensory media of another organism. RyRelee recognized this as a recording derived through a memory scan of a living creature-presumably that of one of the planet's autochthones.

It was night. A drystone hut huddled on the plain. It was a windowless dome with its low doorway closed by a bundle of thorny brush. The corral appended to the hut was also of stones laid without mortar. More brush raised the corral wall and threatened the belly of anything attempting to leap it, herd animal or predator alike. In the near distance sprawled the ridge along which the smuggler's vessel had disintegrated.

The creatures within the hut were bipedal, half a dozen of them. They stirred like a spaded-up nest of rodents when the hut lifted into the air in a single piece. It was through the biped's eyes that RyRelee saw who the Cora had sent to make the initial survey: eight-limbed crewmen like the one who had led him into the Coran's presence.

The hive of natives collapsed in thrashing confusion. One of the crewmen had calibrated the precise setting needed to disco

"You freed these aborigines after you had examined them?" he asked. He kept his voice as perfectly neutral as he could. There was no evidence that the Cora were aware of the inflectional subtexts of spoken words-but RyRelee did not dare chance accusing his masters of either ruthlessness or stupidity.

"Yes, although of course we wiped their memories," the Coran agreed easily. "We kept guard on the dwelling and herd for the few hours we were forced to hold the aborigines. We landed, after all, to eliminate disruption to the Class 6 natives, not to cause it."

"Yes, of course," RyRelee quickly agreed. He recalled the summons that had snatched him from his palace and brought him here-to death or torture, for all he had known. Class 6 natives were to be protected, but he himself-he was merely a catspaw to be used by the Cora, to carry out their clandestine assignments, and if he were to be killed during his task, he would simply be replaced by a more efficient tool. In theory the Cora only acted for the general best interests of the galaxy. Such doubts as he cherished, RyRelee kept to himself. The Cora paid well.

"We took the precaution of obtaining memory scans of these and other subjects to ascertain how those aborigines who might have witnessed the starship's crash would have interpreted the event," the Coran continued. "As it happened, their intellects were too primitive to have made any technological interpretations. To them, it was simply another natural catastrophe or an act of their gods-incomprehensible in either case. It was, however, exceedingly fortunate that we made so thorough an examination of the site, as you will perceive from these next recordings."

A new series of images played through his communications nodes. This time RyRelee failed to repress a hiss of consternation-one which he hoped would be interpreted as only natural dismay. The reassurance he had only moments ago dared to hope for now melted away.

It was the same arid landscape, but something walked across it now that should never have been there. The creature was in riveted irons that must have weighed as much as the blue-scaled biped did itself-and then were only marginally adequate, RyRelee knew well.

"There was a phile on board," a voice murmured, and RyRelee could not be sure whether the Coran had spoken or whether the words came from his own throat.

RyRelee's tongues were too dry for ready speech, but he was now in conscious control again. "But, of course, that's impossible. You must be misinterpreting what the aborigines saw. It's some native species that only resembles a phile."