«Dramatic feller,» Natty observed, but Annadelle said nothing.
The bull continued. «When we arrive, our ships will burn your world to black glass.» The monstrous face writhed; he turned his head as if someone had spoken off-camera. «Unless you can somehow prove to my complete satisfaction that you did not murder Ambassador Trafdechwanelter.»
The screen went black.
Natty scratched at his beard. «Can he do it?»
«Probably. They've done it to other worlds. The Enclaves can't field much of a defense force. The Orbitals are even more vulnerable. If we had more time, if the Sirian fleet weren't so close... we could probably recall enough convoy cruisers to deal with them. But even if the Sirian fleet doesn't burn Earth black, a lot of people are going to die.» She shrugged, a bizarre gesture, under the circumstances.
Natty felt a smothering fear, which he struggled to hold in check. The Sirians, he now remembered, were a militantly xenophobic race, with a reputation for «cleansing» the home worlds of races they found offensive. «How long afore they get here?»
«A little over sixteen hours.»
«Holy batshit,» said Natty.
«I couldn't agree more,» said Annadelle Rostov.
* * *
«We need you,» she said, after a while.
A silence ensued, a silence which Natty finally broke. «What the hell can /do?»
She sat back, and took a deep breath. She looked older than she had; her voice was small and weary. «Probably not much, Natty. But I have to try everything, and you have a reputation for being able to understand alien cultures. You've been successful in a lot of strange places, for a country boy. You've infiltrated Enclaves as diverse as HighRise City and the Yucatan Empire, you've collected bounties on body jumpers in Coastville and Baja Alabama. You were the lead investigator in the group that uncovered the Iberian Conspiracy.»
«Yeah, but...»
«Some of the Enclaves are very strange, Natty. I want your perspective. I have a dead Ambassador in a locked, environmentally-sealed room. No one could have murdered him, but he's dead. The Sirians don't understand suicide as a concept... so I got nowhere with the General when I tried to tell him that the Ambassador must have killed himself. Will you take a look?»
Natty rubbed at his eyes. «What you need are xenobiologists. Xenoanthropologists. Xenocriminologists. Xenopsychometricians.»
«I have them, Natty. They're crawling over the data like maggots, hundreds of them. Every government agency in the Enclaves and the Orbital Domains has at least one expert working on the problem. They're not coming up with any new ideas.»
«Well,» he said, finally. «Can't hurt to take a look, I guess. But if the Earth gets burnt to a crisp, it ain't my fault. Hear?»
* * *
She cued a recording of the Ambassador's suite, taken through remote spycams. «We haven't unlocked the suite yet. If all else fails, we'll show the suite to the General and ask him to tell us how we murdered the Ambassador. It may delay him... though probably not. The Sirians don't have a high curiosity quotient, I understand.» She touched her desk.
Natty watched as the spycam floated through the spartan interior of the Ambassador's rooms. The floors were bare metal, the walls a featureless white.
«Right homey,» Natty commented.
«He was a warrior monk, before he joined their diplomatic corps. Very ascetic,» said Annadelle.
The camera turned a corner and revealed a small comm room, equipped with an all-band holotank. On an uncomfortable-looking haircloth prayer rug, the Ambassador's corpse lay, already far gone into the peculiar decay typical of chlorine-breathing life forms, all puffed up like over-leavened bread and beginning to crumble into powder. The Ambassador was on his back, upper arms flung wide, lower hands clutching his crotch.
His spraddled tentacles were tangled around the base of the holotank.
«Cause of death?»
«Unknown. We have good scans of the body, but there's no sign of violence. The corpse was already somewhat broken down when we discovered it during a periodic spycam surveillance, so maybe we're missing something subtle. But as far as we can tell, he just stopped breathing.»
«So, who was he calling?» Natty asked.
Annadelle shrugged. «That's the big question, I think. We're working on it, but as a Very Important Diplomatic Personage, the Ambassador had an extremely good privacy module on his datastream access, and it's going to take time to break his codes. Right now we're digging out the calls one at a time.»
« 'Calls'?»
«Yes. He made three calls in the waking period before his death. We've identified the first call. We expect to get the second within the next ten hours.»
«And the third?»
She shook her head sadly. «Not before the General arrives, unless we get much luckier than we expect.» Natty looked at her. «You think the last call kilt him?»
«Yes.»
«But how? I reckon his tank was filtered against any deadly resonances. Right? And Sirians don't kill themselves, you say? So it wasn't like he got holt of Dial-a-Dread and got depressed.»
«No, his tank was completely filtered against destructive resonances. But I'm sure something bad showed up in his tank. I just don't know what.» She glared at the screen, eyes like cold stones.
She turned those frozen eyes on him. «The Ambassador's safety was my responsibility.»
«We ain't dead yet. Give me a nice room here, with a tank as good as the Ambassador's. Give me your security data–locks, surveillance systems, filter parameters, environmental lockins–and let me pick it over. I figger you're right–no way he coulda been murdered–but I'll feel better if I see the stuff with my own beady littie eyes.»
«All right.»
«And... you got a record of that first call he made? Good. Gimme that, too.»
As he stood to go, clutching a handful of datawafers, he said, as if to himself, «Obscurocious.»
«What?» asked Annadelle Rostov.
«Oh. That's one of them hillbilly coinages. Sorta like 'ferocious obscure.' Or 'atrocious obscure.' Bodacious obscure. Or if we're talking 'bout lawyers it means 'loquacious obscure'.» He winked, and her henchman bared his large teeth.
«No offense meant, iffen you're a lawyer,» said Natty, and then he left.
* * *
The suite to which the henchman conveyed Natty Looper was a very comfortable one, with three pleasant rooms and a view of Earth. He stood and looked down at his world, wondering if it would see another day as a living planet.
It occurred to him that he was as safe as any human in the system, for the moment. The Osiris catered to aliens of all sorts; the management specialized in providing comfortable accommodations for even the most eccentric life forms. There were probably more aliens currently in residence than humans, and so the Sirians would probably spare the Osiris during the first assault.
He felt no great relief; peeking into the future, he foresaw Sirian heavy troopers smashing in doors and dragging out the hotel's human guests.
He shuddered. He had to make an effort to stop thinking about the consequences of failure.
So he sat down and fed the datawafers into the holo tank.
Two hours later he was certain that Annadelle Rostov was correct. There was no way the Ambassador could have been murdered. The locks were perfect, untouched. Untouchable, short of thermonuclear lances or other means of violent persuasion. The elaborate measures taken to safeguard the integrity of the Ambassador's environment precluded poisons, shock-filaments, hyperfibrillators, gas macros, neural resonators, feral microbodies, nanojects, suppressive radiants... all the tools of the modern assassin.
So it was suicide. Except that the Sirians, according to Annadelle, didn't understand the concept. Why was that? He sighed. Time to learn what he could about the Sirians.
* * *
The narrator was a woman from HighRise City; she spoke slowly and carefully. «The Sirians are that rarity among sapient races: a precisely determinate species. The length of their lives is fixed at birth; the scale pattern on the dorsal plates of a hatchling Sirian indicates its potential life span with an accuracy of plus or minus ten Standard days.»