H’lim’s lips compressed. “Titus, maybe Abbot didn’t kill Mirelle. Maybe Inea did.”
With numb fingers, Titus keyed for Mirelle’s room, trying to recall how Abbot’s override worked. If he could get a picture– suddenly, the vidcom lit up with an incoming call. Titus hit ACCEPT, and the screen cleared to show Inea leaning into the pickup, a gag across her mouth, her hands bound behind her. She was seated, and from the way she was trying to poke at the keys with her nose, Titus thought she must be bound to the chair. The color scheme behind her indicated it was Mirelle’s room.
Her eyes rose to the screen as Titus made inarticulate sounds. H’lim bent over his shoulder. “Abbot did this?”
Vocalizing strenuously, she nodded. Titus felt H’lim’s bony fingers dig into his shoulder and knew what the decision had to be. “Close down,” he ordered her, “and get out of range of the pickup. We’ll be there soon.”
At her relieved nod, he cut off. “Is there an enzyme that will eat bone? And not ruin the water recycling plant?”
H’lim thought a moment, then he, too, fixed on the bathroom door. “Yes,” he choked, “and Abbot knew about it.”
“Where is it?”
“A storage room Andre and I both use, near our labs. Yesterday, there was enough to decompose her body.”
“That is where the other booby trap set for you would be. Mirelle’s room-or maybe Inea herself-will be trapped for me. I’m going to need your help.”
H’lim paused, looking at the bathroom door. “It would be convenient if the body just disappeared without a trace.”
“That is the way Abbot expects you to react, and that’s the last worry we can afford to have. Let the W.S. lose the war and the secessionists execute all of us, but that message must not go out.”
Momentarily, H’lim assumed a preternatural stillness, then replied, “Yes. You’re right, of course.” When he moved again it was with all the bustle of an animated human.
It was the work of a moment for H’lim to cast his Influence around the guards. Titus marveled at the powerful but subtle touch the luren now used to mask their passing from all human eyes, but when he commented, H’lim said, “I can’t keep this up too long. Earth humans are just too sensitive. But of course, now I understand why that is.”
Titus didn’t have a chance to inquire. Mirelle’s door was before them. He and H’lim both went over it, looking for Abbot’s traps. Mirelle had given them the threshold before, so when H’lim picked the lock they had no trouble slipping inside. Inea, still bound to the chair, hopped it across the room, calling mutedly through the strip of sheet gagging her.
The chair itself trailed a twist of sheet that had tethered it to the kitchen sink fixture. Another piece of sheet lay across the sink, frayed end draped nearly to the floor. Titus inserted his fingers and tore the gag across, then pried the wrist and leg bonds away.
Instead of the torrent of gratitude and narrative Titus expected, Inea grew very still as she gazed up at H’lim. As Titus knelt, rubbing circulation back into her feet, Inea said, in a voice and cadence eerily like Abbot’s, “I submit, Senior, that Titus Shiddehara has violated law and custom in permitting me to act uncontrolled and thus to endanger all his kind on Earth.”
Titus hurled the bonds down , “That’s his trap! He’s Influenced her! Lord knows what else she’ll say and to whom!
There was a glassy, unfocused look in her eyes as H’lim knelt to examine her. “That may be all he left for us.”
“Not if I know Abbot. He no longer expects you to enforce the letter of our laws.”
“Doesn’t his using Influence over your Mark constitute a capital offense as well?”
“No. He’s my father, and he’s only scripted her to expose me-probably to any other luren as well as to Colby, though what she’d tell Colby I don’t know.”
H’lim cradled Inea’s jaw in his hands and inspected her eyes. “I can counter it. It’s very superficial.”
Titus reached forth with his own senses to confirm that, swallowing against the ache in his gut. “Yes. Abbot’s always scrupulously legal.” He removed H’lim’s fingers. Titus could see that ferreting out all the triggers Abbot had left would be a delicate job if he wanted to have all of Inea there when he finished. “Stand clear.”
When H’lim had moved back, Titus administered the Influential equivalent of a sobering slap, and Inea blinked hard, twice, shook her head, and gazed at Titus as if he had no right to appear out of thin air. Quickly, he explained what Abbot had done to her. “I can undo it when you’re ready to let me, or H’lim can, but it will take hours. Inea, we don’t have hours-”
She suddenly turned white, rose, and lurched to the bathroom where she shut herself in. The sound of water running almost covered the sound of retching. Titus picked up the bonds and shoved the chair out of the middle of the floor, starting after her. “Did I hurt her bringing her out of it so fast?”
“No,” said H’lim, restraining him and examining the room. “It was Abbot who hurt her. Give her a minute.”
The bed was tumbled, the mattress half off its foundation. A blood kit lay on the floor, parts scattered. He pushed the mattress back in place and found Mirelle’s customized calculator had been shoved between mattress and foundation. Odd. He turned it over. It was activated, showing the Rosetta stone. His hands shook. It’s a message. She left me a message.
He wondered obliquely how she could have done it under Abbot’s Influence, but then remembered Biomed’s anti-hypnotic conditioning and wondered if the humans had wrought better than they knew. He sat down on the bed, and H’lim knelt beside him to see the tiny screen. “What is that?”
“Archeological treasure. It’s too complicated to explain.” He suddenly recalled an utterly cryptic list he’d found in one of Abbot’s station files that he had penetrated. Of their own accord his fingers moved over the keys, trying the few codes he had labored over so long he’d memorized them.
The screen danced, flickered, then settled in to display luren script. H’lim exclaimed, “I wrote that!”
Twisting his head to look at the pale, goggled face, Titus said, “That’s why I’ve never been able to get anything useful out of Abbot’s files! He’s been using Mirelle’s calculator to dump data!” He shook the thing. “If I only knew how to make it scroll.”
H’lim reached a slender finger over Titus’s shoulder and poked a key. The image shifted to the next line of text, and the next. “She showed me, once. Titus, this is only the message I wrote for him. We can’t stay here and-”
“No, wait.” Titus used one of the other commands on the list, found some machine code, then tried another and yet another. He was coming to the end of what he remembered when they hit on a second file of luren script. “And this,” said Titus, laboring over the foreign language, “has to be the message he’s sending now!”
It was built out of the components of H’lim’s message, but omitted all mention of the luren stock breeding company and of the luren home world. Instead it invited responsible governments to bid for the services of those galactic citizens who now controlled Earth. Or who will control Earth by the time they get here if the secessionists win and the Tourists use the inevitable chaos to take over.
Titus looked up when H’lim moved back. Inea was standing braced in the bathroom door, her hair slicked back, a little color around her lips now. But her face was chiseled from stone, and her eyes sparked. When she spoke, it was not in metaphor. “I’m going to kill him.”
Titus rushed across the room to gather her up. “No!”
“He’s gone crazy. He’ll kill us all if we don’t get him first. And after what he did to me in the restaurant-and now-it would be worth my life to take him down with me. You can’t, and H’lim shouldn’t because we don’t want an interstellar incident. Which leaves me. I’ve got to do it.”