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“Fine work,” the governor said as he took his own seat. “This was exactly the night to do this.”

“You are both most kind,” said Donald. He was on the point of signaling the kitchen to bring in the first course when the call came in.

In less than a hundredth of a second, Donald received the signal, decoded it, and identified it as an incoming emergency priority voice call. Another one. The days had been full of them for weeks now.

Donald briefly debated handling this one by himself, or even refusing to answer it. But the governor’s orders on such matters were very clear and specific, and had been reinforced several times in the past few days. Donald really had no choice in the matter. With a slight dimming of his eyes that might have been the robotic equivalent of a sigh of resignation, Donald gave in to the inevitable. “Sir, I am most unhappy to tell you this, but there is an incoming emergency call. It is scrambled, the caller’s identity unknown.”

“Burning devils,” Kresh said, his irritation plain. “Don’t they ever stop calling? Patch it through yourself, Donald. Let’s clear this up here and now, whatever it is. Probably just another farmer who refuses to get off his land or something.”

“Yes, sir. Patching through—now.”

“This is Kresh,” said the governor. “Identify yourself and your business.”

“Sir!” a fussy, nervous-sounding voice answered. “I—I didn’t mean to get patched through to you, but the priority management system did it for me. I am trying to reach Commander Justen Devray.”

“You are speaking with the planetary governor, not an answering service. Who I am speaking with?” Kresh demanded.

“Oh! Ah, Constable Bukket, of the town of Depot. But honestly, the priority coding system put me through to you.”

“Which it only does when the situation demands my prompt attention,” said Kresh. “So what is the situation?”

There was a brief silence on the line, and then a sort of low gulping noise. “Simcor Beddle’s aircar has crashed, sir. At least we think it has. It vanished off Depot Air Traffic Control, and then the disaster beacon went off. And, ah—the beacon is stationary, at a position right in the center of the primary impact zone.”

“Burning devils!” Kresh said, abruptly standing up. “Search and rescue?”

“They launched four minutes ago. They should be there in about another five minutes. I know it’s evening where you are, but we’re early morning here. Local sunrise at the site isn’t for another twenty minutes and it’s very rough terrain, so—”

“So they may have to wait for daylight before they can even set down. Very well. Use the side-channel datapath of this frequency and send all the data you have. Thank you for your report. You will be contacted as needed. Kresh out.” The governor made a throat-cutting gesture and Donald cut the link.

“Damnation,” said Kresh. “Hellfire and damnation. Someone’s made some kind of try for Beddle.”

Fredda Leving’s face went pale. “But you can’t know that,” she protested. “It could have been an accident. His aircar could have malfunctioned. The pilot could have made a mistake.”

“Think so, Donald?” the governor asked.

“No, sir. Preventative maintenance on vehicles is one of the most basic means of preventing harm to humans. The mechanical failure rate on air vehicles is extremely low. Nor is there any plausible chance that it was pilot error. Not with a robotic pilot.”

“And there is no way Simcor Beddle would do his own flying,” said Kresh. “Even if he knew how—and I doubt he does—it would be against his principles to do anything a robot could do for him.”

“But it’s not impossible that it was an accident,” Fredda said. “Burning stars. The political upheaval when Grieg died. I don’t know that we could hold together through that again.”

What would happen if—if things turned out as badly as they might? The Ironheads would probably blame the government, or Alvar personally. Unless they pinned it on the Settlers. The Ironhead movement would be up in arms, that was for sure. Marches, riots, arrests, counter-demonstrations, lunatics and perfectly sane citizens suspecting plots and conspiracies under every rock. She could see it all, plain as day. How the devil were they supposed to contend with that and the comet impact at the same time? “Could it have been an accident, Donald?” Fredda asked, trying to find at least some ray of hope.

“While I grant there is a theoretical possibility of mechanical or pilot failure, I would agree with the governor that foul play of some sort is the far more plausible explanation. That is even more disturbing than it normally would be, given the political implications of the case.”

“Donald, you are a master of understatement. We have to move on this fast. Fredda, dinner is going to have to wait. Donald, call Justen Devray. I want him on the scene. And I want him there now.”

THE DISASTER BEACON that had summoned them all was still blaring, long hours after the crash, the locator strobe on top of the car still flashing. No doubt the hyperwave beacon was still running as well.

Commander Justen Devray gestured to Gervad, his personal robot. “Go find the switches and shut those damned homing beacons off,” he said. “We know where the car is.”

“Yes, sir,” said Gervad, his manner as calm and deferential as ever. He walked across the landing site and went aboard the aircar. After a few minutes, the noise cut off.

Good. He gave an order and someone carried it out. At least something happened the way it was supposed to happen. Justen Devray yawned mightily, fighting back exhaustion. It was full noon here, but it was the dead of night back in the city of Hades, on the other side of the planet. Justen had been getting ready for bed a little less than two hours before.

The local officers were still here—if you could call Depot local, three hundred-plus kilometers away. They were the ones who had detected the beacon, found the aircar—and hyperwaved a priority call to Hades. Kresh had ordered Justen to the scene immediately, and Justen had obeyed with the alacrity of the most slavish robot. Ten minutes after Kresh’s call, he had been en route to Hades Spaceport. Fifteen minutes after that, he had been on a rush suborbital flight with the Crime Scene team, hurtling clear around the planet in a stomach-churning crash emergency flight trajectory. They had landed at Depot Field, transferred to aircars, and flown like fury to get to the downed aircar. He had gotten to the scene fast, but he was not exactly fully awake.

Justen had gone to bed the night before looking forward to his first decent night’s sleep in weeks. He felt a sudden surge of irrational anger toward whoever had done this. Why couldn’t they have waited just a few hours more, and let him rest just a little?

Maybe the kidnappers had just been in a hurry, like everyone else these past month or so. Justen Devray did what everyone did every few minutes, these days. He looked up into the sky, and searched for the glowing dot that was growing brighter all the time. There it was, hanging low in the western sky.

The comet. The comet that was headed straight for the planet Inferno. Straight, in point of fact, for the spot of land Justen Devray was standing on. In five days time it would be here—and then it would be allover…

Justen turned away from the comet and resumed his study of the aircar’s wreckage—if wreckage was the right word for it. Wreckage implied a crash, an accident. This car had landed safely. The damage here had happened after the landing, and it had been committed quite deliberately. Someone had kidnapped Simcor Beddle.

And Justen Devray had just five short days to find the man, before the comet came down.

Devray moved in closer, and studied the exterior of the car more closely. The aircar had landed on the summit of a low hill in the middle of rough country, jumbled rock and scruffy undergrowth, smack in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town of any size was at least forty kilometers away. Devray considered the rugged badlands that passed for countryside in the vicinity. This hilltop, jutting up from a jumbled pile of rock and brush, was probably the smoothest piece of land for twenty kilometers. Beddle and the kidnappers couldn’t have walked out. It would take a mountaineer in perfect condition to make any time at all through this kind of country.