36:
Scout Ship Night
“WHAT did you say to Kearn?”
Ragem delayed answering to take another bite of boiled rast egg, a delicacy from Botharis he’d been delighted to find on the
Quartos Ank’s
menu. Having a first-class chef on a scout ship with a crew of only eight was an extravagance I definitely owed to Skalet. The chef had even managed to produce a platter of arsenic-laced noodles, following a Ket-recipe she’d brought with her from the
Trium Set
. I wasn’t entirely sure she appreciated my well-meant suggestion that leftovers were excellent for pest control.
The noodles sent a welcome fire through my taste buds, a sense I’d resigned myself to keeping numb while Ket among Humans. Skalet was ready to take on our Enemy in combat. Every minute took us closer to Artos, where we were to pick up Ansky and keep her out of harm’s way. My mood would have been downright mellow, if Ragem weren’t avoiding my reasonable questions.
“We can talk freely here, you know,” I said, wondering if he suspected the crew of eavesdropping or of the compact yet gorgeous dining room being rigged with the latest recording devices. “This is S’kal-ru’s ship. It’s a hand-picked crew.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Es.”
I pointed my fork at him. “It’s no reason to get careless, my friend. Nimal-Ket, if you don’t mind.”
Ragem nodded, mouth full again.
“So, my friend. What did you tell Kearn?” I repeated. “He can’t have just said: ‘Off you go, Ragem. Keep the Ket company. I know we’re in a crisis, but the crew and I can handle it without you.’ ”
“Not quite,” Ragem agreed maddeningly. Then he steepled his long fingers before him and launched into a far better imitation of Kearn than I’d managed: “ ‘Ragem, these Kraal are up to no good. Faking a distress call. Claiming it was so we could meet without their opponents catching on. Trying to bribe this ship!’ ” He dropped the whine from his voice for his own reply. “How dare they, sir! You must have been outraged!” Ragem’s voice rose again, adding a touch of Kearn-smugness I remembered well enough to make my fingers flutter. “ ‘Well, we had run up quite the debt with Madame Ket, you know, Ragem. Wonderful creature—very few ships can claim to have one on board as long as we did. If you’d seen her bill, you’d understand why. Worth every credit, but not the easiest thing to explain on the ship’s budget.’ ”
“Kearn let Skalet pay my bill,” I said, shaking my head for Ragem’s benefit. I’d known how Skalet enlisted the cooperation of the
Rigus
from our sharing, but saw no need to remind the Human of such Web abilities. Besides, I was enjoying his performance. “There goes this Ket’s profit margin,” I quipped.
Grinning broadly, Ragem kept going in his Kearn-voice. “ ‘Quite understand the Kraal wanting to hire Madame Ket. Most Ket avoid Kraal space—too much conflict all the time. Having a Ket in the entourage is good for status as well as the, ahem, back.’ ” I almost choked as Ragem flawlessly reproduced Kearn’s chuckle at his own humor.
“Explaining his less-than-grief-stricken reaction to my departure,” I interjected. “And why Kearn didn’t press charges against the
Trium Set
.” Now we came to what neither Skalet nor I knew. “How did you—”
Ragem interrupted me, mercifully in his own voice this time. “I suggested to the Acting Captain that there was something suspicious about all this and that it might be prudent to put an observer on the
Trium Set
to find out what the Confederacy really wanted with you. I was the logical choice, as I tried to tell you before. Hence, my presence as your assistant.”
“You’re Kearn’s spy,” I said numbly.
He locked both hands behind his head and grinned. “At your service, Nimal-Ket.”
Clever being,
I thought to myself.
Entirely too clever for his own good.
“Even Kearn realizes a spy is only as good as his reports.”
Ragem looked hurt. “What do you think I plan to tell him?”
“Not that.” I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them. “What worries me, Paul-Human, is
how
you’re to make those reports.” My mouth kept threatening to tighten into a frown.
He pulled the sleeve up his left arm, revealing tanned skin with a dusting of dark hair. A line of paler skin, already almost imperceptible, ran along the blue tinge of a blood vessel. I crooked one finger. Ragem stretched his arm across the table so I could run my sensitive fingertips over the mark, tracing the device under the skin without difficulty.
“Before your temperature jumps, my paranoid friend,” he said quickly, “I had Lawrenk do some mods on the implant. There’s no record function. It has the emergency homing beacon—we couldn’t remove that—but I control it. No signal goes out. Unless my vital signs hit critical, of course.”
Would it activate if you’re eaten?
I wondered, feeling a kind of devil-may-care lightness in my head I suspected was contamination from Ragem. “How long will it take Kearn to realize your implant isn’t sending positional information or anything else for that matter? How long before he starts chasing after you, too?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” he began with enthusiasm. “I planted a matching signaler on the
Trium Set
. Kearn will back out of Kraal space, receiving exactly what he expects and no more. He’ll be convinced I’m where he left me. In a few days, I’ll need a way to feed him a report, but this ship should have the equipment for it. You see, Nimal-Ket,” Ragem tapped himself on the chest, “I’ve thought of everything.”
“You left a Commonwealth signaling device on Skalet’s ship,” I echoed.
Some of his self-satisfaction faded, replaced by wariness. Perhaps it was the icy tone I used. “To be technical, it’s under the bench in the shuttle.”
One wall of the dining room—to call the elegant little space a galley did it no justice—was lined with a hydroponic garden.
Skalet’s innovation, without doubt.
I stalked over to it, grabbed a nicely lush duras plant, and cycled.
I hadn’t needed all its mass. I tossed what was left of the plant onto the table: let the crew make of it what they would; they most likely expected Ket eating habits to be interesting. Then I surveyed my foolish Human friend over a muzzle that wrinkled in rage very nicely. I could put up with the corresponding upset in my space-tender stomach long enough to make my point.
“Have you forgotten what Kearn is really after, Ragem?” I growled into his startled face. “Me. The shape-changer who blew up in his office. As far as he’s concerned I’m some kind of monster—maybe even the one he’s chased from Panacia. Well, now you’ve left a tracking device in Skalet’s ship. And what kind of being do you think she is?”
“He’d never suspect—”
“Probably not,” I agreed, then answered the dictates of my stomach and cycled back to Ket, wiping moisture from my skin before picking up the hoobit and skirt. While I’d cycled to remind Ragem what we were, it had been a relief to shed energy, an opportunity that might not come again soon.
I hoped.
“But Kearn isn’t the immediate problem,” I continued in my higher-pitched, yet softer voice. “Skalet will find your device, Ragem. Don’t doubt that for a moment. She’ll find it and I’m sure will assume you left it there to track
her
movements. The obvious conclusion is that you are her enemy and possibly mine as well.”
His face was ashen; his voice so low I found it hard to hear in this form. “She doesn’t know I know what you are—what she is.”
Had I ever been that young?
At the moment, I felt every one of the decades I’d lived before this Human’s birth. “Skalet is a leading tactician of a race who treat war as a parlor game, Paul-Human. You don’t have to threaten her true nature to be a threat.”
I went around the table to where he sat, frozen in place, and wrapped one long Ket arm around both his shoulders. They were stiff, whether from some offense he’d taken at my reaction to his wonderful scheme or a more rational alarm at what I was trying to tell him.
I couldn’t guess.
“Ragem, this is me as a Ket. I borrowed a name to use, but this body is the only Ket I can be. When Skalet is in Human form, she is that Kraal military noble you met. And she can be very dangerous to other Humans—especially you.”
Ragem patted my arm. “Then,” he said lightly, “I suggest we defuse the problem before it arises. The
Rigus
should be well out of Kraal space by now. Call Skalet. Tell her I discovered the device in my bag and removed it in the shuttle. Say I hid it there in order not to arouse Kearn’s suspicions. This was my first chance to let you know. Tell Skalet I urge her to destroy it if she hasn’t already.”
Not bad,
I decided, mulling over the idea. There didn’t seem to be any flaws, which didn’t mean they weren’t there. I hadn’t even started my training in subterfuge or strategy, unless this practical experience would count with Ersh. I wrapped my other arm around him and hugged tightly. “Skalet won’t be easy to convince, Paul-Human,” I warned. “But it’s a distinct improvement over what will happen if she finds it first. I’ll send the message right now.”
I went to the doorway.
Snap.
The sound made me look over my shoulder as I was about to open the door.
Ragem sat looking at the broken stem of the glass in his hand; blood, not wine, dripped from the cut end. I’d seen that bleak despair on his face only once before, when we’d been prisoners of the Queeb and he’d been forced to watch my torture.
Now what?
I wondered, close to losing track of which emotion I was supposed to feel next. “Now what?” I asked him.
The Human’s face, while not classically handsome, possessed a pleasing symmetry of bone structure I thought would age well. The proof was before me now, as his expression added years. “I lied to you, Esen.”
When he pressed his lips tightly together, as if to hold in some further outburst, I decided to give Ragem time to gather himself, since this was definitely the beginning of some confession I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear, but I was about to regardless. So I left the door, despite the urgency of contacting Skalet, and returned to the table where I calmly poured us both sombay, spicing mine with a spoonful of leftover sauce from the noodles, careful not to put the spoon into his cup and thereby end his confession before it started. As I fussed over this process, Ragem silently wrapped a napkin around his hand and watched the red stain slowly stop spreading across its white surface.
“Drink,” I insisted, taking a large swallow of the hot stuff myself. “Now. What lie, Paul-Human?”
“Kearn doesn’t care about the Confederacy. He doesn’t care about distress calls and regulations.”
“So . . .” I prompted, able to guess where this was leading, but also guessing it was part of Human friendship to let him bare it all.
“The only thing he cares about is tracking down Esen-alit-Quar. You were right. Nothing will convince him you aren’t responsible for the murders and disappearances. Nothing is likely to stop him hunting you either.” He stared glumly into his cup. “I gave up trying to talk him out of it. We all did.”
“I know about Kearn. You are not surprising me, Paul-Human,” I said very quietly, as if he were some feral creature I could scare away with a louder or harsher voice. “There are always those who fear the unknown. And what am I but all of the unknowns rolled into one?”
“Don’t try to justify him.” Ragem flung up his head and glared at me as if I were the enemy. “He doesn’t represent my kind. Believe that, Esen.”
“Of course,” I made a soothing gesture. “But you are distressed by more than Kearn.”
He took a deep breath, one that shuddered near its end. “After we spoke on the
Rigus
that last time, when you refused to help me come with you on the
Trium Set,
Sas came to my quarters. He’d found the hidden messages I’d sent for you. The ones to Skalet and Ansky. Turns out Kearn had him doing a random check on com traffic, and our security officer pursued the job like a cat after—well, you get the picture. It was my terminal, my shift. I couldn’t deny the logs.”
Ersh.
“Did he read them?”
“No. I’d erased the content right after sending. He couldn’t even be sure of the final destination, but it wasn’t hard to figure out when we started getting the refugee calls from Kraal.”
“So Skalet didn’t fool Kearn at all,” despite the seriousness of the moment, I waggled my fingers.
A blow to an immense ego.
Ragem didn’t appear to find this as amusing. “While you finished packing, Sas took me to see Kearn. We had a—conversation. One in which my options were made very clear.”
“Poor Paul-Human,” I said with true sympathy, able to imagine every detail of that one-way shouting match. “What happened next?”
“I said you convinced me you’d had enough of chasing his monster and had begged me to send a secret message to an old client in the Kraal Confederacy. The message was to take you off the
Rigus
.”
“And he fell for that?” I asked, astonished. I knew Kearn’s weaknesses better than I wanted to, but it was a stretch even for him to believe a Ket would feel safer in a war zone.
“No.”
Ersh, save me from Humans.
“You thought of something better, I take it.”
“I didn’t have to,” he confessed. “Kearn had figured out everything.”
“What!?” I rose to my feet, knees knocking the table, feeling as though Kearn would burst through the door of the room at any minute and ready to run the other way. Illogical, but that was the way of any instinctive fight/ flight response. In this form, as in the Acepan, the response was predominantly flight, the Ket species having matured into a sensible preference to avoid danger whenever possible.
I had to start choosing braver forms
.
“Relax, Esen,” Ragem ordered, rubbing a hand over his face wearily as he gazed up at me. “This is Kearn, remember? He hadn’t figured out the truth. He’d come up with some convoluted plot in which you were a spy for Esen’s people, sent to keep tabs on him. You were leaving the
Rigus
to rendezvous with her or another of her kind.” Ragem’s voice slipped into his mockery of Kearn’s whine again: “ ‘She played on your sympathy and used you to send the coded message. Ragem, you really should pick your friends more carefully.”