do what I tell them.’ Again those are my exact words.
“Director Hannish supported my wishes.”
Obliquely Hashi observed that Koina was staring at him, her lips slightly parted in surprise. It was probable that in the years she’d worked with him she’d never heard him sound so angry.
An undignified flush stained Chief Mandich’s neck, mottled his cheeks with his own anger. He opened his mouth to deliver a retort. But Hashi wasn’t done. He didn’t give the Chief a chance to speak.
“How did you respond?” he went on harshly. “By assigning to me a boy so untried that he was unable to react without hesitation—hesitation which could well have resulted in murder in the meeting hall of the Governing Council for Earth and Space.
“True, he mastered his hesitation. He took the action necessary to save lives. For that I honor him.
“But I do not honor you, Chief Mandich.” If Hashi hadn’t controlled his hands, they would have flown like stings at the Chief’s eyes. “I am the United Mining Companies Police Director of Data Acquisition, and you did not take my stated requirements seriously enough to assign personnel capable of prompt obedience.
“Shall we discuss our separate motivations now, or do you prefer to wait until we can explain them in front of Director Dios?” Hashi shrugged dismissively. “For myself, I am content to wait.”
Chief Mandich closed his mouth. Congested emotion made his features appear swollen. Poor man, he was cursed with a sense of probity so strict that it left him, defenseless. Min Donner would have faced down Hashi’s challenge in order to pursue the answers to her own questions; but her Chief of Security couldn’t do the same.
After a moment he murmured through his teeth, “You have a valid grievance, Director Lebwohl. If you want to censure me, I won’t fight it.”
Stiffly he unclipped his belts and drifted back to his former g-seat.
Oh, censure you, forsooth, Hashi thought in the direction of the Chief’s retreat. I would not trouble myself. Our present circumstances are accusation enough. We confront a dilemma which censures us all.
Honesty with himself forced him to admit that he’d enjoyed scathing Chief Mandich.
Koina met Hashi’s look when he glanced at her. Gravity and speculation darkened her gaze. “Aren’t you being just a little disingenuous, Director Lebwohl?” she asked crisply. “Even a ‘whelp’ like Ensign Crender wouldn’t have hesitated if you’d told him what you were looking for.”
Hashi spread his hands as if to show her that his equanimity had been completely restored. “My dear Koina, have you studied Heisenberg?”
She shook her head.
“A pity.” He settled himself in his g-seat to await the shuttle’s arrival at UMCPHQ. “If you had, you would understand that I could not possibly have known what I was looking for until I found it.”
That may have been as close as he’d ever come to telling her the truth.
Lane Harbinger met him at the dock as soon as the shuttle powered down its systems and the space doors of the bay sealed to restore atmosphere.
On Suka Bator he’d supervised the essential chore of placing Imposs/Alt’s earthly remains in a shielded, sterile bodybag and loading them into the shuttle’s cargo space. Now he watched over the delivery of the bodybag into Lane’s care.
A glance at the corridor in which the kaze had been detonated had assured him that too many people had trampled too much evidence—and indeed that the corridor itself was too large—to permit the kind of meticulous scrutiny Lane had given Godsen Frik’s office. Of necessity he’d surrendered his desire for some form of microscopic data from the region around the body, and had instead concentrated on Imposs Alt’s corpse—on the smears of his blood and the mangled mess of his tissues. The body itself had been simply scooped into the bodybag with a sterile shovel. But every streak or droplet of blood Hashi could locate had been cut out of the concrete with a utility laser and added to the bodybag’s contents.
He hoped devoutly that these remains would enable Lane to find the answers he needed.
No, not the answers: the proofs. He already knew the answers.
A fuming nic dangled from her mouth as she joined him beside the cargo space. Her eyes glittered like shards of mica—a sign that she rode levels of stim and hype which would have poleaxed anyone whose metabolism hadn’t been inured to them. In the pockets of her labcoat her fingers twitched as if they were entering data on a purely metaphysical keypad. While the bodybag was