But I could imagine the Freeps doing it.

And what did they find? Before the plague, they were smuggling out trinkets… no, sorry, the ones that got caught were smuggling out trinkets. Who knew how many other secret expeditions might have been digging around? And who knows if any of those hit pay dirt?

Then the epidemic came to town. Explorers flooded in, searching the countryside for sick Ooloms. The Freeps must have been forced to scurry away before they got noticed.

After the plague, Demoth had laid down tighter controls over incoming spaceships, funneling all arrivals through a down-to-the-marrow medical exam to make sure they weren’t carrying alien microbes. That had mightily cranked off Freeps at the time; before, they’d been able to come and go without passing through any control authority. Away from urban centers, small ships used to be able to slip down to the surface without being noticed.

But postplague, Demoth bought state-of-the-art detectors to monitor the outer atmosphere. Had to keep out those germs, didn’t we? And even the best stealth countermeasures can’t hide a ship when it’s hanging all by its lonesome, nothing but near vacuum for a thousand klicks in any direction. Drop your radar profile to the size of a chicken, and people will still wonder what a chicken’s doing, flying through the Van Allen belts.

So: no more Freep archaeologists. Except Kowkow Iranu. And maybe Maya Cuttack — human, but on the Freep payroll.

What could they be digging for? Not knickknacks. Not the remains of old elevators, or the crumble-rust debris moldering on the floor all around me. Freeps would be chasing the Big Strike: alien tech. Whizbangs beyond the current knowledge of the Technocracy. With so many ruins on Demoth, you got rumors galore of high-tech gizmos, buried just out of sight, waiting to be discovered by the next idle spelunker who scuffed up a bit of dirt. It hadn’t happened yet… but that meant nothing. Who knew if Demoth had been hiding alien treasures for thousands of years?

Such as a machine for making peacock tubes appear out of nowhere?

Speculation, I told myself. But worth discussing with someone. With Tic? Not right now — he’d already scooted away to watch a ScrambleTac officer poke at a lump of dirt. Tic was not in a stand-steady, rational-discussion mood at the moment.

So who to talk with? Cheticamp? Festina?

Or should I just think hard? Peacock, I seek advice as your humble petitioner and maidservant…

A voice sounded clearly in my mind. Po turzijeff. Kalaff.

Not maidservant. Daughter.

I damn near screamed.

A blank few seconds after that. Next thing I can tell, I was cowering tight against a cold rock wall, my hand jammed into my carry-bag and clutching the old cold scalpel. I hadn’t pulled the blade out… just grabbed it like a talisman, razor-sharp stability. Made me wonder, was this some blind impulse to defend myself, or to knife my own skin bloody in a lunatic self-aimed panic attack?

Even a link-seed can’t answer some questions.

I quick yanked my hand from my purse and looked around, feeling the hot-guilt blush in my cheeks… worrying someone might have seen me. Tic, Festina — were they wondering what scared me, wondering what I’d been clutching in my bag? No. Not even looking my direction. They were both paying attention to someone new coming up the tunnel: the medical examiner, Yunupur, flown in from Bonaventure as soon as Cheticamp reported Iranu’s corpse.

You can tell by his name, Yunupur was Oolom… and a young one at that, all hustle-bustle energy. New enough he could still tell you where he kept his accreditation certificate. I’d met him several times — his mother was Proctor Wollosof, one of the Vigil members who’d been scrutinizing Bonaventure since the plague. Thanks to her, Yunupur had grown up in the city among humans, and he’d bought into our culture with bubble and bounce… the roiling breathless enthusiasm only an outsider can muster.

"Mom-Faye!" he cried. "Catch!" He launched himself across the room and made no attempt to slow down as he whumped into me, wrapping his arms round my neck. Kiss kiss, one on each of my cheeks. Oolom lips are stickier than Homo saps. "Looking sexy as always," the boy beamed. "That parka does things for your shoulders."

Festina boggled at the two of us. I muttered, "I know his mother."

"And she wouldn’t be caught dead down here," Yunupur announced, right cheerily. "If she knew this job made me go underground, she’d have a spasm. Old folks, right? They go totally Pteromic over the least little thing." He rolled his eyes, then noticed Tic. "Present company excluded, of course. You look like you’re holding up okay, down here in the dark and squeezy."

"I’m not ‘okay,’ I’m magnificent," Tic answered; but his voice was tight enough to choke. "I also happen to be Proctor Smallwood’s supervisor… which makes me concerned to see her fraternizing unprofessionally with civic officials."

"Ooo," said Yunupur, "chilly. But if you want professionalism, I can give you professionalism." He detached himself from my neck and put on an expression of mock seriousness. "And where is the unfortunate deceased I must examine?"

"How ’bout the guy lying on the ground?" Cheticamp suggested. He pointed toward the corpse.

"Certainly a popular locale for the lamented," Yunupur agreed as he bounced toward Iranu’s body. "I see ’em in beds and I see ’em in chairs, but flat on the floor still wins as the position of choice for those with a love of the traditional. You found him exactly like this? With his hands neatly folded?" Cheticamp nodded.

"Then someone wanted to make a statement." Yunupur knelt beside the body and reached into his carrying bag for a scanning device, much like Festina’s Bumbler. He held the machine a few centimeters above the corpse and moved it slowly from Iranu’s head down to the feet, then back again. "Nothing immediately obvious," he said. "Have you taken all the pictures you want?"

Cheticamp nodded again. "Then let’s start getting personal."

Yunupur produced a small vacuum cleaner and ran it lightly over Iranu’s parka — not that I could see any hairs or fibers that might have come from the killer, but it paid to be thorough. Then, wearing sterile gloves, Yunupur carefully shifted the corpse’s hands enough to clear the parka’s fastener strip. Or at least, that’s what he intended to do; as soon as Yunupur unclenched the hands from one another, Iranu’s dead arms slapped limply to the ground.

"Oops," Yunupur said. "Usually corpses are stiffer than that."

"Do you know anything about Freep cadavers?" Cheticamp asked.

"My med courses covered all the Divian species," Yunupur replied, confident as a rooster. "I haven’t had much practical experience, but still… Freeps advance slowly into rigor over the first twelve hours after death, stay steely for three days, then ease off into something inelastic yet movable." He looked up at Tic. "My professors never said Freeps went totally flaccid."

Tic didn’t answer. His expression showed what he thought of people who blamed their professors for their own clumsiness.

I was thinking something totally different. Something that scared me left, right, and sideways. I prayed rare desperate that Yunupur would find some blatant cause of death — a stab wound through the heart, strangulation marks round the throat.

"Well, let’s keep looking," Yunupur said, still perky. He opened Iranu’s coat to reveal a thick white shirt and red trousers; both looked like normal Freep apparel, upscale but not all the way to obscenely expensive.

No obvious bloodstains.

Iranu had a black knit scarf tied loosely round his throat. Not tight enough to choke, just protection against the cold.

Yunupur undid the scarf. No signs of violence.