“You don’t have to bring all of them,” Wilson said.

“Come again?” Lee said.

“You don’t have to bring their entire bodies,” Wilson said. “Their heads will do just fine.”

*   *   *

“You feel it, too, don’t you,” Abumwe said to Schmidt, during a break in negotiations. The two were in the conference room hallway, drinking the tea Schmidt had gotten them.

“Feel what, ma’am?” Schmidt said.

Abumwe sighed. “Schmidt, if you don’t want me to keep believing that you are entirely useless to me, then you have to actually beuseful to me,” she said.

Schmidt nodded. “All right,” he said. “There’s something not right about Sub-Ambassador Ting.”

“That’s right,” Abumwe said. “Now tell me what that something not right is.”

“I don’t know,” Schmidt said. He saw Abumwe get a look on her face and held up his hand peremptorily. This surprised Abumwe into silence. “Sorry,” Schmidt said, hastily. “I say I don’t know because I’m not sure what the cause of it is. But I know what the result is. She’s being too easy on us in the negotiations. We’re getting too many of the things we want from her. We’re getting something close to a rubber stamp.”

“Yes,” Abumwe said. “I’d like to know why.”

“Maybe she’s just a bad negotiator,” Schmidt said.

“The Bula pulled out these parts of the negotiations specifically for more detailed attention,” Abumwe said. “This suggests they are not trivial to the Bula. The Bula also aren’t known for being pushovers in negotiations. I don’t think they’d put a poor negotiator in charge of this part of the process.”

“Do we know anything about Ting?” Schmidt asked.

“Nothing Hillary could find,” Abumwe said. “The Colonial Union files on diplomatic missions focus on the primary diplomats, not the secondary ones. I have her looking for more, but I don’t expect to find too much. In the meantime, what are your suggestions?”

Schmidt took a small moment to internally register surprise that Abumwe was indeed asking for options from him, and then said, “Keep doing what we’re doing. We aregetting what we want from her. The thing we have to worry about at this point is getting them too soon, and getting done before the Tubingenfinishes her mission.”

“I can come up with some reason to suspend negotiations until tomorrow,” Abumwe said. “I can ask for some more time to research some particular point. That won’t be difficult to do.”

“All right,” Schmidt said.

“On the subject of the Tubingen,any news from your friend?” Abumwe asked.

“I sent him an encrypted note on the next skip drone to the ship,” Schmidt said.

“You shouldn’t trust our encryption,” Abumwe said.

“I don’t,” Schmidt assured her. “But I think it would have been suspicious for me to send him an unencrypted note, considering the mission. The note itself is innocuous blather, which contains a line that says, ‘It was like that time on Phoenix Station.’”

“What does that mean?” Abumwe said.

“Basically it means ‘Tell me if something interesting is going on,’” Schmidt said. “He’ll understand it.”

“Do you want to explain to me how it is the two of you have your own little secret code?” Abumwe said. “Did you make it up together when you were six?”

“Uh,” Schmidt said, uncomfortable. “It just sort of came about.”

“Really,” Abumwe said.

“Harry would see you pissed at me during some negotiation or another and came up with it as a way to let me know he was interested in knowing the details later,” Schmidt said, quickly. He looked away as he said it.

“Are you actually that scared of me, Schmidt?” Abumwe said, after a second.

“I wouldn’t say ‘scared,’” Schmidt said. “I would say I have a healthy respect for your working methods.”

“Yes, well,” Abumwe said. “For the moment, at least, your terrified obsequiousness is not going to be useful to me. So stop it.”

“I’ll try,” Schmidt said.

“And let me know if you hear from your friend,” Abumwe said. “I don’t know what Sub-Ambassador Ting is up to, either. It’s making me uncomfortable. But I have a worry that somehow that wildcat colony on Wantji is involved. If it is, I want to know how before anyone else.”

*   *   *

“You want me to do what?” asked Doctor Tomek. They had taken the entire bodies of the Ivanoviches after all, and both of them were now spread out on examination tables. Doctor Tomek was too much of a professional to register displeasure at the sight and smell of the decayed bodies, but she was not notably pleased with Lieutenant Wilson for bringing them into her medical bay unannounced.

“Scan their brains,” Wilson said. “I’m looking for something.”

“What are you looking for?” Tomek asked.

“I’ll tell you if I find it,” Wilson said.

“Sorry, I don’t work that way,” Tomek said. She glanced over to Lieutenant Lee, who had remained after her soldiers had hauled the Ivanoviches into the medical bay. “Who is this guy?” she asked, pointing at Wilson.

“He’s temporarily replacing Mitchusson,” Lee said. “We’re borrowing him from a diplomatic mission. And there’s something else about him.”

“What?” Tomek asked.

Lee motioned with her head to Wilson, who took that as his cue.

“I’ve got top-level security clearance that allows me to order anyone on the ship to do what I want them to do,” Wilson said, to Tomek. “It’s left over from my last mission. They didn’t get around to revoking it from me.”

“I’ve already complained to Captain Augustyn about it,” Lee said. “He agrees it’s a crock of shit but also that there’s nothing we can do about it right now. He’ll send a complaint with the next skip drone. Until then, you’ve got to do what he tells you.”

“It’s still my medical bay,” Tomek said.

“Which is why I’m asking youto do the scan,” Wilson said, and nodded at the body scanner tucked into a cubbyhole in the back of the medical bay. “I’ve serviced those, and have trained on them. I could do the scan myself. But you’d do it better. I’m not trying to shut you out, Doctor. But if what I’m looking for isn’t actually there, then it’s best for everyone if my paranoid delusions are kept to myself.”

“And if it is there?” Tomek asked.

“Then things begin to get really complicated,” Wilson said. “So let’s hope we don’t find it.”

Tomek glanced back over to Lee, who shrugged. Wilson caught the substance of the shrug. Humor this idiot,it said. We’ll be rid of him soon enough.Well, that worked for him.

Tomek walked over to the cubbyhole and retrieved the scanner and the reflection plate, then came back to the examining table that held Vasily Ivanovich. She donned gloves, gently lifted Ivanovich’s head and set the plate behind it.

“Where’s the visual going?” Wilson asked. Tomek motioned with her head to the display above the examination table; Wilson turned it on. “Ready when you are,” he said. Tomek positioned the scanner, activated it and after a couple of seconds looked up at the display.

“What the hell?” she asked, after a moment.

“Lovely,” Wilson said, looking at the display. “And by ‘lovely,’ I mean ‘Oh, crap.’”

“What is it?” Lee asked, coming over to get a better look at the thing Wilson and Tomek were looking at.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Wilson said. “We’ve all got one in our head.”

“That’s a BrainPal?” Lee asked, pointing at the screen.

“Got it in one,” Wilson said, and leaned in toward the display. “Looks like a little different design than the version I worked on when I was in CDF Research and Development. But it can’t be anything else.”

“This guy is a civilian,” Tomek said. “What the hell is he doing with a BrainPal?”

“Two possible explanations,” Wilson said. “One, it’s not a BrainPal, and we’re looking at a really coincidentally-arranged tumor. Two, our friend Vasily Ivanovich isn’t really a civilian. One of these is more likely than the other.”