Tomek glanced over at Martina Ivanovich. “What about her?” she asked.

“I suspect they’re a matching set,” Wilson said. “Shall we find out?”

They were indeed a matching set.

“You know what this means,” Tomek said, after she shut off the scanner.

Wilson nodded. “I told you this would get complicated.”

Lee looked over at the two of them. “I’m not following.”

“We’ve got BrainPals in the heads of two apparent civilians,” Wilson said. “Which means they’re probably not civilians. Which suggests this wildcat colony might not be the freelance colonization effort that it’s been advertised as being. And now we know why all the computers and records were destroyed by the colonists.”

“Except for the data chip you found in this guy,” Lee said, pointing to Vasily Ivanovich.

“I don’t think he swallowed it to saveit,” Wilson said. “I think he swallowed it because they were being overrun and he didn’t have time to destroy it any other way.”

“What was on the chip?” Tomek said.

“A bunch of daily status reports,” Wilson said. Lee frowned at this, clearly not seeing how that would matter. “It’s not what data were on the chip that was important,” Wilson continued. “It was the fact that data were saved in a memory structure that’s proprietary to BrainPals. The fact it exists implies someone was using a BrainPal. The fact the BrainPal exists implies this is more than just a wildcat colony.”

“We need to tell Captain Augustyn about this,” Lee said.

“He’s the captain,” Tomek said. “He probably already knows.”

“If he already knew, he probably wouldn’t have let me order you to examine these two,” Wilson said. “No matter what my security level. No, I think this is going to be as much of a surprise to him as it is to us.”

“So we tell him,” Lee said. “We tell him, right?”

“Yes,” Wilson said. “He’ll send a skip drone detailing what we’ve found. And I expect that immediately thereafter we’ll get new orders, telling us that it’s no longer just an extraction job.”

“What will it be now?” Lee asked.

“A cover-up,” Tomek said, and Wilson nodded. “Destroy any evidence this was anything buta wildcat colony.”

“We’re supposed to be destroying all the evidence anyway,” Lee said.

“Not just down there,” Wilson said. He pointed to the Ivanoviches. “I mean turning these two—and their BrainPals—into a fine powder. Not to mention obliterating any information on what we just found out, and that data card we found. And if these two really were still active in the CDF, I suspect they’ll be posthumously demoted for not blowing their own heads off with a shotgun.”

Lee went to speak with Captain Augustyn; Tomek stored the bodies. Wilson wandered toward the officers mess to get a cup of coffee. As he did so, he pinged his BrainPal’s message queue and found there was a message there from Hart Schmidt. Wilson smiled and prepared for a delightful dose of Schmidt’s special brand of wan neuroticism. He stopped smiling when Hart noted he’d been assigned to be Ambassador Abumwe’s right-hand man for the Bula negotiations and that Sub-Ambassador Ting’s personality was like that one time on Phoenix Station he and Wilson had met up with that other Bula.

“Shit,” Wilson said. There’s no way that Hart put thatphrasing in thatsentence coincidentally.

Wilson thought about it for several minutes before muttering, “Fuck it,” composing a note and encrypting it. Then with his BrainPal he took an image of his coffee, created a steganographic picture with it and the encoded note, addressed it to Hart and sent it off to the data queue for transmission on the next skip drone, which given the bombshell Lee was dropping into Captain Augustyn’s lap at the moment would probably go out almost instantly.

Wilson wasn’t under the impression that his sleight-of-hand encoding of the message into the image of the coffee would stay unnoticed forever. What he was hoping for was that it would stay encrypted long enough that Hart could do whatever he needed with the information before it got found out.

“Hopefully that won’t take too long,” Wilson said, to his coffee. His coffee was mute on the subject. Wilson slurped some of it and then called up the data he’d transferred from Vasily Ivanovich’s data card into his BrainPal. They were indeed entirely pedestrian reports on colony life, but Wilson had already found something important in there. He didn’t want to miss anything else. He suspected he didn’t have all that much time left to go through the data before he was ordered to delete all of it.

*   *   *

Schmidt didn’t know what strings Ambassador Abumwe had to pull to get her way, but she pulled them. Across the table from her and Schmidt were Anissa Rodabaugh, chief of the mission for the Bula negotiations, Colonel Liz Egan, the liaison between the Colonial Defense Forces and the Department of State, and Colonel Abel Rigney, whose exact position was not known to Hart but whose presence here was nevertheless slightly unsettling. The three of them eyed Abumwe coolly; she returned the favor. No one was paying attention to Schmidt, and he was fine with that.

“We’re here,” Egan said, to Abumwe. “You have five minutes before you and Ambassador Rodabaugh have to get back to it. So tell us why you so urgently needed to see us all.”

“You haven’t been entirely forthcoming with me about this wildcat colony on Wantji,” Abumwe said. Schmidt noted the clipped tone that Abumwe’s voice took on when she was especially irritated; he wondered if it was noticeable to anyone else at the table.

“In what way?” Egan asked.

“In that it’s not a wildcat colony at all, it’s an under-the-radar Colonial Defense Forces outpost,” Abumwe said.

This received about ten seconds of silence, with Rodabaugh, Egan and Rigney studiously not looking at one another. “I’m not entirely sure why you think that is,” Egan said.

“Are we going to waste the next five minutes with this sort of bullshit, Colonel?” Abumwe said. “Or are we actually going to talk about how this is going to affect our negotiations?”

“It’s not going to affect the negotiations at all—,” Rodabaugh said.

“Really,” Abumwe said, cutting her off. Schmidt noted the chagrin on Rodabaugh’s face at this, but she and Abumwe were technically of the same diplomatic rank, so there was little she could do about it. “Because, Anissa, I have a Bula sub-ambassador I’ve been talking to for the last day who I am almost entirely certain knows more about this so-called colony than I do. I think as a result I’m being led down a very short pier. I think when I get pushed off, the entire negotiation is going to go down with me. If I fail at a negotiation because of my own failures, I accept that. If I fail because I’m being screwed by my own side, that I will not accept.”

Colonel Rigney, who had been silent to this point, turned to Schmidt. “Your friend Harry Wilson’s on the Tubingen,” he said, to Schmidt. “I just checked through my BrainPal. He’s the one who’s feeding you information.”

Schmidt opened his mouth, but Abumwe reached out to touch Schmidt on the shoulder. This as much as anything else shocked Schmidt into silence; he couldn’t remember another time Abumwe had physically touched him before. “If Hart or Harry Wilson have done anything, it’s been on my orders,” she said.

“You ordered him and Wilson to essentially spy on a Colonial Defense Forces mission,” Rigney said.

“I reminded them of their obligation to help me achieve our goals as diplomats,” Abumwe said.

“By spying on the Colonial Defense Forces mission,” Rigney repeated.

“I appreciate the attempt to run out the clock by distracting me into a side discussion, Colonel Rigney, but let’s not,” Abumwe said. “I repeat: We have a military mission on a Bula world. I’m almost certain the Bula we are negotiating with are aware of it.”