“What’s your proof of that?” Rodabaugh asked.

“Nothing hard,” Abumwe said. “But I know when people aren’t negotiating in good faith.”

“That’s it?” Rodabaugh said. “You have a feeling? You’re dealing with an alien species, for Christ’s sake. Their whole psychology is entirely different.”

“And that doesn’t matter at all, because in fact we have an illegal military outpost on this alien species’ planet,” Abumwe said. “If I am wrong, then we lose nothing. If I am right, however, then we risk the failure of the entire process.”

“What do you want from us, Ambassador?” Egan asked Abumwe.

“I want to know what’s really going on,” Abumwe said. “It’s bad enough that I went into negotiations having to deal with the possibility that the Bula would discover we snuck a military ship into their territory to remove an attacked wildcat colony, but at least I could spin that if I had to. There is no way to spin a CDF ship coming to the aid of a covert military installation.”

“It wasn’t a covert military operation,” Rigney said, leaning forward.

This got Egan’s attention. “Are you really going to do this, Abel?” she asked, turning to Rigney.

“She already knows more than she should, Liz,” Rigney said. “I don’t think a little context is going to matter at this point.” He turned back to Abumwe. “It really is a wildcat colony,” he said.

“A wildcat colony with CDF soldiers in it,” Abumwe said. The skepticism in her voice was impossible to miss.

“Yes,” Rigney said. “Since the Conclave has restricted us and other unaffiliated species from colonizing, we’ve been dropping a few CDF members into wildcat colonies. The rest of the colonists don’t know. We modify their bodies to look and act like natural human bodies, but keep their BrainPals in. They record data and send it along occasionally. We recruit CDF members with a background in technical work so they usually end up being in control of their colonies’ communications systems.”

“To what end?” Abumwe asked.

“We want to see how the Conclave responds to wildcat colonies,” Rigney said. “Whether it sees them as a threat, whether they respond to them the same way as an official colony, and whether ultimately wildcat colonies—or colonies that give the appearance of being wildcat colonies—are a way we can keep expanding our presence without having a conflict with the Conclave.”

“And you thought colonizing a planet already claimed by another species was a smart thing to do,” Abumwe said.

Rigney spread his hands. “We don’t pick the planets,” he said. “We just put our people into the colony undercover.”

“How many of your people were on Wantji?” Abumwe asked.

“We typically put in a couple of people,” Rigney said. “Most wildcat colonies are small. We’ll put in one for every fifty colonists or so.” He turned to Schmidt. “How many did your friend Wilson wash up?”

Schmidt glanced over at Abumwe, who nodded. “Two, sir,” he said.

“That sounds about right,” Rigney said. He settled back in his chair.

“What do we do about this?” Abumwe asked.

“And by ‘we,’ you mean ‘you,’” Rigney said.

“Yes,” Abumwe said.

“We don’t do anything,” Egan said. “The Bula haven’t brought it up to us.”

“We’re not going to be the ones to bring it up to them,” Rodabaugh said. “If they do ask about the wildcat colony, then we tell them that as soon as we found out about it, we moved to remove them—so quickly that we didn’t ask permission first, so sorry. We’ll be out of there before then.”

“And if they find out about the CDF members among them?” Abumwe asked.

Rigney pointed at Schmidt. “We have them,” he said. “We have them both. More specifically, we have their heads, where their BrainPals are.”

Abumwe gawked at the three of them. “You’re joking, right?” she said. “The Bula are not that stupid.”

“No one said they are stupid,” Rigney said. “But all our intelligence suggests that the Bula don’t know the wildcat colony was there, and they weren’t the ones who attacked it. We’re going to proceed with the negotiations as they are.”

“And if they ask me directly about it? Contrary to all expectation they might,” Abumwe said.

“Then you don’t know anything about it,” Rodabaugh said.

“To be clear, you’re asking me to lie to the Bula,” Abumwe said, to Rodabaugh.

“Yes,” Rodabaugh said.

“You understand I think this is a bad idea,” Abumwe said.

Rodabaugh looked annoyed with Abumwe, but it was Egan who answered. “The directive for this is coming from over all of our heads, Ambassador,” she said. “And none of us have the luxury of arguing with it.”

“Right,” Abumwe said. She got up and walked out of the room without uttering another word.

From their side of the table, Rodabaugh, Egan and Rigney looked over at Schmidt.

“Thanks for coming,” he said, tried to smile, and failed.

*   *   *

Harry Wilson entered the bridge of the Tubingen;a surprised Captain Jack Augustyn looked up, along with his executive officer and other bridge crew. He gave them a couple of seconds for their BrainPals to register and label him. Then he said, “I think we’re in trouble.”

Wilson saw Captain Augustyn have an internal debate whether to jump on him for his unconventional entrance and then make a choice, in the space of half a second. “Explain,” he said.

“We have a couple of CDF corpses in the meat locker right now,” Wilson said.

“Yes,” Augustyn said. “So what?”

“I think there should be another one in there,” Wilson said.

“Excuse me?” Augustyn said.

“We have two dead CDF,” Wilson said. “I think there was another one in the colony. I’ve been going through Vasily Ivanovich’s data. It’s where I found the data stored in a BrainPal-readable format. But some of the documents aren’t originally Vasily’s. Some of them are from Martina Ivanovich, who forwarded them to Vasily using a BrainPal-to-BrainPal protocol. And some of them are from a guy named Drew Talford. Who also sent them BrainPal to BrainPal.”

“We have our people on the planet now, identifying the dead,” Augustyn said. “They’ll find him.”

“They havefound him,” Wilson said. “I wouldn’t be bothering you with this if I hadn’t already checked.”

“If they found him, then what’s the problem?” asked Selena Yuan, the Tubingen’s executive officer.

“They didn’t find allof him,” Wilson said. “He’s missing his head.”

“I would imagine a lot of the colonists are missing limbs and body parts,” Augustyn said. “They were attacked. And it’s been a week since the attack, so scavengers have been at them.”

“Lots of them are missing body parts,” Wilson agreed, and then sent Augustyn and Yuan an image through his BrainPal. “None of the rest of them are missing a body part that’s been cleanly separated from the rest of their body.”

There was a moment while Augustyn and Yuan examined the picture. “No one’s found the head,” Augustyn asked, after a minute.

“No,” Wilson said. “I’ve been having them look intensively for a couple of hours. There are bodies missing heads, but the heads are usually found not too far away, or the separation is ragged. This guy’s head isn’t near the body. It isn’t anywhere.”

“Some animal could have run off with it,” Yuan suggested.

“It’s possible,” Wilson said. “On the other hand, when the head of a CDF soldier has been cut cleanly from his body and his head is nowhere to be found, I’d suggest it’s not prudent to assume some animal is making a snack of it.”

“You assume it’s been taken by whoever attacked the colony,” Augustyn said.

“Yes,” Wilson said. “And while I’m at it, I think that whoever told us that the Bula didn’t know the colony was here guessed really badly wrong. I think not only did the Bula know it was here, I’d be guessing they’re the ones who made the raid. If they didn’t know it was here, I’m willing to bet whoever attacked it took that head to the Bula, because evidence of a CDF presence on one of their planets is worth more than a little bit of cash.”