“No,” said H’lim, restraining him and examining the room. “It was Abbot who hurt her. Give her a minute.”

The bed was tumbled, the mattress half off its foundation. A blood kit lay on the floor, parts scattered. He pushed the mattress back in place and found Mirelle’s customized calculator had been shoved between mattress and foundation. Odd. He turned it over. It was activated, showing the Rosetta stone. His hands shook. It’s a message. She left me a message.

He wondered obliquely how she could have done it under Abbot’s Influence, but then remembered Biomed’s anti-hypnotic conditioning and wondered if the humans had wrought better than they knew. He sat down on the bed, and H’lim knelt beside him to see the tiny screen. “What is that?”

“Archeological treasure. It’s too complicated to explain.” He suddenly recalled an utterly cryptic list he’d found in one of Abbot’s station files that he had penetrated. Of their own accord his fingers moved over the keys, trying the few codes he had labored over so long he’d memorized them.

The screen danced, flickered, then settled in to display luren script. H’lim exclaimed, “I wrote that!”

Twisting his head to look at the pale, goggled face, Titus said, “That’s why I’ve never been able to get anything useful out of Abbot’s files! He’s been using Mirelle’s calculator to dump data!” He shook the thing. “If I only knew how to make it scroll.”

H’lim reached a slender finger over Titus’s shoulder and poked a key. The image shifted to the next line of text, and the next. “She showed me, once. Titus, this is only the message I wrote for him. We can’t stay here and-”

“No, wait.” Titus used one of the other commands on the list, found some machine code, then tried another and yet another. He was coming to the end of what he remembered when they hit on a second file of luren script. “And this,” said Titus, laboring over the foreign language, “has to be the message he’s sending now!”

It was built out of the components of H’lim’s message, but omitted all mention of the luren stock breeding company and of the luren home world. Instead it invited responsible governments to bid for the services of those galactic citizens who now controlled Earth. Or who will control Earth by the time they get here if the secessionists win and the Tourists use the inevitable chaos to take over.

Titus looked up when H’lim moved back. Inea was standing braced in the bathroom door, her hair slicked back, a little color around her lips now. But her face was chiseled from stone, and her eyes sparked. When she spoke, it was not in metaphor. “I’m going to kill him.”

Titus rushed across the room to gather her up. “No!”

“He’s gone crazy. He’ll kill us all if we don’t get him first. And after what he did to me in the restaurant-and now-it would be worth my life to take him down with me. You can’t, and H’lim shouldn’t because we don’t want an interstellar incident. Which leaves me. I’ve got to do it.”

“He’s not crazy, and he’s not out to kill anyone else.”

“Titus, you don’t know what he did to Mirelle. He made me watch. He made me watch him drink until she convulsed and died and he told me that’s what you’d do to me for what I’d done to Mirelle. But I didn’t do anything to Mirelle, nothing wrong. I only gave her a shot of the booster.”

Convulsed?! Titus couldn’t bring himself to probe for details. H’lim asked, “You gave Mirelle the amounts I’d told you? But you used the batch I showed you this morning?”

“Yes.”

“What happened after that?”

“Mirelle fell asleep, just as you said she would.”

“How much later did Abbot arrive?”

“Oh, maybe an hour. He couldn’t rouse her and I told him I’d given her the booster. He threw things around and raged at me. I couldn’t understand what he said, but he wouldn’t let me out the door. Every time I went for it-” She buried her face in her hands. “Snakes and scorpions. It was awful. He’s mad, totally mad.”

Titus didn’t need any more words for what she’d endured to come vividly alive for him. I’d have broken!

H’lim, however, seemed unmoved. “What happened when Abbot went to take her blood?”

“She bled-too easily, he said. It tasted peculiar. He raged about that, not always in English. But then he said he had no choice, and he-he-he drank until she died.”

In the luren language, H’lim said, “She’d have died anyway. Inea gave her twenty-two times the dose she should have used, a hundred times what I’d have started with in Mirelle’s weakened condition. Don’t tell her now.”

Titus turned to H’lim and Inea asked, “What’d he say?”

“Will Abbot get sick from the booster?” asked Titus.

“Probably not. In fact, it could act to increase his own renewing ability, to give him endurance he hadn’t expected Titus, he just might make it, even under the sun.”

“Inea, will you go with us? Outside? To stop Abbot from using the Eighth to call in the galaxy.”

“Shouldn’t someone stay to cover for you?”

“It’s too late for that. Besides, no matter your intentions, you’ll do whatever Abbot commanded because we don’t have time to untangle the mess he made of your mind.”

“Then I’m going.” She headed for the door.

“Wait!” said H’lim cutting her off. While he extended Influence beyond the panel to mask their escape, he asked, “Titus, do you realize what this means?”

“That Abbot has several hours head start on us, and we’ll be pursued, too?”

“No. That Abbot didn’t plan everything he did.”

Inea’s eyes went to the tousled bed. As he opened the door and gestured them out, H’lim told her, “He cut her body into six pieces and smeared her blood around my bathroom.”

The words were out before Titus could stop him. Inea choked and almost gagged. Titus gathered her tight against him, guiding her steps as her eyes closed. “She was dead before that.”

“This is important,” H’lim said. “Titus, he’s not a demon with godlike powers. He’s a fallible mortal, and thanks to you, nothing’s gone right for him in months. Inea has ruined his last, desperate plan. He surely didn’t intend to kill Mirelle.”

“He did. Tourists kill stringers.” Inea shuddered under his arm. He imagined Abbot had explained how he’d taught his son to do it thusly, so she’d never willingly touch Titus again. “Abbot enjoys killing humans.”

“Hacking them apart? Framing blood relatives for it?”

It didn’t sound like a typical Nandoha scheme.

“You’ve got the upper hand,” insisted H’lim. “Not only can you win, but he knows it, and when he learns I’ve joined you at last, he’ll be twice as deadly.”

“You trying to scare me off?” asked Inea.

“No, Dr. Cellura. This isn’t a hopeless, suicidal mission.

We can stop Abbot, possibly without killing him. I don’t kill those of my blood.“

They suited up in the deserted locker room, guarded by H’lim’s powers. Titus, who had labored his way, heart in mouth, through the station before the ban on Influence, marveled at how easily the luren moved through the multiple layers of the surveillance net. “I’ve had a while to study it. Besides, it’s not hard. The instruments are very noisy and their operators are always easy to spot.”

“Their operators?” squeaked Inea.

“H’lim, the control center is across the station!”

The luren looked at them both blankly, holding his vacuum suit’s helmet above his head. “It’s not very far.”

“My God,” whispered Inea, sealing her own helmet.

As he led them to the dock where long-range, enclosed Toyotas were stored, Titus grinned. “Colby would crumble! She’s so sure you can reach only a room or two.”

In the earphones, H’lim sounded uncertain. “Should I have told her?”

“No,” answered Inea gravely. “But if they find out now, you’ll be considered to have kept it a secret, and that will be seen as a threat.”

“I sometimes think I understand Earth’s humans.”