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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


“His name,” Ixil said quietly, “was Dr. Ian Riley.”

We were standing beside the clearing, gazing over the small, uniform mounds in the ground. Mounds I’d assumed were natural undulations.

Mounds I knew now were graves.

“He was one of our theoretical researchers,” Ixil continued. “Six months ago—closer to seven now—he left on a scheduled vacation. Two months after that, he disappeared.”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t just a vacation?” I asked.

“Apparently not,” Ixil conceded. “Sadly, he didn’t share those other plans with anyone else.”

“What was he working on?” Selene asked.

“He had a theory about portals and portal distribution,” Ixil said. “Unfortunately, according to his colleagues, he never thought it had jelled well enough to talk about.”

I snorted. “In retrospect, I’d say it jelled just fine.”

“So it would seem, but we only learned about it after he disappeared and we went through his private journals. Even then, there wasn’t much detail.”

“Except that the portal was on Popanilla?”

“Actually, we thought it was on Armorica,” Ixil said. “He sent a StarrComm message from there to his private journal log saying he was getting close and sounding quite excited. After that, nothing.”

I gazed out over the impromptu graveyard. “So he makes a big show about being on Armorica,” I said slowly. “Complete with a StarrComm transmission just in case he’s not being obvious enough about it. And then he quietly scoots over to Popanilla?”

“That’s my reading, yes,” Ixil said. “Armorica’s only a two-hour flight away, and it has a couple of weekly shuttle runs to Shiroyama Island and the other recreational areas of Popanilla.”

“Trying to throw pursuit off track,” I said, gazing again at the graves. “Only whoever was shadowing him wasn’t fooled. Are we thinking Dent?”

“He’s the obvious candidate,” Ixil said. “But as much as I try, I can’t get the timeline and logic to work. Dent was on Shiroyama at the time Dr. Riley disappeared, but there’s no record of him ever going to Armorica. It seems clear that the two of them had at least a brief conversation, though. Otherwise how would Dent have your name and your connection to Icarus?”

“The timing there works, too,” I pointed out. “Riley’s death is just about the time Dent started his grand search for me.”

“Correct.” On Ixil’s shoulders, his outriders gave a little twitch. “And then, there’s this.”

He handed me the rest of the pictures from the safe. “Go ahead,” he said, waving in invitation. “I’d very much like to hear your take.”

I took the stack, my stomach settling into a knot as I leafed through them. There were several head shots of three other dearly departeds, along with more of the full-body-sprawled pictures like the one Ixil had showed us of Dr. Riley.

Except that the other faces and bodies in Dent’s visual trophy collection weren’t human. Two of them were Iykams.

The third was a Patth.

I looked at Ixil as I passed the pictures to Selene. “So now he’s also killed a Patth?”

“So it would seem,” Ixil confirmed. “And that’s likely to cost him.”

I nodded heavily. He was right on that one. The Patth were not known to treat the death of one of their own in anything approaching a casual manner. “If Dent’s the one who actually pulled the trigger,” I pointed out. “There’s nothing in these photos that really proves that.”

“I thought photographic evidence was sufficient protocol for bounty hunters,” Ixil said. “Documented proof of a successful mission.”

“For bounty hunters, sure,” I pointed out. “But Dent isn’t one. Besides, that protocol requires the pictures be dij so that there’s a time-stamp. Analog photos like this aren’t of any official use.”

“Then why take them?”

“Probably so he’d have something to show around to get an ID,” I said. “Remember he had Riley’s picture when he asked if I knew him.”

“Or he could simply have been recording the scene,” Selene offered. “He was about to bury the bodies, and if he didn’t have photographic evidence of how they were originally laid out, there would be little he could tell the badgemen later.”

“Not that he seems to have told anyone anything about it to date,” I pointed out. “I could also mention that carrying around evidence of four murders isn’t usually considered a smart thing to do.”

“Three,” Selene corrected me. “Dent may have shot the others, but he didn’t kill Dr Riley.” She handed me one of the photos. “There’s blood on the deck beneath the heads of the others. There’s none beneath Riley’s.”

“She’s right,” Ixil said. “That’s something, anyway.”

“Not that it’ll make the Patth feel any better,” I said.

“True,” Ixil conceded. “I suppose we should go inside and see if he left any clues as to where he went. We can look through the rest of the items in the safe later.”

I nodded. Using an Icarus portal left a temporary record of both the destination and home addresses. Unfortunately, those patterns were only held for about fifteen minutes before being erased, and Dent had made it past that threshold long before we came on the scene.

Still, there was a chance he didn’t know we were on to him, in which case he might have left some notes in there. It was a slim hope, but right now it was all we had.

We made our way across the rocky terrain to the exposed section of the portal. Selene found the spot where Dent had pressed his hand when he’d opened the hatch earlier, and at Ixil’s direction held her own hand there until there was a soft click and a section popped open. Ixil caught the edge of the hatch and pulled it open the rest of the way, swinging it a full one-eighty degrees around invisible hinges until it was up against the main hull. He continued pressing; and to my amazement the entire hatch seemed to melt into the hull, leaving the portal with the familiar rectangular opening but no obvious way of closing it.

“I wondered how Alpha stayed sealed way out there in deep space,” I commented as Ixil stooped and shone his light inside. “How do you get the hatch back closed?”

“Same way I opened it, except in reverse,” Ixil said. “You can also set it to open inward if you prefer.” He eased his way into the hatchway, and disappeared inside. I glanced at the edge of the forest behind me, confirming as best I could that no one was skulking out there, and followed.

Entering a portal was the kind of experience that no one who’d never done it could ever quite be prepared for. The main sphere—the receiver module, the one I was currently climbing into—was about forty meters across, with a gravity field radiating outward from the center with “up” everywhere perpendicular to the curved surface. Walking along the hull was literally like a stroll along a walkway, except that looking anywhere except directly in front of you was an invitation to vertigo and falling flat on your face. The other sphere, the launch module, was about half the diameter of the receiver, with a similar radial grav field of its own. The two spheres were connected by a rectangular opening, with the transition between the two and their associated grav fields even more of a challenge for the uninitiated to navigate.

Fortunately, Selene and I had plenty of practice. I finished getting into the receiver module, confirmed that Selene was climbing in gracefully behind me, and turned toward the launch module interface halfway around the sphere.

And came to a sudden stop. Ixil had taken a few steps toward the hatchway and then suddenly stopped, his head tilted back as he stared straight up across the sphere. “What’s the matter?” I asked, following his sight line and seeing absolutely nothing.

“This sphere is much smaller than all the others,” he said, gesturing. “It’s no more than twenty meters across, half the size of a normal receiver module.”

I squinted upward. He was right. “Is that a problem?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “All of the others have had a uniform diameter of exactly forty point three six meters.”

I looked at Selene, got a small shrug in return. “Well, you do only have three samples,” I reminded him. “Maybe this one was made for people on a budget.”

Ixil didn’t answer. For another moment he remained standing, then lowered his gaze and continued toward the launch module. “Let’s see if there are any other surprises.”

He reached the interface and did the lie-down-and-roll maneuver that continued to be the best way to cross the spheres’ opposing gravitational fields. I gave him a moment to regain his feet and move away from the opening, then lay down at the edge and did my own roll. I gave my inner ear a moment to adjust, then stood up and stepped away, looking around the sphere. It looked like all the others I’d seen: the inner surface covered by monitors and control boards, lots of cables snaking everywhere, all of it held in place by a flexible mesh that covered the whole inside. Across from us, a slender, black-and-silver-banded extension arm stretched out into the center of the sphere.

“Gregory,” Selene murmured from behind me, a sudden tension in her voice.

I looked straight up. Like the half-sized receiver module out there, this sphere was also only about half the usual thirty-meter diameters of the Icarus, Alpha, and Firefall launch modules. “Yes, I see,” I said. “Definitely the budget version.”

“Not there,” Ixil said, his voice suddenly odd. “Look at the control board.”

Frowning, I shifted my attention to that section of the surface.

The control board wasn’t there.

Not wrecked, or removed, or even just covered up. It simply wasn’t there. Not only that, but with other sets of controls and displays taking up that space, there was no indication that one had ever been there.

“He was right,” Ixil murmured. “Dr. Riley’s theory postulated there could be sets of permanently linked portal dyads. It appears he found one.”

“Dyads?” Selene asked.

“A pair of portals permanently linked to each other,” Ixil explained. “And only to each other.”

“But why?” I asked, my brain still trying to catch up. “Why build something this complicated and advanced, and then have it only go one place?”

“I don’t know,” Ixil said. “But at least we won’t have any trouble figuring out where Dent went.”

“Won’t we?” I asked. “Do we know this is one of Dr. Riley’s dyads?”

“What else could it be?” Ixil asked.

“What else could it be?” I countered. “Oh, come on, Ixil—use your imagination. It could be a trap, something leading directly to the creators’ version of hell. It could be their version of a magic mystery tour. Step in, ride the extension arm up, and then figure out where it sent you. Heaps of fun.”

“No,” Selene said firmly. “Dent’s clearly been using this portal. Without a home address indicator in here for him to copy down, there’s no way he’d be able to return.”

“Unless the addresses only show up at the other end,” I shot back.

But she was right, and as my confusion-driven consternation started to fade I could see she had a good handle on the internal logic of the place. Besides, Dent would hardly still be using it if it wasn’t safe and reliable. “Fine,” I said. “I suppose you’re going to want us to go through and see what’s at the other end?”

“I could send Pix through first if you’d like,” Ixil suggested. “For once, there won’t be any tricky key-setting logistics involved in getting him back.”

“Thanks for the offer,” I said, walking over to the extension arm. “But Dent might still be hanging out in there, and I’d like to keep you and the outriders our little secret for the moment. No, no—hold back a minute,” I added as Selene started to join me. “I’ll go first. Give me two minutes before you follow.”

“All right,” Selene said. “Be careful.”

I gave her my best shot at a confident smile. “Absolutely.”

I reached the extension arm and got a loose grip around it. The gravitational field around me shifted, starting me on my leisurely journey upward and inward toward the center of the launch module. I was nearly to the gray trigger section when it belatedly occurred to me that we had no idea whether there were other controls we had to turn on or off to make this thing go.

Fortunately, the portal’s creators really had apparently decided this was to be a simple back-and-forth operation. The end of the arm turned the familiar luminescent gray, and as I arrived I closed my fingers firmly around it. There was the usual low-level electrical-type tingle, and the world around me went black. Mentally, I counted down the seconds—as with all the other portal trips I’d taken, there were three of them—and then the lights went back on again, and I was somewhere else.

In this case, somewhere else being the center of the Popanilla portal’s twin’s receiver module.

I looked around as I floated downward. Unlike the portal I’d just left, this one definitely had the lived-in look. On one side of the curved surface was a full camping setup, including a folding chair, a hammock stand, and one of the light-weight mesh hammocks Dent had talked about during our hike. A food cabinet and a small cooker were over in another area, while a small chemical toilet sat off by itself. Sitting on the deck near the hammock was a small rectangular box, presumably the jewelry case Pax had seen Dent take from the safe on Popanilla.

As my father used to say, Home may be where the heart is, but the heart is usually happy enough if it can find a place where no one’s shooting at it.

I reached the deck, coming to the slightly jarring landing that was typical with portals. I walked over to the launch module and checked inside, just in case Dent was hanging out in there—this one didn’t have a control board, either—and was sorting through the jewelry case when I felt a subtle movement of air above me that indicated Selene’s arrival. “Looks like we’re alone,” I called up to her. “Can you find the hatch? The whole surface in here looks the same to me.”

“Yes, as soon as I land,” she said. “Is that the jewelry case Ixil mentioned?”

“Probably,” I said, holding it up so she could get a better view. “Very pricey collection of stuff, too.”

“You think Dent stole it?”

“I assume someone did,” I said. “Dent may just be the delivery team. Tera said he was moving into smuggling, remember?”

“He certainly has an interesting setup for that kind of job.”

“Oh, it’s about as perfect as you can get,” I agreed. “You fly your stolen goods to Popanilla, stroll out into the woods and hop down the rabbit hole, hand them over to the recipient here—wherever here is—and hop back before anyone who was tracking you can even think about looking elsewhere. From that point on, they can watch you lift, even get a warrant and board your ship, and they’ll have nothing to show for it.”

I walked over to the food locker and popped it open. “And if they’re hunting you on Popanilla, you just settle in here with your . . . looks like about three weeks’ worth of food and water.”

“Or he could go back to Popanilla occasionally if he wanted to hunt for fresh food,” Selene pointed out as she came to her own slightly jerky landing. “Those sugarbirds would certainly be easy to catch.”

“Didn’t look like they had much meat on them, though. Hatch?”

“Yes, I’m on it.”

It took less than a minute for her to find the lingering scent of Dent’s hand on one of the plates near where he’d left the jewelry case. She tried pressing her hand against it, as Ixil had showed her how to do on the Popanilla hatch, but this time nothing happened.

“You think he’s figured out a way to lock it?” I asked, frowning as I gave it a try of my own.

“That wouldn’t be very hard to do if it’s set to swing outward,” Selene pointed out. “A bar across the hatch would do the trick.”

“Ixil said you could also set it to swing inward,” I reminded her. “We’ll ask him how to do that. So what can you tell me?”

Her nostrils and eyelashes fluttered, her pupils looking focused and thoughtful. “There’s white jasmine and cinnamon,” she said. “Quite a lot of the former, less of the latter. Other trees and plants, as well, but I don’t know any of them. There’s some kind of copper-based metal—brass or bronze, I think—and some worked stone or at least stone-based dust. There’s also a hint of woodfire smoke.”

“How much?”

She shook her head. “Not very.”

So less likely to be some out-of-the-way primitive part of the Spiral and more likely just some open-air cooking. “What else?”

“I smell humans, k’Tra, and Ulkomaals,” she said. “Probably proportionally in that order, though it’s always difficult with k’Tra.”

I nodded as I headed back to the food locker. K’Tra social status was based on a sliding scale of perfumery, and since they’d enthusiastically adopted a lot of other aliens’ scent choices over the centuries a wealthy k’Tra could easily be mistaken for an over-aromatic human.

“So a place with humans, k’Tra, Ulkomaals, outdoor cooking, and a mix of fancy nature and decorative metal and stonework,” I concluded, pulling out some of the food packages and checking their labels. “Also where you can buy Pachli noodles, BCohn tortellini, and—ah!—Paparry Zindiroon Spice packets. That one’s got to be local. Great.”

I took pictures of the three packages, plus several more of everything just for good measure. “Time to head back,” I said. “I’ll hike over to Trailhead and have the admiral run everything though the computer. Maybe he can figure out what’s at the other end of the rabbit hole before we have to go through it.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” she asked as we headed toward the launch module.

“No, I’ll be fine on my own,” I assured her. “I’d rather you stay with Ixil and help him sort through Dent’s safe. You might spot something he would miss.”

“Or that he doesn’t want us to know about?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said.

“But you’d think it?”

I scowled. “Damn right I would.”

* * *

It was still dark when I set off for Trailhead and whatever passed for civilization here on Shiroyama Island. Ixil insisted on sending Pix along to help me find my way back again, and together he and I trooped our way through the trees and undergrowth, me making a lot more noise than the little outrider despite the fact that I had a light and he didn’t.

Ixil had once told us that on the Kalixiri homeworld outriders in the wild were able to hunt and take down large animals. A part of me rather hoped I’d get to see that happen someday.

There were a few early risers on the Trailhead streets, mostly hikers getting breakfast before setting off into the wilderness. The StarrComm center was another fifteen kilometers past the town itself, but fortunately there were plenty of quick-rent runarounds parked along the quiet streets. I helped myself to one, and fifteen minutes later was sitting in a booth facing a slightly bleary-eyed image of Admiral Sir Graym-Barker. Ten minutes after that I’d finished describing the situation and the Icarus Group computers were busy trying to figure out from my clues exactly where the end of Dent’s rabbit hole was.

I hadn’t expected Graym-Barker to let me stay on the line while the analysts finished their work, not at StarrComm’s rates, and I was right. He told me to get some breakfast and call him back in an hour.

Typically, the area around a StarrComm center had one or two all-day diners, and this one was no exception. I treated myself to a nice meal and then, with half an hour to spare, I went into one of the hiking-gear stores and did a bit of shopping. Exactly one hour after Graym-Barker sent me away I was back in the booth.

And rather to my surprise, they’d come up with an answer.

* * *

“The admiral thinks Twin B is somewhere in or near the Erymant Temple in Malfatti City on Fidelio,” I reported to Selene and Ixil when Pix and I finally made it back. “The temple is a large complex of marker steles and ruined buildings left by some unknown civilization a few thousand years ago, long before humans and k’Tra started colonizing the planet.”

“Two hundred forty-three light-years away,” Selene murmured, scrolling down the pages on her info pad. “Interesting. We traveled from Draelon on Brandywine to Dent on Gremon and then to Popanilla; and now the portal is taking us right back toward Brandywine again.”

“Yes, I noticed,” I said. “We would have saved ourselves about eight days and a hell of a lot of trouble if we’d known. Anyway, the admiral said the temple was first dug up about fifty years ago, and for a while was quite the local attraction. There were guided tours, lecture programs, and souvenir shops and restaurants set up right on the grounds. You could even book one of the conference rooms or lecture-hall chambers for your company meetings or parties.”

“Doesn’t sound like a place that would lend itself to stealthy entrances and exits,” Ixil commented.

“Not back then it wasn’t,” I said. “But it’s a lot more sneakable now. Interest in the place has been waning for the past twenty years, and five years ago the company that owned and operated it went under. Right now the temple and grounds are pretty much a ghost town, though a few tourists probably still pick their way through the weeds from time to time.”

“And if the portal is within the temple grounds, there seem to be a number of blind corners and visual blockages that would help protect Dent from view as he came and went,” Selene said, scrolling through the info pad pictures.

“I guess we’ll find out,” I said. “As my father used to say, The best way to be invisible is to just avoid everyone.” I nodded toward the partially disassembled safe. “So what else did he have in his stash?”

“A few more of the pictures you saw earlier,” Ixil said. “A couple each of Dr. Riley, the Patth, and the two Iykams. There was another jewelry case, and a red-edged document in a script I don’t recognize that I’m guessing may be part of an extortion or blackmail scheme. He also had a fair number of less-official documents in English that look like coded bills of sale or transfer.”

“We’re thinking those are connected to his smuggling business,” Selene added.

“We can hand them over to ISLE once we’re done analyzing them,” Ixil said. “Someone there may be able to match the dates and locations to known crimes. There were also two corona guns.”

“Matching the two dead Iykams in Dent’s pictures,” I said wincing. “If it’s all the same with you, I’ll just hang onto your DubTrub for the moment.”

“No problem,” Ixil assured me. “Which leads nicely to the last and most interesting items in the safe. Namely, fourteen of these.” He pulled a short, thick, black cylinder from a pocket and offered it to me. “Look familiar?”

I frowned as I took it. My first thought was that it looked like a quick-load for the DubTrub, with the four 2mm barrels forming an orderly array inside the outer shell. It was definitely the right size and shape, but the usual connection coupling for that kind of swap-out was gone. Instead, the non-business-end of the cylinder had been replaced by a three-centimeter extension that was in turn mounted on some sort of triple gimbal and a high-strength adhesive pad.

“Selene says it looks like your description of the weapon Dent’s brother was firing through the curtain at the Roastmeat Bar on Gremon,” Ixil added.

“Well, the front end of it does, anyway,” I confirmed, peering down the barrels. The tips of the four tiny missiles were just visible, black against the black of the barrels. I also noted that a 04 had been scratched into the side of the cylinder’s extension. “We never saw the back end, so I don’t know if it had this same extension. Looks handmade, by the way—there’s no serial number or place for one. These numbers etched into the side all different?”

“The way they were laid out started at zero-three on the far left, went to twelve, and then started over at zero-one,” Selene said. “The one you’re holding was the farthest on the right.”

“Any idea what the numbers signify?”

“They identify which cylinder is which, obviously,” Ixil said. “Aside from that, I don’t know if they have another purpose.”

“I guess we’ll just have to ask him,” I said, putting the cylinder in my pocket. “I think it’s time we headed through and checked out the other end. Selene, you coming with me or staying here to help Ixil with his inventory?”

“The inventory’s basically done,” Ixil said. “If you two want to head to Fidelio, I could go to the Aerie StarrComm center and copy these documents to the admiral.”

“Or you could stay here and keep watch in case Dent gets past us,” Selene said. “He’s surely going to return sometime for the jewels and papers.”

“I think it unlikely he’ll try to move more than one item at a time,” I told her. “Since he’s already got the one jewelry case—and hasn’t yet delivered its contents—it should be a while before he comes back for more.”

“I agree,” Ixil said. “Which is why I think I should go to Aerie now, so that I can be back before he returns.”

“Seems reasonable,” I said. “Oh, and I bought some camping gear to make future stakeouts a bit more comfortable. There’s a better collection of packaged food, some woodland tools, and three inflatable mattresses, plus blankets and rain canopies.”

“I doubt we’re going to be here that long,” Ixil said.

“You never know.” I turned to Selene. “You still don’t look happy with all this.”

“I’m concerned about Ixil being out of touch if we need backup,” she said. “We don’t actually know Dent won’t be coming back soon.”

“We’ll be all right,” I soothed. “Remember, Dent doesn’t know we know anything about Icarus or the portals, let alone that we’ve found Twin A. He won’t be expecting us to suddenly show up in Twin B.”

“Castor and Pollux,” Ixil murmured.

I frowned. “What?”

“Not Twin A and Twin B,” he said. “The names in Dr. Riley’s journal for his theoretical Gemini portals were Castor and Pollux.

I opened my mouth to ask a bit snidely if this was the same Dr. Riley who’d caused infinite grief for all of us by playing his cards so close to his chest that we couldn’t even find the damn things after he disappeared. But Ixil would probably take exception to the tone of any such question. Even if he didn’t, Selene almost certainly would. “Fine,” I said. “In that case Dent doesn’t know we’ve found Castor and are planning to pop out of Pollux.”

“Maybe,” Selene said, her pupils still unconvinced. With her full attention on the problem at hand, she might not even have noticed that I was being snarky. “But there’s also his brother to consider, and we don’t have any idea where he is right now.”

“Good point,” I agreed. “Ixil?”

“I don’t know how Weston Dent could have gotten here from Gremon this quickly,” he said. Still, he didn’t sound entirely confident. “But we can’t just wait for things to happen. We know Easton is on Fidelio, and we have to move on that knowledge before we lose all initiative.”

“I have to agree,” I said, looking back at Selene. “It’ll be all right, Selene. He’ll never see us coming. Come on, let’s go.”

I was right about that, as it turned out. He didn’t. But as my father used to say, Just because you’re right doesn’t necessarily mean you understand what the hell is going on.

* * *

During the time I was in Aerie, Ixil had shown Selene the launch module control that switched the receiver module hatch from outward-swinging to inward-swinging. He’d also revealed that portals typically had a large number of possible hatches around the receiver rim that could be opened as circumstances and the positioning of the portal required, and showed her how to choose among them.

It was, in retrospect, a fairly obvious design feature, especially given that the majority of the portals the Icarus group had located had been at least partially buried. All the more reason for me to be quietly embarrassed that that possibility of such an option had never even occurred to me.

In this case, the Pollux receiver module hatch that Selene had identified as Dent’s turned out to be surprisingly convenient, opening up into a blind corner and situated at right angles to Fidelio’s own gravitational field. It also had a snakelike bronze bar wiggling its way across the outside, which explained why we hadn’t been able to push it open earlier. Selene confirmed that no one was nearby, I shoved the bar upward out of the way, and we rolled our way outside.

The articles and pictures of the Erymant Temple Selene had showed me had been pretty impressive. The reality of the place, as we moved out into the grounds, was even more so. Narrow passageways lined with carved and decorated stone pillars would suddenly open up into broader avenues or gathering areas set between the various buildings. The walkways were all tiled with dusty, closely fitted flagstones, while the buildings were all curves and arches, their white stone highlighted with more of the serpentine bronze metal trim that meandered across the surfaces like frozen ivy. It was evening in this part of Fidelio, and as I gazed out into the fading light I could imagine vaguely shaped aliens in toga-style outfits strolling serenely along the flagstones, conversing in melodious tones.

But there weren’t any such exotic aliens here, or even any of the crowds of tourists that had once come to gaze at the quiet grandeur. Selene and I were alone, staring at the deserted ruins in the fading light.

So what the hell was a portal doing here?

Selene touched my arm, jolting me out of my musings. Her nostrils were fluttering, her head moving slowly back and forth as she sampled the air. “Four humans,” she murmured, pointing to the textured wall to our left. “That direction.”

“Dent?” I murmured back.

“No,” she said slowly, her eyelashes joining in the analysis. “But I can smell him. I think they’ve had recent contact with him.”

His buyers? Possibly. But in that case, why were they poking around out here instead of making tracks for the nearest spaceport or runaround rental? “You’re sure Dent’s not with them?” I asked.

“No, he isn’t,” Selene said, her pupils suddenly tense. “But I think . . . Gregory, I can smell blood.

“Dent’s blood.”


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