"I do not know any way," Doctor-Cavan-a said, her voice quiet. "I am sorry."

For a few beats the metal room was silent. The metal prison. "Then what do we do?" Prr't-zevisti asked at last. "How can we stop the war?"

"I do not know any way," Doctor-Cavan-a said again. "We must try to think of a way."

She turned around and pushed the door open just far enough for her to slip through. "You go?" Prr't-zevisti asked.

"I must go," Doctor-Cavan-a said. "My commander has ordered me to stay away from you until he decides."

"But—"

"I am sorry, Prr't-zevisti. Farewell for now."

She slipped out through the opening, swinging the door shut behind her. It closed with a muffled boom.

And Prr't-zevisti was once again alone.

"The fools," he murmured aloud. "The irresponsible fools."

The words echoed through his mind and faded into silence. So it was over. His own people had abandoned him here; and now the Humans themselves had rejected the truth.

Which made them doubly fools, because with that rejection they had resigned themselves to their own destruction. The Zhirrzh warriors would win this war, just as they always won. And it would serve the Humans right.

He flicked his tongue in disgust. It would serve them right... but he knew perfectly well that he couldn't just sit by and let that happen. Not if there was any way to stop it. He'd been a warrior once, a warrior of the proud and noble Dhaa'rr clan. True warriors made war only in self-defense.

Which meant he would just have to find a way to convince Doctor-Cavan-a and her Human commander that he was telling the truth.

And hope that until then neither the Humans nor the Zhirrzh did anything that would inflame the war so much that nothing he could do would stop it.

Bronski shook his head. "I don't know, Cavanagh. It seems to me that if it was this easy, someone at Command would have come up with it by now."

"There's a good chance someone has," Lord Cavanagh said, running his eye over the numbers one more time. With access to Bronski's ship computer he'd finally been able to nail down the idea that had been floating nebulously around his mind during all those days stuck on Granparra. "On the other hand, maybe not. Peacekeeper Command may be concentrating on high heat-capacity materials. If they're even experimenting with ablative coatings at all."

"Oh, you can bet they're concentrating on pretty much everything," Bronski assured him, flipping through the graphs on the display again and stopping at a sharply rising hyperbolic curve. "These philo-plant leaves really behave like this?"

"Trust me," Cavanagh assured him. "The R-and-D group that first tested them thought they'd found the ideal circuit-board material: tough yet flexible, and with a better semimagnetic profile than even sloanmetal."

"Not to mention free," Bronski murmured.

"Right," Cavanagh said. "The Palisades Alps were practically covered with the things. Anyway, the team thought they had their bonuses already in the bank on this one. They had fifteen hundred boards made up and flown to Avon for further tests."

He smiled tightly at the memory. "And then someone tried laser-welding components onto them; and bingo: vapor defocusing."

"Yeah," Bronski muttered. "You realize, of course, that defocusing a welding laser is a far cry from doing the same to those big war lasers the Zhirrzh use."

"Of course," Cavanagh said. "These self-cohesion curves might easily break down under that sort of flash-heating. But I think it's at least an avenue worth exploring further."

"I suppose," Bronski agreed grudgingly. "Sure, get it written up and we'll send it out on the next skitter headed for Earth or Edo."

"Brigadier?" Kolchin's voice called. "Nearly time to mesh in."

"Thanks," Bronski said, brushing past Cavanagh and heading up into the control room.

Cavanagh filed away his calculations and followed, arriving just as Bronski was replacing Kolchin in the pilot's seat. "I hope we'll be exercising a certain amount of discretion," he commented, sitting down behind the brigadier.

"I wasn't planning on charging in with shredders blazing and making wholesale arrests, if that's what you mean," Bronski said. "Don't worry, I know how to sneak into places."

"The ship has a false ID signal?" Kolchin asked.

"You'd be amazed at the assortment of ID signals it has," Bronski replied. "Here we go."

From somewhere beneath them came the rattle of multiple relays snapping open. The blackness outside the canopy became a brief illusion of a tunnel; and then the stars flowed back into their proper places surrounding the planet ahead. "Looks like we're about a half hour out," Bronski said, giving his displays a quick survey.

"What do we do about passports?" Cavanagh asked. "Or were you planning on leaving us on the ship while you snoop around?"

"Tempting thought," Bronski said. "But knowing you, you'd probably steal it. Here."

He tossed a pair of dark-green passports—Arcadian issue?—back over his headrest. Cavanagh caught them and opened them up.

They were Arcadian, all right, made out to a father-and-son merchandising team of Baccar and Gil Fortunori. Cavanagh's and Kolchin's photos and thumbprints were already imprinted beneath the tamper proofing. "Impressive," Cavanagh said, handing Kolchin his passport. "Who do you get to be?"

"Jan-michael Marchand," Bronski said. "Your pilot and cultural facilitator." He threw Cavanagh a look over the back of his chair. "Which means I do all the talking while you two stand in the background grinning like harmless innocents. Got it?"

"I think we can handle the roles," Cavanagh said, sliding his new passport into his jacket.

"Good," Bronski said, turning back to his board. "I tucked some background info on your characters into the backs of the passports. I suggest you get to know yourselves."

The Prime gazed down into the carrier box that Speaker Cvv-panav had just dropped unceremoniously onto his desk. "All right," he said, looking up again. "It's a fsss organ. So?"

"It's not just any fsss organ, Overclan Prime," the Speaker for Dhaa'rr bit out. "It's Prr't-zevisti's fsss organ. You remember Prr't-zevisti?"

"It would be hard to forget him," the Prime said dryly. "Certainly not after all the Dhaa'rr petitions I've received calling for Commander Thrr-mezaz's removal. I was under the impression that the Dhaa'rr clan was preparing final rites for him."

Cvv-panav smiled. "You hide your disappointment well, Overclan Prime. I'm sure you would have preferred to have the evidence destroyed in the ceremony of fire. Tell me, did you and Thrr-gilag make the arrangements together to take an illegal cutting of this fsss? Or was your role merely to assist in burying the crime after its commission?"

With the ease of many cyclics of practice, the Prime kept his gaze steady and his tail spinning serenely. "That's a very serious allegation, Speaker Cvv-panav. Have you any proof that Searcher Thrr-gilag was involved in any illegal acts?"

"I have proof that some of the semiliquid material from the interior of this fsss was removed by needle," Cvv-panav said. "I can also prove that Thrr-gilag visited the Prr-family shrine shortly before the tampering was discovered."

"I see," the Prime nodded. "And for how many cyclics before Thrr-gilag's visit had the fsss been resting unexamined in its niche?"

"That's irrelevant."

"Is it?" the Prime countered. "Seems to me it's the first question a jurist would ask."

For a long beat Cvv-panav gazed at him, a mixture of speculation and irritation on his face. "This is the key, Overclan Prime," he said softly. "The key to bringing you down."

"Undoubtedly," the Prime said with a sigh. "And I wish you good luck when you've taken over the burden of running the eighteen worlds. For right now, though, that's still my job. If you'll excuse me, I have a great deal of work to do."