“Murder,” Perry muttered after a long pause. The height of the storm was almost there, and as the sounds of the wind increased he had become more clearly uncomfortable. Unable to sit still, he was prowling in front of the window, looking out at the threshing ferns and tall grasses, or up at racing clouds ruddy with the rusty light of Amaranth.

“Murder,” he repeated. “Multiple murder. That’s what your request to visit Opal said.”

“It did. But only because I was reluctant to send word of a more serious charge over the Bose Network.” Julius Graves was surely not joking now. “A more accurate word is genocide. I will moderate that, if you prefer, to suspected genocide.”

He stared quietly around him, while new rain lashed the walls and roof. The other two men had frozen, Max Perry motionless in front of the window, Hans Rebka on the edge of his seat.

“Genocide. Suspected genocide. Is there a significant difference?” Rebka asked at last.

“Not from some points of view.” The full lips twitched and trembled. “There is no statute of limitations, in time or space, for the investigation of either. But we have only circumstantial evidence, without proof and without confession. It is my task to seek those. I intend to find them here on Opal.”

Graves reached into the blue-trimmed pocket of his jacket and produced two image cubes. “Improbable as it seems, these are the accused criminals, Elena and Geni Carmel, twenty-one standard years old, born and raised on Shasta. And, as you can see, identical twin sisters.”

He held the cubes out to the other two men. Rebka saw only two young women, deeply tanned, big-eyed, and pleasant looking, dressed in matching outfits of russet green and soft brown. But Max Perry apparently saw something else in those pictures. He gave a gasp of recognition, leaned forward, and grabbed the data cubes. He stared into them. It was twenty more seconds before the tension drained from him and he looked up.

Julius Graves was watching both men. Rebka was suddenly convinced that those misty blue eyes missed nothing. The impression of quaintness and eccentricity might be genuine, or it might be a pose — but underneath it lay a strange and powerful intelligence. And fools did not become Council members.

“You seem to know these girls, Commander Perry,” Graves said. “Do you? If you have ever met them, it is vital that I know when and where.”

Perry shook his head. His face was even paler than usual. “No. It’s just that for a few moments, when I first saw the cubes, I thought they were… someone else. Someone I knew a long time ago.”

“Someone?” Graves waited, and then, when it was clear that Perry would say nothing more, he went on. “I propose to keep nothing from you, and I strongly urge you to keep nothing from me. With your permission, I will allow Steven to tell the rest of this. He has the most complete information, and I find it difficult to speak without emotion clouding my statements.”

The twitching ceased. Graves’s face steadied and took on the look of a younger and happier man. “Okay, here goes,” he said. “The sad story of Elena and Geni Carmel. Shasta’s a rich world, and it lets its youth do pretty much what they like. When the Carmel twins hit twenty-one they were given a little space tourer, the Summer Dreamboat, as a present. But instead of just hopping around their local system, the way most kids do, they talked their family into sticking a Bose Drive in the ship. Then they set off on a real travel binge: nine worlds of the Fourth Alliance, three of the Zardalu Communion. On their final planet, they decided to see life ‘in the rough’ — that’s how their ’grams home put it. It meant they wanted to live in comfort but observe a backward world.

“They landed on Pavonis Four and set up a luxury tent. Pav Four’s a poor, marshy planet of the Communion. Poor now, I should say — rich enough before human developers had a go at it. Along the way, a native amphibian species know as the Bercia were a nuisance. They were almost wiped out, but by that time the planet was picked clean and the developers left. The surviving members of the Bercia — what few there were — were given the probationary status of a potential intelligence. They were protected. At last.”

Graves paused. His face became a changing mask of expressions. It was no longer obvious whether it was Julius or Steven who was speaking.

“Were the Bercia intelligent?” he said softly. “The universe will never know. What we do know is that the Bercia are now extinct. Their last two lodges were wiped out two months ago… by Elena and Geni Carmel.”

“But not by design, surely?” Perry was still clutching the data cubes and staring down at them. “It must have been an accident.”

“It may well have been.” From the serious manner, Julius Graves was again in charge. “We do not know, because when it happened the Carmel twins did not stay to explain. Inexplicably, they fled. They continued to flee, until one week ago we closed the Bose Network to them. And now they can flee no farther.”

The storm had arrived in full force. From outside the building a mournful wail sounded, the cry of a siren audible over the scream of wind and the thresh of rain on the roof. Rebka could still listen to Graves, but some other conditioning in Perry took over. At the first note of the siren he headed for the door.

“A landing! That siren means someone’s in trouble. They’re crazy, if they don’t have the right experience, in a Level Five storm…”

He was gone. Julius Graves began to rise slowly to his feet. He was restrained by Hans Rebka’s grip on his arm.

“They fled,” Rebka prompted. Through the rain-streaked window he could see the lights of a descending aircar, dipping and veering drunkenly in treacherous crosswinds. It was only a few meters from the ground, and he had to get out there himself. But first he had to confirm one thing. “They fled. And they came — to Opal?”

Graves shook his scarred and massive head. “That is what I thought, and that is why I requested a landing here. Steven had calculated that the trajectory had its end-point in the Dobelle system. But when I arrived I spoke at once with the Starside Spaceport monitors. They assured me that no one could have landed a ship with a Bose Drive on this world, without them being aware of it.”

There was a new wail of alarm equipment from outside and the lurid glare of orange-red warning flares. Voices were screaming at each other. Watching at the window, Rebka saw the car touch down, bounce back high into the air, and then flip over to hit upside down. He started for the door, but he was held back by Graves’s sudden and strong grip on his arm.

“When Commander Perry returns, I will inform him of a new request,” Graves said quietly. “We do not want to search Opal. The twins are not here. But they are in the Dobelle system. And that can only mean one thing: they are on Quake.”

He cocked his head, as though hearing the scream of sirens and the sounds of tearing metal for the first time. “We must search Quake, and soon. But for the moment, there seem to be more immediate problems.”