“It is not a matter of helping,” Rrin-saa said, and Roman could almost hear a note of sadness in the whiny alien inflections. “It is a matter of betrayed trust.”
Roman frowned. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand. What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“We brought Quentinninni into our service, Rro-maa. We attached him to a ship, spoke deeply into his mind. In exchange for such service, we promised him care and protection. Instead, we exposed him to great danger. Further, we forced him into such trauma that he entered perasiata as the only way to endure it.” The Tampy gave a wheezing sigh. “How can we now pretend nothing has happened?”
Roman pursed his lips. “It seems to me that circumstances warrant giving yourselves a second chance.”
“We made a promise,” Rrin-saa said simply.
Roman sighed. The Starforce and Senate weren’t going to like this at all… but Amity’s charter specifically stated the Tampies had final say in any decision concerning space horse health. This was close enough. “All right. There’s probably no advantage in sending Quentin off wrapped up in space horse webbing. If you’ll allow me another hour, I’ll send a boat out to remove the stuff properly.”
“That will be acceptable,” Rrin-saa agreed. “Thank you, Rro-maa.”
An hour later, Roman watched from the bridge as Quentin drove swiftly away into the black of space… and wondered if perhaps the Tampies really were too alien for human beings to ever truly understand.
Chapter 22
The hearings convened forty-eight hours later—not in the relative luxury of the Solomon state house this time, but in Earth orbit in the grim starkness of the warship C.S.S. Defiance. At Solomon, the Starforce and Senate had been more or less evenly represented; here, such balance was summarily dispensed with. Military men and women dominated the sessions, with the handful of civilians present participating mainly through intent listening.
The Senator, of course, was one of those civilians. As Ferrol had expected he would be.
But for the first three days they had literally no chance to speak privately. Ferrol’s days were filled to the brim with debriefings; sometimes alone, other times with Roman or Kennedy or Tenzing sharing the stand with him. Nights were likewise filled, with fatigued sleep punctuated by disturbed dreams of sharks and vultures.
And of Prometheus. It had been this same Defiance which had taken him and the other evicted colonists away from their world. More than once, he wondered if choosing this particular ship for the hearings had been someone’s twisted idea of a joke.
Awake, he talked; asleep, he dreamed… and at all times he waited with growing impatience for the Senator to finally draw him aside. On the fourth day, the last one scheduled, he got tired of waiting.
“I’m sorry,” Stefain Reese said, his tone a combination of firm and bland, “but the Senator is really very busy at the moment.”
“He’ll see me,” Ferrol told him, craning his neck to see past the half-closed door into the other part of the office suite. The Senator was there, all right, in deep conversation with another civilian and two military men in heavily decorated dress uniforms. “Tell him who it is.”
The other hesitated just a second, then picked up his phone and murmured into it.
Straining, Ferrol could hear the tone of the Senator’s speech change—“He says for you to go back to your room, Ferrol, that he’ll call you later.”
A quiet alarm bell went off in the back of Ferrol’s brain. The scheduled return to Amity was barely two hours away. “There isn’t going to be any ‘later,’ ” he told Reese. “Tell the Senator I’ll give him one minute to get rid of his guests. After that, I’ll go on in and state my business in front of all of them.”
Reese gave him a long, thoughtful look, as if weighing the feasibility of calling Security. Ferrol countered with a stare of his own; and after a moment Reese dropped his eyes and spoke again into the phone. A short pause—“He’ll be right with you,” he muttered.
Ferrol nodded and, for no particular reason, began counting off the seconds. Fiftyfive of them later, the Senator’s visitors got to their feet and, with only casual glances in Ferrol’s direction, filed out of the suite.
The Senator remained standing in the inner doorway; and as the last of his guests left, his gaze shifted deliberately to Ferrol. A calm gaze, even and totally devoid of emotion. “Commander,” he nodded in a voice that matched the gaze. “Do come in.”
Silently, Ferrol eased past him into the room. This time, the Senator closed the door all the way. “You interrupted an important meeting,” he told Ferrol, crossing to an ornate metal desk in the corner and seating himself behind it.
“I’ll be leaving the Defiance in two hours,” Ferrol told him, successfully fighting the automatic urge to apologize. For once he wasn’t going to let the Senator put him on the defensive right from word one. “Sometime in the next twelve hours Amity’ll get her orders, and it’ll be off to God knows where, for God knows how long. Breaking up a meeting was the only way I was ever going to get to talk to you.”
The Senator lifted an eyebrow. “And what makes you think we have anything to talk about?”
For a long minute Ferrol stared at him. “I don’t understand.”
The Senator’s lip twisted. “Then let me spell it out in block letters: you, Chayne, are no longer in my service.”
Ferrol felt his mouth fall open. “What?” he whispered. “But… why not?”
“Does it matter?” the other asked.
Ferrol swallowed hard, moisture in his eyes making the room swim. The air around him had turned abruptly cold, filled with ice and disapproval and contempt.
Suddenly he was a child again, facing his father’s anger…
He fought the feeling back. He was not a child, and the man facing him was not his father. “Yes,” he gritted out between clenched teeth—clenched so that they wouldn’t chatter with emotion. “It matters. For years now I’ve been one of your best agents—”
“ ‘Best’?” The Senator snorted in a genteel sort of way. “Oh, come now, Chayne, you don’t even fool yourself on that one. You were useful, certainly, but hardly one of the best. That status takes far more years of experience than you’ve even been alive.”
“And I won’t be having any more of that experience now, will I?” Ferrol countered. The helpless childlike feeling was fading, leaving behind a growing anger. “Why?”
“For one thing, there’s a little matter of confidence,” the Senator said, his manner shifting abruptly from daunting to idly offhanded. Perhaps he’d recognized the other approach wasn’t working. “When an agent of mine freely offers classified information to an opponent—well, I’m sure you can see how that could make me reluctant to keep such an agent on.”
It took Ferrol a second to realize just what the hell the other was talking about.
“Senator, we were facing a life and death situation out there,” he growled. “Would you rather I have played dumb with Kheslav’s data and let the shark eat Amity and me both?”
“From what Captain Roman has testified, Kheslav’s data didn’t really seem to help him much.”
“No, it didn’t,” Ferrol conceded. “But that was hardly something I could have known in advance.”
“Perhaps. The fact remains that the datapack was private information, and that you had no business possessing a copy of it in the first place.”
“And that’s the real issue here, isn’t it,” Ferrol said. “The fact that I had illegally obtained information that could be traced to you.”
He expected a reaction of some sort—anger, caution; something that would give him a glimpse into what the other was thinking. But as usual, the Senator denied him even that much. “Illegally obtained?” he asked mildly. “Come now, Chayne—how on Earth can information about a creature orbiting an unclaimed planet be illegally obtained? And as for tracing it back to me, don’t be absurd. I cover my tracks better than that.” The Senator shook his head. “No, Chayne, the real issue here, as you put it, is not whether you and your past activities—any of them—can be linked to me. It’s not even whether or not I can still trust you to function on my behalf; I really only brought up the Kheslav thing to air my disappointment with how you handled the situation. The real issue—” he paused dramatically —“is that we’ve won.”