Ferrol grimaced. No, not really. Not any more. “The mechanisms and methods aren’t important,” he told Roman shortly. “What’s important is that the Tampies’

very presence in and around human space is a threat to us… and that threat’s going to end.” He focused on Kennedy. “I gave you an order, Lieutenant.”

For a moment he thought she was going to refuse. Then, without a word, she turned away from his gaze and swiveled back to her console. A brief, low conversation with the Handler, and a minute later Amity was moving again. “What’s our ETA?”

he asked as Sleipnir reached the indicated two gees.

“About seventy minutes,” she said, not looking back.

Giving them just under an hour to destroy a section of webbing and get out of the way before the sharks arrived. Should be adequate. “Very good,” he nodded.

“Rrin-saa also said they’d like to know why we’re going there,” she added.

“Tell them we’re helping them do the honorable thing,” he growled. “Let them figure it out from there.”

Beside him, Roman stirred. “Commander, I wonder if I might see you in my office for a moment,” he said quietly. “When you have the time, of course.”

Ferrol frowned up at him, a ripple of suspicion running through him. “Anything you want to say to me you can say right here,” he told the other.

Roman shook his head, his face unreadable. “What I have to say is strictly confidential.”

Ferrol gnawed his lower lip. Confidential, hell—Roman was up to something, and they both knew it. But what? Some kind of attempt to overturn or get around the Senate directive? By having Kennedy secretly Jump them back to the Cordonale, perhaps, and getting someone there to countermand the directive via tachyon?

Or did Roman have something else in mind? Something more direct, perhaps?

“You realize, I trust,” he said quietly, “that if anything happens to me, the Amity will be trapped here. I doubt very much the Scapa Flow will clear out the vultures’

optical net unless the order to do so comes from me.”

He held his breath, wondering if Roman would sense that the warning was at least fifty percent bluff. But the other merely cocked an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting,”

he asked mildly, “that I might engage in mutiny against a legally appointed commander?”

Ferrol glared at him, the uncertainty curdling in his stomach… but there was only one way to find out for sure what the other had in mind. “Kennedy, you have command of the bridge,” he said, unstrapping himself and standing up carefully against two gees’ worth of weight. “I’ll be in the captain’s office; continue our course, and alert me of any change in the situation with the sharks.”

“Acknowledged,” she said, not turning around.

Ferrol turned to Roman, and for a moment the two men eyed each other. Then, Ferrol raised a hand, gestured toward the door. “After you, Captain.”

And besides, nothing Roman could do now would make any real difference.

Whatever happened to Ferrol or the Amity, the Tampies had already lost.

“You won’t mind, I trust,” Ferrol said as the office door buzzed and slid open, “if I sit at the desk.”

Roman cocked an eyebrow at him. “So that you can watch the door?”

“So that I can watch the helm repeater,” Ferrol corrected shortly, circling the desk and dropping into the chair. Keeping an eye on Amity’s progress really was his primary concern, he told himself firmly. The fact that this way Roman would be between him and any unannounced visitors was purely coincidental. “So. What’s this confidential news you need to tell me?”

Roman sat down across from him, and for a moment studied Ferrol in silence.

“That Senate directive of yours is dated over a year ago,” he said at last. “You’ve had it ever since you first came aboard the Amity.”

“That’s right,” Ferrol nodded. “It was my guarantee that you wouldn’t rig things so as to snowdrift the data from our wonderful mixed-crew experiment.”

“But you didn’t use it then,” Roman pointed out.

“There was no need,” Ferrol snorted. “The experiment was a disaster, and everyone knew it. If Pegasus hadn’t come out of left field with that calf, Amity would have been decommissioned and you’d have been sent back to the Dryden. We’d have become a footnote in some obscure Starforce report somewhere, and that would have been the end of it.”

“Agreed; but that’s my point. If the data so overwhelmingly supported the anti- Tampy viewpoint, and you were so afraid I’d hide it, why didn’t you take command when we first returned to Solomon after our mission?”

Ferrol opened his mouth; closed it again. Somehow, the question had never even occurred to him. “I don’t know,” he had to admit. “I suppose… well, I suppose I’d decided I could trust you to be honest.”

Roman nodded, an oddly intense look on his face. “And that’s what it ultimately boils down to, isn’t it? Trust. None of us can ever truly know everything, at least not in the sense of personal, firsthand experience. Our knowledge, our opinions, even many of our deepest beliefs—all of them hinge on the reliability of other people.”

“If you’re wondering if my directive is valid—”

“Oh, I’m sure it is,” Roman assured him. “Perhaps your former sponsers would repudiate it now, but by the time we’re in a position to ask them our activities here will be a fait accompli. We both know that.”

“Then if you have a point, I’d appreciate it if you’d get to it,” Ferrol growled, the hairs on the back of his neck beginning to tingle. This was it: Roman was about to launch his countermove.

“The point,” Roman said, “is in a black envelope in my desk. Bottom right-hand drawer.”

“You have a Senate directive of your own?” Ferrol asked, trying for a sardonic tone even as a shiver ran up his back.

Roman shook his head silently.

For a moment Ferrol eyed him. Then, steeling himself, he reached down, making sure to keep Roman in his peripheral vision at all times, and keyed open the drawer. The envelope was large and thick and—especially in two gees—remarkably heavy.

And across its flap was plastered a blood-red TOP SECRET label.

He frowned at Roman. “What is this?” he demanded.

“Open it and find out,” Roman told him.

Ferrol looked down at the envelope, wondering vaguely what the penalty was for unauthorized entry. But Roman was hardly the type to pull something so petty as trying to get him into minor bureaucratic trouble this way. With a quick slash of his hand, he broke open the seal and pulled out the folder inside.

And on its cover…

He looked sharply at Roman, a sudden pain shooting through his heart. “Yes,”

Roman said quietly. “It’s the official report on the Prometheus colony. I thought it was time you knew the truth.”

Chapter 29

Ferrol stared at the other across the desk, heart thudding painfully. “Where did you get this?” he demanded, his voice sounding strained and hoarse in his ears.

“From the Senate records,” Roman said.

“From your pro-Tampy friends, you mean,” Ferrol bit out. His hands were beginning to tremble; viciously, he jammed his palms against the edge of the desktop to silence them. “So what exactly is it?—just very heavily slanted in their favor, or a straight out-and-out forgery?”

Roman cocked an eyebrow. “You seem awfully vehement,” he said calmly, “for someone who doesn’t even know what’s in the report.”

Ferrol clenched his teeth, the ghosts and memories of Prometheus twisting through his mind and gut. “My parents’ hopes are in there,” he gritted. “Their hopes, and their dreams, and their lives. I know what happened on Prometheus, damn you.”

“Then read it for my sake,” Roman said. His voice was still calm, but there was a hard glint in his eyes. “So that you can enlighten me as to where I’ve been lied to.”