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Chapter Seventeen
Somewhere between Dharampal and Thamboon on Kalapriya

The morning sunlight flashed off the High Jagirs, turning their snow-covered peaks into a fantasia of gold and crystal. Below, the shadows covered a world of rocky cliffs and deep green forest; above, there was nothing but an endless blue so pale and thin that it made Maris even colder to look up at it. As Gabrel sighed with satisfaction at the vista opening before them, she reflected that it would probably be hours before any of that sunshine reached the hillside where they were making their way up something that might be laughingly referred to as a path. The disadvantages of dirtside living never ceased to amaze her; imagine having to wait for hours just to get the lights turned on!

"There's Bald Wizard," Gabrel pointed out a slightly rounded peak to the right side of the range, "and Old Snow Lady beside him." Maris supposed that the double cones of the second mountain's outline made the reason for the name obvious enough. If you thought like a man.

"And there," he said with a reverence that Maris found intensely irritating, "there is Ayodhana herself." He indicated a distant peak that dwarfed the others into mere foothills.

"If we have to walk all the way to the top of that mountain, we'll maybe get there some time next century," Maris grumbled. "Might as well go back to Valentin now." Valentin had been looking better and better to her during the long hours of night climbing. She had a blister on her right heel, and she felt as filthy as she had before that lovely bath in Harsajjan Bharat's house, and there were permanent wires of pain running from her feet up through her hips—and for what? All that walking to get them into the middle of nowhere? Valentin might be primitive, but it had houses and food stalls and places to sleep that didn't have sharp rocks sticking into your hip bone.

"Nobody climbs Ayodhana," Gabrel said, sounding shocked. "She is the sacred mountain."

"Yeah, and these caves yer friend wants us to go to—they're sacred too, right?" Maris pointed out. "And that doesn't seem to've stopped the Bashir from turning them into some kind of weapons locker, or whatever."

Gabrel looked sick. "I'm afraid it's not exactly—"

Chulayen interrupted him and said something in a low, agitated voice, pointing back the way they had come. "Hai, hai," Gabrel agreed before turning back to Maris. "We need to keep moving. There are tribesmen in Dharampal who know these trails much better than Chulayen does. If they realize we haven't gone straight back to Valentin, they'll have trackers out checking the trails. But if we can cross into Thamboon before they catch up with us, the Vakil won't send anybody over the border. Probably."

"And what if it's not the Vakil tracking us, but that ugly bastard from Udara?"

"That," Gabrel said, "is an extremely good reason to keep moving."

Fortunately, the next segment of the trail was not as grueling as the rocky slopes they'd covered in darkness. It wound about the shoulder of the mountain, well below the treeline, and almost level as such things were counted in the ranges of the Lower Jagirs—which meant they had to scramble up and down over rocks and around tree roots, but at least it wasn't the constant, monotonous climbing that had made the night walk such a misery. The narrow path passed through alternating bands of shadow and light. There were forested areas where the great trees enclosed them like walls and filled the air with a resinous scent that gave Maris new energy, and there were sudden openings into grassy meadows where the shelves of stone lay too near the surface for trees to flourish. In one of the glades Chulayen held up his hand as a signal to pause. While Gabrel and Maris froze, listening for the sounds of somebody following him, he climbed a few feet up one of the gnarled trunks and came down with his hand full of what looked like dark, sticky chunks of quartz. He said a few words to Gabrel and popped one of the rocklike things into his mouth.

"Sundhu resin," Gabrel explained to Maris. "He says chewing it will give us more energy for the trek and we won't need to load our bellies with food."

Maris had been rather looking forward to a stop for something to eat, and she had not been thinking in terms of chewing on something that smelled—she took another suspicious sniff to confirm her suspicions—like paint thinner. Still, Gabrel was munching away now with every evidence of enjoyment, so she cautiously took the smallest sliver of gunk she could find in Chulayen's open hand and stuck the end into her mouth.

Yep. Paint thinner.

She bit down on the stuff and almost gagged as the resinous texture and sharp taste flooded her mouth.

It would doubtless be considered extremely rude to spit it out again. Once they were walking, maybe, if she could manage to be last in line . . . but right now Gabrel and Chulayen were both watching her.

She chewed, swallowed the bitter saliva that filled her mouth, chewed again. It didn't taste quite so bitter now. A few more bites, and the chunk of stuff she'd taken had disintegrated into fibers, and she felt as if she'd just popped a couple of stimmers. And the taste . . . Her eyes widened, and the men laughed.

" 'S good!" she said in surprise.

"It's also addictive," Gabrel told her as they shouldered their packs and started forward again, "but Chulayen says the only people who get a chance to be addicted are the mountain tribes—it has to be taken fresh from the tree, and whatever active compounds make it such a good stimulant break down within hours. Someday I'd like to get a biochemist up here to analyze the freshly harvested sap."

"Mmm," Maris nodded while sucking the last delicious, tangy resinous flavor from the fibers in her mouth. Chulayen, ahead of them, spat his mouthful of fibers onto the trail, and she followed his example. "Synthesize this stuff, you could make a fortune selling it as, I dunno, chewing gum or something. Maybe make a drink out of it."

"That," said Gabrel, sounding shocked, "would be immoral. Didn't I tell you it was addictive?"

Maris had thought that was the point. Nothing like having a monopoly of something that people not only liked but had to have more of. If Johnivans could get his hands on an analysis of this stuff, he'd . . . kill the biochemist, and then . . .

What had seemed simple, clear, and profitable when she thought with her Tasman mind did seem immoral when she thought like Calandra Vissi, who was dead but who seemed to be taking over her head anyway. Maris remembered the kids who'd gone the dreamdust way on Tasman. Not just the ones in Johnivans' gang, but the young prostitutes who used the stuff to make their short lives bearable until the 'dust killed them. Would she have died that way if Johnivans hadn't taken her in?

So what was immoral? Providing dreamdust? Or leaving people in lives so miserable that dying of slow starvation on a constant dreamdust high seemed preferable to reality? Damn, trying to be a real person instead of a scumsucker was complicated. Too bad she wasn't really Calandra Vissi. The Diplo probably knew the right thing to do without having to think about it.

Anyway, she couldn't climb and think at the same time, she was too tired. She rubbed the sweat off her forehead—funny how you could sweat so much when it was so bunu cold—and tapped Chulayen's shoulder, holding out her hand for another chunk of sundhu resin.

Breakfast turned out to be a stale, flat onion pancake, handed out by Chulayen while they were still walking the level—and the sundhu resin, or her hunger, made even that taste delicious. Maris started scanning for likely trees every time they entered a band of forest, pointing them out to Chulayen until Gabrel reminded her that there was no point in stockpiling the resin; what they couldn't chew as they walked would lose its stimulant qualities in storage.

When no one was watching, she broke off half the next piece Chulayen gave her and tucked it into a corner of her pack. She could test it tomorrow; no need to take everything some total stranger told her at face value, just because Gabrel believed him. After all—Gabrel believed her, didn't he? He might fall for any lie—he hadn't trained with professionals, like she had.

That is, she could test it if she was still alive tomorrow. When they finally stopped for a rest and another yummy stone-cold onion pancake, Gabrel had time to translate what Chulayen had been telling him. And it didn't sound good to Maris.

"I thought this guy said the Bashir was storing his pro-tech weapons in these caves we're going to."

"That's what I thought at first," Gabrel admitted, "but you can see that wouldn't make any sense. You don't use some location too remote for anybody but mountain goats as a weapons locker; can you imagine carrying heavy machinery up this trail?"

"Tanglefield generators and nerve dazers aren't all that heavy."

"In large quantities they are."

"So what does he use it for?"

Gabrel's lips tightened for a moment; he looked sick. "According to Chulayen, he uses it for . . . making what he trades for the weapons. He used to do it in Udara, but because of the rumors that somebody was going to investigate, he moved everything to the Jurgan Caves in Thamboon."

"So what do you manufacture in 'some location too remote for anybody but mountain goats,' then?" Maris threw his own words back at him, and the answer came to her before Gabrel could speak. Those bio-shielded cylinders that Johnivans got from Kalapriya, that went out to Rezerval as "medical supplies" . . .

"Bacteriomats," she answered her own question. "He's found a way to culture 'mats outside the coastal caves, and instead of selling them to the Barents Trading Society, he's trading them to . . . somebody . . . for pro-tech weaponry."

Gabrel nodded. "So he can conquer more territory, so he can take more prisoners, so he can culture more bacteriomats, so he can get more arms . . . It's an endless spiral."

Maris thought it over. "I don't quite get the bit about the prisoners."

"I'm not quite sure either," Gabrel said, "but Chulayen insists that they're being used to help culture the 'mats, and that it kills them, so the Bashir needs more and more people. He used to condemn his political prisoners to the 'mat culture caves, but that's not enough anymore; he's taking people from the conquered areas. I don't quite get what's so toxic about the 'mat culture process; our people in Barents do it without dying or even getting sick, and my Kalapriyan isn't good enough to understand what Chulayen is saying. I keep asking how the prisoners culture the 'mats, and he says the prisoners are the 'mats. Something is getting badly mangled in translation."

Chulayen broke in here with a flood of Kalapriyan in which Maris managed to make out the words "wife, son, daughters—everybody, all my family!" and some names.

"His family was taken by the Ministry for Loyalty," Gabrel translated. "Fairly recently. They were sent to the Jurgan Caves before he could do anything. He wants us to get there as fast as possible in case there's a chance of saving them."

Maris blinked back tears, angry at herself for the weakness. So Chulayen had lost his family, so what was that to her? She'd never had a family. But the little clerk's grief made something ache inside her. She focused on practicalities.

"And exactly how are we going to do that?"

"We may not be able to," Gabrel admitted. "We'll have to see what the situation is like when we get there. I'm not going to risk your life in some desperate attempt to save the prisoners in the caves. You're too valuable for that; you're the key to our whole success."

"Who, me? How? I don't feel all that valuable," Maris said. "I mean, I don't want to die, or anything, but . . ."

"Don't you see, Calandra? You're our link with Rezerval! Even if you're not fully trained yet, you're a Diplo intern. You've got contacts with people who can stop this whole filthy business, and they'll believe you. I can't risk going to Valentin with the story, because some of the senior Trading Society people have to be in it, and I don't know which ones. But you can take it directly to Rezerval."

Maris took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The thin mountain air seemed a bit short on oxygen; that must be what was making her feel so dizzy. "Gabrel. Tell me that's not your only plan—having me get help from Rezerval?"

"Can you think of a better?"

"Almost anything," Maris said, "would work better than that." Stop! screamed a voice within her. We never tell outsiders the truth. 

So who's more of an outsider than me? Maris argued back at her own protective voice. Johnivans was gonna kill me, remember? 

That just goes to show. You can't trust anybody.

But if that was true—if she couldn't trust Gabrel, who had been so patient, so helpful, who had supported her a hundred ways without ever once complaining—well, what was the point of living in a world where you really couldn't trust anybody at all?

"Calandra? Are you all right?"

Maris realized that she had closed her eyes, wrapped up in her internal dialogue for what must have seemed like forever to Gabrel and Chulayen.

"I'm going to do it," she said, half aloud. "And if he hates me, so what?"

"Calandra." Gabrel took both her hands in his. "What's the matter? Of course I don't hate you. I couldn't hate you. Damn it, Calandra, you know how I feel about you."

"You won't anymore," Maris said bleakly, "when I explain." But there wasn't any other choice, now. Somehow, traveling with Gabrel Eskelinen and trying to think with Calandra Vissi's head had fatally messed up her own head. She had become infected with outsider notions about doing the right thing instead of looking after yourself first, last, and always.

"Explain what?"

No way to put it off any longer. No excuse to put it off any longer. "Gabrel, you didn't quite get it right—about who I am—"

"You're not an intern?"

"No."

"But—I could have sworn you weren't a fully trained Diplo with all the implants."

"I'm not that either," Maris said. "And me name ain't even Calandra! I'm Maris! Maris Nobody from Tasman, got that? I'm a damn fake and you been too bunu dumb to catch on, all this time! Calandra's dead, you idiot! I—I needed to get off Tasman real quick, they was gonna kill me, and I had her ID and I used it and I was gonna run off soon's I got away safe only there wasn't never no chance!" Angry tears choked her and she realized she'd been shouting like a Tasman scumsucker. She took a deep breath and let the memory of Calandra Vissi fill her with borrowed calm.

"I didn't kill Calandra," she said, more quietly. "Nobody meant to kill her. It was an accident. But afterwards—" She could not bear to tell him how Johnivans had meant to throw her life away. That she was a person so worthless, her best friend in all the world had no more use for her living self than for her corpse. "Well, I was in trouble. Real bad trouble. And I look a little bit like Calandra, and Ny—a friend," she substituted, "hacked into the databases and fixed it so my DNA and retina scans would go on her ID, so I could use it to get away. That's all I wanted—to get away."

"To Kalapriya?"

"Anywhere off Tasman, and that's where Calandra was s'posed to be going, so I thought that would be easiest. I didn't realize until I got here," Maris confessed, "that the only way out was back through Tasman again. So I was stuck."

Gabrel sat down at the base of a tree and leaned forward, resting his arms on his bent knees.

"I . . . didn't mean to get you stuck with me," Maris ventured after a while, and then, after another silence, "I'm sorry."

Gabrel raised his head and Maris looked away, afraid of seeing scorn in his eyes.

"You've never even been on Rezerval."

"Right."

"You're here because your friends killed the real Diplo."

His voice was flat and dead. He hated her. He had to; look at the mess she'd gotten him into, and how she'd been lying to him since the day they met. She might as well spell out the whole sorry story. When you had nothing left but pride . . . well, what good was pride?

"I'm here," Maris corrected, "because when the Diplo spaced herself, my 'friends' needed a substitute. If a Diplo'd just disappeared on Tasman, there'd've been a search that could've messed up Johnivans' whole organization. So his idea was to hack into Rezerval's databases and substitute my physical data for Calandra's, then let them find my dead body in her quarters and report she'd died of natural causes. Only when I put the story together, I decided I'd rather impersonate a live Diplo than a dead one. I got out of Tasman one step ahead of Johnivans . . . I don't have any friends," she finished, swallowing hard. "I'm nobody. I can't do you no bunu good." At least she could quit trying to talk toppie now.

She could feel Gabrel studying her face. Maris hoped she didn't look as miserable as she felt.

"You're wrong about that, you know," he said.

Maris lifted her empty hands. "And just what do you think I can do? I'm for sure not your contact with any Rezerval toppies!"

"You have friends now," Gabrel said. "You saved my life in Valentin, and you've been a damned good marching companion all this way. No accredited Diplo could have done better. Don't run yourself down, Cal . . . umm . . ."

"Maris." She folded her arms, as if she could hold on to herself, hold on to her misery. Words cost nothing. If she let herself believe them, it would just hurt worse when Gabrel showed the truth. Whatever he might say, he couldn't feel the same about a Tasman scumsucker as he would've about a Rezerval Diplo. "You always do jump to conclusions too fast," she told him. "When you've had time to think about it, you'll hate me for getting you into this. So why don't we just fast-forward to that part now and skip the nice talk?" And skip the part where she started to feel good again and then it was taken away. The remembered pain of discovering Johnivans' betrayal shot through her again, almost taking her breath away; it felt like a hand squeezing her heart. She couldn't go through that again with Gabrel.

Gabrel sighed. "Maybe we should just forget about personal relationships and decide how we're going to finish the job."

It did hurt.

"Fine by me," Maris said tightly.

"Okay, then."

"Okay."

After a long, tense silence Gabrel finally spoke again . . . in Kalapriyan this time. Chulayen answered, no, asked a question. Gabrel said something that sounded way too short to be a summary of her confession to him. In fact, if she knew Kalapriyan any better, she'd have thought he said, "Go away."

He had; Chulayen turned his back to them and walked down the path they'd come up until he was lost to sight among the trees.

"Wait a minute!" Maris cried. Never mind her personal misery, there was more than that at stake. "You can't just send him away like that. We got to try and rescue his family, don't we?"

Gabrel stood up. Maris dropped her eyes so she wouldn't have to see his face. All she could see was the toes of his boots coming closer until they stopped, inches from her own toes. "This isn't going to work, Maris."

"We could try, couldn't we? Oh, gods take it. Call Chulayen back. Him and me'll bunu try and get in there. We don't need you!" I don't need you. Leastways, not any more than I need air and water. 

"I didn't mean that," Gabrel said. "Of course we're going to try. But we can't go in with our minds on other things, and I don't know about you, but I can't forget about our personal relationship and leave things like this. We've got to clear the air."

Maris looked up, avoided meeting his eyes, glanced from side to side at the conifer-studded hills. "Looks plenty clear to me," she said.

"Stop. Playing. Word. Games." Gabrel said through clenched teeth. "Oh, gods . . ." His hands closed on her shoulders and his mouth came down over hers, at first hard, then soft and warm and . . . Maris lost track of her thoughts and everything else. She'd imagined this a million times, only not like this, not with him knowing who she really was—

That brought her back to reality and she wrenched her head away. It hurt to stop. Hurt worse than anything yet.

As soon as his own mouth was free, Gabrel was talking, saying nonsense, not letting her get a word in edgewise. "Maris, I love you, don't you understand? I don't care who you were before, you're mine now."

"You don't love me," Maris told him. "I was being Calandra Vissi. It's her you love, and she's dead."

"Calandra Vissi didn't save my life in Valentin, and ride until her thighs were scraped raw without a word of complaint, and lead pack ghaya up into the hills with me, and make camp in the mountains with me," Gabrel said. "You did. It doesn't matter what you were calling yourself at the time. The girl who made this trip with me is the one I love."

He bent his head to kiss her again, but Maris twisted away. "Wait," she pleaded. "I got to think."

Love her? That couldn't be true. There wasn't anything about her to love. If there had been, Johnivans wouldn't have tossed her life aside so casually.

Unless . . .

Johnivans was a different sort of person than Gabrel, wasn't he?

Actually, Johnivans wasn't up to Gabrel's class at all. Now that she thought about it.

Maybe the problem wasn't that she wasn't worth anything, but that Johnivans didn't know how to care about people.

And Gabrel did.

He knew a lot more than that, too. While he was ostensibly giving her time to think, his left arm was holding her very close and his right hand was roaming in a most distracting fashion. It would be so easy to quit thinking altogether and give in to what felt so very, very good and safe. But she wasn't quite ready yet.

"You always fall in love with girls who drag pack-ghaya up a mountain trail?" she demanded. "Because if so, I'm gonna have too bunu much competition in these hills."

Gabrel tried to look serious, as if he were thinking it over, but the corners of his mouth kept twitching up. "Actually," he said, "I think I fell in love with you when you bullied me into talking to you, that first evening in Valentin."

"Huh! You mean when I listened to you all the way to the meeting hall."

"No," he said, "I think it was when you half crippled me by stepping on my feet during the valsa."

"I never!"

"Oh, yes, you did, my love. You are entrancing, maddening, beautiful, brave, and a terrible dancer. But I'll teach you to valsa properly."

"I am not a terrible dancer!"

"You should have seen the bruises."

"You're making it up, you walked fine afterwards didn't you?"

"A soldier is trained to bear pain," Gabrel said solemnly, "and if you don't stop talking, I'll have to shut you up again."

"Yap," Maris said. "Yap yappity yap. Yap yap ya . . ."

The second kiss was definitely better than the first. She was seriously tempted to keep arguing and kissing, just to see how much better it could get, but they did have a job to do.

She and Gabrel evidently realized that at the same time. His grip on her loosened and he stepped back.

So did she.

It felt like having part of her self torn away.

"I suppose," she said, "we'd better call Chulayen and get on with it, then."

"I suppose so," Gabrel agreed.

When they resumed the council of war, Maris was seated on the ground beside Gabrel, in the curve of his arm. And Chulayen looked at them and looked . . . not happy, perhaps, but less miserable than he'd been since they met. He said something to Gabrel that Maris couldn't follow, but she was pretty sure the word "love"—khariya—came in there.

"Okay," Gabrel said, trying to sound businesslike. "We need to figure out where we are and go on from there, right?"

"Going on" was painfully slow, since he had to say everything twice, once in Galactic for Maris and once in Kalapriyan for Chulayen—they couldn't risk anybody missing anything, not now—but there wasn't that much to say, really. You could only say "hopeless situation," and "forlorn hope," so many ways.

"The way I see it," Gabrel summarized, "we've got people trying to kill us in Valentin. And we've got people trying to kill us in Dharampal. And we've probably got people trying to kill us in Udara. And that's the good news."

And people trying to kill me on Tasman, Maris added mentally, not that it would make any difference—so why bother saying it aloud?

"I don't think it would work to head back from here to Valentin and try to tell them all that we've decided to drop the investigation. They might not give us a chance to discuss it. They might not even believe us. Besides—" Gabrel gave a wry smile "—I'd really, really hate to have come all this way for no result."

"And besides," Maris said, "we got to get Chulayen's wife and kids out, don't we?"

"If we can," Gabrel agreed.

"After which we'll also have people trying to kill us in Thamboon."

"Ah. But with any luck we'll also have evidence that ties the whole scheme together. Then we try to make it back to Valentin—no, to Rezerval—and take what we've got to . . . whatever authorities we can find."

"You reckon our chances of getting back alive are any better this way?"

"No," Gabrel admitted, "but they're no worse, and at least this way, if we do get back, maybe we can do something worthwhile. Mathematically, it makes perfect sense; our choice is between probably getting killed with no outcome, and probably getting killed with a possible good outcome."

"I can't begin to tell you," Maris said, "how much better it makes me feel to know we've got a mathematician on the job. Makes all the difference. Okay, which way do we go from here?"

After a brief consultation with Chulayen, Gabrel reported that the pilgrim route to the cave was a relatively gentle downhill walk from the glade where they rested.

"Too good to be true!" Maris exulted.

"Well, yes. They're bound to have guards posted. However, Chulayen is almost sure there's another way into the cave complex. When he was there on pilgrimage with his wife he noticed there was a constant slight breeze blowing against his face. Also, the Inner Light Way priests appeared very suddenly from the back of the main cave. He's pretty sure there is a series of chambers back beyond the crystal caves with some opening to the outside, and he thinks he can figure out how to work around the main entrance to that one. So we're going to go that way—" Gabrel pointed at a discouraging rocky slope "—and then around there, and then with any luck there'll be a rope bridge . . ."

"Don't tell me any more," Maris implored. "I think I'm happier not knowing."

There was a rope bridge. Maris wasn't sure that counted as good luck, though. The thing consisted of two ropes, count them, two: one to stand on and one to hold on to while you shuffled over a lot of very hard- and spiky-looking rocks a very long way below. And in full gravity! Another minus for dirtside life: not only couldn't you turn on the lights, you couldn't turn off the gravity.

You had, in fact, very little control at all. But when had she, personally, had any control over her circumstances? Surely not on Tasman, where Johnivans had used her as a spy, runner, and thief until it was more convenient to discard her. Certainly not since she'd run from Tasman. She wasn't even sure she'd had any control over falling in love with Gabrel. It felt more like giving in to a force of nature, like gravity.

Not that she really wanted to think about gravity just then . . . "What the hell," Maris said, and followed Chulayen over the double rope. Actually she crossed a little faster than he did, and a lot faster than Gabrel, whose weight made the device sag and creak alarmingly.

"In a holo," she said when Gabrel finally crossed the chasm, "the native guide would scamper across without even using the top rope, 'stead of gripping it with all ten fingers the way he did."

Gabrel grinned and translated the comment to Chulayen, who was looking rather more olive green than his usual light brown color. Chulayen replied with a spate of words ending in a shaky laugh. "He says he's a soft clerk in a Udaran government office, not a mountain tribesman," Gabrel translated, "and the pilgrim path to the caves is quite bad enough for him. After the pilgrimage he vowed never to go near one of these rope bridges again. Furthermore, he is beginning to hope we will all be killed attempting to enter the caves, so that he won't have to come back this way."

Maris looked with new respect at the little brown-skinned man. Just a clerk in some government office, but he'd joined the Udaran resistance movement, traveled across country to meet unknown foreigners, and led them back through the mountains because his family might still be alive in these mysterious caves of Thamboon. And even if he had gripped the handrope so tightly his knuckles turned white and taken half of forever to shuffle along the footrope, still he'd been the one to show them the way across the bridge. "Well, tell him if that's what the old softies of his country are like, I hope I never run across a tough young one!"

After the bridge they went more slowly; there was nothing so well defined as a path to guide them, only narrow trails through the bent grass. Chulayen studied the outlines of the surrounding hills intently. Gabrel flipped the curved Kalapriyan-style dagger he carried upside down and revealed a primitive compass concealed in the hilt. He and Chulayen stopped and conferred so often Maris began to wonder, then to suspect, then to feel certain—

"We're lost."

"Not lost," Gabrel said defensively, "we just aren't sure exactly—"

"Do you know where we are?"

"Well . . ."

"Does he know where this supposed back entrance to the caves is?"

"I . . . look out!"

Gabrel's shoulder caught her in the midriff and knocked the breath out of her, sending them both tumbling down among the stiff thorny bushes. A moment later Chulayen dove on top of them. Something caught the hem of Maris's long tunic and dragged it upward—damn thorns—and she had just time to think that Chulayen's weight on top of Gabrel's would drive the thorn bushes right into her bare back—and now she heard the buzzing that had alerted Gabrel; some kind of machine?—but she couldn't see over his body pinning her down, wriggled sideways and got room to breathe again, no, more than that, falling into darkness— She landed, hard, on something entirely composed of hard knobbly lumps and sharp edges.

"A flitter," Gabrel said under his breath. "Gods, they're getting blatant about it, not even trying to hide their smuggled technology anymore! Stay down, Maris, if they see us— Maris?"

The breath that had been knocked out of her body came back in, lovely beautiful oxygen, and the bruises—well, one good thing about the dark, she couldn't see the extent of the damage, but it didn't feel like anything was broken. She wasn't even bleeding. Much. Just the one scraped elbow that had found a rock face on the way down. "I think," Maris called up, "I've found it. The back way. Into them caves."

After some discussions about how deep the hole was ("Not bad," Maris reported, "I didn't break nothing."), whether Chulayen and Gabrel could climb down rather than falling in ("Try climbing. Falling's not fun."), and whether there were passages leading into the interior of the mountain ("Why d'you think I said I'd found it? 'Course there's passages!") Gabrel first lowered Chulayen down the precipitous sides of the hole, then swung himself over, hung by his hands for a moment, and let himself drop. A vigorous Barentsian curse helped Maris identify his shadowy form.

"Reckon you found the same ledge I did," she said, not without satisfaction. "Scrape yer elbow?"

Gabrel didn't deign to reply. He asked Chulayen something and got back an answer most of which Maris understood; her Kalapriyan seemed to be improving rapidly with all the practice she got listening to Gabrel and Chulayen. The little clerk didn't think this was the back way that had been used by the priests, and Gabrel agreed that there were probably easier entrances to the cave complex somewhere else; however, the faint continual draft of air past their faces made this one seem as promising as any other.

"Help if we could see anything," Maris complained, and even as she finished speaking a faint glow lit up Gabrel's face. It looked as though his cheek and forehead had intercepted the ledge on which Maris had scraped her elbow; no wonder he was testy. But showing off his light source seemed to be cheering him up.

"Built in with the compass," he explained. "Only turns on when I twist this little knob on the side of the hilt—see?" And he demonstrated by clicking the light on and off several times.

"The Bashir supplies his troops with magic lights also," Chulayen said—that was short and simple enough that Maris could understand it, especially when the clerk also produced a glowing disk from the folds of his sash.

"I thought you were just an office clerk," Gabrel said with suspicion.

"My . . . friends . . . occasionally divert some military supplies," Chulayen explained.

Maris threw up her hands. "This bunu world! Everybody except me is already carrying pro-tech, and who got arrested in Dharampal on suspicion of having outlander weapons? Me!"

After some time crawling along the one useful passage leading from that deep hole, Maris wished Gabrel and Chulayen had been carrying a little more prohibited technology. Something to map the cave complex would have been nice. She wasn't entirely happy with following the faint breath of air moving through the tunnel as evidence that somewhere up ahead were the larger caverns of which Chulayen had spoken. Still, it wasn't like there'd been a lot of choices. The other apparent passages had been only deep crevices with no openings; if this one petered out they'd have to backtrack, climb out of the hole she'd accidentally discovered, and look for another entrance.

Back through that narrow bit where they had to crawl single file on their bellies through slimy puddles . . . She really, really hoped they were going the right way. Then she realized that once they got to the crystal caves, they would have to find something they could steal that would be enough to get the attention of the authorities on Rezerval, lift whatever-it-was without being killed by the cave guards, then go back through that slimy tunnel, trek over the mountains, not get killed by Udaran assassins, find a boat back down the river to Valentin, not get killed by Barentsian assassins, get themselves to Rezerval from a planet whose only access station was Tasman, not get killed by Johnivans . . . She moaned softly to herself. They'd never make it. She might just as well lie down and die right here in the tunnel, except . . .

"What is wrong?" Chulayen asked. He spoke slowly and clearly so that she could understand him.

"Nothin' " Maris said. Her Kalapriyan definitely wasn't up to explaining all the ways they could die on the way back. "I . . . don't like tunnels." Okay, so she'd slipped through narrower spaces in the maintenance shafts on Tasman, but even there you could turn on the lights . . . and she knew her way around Tasman.

"There is nothing to fear," Chulayen promised her. "These mountains are very old. Nothing will fall to close our way."

Gods, she hadn't even thought to worry about that possibility!

"And the crystal caves are . . . were . . . very beautiful," Chulayen went on. "You and Gabrel will be the first outlanders to see them. Walls lined with crystals, you understand? Light everywhere. In darkness, one lights a candle first, and light dances everywhere."

That was something good to think about while she crawled on hands and knees through the stinking mud. After a while the passage opened up a little. They couldn't stand up, but at least she didn't have to keep her head down where her nose was practically in the mud. So the smell should have been better . . . but instead, as they progressed, it got worse.

Much worse.

If the roof hadn't raised up so that Maris could stand, she thought she would have thrown up. Chulayen stood up too, with a smothered groan of relief and a hand at the small of his back. Gabrel was too tall; he had to walk in a half-crouch that looked even more uncomfortable than crawling. Still, the change of position must be some relief.

And that cloying, sickly sweet smell kept getting worse.

"Watch out for crevasses," Gabrel warned in a low voice. He angled his dagger hilt so that a faint light showed the broken ground before them. Maris realized that the black areas weren't just deep shadows but actual openings in the cave floor, falling down who knows how far? She certainly didn't want to find out. Fortunately they were mostly narrow. She stepped across the openings carefully, holding Chulayen's hand for safety, then helped to balance him while he crossed each one.

"Bigger ones coming up," Gabrel murmured, "and we must be close now. Somebody else has been using this part of the cave." His light illumined a roughly planed plank that bridged a wide crevasse ahead.

"Smells like something crawled in here to die," Maris muttered.

"Maybe somebody fell through." Gabrel dropped to his knees, then to his stomach. One hand over his mouth and nose, he lowered his other hand with the light down into the gaping crevasse, then gasped suddenly and jerked backward, gagging.

"What is it?" Maris whispered.

"Don't look!"

Chulayen squeezed past her and whispered something in Kalapriyan to Gabrel, then took the light and lowered it at arm's length into the crevasse, peering intently. When he straightened up he looked even greener than before, but maybe that was just the effect of the dim light among the shadows of the cave.

Or the effect of the smell.

"I can look or you can tell me," Maris said, carefully taking the shallowest breaths she could, "but I ain't going out on that plank until I know what's underneath me."

"Bodies," Gabrel said reluctantly.

Maris supposed she had already known that, because she didn't feel shocked or surprised. Just cold. "His people?" She jerked her head at Chulayen.

"He didn't recognize anyone . . . There's no way of telling for sure," Gabrel said. 'They've been . . . their heads are . . . I don't understand it. Why drag prisoners all the way up here just to execute them?" He turned to Chulayen and repeated the question, got back a long answer whispered so fast that Maris couldn't follow a word of it.

"He doesn't really know either, I don't think," Gabrel told Maris. "He keeps saying that Meer Madee told him they use the prisoners to make the bacteriomats and then they die."

"I guess we got to go on, then," Maris concluded. "Us seeing a heap of mangled bodies isn't going to count for evidence, is it? Even if you had a rope and could get down there and bring one back . . ."

"It might prove something," Gabrel said, "or it might not, depending on what's been done to the bodies. Unfortunately, we do not have a rope." He didn't sound that unhappy about it.

For once Maris found it easy to obey Gabrel's injunction not to look down as she crossed the plank across the crevasse. She really wished there were some way to turn off the gravity for that few seconds, though.

On the far side of the crevasse things improved. A lot. The cave was high enough for even Gabrel to stand up in, and wide enough that they could walk side by side. If you could call what they were doing walking. Gabrel evidently figured they were getting close to where the action was, so he insisted on what he called "slow advance mode," which was apparently a military term for sneaking up on some place really slowly and carefully.

Accent on slowly.

First Gabrel twisted the hilt of his dagger so that only the faintest light came from it, barely enough to show the uneven floor of the cave; and even that was shielded by his hand so that nobody in front of them would be likely to see it. He would take three steps forward, then pause and listen. He'd motion to Chulayen, who did the same thing, a lot more quietly than Gabrel. Last came Maris. Another pause to listen. Then they repeated the whole thing.

After a minor eternity of three-steps-and-listen, Maris realized that the cave was slowly getting brighter. She could see sparkly bits on the sides of the passage, and long back-cast shadows where those bits stuck out. She tapped Gabrel on the shoulder and pointed to the shadows. He nodded acknowledgment, twisted the light off and tucked his dagger back into the sash of his tunic.

Moving even more slowly than before, they came from the shadows of the crevasses to a world of glittering lights. The walls around them flowered with crystalline shapes, some like sharp-edged flowers, some like stars, others like broken bits of space debris, with no recognizable form to them, but a sense of some underlying purpose in their structure. The reflections from the crystal facets danced and swam around them, making Maris so dizzy that it was hard to reason out the cause: the light source must come from torches somewhere ahead. Torches, people . . . they slowed even more. A murmur that had at first seemed no more than the sighing of the cave now sounded like water, then like voices babbling indistinguishable syllables. Gabrel put his finger to his lips, listened intently, then turned to Chulayen with brows lifted. Chulayen shook his head; Maris deduced that he, too, was unable to make any sense out of what they were hearing. But at least it proved there were living people in the caves before them.

An outcropping of crystal-encrusted stone partially blocked the way forward. They crowded behind it and peered at what they could see of the lighted cave. The moving sparks of reflections from the crystal walls were so confusing that it was hard to make out details even close to the torches affixed to the walls at intervals, but it looked to Maris as if there was just one person walking around, and any number sitting against the cave walls—shadow upon shadow, moaning and mumbling singsong nonsense that chilled her even while she told herself that she couldn't expect to understand Kalapriyan mumbling. No matter what the language, the tones were those of madness.

"One guard," she breathed to Gabrel, and he nodded. They moved back a few (agonizingly careful) steps and held a whispered conference. What would be the best way to get rid of the guard so they could free the prisoners? Her appearance, or Gabrel's, would be sure to alarm him. Could Chulayen pass as another guard for long enough to lure the man back here where they could capture him? He looked dismayed at the suggestion but said something that Maris thought would have sounded snobbish, if he could have got enough intonation into his whispers.

"What'd he say? What's he going to do?" she demanded under her breath as Chulayen inched toward the cave opening again.

"He says he isn't dressed right to be a guard but if he tries really hard he thinks he can imitate a lower-class Rohini accent long enough to get the man back here."

Maris nodded. Like she thought—snobbish. She remembered Gabrel's brief explanations about the class differences between Rudhrani and Rohini. Hmm. If this Chulayen was Rudhrani, and a Udaran government employee at that, what was he doing with the resistance movement? Was he leading them into a trap?

Chulayen called out in Kalapriyan. The guard's pacing stopped, and Gabrel didn't seem to be worried by whatever Chulayen had said, so probably it was all right. But the guard didn't come toward them. Chulayen said something else and the guard took a step closer. Would he—

"Baba! Babaji!" A child's cry of delight echoed from the walls of the cavern, and a small figure ran past the guard, all the way to the outcropping of crystals that concealed their party. Chulayen leapt forward, dropped to one knee and embraced the child, heedless of the torchlight falling upon his exposed face. Tears glittered on his face as he rocked the child back and forth in his arms. His story had been true, then; Maris had been worrying about the wrong thing, as usual.

What she should have been worrying about was the number of guards. The first man, the one they'd tried to lure back here, gave a shout—for help?—and suddenly there were three, no, five men all coming at them, the others must have been sleeping, and now they were really sunk—

"Back here!" Gabrel pushed her unceremoniously back into the deepest crevice between the crystal pillar and the cave wall, then strode forward into the torchlight and said something in Kalapriyan. The guards seized him and Chulayen, tore the child from Chulayen's arms, and dragged all three of them out of Maris's sight.

They didn't search further. She huddled in the crevice and alternated between wondering what to do next and cursing Gabrel. She'd recognized the Kalapriyan word for "two" in what he said, so presumably it was something like "It's just the two of us." Nice that they took his word for it! But what was the good of leaving her free on her own? Anybody would think he'd forgotten that she wasn't a real Diplo with wonderful weapons and secret powers—just a Tasman scumsucker with no skills but lying and evasion. Demons take the man—if only they'd both hidden—well, okay, there probably wasn't room in here for both of them; it was a tight fit for her alone. So fine. He should have hidden and let her be captured, then rescuing them would've been his problem. Talk about getting noble and chivalrous at the wrong moment! Johnivans would have dived for cover without a second thought, probably first pushing her out into the light to distract the guards, and . . . Would you really prefer that? Okay. No, she wouldn't. Gabrel was worth a hundred of Johnivans. He was brave, Chulayen was honest, and she, Maris, was a nasty suspicious little liar who thought the worst of everyone until proven wrong and who didn't deserve to be the only one of them left free.

Maris sighed—quietly—and prepared to see what she could do with her own skills. Being a Diplo and probably able to call up reinforcements from Rezerval would've been nice, but being just herself, she'd have to rely on lying and evasion. Eavesdropping would've been a good supplement, but she couldn't follow the guards' mumbling, slang-filled conversation. Who was she kidding? She could barely follow a very slow, clear conversation in very basic Kalapriyan. If she already knew what it was about. Besides, she could barely hear the guards now . . .

A cold hand tugged at her arm. Maris started, cracked her head on something hard and sharp jutting out of the crystal pillar, and—it was only the child.

Who'd given them away to the guards, she reminded herself.

But probably not on purpose.

Now the child—a little girl, she thought, with those long black braids—was whispering something urgently. Maris bent down to hear. A lot of good that did—it was still bloody Kalapriyan. She fumbled for words and managed something like "No understand, talk slow please."

What she wouldn't have given for a Diplo's language implant.

Finally the little girl calmed down enough to put it in words of one syllable for the dumb outlander. "Guards gone now. We get my babaji. You come help!"

Maris realized that the voices of the guards were quite inaudible now; all she could hear was the continual low-toned babbling and moaning of, she supposed, the prisoners. Inaudible didn't necessarily mean gone. She risked a cautious peek around the crystal pillar and saw nobody standing, not even any long shadows of standing men.

Yeah, right. So maybe the guards were sitting down like everybody else.

The kid tugged more urgently. Maris dug in her heels and pulled right back, enough to get the girl's attention, then squatted down to bring their heads together. "Go slow," she whispered. "Careful. No talk loud." She hated trying to talk this language; it made her feel like an idiot. She added in Galactic, more for her own satisfaction than because she really thought she'd be able to communicate, "Look, kid, you are with an expert at sneaking around now. You just stay back and let me handle things, you hear?" Not that she had any idea how she was going to "handle" the situation, but at least she could scope it out better if this kid would just calm down and stay put.

Something in her tone seemed to work—maybe it was just the universal Voice of Adult Authority—and the little girl stayed quietly in the shelter of the crystal pillar while Maris slunk to the next bit of shadowy cover, thinking nobody-here-you-don't-even-want-to-look thoughts to discourage anybody who just might be looking.

The torchlight was some distance away, and anyway it did a terrible job of lighting this back part of the cave; patches of crystals sparkled in occasional pools of light, surrounded by dark shadows. Even if somebody saw a bit of movement, they'd probably take it for a crystal flashing in the wavering light. And the irregular walls of the cave provided plenty of solid cover. Maris couldn't have had a better environment for sneaking up on somebody if she'd custom-ordered it. Compared to following a mark along the brilliantly lit corridors of one of Tasman's toppie levels, this was a piece of cake.

Of course, last time she'd tried to do that, she hadn't been such a great success. But who'd have known the mark would turn out to be a Diplo? A bunch of stupid Kalapriyan guards had to be easy in comparison.

How do you know they're stupid?  

Maris slipped from the shadows cast by a boulder sparkling with iridescent white snowflakes, across the narrow cavern and into the shelter of a stalactite cluster that seemed to be dripping half-melted crystals. This isn't exactly the kind of job that goes to the sharpest guys around, she answered the carping voice in her head.

And speaking of "around," where were all those guards who'd piled onto Gabrel and Chulayen? Maris peered between two flows of crystal and squinted into the uneven light of the cavern where it opened out ahead of her, carefully taking stock of every bit of information her senses could bring her.

Torches were fixed into the walls at head height every two or three meters. She avoided looking directly at the flames. Even the sparkling walls revealed by the torchlight were bright enough to mess up her vision. She directed her gaze down toward the cavern floor, where huddled dark shapes lined the walls.

People. Chained to the walls? Not moving much, anyway. Here and there she saw a head or an arm moving in a kind of aimless flopping motion, that was all. Some of them were moaning or babbling; nearly all the shapes looked wrong in some way that she couldn't make out from here.

None of them looked like Gabrel or Chulayen.

And they smelled—gods, how the place stank! You'd think they were sitting in pools of their own excrement.

As she moved into the open space, so slowly it was more like flowing than walking, Maris saw that was exactly what they were doing. The prisoners were chained by the neck to bolts driven deep into the cavern walls. Some flopped so limply against their chains that they had to be unconscious or dead. Just before her, two chained bodies sat in the frozen stiffness of death. Beyond them, a head wavered, fell forward into torchlight and revealed a gaping wound in the skull that exposed the brain matter.

Maris swallowed hard and ordered her stomach to control itself. She couldn't do anything about this, not now; she had to find Gabrel and Chulayen first. No point in even thinking about what tortures were being inflicted here what they might be doing right now to Gabrel don't think about that don't think. She managed a few more cautious steps and came to a halt right beside one of the torches. The flickering downward light showed the bodies beneath all too clearly and she could not resist a horrified look there's something growing out of his head don't look don't look . . .

"Ca— Maris!"

Gabrel's voice. "Go back, Ca— Maris," he called. "Something's distracted the guards. This is your chance to get away. Go back the way we came."

"Demons fly away with the way we came!" Maris followed the voice, kept her eyes averted from the parade of horrors against the cavern walls, finally came to where Gabrel and Chulayen were chained but, not, thank God, tortured yet . . . she felt his head to make sure.

"This is an order," Gabrel said in an urgent undertone. "You can't save us. Someone must tell Rezerval what's going on here."

The chains were some kind of antique metal, actual links, nothing programmable; she felt for a keypad or some device she could fiddle and cursed primitive worlds. "Mebbe you forgot," she told Gabrel while feeling down the length of the chain to the wall bolt and back again, "I ain't in yer army. Anyway, I don't take orders from somebody as can't even remember me right name." Ha! There was some kind of a catch here, holding the chain tight around Gabrel's neck.

"You'll do what I tell you—arrgh! Whose side are you on anyway?" Gabrel complained. "You trying to strangle me?" She had jerked his head sideways and cut off the slack in the chain while trying to get a view of the catch.

"The idea," Maris said between her teeth, "is not without its attractions. Gimme your dagger."

"Guards took it."

"Well, don't you have anything useful in those sash pockets?" Maris dug into the recesses of her own clothing and came up with a bone comb. That might work, if she broke off the inside teeth and used one of the strong outside teeth as a probe. She twisted the chain just a little more, using it to break off part of the comb and turn it into a tool, and Gabrel made gagging noises.

"Just hold on, I got to see what I'm doing," Maris muttered. Push the long bone tooth into this opening, feel gently, gently . . . Gabrel jerked and she lost her grip on the catch. "Hold still!"

"Not much point in picking the lock if I'm strangled first."

Maris was beginning to think she couldn't pick the lock anyway; the triangle of the bone tooth was too broad to slip deep enough into the catch. She could probably file it down on the metal of the bolt, but that would take time . . .

Steps at the mouth of the cave startled her. She crouched between Gabrel and Chulayen, trying to blend in with the huddled prisoners.

Light blinded her for a moment—not torchlight, but a proper light that you switched on and off; like Gabrel's dagger, only about a hundred times brighter. Maris blinked and squinted at the figure behind the light. It wasn't a guard returning. Maybe worse—a tall, fair-haired woman who walked confidently, as if she thought she owned the caverns, and openly carried a flash that was way beyond anything legal to have in Kalapriya.

One of the arms dealers, come to inspect the bacteriomats they took in trade for their offworld weapons? Had to be—who else would be let past the guards like that? For that matter, who else would be foolhardy enough to just walk in like this, alone?

Of course, she thought everybody in the cavern was chained to the wall.

Maris let her get two steps farther in; the light shone on a man just beyond Chulayen, and she heard the woman make a gagging noise as though unprepared for the sight. Now.

It was a beautiful move, if she did say so herself, one that Ice Eyes had taught her back on Tasman: propelling herself straight out from the wall without worrying about the coming fall, arms out to grab the arms trader around the knees and bring the woman down in, hopefully, a surprised and breathless heap.

Of course, the way Ice Eyes taught the move, you were supposed to wind up on top of your adversary, not squashed between them and the floor. The extremely rocky and uneven floor, in this case. Fortunately the arms trader was not only surprised but also considerably older than Maris, and slow; Maris managed to reverse their positions and got a knee resting on the older woman's throat before the trader had recovered from the shock of being knocked flying.

"Call off the guards," she said, "or I'll choke you now."

The arms trader made a series of whooping, breathless noises. Someone else appeared behind her and cried out, "Annemari!" Another woman, from the voice. What was this weapons consortium, anyway, the first female-run business on Barents?

"If you're at all fond of Annemari," Maris said, "you just stay right where you are. All I gotta do is lean forward a little—"

A point of light flickered, burst into a spreading network of lights and settled over both Maris and her captive. Immobilized, Maris looked up at the new arrival as she came forward. It was like looking at her own face—with a bit more mileage on it—olive skin, black eyes, artful mop of black curls.

"You?" they both said at once.

"I thought you were a Diplo," Maris said.

"You've been pretending to be me, haven't you? Of all the nerve!"

"Oh, gods. If there's a Diplo in on this, Gabrel, there ain't nobody we can go to for help."

"You've got that right, anyway. Your guards are nice and secure in another tanglenet."

"My guards? You got them bastards in a tanglenet? I thought you were with them!"

"Aren't you working with them?"

A wheezing noise under Maris's knee reminded her of her hostage. The tanglenet allowed neither of them much freedom of movement, but she was able to draw her knee up a little and give the arms dealer a chance to breathe—and to speak.

"Delightful as it is to wander unchecked through this garden of bright images," the arms dealer said, "perhaps a little explanation would help here. Calandra, can you get this thing loose from me?"

"Not without letting her free," said Calandra, jerking her head at Maris.

"I suspect that won't be a problem," said the arms dealer. "Allow me to introduce myself."

For an old lady who'd just been knocked off her feet, half strangled, and caught in a tanglenet by her own side, Maris had to admit that she did have an impressive degree of aplomb.

"I," said the arms dealer, "am Annemari Silvan, of Rezerval. The lady wielding the tanglefield generator is Diplomat Vissi. We are here to investigate the source of the black-market bacteriomats recently appearing in Federation worlds, and—if this is the source—to put an end to the trade."

A chain clinked, off to the side. "Leutnant Gabrel Eskelinen, Barents Trading Society," Gabrel said. "My companions and I are investigating allegations of illegal technology imported onto Kalapriya." He looked pointedly at the tangler in Calandra Vissi's hand.

"There's a lot more illegal stuff than this floating around," the Diplo said, but at least she switched off the generator. Maris straightened with a sigh of relief, then offered her hand to the woman she'd knocked down, who was being a bit slower about getting up. Once up, though, she stood erect, brushed the dirt off her beautifully cut beige silk suit, and started talking as though she'd been in control of the situation all along. Maris had to wonder what would get this woman rattled.

"If what you say is accurate," she said, "it would seem that we are all on the same side."

"If you got them guards in a tanglenet, you bet we're on the same side," Maris said.

"Without wishing to give offense, have you any way to substantiate your statements?"

Maris was still trying to parse that when Gabrel spoke up.

"My companion let you up."

"Only after mine trapped her in a tanglefield net. Agreeing to break a stalemate is not the same as active cooperation. After a war, it is not unusual to find that the entire civilian population of the defeated country claims to have been secretly against their own leaders."

"If this is a war," Gabrel pointed out, "it's not exactly over."

"Oh, yes, it is," said Annemari. "Too much has been brought to Federation attention for anybody to hush it up now." She thought briefly of the colleagues whose surprisingly large secret credit accounts on Toussaint she'd discovered, back at the beginning of this investigation, and wondered how many of them would have some serious explaining to do when all was uncovered. And how many of them would have stopped her coming here if they'd known her plans. No, she'd been right to act alone and with no more authority than her title and a confident approach could give her . . . but this disheveled young man in chains might be right, too. The war was only over if she could carry off her bluff a little longer.

"Chulen!" a girl's voice called, joyous.

"Khati!"

A Kalapriyan girl appeared behind Calandra and Annemari, ran to Chulayen and knelt beside him, shooting off questions like a machine gun. Chulayen answered at the same speed.

"What are they saying?" Annemari demanded of Calandra.

"It's all right," Calandra answered obliquely. "They really are part of the underground resistance movement." She asked a sharp question in Kalapriyan and got a distracted agreement from Chulayen and Khati. "And these two are with them." She pulled a slender laserknife out of the decorative barrette holding back her curls and used it to slice through Chulayen's and Gabrel's chains. As soon as Chulayen was free, he grabbed for Annemari's flash.

"Let him have it," Gabrel said wearily. "He's . . . looking for his family." He swallowed. "You're right. This is the source of the bacteriomats. Chulayen tried to explain it to me on the way here, but my Kalapriyan isn't that good, and he didn't really have the background to understand and explain it. But it seems that somebody has figured out a culture medium that works for bacteriomats. Living human brains."

The flash, in Chulayen's hands, illuminated one scene out of nightmare after another: sunken faces, eyes glazed over with madness, wailing mouths. And, over and over again, opened skulls with greenish-grey mats of slime oozing over the exposed lobes.

"We have to get medical help for these people." Annemari turned to Calandra. "Can you transmit direct?"

"Not from in here, no. I'll have to go back to the surface."

"Transmit? Medical help?" Gabrel seemed to be having as hard a time as Maris in keeping up. It didn't help that they were talking over the moans of prisoners crying to be freed.

Annemari looked faintly amused. "You didn't think I'd go after a planetwide conspiracy without any backup at all, did you? But the medical problems, those I was not anticipating." Her lips tightened as she looked where Chulayen knelt, holding what seemed to be a living corpse in his arms, a bag of bones held together by tight-stretched skin.

"Anushka, Anushka," he mourned, then something in Kalapriyan. Maris recognized one of the words; that was enough.

"Gimme the laserknife," she demanded, all but snatching it out of Calandra's hand. "We gotta cut that one loose. That's his wife. That's why he came here."

"We shall free them all," Annemari said mildly, but Maris wasn't waiting to hear. The laserknife sliced through metal chains as if it were cutting soycakes; Chulayen stood with the bag of bones in his arms and said something else, urgently.

"Tell him we're getting doctors, Gabrel!" She looked at Annemari. "Aren't we?"

"Can your medical staff in Valentin help? Which of them can you trust?" Annemari demanded of Gabrel.

He shook his head. "Some of Valentin is in it. I don't know which ones—though I could make some guesses. But there had to have been a doctor helping them do this butchery."

"I think I know which one," said Annemari tightly. "Did you know that the Barents Resident in Udara was kicked out of surgical training for incompetence and unethical behavior? I didn't know that until I happened to mention his name to the right person. He had been studying under Nunzia Hirvonen, the leading neurosurgeon on Rezerval. I would be willing to bet this is his work. Ask any of these people—any who can talk," she corrected herself.

"Lorum." The thread of a voice was almost lost amid the moans of other prisoners, but Annemari heard the name that had been in her mind, took the flash from Chulayen and illuminated a section of cave wall where an emaciated man, taller and paler than the other prisoners, knelt in a puddle of filth.

"Montoyasana!"

"Lorum van Vechten . . . was the surgeon," Orlando Montoyasana said weakly. His eyes rolled. "It's coming back."

"What is coming back?" Annemari knelt beside Montoyasana and reached out a hand for the laserknife.

"Rainbow colors, they sound so sharp . . . Intrinsic disharmonies . . . I'm not mad." Montoyasana said. "Hallucinations. Infection in the cortex . . . oh, it sounds so bright," he moaned, and his eyes rolled up into the top of his head.

"Would you believe there are no flitters on this entire world?" Calandra burst back among them, her tight dark curls crackling with frustrated energy. "We'll have to ferry them back to Valentin one load at a time. It'll take forever, but they're making up a medical ward for them right now."

"Return trip," Maris said. "Don't waste it. You can bring back stuff we need here. People too."

"What—oh, right! Calandra, tell them we're bringing in the first group there, and they should have inflatable personnel carriers ready for you to bring back, and have them send a medic with whatever antibiotics they've got and, oh, whatever emergency medical supplies they can think of. We can start treating people here while the flitter shuttles cases to Valentin. Calandra, send half our people back with that first load, and tell them I'm putting Leutnant Eskelinen in command; he knows the local situation. Leutnant, you can draw a sidearm from one of my people, and if anybody in Valentin makes a move you don't like, you have my authority to neutralize them. Calandra, you go too. I want you to get on the ansible to Rezerval and tell them to send more flitters and a full division from Enforcement; the two squads I brought with me won't begin to do the job. We're going to place Valentin under military law until this mess is sorted out . . . Oh, hell. I need to keep somebody who speaks Kalapriyan here to interpret for us."

"I c'n try," Maris said shyly. "If they don't talk too fast."

"I'm not," Annemari said, "too worried about understanding what they have to say. I just want to be sure they understand me. Can you do that much? Good. Start with telling these people they are all—all—going to be freed and cared for, and that those who put them there will never have power over them again."

It took Maris a while to put that together in words from her extremely limited vocabulary, but perhaps, she thought, it wasn't such a bad idea to keep it simple. A lot of these people looked as if they were past handling complicated concepts. They worked down the line together, Annemari cutting the chains, Maris promising the freed prisoners they would be cared for, Calandra doing a rough triage on each wasted body. "For the first load we have to pick people who can sit in the flitter seats," she explained when Maris wondered why she was choosing the healthiest prisoners to go first. "After that we'll have carriers to immobilize them in comfortable positions, and we can start sending out the worst cases while the medics work on the others."

Maris nodded. "Okay, makes sense. But could you explain it to them?"

Calandra gave her a strange look. "Why don't you give it a try? You did well enough just now."

She painfully constructed another couple of Kalapriyan sentences, explaining to the prisoners why most of them would have to wait for a while. The verbs were all jumbled up, wrong tense and mood, but the people who still looked sane seemed to understand her okay. And Calandra nodded as she went along.

"Not bad," Calandra said when she finished. "You know, I thought on Tasman that you were just some gang kid trying to pick my credits, but maybe . . . are you a student or something? Language specialist?"

Maris felt her cheeks turning dark red. "You were right on Tasman. I ain't no student. Just . . . well, Diplos are s'posed to have implants so they can speak the language where they're going, right? And I was s'posed to be a Diplo . . . so I studied real hard, every chance I got."

"You did well."

"Not well enough," Maris said ruefully. "He caught on to me right away." She jerked her head toward the mouth of the cave, toward Gabrel.

"Did he indeed? Hmm . . . I wonder why he brought you so far upcountry, then?"

"Well, maybe he didn't catch on right at first," Maris allowed. "He thought mebbe I was some kinda baby Diplo, like somebody who'd been to the School all right but hadn't graduated yet."

"And you cheated the retinal and DNA scans that were supposed to check for my ID," Calandra said wonderingly. "Sometime you must tell me how you pulled that off."

Maris didn't really want to dub on her old pals on Tasman, so she murmured something noncommittal and pretended to be having a hard time making the Kalapriyan prisoners understand her. Fortunately they had nearly enough people to fill the flitter with its first load; a few minutes later the flitter was gone, and Calandra and Gabrel with it. Maris told herself that the sick empty feeling inside her was relief. Now she wouldn't have to evade Calandra's questions about how the Tasman gang had hacked the Federation database. Now she wouldn't have to apologize to Gabrel for lying to him all along.

"Only thing is," she muttered to herself, "what do I do now?"

"You can help get these people more comfortable," Annemari said at once, "and as soon as the flitter is back with medics, you can be a great deal of help by translating what they wish to ask the prisoners."

And after that, what? Well, it wasn't Annemari's problem. Wasn't anybody's problem but hers, really. And she'd been taking care of herself long enough, she had no business feeling daunted by the prospect now. She wasn't going to be too popular here on Kalapriya, she didn't suppose. And she could hardly go back to her old life on Tasman. But with the redoubtable Annemari's help, she could probably get through Tasman alive and go on to—well, anywhere else. Some place where nobody wanted to kill her; that would have to do for a start.

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Framed

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Contents

Chapter Seventeen
Somewhere between Dharampal and Thamboon on Kalapriya

The morning sunlight flashed off the High Jagirs, turning their snow-covered peaks into a fantasia of gold and crystal. Below, the shadows covered a world of rocky cliffs and deep green forest; above, there was nothing but an endless blue so pale and thin that it made Maris even colder to look up at it. As Gabrel sighed with satisfaction at the vista opening before them, she reflected that it would probably be hours before any of that sunshine reached the hillside where they were making their way up something that might be laughingly referred to as a path. The disadvantages of dirtside living never ceased to amaze her; imagine having to wait for hours just to get the lights turned on!

"There's Bald Wizard," Gabrel pointed out a slightly rounded peak to the right side of the range, "and Old Snow Lady beside him." Maris supposed that the double cones of the second mountain's outline made the reason for the name obvious enough. If you thought like a man.

"And there," he said with a reverence that Maris found intensely irritating, "there is Ayodhana herself." He indicated a distant peak that dwarfed the others into mere foothills.

"If we have to walk all the way to the top of that mountain, we'll maybe get there some time next century," Maris grumbled. "Might as well go back to Valentin now." Valentin had been looking better and better to her during the long hours of night climbing. She had a blister on her right heel, and she felt as filthy as she had before that lovely bath in Harsajjan Bharat's house, and there were permanent wires of pain running from her feet up through her hips—and for what? All that walking to get them into the middle of nowhere? Valentin might be primitive, but it had houses and food stalls and places to sleep that didn't have sharp rocks sticking into your hip bone.

"Nobody climbs Ayodhana," Gabrel said, sounding shocked. "She is the sacred mountain."

"Yeah, and these caves yer friend wants us to go to—they're sacred too, right?" Maris pointed out. "And that doesn't seem to've stopped the Bashir from turning them into some kind of weapons locker, or whatever."

Gabrel looked sick. "I'm afraid it's not exactly—"

Chulayen interrupted him and said something in a low, agitated voice, pointing back the way they had come. "Hai, hai," Gabrel agreed before turning back to Maris. "We need to keep moving. There are tribesmen in Dharampal who know these trails much better than Chulayen does. If they realize we haven't gone straight back to Valentin, they'll have trackers out checking the trails. But if we can cross into Thamboon before they catch up with us, the Vakil won't send anybody over the border. Probably."

"And what if it's not the Vakil tracking us, but that ugly bastard from Udara?"

"That," Gabrel said, "is an extremely good reason to keep moving."

Fortunately, the next segment of the trail was not as grueling as the rocky slopes they'd covered in darkness. It wound about the shoulder of the mountain, well below the treeline, and almost level as such things were counted in the ranges of the Lower Jagirs—which meant they had to scramble up and down over rocks and around tree roots, but at least it wasn't the constant, monotonous climbing that had made the night walk such a misery. The narrow path passed through alternating bands of shadow and light. There were forested areas where the great trees enclosed them like walls and filled the air with a resinous scent that gave Maris new energy, and there were sudden openings into grassy meadows where the shelves of stone lay too near the surface for trees to flourish. In one of the glades Chulayen held up his hand as a signal to pause. While Gabrel and Maris froze, listening for the sounds of somebody following him, he climbed a few feet up one of the gnarled trunks and came down with his hand full of what looked like dark, sticky chunks of quartz. He said a few words to Gabrel and popped one of the rocklike things into his mouth.

"Sundhu resin," Gabrel explained to Maris. "He says chewing it will give us more energy for the trek and we won't need to load our bellies with food."

Maris had been rather looking forward to a stop for something to eat, and she had not been thinking in terms of chewing on something that smelled—she took another suspicious sniff to confirm her suspicions—like paint thinner. Still, Gabrel was munching away now with every evidence of enjoyment, so she cautiously took the smallest sliver of gunk she could find in Chulayen's open hand and stuck the end into her mouth.

Yep. Paint thinner.

She bit down on the stuff and almost gagged as the resinous texture and sharp taste flooded her mouth.

It would doubtless be considered extremely rude to spit it out again. Once they were walking, maybe, if she could manage to be last in line . . . but right now Gabrel and Chulayen were both watching her.

She chewed, swallowed the bitter saliva that filled her mouth, chewed again. It didn't taste quite so bitter now. A few more bites, and the chunk of stuff she'd taken had disintegrated into fibers, and she felt as if she'd just popped a couple of stimmers. And the taste . . . Her eyes widened, and the men laughed.

" 'S good!" she said in surprise.

"It's also addictive," Gabrel told her as they shouldered their packs and started forward again, "but Chulayen says the only people who get a chance to be addicted are the mountain tribes—it has to be taken fresh from the tree, and whatever active compounds make it such a good stimulant break down within hours. Someday I'd like to get a biochemist up here to analyze the freshly harvested sap."

"Mmm," Maris nodded while sucking the last delicious, tangy resinous flavor from the fibers in her mouth. Chulayen, ahead of them, spat his mouthful of fibers onto the trail, and she followed his example. "Synthesize this stuff, you could make a fortune selling it as, I dunno, chewing gum or something. Maybe make a drink out of it."

"That," said Gabrel, sounding shocked, "would be immoral. Didn't I tell you it was addictive?"

Maris had thought that was the point. Nothing like having a monopoly of something that people not only liked but had to have more of. If Johnivans could get his hands on an analysis of this stuff, he'd . . . kill the biochemist, and then . . .

What had seemed simple, clear, and profitable when she thought with her Tasman mind did seem immoral when she thought like Calandra Vissi, who was dead but who seemed to be taking over her head anyway. Maris remembered the kids who'd gone the dreamdust way on Tasman. Not just the ones in Johnivans' gang, but the young prostitutes who used the stuff to make their short lives bearable until the 'dust killed them. Would she have died that way if Johnivans hadn't taken her in?

So what was immoral? Providing dreamdust? Or leaving people in lives so miserable that dying of slow starvation on a constant dreamdust high seemed preferable to reality? Damn, trying to be a real person instead of a scumsucker was complicated. Too bad she wasn't really Calandra Vissi. The Diplo probably knew the right thing to do without having to think about it.

Anyway, she couldn't climb and think at the same time, she was too tired. She rubbed the sweat off her forehead—funny how you could sweat so much when it was so bunu cold—and tapped Chulayen's shoulder, holding out her hand for another chunk of sundhu resin.

Breakfast turned out to be a stale, flat onion pancake, handed out by Chulayen while they were still walking the level—and the sundhu resin, or her hunger, made even that taste delicious. Maris started scanning for likely trees every time they entered a band of forest, pointing them out to Chulayen until Gabrel reminded her that there was no point in stockpiling the resin; what they couldn't chew as they walked would lose its stimulant qualities in storage.

When no one was watching, she broke off half the next piece Chulayen gave her and tucked it into a corner of her pack. She could test it tomorrow; no need to take everything some total stranger told her at face value, just because Gabrel believed him. After all—Gabrel believed her, didn't he? He might fall for any lie—he hadn't trained with professionals, like she had.

That is, she could test it if she was still alive tomorrow. When they finally stopped for a rest and another yummy stone-cold onion pancake, Gabrel had time to translate what Chulayen had been telling him. And it didn't sound good to Maris.

"I thought this guy said the Bashir was storing his pro-tech weapons in these caves we're going to."

"That's what I thought at first," Gabrel admitted, "but you can see that wouldn't make any sense. You don't use some location too remote for anybody but mountain goats as a weapons locker; can you imagine carrying heavy machinery up this trail?"

"Tanglefield generators and nerve dazers aren't all that heavy."

"In large quantities they are."

"So what does he use it for?"

Gabrel's lips tightened for a moment; he looked sick. "According to Chulayen, he uses it for . . . making what he trades for the weapons. He used to do it in Udara, but because of the rumors that somebody was going to investigate, he moved everything to the Jurgan Caves in Thamboon."

"So what do you manufacture in 'some location too remote for anybody but mountain goats,' then?" Maris threw his own words back at him, and the answer came to her before Gabrel could speak. Those bio-shielded cylinders that Johnivans got from Kalapriya, that went out to Rezerval as "medical supplies" . . .

"Bacteriomats," she answered her own question. "He's found a way to culture 'mats outside the coastal caves, and instead of selling them to the Barents Trading Society, he's trading them to . . . somebody . . . for pro-tech weaponry."

Gabrel nodded. "So he can conquer more territory, so he can take more prisoners, so he can culture more bacteriomats, so he can get more arms . . . It's an endless spiral."

Maris thought it over. "I don't quite get the bit about the prisoners."

"I'm not quite sure either," Gabrel said, "but Chulayen insists that they're being used to help culture the 'mats, and that it kills them, so the Bashir needs more and more people. He used to condemn his political prisoners to the 'mat culture caves, but that's not enough anymore; he's taking people from the conquered areas. I don't quite get what's so toxic about the 'mat culture process; our people in Barents do it without dying or even getting sick, and my Kalapriyan isn't good enough to understand what Chulayen is saying. I keep asking how the prisoners culture the 'mats, and he says the prisoners are the 'mats. Something is getting badly mangled in translation."

Chulayen broke in here with a flood of Kalapriyan in which Maris managed to make out the words "wife, son, daughters—everybody, all my family!" and some names.

"His family was taken by the Ministry for Loyalty," Gabrel translated. "Fairly recently. They were sent to the Jurgan Caves before he could do anything. He wants us to get there as fast as possible in case there's a chance of saving them."

Maris blinked back tears, angry at herself for the weakness. So Chulayen had lost his family, so what was that to her? She'd never had a family. But the little clerk's grief made something ache inside her. She focused on practicalities.

"And exactly how are we going to do that?"

"We may not be able to," Gabrel admitted. "We'll have to see what the situation is like when we get there. I'm not going to risk your life in some desperate attempt to save the prisoners in the caves. You're too valuable for that; you're the key to our whole success."

"Who, me? How? I don't feel all that valuable," Maris said. "I mean, I don't want to die, or anything, but . . ."

"Don't you see, Calandra? You're our link with Rezerval! Even if you're not fully trained yet, you're a Diplo intern. You've got contacts with people who can stop this whole filthy business, and they'll believe you. I can't risk going to Valentin with the story, because some of the senior Trading Society people have to be in it, and I don't know which ones. But you can take it directly to Rezerval."

Maris took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The thin mountain air seemed a bit short on oxygen; that must be what was making her feel so dizzy. "Gabrel. Tell me that's not your only plan—having me get help from Rezerval?"

"Can you think of a better?"

"Almost anything," Maris said, "would work better than that." Stop! screamed a voice within her. We never tell outsiders the truth. 

So who's more of an outsider than me? Maris argued back at her own protective voice. Johnivans was gonna kill me, remember? 

That just goes to show. You can't trust anybody.

But if that was true—if she couldn't trust Gabrel, who had been so patient, so helpful, who had supported her a hundred ways without ever once complaining—well, what was the point of living in a world where you really couldn't trust anybody at all?

"Calandra? Are you all right?"

Maris realized that she had closed her eyes, wrapped up in her internal dialogue for what must have seemed like forever to Gabrel and Chulayen.

"I'm going to do it," she said, half aloud. "And if he hates me, so what?"

"Calandra." Gabrel took both her hands in his. "What's the matter? Of course I don't hate you. I couldn't hate you. Damn it, Calandra, you know how I feel about you."

"You won't anymore," Maris said bleakly, "when I explain." But there wasn't any other choice, now. Somehow, traveling with Gabrel Eskelinen and trying to think with Calandra Vissi's head had fatally messed up her own head. She had become infected with outsider notions about doing the right thing instead of looking after yourself first, last, and always.

"Explain what?"

No way to put it off any longer. No excuse to put it off any longer. "Gabrel, you didn't quite get it right—about who I am—"

"You're not an intern?"

"No."

"But—I could have sworn you weren't a fully trained Diplo with all the implants."

"I'm not that either," Maris said. "And me name ain't even Calandra! I'm Maris! Maris Nobody from Tasman, got that? I'm a damn fake and you been too bunu dumb to catch on, all this time! Calandra's dead, you idiot! I—I needed to get off Tasman real quick, they was gonna kill me, and I had her ID and I used it and I was gonna run off soon's I got away safe only there wasn't never no chance!" Angry tears choked her and she realized she'd been shouting like a Tasman scumsucker. She took a deep breath and let the memory of Calandra Vissi fill her with borrowed calm.

"I didn't kill Calandra," she said, more quietly. "Nobody meant to kill her. It was an accident. But afterwards—" She could not bear to tell him how Johnivans had meant to throw her life away. That she was a person so worthless, her best friend in all the world had no more use for her living self than for her corpse. "Well, I was in trouble. Real bad trouble. And I look a little bit like Calandra, and Ny—a friend," she substituted, "hacked into the databases and fixed it so my DNA and retina scans would go on her ID, so I could use it to get away. That's all I wanted—to get away."

"To Kalapriya?"

"Anywhere off Tasman, and that's where Calandra was s'posed to be going, so I thought that would be easiest. I didn't realize until I got here," Maris confessed, "that the only way out was back through Tasman again. So I was stuck."

Gabrel sat down at the base of a tree and leaned forward, resting his arms on his bent knees.

"I . . . didn't mean to get you stuck with me," Maris ventured after a while, and then, after another silence, "I'm sorry."

Gabrel raised his head and Maris looked away, afraid of seeing scorn in his eyes.

"You've never even been on Rezerval."

"Right."

"You're here because your friends killed the real Diplo."

His voice was flat and dead. He hated her. He had to; look at the mess she'd gotten him into, and how she'd been lying to him since the day they met. She might as well spell out the whole sorry story. When you had nothing left but pride . . . well, what good was pride?

"I'm here," Maris corrected, "because when the Diplo spaced herself, my 'friends' needed a substitute. If a Diplo'd just disappeared on Tasman, there'd've been a search that could've messed up Johnivans' whole organization. So his idea was to hack into Rezerval's databases and substitute my physical data for Calandra's, then let them find my dead body in her quarters and report she'd died of natural causes. Only when I put the story together, I decided I'd rather impersonate a live Diplo than a dead one. I got out of Tasman one step ahead of Johnivans . . . I don't have any friends," she finished, swallowing hard. "I'm nobody. I can't do you no bunu good." At least she could quit trying to talk toppie now.

She could feel Gabrel studying her face. Maris hoped she didn't look as miserable as she felt.

"You're wrong about that, you know," he said.

Maris lifted her empty hands. "And just what do you think I can do? I'm for sure not your contact with any Rezerval toppies!"

"You have friends now," Gabrel said. "You saved my life in Valentin, and you've been a damned good marching companion all this way. No accredited Diplo could have done better. Don't run yourself down, Cal . . . umm . . ."

"Maris." She folded her arms, as if she could hold on to herself, hold on to her misery. Words cost nothing. If she let herself believe them, it would just hurt worse when Gabrel showed the truth. Whatever he might say, he couldn't feel the same about a Tasman scumsucker as he would've about a Rezerval Diplo. "You always do jump to conclusions too fast," she told him. "When you've had time to think about it, you'll hate me for getting you into this. So why don't we just fast-forward to that part now and skip the nice talk?" And skip the part where she started to feel good again and then it was taken away. The remembered pain of discovering Johnivans' betrayal shot through her again, almost taking her breath away; it felt like a hand squeezing her heart. She couldn't go through that again with Gabrel.

Gabrel sighed. "Maybe we should just forget about personal relationships and decide how we're going to finish the job."

It did hurt.

"Fine by me," Maris said tightly.

"Okay, then."

"Okay."

After a long, tense silence Gabrel finally spoke again . . . in Kalapriyan this time. Chulayen answered, no, asked a question. Gabrel said something that sounded way too short to be a summary of her confession to him. In fact, if she knew Kalapriyan any better, she'd have thought he said, "Go away."

He had; Chulayen turned his back to them and walked down the path they'd come up until he was lost to sight among the trees.

"Wait a minute!" Maris cried. Never mind her personal misery, there was more than that at stake. "You can't just send him away like that. We got to try and rescue his family, don't we?"

Gabrel stood up. Maris dropped her eyes so she wouldn't have to see his face. All she could see was the toes of his boots coming closer until they stopped, inches from her own toes. "This isn't going to work, Maris."

"We could try, couldn't we? Oh, gods take it. Call Chulayen back. Him and me'll bunu try and get in there. We don't need you!" I don't need you. Leastways, not any more than I need air and water. 

"I didn't mean that," Gabrel said. "Of course we're going to try. But we can't go in with our minds on other things, and I don't know about you, but I can't forget about our personal relationship and leave things like this. We've got to clear the air."

Maris looked up, avoided meeting his eyes, glanced from side to side at the conifer-studded hills. "Looks plenty clear to me," she said.

"Stop. Playing. Word. Games." Gabrel said through clenched teeth. "Oh, gods . . ." His hands closed on her shoulders and his mouth came down over hers, at first hard, then soft and warm and . . . Maris lost track of her thoughts and everything else. She'd imagined this a million times, only not like this, not with him knowing who she really was—

That brought her back to reality and she wrenched her head away. It hurt to stop. Hurt worse than anything yet.

As soon as his own mouth was free, Gabrel was talking, saying nonsense, not letting her get a word in edgewise. "Maris, I love you, don't you understand? I don't care who you were before, you're mine now."

"You don't love me," Maris told him. "I was being Calandra Vissi. It's her you love, and she's dead."

"Calandra Vissi didn't save my life in Valentin, and ride until her thighs were scraped raw without a word of complaint, and lead pack ghaya up into the hills with me, and make camp in the mountains with me," Gabrel said. "You did. It doesn't matter what you were calling yourself at the time. The girl who made this trip with me is the one I love."

He bent his head to kiss her again, but Maris twisted away. "Wait," she pleaded. "I got to think."

Love her? That couldn't be true. There wasn't anything about her to love. If there had been, Johnivans wouldn't have tossed her life aside so casually.

Unless . . .

Johnivans was a different sort of person than Gabrel, wasn't he?

Actually, Johnivans wasn't up to Gabrel's class at all. Now that she thought about it.

Maybe the problem wasn't that she wasn't worth anything, but that Johnivans didn't know how to care about people.

And Gabrel did.

He knew a lot more than that, too. While he was ostensibly giving her time to think, his left arm was holding her very close and his right hand was roaming in a most distracting fashion. It would be so easy to quit thinking altogether and give in to what felt so very, very good and safe. But she wasn't quite ready yet.

"You always fall in love with girls who drag pack-ghaya up a mountain trail?" she demanded. "Because if so, I'm gonna have too bunu much competition in these hills."

Gabrel tried to look serious, as if he were thinking it over, but the corners of his mouth kept twitching up. "Actually," he said, "I think I fell in love with you when you bullied me into talking to you, that first evening in Valentin."

"Huh! You mean when I listened to you all the way to the meeting hall."

"No," he said, "I think it was when you half crippled me by stepping on my feet during the valsa."

"I never!"

"Oh, yes, you did, my love. You are entrancing, maddening, beautiful, brave, and a terrible dancer. But I'll teach you to valsa properly."

"I am not a terrible dancer!"

"You should have seen the bruises."

"You're making it up, you walked fine afterwards didn't you?"

"A soldier is trained to bear pain," Gabrel said solemnly, "and if you don't stop talking, I'll have to shut you up again."

"Yap," Maris said. "Yap yappity yap. Yap yap ya . . ."

The second kiss was definitely better than the first. She was seriously tempted to keep arguing and kissing, just to see how much better it could get, but they did have a job to do.

She and Gabrel evidently realized that at the same time. His grip on her loosened and he stepped back.

So did she.

It felt like having part of her self torn away.

"I suppose," she said, "we'd better call Chulayen and get on with it, then."

"I suppose so," Gabrel agreed.

When they resumed the council of war, Maris was seated on the ground beside Gabrel, in the curve of his arm. And Chulayen looked at them and looked . . . not happy, perhaps, but less miserable than he'd been since they met. He said something to Gabrel that Maris couldn't follow, but she was pretty sure the word "love"—khariya—came in there.

"Okay," Gabrel said, trying to sound businesslike. "We need to figure out where we are and go on from there, right?"

"Going on" was painfully slow, since he had to say everything twice, once in Galactic for Maris and once in Kalapriyan for Chulayen—they couldn't risk anybody missing anything, not now—but there wasn't that much to say, really. You could only say "hopeless situation," and "forlorn hope," so many ways.

"The way I see it," Gabrel summarized, "we've got people trying to kill us in Valentin. And we've got people trying to kill us in Dharampal. And we've probably got people trying to kill us in Udara. And that's the good news."

And people trying to kill me on Tasman, Maris added mentally, not that it would make any difference—so why bother saying it aloud?

"I don't think it would work to head back from here to Valentin and try to tell them all that we've decided to drop the investigation. They might not give us a chance to discuss it. They might not even believe us. Besides—" Gabrel gave a wry smile "—I'd really, really hate to have come all this way for no result."

"And besides," Maris said, "we got to get Chulayen's wife and kids out, don't we?"

"If we can," Gabrel agreed.

"After which we'll also have people trying to kill us in Thamboon."

"Ah. But with any luck we'll also have evidence that ties the whole scheme together. Then we try to make it back to Valentin—no, to Rezerval—and take what we've got to . . . whatever authorities we can find."

"You reckon our chances of getting back alive are any better this way?"

"No," Gabrel admitted, "but they're no worse, and at least this way, if we do get back, maybe we can do something worthwhile. Mathematically, it makes perfect sense; our choice is between probably getting killed with no outcome, and probably getting killed with a possible good outcome."

"I can't begin to tell you," Maris said, "how much better it makes me feel to know we've got a mathematician on the job. Makes all the difference. Okay, which way do we go from here?"

After a brief consultation with Chulayen, Gabrel reported that the pilgrim route to the cave was a relatively gentle downhill walk from the glade where they rested.

"Too good to be true!" Maris exulted.

"Well, yes. They're bound to have guards posted. However, Chulayen is almost sure there's another way into the cave complex. When he was there on pilgrimage with his wife he noticed there was a constant slight breeze blowing against his face. Also, the Inner Light Way priests appeared very suddenly from the back of the main cave. He's pretty sure there is a series of chambers back beyond the crystal caves with some opening to the outside, and he thinks he can figure out how to work around the main entrance to that one. So we're going to go that way—" Gabrel pointed at a discouraging rocky slope "—and then around there, and then with any luck there'll be a rope bridge . . ."

"Don't tell me any more," Maris implored. "I think I'm happier not knowing."

There was a rope bridge. Maris wasn't sure that counted as good luck, though. The thing consisted of two ropes, count them, two: one to stand on and one to hold on to while you shuffled over a lot of very hard- and spiky-looking rocks a very long way below. And in full gravity! Another minus for dirtside life: not only couldn't you turn on the lights, you couldn't turn off the gravity.

You had, in fact, very little control at all. But when had she, personally, had any control over her circumstances? Surely not on Tasman, where Johnivans had used her as a spy, runner, and thief until it was more convenient to discard her. Certainly not since she'd run from Tasman. She wasn't even sure she'd had any control over falling in love with Gabrel. It felt more like giving in to a force of nature, like gravity.

Not that she really wanted to think about gravity just then . . . "What the hell," Maris said, and followed Chulayen over the double rope. Actually she crossed a little faster than he did, and a lot faster than Gabrel, whose weight made the device sag and creak alarmingly.

"In a holo," she said when Gabrel finally crossed the chasm, "the native guide would scamper across without even using the top rope, 'stead of gripping it with all ten fingers the way he did."

Gabrel grinned and translated the comment to Chulayen, who was looking rather more olive green than his usual light brown color. Chulayen replied with a spate of words ending in a shaky laugh. "He says he's a soft clerk in a Udaran government office, not a mountain tribesman," Gabrel translated, "and the pilgrim path to the caves is quite bad enough for him. After the pilgrimage he vowed never to go near one of these rope bridges again. Furthermore, he is beginning to hope we will all be killed attempting to enter the caves, so that he won't have to come back this way."

Maris looked with new respect at the little brown-skinned man. Just a clerk in some government office, but he'd joined the Udaran resistance movement, traveled across country to meet unknown foreigners, and led them back through the mountains because his family might still be alive in these mysterious caves of Thamboon. And even if he had gripped the handrope so tightly his knuckles turned white and taken half of forever to shuffle along the footrope, still he'd been the one to show them the way across the bridge. "Well, tell him if that's what the old softies of his country are like, I hope I never run across a tough young one!"

After the bridge they went more slowly; there was nothing so well defined as a path to guide them, only narrow trails through the bent grass. Chulayen studied the outlines of the surrounding hills intently. Gabrel flipped the curved Kalapriyan-style dagger he carried upside down and revealed a primitive compass concealed in the hilt. He and Chulayen stopped and conferred so often Maris began to wonder, then to suspect, then to feel certain—

"We're lost."

"Not lost," Gabrel said defensively, "we just aren't sure exactly—"

"Do you know where we are?"

"Well . . ."

"Does he know where this supposed back entrance to the caves is?"

"I . . . look out!"

Gabrel's shoulder caught her in the midriff and knocked the breath out of her, sending them both tumbling down among the stiff thorny bushes. A moment later Chulayen dove on top of them. Something caught the hem of Maris's long tunic and dragged it upward—damn thorns—and she had just time to think that Chulayen's weight on top of Gabrel's would drive the thorn bushes right into her bare back—and now she heard the buzzing that had alerted Gabrel; some kind of machine?—but she couldn't see over his body pinning her down, wriggled sideways and got room to breathe again, no, more than that, falling into darkness— She landed, hard, on something entirely composed of hard knobbly lumps and sharp edges.

"A flitter," Gabrel said under his breath. "Gods, they're getting blatant about it, not even trying to hide their smuggled technology anymore! Stay down, Maris, if they see us— Maris?"

The breath that had been knocked out of her body came back in, lovely beautiful oxygen, and the bruises—well, one good thing about the dark, she couldn't see the extent of the damage, but it didn't feel like anything was broken. She wasn't even bleeding. Much. Just the one scraped elbow that had found a rock face on the way down. "I think," Maris called up, "I've found it. The back way. Into them caves."

After some discussions about how deep the hole was ("Not bad," Maris reported, "I didn't break nothing."), whether Chulayen and Gabrel could climb down rather than falling in ("Try climbing. Falling's not fun."), and whether there were passages leading into the interior of the mountain ("Why d'you think I said I'd found it? 'Course there's passages!") Gabrel first lowered Chulayen down the precipitous sides of the hole, then swung himself over, hung by his hands for a moment, and let himself drop. A vigorous Barentsian curse helped Maris identify his shadowy form.

"Reckon you found the same ledge I did," she said, not without satisfaction. "Scrape yer elbow?"

Gabrel didn't deign to reply. He asked Chulayen something and got back an answer most of which Maris understood; her Kalapriyan seemed to be improving rapidly with all the practice she got listening to Gabrel and Chulayen. The little clerk didn't think this was the back way that had been used by the priests, and Gabrel agreed that there were probably easier entrances to the cave complex somewhere else; however, the faint continual draft of air past their faces made this one seem as promising as any other.

"Help if we could see anything," Maris complained, and even as she finished speaking a faint glow lit up Gabrel's face. It looked as though his cheek and forehead had intercepted the ledge on which Maris had scraped her elbow; no wonder he was testy. But showing off his light source seemed to be cheering him up.

"Built in with the compass," he explained. "Only turns on when I twist this little knob on the side of the hilt—see?" And he demonstrated by clicking the light on and off several times.

"The Bashir supplies his troops with magic lights also," Chulayen said—that was short and simple enough that Maris could understand it, especially when the clerk also produced a glowing disk from the folds of his sash.

"I thought you were just an office clerk," Gabrel said with suspicion.

"My . . . friends . . . occasionally divert some military supplies," Chulayen explained.

Maris threw up her hands. "This bunu world! Everybody except me is already carrying pro-tech, and who got arrested in Dharampal on suspicion of having outlander weapons? Me!"

After some time crawling along the one useful passage leading from that deep hole, Maris wished Gabrel and Chulayen had been carrying a little more prohibited technology. Something to map the cave complex would have been nice. She wasn't entirely happy with following the faint breath of air moving through the tunnel as evidence that somewhere up ahead were the larger caverns of which Chulayen had spoken. Still, it wasn't like there'd been a lot of choices. The other apparent passages had been only deep crevices with no openings; if this one petered out they'd have to backtrack, climb out of the hole she'd accidentally discovered, and look for another entrance.

Back through that narrow bit where they had to crawl single file on their bellies through slimy puddles . . . She really, really hoped they were going the right way. Then she realized that once they got to the crystal caves, they would have to find something they could steal that would be enough to get the attention of the authorities on Rezerval, lift whatever-it-was without being killed by the cave guards, then go back through that slimy tunnel, trek over the mountains, not get killed by Udaran assassins, find a boat back down the river to Valentin, not get killed by Barentsian assassins, get themselves to Rezerval from a planet whose only access station was Tasman, not get killed by Johnivans . . . She moaned softly to herself. They'd never make it. She might just as well lie down and die right here in the tunnel, except . . .

"What is wrong?" Chulayen asked. He spoke slowly and clearly so that she could understand him.

"Nothin' " Maris said. Her Kalapriyan definitely wasn't up to explaining all the ways they could die on the way back. "I . . . don't like tunnels." Okay, so she'd slipped through narrower spaces in the maintenance shafts on Tasman, but even there you could turn on the lights . . . and she knew her way around Tasman.

"There is nothing to fear," Chulayen promised her. "These mountains are very old. Nothing will fall to close our way."

Gods, she hadn't even thought to worry about that possibility!

"And the crystal caves are . . . were . . . very beautiful," Chulayen went on. "You and Gabrel will be the first outlanders to see them. Walls lined with crystals, you understand? Light everywhere. In darkness, one lights a candle first, and light dances everywhere."

That was something good to think about while she crawled on hands and knees through the stinking mud. After a while the passage opened up a little. They couldn't stand up, but at least she didn't have to keep her head down where her nose was practically in the mud. So the smell should have been better . . . but instead, as they progressed, it got worse.

Much worse.

If the roof hadn't raised up so that Maris could stand, she thought she would have thrown up. Chulayen stood up too, with a smothered groan of relief and a hand at the small of his back. Gabrel was too tall; he had to walk in a half-crouch that looked even more uncomfortable than crawling. Still, the change of position must be some relief.

And that cloying, sickly sweet smell kept getting worse.

"Watch out for crevasses," Gabrel warned in a low voice. He angled his dagger hilt so that a faint light showed the broken ground before them. Maris realized that the black areas weren't just deep shadows but actual openings in the cave floor, falling down who knows how far? She certainly didn't want to find out. Fortunately they were mostly narrow. She stepped across the openings carefully, holding Chulayen's hand for safety, then helped to balance him while he crossed each one.

"Bigger ones coming up," Gabrel murmured, "and we must be close now. Somebody else has been using this part of the cave." His light illumined a roughly planed plank that bridged a wide crevasse ahead.

"Smells like something crawled in here to die," Maris muttered.

"Maybe somebody fell through." Gabrel dropped to his knees, then to his stomach. One hand over his mouth and nose, he lowered his other hand with the light down into the gaping crevasse, then gasped suddenly and jerked backward, gagging.

"What is it?" Maris whispered.

"Don't look!"

Chulayen squeezed past her and whispered something in Kalapriyan to Gabrel, then took the light and lowered it at arm's length into the crevasse, peering intently. When he straightened up he looked even greener than before, but maybe that was just the effect of the dim light among the shadows of the cave.

Or the effect of the smell.

"I can look or you can tell me," Maris said, carefully taking the shallowest breaths she could, "but I ain't going out on that plank until I know what's underneath me."

"Bodies," Gabrel said reluctantly.

Maris supposed she had already known that, because she didn't feel shocked or surprised. Just cold. "His people?" She jerked her head at Chulayen.

"He didn't recognize anyone . . . There's no way of telling for sure," Gabrel said. 'They've been . . . their heads are . . . I don't understand it. Why drag prisoners all the way up here just to execute them?" He turned to Chulayen and repeated the question, got back a long answer whispered so fast that Maris couldn't follow a word of it.

"He doesn't really know either, I don't think," Gabrel told Maris. "He keeps saying that Meer Madee told him they use the prisoners to make the bacteriomats and then they die."

"I guess we got to go on, then," Maris concluded. "Us seeing a heap of mangled bodies isn't going to count for evidence, is it? Even if you had a rope and could get down there and bring one back . . ."

"It might prove something," Gabrel said, "or it might not, depending on what's been done to the bodies. Unfortunately, we do not have a rope." He didn't sound that unhappy about it.

For once Maris found it easy to obey Gabrel's injunction not to look down as she crossed the plank across the crevasse. She really wished there were some way to turn off the gravity for that few seconds, though.

On the far side of the crevasse things improved. A lot. The cave was high enough for even Gabrel to stand up in, and wide enough that they could walk side by side. If you could call what they were doing walking. Gabrel evidently figured they were getting close to where the action was, so he insisted on what he called "slow advance mode," which was apparently a military term for sneaking up on some place really slowly and carefully.

Accent on slowly.

First Gabrel twisted the hilt of his dagger so that only the faintest light came from it, barely enough to show the uneven floor of the cave; and even that was shielded by his hand so that nobody in front of them would be likely to see it. He would take three steps forward, then pause and listen. He'd motion to Chulayen, who did the same thing, a lot more quietly than Gabrel. Last came Maris. Another pause to listen. Then they repeated the whole thing.

After a minor eternity of three-steps-and-listen, Maris realized that the cave was slowly getting brighter. She could see sparkly bits on the sides of the passage, and long back-cast shadows where those bits stuck out. She tapped Gabrel on the shoulder and pointed to the shadows. He nodded acknowledgment, twisted the light off and tucked his dagger back into the sash of his tunic.

Moving even more slowly than before, they came from the shadows of the crevasses to a world of glittering lights. The walls around them flowered with crystalline shapes, some like sharp-edged flowers, some like stars, others like broken bits of space debris, with no recognizable form to them, but a sense of some underlying purpose in their structure. The reflections from the crystal facets danced and swam around them, making Maris so dizzy that it was hard to reason out the cause: the light source must come from torches somewhere ahead. Torches, people . . . they slowed even more. A murmur that had at first seemed no more than the sighing of the cave now sounded like water, then like voices babbling indistinguishable syllables. Gabrel put his finger to his lips, listened intently, then turned to Chulayen with brows lifted. Chulayen shook his head; Maris deduced that he, too, was unable to make any sense out of what they were hearing. But at least it proved there were living people in the caves before them.

An outcropping of crystal-encrusted stone partially blocked the way forward. They crowded behind it and peered at what they could see of the lighted cave. The moving sparks of reflections from the crystal walls were so confusing that it was hard to make out details even close to the torches affixed to the walls at intervals, but it looked to Maris as if there was just one person walking around, and any number sitting against the cave walls—shadow upon shadow, moaning and mumbling singsong nonsense that chilled her even while she told herself that she couldn't expect to understand Kalapriyan mumbling. No matter what the language, the tones were those of madness.

"One guard," she breathed to Gabrel, and he nodded. They moved back a few (agonizingly careful) steps and held a whispered conference. What would be the best way to get rid of the guard so they could free the prisoners? Her appearance, or Gabrel's, would be sure to alarm him. Could Chulayen pass as another guard for long enough to lure the man back here where they could capture him? He looked dismayed at the suggestion but said something that Maris thought would have sounded snobbish, if he could have got enough intonation into his whispers.

"What'd he say? What's he going to do?" she demanded under her breath as Chulayen inched toward the cave opening again.

"He says he isn't dressed right to be a guard but if he tries really hard he thinks he can imitate a lower-class Rohini accent long enough to get the man back here."

Maris nodded. Like she thought—snobbish. She remembered Gabrel's brief explanations about the class differences between Rudhrani and Rohini. Hmm. If this Chulayen was Rudhrani, and a Udaran government employee at that, what was he doing with the resistance movement? Was he leading them into a trap?

Chulayen called out in Kalapriyan. The guard's pacing stopped, and Gabrel didn't seem to be worried by whatever Chulayen had said, so probably it was all right. But the guard didn't come toward them. Chulayen said something else and the guard took a step closer. Would he—

"Baba! Babaji!" A child's cry of delight echoed from the walls of the cavern, and a small figure ran past the guard, all the way to the outcropping of crystals that concealed their party. Chulayen leapt forward, dropped to one knee and embraced the child, heedless of the torchlight falling upon his exposed face. Tears glittered on his face as he rocked the child back and forth in his arms. His story had been true, then; Maris had been worrying about the wrong thing, as usual.

What she should have been worrying about was the number of guards. The first man, the one they'd tried to lure back here, gave a shout—for help?—and suddenly there were three, no, five men all coming at them, the others must have been sleeping, and now they were really sunk—

"Back here!" Gabrel pushed her unceremoniously back into the deepest crevice between the crystal pillar and the cave wall, then strode forward into the torchlight and said something in Kalapriyan. The guards seized him and Chulayen, tore the child from Chulayen's arms, and dragged all three of them out of Maris's sight.

They didn't search further. She huddled in the crevice and alternated between wondering what to do next and cursing Gabrel. She'd recognized the Kalapriyan word for "two" in what he said, so presumably it was something like "It's just the two of us." Nice that they took his word for it! But what was the good of leaving her free on her own? Anybody would think he'd forgotten that she wasn't a real Diplo with wonderful weapons and secret powers—just a Tasman scumsucker with no skills but lying and evasion. Demons take the man—if only they'd both hidden—well, okay, there probably wasn't room in here for both of them; it was a tight fit for her alone. So fine. He should have hidden and let her be captured, then rescuing them would've been his problem. Talk about getting noble and chivalrous at the wrong moment! Johnivans would have dived for cover without a second thought, probably first pushing her out into the light to distract the guards, and . . . Would you really prefer that? Okay. No, she wouldn't. Gabrel was worth a hundred of Johnivans. He was brave, Chulayen was honest, and she, Maris, was a nasty suspicious little liar who thought the worst of everyone until proven wrong and who didn't deserve to be the only one of them left free.

Maris sighed—quietly—and prepared to see what she could do with her own skills. Being a Diplo and probably able to call up reinforcements from Rezerval would've been nice, but being just herself, she'd have to rely on lying and evasion. Eavesdropping would've been a good supplement, but she couldn't follow the guards' mumbling, slang-filled conversation. Who was she kidding? She could barely follow a very slow, clear conversation in very basic Kalapriyan. If she already knew what it was about. Besides, she could barely hear the guards now . . .

A cold hand tugged at her arm. Maris started, cracked her head on something hard and sharp jutting out of the crystal pillar, and—it was only the child.

Who'd given them away to the guards, she reminded herself.

But probably not on purpose.

Now the child—a little girl, she thought, with those long black braids—was whispering something urgently. Maris bent down to hear. A lot of good that did—it was still bloody Kalapriyan. She fumbled for words and managed something like "No understand, talk slow please."

What she wouldn't have given for a Diplo's language implant.

Finally the little girl calmed down enough to put it in words of one syllable for the dumb outlander. "Guards gone now. We get my babaji. You come help!"

Maris realized that the voices of the guards were quite inaudible now; all she could hear was the continual low-toned babbling and moaning of, she supposed, the prisoners. Inaudible didn't necessarily mean gone. She risked a cautious peek around the crystal pillar and saw nobody standing, not even any long shadows of standing men.

Yeah, right. So maybe the guards were sitting down like everybody else.

The kid tugged more urgently. Maris dug in her heels and pulled right back, enough to get the girl's attention, then squatted down to bring their heads together. "Go slow," she whispered. "Careful. No talk loud." She hated trying to talk this language; it made her feel like an idiot. She added in Galactic, more for her own satisfaction than because she really thought she'd be able to communicate, "Look, kid, you are with an expert at sneaking around now. You just stay back and let me handle things, you hear?" Not that she had any idea how she was going to "handle" the situation, but at least she could scope it out better if this kid would just calm down and stay put.

Something in her tone seemed to work—maybe it was just the universal Voice of Adult Authority—and the little girl stayed quietly in the shelter of the crystal pillar while Maris slunk to the next bit of shadowy cover, thinking nobody-here-you-don't-even-want-to-look thoughts to discourage anybody who just might be looking.

The torchlight was some distance away, and anyway it did a terrible job of lighting this back part of the cave; patches of crystals sparkled in occasional pools of light, surrounded by dark shadows. Even if somebody saw a bit of movement, they'd probably take it for a crystal flashing in the wavering light. And the irregular walls of the cave provided plenty of solid cover. Maris couldn't have had a better environment for sneaking up on somebody if she'd custom-ordered it. Compared to following a mark along the brilliantly lit corridors of one of Tasman's toppie levels, this was a piece of cake.

Of course, last time she'd tried to do that, she hadn't been such a great success. But who'd have known the mark would turn out to be a Diplo? A bunch of stupid Kalapriyan guards had to be easy in comparison.

How do you know they're stupid?  

Maris slipped from the shadows cast by a boulder sparkling with iridescent white snowflakes, across the narrow cavern and into the shelter of a stalactite cluster that seemed to be dripping half-melted crystals. This isn't exactly the kind of job that goes to the sharpest guys around, she answered the carping voice in her head.

And speaking of "around," where were all those guards who'd piled onto Gabrel and Chulayen? Maris peered between two flows of crystal and squinted into the uneven light of the cavern where it opened out ahead of her, carefully taking stock of every bit of information her senses could bring her.

Torches were fixed into the walls at head height every two or three meters. She avoided looking directly at the flames. Even the sparkling walls revealed by the torchlight were bright enough to mess up her vision. She directed her gaze down toward the cavern floor, where huddled dark shapes lined the walls.

People. Chained to the walls? Not moving much, anyway. Here and there she saw a head or an arm moving in a kind of aimless flopping motion, that was all. Some of them were moaning or babbling; nearly all the shapes looked wrong in some way that she couldn't make out from here.

None of them looked like Gabrel or Chulayen.

And they smelled—gods, how the place stank! You'd think they were sitting in pools of their own excrement.

As she moved into the open space, so slowly it was more like flowing than walking, Maris saw that was exactly what they were doing. The prisoners were chained by the neck to bolts driven deep into the cavern walls. Some flopped so limply against their chains that they had to be unconscious or dead. Just before her, two chained bodies sat in the frozen stiffness of death. Beyond them, a head wavered, fell forward into torchlight and revealed a gaping wound in the skull that exposed the brain matter.

Maris swallowed hard and ordered her stomach to control itself. She couldn't do anything about this, not now; she had to find Gabrel and Chulayen first. No point in even thinking about what tortures were being inflicted here what they might be doing right now to Gabrel don't think about that don't think. She managed a few more cautious steps and came to a halt right beside one of the torches. The flickering downward light showed the bodies beneath all too clearly and she could not resist a horrified look there's something growing out of his head don't look don't look . . .

"Ca— Maris!"

Gabrel's voice. "Go back, Ca— Maris," he called. "Something's distracted the guards. This is your chance to get away. Go back the way we came."

"Demons fly away with the way we came!" Maris followed the voice, kept her eyes averted from the parade of horrors against the cavern walls, finally came to where Gabrel and Chulayen were chained but, not, thank God, tortured yet . . . she felt his head to make sure.

"This is an order," Gabrel said in an urgent undertone. "You can't save us. Someone must tell Rezerval what's going on here."

The chains were some kind of antique metal, actual links, nothing programmable; she felt for a keypad or some device she could fiddle and cursed primitive worlds. "Mebbe you forgot," she told Gabrel while feeling down the length of the chain to the wall bolt and back again, "I ain't in yer army. Anyway, I don't take orders from somebody as can't even remember me right name." Ha! There was some kind of a catch here, holding the chain tight around Gabrel's neck.

"You'll do what I tell you—arrgh! Whose side are you on anyway?" Gabrel complained. "You trying to strangle me?" She had jerked his head sideways and cut off the slack in the chain while trying to get a view of the catch.

"The idea," Maris said between her teeth, "is not without its attractions. Gimme your dagger."

"Guards took it."

"Well, don't you have anything useful in those sash pockets?" Maris dug into the recesses of her own clothing and came up with a bone comb. That might work, if she broke off the inside teeth and used one of the strong outside teeth as a probe. She twisted the chain just a little more, using it to break off part of the comb and turn it into a tool, and Gabrel made gagging noises.

"Just hold on, I got to see what I'm doing," Maris muttered. Push the long bone tooth into this opening, feel gently, gently . . . Gabrel jerked and she lost her grip on the catch. "Hold still!"

"Not much point in picking the lock if I'm strangled first."

Maris was beginning to think she couldn't pick the lock anyway; the triangle of the bone tooth was too broad to slip deep enough into the catch. She could probably file it down on the metal of the bolt, but that would take time . . .

Steps at the mouth of the cave startled her. She crouched between Gabrel and Chulayen, trying to blend in with the huddled prisoners.

Light blinded her for a moment—not torchlight, but a proper light that you switched on and off; like Gabrel's dagger, only about a hundred times brighter. Maris blinked and squinted at the figure behind the light. It wasn't a guard returning. Maybe worse—a tall, fair-haired woman who walked confidently, as if she thought she owned the caverns, and openly carried a flash that was way beyond anything legal to have in Kalapriya.

One of the arms dealers, come to inspect the bacteriomats they took in trade for their offworld weapons? Had to be—who else would be let past the guards like that? For that matter, who else would be foolhardy enough to just walk in like this, alone?

Of course, she thought everybody in the cavern was chained to the wall.

Maris let her get two steps farther in; the light shone on a man just beyond Chulayen, and she heard the woman make a gagging noise as though unprepared for the sight. Now.

It was a beautiful move, if she did say so herself, one that Ice Eyes had taught her back on Tasman: propelling herself straight out from the wall without worrying about the coming fall, arms out to grab the arms trader around the knees and bring the woman down in, hopefully, a surprised and breathless heap.

Of course, the way Ice Eyes taught the move, you were supposed to wind up on top of your adversary, not squashed between them and the floor. The extremely rocky and uneven floor, in this case. Fortunately the arms trader was not only surprised but also considerably older than Maris, and slow; Maris managed to reverse their positions and got a knee resting on the older woman's throat before the trader had recovered from the shock of being knocked flying.

"Call off the guards," she said, "or I'll choke you now."

The arms trader made a series of whooping, breathless noises. Someone else appeared behind her and cried out, "Annemari!" Another woman, from the voice. What was this weapons consortium, anyway, the first female-run business on Barents?

"If you're at all fond of Annemari," Maris said, "you just stay right where you are. All I gotta do is lean forward a little—"

A point of light flickered, burst into a spreading network of lights and settled over both Maris and her captive. Immobilized, Maris looked up at the new arrival as she came forward. It was like looking at her own face—with a bit more mileage on it—olive skin, black eyes, artful mop of black curls.

"You?" they both said at once.

"I thought you were a Diplo," Maris said.

"You've been pretending to be me, haven't you? Of all the nerve!"

"Oh, gods. If there's a Diplo in on this, Gabrel, there ain't nobody we can go to for help."

"You've got that right, anyway. Your guards are nice and secure in another tanglenet."

"My guards? You got them bastards in a tanglenet? I thought you were with them!"

"Aren't you working with them?"

A wheezing noise under Maris's knee reminded her of her hostage. The tanglenet allowed neither of them much freedom of movement, but she was able to draw her knee up a little and give the arms dealer a chance to breathe—and to speak.

"Delightful as it is to wander unchecked through this garden of bright images," the arms dealer said, "perhaps a little explanation would help here. Calandra, can you get this thing loose from me?"

"Not without letting her free," said Calandra, jerking her head at Maris.

"I suspect that won't be a problem," said the arms dealer. "Allow me to introduce myself."

For an old lady who'd just been knocked off her feet, half strangled, and caught in a tanglenet by her own side, Maris had to admit that she did have an impressive degree of aplomb.

"I," said the arms dealer, "am Annemari Silvan, of Rezerval. The lady wielding the tanglefield generator is Diplomat Vissi. We are here to investigate the source of the black-market bacteriomats recently appearing in Federation worlds, and—if this is the source—to put an end to the trade."

A chain clinked, off to the side. "Leutnant Gabrel Eskelinen, Barents Trading Society," Gabrel said. "My companions and I are investigating allegations of illegal technology imported onto Kalapriya." He looked pointedly at the tangler in Calandra Vissi's hand.

"There's a lot more illegal stuff than this floating around," the Diplo said, but at least she switched off the generator. Maris straightened with a sigh of relief, then offered her hand to the woman she'd knocked down, who was being a bit slower about getting up. Once up, though, she stood erect, brushed the dirt off her beautifully cut beige silk suit, and started talking as though she'd been in control of the situation all along. Maris had to wonder what would get this woman rattled.

"If what you say is accurate," she said, "it would seem that we are all on the same side."

"If you got them guards in a tanglenet, you bet we're on the same side," Maris said.

"Without wishing to give offense, have you any way to substantiate your statements?"

Maris was still trying to parse that when Gabrel spoke up.

"My companion let you up."

"Only after mine trapped her in a tanglefield net. Agreeing to break a stalemate is not the same as active cooperation. After a war, it is not unusual to find that the entire civilian population of the defeated country claims to have been secretly against their own leaders."

"If this is a war," Gabrel pointed out, "it's not exactly over."

"Oh, yes, it is," said Annemari. "Too much has been brought to Federation attention for anybody to hush it up now." She thought briefly of the colleagues whose surprisingly large secret credit accounts on Toussaint she'd discovered, back at the beginning of this investigation, and wondered how many of them would have some serious explaining to do when all was uncovered. And how many of them would have stopped her coming here if they'd known her plans. No, she'd been right to act alone and with no more authority than her title and a confident approach could give her . . . but this disheveled young man in chains might be right, too. The war was only over if she could carry off her bluff a little longer.

"Chulen!" a girl's voice called, joyous.

"Khati!"

A Kalapriyan girl appeared behind Calandra and Annemari, ran to Chulayen and knelt beside him, shooting off questions like a machine gun. Chulayen answered at the same speed.

"What are they saying?" Annemari demanded of Calandra.

"It's all right," Calandra answered obliquely. "They really are part of the underground resistance movement." She asked a sharp question in Kalapriyan and got a distracted agreement from Chulayen and Khati. "And these two are with them." She pulled a slender laserknife out of the decorative barrette holding back her curls and used it to slice through Chulayen's and Gabrel's chains. As soon as Chulayen was free, he grabbed for Annemari's flash.

"Let him have it," Gabrel said wearily. "He's . . . looking for his family." He swallowed. "You're right. This is the source of the bacteriomats. Chulayen tried to explain it to me on the way here, but my Kalapriyan isn't that good, and he didn't really have the background to understand and explain it. But it seems that somebody has figured out a culture medium that works for bacteriomats. Living human brains."

The flash, in Chulayen's hands, illuminated one scene out of nightmare after another: sunken faces, eyes glazed over with madness, wailing mouths. And, over and over again, opened skulls with greenish-grey mats of slime oozing over the exposed lobes.

"We have to get medical help for these people." Annemari turned to Calandra. "Can you transmit direct?"

"Not from in here, no. I'll have to go back to the surface."

"Transmit? Medical help?" Gabrel seemed to be having as hard a time as Maris in keeping up. It didn't help that they were talking over the moans of prisoners crying to be freed.

Annemari looked faintly amused. "You didn't think I'd go after a planetwide conspiracy without any backup at all, did you? But the medical problems, those I was not anticipating." Her lips tightened as she looked where Chulayen knelt, holding what seemed to be a living corpse in his arms, a bag of bones held together by tight-stretched skin.

"Anushka, Anushka," he mourned, then something in Kalapriyan. Maris recognized one of the words; that was enough.

"Gimme the laserknife," she demanded, all but snatching it out of Calandra's hand. "We gotta cut that one loose. That's his wife. That's why he came here."

"We shall free them all," Annemari said mildly, but Maris wasn't waiting to hear. The laserknife sliced through metal chains as if it were cutting soycakes; Chulayen stood with the bag of bones in his arms and said something else, urgently.

"Tell him we're getting doctors, Gabrel!" She looked at Annemari. "Aren't we?"

"Can your medical staff in Valentin help? Which of them can you trust?" Annemari demanded of Gabrel.

He shook his head. "Some of Valentin is in it. I don't know which ones—though I could make some guesses. But there had to have been a doctor helping them do this butchery."

"I think I know which one," said Annemari tightly. "Did you know that the Barents Resident in Udara was kicked out of surgical training for incompetence and unethical behavior? I didn't know that until I happened to mention his name to the right person. He had been studying under Nunzia Hirvonen, the leading neurosurgeon on Rezerval. I would be willing to bet this is his work. Ask any of these people—any who can talk," she corrected herself.

"Lorum." The thread of a voice was almost lost amid the moans of other prisoners, but Annemari heard the name that had been in her mind, took the flash from Chulayen and illuminated a section of cave wall where an emaciated man, taller and paler than the other prisoners, knelt in a puddle of filth.

"Montoyasana!"

"Lorum van Vechten . . . was the surgeon," Orlando Montoyasana said weakly. His eyes rolled. "It's coming back."

"What is coming back?" Annemari knelt beside Montoyasana and reached out a hand for the laserknife.

"Rainbow colors, they sound so sharp . . . Intrinsic disharmonies . . . I'm not mad." Montoyasana said. "Hallucinations. Infection in the cortex . . . oh, it sounds so bright," he moaned, and his eyes rolled up into the top of his head.

"Would you believe there are no flitters on this entire world?" Calandra burst back among them, her tight dark curls crackling with frustrated energy. "We'll have to ferry them back to Valentin one load at a time. It'll take forever, but they're making up a medical ward for them right now."

"Return trip," Maris said. "Don't waste it. You can bring back stuff we need here. People too."

"What—oh, right! Calandra, tell them we're bringing in the first group there, and they should have inflatable personnel carriers ready for you to bring back, and have them send a medic with whatever antibiotics they've got and, oh, whatever emergency medical supplies they can think of. We can start treating people here while the flitter shuttles cases to Valentin. Calandra, send half our people back with that first load, and tell them I'm putting Leutnant Eskelinen in command; he knows the local situation. Leutnant, you can draw a sidearm from one of my people, and if anybody in Valentin makes a move you don't like, you have my authority to neutralize them. Calandra, you go too. I want you to get on the ansible to Rezerval and tell them to send more flitters and a full division from Enforcement; the two squads I brought with me won't begin to do the job. We're going to place Valentin under military law until this mess is sorted out . . . Oh, hell. I need to keep somebody who speaks Kalapriyan here to interpret for us."

"I c'n try," Maris said shyly. "If they don't talk too fast."

"I'm not," Annemari said, "too worried about understanding what they have to say. I just want to be sure they understand me. Can you do that much? Good. Start with telling these people they are all—all—going to be freed and cared for, and that those who put them there will never have power over them again."

It took Maris a while to put that together in words from her extremely limited vocabulary, but perhaps, she thought, it wasn't such a bad idea to keep it simple. A lot of these people looked as if they were past handling complicated concepts. They worked down the line together, Annemari cutting the chains, Maris promising the freed prisoners they would be cared for, Calandra doing a rough triage on each wasted body. "For the first load we have to pick people who can sit in the flitter seats," she explained when Maris wondered why she was choosing the healthiest prisoners to go first. "After that we'll have carriers to immobilize them in comfortable positions, and we can start sending out the worst cases while the medics work on the others."

Maris nodded. "Okay, makes sense. But could you explain it to them?"

Calandra gave her a strange look. "Why don't you give it a try? You did well enough just now."

She painfully constructed another couple of Kalapriyan sentences, explaining to the prisoners why most of them would have to wait for a while. The verbs were all jumbled up, wrong tense and mood, but the people who still looked sane seemed to understand her okay. And Calandra nodded as she went along.

"Not bad," Calandra said when she finished. "You know, I thought on Tasman that you were just some gang kid trying to pick my credits, but maybe . . . are you a student or something? Language specialist?"

Maris felt her cheeks turning dark red. "You were right on Tasman. I ain't no student. Just . . . well, Diplos are s'posed to have implants so they can speak the language where they're going, right? And I was s'posed to be a Diplo . . . so I studied real hard, every chance I got."

"You did well."

"Not well enough," Maris said ruefully. "He caught on to me right away." She jerked her head toward the mouth of the cave, toward Gabrel.

"Did he indeed? Hmm . . . I wonder why he brought you so far upcountry, then?"

"Well, maybe he didn't catch on right at first," Maris allowed. "He thought mebbe I was some kinda baby Diplo, like somebody who'd been to the School all right but hadn't graduated yet."

"And you cheated the retinal and DNA scans that were supposed to check for my ID," Calandra said wonderingly. "Sometime you must tell me how you pulled that off."

Maris didn't really want to dub on her old pals on Tasman, so she murmured something noncommittal and pretended to be having a hard time making the Kalapriyan prisoners understand her. Fortunately they had nearly enough people to fill the flitter with its first load; a few minutes later the flitter was gone, and Calandra and Gabrel with it. Maris told herself that the sick empty feeling inside her was relief. Now she wouldn't have to evade Calandra's questions about how the Tasman gang had hacked the Federation database. Now she wouldn't have to apologize to Gabrel for lying to him all along.

"Only thing is," she muttered to herself, "what do I do now?"

"You can help get these people more comfortable," Annemari said at once, "and as soon as the flitter is back with medics, you can be a great deal of help by translating what they wish to ask the prisoners."

And after that, what? Well, it wasn't Annemari's problem. Wasn't anybody's problem but hers, really. And she'd been taking care of herself long enough, she had no business feeling daunted by the prospect now. She wasn't going to be too popular here on Kalapriya, she didn't suppose. And she could hardly go back to her old life on Tasman. But with the redoubtable Annemari's help, she could probably get through Tasman alive and go on to—well, anywhere else. Some place where nobody wanted to kill her; that would have to do for a start.

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Framed