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chasing Celline? Or does she chase you?” To the remaining Iridians, and the Tressens who covertly sympathized with them, Celline was hope. To the ferrents, her rebellion was an infuriating symbol of their impotence. To Polian, she was irrelevant. But she was a momentarily amusing pin with which to prick this ferrent’s ass.
    The ferrent’s pointing finger shook. “We don’t chase myths. The last Iridian royal was hanged years ago.”
    Polian smiled again. “Then why is her wanted poster still hanging in the employee lounge? Just an oversight, I’m sure. A rebellion could never survive for thirty years. Not against you ferrents.”
    The doctor coughed a laugh into his hand. He had probably never heard anyone call a chief inspector of the Interior Police “ferrent” to his face.
    The ferrent folded his pointed finger into a fist, shook it, then waved his subordinate to follow him as he stalked out the doors.
    Twenty minutes later, in the windowless hospital room to which the anonymous patient had been returned, Polian stood alongside the unconscious woman while she breathed.
    He stared down at her. With the bruising faded from her cheeks, she was a beautiful woman, but somehow not a regal one.
    Polian stroked his chin and thought out loud. “Well, whoever you are, you’re no more an Iridian than I’m a Tressen. You’re a Trueborn from your toes to your eyeballs. You’ve got an athlete’s body. Or a soldier’s.” He ran a finger along the intravenous feeding tube taped to the woman’s emaciated arm. “Well, you did have a month ago.”
    Her wounds had been so massive that her stable survival was, considering the primitive state of Tressen medical practice, miraculous. Back home, Yavi medical technology could have healed her to interrogatable condition long ago. And Yavi interrogation methods would then have wrung her dry within days. For now, all Polian could do was wonder. “How much do you know? How much does your partner know? How much of what you know have you passed on to your masters?”
    Wonder, and wait on the next damn Trueborn cruiser to bring the next Yavi “humanitarian” delegation to Tressen.
    He sighed at the serene, silent spy. “Well, once we succeed here, nothing the Trueborns know will help them.”

Seven
    “Those are the roughest holy men I’ve ever seen.” The blue-eyed, pale kid seated across from me stared past me at the far side of the main dining salon of the Human Union Bastogne-class cruiser Emerald River . The twenty Yavi who were seated there wore cleric shawls and bowed their shaved heads in post-meal prayer. But they were the fittest priests anybody had ever seen.
    Three days after my conversation with Howard Hibble, Emerald River had slid her ancient, mile-long bulk out Mousetrap’s South Lock. Bound, as scheduled, for Tressel, she carried me, along with an insertion-support team and the rookie case officer with whom Howard had paired me. This lunch was my first meeting with my new junior.
    I glanced over my shoulder. “They aren’t preachers, Weddle, if I know my Yavi. And I do. I grew up on Yavet.”
    My new partner wrinkled his forehead. “You? You look as Trueborn as I do.”
    Actually, nobody looked as white-bread Trueborn as Weddle. Fortunately, the look blended with the Tressens with whom we would be mingling.
    “Long, boring story. Weddle, there are two kinds of Yavi. The first kind are the general population. Short, docile, beat down by generations of overcrowding.” I jerked my thumb at the Yavi lunch group. “The second kind of Yavi are those jokers. Military, and cops who act like military. The second kind make sure the first kind stay docile. They make decent soldiers, and excellent bullies.”
    The bulk of Emerald River’s cargo consisted of farm implements, electronics, and the latest consumer goods from the Motherworld. Those items would be off-loaded at intermediate planetary waypoints. Once the cruiser reached her turnaround point, which for an