"You trust me enough to say that? Hey, we've only known each other for a few hours, Colonel. Don't you think this is a little abrupt?"

"Well, I feel that I know you pretty well, Mr. Hopester. Access to ITAA data is worth something at least. You're on the outs with your wife and she's the one with the family ties, not you. You're just jumped-up trash from some hellhole in South Trias. You're a hustler, Hopester; in fact, your real name is Gelim Makoob. I even have a file on your mother, Jillian Makoob. She was an interesting woman, highly creative."

Hopester bridled.

"You'd better be right about this plane being clean or you may have signed my death warrant by saying that."

"It's clean," she smiled. "Come on, man, that's my profession, you can trust me on surveillance. And the Skua's engine noise is enough to make long-range surveillance by satellite imager very difficult; everything on these planes vibrates."

Hopester stared out the window. Chang was sure she'd nettled him with that "jumped-up trash"

remark.

"I'm sorry if I'm too candid for you, Mr. Hopester."

"Call me Darel, and I'm sorry for being prickly, but you have to remember where you are, Colonel.

This is Wexel."

"So everyone keeps telling me."

"We're used to an ITAA that just puts in its wells and keeps its nose clean, you know what I mean?"

"I know there have been a series of complaisant ITAA commanders here. However, there have been changes within Cluster Command. A certain executive commander has been retired from the force and will face charges."

Hopester's eyes widened. "Well, at last." Then be chuckled mirthlessly. "And so they send you?"

She had to smile. "Well, thanks very much, Mr. Hopester, for your expression of confidence in me."

He rolled his eyes. "Hey, you could be Attila the Hungry, the big blue man-eater, and you would still be all alone in this thing. if the ITAA is going to change things here, they have to send in more than one new person."

"A lot of people are going to be replaced. Eventually the entire ITAA operation here."

Hopester whistled. "Well, who knows, maybe this is the story of the century. I should get onto the net at once."

"You do that and I will kill you, Mr. Hopester, no joking."

Hopester chuckled. "I've got it then, you're a spy. They sent you in to rouse up the waters and see who needs to be taken out first. Then they gradually bring in an entirely new unit to take over."

Hopester was smart, no doubt of that. "They're retraining people for the operation right now."

"Only question is can you trust the new people. Are there that many honest people in the ITAA?"

A good question, a terribly good question, she thought.

"I don't know, Mr. Hopester, I hope so," she said in a toneless voice.

"So it still all rests on a political faction. It's still a risk. You could find yourself out on a limb in this thing, and anyone who helped you would be out there with you. Guilt by association is very popular here."

She shrugged. She was a career officer in the ITAA military, what did he expect of her?

"I don't have any easy answers for you, Mr. Hopester. If my operation works as planned, most of the people currently on duty here will be replaced within a year. During that time we will take a more vigorous approach to the war fronts and the killer groups."

"But they own the goddamn planet. I mean the Regulators are controlled by the rulers here."

"The ITAA legal division is big enough to take them on. Don't forget, for the ITAA, time in an ITAA court is free."

And that was an ultimate truth. Hopester knew it.

No human world could leave the ITAA; that was central to the agreement itself. And thus anyone was liable to appear in an ITAA court if summoned, and no amount of money and influence could prevent being selected for trial. And once in the toils of an ITAA court a person faced years of legal pressure and eventual prison sentences. The ITAA had been built on the absolute need in the worlds of man for a form of justice that ruled from beyond the planetary envelope. Something to pluck down dictators who went too far or powerful crime lords, or cultist archbishops. By and large it had worked well since it had been established.

Outside, below them, the desert was beginning to give way to grasslands, with occasional stands of trees.

Hopester pointed, seeking the right analogy for Wexel.

"Did you know that the Suukup is a man-made desert?"

"Mmm, I may have read something about that. There's been a lot to read."

"Used to be a forest, when people first settled Trios. That didn't last long. The native trees were primitive, the wood wasn't much good. Most of those species are extinct now. In fact, they built the original cities with the trees. Mostly as plywoods, mostly for concrete molding. Then for a long while it was farmed, but the soil was weak and soon gave out. It's bare rock for hundreds of square miles in the center."

"Not the only burned-out region of Wexel, is it?"

"There are thousands. Look, I'll admit up front that I'm an ecovist, but I don't think it's biased to say that Wexel has been abused continuously since the beginning of the colony."

"But there was nothing inherently different here than on a thousand colony worlds."

Hopester grew somber. "It was the lost century that did it. Wexel was out of touch for more than a hundred years, after the Starhammer War."

"Sheer bloody anarchy, then?"

He nodded. "The rule of the strong, the small armies, genocide everywhere."

"Genocide, yes, I noticed."

"That started with the laowon. On Wexel the resistance was very intense in the early days. The laowon responded with terrible cruelty."

"Of course, all the Wexel children's tales are still concerned with Der Thchumpser, 'He Who Ate Children.'"

"Which he did, by the way, on television, widely broadcast.

They were roasted alive and then carved and eaten by the Thchumpser's court."

"Der Thchumpser was a real person?" she said in disbelief. "Not even the laowon were that weird."

"Der Thchumpser was born and bred on Wexel. A laowon noble of the Blue Seygfan. He was regarded as an extremist, no more. On Wexel the laowon had always taken a stern line in their dealings with the human population.'

"And then?"

"After Laogolden and the great fleet were destroyed the laowon here died, most of them. A couple of hundred thousand at the most ever got out. The rest were slaughtered. There is a grotto in the Skullas Hills."

"Yes, I know, I've seen it."

"Ah." He was surprised. "Well, in that case you can understand. But the real tragedy, in a sense, came after that."

"So they were out of touch? Most of the human race was out of touch. The ITAA started small, it took time."

He was angry all of a sudden. "You refer to the heroic period of our ITAA civilization," he sneered.

"Yeah, sure, great events in a very brief span of time, I know. That was on my education tapes like everyone else. What happened on Wexel was that things broke down totally. There was savagery here.

It's all been over for two thousand years, but the planetary economy is less advanced than it was before the laowon came. I don't think it can ever come back."

"Social lebanonization; there are soft-generated social crisis predictions about that."

"The Ownership prefers it that way. Any other way and they'd lose. It's a very successful oligarchy."

"Well, things have to change; Scopus Central is determined about that."

"I hope so; for all our sakes l really do."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

IT WAS COLD AND UNNATURALLY BRIGHT IN THE COW SHED. IN one corner stood a low cage, designed to pen up veal calves long ago.

In this cage crouched an exhausted Caroline Reese, in terror for her life.

The cage was a horror of cold, tubular bars and a rough concrete floor. There was no room to move, not even to turn around. It brought on a dreadful claustrophobia that threatened to send her into a fit of manic screaming.

From the front of the cage, which was but a meter wide, a meter high, and two meters long, Reese could see the boxy calving machine. Its white surface gleamed unpleasantly under the overhead lights.

A bench with lab decks and monitors had been set up opposite the table with the calving machine. A video camera on a tripod was positioned at the calving machine's dorsal observation window.

To the decks came Count Karvur from time to time, to make a cursory inspection of the screens and the data outputs, and then with a melodramatic sniff to march away, his heavy coat flapping around him.

He always ignored Caroline.

The rest of the time the place was empty except for her and the thing in the machine.

Except that now and then a beetle scuttered along the floor, checking the gutters of the old cow shed for edibles. Caroline shuddered at the sight of them. Little Wexel kachi, a ubiquitously successful native insect.

From the fact that she was still alive she knew Karvur needed her for some purpose. She had one hope, that she might play on that need to survive until she could escape. How she was going to do that she had no idea. Her options seemed painfully restricted.

She had been there for at least a full day and a half when she noticed the first odd sounds.

There was a high squeaking in the air, with a harsh metallic tone to it as if it came from tiny drills working on metal.

It lasted a minute and was followed by a scraping sound. She stared across at the calving machine.

Was it breaking down?

The noise intensified.

A small power port on the lower right side of the machine suddenly snapped out of its socket and hung loose.

Something scuttled out and dropped to the tabletop. For a moment, no more, it stood there surveying the place. Details were hard to discern from fifteen feet away, but to Caroline the thing bore the definite appearance of a tiny man, a scailet biped six inches high with earthworm skin and an undersized head.

Then it disappeared over the side of the table. A few seconds later it reappeared, running across the floor to the foot of the high bench on which were set the science decks and monitors. It climbed a table leg with a swift motion reminiscent of a man climbing a tree and then moved briskly around the equipment for a few minutes.

Caroline crouched back in the cage, with both bands stuffed in her mouth. There was a weird purposefulness about the thing that made her skin crawl.

After about five minutes there was a click and the video camera moved while lenses turned in the turret; then it swung back to covering the viewport in the calving machine.

The small biped had discovered the camera controls.

There were other clicks and switch noises. Other aspects of the equipment responded. Then the biped appeared once more at the top of the table. For a moment it stood there like a man atop a cliff, and then it jumped, landing out of her sight beyond the bench.

A few moments later it reappeared, on the far side of the calving machine, speeding across the concrete floor of the cow shed like a miniature human sprinter.

It moved with an insectile rapidity, going from the windows to the door, to a set of lockers by the door.

Eventually it began to move toward the corner where Caroline was caged.

She was about to scream her guts out when it stopped in midstride. A large kachi was ambling along nearby. The scailet biped ran down the bug after a brief chase and hoisted it, alive and kicking, over its head and ran back with it to the calving machine.

There it scrambled up the side of the machine and back into the outlet port once more, dragging the kachi behind it. The cover snapped shut a second or so later.

Caroline shuddered in a new, terrible way.

That was no hallucination.

The thing in the machine was alive all right, and it was breeding, or budding, or something along those lines. Not only that but it had worked out how to get out of the calving machine. All this in just a couple of days since she'd seen it in a condition much more dead than alive.

Questions rang in her thoughts.

What the hell did it want kachi for? What the hell was it that it could reproduce so rapidly? The thing she had left two days ago had been inert, barely capable of twitching in the nutrient gel.

Had this new form been in gestation at the time? It seemed impossible; the scans would have picked it up.

All of a sudden she bad an enormous desire to see that ITAA biolog download that she knew had been sitting in her office computer when Karvur broke in.

Had Karvur taken the trouble to record all the stuff on her chives before he erased them? Had he already reviewed the ITAA biolog match data?