If this was really Directive 115, then she had to wonder about her luck. How could this be happening to her!

She took out the bottle she kept in her bottom drawer. Loupiac Grappa, 90 proof, aged ten years in oak barrels. With a guilty glance toward the door she knocked back a mouthful straight from the bottle.

The Loupiac was smooth and it went down easily. In a moment, she felt better. Chang pushed the horrors of the Saskatch video away and tried to concentrate on the business at hand.

Cachester ought to be under arrest, along with two sergeants from the accounts division, but as yet Chang's Taklish Investigator had found no evidence to link them to the explosion that had killed the base computers the night before.

She had to have some evidence, and soon, or they would be able to force a premature hearing in an ITAA court. All hell would break loose then; her cover would be utterly blown.

Scopus Central was already monitoring the situation closely. Chang realized that her job hung by a thread. It would be a disaster for her career if she was removed at this point. Effectively unhorsed by a subordinate.

To lose to Cachester could not be borne!

Meanwhile Captain Blake had disappeared again, taking a full patrol with him on an orbital drop at 0900 hours that morning. No word in explanation, no request for permission. A full twelve-person drop from orbit, at a cost of at least a quarter of a million credit units!

Luisa sighed heavily.

And then Jean Povet came in with a peculiar expression on her face.

"She's gone. The woman with the wild story? She left."

"Left? What do you mean left? You mean they let her just walk out?"

Povet looked uncomfortable. "They didn't have any orders not to. Voltsk sent her up here but he didn't tell the guards to keep her from leaving."

"Oh, great, do we have anything more on analysis?" The Strand whirred and displayed some information. "Have computed probabilities in excess of eighty percent now indicating some degree of truthfulness," it whispered.

"Thanks, Sergeant Voltsk. I guess this is the payback for yesterday. Shows you that you can't afford to lose your temper in this job."

Povet smiled. "Thick and fast, Colonel, thick and fast."

"Well, we've got to get this woman back. This is Directive 115 stuff, it has override. And I've got to tell Scopus Central, too; this might have to go Over-Cluster."

Povet's eyebrows rose at that. "We'll put out an all-points on her."

"Get me Chief Hafka. I want a vigorous search; we've got to find her if we have to turn over every hotel in Doisy-Dyan. Can she get out of the city tonight? Check the airports."

"There's a midnight flight to Luc."

"Of course." That was the flight that Hopester was always taking, out to Luc where you could link up with the continental shuttle and get up to Frentana and Cowdray-Kara.

"I want a squad at the airport to make sure she doesn't get out that way. We'll have to energize the local cops to blockade the roads."

"Chief Hafka is on line for you now." Povet switched him through from the office, and Luisa Chang found herself staring at the fleshy face and narrow little eyes of the head of the DDPD.

She hadn't had too much to do with Hafka so far. Relations with the local forces had been good for years. But she knew that he was a leader of the local Preservationists and that he personally had executed hundreds of people considered Liberators.

Chang took a deep breath and explained that she had a potential Directive 115 problem.

"Directive 115," Hafka yelped in a voice that was ludicrously high for one so bulky. "That's the ITAA superclause, what's it? The one with alien lifeforms?"

Chang put Caroline Reese's image on the screen; her hair was disheveled, her eyes were wild.

"Something like that, Chief. I'm sorry to be the one with bad news, but this came to us first. I don't know why. Anyway, we need to find this woman and check this story out. We also have to do it quickly.

There's probably nothing to it, but if it's somehow true then we need to know about it very soon."

Hafka nodded, grumbling to himself. "So you wants an all-points and you want fifty police and what else do you want?"

"I want a lot more than fifty cops, Chief. I want a complete shutdown of all road mutes out of the city and I want it fast. This should be a priority, absolute priority."

"Ab-so-lute priority! Colonel, what d'ya want, ya want the whole Doisy-Dyan PD? For how long?

And what shall I tell the people of the city to do about protecting themselves from thieves and Liberators while you're using it? Come on, give me a break, how can I do this?"

"Directive 115, Chief, look it up. It's in the Addendum to the ITAA Charter. Wexel signed up for ITAA regulation, you must give this priority."

"Must, schmust, will you stop issuing orders, Colonel? I'm not in your command. I don't have to listen to any more of this."

"Chief, let's make peace. Look, I have a simple problem. My hands are tied; Directive 115 is written the way it is because it's the only way things can work in a situation requiring it."

"Look, I don't care what your directive is, you don't take over the DDPD while I'm around."

"Will you just put out roadblocks on the roads? I have to get this woman, tonight if possible."

"And you intend to search in my city? With what, ITAA troopers in full combat gear? What are you, crazy? Every Liberator in the whole rotten pack will be out there trying to kill one of your men and get his equipment. I'll be forced to call out the militia to protect you."

Luisa massaged her temples. This had to be handled skillfully. If only she didn't feel so tired and so fed up with obstructive behavior!

"Chief, if you don't give me what I'm asking for, I'm going to have to call Cluster Command and set in motion a process that will put you in an ITAA court sometime in the next year or so. I don't want to do that, I just want to find this woman and I need your cooperation. If I have to, though, I will do it, and later, when you've been put under arrest, I will use the DDPD and we will search your city for this woman. Because we have to, or we, too, will wind up in an ITAA court sometime in the next year. And all of us will then do a lot of time in an ITAA prison somewhere. You understand me? You know you can't beat the ITAA. Why risk spending twenty years on an airless rock? Besides, if it turns out to be a false alarm then I'm the one who'll be here to take the heat."

Chief Hafka was looking very unhappy. He sighed mightily. "Look, I got to check this Directive, what you say?"

"One-fifteen, damn it."

"All right."

Povet had another call lined up. "Captain Blake for you, sir, long distance, it's through the comsat."

Exercising maximum self-control, she fought down the urge to scream into the commo.

"Where are you, Captain Blake?" she managed in a remarkably calm voice.

Blake was grim and gray-faced. He was standing in a ruined house. He held up a gnawed human ulna.

"I'm up in the Ruinart Mountains. We have a very weird atrocity story up here and some things about it are making me think we have a Directive 115 thing here."

Luisa felt her eyes bug out of her head. She sucked in a breath. "What happened?"

"Some kind of creature got loose up here. A local aristo named Karvur had it penned up in a dairy barn. It escaped and killed several people here two days ago. Then today a relative reported people missing up here at this farm."

"What kind of creature?" Chang was dry-mouthed.

"Bipedal, tentacled; things that look like flowers projecting from the head. It "stabbed' people with the tips of the tentacles."

"Oh, wonderful, just what we need. Anything else?"

"Oh, yes, it picked up a shotgun and used it. This was after it had been shot with the same gun."

"No, no, this is . ."

"And there was another victim, who was turned into some kind of insect or something. The peasants say he was inside an egg that they burned. His face, on the body of a huge insect. These are unsophisticated people, they believe it's voodoo and they're ready to start a blood feud with any or all of their neighbors over it any time soon."

"There's no doubt about it, then."

"Directive 115," Blake said.

"Not my lucky day, is it. Well, I've already set a 115 alarm going down here. We have a fugitive informant who was trying to tell us something about this very same event."

Blake was taken aback by this; he pursed his lips.

"What's next, then?" he grunted. "Something horrible definitely happened here. We've found the corpse of a man here without his arms or legs. There are chewed human bones and dog bones, too. There's a lot of bloodstain, too. Better get some forensics up here fast."

Chang was licking her lips, feeling a new, high anxiety all of a sudden. Directive 115 for real!

She'd always thirsted after action, but never this particular kind of thing. If this was truly Directive 115, then the whole fucking human universe was on the line right behind her. Everything depended on how well she did her job.

"Colonel? Eh, Colonel." It was Blake.

She shook herself into activity. "Yes, Captain, look, you continue your patrol, but be very careful. I don't want this thing set into motion accidentally, we need to find this thing and we need to surround it. I'll see to reinforcing you and getting some air support up there soonest, understood?"

"Yes, sir, Colonel Chang."

"You find anything you get it back to me, fast, in video if you possibly can."

Blake was gone. Chang breathed a deep sigh. Then she straightened up. No rest tonight, no rest for quite a while beyond tonight.

She called to Povet, "Where's that damn woman? I want her and I want her now!"

Chief Hafka was back; his face was thunderous.

"All right, this thing is like you say. if you wrong then you fuck up so bad you gone from here next week. If you right then we got to save whole planet's fucking ass, right?"

"Right."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

REENA'S PLAN WAS FOR THEM TO LEAVE THE NEXT DAY, IN THE evening. They'd walk out. That meant getting down rough trails and over the Peekaw Ridge, perhaps fifty kilometers before they reached the first hamlet. But they knew the country well between the Klimatee and the Peekaw, and they'd be over the ridge by dawn and Larshel and the others would never dare follow them then.

They woke with the dawn and dressed and headed out of the woods toward the box canyon. Griff's body would soon attract scavengers, and the crows would lead Larshel to it.

What happened next depended on how well Reena handled Larshel in the next couple of hours.

And then came something that altered all their plans, turning them to dust within the greater dice play of the universe.

They were at the entrance to the canyon, they could smell oatcakes cooking on the grill, when they heard it.

A popping sound, then a sputter, quite distant, the unmistakable sound of an ATV engine in low gear.

Already the other men were coming out of the cave. Larshel held up his hand for silence.

There it was again, a sputtering, coming from the south.

"Someone's coming down from the mountains," Gugen exclaimed.

"Bullshit, no one lives up there."

"Well, listen to it, asshole, it's coming from the south."

"Who you calling an asshole?"

"You is who, shut up and listen."

"This is strange," grumbled Larshel, whose eyes rested briefly on Reena's body. "Get your weapons, we can ambush at the slanted rock."

Cautiously the dubtigers stirred themselves and ventured up to the slope above the box where a slanted slab of rock overhung a narrow way through the canyons.

A glance to the south confirmed what they'd been hearing: a single battered ATV was indeed approaching, negotiating a tortuous way down through the boulder field above the canyon.

It was apparent to all of them that this ATV had come a long way. Its engine bad the whine that said the fuel cells were close to exhaustion.

They disposed themselves to ambush the approaching vehicle.

Even as they took cover, the Battlemaster, riding in the ATV beside the Secondary Form, observed that the nearest passage down to lower ground lay between bluffs that made a perfect ambush point.

Still there was no reason to expect attack. No sign of the host creatures had been seen for days, not since the Battlemaster bad learned to operate the poor Benuils' Spad ATV.

The Battlemaster had driven the vehicle north, away from the roads and straight into a trackless wilderness. Then had come mountains and remote valleys and boulder fields, and finally glaciers. All had been conquered and left behind.

Now the ATV rolled on toward lower ground.

And bullets shattered the windshield and ricocheted around the cab.