NOVEL NEXT 5.29 Interlude-Provocateur
Interlude-Provocateur
(Starspeak)
A dark metal chevron darted across the sky, chased by an even smaller dot that gave off a few sparkles every second. The former tried to zig-zag its way into an evasive pattern, making a sharp dive followed by an equally quick climb.
Trying to throw off the pursuer, whose flesh and bone limited their possible acrobatic maneuvers.
Unfortunately for the metal evader, it was outgunned.
One streak of faint blue light flashed, tracing the path of a projectile instantly. The metal aircraft zipped to one side, ready for the one shot.
It went wide by a margin visible to even those on the ground.
The second shot came much closer. It could have scraped a wing. The pursuer having predicted where they would fly after evading the first.
There was no third shot though. Instead of giving them the chance to take it, the metal aircraft pulled a flip turn and barreled right toward its slower pursuer. With no way to shoot back, the drone was trying to knock the Adept right out of the sky.
It didn’t work.
The drone screeched toward the Vorak and— Zzzrt!
Crossing into an invisible bubble, the drone suddenly died three different ways: melted circuits, magnetic actuator failure, and a fatal computing error. Lighting coursed around the Adept forming the invisible bubble of electrical current.
Like a fly wandering into a bug zapper, one touch had been enough to ruin the drone.
Gravity pulled it from the sky without remorse, dashing it to smithereens on impact with the ocean below. The metal sank beneath the waves, never to be seen again, and it was all over.
·····
People kept draping blankets around Nora’s shoulders.
It was bothering her in a big fucking way.
Not the blanket itself, it wasn’t uncomfortable or anything. It was the care.
Sitting halfway out of a first responders’ aerial vehicle, Nora could see dozens of aliens shuffled back and forth between hunks of wreckage and the AVs that had finally responded to the crash site. Vorak in dark green jumpsuits hustled toward the Red Sails’ soldiers first, then quickly moving on to the Casti civilians—some of them already being attended to by more local, non-military medics. The rest of the Vorak were armed with heavy rifles, all pointed toward all the now-junked robots and the pods they’d come from.
Half a mile down the slope towards the ocean, the Athena had found a nice flat patch of grass to land on. A dozen abductees were stomping around too, psionically checking for any survivors they’d missed, helping move the injured and medical supplies.
They all knew better than to come near Nora when she was in this kind of mood.
A Casti medic responding from Glatten Island had been the first to put a blanket on her, practically on autopilot. She’d nearly bitten his head off and thrown the blanket aside.
There’d been more twenty people aboard the shuttle on takeoff. Six were already confirmed dead. Another seven were still missing.
Dust had cleared since the crash, and now all the blood was painfully visible. Oozing between the metal scrap, smeared down the grassy hillside in streaks impossible to ignore.
Another medic had seen her without a blanket and tried to remedy that. If not for the injured pilot, Nora might have done even worse than yell.
People had died because she’d gone asking them for help. Nora was so angry, she was almost shaking. She’d seen bad things happen. Abductees had suffered allergic reactions, alien colonists had screamed vitriol right into their faces and made threats, training accidents, all sorts of incidental violence.
This was different. This was enemy action.
How could she have forgotten this feeling? Every abductee knew it in the pit of their stomach when they thought about the feeling of planet Earth spinning away from under their feet. Being whisked away to alien parts unknown…
…all on the whim of some wannabe asshole dark-god AIs and their faceless creator.
Nora was proud of every human she met out here. They’d come together, supported each other, and forged themselves into a well-functioning group capable of treating with armies and kings, however cursorily.
They’d done well for themselves, all things considered. They’d clung to some optimism because their results said they’d earned a little hope.
But this?
It was dose of cold water about exactly where they stood in the universe. Humans had enemies. And turns out? Those enemies were willing to kill people just associated with them.
Nora’s mind raced, unable to let the realization simply be.
They had enemies, but they didn’t know which one this was. Some of the style screamed SPARK. But not all of it. Maybe it was CENSOR. Or even ENVY. Or one of the other siblings they didn’t even know the name of yet.
It had all screamed ‘assassination’ to her as it had unfolded, but now? She couldn’t be sure. It was impossible to tell who the intended target was, much less if they were actually among the dead.
She hadn’t been ready for this. It had been scary enough during the attack on Moy’s colony. But there’d been time then. To plan even the next few minutes.
This time SPARK had literally knocked them out of the sky.
Getting sucker punched was humiliating in a way that could only morph into rage.
Another medic knelt next to her, ready to give another—
“I don’t. Need. A blanket!”
Somewhere in the back of her head, she considered that her temper might need work.
Not right now though. Not this fucking minute.
The strongest Vorak in the system was finally the one who forced a blanket on her.
Bestir Khorsi touched down with a ripple of static humming through the air. Rows of ultra-fine strings trailed behind them in the air, dematerializing as the Adept touched down. But before they vanished, Nora glanced into the sky and saw they seemed to stretch on and on. They must have been a quarter, maybe half a mile long.
Using super-elongated electrified strings as wings?
Before she could distract her anger with that though, Railgun threw a blanket at her face.
“[What the fuck?]” she hissed.
“Just wrap yourself in it,” the Vorak said, equally impatient. “Medics keep thinking you haven’t been treated.”
“I’m not injured,” she said. “This fish is though.”
She nodded to the pilot lying next to her on a stretcher board, immobilized.
“You survived!” Railgun remarked. “Honest? I wrote you off the moment when I saw the crash.”
The pilot said nothing aloud, unable to move more than a finger in acknowledgement without provoking shooting pains through half their skeleton.
“What stuff?” Nora started to ask, but Railgun was already moving on.
“Miss Clarke, you need to clear this AV. It’s taking off immediately, and your Humans need to talk to you,” they said.
It should have been simple to respond. Just hop to her feet. Move. Let the AV take off.
But her brain tripped up on itself, and she was paralyzed.
Too many emotions ran through her right now. Fear. Relief. Anger. Confusion. Bestir didn’t even blink. Instead, the Vorak just waited patiently for Nora collect herself.
Get your shit together, she berated herself.
“[Quit that,]” a familiar voice chimed in.
Her relief threatened to overwhelm her, and she choked down a sob. Caroline was here.
“Wrap her up like a [Christmas] present, Car,]” Roxanne said. “It’s for shock and distress, not the chill.”
It might have been a bright and sunny afternoon, but the mood was ice-cold in comparison. Nora had barely even noticed it so far. But she didn’t fight as Caroline threw the blanket over shoulders and forced Nora to clutch the edges tight in her hands.
“Come on, Nick’s here too,” Caroline said. “On your feet, boss.”
Nora threw a concerned glance at the pilot she’d rescued.
“
When she was still frozen where she stood, Caroline gave Nora a reassuring bump with her shoulder. God, even those small contacts were like water on a hot day. The ground seemed to become more solid beneath her feet, however slightly.
“Yeah. Let’s hear it,” Nora said, steeling herself and marching toward the wreckage.
Nick went first.
“Bots are all the same,” he said. “Brains and processors all dematerialized, skeletons, actuators, batteries, and weapons all intact.”
“Weapons,” Nora said. “None of the bots we saw fired any shots.”
Nick nudged one of the drones on its side, revealing extendable metal blades on the underside of its forearms. Each one was painted an obnoxious color with the gaps in the paint forming English letters.
On this bot’s blades was written ‘gutter’ and ‘te are ror’.
“SPARK’s sense of humor,” Nora recognized. “Stupid paint job too, just like the bots we dragged back from Moy’s colony.”
“Yeah, if SPARK did this, he didn’t cover his tracks very well,” Nick said. “…Assuming SPARK actually did this.”
“Any evidence to say he didn’t, or just paranoid possibilities?” Nora asked.
“The latter,” he conceded. “But…it is really far outside of SPARK’s MO. He didn’t do much until the Flotilla ID’d and cornered those operatives. SPARK is usually reactive. This is very not.”
“When those operatives got cornered, SPARK blew them up along with half a shipyard,” Nora reminded him. “And he started out by enabling a conspiracy to kill humans in a false flag. I think it would be a mistake to consider SPARK passive.”
Nick nodded and conceded the point.
“Well that’s where SPARK shows a little more guile than your average killer robot,” Nick said. “All the bots outside were armed with blades and junk.”
“Outside?”
“Caroline found this one, looking for survivors,” Nick explained.
He led them through a gaping tear in the side of the shuttle—the bottom half. It was battered from its tumble down the hill, but it had come to rest almost upright leaning against a steeper portion of the slope.
Nora and Ken had been on the top passenger deck. Everyone had survived from their deck. The one below…not so much.
The cabins were riddled with bloody dents where bodies had been flung into them as the shuttle had careened down the hill.
It was absurd. No one had actually died on impact. It wasn’t until SPARK’s attempts to launch drones had cut the ship in half had anyone died.
Except…
Just off the center of the deck, at the entrance to the cabin smeared with the least blood…
A bot was slumped. Instead of wannabe-punk saw blades and spray-painted armor, this one was only armed with a small compact pistol embedded in its arm.
“Whoa…” Nora said, immediately looking around. “How did it get here? When? I thought none of the bots reached the shuttle.”
“That’s only half of the interesting part,” Nick said. “The pistol? It wasn’t fired. Still has a full mag.”
“So it got inside and didn’t kill anyone?” Nora asked.
“Hate to say it, but it kinda puts a damper on your assassination theory,” Caroline pointed out.
Nora peered at the bot and exactly where it had come to kneel. The back of its head had a cylindrical void where a critical exotic component had been dissolved. Its torso had a similar void for its processor.
They’d yet to capture a bot as intact as this one. They all seemed to be rigged to have their most sensitive parts spontaneously dematerialize upon taking fatal damage.
But this bot was untouched.
So what had triggered the dematerialization of its components?
“It had to have shut down on its own,” Nora guessed. “It’s not even cracked. So it had to have come in after this half of the shuttle tumbled down the hill.”
“But then it doesn’t shoot anyone,” Caroline observes. “…Maybe it was after one specific target. Maybe it got here, and they were already dead. Killed in the crash?”
Something about that pricked at Nora’s sense of coincidence.
It explained everything.
SPARK wanted one passenger dead. Shoots down the shuttle. Minor complications with the ground engagement. More casualties than expected, but ultimately the target wound up dead.
“Look where it stopped,” Nora said, pointing out its position on the deck. “It would have had to enter the same way we did. So it walks to this cabin opening here, but look, it’s turned around. Facing the opposite one.”
“It poked its head in,” Nick said. “Didn’t find what it wanted…”
“…and checked the opposite cabin,” Nora agreed, pointing to the opening across from the bot.
Nora clutched her blanket tighter as she stepped into the empty cabin. She’d been sitting in almost an identical one on the deck above. She tried to sharpen her focus, drinking in every detail.
This was a crime scene. Even the slightest details could have big implications.
It was hard to focus though. The blood smeared on the floor was still half wet, squishing underfoot.
The medics had extricated all the bodies already, smearing the blood all over the ground. So the footprints were useless. But the rest of the scene should have been undisturbed.
Ignore the blood underfoot, she forced herself.
She stepped into the doorway of the cabin, half-in half-out.
The bot had come to a stop without actually entering the cabin it was looking at…and…
She held up her blanket-draped arm, forming a curtain parallel to what the bot’s line of sight would have been. The two seats on either side of the cabin door were out of sight. Entirely. The bot would only have been able to see the two seats on the side of the cabin opposite the door.
Nora ran her eyes across the two seats in question, trying to work up the nerve to push her cascade through the floor…feeling all the blood smeared across said floor…
“One of those two couches,” Nick recognized. “They would be the last thing the bot saw before shutting off.”
“So one of those two passengers died in the crash, so the bot didn’t have any further tasks. So it just fizzles,” Caroline followed.
Nora fished out her handbook, thumbing through the settings to the embedded psionic signal booster. In tending to the pilot’s wounds, she’d cascaded their whole body, specifically their nervous system and psionics.
She’d glimpsed their long-range psionic tags.
“
They picked up.
the pilot groaned. They were dozens of miles away by now, but Nora needed what they knew.
“
“
“
“
“Skeru Hothakovig…technical specialist. Circuitry and power routing. She won a science prize for ship reactor design. She was going to be peeling apart our A-ships for clues,” Nick said.
Nora had the same psionic list of people they’d invited, but Nick was quicker with it.
One of those two Casti had been marked for death by SPARK. Why?
There didn’t seem to be anything left in the ship, and everyone was eager to get away from the blood.
Something was still bothering Nora, even as she crawled out of the wreckage again. She just couldn’t place exactly what…
·····
The Athena was doing final pre-flight checks, and Nora was pretending like she wasn’t in charge. Technically, Nick was captaining the ship, and she was ready to use that as an excuse to leave all the work to him.
She materialized a beanbag chair and plopped into it, content to just sink into the thing all the way through takeoff. And half the A-ship’s active crew still reported progress to her.
“Reactor’s warming up,” someone reported.
Nora didn’t even open her eyes, just pointing to a placard she’d materialized that read ‘Nick is in charge’.
“Red Sails people want to talk to you about their soldiers when we get back to Archo,” someone else said.
She just pointed.
‘Nick is in charge’.
“[You couldn’t pass out in one of the ship beds?]”
Nora pointed again—wait, that was Caroline.
“[I’ve had a long fucking day,]” she said. “[And I’m feeling a bit rattled about going up in a spaceship again today.]”
“[Fair point,]” Caroline said, plopping down on the beanbag chair next to her. “[Sorry if that was insensitive.]”
“[‘S fine,]” Nora mumbled. “[Just…too much blood for one day.]”
Caroline just patted an affectionate hand on Nora’s shoulder.
It was nice.
“[Aren’t you on duty?]” Nora frowned.
“[Nah. I’m not on Nick’s crew,]” she shrugged.
Nora’s frown only deepened.
“[Then why…?]”
Then why are you here?
The question answered itself, really. Caroline even blushed.
“[Didn’t really think that far,]” she admitted. “[Just heard your shuttle had gone down. Didn’t really give Nick the chance to argue with me.]”
“[…Well thanks,]” Nora said. “[Today was fucking awful, and even a little of you went a long way.]”
“[A little? Dang, I thought I was laying it on thick,]” she grinned.
Nora rolled her eyes, pretending to be exasperated. But inside, she had to think back. Had Caroline really?
Nora remembered the small bumps and supportive words that had helped her the most. Had there been more?
She honestly couldn’t remember.
What surprised her about that was the unexpected certainty she had that Caroline wouldn’t hold it against her. Nora had been through something traumatic, and Caroline understood that. If she’d given her the cold shoulder without thinking, Caroline wouldn’t blame her even for a second.
“[I’m not sure my dish was getting optimal reception,]” Nora said. “[Thanks for being here, really.]”
She leaned her head against Caroline’s shoulder, vaguely noting that at some point in the past two years, Caroline had grown taller than her.
The moment was precious relief, even when one of the Athena’s munchkins poked his head in.
“[Ooo! Caroline and Nora sittin’ in a—ow!]”
Caroloine threw a rag at the kid.
“[Buzz off, Mark, or I’m going to sic Trakin on you,]” Caroline threatened.
Mark just stuck his tongue out and raced up the mess’ ladder to the dormitory decks.
“[…If you aren’t on Nick’s crew, then shouldn’t you be on duty at the Mission?]” Nora asked her.
“[Not for the next…six hours,]” Caroline said innocently.
“[We’re not going to be back there for twelve, minimum,]” Nora pointed out. “[Seriously? You can’t just ditch assignments. People are going to think I’m giving you shit just because…y’know.]”
“[I accept that I need to get dinged when we get back. Whatever the punishment, I’ll take it,]” Caroline said. “[I just wasn’t going to do nothing when I heard you were in trouble.]”
“[Well, nice as it is to imagine you trying to white-knight it up for me, Jacob is going to chew your ear off. Being prepared to take the punishment is no excuse for dereliction of duty.]”
“[It’s not like they’ll notice me missing,]” Caroline said. “[Team Georgia and I were spinning our wheels waiting for you to come back with the experts.]”
“[Somehow, I think they’re still going to notice when you miss role call,]” Nora said. Wait a minute… “[Sonofabitch.]”
She jumped up without any further warning.
“[Hey where are you going?]”
Caroline fumbled cutely trying to extricate herself from the giant beanbag chair.
“[Crash site. Won’t take five minutes.,]” she said.
“[If this is your idea of a hot date night idea: seek help,]” Caroline complained, jogging after Nora.
·····
Nora ducked into the same bloody wreckage, barely even waiting for Caroline behind her.
It was just as bloody and nightmare inducing as the first time. And now after baking in the sun for a few hours, the wreckage had a smell that would haunt their nightmares for months.
But Nora forced herself to buck up. The first time through, she’d still been wrapped up in a stupid blanket. In her haste and discomfort, she’d overlooked something. Not what was there, but what wasn’t—a staple of every good crime-fighter.
The blood on the ground really was useless. Orange and navy streaks washed over every surface with a disturbing amount of direction to it. The shuttle was cylindrical enough for its roll down the hillside to be steady.
So anyone unsecured had basically hit every wall, painting every square inch of the cabin. The steady roll had even distributed the gore evenly too.
“Look at the wall,” Nora said. “The seat too.”
“I saw it just fine the first time,” Caroline said. “What are you seeing now?”
“Vertical drips,” she explained, pointing to the section of wall. “Look at this section right here. Squint. It’s like an optical illusion. You don’t see any of it unless the whole thing slides into place.”
Almost every single square inch of the wall had bloody smudges and smears, but seat number three in the che cabin was missing a part of the pattern.
It was every bit as bloody as the rest of the cabin, but in the wrong places. Where the wall met the seat only had vertical drips of blood going through it.
“The smears,” Caroline noticed. There should be horizontal smears visible between the vertical rivulets. Wow. How’d you pick that out? It’s…a perfect silhouette.”
Forcing herself to cascade the grizzly mess, Nora found true confirmation in the surfaces beneath the cushioned seat. Blood had soaked into and through the other three seats in the cabin, but the fourth saw much less.
Something had been covering the seat while the cabin had been smeared with blood. A passenger had stayed strapped into their seat even as everyone else had tried to disembark and avoid SPARK’s airstrike.
Nora’s first instinct was to wonder why they were dead then. But if even one other body was free when the ship went tumbling, passengers would be pulverized by that unsecured person. Her second instinct was to doubt herself.
They’d crash landed. It made sense why passengers would stay harnessed in their seats.
But everyone had heard about the incoming airstrike. Everyone would have heard the explosions going off near them the whole way down. Every single person on that shuttle had been unnerved. Even Bestir.
Every last one of them would have been chomping at the bit to escape the shuttle. So why the hell had someone stayed in their harness the whole time?
The two of them snapped photos of the blood, and withdrew to the Athena. With the Red Sails and regional air patrol watching the skies for anymore drones, nobody else would be shot down today. But Nora was still nervous enough to hold Caroline’s hand on takeoff.
·····
Once the Athena finally touched back down at Asrin-Dane colony, Nora grabbed a posse and B-lined it for the local Vorak garrison.
The military had taken custody of the bodies, and there were details that needed checking.
“Explain,” Nick asked, walking behind her.
“Exactly one passenger was still harnessed to the seat when the bombardment hit,” Nora said. “I saw all the passengers on the upper deck cabins. And I checked all the blood for the seats on the lower.”
“Which one?” Nick asked.
“Hothakovig,” Nora said. “I got a hold of the medics who first responded too: she was battered to a bloody pulp, but she was definitely still harnessed in when they checked for survivors.”
“And you want to check the body for what exactly?” Sendin Trakin asked.
“Cause of death,” Nora said.
“I saw the bodies,” Trakin huffed. “They’re all the same. Blunt-force trauma.”
“How good is your medical examiner at determining peri-mortem wounds from post-mortem ones?” Nora asked. “Especially in Casti, rather than Vorak?”
Trakin only frowned.
“I can examine the body,” Roxanne said. Of all the abductees who’d attempted to cultivate a specific field of expertise, she was one of the most successful. Her grasp of bio-Adeptry was only rivaled by Nora, and even then, not very closely. If you were talking even more specifically about medical Adeptry, Roxanne blew her and scores of skilled aliens out of the water.
“That was my thinking,” Nora said.
“You can ask our investigator to check first,” Trakin insisted. “It hasn’t even been a day. Autopsies have barely begun.”
“Actually, I kinda pulled rank on this one,” Nora said. “I asked Tispas to intervene and put Hothakovig at the top of the list.”
“Well then they’re probably done by now,” Trakin said, pushing open the doors to the base morgue. “Lieutenant?”
Awaiting them was a frocked Vorak sporting rubber gloves and all the other sensible wrappings one took when dissecting a corpse.
“Sten Sendin. Timely,” the lieutenant noted. “I just finished with that autopsy.”
“This is time sensitive,” Nora said, stepping ahead of Trakin. “You didn’t put any of the requests into records, did you?”
“No. Marshal Tispas’s instructions were clear, if unorthodox. Follow me please, and put on gloves and face coverings.”
Doing so, they followed the medical officer, who opened the only body cooler with any condensation on it.
They hauled out a truly horrific body. Skeru Hothakovig was completely unrecognizable. Their face, arms, and legs were all pulverized and swollen, with strips of skin and muscle having been crushed. Three other bodies had tumbled around that cabin. It would have been like being inside a maraca as it was shaken, loose objects bashing into every wall as fast as possible.
“Body is riddled with blunt-force traumas,” the medical examiner said unenergetically. It was an obvious detail. “Cause of death is entirely impossible to reduce to a certainty…but I can say that [Miss] Clarke’s instinct is at least possible.”
“There’s some additional testing we’d like to do—” Trakin glared at Nora. “—that we’d like to ask you to do, since you are more impartial than us.”
“Sure, but the body’s in awful condition. Most physical examination isn’t going to yield anything.”
“Subcellular fluid pressure test,” Nora said. “A series actually.”
Whatever the medical examiner had been expecting to hear, that was not it.
“…You wanted to do those tests yourself? Are you even capable?”
Nora materialized a miniature starfish on her palm and psionically instructed it to stand. Showing off, really.
“Skilled bio-Adept, got it,” the Vorak grunted.
“Roxanne’s actually better than I am,” Nora said easily.
“If the subcellular test doesn’t work, we think we can still confirm time of death with some cascading and specialized psionics,” Roxanne said.
“How would psionics help with an autopsy?”
“Pressure tests first,” Nora asked.
“Fine. This is your fishing expedition, so where am I sampling first?”
Nora traded looks with Roxanne and Nick.
Considering the hypothesis?
“Brain,” they all answered.
A subcellular fluid pressure test was only for the truly paranoid. It tested the pressure of a cell’s fluid contents. It had no diagnostic purpose other than to disconfirm a particular paranoid dread of being poisoned by matter that could stop existing from inside you.
Theoretically, if an exotic poison were ingested and metabolized, the exotic molecules would have to travel through the body in order to do their damage. But it was the nature of corpses to stop processing molecules through them.
So wherever the poison did it’s damage, the molecules wouldn’t change position. But they would dematerialize.
With matter suddenly not existing inside the cell, however slightly, a vacuum would be created, and the average pressure of the cell would drop infinitesimally. If you got lucky with the cells you checked,
It was a strictly dispositive test. Because normal cell pressure simply eliminated the chance of exotic infiltration, but below normal pressure didn’t necessarily prove that exotic molecules had been present.
The test had to be run on hilariously small tissues, just a couple dozen cells, ideally. It also couldn’t be performed too long after death. The window for Casti was a bit longer than for Vorak, so they had that working for them.
But the brain samples yielded nothing. Two false positives and a slew of more reliable negatives.
Heart. Same results.
Past that, the most likely culprits to turn up what they were looking for was the Casti endocrine glands, but there were dozens upon dozens of them. And any one of them could have the .01 mg discrepancy they were looking for.
“Lungs,” Nick suggested. “Spaceship taking off, even if it wasn’t high-G, it’s stress on the body, right?”
“Clot…yes, a clot would remain intact even after the trauma,” the examiner nodded. “The body is so badly damaged, it would practically be invisible on most imagining. But it could still be there.”
“Pressure test first,” Nora asked. “There’s a clock.”
The first result on the lung pressure test was positive. But they checked again. They’d gotten false positives already.
The second test dinged too.
And the third.
Thirteen out of fourteen lung samples showed minute pressure discrepancies. Taken from one area of the lungs? A result like that could be written off. But their samples had come from both lungs.
“Well, it’s not conclusive,” Trakin said, “but odds are you were right. That Casti was dead before the shuttle crashed.”
No wonder SPARK’s drone hadn’t needed the bullet.
“Not just that,” the medical examiner said. “Confirmed massive blood clot in the lungs. Unusual location too. I am no longer in doubt. Skeru Hothakovig was dosed with a lethal blood agent at least an hour before their death.”
“Glatten Island, then,” Nick said. “It’s a huge transport hub. Thousands of possible suspects or dupes for SPARK to use.
“That’s wrong,” Roxanne said.
Nora nodded.
“SPARK downed the shuttle targeting Hothakovig specifically. Why do that if he’d already poisoned her? He plays stupid games, but not with himself. Not like that,” Nora said.
So who the hell had killed the electrical expert?
She didn’t like it, but she already felt like she knew why. The Casti had volunteered to look into the A-ships with them. Then wound up dead before they could share their expertise?
No, someone was outmaneuvering them again, all in the background, practically invisible.
Whoever they were, if they could do that unchecked, they could likely kill any abductee they wanted, just like SPARK could have.
Nora’s blood was boiling now.
There was a mistake to exploit though. They’d discovered the assassination. It didn’t look like an accident anymore. It was a coverup.
And once you could see there was a coverup…
Then you just needed to dig.