Translator Dlique threw up her incongruously gray-gloved hands, a gesture, I thought, of exasperation. Say exactly what we told you to and nothing will go wrong, they said. Well, it all went wrong anyway. And they didn’t say anything about this. You’d think they might have, they said lots of other things. Sit up straight, Dlique. Don’t dismember your sister, Dlique, it isn’t nice. Internal organs belong inside your body, Dlique.” She scowled a moment, as though that last one particularly rankled.

“There does seem to be a general agreement that you are, in fact, Dlique,” I said.

“You’d think! But it doesn’t work like that when you aren’t anybody. Oh!” She looked up as Kalr Five entered with two cups and a bottle of arrack. “That’s the good stuff!” She took the cup Five handed her. Peered intently into Five’s face. “Why are you pretending you’re not Human?”

Five, in the grip of an offended horror so intense even she couldn’t have spoken without betraying it, didn’t answer, only turned to give me my own cup. I took it, and said, calmly, “Don’t be rude to my soldiers, Dlique.”

Translator Dlique laughed, as though I’d said something quite funny. “I like you, Fleet Captain. With Governor Giarod and Captain Hetnys, it’s all what is your purpose in coming here, Translator, and what are your intentions, Translator, and do you expect us to believe that, Translator. And then it’s You’ll find these rooms very comfortable, Translator; the doors are locked for your own safety, Translator; have some more tea, Translator. Not Dlique, you see?” She took a substantial swallow of arrack. Coughed a little as it went down.

I wondered how long it would be before the governor’s staff realized Translator Dlique was missing. Wondered for only a moment why Station hadn’t raised the alarm. But then I remembered that gun, that no ship or station could see, that had come from the Presger. Translator Dlique might seem scatterbrained and childlike. But she was certainly as dangerous as Governor Giarod and Captain Hetnys feared. Likely considerably more so. They had, it seemed, underestimated her. Perhaps by her design. “What about the others on your ship?”

“Others?”

“Crew? Staff? Fellow passengers?”

“It’s a very small ship, Fleet Captain.”

“It must have been crowded, then, with Zeiat and the translator along.”

Translator Dlique grinned. “I knew we’d get on well. Give me supper, will you? I just eat regular food, you know.”

I recalled what she’d said when she’d first arrived. “Did you eat many people before you were grown?”