“And third, we have the status of the person named Alaric, who stole the ship in the first place. I understand he is deceased?”

I felt the blood drain from my face. They were ending with the clincher, at least as far as I was concerned. Oh well, might as well get it over with. “Ah, yeah, I kind of ran him over.”

Nond made the sideways motion with his head again. “Your ship intelligence gave us a summary of events from the moment it was stolen, and has released the postmortem report to us. It described Alaric’s fate in—”

“He,” Nat interjected.

“What?”

“He. Sheldon is a sentient being, not an object.”

Nond gazed at her for a moment. “That is an item for future discussion. However, even granting your premise, the pronoun I am using is a valid gender-neutral designation, at least in Gen. It may not be translating well into Human.”

“English. And I’ll concede the usage on that basis.”

I turned to stare at Nat, wondering if I’d made a mistake taking the lead. She was going for the jugular, which actually might be a good thing.

Nond turned back to me. “Further to the subject of Alaric. He was killed during the commission of a felony, so his right to consequential correction is already compromised. And given the circumstances, we’re not entirely sure there are any laws under which we could prosecute, even if we wanted to. A defense advocate would simply argue that you could not avoid, er, running over Alaric if you couldn’t see him, and placing him in a freezer was a good-faith attempt to preserve him for a proper post-life ceremony. I can’t say I would disagree with such an argument.”

“What about the medical nanites?” I asked. “I made resuscitation impossible. I effectively killed him a second time with the freezer thing.”

Nond frowned. Actually frowned, which seemed to have the same meaning to a Gen. “What do you mean?”

I gave a summary of Sheldon’s original commentary about reviving Alaric. When I was done, Nond and his associates looked at each other in turn. “But that’s … ridiculous,” Nond said. “I’ve seen the postmortem report. You don’t come back from that level of cranial damage in any case, but freezing would generally not be a critical issue. If a victim were otherwise revivable, medical nanites would simply repair damage from ice crystals as part of the process.”

Now it was our turn to exchange confused glances. “So,” Nat finally said, “Sheldon lied to us?”

“Sheldon?” I subvocalized. “Any comment?”

Nothing.

“We have excluded the Ship Intelligence from this discussion,” Nond said, apparently sensing the attempted sidebar. “And to answer your question, yes, it would appear the Ship Intelligence lied to you. Which … ” Nond frowned again, “should be impossible.”