Nat sighed. “A month ago, I’d have said no. Sometimes a lot of people do the same things for similar reasons, and it looks like they’re working together, but they’re really just each following their own best interests. But in this case … ”

“Loranna,” Patrick answered with a smile and a shrug, sitting down and taking a sip of his coffee. Then he sat forward abruptly, barely avoiding spilling the entire cup. He pointed at the news monitor, his hand shaking slightly. “Isn’t that Phil?”

I turned quickly to look, just as the scene changed to a studio-based talking head. But I had gotten an impression of a short, dumpy, bald man with a long fringe, watching the Harris activity from the sidelines. “Sorry, Patrick, I didn’t get a good look. But he’s dead, isn’t he? Luthor sure made that clear.”

“Did he? Now that I think of it, Luthor actually never used the word dead, and Arley talked about Phil as lunch as a future state of being.”

I was still parsing Patrick’s statement when Sheldon announced, “Commander Nond requests your presence at your earliest convenience. I think he means now, though. Your honor guard is already assembled outside the airlock.”

Patrick looked down at his coffee, still steaming and barely touched. “I just made this, dammit. I hope they like the smell of coffee.” He grabbed a travel lid and slapped it on the cup.

As we descended the airlock steps, I wondered idly if the guard detail actually was an honor guard. Maybe we were being treated like diplomats … Naw. The guards’ attention was directed inward, not outward.

Commander Nond and two other Gen were sitting at the conference table when we entered. Once again, Nond didn’t bother to do introductions, which could have been good or bad or just Gen manners.

As soon as we were seated, Nond began to speak. “We have come to a decision regarding the Foundation ship, the Quest for Knowledge, which you refer to as the Halo or Sheldon. It has,” Nond glanced at Nat, “he has demonstrated sufficient evidence of sentience so that resetting him could be considered equivalent to a mind-wipe, which in human terms would be equivalent to capital punishment. So we are faced with a conundrum. The subject individual is not technically a citizen and could be considered property if you looked at it a certain way.”

Nat opened her mouth to retort, and Nond held up a hand to forestall her. “Not that such a viewpoint could be defended legally once you posit sentience. The problem,” Nond shrugged in a very human fashion, and I wondered if he was deliberately using human body language, “is that Sheldon doesn’t really have an easily definable place in Gen society, and frankly his very existence is a definite embarrassment.”

“Was there a clincher, or was it just a balance-of-evidence thing?” Nat asked.