“Yes,” Rodabaugh said.

“You understand I think this is a bad idea,” Abumwe said.

Rodabaugh looked annoyed with Abumwe, but it was Egan who answered. “The directive for this is coming from over all of our heads, Ambassador,” she said. “And none of us have the luxury of arguing with it.”

“Right,” Abumwe said. She got up and walked out of the room without uttering another word.

From their side of the table, Rodabaugh, Egan and Rigney looked over at Schmidt.

“Thanks for coming,” he said, tried to smile, and failed.

*   *   *

Harry Wilson entered the bridge of the Tubingen; a surprised Captain Jack Augustyn looked up, along with his executive officer and other bridge crew. He gave them a couple of seconds for their BrainPals to register and label him. Then he said, “I think we’re in trouble.”

Wilson saw Captain Augustyn have an internal debate whether to jump on him for his unconventional entrance and then make a choice, in the space of half a second. “Explain,” he said.

“We have a couple of CDF corpses in the meat locker right now,” Wilson said.

“Yes,” Augustyn said. “So what?”

“I think there should be another one in there,” Wilson said.

“Excuse me?” Augustyn said.

“We have two dead CDF,” Wilson said. “I think there was another one in the colony. I’ve been going through Vasily Ivanovich’s data. It’s where I found the data stored in a BrainPal-readable format. But some of the documents aren’t originally Vasily’s. Some of them are from Martina Ivanovich, who forwarded them to Vasily using a BrainPal-to-BrainPal protocol. And some of them are from a guy named Drew Talford. Who also sent them BrainPal to BrainPal.”

“We have our people on the planet now, identifying the dead,” Augustyn said. “They’ll find him.”

“They have found him,” Wilson said. “I wouldn’t be bothering you with this if I hadn’t already checked.”

“If they found him, then what’s the problem?” asked Selena Yuan, the Tubingen’s executive officer.

“They didn’t find all of him,” Wilson said. “He’s missing his head.”

“I would imagine a lot of the colonists are missing limbs and body parts,” Augustyn said. “They were attacked. And it’s been a week since the attack, so scavengers have been at them.”

“Lots of them are missing body parts,” Wilson agreed, and then sent Augustyn and Yuan an image through his BrainPal. “None of the rest of them are missing a body part that’s been cleanly separated from the rest of their body.”

There was a moment while Augustyn and Yuan examined the picture. “No one’s found the head,” Augustyn asked, after a minute.