As the party continued, Negasi decided to snoop around. He had just been talking to Nova, who finally got around to paying them. The credits appeared in his communicator, and when he glanced over at Jeridan, talking up some pretty woman, the pilot gave him a thumb's up.

Now they were a lot richer. That still didn't leave Negasi satisfied, though.

There were still too many secrets around here, secrets that might put them in danger. He mingled a bit, chatting with various techies who came up to him to congratulate the team's success, and then did that classic old dodge to get out of a room and explore the rest of the building.

He asked for directions to the bathroom.

Not the most graceful way to get out of a crowd, but it always worked.

He had already noticed there weren't any keypads on any of the doors he had seen, and all the security cameras were on the outside walls of the compound, pointing at the driveway and surrounding countryside. He was surprised the security was so lax. Maybe once they had screened the employees, the League figured they were safe. And he bet the computers had military-grade encryption.

No one would see anything important that they weren't supposed to see.

That didn't mean an outsider like him couldn't find out a thing or two by snooping around.

The engineer he had asked had pointed to one of the doors leading off from the reception room, so he passed through it and found himself in an empty hallway with no visible security cameras. A series of closely spaced doors ran along the righthand wall. There were no windows or doors on the lefthand wall and Negasi guessed it was the outer wall. One door halfway down on the right stood open. He peeked inside.

A small office with not much more than a desk, a computer with the monitor switched off, and a few personal items like a gravball racquet and a poster for some synthbase band.

Disappointed, he kept going. The men's room was the last door on the right before the hallway ended at another door. Negasi pretended not to notice the sign and went through the door.

Now he was in a more interesting section. The hall continued, but instead of a series of offices, on the right there was a glassteel window running the length of the hall looking into a large engineering lab.

No one was inside. He could see various parts lying on worktables and recognized them as pieces from a jump gate. Not the miniature one they had discovered on the dinosaur planet—those must have been somewhere else—but portions of a standard jump gate.

While Negasi had never actually set foot on one of the old jump gates, he had studied the partial schematics available to the public for so long he felt like he had actually worked on one of those massive installations.

The one thing he especially remembered was how complicated it all was. Even Jeridan, who had a lot more training in engineering than he did, had admitted that he couldn't understand half the stuff he had seen. And if Jeridan admitted he didn't know something, he really didn't know it.

This team of experts would figure it all out, though. Negasi was sure of it.

He felt tempted to go into the lab but decided that might be a step too far. If someone came along, he'd have a hard time explaining himself and it wasn't like he was going to understand all that stuff anyway.

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The hallway stopped and another closed door. Curious, he passed through …

… and bumped into someone he never thought he'd see again.

Ogedai, the Mongol security guy from the Yavari Prime.

He took up the entire doorway, a rectangular slab of muscle and attitude.

"Who the hell are you?" Ogedai demanded, his voice sounding like an avalanche.

"Negasi, don't you recognize me?"

Ogedai grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him against the wall.

"Bullshit! You ain't Negasi."

"Ogedai, wait! I have an electronic disguise on. Let me press the command to turn it off."

Ogedai whipped out a flechette pistol and pressed it against Negasi's forehead.

"You think I'm stupid?"

Negasi decided full disclosure might be fatal, so he said, "We had to save Captain Boutros from that river monster, remember? Then you took something from the turncoat's shuttle you wouldn't let me see."

Ogedai's eyes narrowed. "How did you know all that?"

The cold muzzle of his pistol still pressed against Negasi's temple.

Strange that the disguise lets you feel that.

"Let me turn off this disguise, all right? I just have to touch below my neck."

"If you try anything … "

"You'll blow my head off. Yeah, I got it."

Negasi moved his hand slowly up to the chain, found the switch, and switched it off.

Ogedai blinked with surprise as Negasi revealed his true face.

"Huh, top of the line. You even felt different."

"Yeah. Good stuff. Can you let me go now?"

Ogedai let him go. Negasi fell a few centimeters to plop back down on the floor.

"Where did you get that?" Ogedai asked.

"At Luna's Lectronics on Luna's Layover."

Ogedai slapped him upside the head.

"I told you not to use alliteration!"

"Ow! Obnoxious Overtures!"

That earned him another slap.

"Please stop doing that."

"That wasn't alliteration."

"I know," Negasi said, rubbing his head.

"Why are you wearing a disguise?"

Negasi decided to tell the truth, or at least the version of the truth he and his partner had decided on.

"We've been here before, selling hoverbikes to the nobility, better hoverbikes than the Royal Guard had. When the king caught wind of it, he confiscated the bikes and ordered our arrest. We barely got off the planet."

Ogedai laughed. "That's a good one! The king is a loser." His laughter faded and was replaced with a scowl. "Wait a minute, what are you doing sneaking around back here?"

Negasi found himself being lifted up again.

"I was looking for the bathroom."

"You think I'm stupid?"

Once again, Negasi sensed an honest answer might be a fatal one, at least to that question. He decided to answer the first question honestly.

"Nova has been handing us a line of cack ever since we signed up. Hiding important information, lying about motives and dangers, the works. Jeridan and I got sick of it. So now that I'm actually here, I decided to give myself a little tour."

Ogedai nodded slowly and let him back down.

"You ain't the only one."

"Aren't."

"Huh?"

"The proper word is 'aren't.' Ain't is slang."

Ogedai scowled again. "What are you, a grammar teacher?"

"Sorry. Been around kids too long. So they lied to you too?"

"I worked for the League for more than a year before I got told about the ruins on Yavari Prime or the Imperium station. I thought they were simply a group of snooty tech scavengers."

"They're more than that, although they're that too. Um, what are you doing back here?"

Ogedai grinned. "Snooping around. It's the only way to find out the truth in this outfit. I've been told so much cack it's coming out my ears."

"Let's go snoop then."

Ogedai glanced at the closed door he had just come through, then back at Negasi.

"You know about what they plan to do to Nova's kid?" he whispered.

Negasi's mood blackened. "Hell yeah, I do. They didn't tell us, of course. We had to find out for ourselves."

The Mongol nodded slowly. "I listened in to a conversation between Captain Boutros and one of the lead eggheads here. That's how I found out. How could they do that? They deserve to get vaporized!"

"Keep your voice down. We confined Nova to quarters and made her promise to get rid of Derren once they've processed all the data. That will be any day now. Then we're taking Nova to the cops."

Ogedai snorted. "Derren, Nova's dead husband?"

"Yeah. Oh, don't you know? They weren't planning to put him in Mason's head, they've already done it!"

Ogedai stared. "What are you talking about?"

"What the League planned to do to Nova's kid, just like you said."

Ogedai shook his head, stunned. "Put Derren into Mason's head, like an AI? That's screwed up. Is that even possible?"

Negasi stated at him. "Wait. Isn't that what you were talking about?"

"No. I wasn't talking about Mason. I was talking about Aurora."

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