I smiled. 'You tried to kill me for a start/
'You?'
'I'm an Imperial inquisitor/
At that, terror made him lose control of his body functions. He began pleading, begging, telling us all sorts of misdemeanours, none of which mattered.
I knew from the first moments that he was useless. Just a mesmerised slave, chosen for his muscle, knowing nothing. But we spent two hours with him anyway. Fischig slowly turned a wall dial near the door that vented in increasing measures of the sub-zero air outside the Sun-dome. In our heat gowns, we asked questions over and again.
When Bonz's flesh began to adhere to the metal chair, we knew there was nothing more.
'Warm him up and feed him well/ Fischig told his men as we left the cell. We execute him at dawn/
I didn't ask if that meant some arbitrary time in the next cycle or real dawn, six months away, at the start of Thaw.
I didn't much care.
Fischig left us to our own devices for a while, and I ate lunch with Aemos at a public bistro almost directly under the Sun-dome. The food was sour, rehashed from freeze-dried consumables, but at least it was hot. Fountain banks projected walls of water around the edges of the bistro so that the sun-globe light made rainbows that criss-crossed the tables and aisles. On this sombre day of mourning, there were no other diners present.
Aemos was in good spirits. He chatted away, making connections I hadn't begun to see. For all his faults, he possessed a superb mind. Every hour I spent with him, I learned more techniques.
He was forking up fish and rice and reviewing his data slate.
'Let's look at the transmission lag that Lowink detected in the messages Eyclone sent and received while on the planet/
They're all in cipher. Lowink hasn't unlocked them yet/
'Yes, yes, but look at the lag. This one… eight seconds… that's from a ship in orbit… and the timeframe matches that period in which we know Eyclone's mysterious starship was here. But this… during your struggle with him last night. A lag of twelve and a half minutes. That's from another system/
I stopped trying to macerate a lump of meat that resembled a slug and peered over. I'd never much considered the blurry side-bar that edged all astropathic message forms before.
Twelve and a half? You're sure?'
'I had Lowink check/
'So that gives us a reference frame?'
He smiled, pleased I was pleased. Three worlds in the picture. All between eleven and fifteen minutes' lag of here. Thracian Primaris, Kobalt II and Gudran/
Thracian Primaris was no surprise. That had been our last port of call, our last sighting of Eyclone. And, as far as we knew from the wretched Bonz, the place where he had recruited some or all of his servants.