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place?” he said reproachfully. “I talked to Finke, too.”
    Hieronymous Finke, the salvage operator and independent contractor whom I’d asked to bring in the remains of
Calypso
after the gray ship spat it out, together with a lot of Seouras debris.
    “Finke said he brought some space junk back for you and you stored it in one of the lower bays,” said Murdoch.
    “ConFleet was busy at the time,” I protested. “I didn’t want to bother them.”
    “Uh-huh. And you stored the junk as research material and paid Finke from the engineering budget. Nice bit of creative accounting, that. Veatch would be proud.”
    I suppose it had been naive of me to think that if we were successful, these minor transgressions would be overlooked. An unpleasant feeling, to have one’s sins exposed one after the other. I remembered how I’d kept away from everyone, including Murdoch, over the next couple of months as I investigated what remained of
Calypso
’s engines. Maybe I was too angry at the Invidi, maybe overreacting to the events of the blockade.
    “I went back to your engineering colleagues,” said Murdoch, “and told them I wanted answers. They were all a bit subdued by then—I think they needed to tell someone what had gone wrong. They told me you were probably at the other end of the jump point
Calypso
came through. Nothing we could do from our end.”
    He leaned forward again. “I thought, I can do something. I was going to go to ConFleet and request a rescue ship to go through the same jump point. At least, I wondered if I should do that, because if ConFleet caught you with Invidi jump technology you’d be under arrest in no time. But anyway, before I could do anything, transfers came through for all three of your engineering team.”
    “Whose orders?”
    “EarthFleet for Josh Heron and ConFleet for the other two. Admiral’s signatures on all transfers, no discussion. I barely had time to ask them what was going on; none of them knew. I went back to check whether I had enough evidence about the project and where you’d gone to take to ConFleet if necessary, and what do you know? Lee’s navigational data was missing.”
    “What about the research results?” I said, not really wanting to hear the inevitable answer.
    “Some of it had security seals on it. Above my level. Some of it had been ‘transferred’ and disappeared into a bureaucratic muddle.”
    “Sounds like An Barik’s been busy.”
    I meant our “local” Invidi, An Barik, who had been the Confederacy Council observer on Jocasta for several years before the Seouras blockade. An Barik lived on Jocasta but didn’t socialize in any way with other species, and only appeared at official functions when absolutely necessary. We suspected he’d been able to contact the Confederacy at any time during the blockade but chose not to. It was difficult to understand why, but as far as we could see, his reason was so that nothing would happen to prevent
Calypso
arriving.
    He nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. So I went to see him. Tried to, that is, but I never got any response that made sense. I started to get really worried. It was over a month since you left and everyone was saying how sad, a tragic accident, let’s get on with our lives.”
    “I’m sorry, Bill.” I looked up from where I’d been tracing circles on the coarse brown weave of the blanket. “I meant to tell you.”
    “You mean, you didn’t mean to get lost.”
    “Right.” I don’t know what bothered me more, that he knew me well enough to accept I’d put off telling him, or that I had, in the excitement surrounding the test flight, put it off too long. “So, um, what happened after that? Did you go to the Confederacy and tell them what you suspected?”
    “No-o,” he said slowly. “I waited another couple weeks. I mean,”—he flashed me a quick smile—“you’ve got out of some difficult situations before this. And... I dunno. I didn’t want them to arrest you for