“Do you have fairs on your planet?” Daria asked suddenly, distracting him from the wistfulness that futile thought evoked. Her hand twined with his and lightly squeezed.

“More or less,” he said. He was intensely aware of her thumb. She was rubbing it back and forth along his wrist, seemingly without being aware of it as she swept her gaze across the other humans. “Less crowding. Less screaming.” He glanced up at the capricious trackline of one of the open-car rides. “Less imminent death.”

“And more what?”

He found it a little disturbing that she hadn’t argued with his assessment of the rides. But he considered the question carefully, thinking back to the few public celebrations he had attended in his life. The Child-Hall where he had spent his youngest years sponsored several, and although he could not recall them clearly beyond a general sense of frenzied fun, he knew they hadn’t been much like this. After he’d been sent to live with Kolya Pahnee, there had been very little in the way of revelry of any kind. Public observances were limited to those at which his father were receiving honors of some kind—Veteran’s March, High Tribute, Fleet Academy Commencement, that sort of thing.

“More to do,” he said at length. “There were things to make. There were musicians and entertainments. There were games. Not games of this sort,” he added, waving at a booth where several humans were attempting to thread a rotating wire maze. “Fields of games. Contests.”

“Did you ever win any?”

“Oh yes.” Considering Kolya Pahnee’s ruthless training techniques, it was a wonder Tagen hadn’t won all of them. “The rewards were much the same, I think. In principle if not in form.”

“You sound like you’ve been to a few.”

Tagen grunted noncommittally, eyeing a booth of moving targets and the pellet projectile weapon that was meant to be used against them. Were it not for his hands and the need to keep them hidden, he would be sorely tempted to try his skill.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been to one of these.” Daria plucked at his sleeve as she set off in a new direction, moving towards the inner fair, toward the smell of food. Her eyes, too, were scanning the masses, but there was a smile on her lips to suggest not all her attention was in the here and now. “Ten years, at least. It just figures I’d have to come now, for this.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I am. I’d love to kick it around here for a few hours without having to worry about killer aliens harvesting brain stems.”

He gave her a long, dubious look. She didn’t seem at all nervous. “How is it,” he began tactfully, “that you have such difficulty approaching those we meet at your hotels—”

She laughed. “And not here, when I’m literally drowning in total strangers?” she finished for him. “Look around, Tagen. No one sees me. If I fell down, they’d step right on me and keep going. It’s as good as being here by myself.”

Tagen frowned and stared out at the crowd again.

“For crying out loud, you’re a seven-foot-tall guy with visible fangs, yellow eyes, three fingers and claws, walking around in socks, wearing a shiny military uniform and an empty gunbelt and no one’s even stopped to ask if you’re performing here or anything.”

His frown deepened.

“I could stand on your shoulders and shout out that you’re an alien and I don’t think most of these people would even stop to stare.”

“You have made your point,” he told her. The sense of this place as a chemist’s killing grounds was now overwhelming. To distract himself as much as her, he said, “Why have you not recently been to fair if you enjoy them and are not frightened?”

She shrugged. “No one to go with, I guess. It’s no fun being at the fair by yourself.” She looked wistfully around her. “And this one looks like a really cool one. They’ve even got roller coasters.”

Tagen glanced at the nearest loop of unstable track just an open car came thundering through it with a full load of shrieking, unharnessed passengers. “Which I would never allow you to ride,” he said.

“And I’d eat. You can’t get food like this anywhere but at the fair.”

Tagen watched a cook pull a dripping battercake from a vat of boiling grease and coat it with pure sugar until it had a solid crust. “Have you never wondered why?”

“You know, I bet you were just mountains of fun when you were a kid,” she said wryly.

“You would lose that bet.”

“Yeah, that’s why I…oh never mind.”

He smiled, and then knuckled sweat from his eyes. “If you insist on poisoning us both, you had best do it swiftly. I am losing to Heat, and much as I dislike the thought of scandalizing your cat, there are some things I have no doubt will draw attention even in this crowd.”

Pink rose high in her cheeks and she giggled. “Well, okay. I have to do my part for Jota’s boys in blue. Or black, as the case may be. I see barbeque chicken on some of these people’s plates, you ought to be able to choke that—Oh God!”

He looked sharply around, and then down at her again. “What is it?”

“Tagen, look!”

There were too many people, too much to see. Tagen gripped her hand a little tighter, aiming his eyes in the direction of her stare, and tried to see what she saw.

He saw the purple hair first. Purple hair, just as the lawman had described, a color so astounding that for a moment, it was all Tagen could see. And then he saw the man walking beside her, a man that stood head and shoulders above her. A man in a long coat and head-cover, the only man so attired on such a hot day.

“Is it him?” Daria asked. She clutched at his arm, her little claws digging painfully at him. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

Big man and two women, one of them with purple hair, the other blonde.

“Cover your ears,” Tagen said. He had no idea what the range for his neural stunner might be in the open like this, and there were hundreds of humans all around him, but he could not open fire with a plasma gun into this crowd. Likewise, he could not follow along behind the three forever, and if E’Var turned and saw him, there would be carnage. Tagen had one chance, one alone, to catch his prisoner by surprise.

He reached into his jacket and took his neural stunner in one hand, his plasma gun in the other.

Daria paled, her eyes flashing wildly around at the crowd. “You can’t mean it!” she hissed. “There’s people everywhere!”

“Cover your ears,” he told her again.

“Tagen!”

His temper slipped and he bent close to her ear and snarled, “I have no time, woman, obey me!”

Clap went her hands on her ears. Her eyes were pleading.

Tagen raised the stunner over the crowd and pushed the trigger. He saw the pulse belch out from the device, a colorless distortion of sound that struck like a hammer inside his head and left a nauseating echo, but he was Jotan and it passed. The humans, for which the device had been developed, dropped in waves all around him, leaving a sea of prone bodies in a perfect ring. He heard Daria cry out, the sound rapidly eclipsed by screaming as the surrounding humans reacted to the sudden incapacitation of so many of their kind.

The two humans walking aside of the coated man fell with the rest of them, but the man merely staggered, and that was it, that was E’Var. Tagen had just time enough to register this, not even time to raise his plasma gun, and then E’Var was gone, darting around the side of the nearest booth in a snap of black coat without even glancing to see where the attack had come from.

But the booth was isolated from the bank of them. E’Var could not flee unseen, he could only hide. A live capture was not out of the realm of possibility.

“Prisoner!” Tagen shouted in Jotan. He had to shout to be heard. The humans were running, streaming past him in a blind panic, even trampling their own fallen in their desperation to escape. “I arrest you, Kanetus E’Var. Surrender yourself!”