“The humans have groundcars,” Tagen said mildly, and only Admiral Sta’al did not recoil at once. “They have broadcast media. They have sky cars. They have orbiting weapons arrays. They have sent probes to other worlds in their system. Please believe me when I say they are fifty years or less from encountering our Gate with a manned transport of their own. That is the Earth you sent me to.”

He had their full attention now.

“Kanetus E’Var knew this Earth. He landed, he took possession of a human and a groundcar and he was gone. I was on foot. I was made to believe that I would meet primitives with hand-held blades. I met this.” He took E’Var’s gun from his jacket and thumped it hard on the table. “So if there was an egregious lack of anything, with respect, Magistrate, it was with preparative intelligence. Yes, I invaded Daria Cleavon’s home. She, in turn, instructed me in N’Glish and used every resource at her disposal to locate my prisoner, an act that cost her everything she owned.”

“That…is regrettable,” the Magistrate began with a sidelong glance at Sta’al. “And I’m sure her actions are laudable—”

“I am not here to be placated,” Tagen said flatly. “I am not here to ask allowance. I am here to state without apology what I have done and what more I mean to do. I robbed Daria Cleavon of her home. I robbed her of any hope of resuming her life. And so I brought her here and here, I have told her that she will be free to make herself a new one.”

“It is against the law!” Inarr bit every word off a little louder than the one before and finished by clapping her hands in her judiciously-short hair and snarling at the ceiling. “Use your head, you fool male! What hope have we of maintaining order when our own officers are allowed to keep slaves?”

“She is not a slave.”

“The appearance of impropriety is every bit as important as impropriety itself,” Commander Cura answered. He kept his voice low and his posture relaxed, but his eyes never lost that penetrating stare. “The message you are sending is that the officers of the Fleet are above the law they enforce.”

“That is unfortunate,” Tagen replied. “Because the message I should be sending is that an alliance must be found between our races before we meet again. Daria has agreed to act as translator and liaison to the preserves. With her help, the humans we’ve recovered may become a true colony. Self-sufficient. A resource of outstanding potential. Think. There are a quarter million of them and, at this moment in time, they are not happy with us.”

Cura leaned back and looked thoughtful. Admiral Sta’al looked at her hand on the table, her lips curved in a half-smile.

“Law, all law, prohibits the keeping of humans.” Magistrate Inarr stood and paced the room, fighting for calm and projecting only her blatant impatience and fury. “If this one is as intelligent and influential as you claim, let her work her will from the preserves.”

“Very well.” Tagen unfolded his hands, removed his jacket and his gunbelt and laid them on the table before three pairs of disbelieving eyes (Admiral Sta’al’s small smile broadened). “I resign my commission. I will go to the preserves with her. I gave my word that I would not abandon her and I mean not to.”

The Magistrate cast her eyes skyward, palms upturned in mute supplication for just an instant before slamming them down again on the table. “Very dramatic, sek’ta Pahnee, now sit down and be serious.”

“I am not, as my record surely shows, prone to frivolity.”

Commander Cura leaned forward. “Think what you do, Pahnee,” he urged, frowning. “The preserves are hostile toward Jotan and we will not protect you.”

“I will take my chances, but I will not break my word to the human who risked and ruined her life to aid me.”

“For the gods’ sakes!” Inarr groaned. “You don’t owe that animal a thing!”

A following silence gave those words weight and ugliness until even the Magistrate looked uncomfortable.

“You make me ashamed of my race,” Tagen said at last.

“How dare you speak to me—”

“This is not about you. I am not asking. I am telling. Daria Cleavon stays with me, one way or another. And that is all. If—and believe me, only if—she is allowed her freedom will she offer her services as mediator to other humans. And if she is sent to the preserves, I will go with her and you will get nothing.”

*

“Well, I’m glad it went so well,” Daria said, stirring at the sauce that simmered in the cooker. “I guess it’s okay now to say I was worried.”

“Mm.”

“I’m guessing you talked about everything…” Daria glanced around at him, her brows now pinched with that look of hopeful concern. “Has anyone seen Raven?”

*

“There’s been no report whatever of this second human who escaped from the docking bay on your arrival.” Commander Cura studied his personal media-card a moment longer, his lip curling to expose the tip of one fang, and then tossed the tablet on the table with a clatter. “You’d think a human running loose in the Fleet’s own dock would draw someone’s eye.”

“You’d think,” Admiral Sta’al murmured.

“I think of it as a panicked flight rather than an escape,” Tagen remarked.

“Semantics.” Magistrate Inarr was pacing again.

“Hardly.” Tagen kept his voice calm, but there was a simmering heat in his chest working its way up through his body to his mouth. “Escape implies a wrongdoing on her part. She fled at the thought of being imprisoned in a preserve.”

“Then she should have stayed on Earth.”

“Where she would have been killed for E’Var’s crimes,” Tagen countered.

“I’m sure the humans know best how to manage their people,” the Magistrate said dismissively. “She would have nothing to fear if she hadn’t—”

“If she had not what?” Despite every shred of his will, anger found his words at last. “He abducted her. He raped her repeatedly while in Heat. He butchered over a hundred of her kind right before her eyes. He beat her. He branded her. He mutilated her. And you wonder that she did not fight him?”

The others in the room were silent and even Inarr seemed taken aback, although the High Magistrate was still the first to respond.

“Surely,” she said, staring at him in shock, “Surely you do not suggest we prosecute these events as crimes?”

He had intended no such thing actually, but the unabashed astonishment it signified infuriated him past the bound of self-control.

“And what do you intend to prosecute him for?” he demanded. “Evasion of law? Unauthorized use of a Gate? Theft of Fleet property?”

“Easy,” murmured Commander Cura.

“I have spent thirty-five days in pursuit of this man! Thirty-five days on Earth in the worst of its Heat-season watching E’Var slaughter ten and twenty and thirty humans at a single hunt and you sit here in your clean white robes and ridicule me for calling it a crime?”

It was quite possible that High Magistrate Inarr had never had a male shout at her in her entire life. She didn’t seem to know how to respond. She opened her mouth, closed it, and cautiously sat down. “I don’t deny the savagery of his actions,” she said in her most neutral tones. “But my jurisdiction is restricted to crimes perpetuated in our own corner of the galaxy. However unfair it may seem to you, Earth must police itself.”

“Bureaucrat!” Tagen spat. He made the word a curse. “For five hundred years, Jota has known of the existence of humans in the universe. For five hundred years, the human homeworld has been quarantined and laws affected to prohibit contact. And for that full five hundred years, Jotan criminals have trafficked in human lives! Don’t you dare dismiss that suffering with ‘Earth must police itself!’ We are responsible for these outrages and now we are responsible for those abandoned in our corner of the galaxy and how are we proving our responsibility? We gather them up when we stumble on them and drop them on a moon to leave them to their own devices! The human Raven chose to run blindly into an alien world rather than face that fate!”