Free Final Inquiries by Roger MacBride Allen Page B

big machine parts banging along and the sight of their craft being bashed and shuttled around.
    "Activating launch sequence," said Greveltra in his bland, flat, expressionless voice.
    There was a blinding flash of light and suddenly the shaft was filled with a storm of lightning bolts that flared around the sphere, engulfing it without touching it. The walls of the shaft flashed past in a blur, and, in less than a heartbeat, the sphere was flung into clear space.
    They were looking upward and backwards along their line of flight at the massive spherical bulk of the Eminent Concordance --or at least the ninety-nine-point-ninety-five percent of her that was her massive propulsion module.
    The sheets of lightning blazed up out of the launching shaft, seemingly unwilling to release the command sphere, their crackling fires dancing and reflecting on the polished golden surface of the great ship.
    Greveltra swung the command sphere about, pointing it along its direction of travel, straight at the planet itself, directly overhead.
    They were moving fast enough that Tifinda was growing visibly larger moment by moment. Jamie made a rough guess at their distance from the planet and realized they had to be moving at something like a hundred thousand kilometers an hour, straight at the planet. If Greveltra suddenly keeled over and the command sphere flew on as it was and impacted the surface at their present speed, at minimum the energy release would be comparable to a large nuclear weapon. He decided a few prayers for the health of their pilot and the continued proper functioning of their ship might be in order.
    Jamie felt a few muscles straining and decided he had gotten tired of craning his neck to look directly overhead. He sat down on the deck, pulled off his gear vest, bunched it into a lumpy makeshift pillow the same way Hannah had, and lay down flat, his head on the vest. He could be astonished and overawed just as handily while flat on his back.
    Hannah glanced down at him, saw what he had done, and lay down next to him, her head on her own vest. For a bizarre moment, Jamie was irresistibly reminded of camping trips in the mountains, lying back, looking up at the sky, and sharing the teenage equivalent of deep thoughts with his camping buddy. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" he half muttered, more to himself than to Hannah.
    "Huh? What?"
    Jamie chuckled and shook his head. "Nothing. Never mind."
    "Glad you can find something to laugh about," Hannah said. "Do you have any idea how fast we must be going?"
    "Yes," said Jamie. "But I don't see any point in discussing it." He glanced over at Brox, who had sat himself down and was calming watching the incoming planet. Jamie decided the Kendari was out of earshot and spoke to Hannah in low tones. "Do you have any useful guesses about what we're going to find down there?"
    It was Hannah's turn to chuckle. "Yes, but I don't see any point in discussing it."
    "Okay, you got me there."
    "Seriously though--my guess is that there was some sort of bad accident involving humans and Kendari, and maybe Vixa or some other species." She gestured toward Greveltra. "The way he drives makes that easy to believe."
    "Why do you say accident? Brox used the term 'crime scene.'"
    "A bit of sloppy phrasing. I say accident because Brox is the enemy--but Brox isn't acting hostile. He's not angry at us, at humans. If anything, he's oddly sympathetic. So something caused us and them trouble, but no one is to blame. And it happened at exactly the wrong time, just when everybody is about to sit down and sign the deal. They want a joint investigation to smooth it all over, confirm no one was at fault, and have a nice signing ceremony."
    "Hmmph. Well, maybe." The planet was getting bigger by the minute. Maybe a hundred thousand kilometers an hour was a low estimate. It looked as if they were heading for the daytime side, toward a part of the globe where it was roughly late afternoon. The cloud cover hid