Free A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) by Robert Taylor

systems re-written. I promise you, only those that know you personally will question this revelation. If they create too many waves, well, accidents happen. Or maybe it will turn out that they, too, are members of the Righteous Flame terrorist cult, like Mr. Hamilton here.”
    “So that’s your answer?” Hamilton said. “To have us all locked up as criminals?”
    Walsh shrugged. “Pretty much. You’ll be out of the way, I’ll be happy. It’s a win-win situation.”
    “You’re all heart.” Hamilton muttered.
    “I know! It will take time for the information to propagate out to Tantalus Station from where I am. Once it does, the local authorities will deal with you. Nice of you to place yourself in quarantine, though. That makes it so much easier for them to round you all up!”
    Hamilton gritted his teeth. “How long do we have?”
    Walsh shrugged again. “Who knows? Your StellarNet is so sluggish, even for critical alerts like this. Too many jumps along the way. A half-hour maybe?”
    Half an hour. Hamilton glanced at Rames, who nodded and disappeared.
    “Thirty minutes isn’t very long. You could have given us a few hours.” Hamilton told Walsh.
    “Oh no! I couldn’t!” Walsh protested. “That’s far too long for someone as clever – for a human – as you. You’d be up to no end of tricks. Better it’s all over quickly, don’t you think?”
    “What about this?” Hamilton tapped the screen of the communicator. “This isn’t standard issue. Something you whipped up, I imagine. This, plus our story, could cause you embarrassment.”
    Walsh’s smugness reappeared. “You really must stop thinking that I leave loose ends. The comms unit will degrade into a pile of dust – a dust-pile that contains traces of bio-agent material – and no one will believe the word of known terrorists. Especially terrorists whose cult believes in ‘aliens among us’! The courier that delivered the package will be found dead. It will be presumed that your fellow cult members tried to smuggle a bio-agent in to you so that you could perform some atrocity. The data trail for the package has been obviously faked, so it all looks like a nasty incident, narrowly avoided. All very tragic.”
    “You forget that our records will have been scrutinized over the last few days since we arrived here. The sudden changes will be noticed.” Hamilton pointed out.
    Walsh shrugged. “So what? Your questioners have their own hidden agenda. Or did you not pick up on that? When this alert comes through, they’ll distance themselves from you and be the first to sign the local arrest warrants. They won’t want any spotlight focusing on them, or the Morebaeus .”
    “I did pick up on that, thank you. Something about the cargo?” Hamilton wondered.
    Walsh nodded. “Yes. I think someone shipped something out on that ship that shouldn’t have been on there. No doubt it’s all terribly important to your kind, but irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. Either way, they don’t want to be connected to it, so they’ll sell you down the river – all of you – rather sharply.”
    “Then I guess we have nothing more to say to each other.” Hamilton growled.
    “Not really. But rest assured that some day, when I’ve found the answers I’m looking for, I’ll come visit you in whatever prison they put you in. That’s assuming they don’t just shoot you!” Walsh looked at Hamilton’s data-pane, then turned a surprised face to the screen. “Phew! You are one nasty piece of work now! I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark alley!”
    “Why don’t you hold that thought!” Hamilton snarled and slammed the screen down, deactivating the contact. Almost at once, the unit began to give off a vile odor then, slowly, it started to crumble before their very eyes. In less than a minute, it was exactly what Walsh had promised it would be. A pile of dust.
    “Great. Now what?” Klane muttered.
    “Now,” Hamilton stated. “We get out of