Free Masterminds by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page B

threatened,” Salehi said.
    “Maybe not at home,” Uzvuyiten said. “But our place in the Alliance is. And I’m here to protect it. Or die trying.”
    He continued down the corridor.
    Salehi watched him go, and then sighed.
    Uzvuyiten seemed to think he could be a martyr to the cause, not realizing they already had one.
    Salehi returned to his suite.
    He had always known this was going to be an interesting trip. He just hadn’t realized how interesting.
    Or how dangerous.
    For all of them.

 
     
     
     
    TWELVE
     
     
    THE SHIP ARRIVED sooner than Flint had expected.
    He had just entered the port when he got the first contact from Murray Atherton of Space Traffic Control.
    Your boy just arrived .
    No explosions, then. Flint let out an audible sigh of relief, which made the new kid standing behind the west security entrance look at him with suspicion. To be fair, the new kid behind the west security entrance to the port looked at everyone with suspicion.
    The port was no longer the place it had been when Flint worked there just seven years before. It looked older, battered, filthy in a way it had never looked before. All effort had been turned to security, and with that effort, most of the funds, as well.
    So cleaning bots had been reprogrammed to sniff out all kinds of toxins and explosives; the human security staff had been beefed up to the point of ridiculousness; and, most disturbing to Flint, the entrances had been set up to separate people by species. Humans had their own entrance, as did the Disty and the Peyti. Other species often were lumped together by size, with little consideration for species tolerance or the way that the species might travel.
    Lately, Flint had tried to come to the port as infrequently as possible.
    He slipped through the first round of security, which checked him for weaponry and explosives. Ahead, he would have to go through a decontamination unit to make certain he wasn’t bringing any biological hazard into the port, never mind that Armstrong’s environmental systems swept for biological hazards continually, and it would be nearly impossible for someone to bring a known biological hazard—the kind that would cause mass deaths—into the port.
    But he wasn’t one of the people making the decisions for the port, and he never had been.
    The new kid—whom Flint spotted by his attitude and his creased and shiny uniform—continued to stare at Flint as if he had sprouted horns or something. And then Flint flushed. The kid was looking at Flint because Flint was as blond and pale as the Frémont clones. White skin, blue eyes, and blond hair were recessive traits—a sign of inbreeding, his ex-wife Rhonda had said to him in one of their epic fights—and uncommon in almost all human communities.
    Flint tipped an imaginary hat to the kid and kept going, contacting Murray while crossing the expanse between the first check-in point and the second.
    Is he out of the ship?
    Not yet, Murray sent. The suits are going in first. There’s no identification on his ship, you know. What you sent me, I can’t confirm it by the ship itself .
    That didn’t surprise Flint. He was about to say so when he had to step into the decontamination unit. It was an old unit, clearly moved from the arrival terminals.
    Security might have improved here, but not enough to make the port more secure.
    The decontamination unit was large enough to hold a tall, fat man or a Sequev. Flint stood in the center as lights washed over him, checking him for a thousand different things.
    He made himself take a deep breath. He’d been running since he left the Security Office. Talia remained there, under protest. She wanted to know what was happening. But he didn’t want to bring her into what could be an extremely dangerous situation.
    She didn’t entirely understand, although she said she did. She made him promise that he would tell her if the real Zagrando was dead.
    Flint would have anyway, so the promise was easy.
    The