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I followed this trail all the way to the bridge of the ship, which was where I’d been headed anyway. I could access the stored schematics from here.
I found another corpse there.
This was a donen.
A donen? What was he doing on the ship? He was clothed. He had a shirt on and a pair of pants, but his clothing was full of blood, and he was sitting in one of the seats in the bridge clutching a blaster and gazing sightlessly out at the array of controls for the ship. His antlers weren’t as tall or as numerous as Holston’s. Did that mean he was younger?
His chin was resting against his chest.
I pushed past him and took off my bracelet. I tapped the side of it and a little nodule came out. I plugged my bracelet directly into the main control board of the ship and then I began tapping on the ship’s control keyboard, looking around for the schematics I needed.
There.
Okay.
I moved the schematics over to the bracelet and then I snatched it back out and rushed back through the ship.
I climbed down and Holston was nowhere to be found.
But when I walked around the ship, I saw a fire.
I headed over and found it burning away merrily. He wasn’t there either, but neither was his bolts and bow. He was hunting.
I gripped the blaster I had and sat near the fire and shook.
What was that donen doing there? Had he shot the woman in her quarters? How had he gotten on the ship?
Holston materialized out of the darkness, dragging a big bird. “I told you to stay on the ship.”
“Do donen ever wear clothes?” I said.
“It’s not safe out here.” He gestured. “On the ship, you can keep both me and the vvoln out—”
“Like in the cities, maybe?”
“In the cities what?”
“Clothes,” I said.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, okay, once in a long, long while, you’ll see a donen on some vid or something, and they’re always clothed. I figure it’s like anything. You decide to leave your home planet, you got to assimilate.”
I let out a breath. “Right. He must have been on the ship. He must have brought the ship down here. It makes sense. It’s his planet. And I did think that it had to have been a member of the resistance who committed the murder—Can your mating madness affect a guy in space?”
“What are you talking about?”
“They’re dead, on the ship,” I said.
“I told you they would be.”
“But dead because they were shot with blasters,” I said.
He straightened up. “Seriously?”
“Come and look,” I said, getting to my feet.
“Shei, I don’t need to go on that ship—”
“You get really turned on by blood?”
