Dav was having breakfast before heading to work in the medicenter when he was summoned to the small conference room in the administrative wing. He had expected it. He was lucky there was a policy to let agents sleep at least eight hours after a major incident report, or they would have asked him to meet with the seniors sooner. They would want to talk about Ash'la and whatever else he had learned. He had learned very little besides what was on his report, but they would want to go over it with him.

  Tired as he had been, he had checked The List for Ash'la and the healer he thought she'd called Letiyo before he had turned in the previous night. He had begun his morning with a search on the infi for medical students with either name or ivariations. Now, as he finished his breakfast, he went through the vipix of the previous day, selecting the ones he found in the best poses for the identification software.

  Nothing turned up. He had a short list of possibles for Ash'la, but none of them was convincing. For Letiyo, he could not find anyone.Psi-healers with medical training in one of the Alliance medical schools were relatively few. Perhaps they had not disclosed that they were psi-healers? He widened the search for any Jaraidan at all with those abilities even if the name was different. There were several, but physical descriptions did not match what he'd noted about Ash'la and Letiyo.

  There should have been some record of them—travel documents, admission applications to whatever school they had attended, term reports, certificates—but there was nothing.

  *****

  In the small conference room, Dav sat at the round table with Leader Hakis, Leader Tro, Seniors Bir, and Senior Ta-Thatta. Bir was communications. Ta-Thatta was intelligence. If Dav had wondered why they wanted to talk to him before he had even completed his formal reports, Ta-Thatta’s presence made it clear.

  “You have a name now, for the woman you met at an earlier incident, the one who speaks Panlex fluently,” said Senior Ta-Thatta after Leader Hakis had gone through the usual preliminaries. “Have you identified her further?”

  “No sir. I have tried, but there hasn’t been much time—I’ve been involved in the rescue operations.”

  “You know her name, Ash’la, now. She told you yesterday,” said Bir, checking his notes.

  “To be precise, she did not say it was her name, only that she was known as Ash’la-na among her people,” Dav said.

  Ta-thatta nodded, understanding the distinction. Bir looked a little put-out at the correction.

  “But you don’t believe that is her real name,” Ta-Thatta said, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

  “It may be a version of her name,” Dav said. “Or one of her names—Jaraidans have many names and we haven’t yet figured out how they choose the names they use for their Alliance IDs when they travel. Ash’la is not a name in Alliance records, so it is not the name she traveled with. Neither are there any recognizable variants: no Ashala or Ashenala or Ashlani, for example.”

  “What can we do with the information that she is a psi-healer who had medical training outside Jaraida? There can’t be that many in the right age-bracket,” suggested Tro.

  Ta-Thatta and Bir blinked as they checked the infi. Dav who had already done the search was able to tell them that there was no one.

  “There was an Academy student Shay’lin Setan that almost matched,” he said. “But she would be eight or ten years younger than this woman, and in any case she is supposed to have died in that transfer disaster.”

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  “A very suspicious accident,” said Ta-Thatta. “But maybe she wasn’t there? We all know cases of people reported dead in a mass accident who later turned out to have not been part of the group. She might appear older than she is, given the problems faced by her planet in the past 5 years or so?

  Dav granted that it was possible, and pulled the record for Shay’lin Setan forward to share on the table screens.

  “She has light brown hair,” said Hakis. “The woman calling herself Ash’la has dark black hair in the vipix from your shoulder cam.”

  “It could be an effect of the light,” suggested Bir.

  “And people can change their hair-color,” suggested Tro.

  Dav considered it. Would dyeing your hair be against the Code? He could not be sure. In any case, he didn’t think Shay’lin Setan was a good candidate for Ash’la, even though she was the closest he could find.

  “There are a couple of other possibles who are not good matches either,” he said. “Either the height is wrong, or the hair color is wrong, or they are the wrong age—or all three.”

  The group of seniors considered the other possibles and agreed that they were too far from a match.

  “So the best choice is Shay’lin Setan, so far,” said TaThatta. “If she survived. I will start an investigation on whether we can be sure of the accuracy of the report on the passengers in that spinner disaster.

  “What about the healer? ‘Letiyo,’ you said?”

  “That’s what it sounded like,” Dav said. “She was speaking softly, and the recording is faint. It seemed a name, but possibly no more than a family pet name. They seemed very close.”

  “We need more information Agent Arteyn,” Ta-Thatta said. “Not just about this woman and the healer but about any other Jaraidans that might be friendly, that might be persuaded to collaborate.”

  Dav replied that he understood the need and had been working on getting Jaraidans to collaborate, to share information about their leadership, how their current government was structured, where people the Alliance was interested in had gone. So far, his success had been very limited.

  “That seems to be a common experience for our agents,” said Ta-Thatta. “The attitude of Jaraidans to PASS is one of the things we must investigate further.”

  “They are practically hostile to us,” said Bir. He had a high, somewhat whiny voice that Dav found annoying.

  “A lot of them are afraid,” said Tro. “They don’t understand or trust our science.”

  “That is not a good reason for the government to avoid communicating with us,” said Bir, showing a bit more annoyance than Dav thought reasonable.

  “We are investigating what is going on. One contact suggested that the people in control of the government are old-fashioned and easily frightened by all the changes that that the planet has experienced,” said Hakis.

  Dav thought that this was a somewhat creative interpretation of a teener’s “bunch of scared old folk,” but could see why Hakis was putting it this way.

  “There is a lot to investigate,” said Ta-Thatta. “Agent Arteyn has been doing well, but we need to redirect our focus a little.

  “Instead of putting so much energy on finding out about Gin’va Adeni and other Jaraidans who were off-world, the focus must be on the government. We need to find out more about who could be the leaders and how we might communicate with them.”

  “Leader Hakis has already mentioned this to me,” Dav said. “And I have been making it a priority whenever I have the chance to pursue that direction of investigation.”

  “Good,” said Ta-Thatta. “Just stay focused on that goal. Though your humanitarian work and the Mehland language project are useful in themselves, they should not take priority over your investigation into more important matters.”

  Dav was not happy. Though there was nothing new about being asked to find out as much as possible, Ta-Thatta was implying that the humanitarian work was secondary to the intelligence part of his assignment. How did Ta-Thatta feel about Dav’s work as a cultural specialist? Did he think that was secondary also?

  Probably guessing Dav’s feelings—though he had barriered them carefully—Hakis said something about how Dav’s work as a cultural specialist was invaluable and that he would need to be free to continue it.

  Ta-Thatta assured her that all the work Dav did was a good “cover” for the more subtle investigation, and that he supported Dav continuing as he was.

  “For some reason—his language skills, or the way he can connect with the people—Agent Arteyn seems to have better luck getting information than most other operatives,” he said. “I am just urging that he should focus his attention on finding out more about the government. It is rather urgent, as you know, that we should make progress in this matter.”

  Dav did not want what he considered his main work dismissed as a “cover,” but apparently Ta-Thatta thought of it this way. Intelligence folks too often lost sight of everything other than the pursuit of the information they sought. He’d always known that as a telepath and specialist in culture, he would often be asked to collaborate with Intelligence, but he hoped he wasn’t going to have to answer directly to Ta-Thatta.

  “You will have some help,” said Hakis, though she didn’t reassure him about answering to Ta-Thatta. “We don’t want you to neglect the language project or abandon your medicenter duties or the humanitarian work. Trainee Caruth will be arriving tomorrow.”