Unfortunately, Naira reflected as she crouched beside her sister, squinting her eyes against the dust blowing in the wind on this barren hillside, Etidorhpa Neris had a disgustingly unhealthy lack of respect for the notion of safety. The Terra Group women had deposited the sisters "somewhere safe"--this turned out to be the enormous McDonald's just off Ben Yehuda Street, a reassuringly (or an eerily) familiar environ, for the ladies in waiting no less than for the Terra Group agents, since even to Mendellia the franchise of the golden arches had long since penetrated. And then the agents had gone off in search of their teammates and left Eti and Naira on their own. Naira figured that whatever happened next was the agents' own fault for leaving Eti on her own, a grave oversight when one considered what sorts of things usually happened in that circumstance.
Of course, they had not lingered long in the safety of McDonalds; rather, they had set out to tail the Terra Group agents at the earliest possible opportunity. They had arrived at the scene of the explosion just in time to see the last of the agents, almost hidden in an alley out of the way of more conventional rescue crews arriving, climb a ladder and disappear into thin air. Naira gawked; Eti scowled. "Cloaked, presumably," she whispered to her older sister. "Still it has to be the ship they came here on. Something big has happened. That explosion was their mission going awry, and that ladder is their backup pulling them out of it."
"How is it you know so much about the doings of Terra Group?" Naira had muttered, but she'd received only a smirk in answer--unless you wanted to count Eti's command of "Come on!" They had set off on a course that took them back the route they had walked just that morning, back out to the dusty hills of Judea and the narrow Roman road that wound from Jerusalem to Jericho. Now, crouching beside her sister, Naira was beginning to appreciate just what a wonderful spot this was for bandits to assault a traveler and leave him for dead-- and just how little likely it was that any good Samaritan would be around today should such a fate befall the Neris sisters.
Nonetheless, Eti had apparently guessed right: the Red Home had returned to roost where it had settled earlier that morning to discharge its passengers for their walk into the city. It wasn't cloaked now, for who but the watching ladies-in-waiting could possibly see it in that narrow canyon? They'd had a devilish time trying to pick their way down the steep, pebbly slope to get closer to the ship, and they wouldn't have known to look for it there in the first place if they hadn't been among its passengers themselves the last time it showed up there. Then, however, it had only hovered briefly above the old road to let the agents disembark; this time it was tucked back much more securely into the canyon, away from most travelers' eyes.
"Eti," Naira tried again with quiet urgency, "let's just go home. It's no good hanging around here any more. What do you expect to see, anyway, now that the sun's down?"
Eti ignored her as usual. Naira sighed and sat back against the boulder behind which they had taken refuge to watch the ship. It was a testament to the harrowing day she'd had--even for a day with Eti, this one had been exceptionally exhausting--that she was asleep nearly before she had time to register the unpleasant hardness of her rock-pillow.
She woke with the boulder still at her back, though she'd slipped down from her sitting position to lie on her side at some point during the night. The light was gathering in the east, beyond the hills, but was still very dim as yet. It was more than sufficient, however, to gleam neatly off the barrel of the blaster pointed more or less in her direction. Naira gasped and started to sit up, then thought better of it halfway there, and froze wide-eyed and gape- mouthed, lest her sudden movement bring the wrath of the weapon to bear upon her.
The blaster wavered, just enough that Naira's attention was drawn to the face behind it, and after a moment she recognized her adversary-- the younger of the Terra Group agents they'd talked to earlier, the one who was supposed to be Queen. The one Eti would do very well anything to dislodge from that position.
"Sorry," said Becki suddenly. "Didn't mean to wake you like that."
Naira frowned. "What did you mean to do, then? Just shoot us in our sleep?"
"Actually," she grinned a little, slyly, "the thought has crossed my mind. Don't look so alarmed, though--it's set on stun. Nothing you wouldn't wake up from eventually, if a few hours later than you'd expected."
"Oh." Naira tried not to stare at the weapon. The Terran's words and manner seemed calculated to be at once soothing and a little disconcerting, but Naira wasn't inclined to be soothed. Disconcerted, yes. Disconcerted was well within her inclinations at present.
"So, since you're awake now anyway," Becki was saying, "care to wake up your sister too? Don't want to leave her out of this. She strikes me as the type who hates to be left out of things."
Despite herself, Naira felt a smile threatening at that. "You're observant," she said.
"She's blatant," Becki shrugged before Naira's none-too-gentle poking could bring Eti back to the waking world.
It took a few minutes to get Etidorhpa calmed down and to dissuade her of the idea of overpowering their captor and running for the hills, but Naira's cooler head and Becki's cool smile as she kept the blaster trained on the younger sister finally won out. The sisters were admonished to keep their hands in plain sight and marched without further ceremony into the Red Home.
Inside the ship, Eti nudged her sister slightly with one foot, then made a show of looking all around, straining her neck to gawk at the interior as if--
Naira got the message. She joined her sister in playing "tourist", trying to look as intimidated by the strange surroundings as she had felt the first time the two of them had visited the ship, lest a lack of natural interest betray to the Terra Group agents the fact that the girls had been in the ship before.
In the main passenger compartment, the tribunal awaited: three more Terra Group agents were assembled around a small table. Naira recognized the woman--Vickie--the one Eti had named as an agent of Llessur's. That was good--but then, given their earlier encounter with her in the city, Naira wasn't so sure they could expect help from her, whatever her status in Llessur's machinations. The two men seemed familiar as well, but Naira's stint as a lady in waiting had been regrettably short and she hadn't learned the names of most of the people she'd seen in the palace outside of Llessur's entourage.
Vickie and the two men at the table exchanged glances, then one of the men rose from his seat and nodded at the sisters. "Glad you could join us. Please, have a seat. I'm Lieutenant Cochran; this is Captain Boyd, and this is Lieutenant--"
"Mike," the indicated agent interrupted. "I think we've met before, though. Lady Eti Neris, isn't it?"
"Oh, Mike," Eti gushed, bringing all her charms to bear, "I didn't know you were a lieutenant!" Mike winced, but Lt. Cochran recovered the conversation. "And you," he turned to Naira, "would be Dohrnaira Neris?"
"Yes," she managed to say. Just barely.
"And I think you both know Lieutenant Bush," Cochran continued. "Now, I'm sure you're wondering why we've invited you here--"
"Though what you should be wondering," Mike grinned, "is why we didn't invite you in much sooner, since you have been waiting at our gates since before sundown yesterday."
"What we're really wondering," Eti exploded, starting up from her chair despite every Terra Group agent's hand reaching for a weapon at her sudden movement, "is why, just for an invitation to tea or whatnot, you see fit to threaten and--and--bully us--point guns at us . . ." She trailed off into a credible verge-of-tears whimper, combined with an accusing glare at Becki.
"Lady Neris!" Lt. Cochran barked, drawing Eti's attention back to him and then matching her glare until she subsided and finally resumed her seat. "If we had wanted to bully you," he said coolly, "it wouldn't have been Becki extending the invitation. She's among the more, shall we say, diplomatic members of the team. If we wanted to bully you, you'd know you'd been bullied."
"You don't scare me," Eti hissed, once again matching him glare for glare.
"No? Well--"
The sound of a throat being cleared interrupted him, and Becki spoke up from behind the sisters. "Josh? If you don't mind . . . maybe I could try a more, shall we say, `diplomatic' approach?"
He frowned up at her, then shrugged and sat back in his chair. "Be my guest."
"Okay, it's like this," Becki went on, gesturing alarmingly with the blaster. "Running into you two on Ben Yehuda Street was one thing. Personally, I find the coincidence of your being on vacation in Jerusalem the same time we're here on a mission just a bit of a stretch to believe . . . but had that been the end of our encounters with you, we might've left it at that and believed it anyway. Now you turn up here, basically out in the middle of nowhere, and all night long, just watching our ship. What you might be watching for, we of course don't know. But you can't expect us not to speculate, hm? And you can imagine just what sort of speculation we've come up with, watching you two on our ship's monitors all night long. I'm sure I need not tell you, my ladies, that this does not look good for you."
"But that's all speculation!" Eti burst out. "You can't--can't do anything to us--based merely on speculation!"
"It would be best not to," Becki smiled. "Thus our invitation. It is this: We invite you to tell us, the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but, just why you are here. I do hope, for your own sakes, you can prove our speculations wrong."
The sisters exchanged a panicked glance, then both burst out talking at once.
"We were just--"
"It was--"
"We didn't mean to--"
"Just a vacation--tourists, you know--"
Silence fell for a split second as they realized they were only blocking each other; then Eti gathered herself to make their final defense.
But Dohrnaira spoke first. "We were just doing as you said, Lieutenant."
"What?" Becki frowned.
"What's that?" Eti said in a surprised whisper.
"Well, yes," said Naira, shrinking before all the eyes now staring at her alone, but gathering strength in what she had found to say. She glanced at Vickie: "And you, too . . . er . . . Captain? You remember, in the city, we were talking to you when there was an explosion, and you and the Lieutenant went to see what it was, but before you left . . . you said you would tell us later."
"I what?" Vickie asked with a thoughtful frown.
"I was saying, oh, I forget what exactly, something about I wanted to know what was going on before you left us there. And you said you would tell us later."
"You know, Vic . . . I think you did," Becki murmured.
"So it's later, and we were hoping now you could tell us what happened," Naira finished with a slight smile.
"You're joking," Vickie scowled.
"Well . . . if you can't tell us, I suppose we'd understand. We don't mean to pry into your mission. . . . We can just be going, then . . ."
"No, you can't," Lt. Cochran warned, somehow managing to include both the Neris sisters and Captain Boyd in his glare. "You still haven't told us everything."
"What haven't we?" Eti challenged. "We told the ladies why we're here in the first place--it's just a vacation for us. And we've told you why we came back--just curiosity, really. And do you blame us if we were a wee bit concerned for you? It looked like there was trouble, and, well, Terra Group are our country's heroes. We were worried about what had happened. By the bye, are you all quite all right? Nobody hurt, or anything?" She favored with him with her most ingenuous smile.
"You might tell us, for starters," he said, ignoring her questions, "just how you found us this second time. If you followed this ship back from Ben Yehuda Street, well, I'd damn well like to know how, seeing as it was cloaked for the whole flight. If not, I'd like to know how you knew where to look for us out here. You can't have just stumbled across the ship while out for a walk--if you did, it's time we were finding a better hiding place."
"And you might tell us," Mike said quietly, "how you got to Jerusalem in the first place. We've had a slight difficulty finding either of you named on the passenger lists of any flights into Jerusalem in the past few days."
Eti was, to Naira's great relief, thinking fast. "Of course not. You wouldn't have access to the Queen Mother's personal flights."
"Llessur's here?" Vickie blanched.
"Well . . . no. I mean, as ladies in waiting, we do have access to her pilot. Why would we take a commercial flight?" She gave her head an arrogant toss--quite convincingly, being well practiced in it.
"All right," Josh said, "but what about finding us last night?"
"Again," said Eti, "we are the Queen Mother's ladies in waiting. You surely don't think being a lady in waiting is merely a matter of looks? We're highly trained assistants to her Highness. We have ways . . . I'm sorry, I can't really divulge secrets--any more than you lot seem willing to tell us what was going on in Jerusalem yesterday," she smiled sweetly. "But suffice to say that our training was what allowed us to locate you."
"Seems like an awful lot of effort," Josh frowned, "just to come looking for gossip. Look--you spin a pretty story, my lady, but we all know there's more to it than you're telling us. Now I want to hear the rest of this story, and if you're not ready to tell it, we're ready to wait you out. You can't expect us to leave you to wander around Jerusalem, especially with your track record of hounding our steps on this mission so far, until we know for sure exactly what you're up to." He paused, fixing his stare on each of them in turn, while the silence mounted to an uncomfortable degree, but the sisters sat stubbornly and said no more. "All right then," Josh said finally, "I'm sorry, but you'll just have to stay--"
"No," Becki interrupted him quietly. "Wait."
He blinked at her, speechless, for a moment before asking, "What?"
She shook her head. "We can't."
"Can't what?"
"Can't keep them."
"What? But they--"
"No, Josh. Not this time."
"Then just what," he frowned, "do you propose we do with them?"
"Let 'em go," she shrugged; though she spoke to Lt. Cochran, her eyes, unblinking, were on the Neris sisters, so that Naira felt the words as if they were meant for her alone. "If their story's true, what they do when they leave here will confirm it. If not, we'll be watching them from now on, and we'll know if they try anything."
"It'd be safer," he said, "and a lot simpler, just to watch them here."
She shook her head. "We really have no grounds for it. And--honestly, Josh--no real need." He didn't answer, so she smiled a little and reached out a hand as if in supplication. "Trust me on this, okay, Psycho Jedi Boy? We need to let them go. Just--call it intuition."
"I think," Mike suddenly broke in, "she might be right. After all, it's not like Jedi are the only ones who can have a gut feeling when logic is lacking. And I don't like superfluous prisoners cluttering up my ship." He grinned and winked at Becki. "I vote with my wing."
Josh looked from one to the other of them, and then turned to Vickie. "Vic? What do you say?"
Vickie paused, then answered, slowly and deliberately. "I don't really like the idea of letting them go," she admitted. "But Becki has a point--we don't have much of a case for keeping them right now. Sorry, Josh."
Josh drew a deep breath and let it out slowly before looking at the Neris sisters again. "Well. I seem to be outvoted." He stood and waved an arm toward the ship's exit ramp. "You're free to go. But we will be watching you."
Outside the Red Home, Josh raised his eyebrows at Becki as she watched the ladies in waiting disappear over the next hill. "That was diplomacy? We might have got more out of them with bullying."
"You have a lot to learn about diplomacy, Psych," she smiled placidly, then ducked back into the ship.
He turned to Vickie, only to find her chuckling under her breath. "What was that all about?" he asked. "And why'd you vote to let them go? You had to be feeling it as strongly as I was--if they weren't lying through their teeth, the Force was, because I never sensed such a--a--stranglehold of deception in my life!"
"Of course they were lying," Vickie shrugged. "That's why we had to let them go."
"Oh," he said sarcastically. "So that's the first lesson of diplomacy? A liar always gets her way?"
"Well, that might be one of its lessons," Vickie said thoughtfully. "But not really applicable here. See, it's what Becki said, back in the ship. We let them go--and we are watching them now, after all, at least presuming that they were lying about all that lady-in-waiting training and they don't actually know enough to find the homing devices--so that we can find out if their stories are true or not. There was no way we could break their story here and now- -like you said, their deception was so strong in the Force we'd have never finished untangling it. Holding them wouldn't have made them any likelier to confess, either. But letting them go--they think they've beaten us. So what they do now tells us the truth they wouldn't tell themselves. If they're legit, they'll keep as far away from us mean, bullying Terra Groupers as they can," she grinned. "If not, well, if they have any sense, they'll keep away anyway, knowing that we're on to them. And if they don't . . . we have the advantage now. Next time, we won't have to let them go." She winked, and then she too went back to the ship, leaving him alone outside it, pondering diplomacy as he gazed down the Jericho Road.