Back at 3WA headquarters:

Kei was at her desk talking to her communicator screen. "So how are you doing?"

Sergeant Shriver smiled at Kei. His head was bandaged, he had a tube in his good arm, and his other arm ended in a bandaged stump above the elbow, but all things considered, he looked pretty good. "Not bad. The food is actually better than you might think."

"Has your family visited you?"

"Yeah, they visit every day, fussing over me. You know how it is."

"I guess."

"Hey, you know who visited me yesterday? The gunny!"

"Your old sergeant? How is he?"

"Still getting used to his new legs, but claims to be able to kick my ass anyway."

"I wouldn't put that to the test if I were you."

"I won't. Turns out this was the hospital they brought him to when he was injured."

"How's the arm?"

"It itches sometimes. They warned me about phantom limb syndrome, but it is seriously weird. Yesterday morning, I caught myself drumming my fingers on the bed. Just absent-mindedly, you know? Then I looked down, and I realized I didn't have any fingers to drum. The feeling was so real."

"I'm sorry, Tim."

Tim smiled again. "Hey, don't worry about it. My next arm comes with a factory guarantee." Kei smiled as well. Tim leaned in a little closer. "Listen, Kei. I know I'm not quite the man I used to be, and this situation is, well, kind of awkward. But I'd like to… Well, I mean, if you want to… I'd like to see you again. I know the long-distance thing makes it hard, and I still have rehab, and—"

"Tim."

"Huh?"

"Yes. I'd like to see you again too."

"Oh. Well, that's good. Um…"

Kei started giggling, and Shriver followed, and they were just sitting, laughing, when Yuri appeared in the doorway. They got control of themselves as Shriver said, "Oh, hi, Yuri."

"Hi, Sergeant, how are you?"

"Fine." He looked at Kei. "Better than fine."

"Good." Yuri looked from the monitor to Kei. "Kei, it's time."

"Right. Sorry, Tim, got to go." She blew him a kiss as she got up.

"Go get 'em, tiger." The screen went blank.

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Kei and Yuri were in the chief's office. He handed them a print-out. "This article was from this morning's Muktara Mirror, one of the most respected newspapers on Huja."

Kei read the title. "New revelations about Ikaria collapse."

Yuri read aloud, "In the wake of rising violence on Ikaria, numerous sources now say that agents of the 3WA, code-named the Lovely Angels, a.k.a the Dirty Pair, were sighted on the planet in the week before the collapse."

Kei continued. "When asked about these reports, the president's press secretary would neither confirm nor deny them, but added, 'If the Dirty Pair were there, you can see why we had to take action.'" Kei crushed the paper in her hand. "That bastard! He sold us out!"

Yuri was a little confused. "So things are going south on Ikaria, and the president is using us for political cover?"

Kei was still fuming. "This is ridiculous! He's the one who asked us to go in, and we've got the transmission to prove it!"

Chief Gooley touched a button on his desk. "Not quite." A replay of the original transmission from the president, with the sound off, came on screen. "When we had this conversation, something seemed off. I didn't think much of it at the time, but a few days ago, after the Hujans intervened on Ikaria, I sent it out for analysis." He paused the playback. "This," he said, pointing at the impeccably dressed figure on the screen, "was not the Hujan president."

"What?" asked Kei.

"It was a virtuon. Someone uploaded the president's appearance and speech patterns into an AI program and told it what to say. When you talk with it via trans-space communications, it is indistinguishable from the real person."

"So if we go to the press with this…"

"They'll analyze it, see it's a fake, and we look like we're incompetently trying to cover our asses. And the transmission was bounced off a few different stations, so we can't prove this came from Huja."

"So we're made the scapegoats, and he looks like the man who saved the planet. From us."

"But if he went to all that trouble," said Yuri, "then he must have been preparing for this."

"I think it goes further than that." Gooley turned off the monitor and leaned forward on his desk. "Did you know that he asked for you specifically?"

Kei and Yuri looked at each other. "No way," said Yuri.

"Nobody asks for us," said Kei.

"Exactly," said the chief. "It seemed strange to me, too, but when I asked, he just said that you were the best, and he wanted the best."

"You think he set this whole thing up?" asked Kei.

"To have an excuse to invade Ikaria," said Yuri, punching her fist into her hand.

Chief Gooley held his hands up. "We don't know that yet. Yuri, I want you to dig. Find out everything you can about the Hujan President. Political motivations, old grudges, anything that could tell us why he might have done this. Go back as far as you have to. Kei, I want you to look for Vido Zulga. Go through our surveillance reports of the Syndicate. Try to find out where he was when you were sent to Ikaria. If we can find out where he was, maybe we can prove that the president sent us to where he wasn't."

"Got it, chief."

"OK. Dismissed."

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Kei briskly walked down the hallway. She saw Chief Gooley just coming out of his office. "Chief!" She waved at him, and ran up.

"What is it, Kei?"

"I found him."

The chief's eyes widened. "Let's talk." He led the way back into his office. "Janet, can you tell the director I'm going to be late for the meeting?" he said to his assistant as he and Kei went in. Once they were inside, the chief turned around to Kei. "What do you have?"

Kei handed him a photo. It showed a small spaceship in port. It was a little larger than the Lovely Angel, with an attacking leopard painted on the side. "That's the Gertrude, Zulga's personnel ship. Wherever he goes, he goes on that ship."

"Pretty distinctive."

"He has a new design painted on it every two weeks or so." Kei produced more photos, of the same ship, each one with different art. "But he is always on that ship or has it close by."

"And you found the ship."

She brought out some more photos. "These are from a couple of our Watcher drones. I had them enhanced."

All the pictures showed the Gertrude, although two of them showed it with a serpent design on the nose, and in the rest, the serpent design was gone, and the words "Duffy's Movers" had replaced it. "When were these taken?"

"These," Kei said, indicating the ones showing the serpent design, "were taken three weeks ago, and these," she pulled up the photos of the ship with the lettering, "are from last week."

"And where?"

"Both drones are stationed around the Giltarea Badlands. The photos clearly show him going in and then going out."

The chief considered that. "Not the ideal vacation spot, but a great place to get away from it all."

"Exactly. All the gravity wells make it too dangerous for heavy ships, and there are so many places to hide, it's not worth it to go in after him. And," she continued, pulling out a holographic projector and setting it on the chief's desk, "this is a 3-D map of the region." She activated the projector, showing the region of space known as the Badlands, with several small spots of different colors around it. "All of those dots are Watcher drones. You probably know that most of the major powers keep some around the area to monitor it. Since it's such a great sanctuary for criminals, they keep an eye on it just like we do. The ones in blue are ours, the ones in red belong to the Trelanite Empire, and the ones in yellow—"

"Huja Republic?"

"Bingo. They either knew where Vido Zulga was at the time, or should have known. They have as many Watchers around the Badlands as we do, covering the whole area. They should have seen him enter."

"Could the ship be a decoy?"

"I used the exact parameters in a search of our surveillance records of that time period, and nothing came up. And, he's never used decoys before, not with the Gertrude."

Gooley was honestly impressed, and his face showed it. "Good work, Kei." He continued. "Well, I checked out the Hujan intelligence reports. The ones that they sent us reported a high likelihood that Zulga was on Ikaria, but the sources were considered suspect by their agency. The reports were given a reliability rating of D minus, and put at the bottom of the pile."

"Until somebody dug them up and sent them to us as 'proof'. And since they were sent with reliable reports about Syndicate businesses on Ikaria, we accepted them without a second thought. Neat."

"So, now we're sure they sent us on a wild goose chase, the only question is why."

"I think Yuri had something on the line." Kei activated her comm and called Yuri.

"Kei, where are you?"

"In the chief's office. We found out where Zulga was, and it wasn't Ikaria."

"Good. Stay right where you are, I'm on the way."

A few minutes later, Yuri came into the chief's office, breathless, but with a smug look on her face. "I know why the president sent us." She put a data rod into the port on the chief's desk, and information came up on the monitor.

"The president's info?" asked Kei.

"Yep. Everything I could find. You know how relations between Huja and Ikaria haven't been so warm recently? Well, it wasn't always that way. In fact, the president's father was the ambassador to Ikaria. He grew up there."

"OK. How long was he there for?"

"His father was appointed ambassador when he was eight years old, and he was there until he was sent away to school at fourteen."

"So it had time to make an impression on him. But what kind of impression?"

"Not a very good one, apparently. Check out this paper he wrote in his junior year."

Kei read, "'A Comparative Study of Single Planet Governments.' So?"

"He compared the progress of fifteen different planets, including Ikaria, and came to the conclusion that Ikaria was the most backward of them all. That sentiment is also evident in other papers he wrote." She scrolled down. "This one makes the case for a new government on Ikaria, one that could 'lift the Ikarians out of the dark age they have fallen into.'"

"Interesting. Does he still think that way?"

"Sure looks like it. He was in the running for his party's nomination for president, but he lost and was tapped for vice-president. During the campaign, several of his speeches referred to the dangers of renormalizing relations with Ikaria. Apparently, it was an issue that the parties disagreed on. In one speech, he called it a 'hive of criminal activity' and a 'refugee crisis waiting to happen'."

"Sheesh. What did President Schwarz think of all this?"

"They were pretty close on the issue. There were rumors of an agenda to depose the Ikarian monarchy even before the administration was inaugurated. A few months later, President Schwarz was assassinated, and the war on the Syndicate took priority. Until now, apparently." Yuri turned to face Kei. "You said you found Zulga?"

Kei explained what she had found, and the three were silent for a moment. The chief spoke. "So now we know what they did and why, but that leaves us with the question, what now?"

Kei turned to the chief. "We go over there, and take it out on his hide!"

Yuri sighed. "Yes, beat up the president of one of the most powerful systems in the galaxy. Good thinking." To the chief, she said, "Can't we tell the press what we've found? Put it out there and expose him?"

"I don't know," said the chief. "The less 3WA is openly involved, the better. We don't want to get any more into the limelight than we already have."

"Hmm," said Yuri, and went back to the computer file. She scrolled until she found the part she wanted. "Yes. I think, yes. That'll work."

"What?"

Yuri looked at the chief and smiled sweetly. "Don't worry, chief. We'll handle it."

Kei looked at Yuri. "We will?"

Yuri's smile turned Cheshire as she looked back at the screen. "Yes, we will."

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Still having fun writing this, and I hope you're all having fun reading it. One more chapter left! Please review!