She mustered a smile. “Nice to meet you, Clif. I’m afraid I can’t talk to you for very long. I don’t get much time to myself, you see, and—”
“I’ll be real brief,” he assured her, interrupting. “It’s about those two skimmers that went missing.”
She hesitated with a full fork halfway to her lips, carefully set it back down on the rectangular Deyzaran serving tray. “What about them?”
He stole another glance at the busy dining room. “Everybody’s talking about them, but nobody seems to know much of anything.”
“And you do—Clif?” She was watching him intently now, her rapidly cooling lunch temporarily forgotten.
He looked away and shrugged uncomfortably. “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s just something I seen. I work graveyard cleanup at the port, Administrator.”
She nodded understandingly. He had her full attention. “Go on, Clif. Don’t worry. Anything you say to me here stays with me, and is between you and me alone.”
He was appropriately encouraged. “People are whispering that they didn’t come back ’cause they were sabotaged. Talk is that the Deyzara is responsible. Me, I don’t see how the two-trunks could bring off something like that. Seems to me you got to really know your way around the insides of a skimmer’s instrumentation to bring off something like that, you know?”
Folding her arms, she leaned forward and rested them on the table. “You don’t think the Deyzara did it?”
“What for?” He looked out over the town, into the steadily increasing downpour that had replaced much of the original view with a palisade of drumming gray. “I mean, what would the two-trunks get out of it? Especially if they were found out and held to blame. A few folks, they’re saying that the Sakuntala did it and are making it to look like the Deyzara are responsible. Now, that makes more sense to me, ’cause right now the Sakuntala need to make the Deyzara look as bad as possible, so’s to help justify what their trigger-happy warriors are doing to the two-trunks.” He shook his head, lips tightening. “But I’ve never seen any Sakuntala messing around with skimmers they weren’t using. Certainly not late at night, when I’m doing my job. And none of the regular engineering types I’ve talked with know of a Sakuntala tech skilled enough to carry out that kind of advanced high-level instrumental manipulation.”