“Yes. And the head of their military is bald. Travis will like that one.” Crash returned her attention to the prisoner. “How many Jackals are there? How many can do what you do?”

“There are only three hundred and thirteen elite warriors of the Pharaoh,” Sabbaht said, lifting his chin proudly.

“Get that?” Crash asked.

“Three hundred and thirteen,” Marks said, writing it down.

“And she lost eighteen just on this little expedition,” Crash added. “Sounds like a good number of them fell from the cliffs.” She cocked her head and turned to Marks. “By the way, did the Commandant find that other guy?”

“They’ve been doing a search grid,” Marks said. “No luck yet.”

“Tell Quad to find him,” Crash said, making a dismissive wave of her hand. “Take about thirty seconds.”

“The Engineer said he wanted to help, but Commandant told him to stay put on the other side of the country until we get this threat under control.”

Crash laughed. “Yeah, like that’s going to stop him.” She turned back to the savage, considering. “So I already know the answer to this one, but Travis wants me to make sure I ask, so here goes: Does the Pharaoh have access to ships like we do, or does she have to walk or ride horses wherever she wants to go?”

“The Pharaoh only walks within the palace,” Sabbaht said. “Beyond, she is carried on a palanquin or rides in a carriage.”

“But no ships,” Crash said, remembering how she’d watched the gold-bedecked Pharaoh literally climb into a chair carried by four burly slaves rather than walk fifty feet to examine one of her newly-crafted monuments.

“No palaces of air,” Sabbaht agreed.

“Yeah, they’re still stone age,” Crash said, then frowned slightly. “But they’ve got Hummers.” She clearly remembered seeing them driving around the desert in Hummers. “Electric powered, old design, new manufacture.”

“He said that?” Marks said, sounding slightly confused. “I thought he said—”

Sighing deeply, Crash said to the savage, “So you guys have ground vehicles that only your military uses, right?”

He nodded.

“What do you call them?” she asked, giving Marks a pointed look.

“Hummers,” Sabbaht said, using the Ancient American English word as precisely as if she had gotten out an ancient video from the Fall on army movements in the war and listened to it. She quirked a brow at Marks.

Marks blinked at her. “But I’ve been here the whole time and he never said the word Hummer before this…”

“Eh.” Crash waved him off. “I saw it last night.” She tapped the table with her fingernails, returning her attention to the captive. “So before we go into the kind of stuff Travis wants, like how long you had to walk to get to the Rim from New Cairo, what kinds of weapons you’ve got, and whether the Pharaoh would simply throw an ambassador into a volcano rather than talk to us, there’s something that’s been really bugging me about this whole thing.”

Sabbaht gave her a wary glance, like he expected her to throw coffee in his face again.

“This brother of yours… He didn’t kill anyone, did he? Is that why you parted ways? He refused to murder people? He’s got, what, some sort of honor code whereas the rest of guys thought you were so far from any authority you figured you could just go wild?”

Sabbaht’s brown eyes grew dark. “Is he here in this building with me, feeding you these lies?”

Crash snorted. “If he was, we wouldn’t tell you.”

“Khayu was the one who insisted on making war,” Sabbaht snapped. “It was his command.”

Crash felt every muscle in her body go tense. “You’re lying again.”

“I’m not!” the man lied. “He was given the command. I was trying to protect him out of duty. It was his choice to attack the two villages.”

“And yet,” Crash gritted, “we have video of you, specifically, eating the liver out of a farmer and his wife, yet we can’t seem to find any evidence your brother did any violence whatsoever.”

“He lies!” Sabbaht snapped. “He was always jealous of me.”

“Jealous of what, exactly?” Crash asked, fighting the urge to throw something at the man again.

“My prowess. The Pharaoh’s favor. I shared her bed seventeen times. She never chose him once because she knew he wasn’t loyal.”

That was a complete lie. Crash guessed it was actually the other way around. Looking down at the table-top, she forced her fingers to release the death-grip they had on the metal. “Tell Travis,” Crash said evenly to Marks, desperately attempting to ignore the bone-shards being shoved through her brain at the lie, “that the savage he hasn’t found yet probably is still trying to do the recon mission he was given, the only one who is still loyal to the Pharaoh, and I think you haven’t found any additional murders because he hasn’t killed anyone, and probably won’t unless he’s cornered. I think he might even be amenable to coming forward to do a peace talk. His mission was to get over here and see what’s up, then get home. I think he’d avoid climbing those cliffs again if we gave him a way out.”

Sabbaht watched what she said to Marks carefully. “You don’t believe me,” he said. “You actually think I’m lying! You think I chose to kill those people!”

Remembering the look Travis had given her the last time she’d lost it, Crash carefully kept her irritation in check. That muscle in her neck spasming, Crash said evenly, “I think you have every motivating factor to ensure we look at you in the most favorable—”

Quad popped into the room at her shoulder, gasping, his blue eyes wide. “Crash!” he cried, grabbing her by the arm. “Crash! I found him! And he saw me!” He tugged, like he wanted to take her there immediately.

Crash refused to look at the four-foot-high cretin. “I’m talking to this one right now,” Crash said. “Go tell Travis. Give coordinates.”

Quad’s ebony brow creased into a little frown even as all the soldiers in the room breathed a reverent gasp, realizing the Engineer now shared the room with them. “Oh,” Quad said, sounding confused. “I didn’t use coordinates. I modified my Kelthari minerals evaluator to lock onto his slightly denser mental signature and tinkered with my Quadrocity gun to highlight him on my interstellar map and not fry him so it would give my jump tech an anchor—though I was careful to calculate for nearby obstructions and elevation changes because nobody wants to end up teleported one quarter centimeter into a shower stall or someone’s birthday cake—and then I used my broken jump tech to pop over to the Edge. Anyway, I just had to search for someone who was actively thinking about hiding and boom. Only had to go through fourteen people—one was a little kid hiding from his dad who was beating up his mom, so I helped him and his mom get to the police—but then I found him, Crash! He’s big, and he grabbed me right out of the slip dimension, like he could see right through it. Like, I think these guys have some sort of innate trans-dimensional interchange capacity, probably as a result of their Tuliin heritage. Their weapons, too. It’s fascinating.”

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“That’s nice,” Crash said, getting irritated. “Tell Travis.”

Quad’s face fell. “I can’t tell Travis. He won’t understand me.”

Crash glanced at the ceiling and groaned. She’d trained not one, not two, not three, but four government linguists to understand every. Single. Word. The Engineer said, and yet Quad continued to come only to her when he wanted to jabber about inconsequential shit when she was busy.

“Listen to me,” Crash gritted. “I—” she jabbed a thumb to her chest, “—have stuff to do. Go fuck off playing hide and seek with that Tuliin savage for all I care. Just don’t bother me right now, okay?”

Quad blinked at her, then turned and seemed to shake himself startledly when he saw the prisoner in the room with them. “Oh. You have one too.”

“Yes,” Crash said, her tone dripping with a sardonic bite. “One who was answering all my questions, before you showed up.”

“Oh.” Quad grabbed the chair Marks had vacated in his surprise—and awe—to be in the presence of the Engineer, then pulled it around and sat down right beside her, leaning over the back of the chair to face the savage. “Can you ask him if the staff his brother uses has some sort of electrostatic component? I was trying to get a better look at it when his brother caught me and I had to escape. It shocked me, but I’m not sure if it was electron-based or something more interdimensional.”

“That wasn’t on my questions list from the Commandant,” Crash muttered. Then, at Quad’s disappointed look, she sighed. “But okay.” She glanced at the Tuliin hybrid. “This is Quad. He’d like to know how your staves are made.”

“No,” Quad said quickly, “I figured out how they were made in the first thirteen seconds. I just wanna know if it’s an electrostatic component that creates the anchoring effect or if it’s something my scan didn’t pick up and the electrostatic is really just a gigantic shock device for scary effect, like they zap it into the air to scare people like Madam Storm, but its real power is the dimensional anchor between the prongs.”

“Quad…” Crash started, gritting her teeth, “…nobody cares about the tech.”

“I do,” Quad said, blinking at her.

Crash glanced again at the ceiling for patience. “All right,” she gritted. “The staff your brother carries. Does it have a…”

“…electrostatic component…” Quad prodded, in his language.

“I know what you said, goddamn it,” Crash snapped. “I’m trying to figure out how to translate it into Ancient West American.”

“Oh.” Quad considered. “Ask him if it’s the shock from like a taser or a cattle prod that lets it drag interdimensional travelers out of hiding, or if it’s something else doing it. Khayu zapped me with it twice when he caught me spying on him the second and third times. It hurt, but I didn’t get a good look at the components because I was distracted.”

Crash frowned. “Someone zapped you?” As far as she knew, no one had been able to either pin down, shoot, stab, electrocute, nuke, or in any other way damage, harm, stun, or impede the Engineer in the last thirty-six years of him haunting their dimension.

“Yeah,” Quad said, rubbing his side like it still stung. “Really hurt. Locked me back into the physical for a couple minutes, but when the guy went to grab me, I exploded a Quadric Smoke Bloom in his face and ran for it.”

Crash gave the Engineer a long look, then turned back to the man across the table, who was watching their conversation with extreme interest.

Too much interest. Crash frowned at him, then back at Quad, remembering overhearing the soldiers talking about the Commandant expressly forbidding the Engineer from being in the room with the prisoner. Huh. Maybe this guy could actually hurt him, Crash thought, feeling a tiny pang of fear for the kid.

“What does the Skymancer want to know about the staff?” Sabbaht asked, his brown eyes sharp like a predator.

“Uh…” Crash suddenly felt vulnerable, like she was entering territory she shouldn’t, strategically-speaking. She glanced again at the kid, who seemed totally relaxed and curious, leaning against the back of the chair with casual interest.

“Marks, is the Commandant watching this?” Crash asked, making a tiny gesture with her head at Quad, who didn’t notice.

“Uh, no, he had something come up on one of the sweeps,” Lieutenant Marks said. “They think they found the last guy, but they can’t pin him down. He said he’ll only be a minute or two.” Marks was watching Quad with a nervous look. “Should I…call him?”

“Yeah,” Crash said. “Call him.” To Quad, she said, “Hey bud, I really think you should go home now, okay?”

“I can’t go home until I find a way to fix my Quadregic Interslip,” he said idly. “Thirty-six years passed, too, so I’ll need to modify the modulator for a time jump, too. I don’t wanna have missed anything back home. Jedi Wolverine was due for a brand new comic the very next day and Anna arranged a deal with my supplier to get her copy one day before me in return for not killing him and his family with flesh-eating bacteria, which is so frustrating. I think it’s cheating to jump time to read the whole series before it actually comes out, but Doby tells me that’s morally acceptable as long as I don’t bring anything back. What do you think?”

“I think you need to go feed my fish,” Crash said.

“Did that,” Quad said, waving a hand. “An hour ago.”

Crash scowled at him. “Go take Trebuchet on a walk, then.”

Quad perked up a little. “Really? Last time you told me I couldn’t walk him anymore because I fitted him with my Float Feet prototypes and one fell off and they flipped him over and drove him to the bottom of that lake. I was thinking this time I walk him, I could make the feet attachments permanent and give him an onboard power system so the thrust has a counterweight and he doesn’t flip again.” He frowned. “Though I’d have to add forty pounds to each leg for balance and he wouldn’t actually be able to physically lift his feet afterwards, so I’ll need to upgrade his leg power with hydraulic implants tied directly to his brain.”

Remembering how her puppy had almost died, Crash glared. “New plan. Go get one of those translators I trained and tell Travis how to find that missing savage.”

Quad’s childlike shoulders drooped, obviously having looked forward to spending time tinkering with the dog again. “Are you sure they’re savages?” Quad said, sounding dubious. “That tech in Khayu’s staff was pretty badass. I was impressed. I’m already thinking on how to redesign it for taking on Phageospores. I think I’m gonna call it Counterblast. I’ll put a glowing Kelthari crystal on it to make it more impressive looking, just like these guys did with their low-grade zappy stuff, then tie in the interdimensional shifting components so I can use it to levitate stuff, not just shock them, plus add a three-dimensional positioning axis to its onboard sensor matrix so it can affect stuff at a distance.”

“Great,” Crash said. “I’m busy, Quad.”

“Okay, but ask him about the electrostatic component,” Quad insisted, staying right where he was and watching the savage with expectant excitement.

Crash glanced up at Marks, who still looked to be in a hushed awe by the presence of the Engineer, just like all the other thugs in the room who didn’t actually have to deal with the annoying little prick.

Sighing deeply, she glanced back at the man across the table. All of his attention was on Quad, and she didn’t like that.

“What did the Skymancer want to know about the staff?” Sabbaht asked, eyes sharp as they watched Quad fiddle with some gadget fused to his shirt.

“He wanted to know if it is the shock that pulls people out of another dimension,” Crash said, fumbling at the proper word evolution based on previous morphing patterns, hoping it got the point across. Tech talk was always dicey, because it seemed to evolve so quickly over time, and she was using sixteen-hundred-year-old word choices to describe a present-day weapon.

“It is the power of Burkan,” the man said with…a sneer?

“What’d he say?!” Quad cried, all but hopping with excitement.

“He’s spouting nonsense about it being powered by a volcano god,” Crash said.

Quad deflated, his child-sized form displaying his disappointment as clearly as if it had been written upon his chest. “I wish they hadn’t blown up those other two staffs. Then I could just take one apart and I’d know.”

“They’d just massacred a village and were trying to save what was—”

The door slammed open, cutting her off. “What in the fuck are you doing in here, Quad?!” the Commandant demanded, striding into the room so hard he embedded the doorknob in the hardboard wall. His Coalition Standard was crude and choppy, but it got the gist across.

Immediately, Quad jumped out of his chair and looked at his feet, flushing. “I’m sorry, Commandant, I just wanted to ask some questions about—”

“Get out!” Commandant Belkin snarled, pointing at the wall. “Away from him. Right the fuck now.”

Quad, who had never been addressed in such a way by the Commandant, blinked, his eyes going round.

“Get!” Commandant Belkin snapped, picking up a chair and hurling it into a wall. “And don’t come back!”

Still wide-eyed, Quad touched something on his wrist and blinked out of sight.