Project Persephone by Leah R Cutter

Author:Leah R Cutter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644703120
Publisher: Knotted Road Press

CHAPTER 18

CLAYTON

Clayton sat behind his desk, waiting for Fredrick to arrive.

He’d been a bad dog.

Time to thwack his nose. Hard.

Fredrick had gone too far for Clayton to try to retrain him. However, Fredrick had done some good work. This last interview was for Clayton to try to do the right thing, and place Fredrick in the appropriate new job at Universal.

There was also the possibility that an accident needed to befall the Yu’udir. That was just the cost of doing business as far as Clayton was concerned.

Fredrick didn’t look subdued as he came into Clayton’s office. In fact, he looked unrepentant.

That wasn’t good.

“You know why I’ve called you in here,” Clayton said without preamble, after Fredrick had taken his usual chair.

Something else Clayton was going to have to change out, to remove the visitor’s chair that was specially designed for a Yu’udir.

“I do,” Fredrick said. That was all he said. He appeared to be willing to wait for Clayton to continue.

“You had everything, you know,” Clayton couldn’t help but point out. “This would have been the ticket that made your career.”

Fredrick nodded his head once, acknowledging the fact that he’d just screwed up everything.

“Instead, you chose to throw it all away, continuing to poke into areas of inquiry after you’d already been warned off.” Clayton was honestly still a little pissed off at that.

Again, the single nod of the head.

Fredrick knew what he’d done.

“You didn’t find anything though,” Clayton added smugly.

Fredrick shrugged his shoulders. “You didn’t give me enough time,” he said, finally speaking.

“Good,” Clayton purred, feeling a shark-like smile take over.

The pointed-teeth smile he received in return was unsettling. The Yu’udir tended to not show their teeth when they smiled, particularly to Humans.

What was Fredrick’s game?

“There were some fascinating hints, though, of what had occurred,” Fredrick added. “Both with your grandfather, as well as yourself. Payments made both before and after catastrophic disasters. Such as the queens in the Chonchu system all coming down with a plague, as well as Camelot being destroyed.”

Clayton knew that he wasn’t giving anything away. He didn’t have any sort of physical tell that would alert anyone to the truth.

Still, he would admit that Fredrick’s statement made him uncomfortable.

“All lies and conjecture on your part,” Clayton said. “You can’t prove anything, particularly since there’s nothing to prove.”

Fredrick gave him another tooth-filled grin. “As you say. Tracks have been covered well, as if storm winds and snow have filled in the footprints.”

Was Fredrick lying? Had he actually found something?

Then again, the main reason Clayton had brought Fredrick on board had been because he’d been able to put together coincidences that a machine wouldn’t have noticed: even the smartest of systems couldn’t have been trained to follow those scents.

Not like his good hunting dog.

Clayton decided to give him one last chance.

“Do you have anything to report on that last lead you had? The ghost ship we’d been tracking?”

Fredrick considered his response. Was he about to lie?

Finally, he listed off a number. “If I was still hunting, that’s the system I would start in,” he said.

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