Radig stepped up to the panel, tapped six buttons on a keypad she hadn't noticed before, and opened the door.

Jin was gliding down the hallway toward the closing door before it occurred to her on a conscious level that sneaking into Obolo's office right on Radig's heels might be an unnecessarily stupid risk to take. But she kept going. Obolo presumably had a perfectly adequate communications system available in his office, and if he and Radig needed to speak in person, perhaps it would be worth listening in on.

She reached the door unseen and repeated Radig's code on the keypad. Too late, she wondered if the system might also be sensitive to fingertip pattern... but

Obolo hadn't bothered with extra refinement, and with a quiet click the door unlocked.

She opened it just enough to slip through, closing it again behind her and moving immediately to the cover of the nearest hanging curtain. The room seemed hazy, and she nearly choked on her first breath. Chemical smoke, she realized, remembering the unnatural glow in Obolo's eyes earlier. Presumably one of those wonderful mind-stimulating drugs. Keying in her audio enhancers, she slid off her shoes and moved out cautiously in Radig's wake.

Two guards were near the door, hidden from view behind a pair of curtains.

Pinpointing them by the sounds of their breathing, Jin moved silently past on her bare feet. Radig's footsteps were easy to follow, and she was within a single curtain of Obolo Nardin's cushion throne when they came to a halt.

Squatting down behind the curtain, Jin held her breath.

"My son," Obolo's voice said, his tone oddly grating in Jin's ears-the vocal equivalent, perhaps, of the drug user's shining eyes.

"My father," Radig greeted the elder Nardin in turn. "I've brought you the manifest of the latest shipment. Unloading has already begun; transfer of the special components to the assembly building will begin as soon as it's dark and all the temporary workers are properly confined in their houses."

The familiar shisss-click of a magdisk into a reader... Obolo grunted. "Good.

Have they begun work on the second computer system yet?"

"They're still setting it up," Radig told him. "They estimate it'll be ready in about two days."

"Two and a quarter," Obolo said with casual certainty. "They consistently underestimate the actual time they'll need."

"Perhaps this time-" Radig stopped as a ping came from the work table.

"Obolo Nardin," Obolo said. Something inaudible even to Jin's enhanced hearing... "Command," he bit out angrily. "Specified recorder; last playback."

More inaudible speech... but even without visual cues, Jin could sense a sudden tension on the other side of the curtain.

As Radig clearly also did. "What is it?" he asked tautly when the voices had stopped.

Obolo took an audible breath. "The Shahni agent who came in with Daulo Sammon has found the key to the Mongoose Project."

"The Shahni-? You know for certain that's what he is?"

"If I hadn't already, his last conversation with Daulo Sammon confirmed it."

Obolo's voice was settling down, drifting almost toward boredom. "His reaction this morning to the subliminals was actually all the proof I needed."

Radig seemed to be having trouble catching up. "You say he knows? How?"

"He was pushed into the discovery by Daulo Sammon, as it happens. There was some fantasy about missile production here, and it goaded the agent into disassembling the phone. Perhaps you were right; perhaps we should have removed the villager right at the beginning."

"But the phone's self-destruct-"

"Worked properly, of course. But you don't suppose for a minute that that really helped, do you? Destroyed evidence is as intriguing to such people as undestroyed evidence."

Radig cursed. "We'd better get some guards to their complex right away."

"Why?"

"Why?" Radig echoed in disbelief. "Because if he gets that information to his superiors-"

"He can't." Obolo was almost glacially calm. "Mangus is sealed for the night, and I've had all outside phone contact except that from this building shut off since he betrayed his identity this morning. Quiet, now, my son, and let me think."

For a moment the painful thudding of her own heart was all Jin could hear. It had happened, her worst fear about this whole penetration: Daulo was in deadly danger. Her legs trembled with the urge to leap out of concealment, cut both

Obolo and Radig in half with her antiarmor laser, and get herself and Daulo out of here...

"Yes," Obolo said abruptly. "Yes. You will assemble a small force, my son-four men-and take them to the assembly building. The agent's next step will be to try and find some of our special components in undamaged form to take out of Mangus with him."

"How will he know-"

"He'd have seen the final assembly room door this morning when he and the villager left their own area in reaction to the subliminals. He'll remember it and go there first."

"I understand. Do you wish them killed there, caught in an act of burglary?"

Jin's hands twitched involuntarily into combat position: little finger pointed straight out, thumb resting on ring-finger nails... "Of course not," Obolo snorted scornfully. "That would merely bring others from the Shahni to investigate why one of their preconditioned agents would stoop to simple thievery. No, my son, bring them back here, alive and unharmed."

"We will eventually kill them, though, won't we?" Radig asked, almost pleading.

"A Shahni agent's training won't allow-"

"Of course we won't kill them," Obolo said evenly. "We will do nothing. It'll be the offworlder spy who'll handle that task for us."

Chapter 38

The door to the assembly building was locked, but an unusual-looking tool from

Akim's kit took care of it in short order. "Now where?" Daulo whispered as they slipped inside.

"That room we saw when I-" Akim pursed his lips. "You remember-at the end of the hallway the instructor tried to keep us out of?"

"Right," Daulo nodded, glancing out the window beside the door. At Akim's insistence they'd taken a leisurely, roundabout route here from their housing complex, and the earlier twilight had faded now into deep dusk. "What do you want me to do?"

Akim stepped past him to relock the door. "You might as well stay here," he said, not sounding entirely happy with the decision. "This is the door any visitors would be most likely to use. If you see anyone coming, give a whistle."

"A whistle?" Daulo frowned.

"Whistles carry as well in a building as shouts do with less chance of being heard from outside," Akim explained briefly. "Watch carefully."

And he was gone. Daulo listened as his footsteps faded down the hallway, trying to ignore the gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach. So Jin had been wrong all along. It wasn't missiles... or was it? There was still that walled-off section of Mangus that none of their instructors had even referred to.

But then what was all this business with the phones?

The tap on the window barely ten centimeters from his face nearly threw him across the hall in reaction. God above! He staggered, trying to regain his balance-tried to shape unsteady lips for a whistle-

"Daulo!" The whisper was barely audible through the glass. His whole body trembling, Daulo moved back to the window.

It was Jin.

Taking a shuddering breath, Daulo stepped to the door and unlocked it. "Jin-God above, but you startled me-"

"Shut up and listen," she growled, brushing past him to peer out the window.

"Obolo Nardin's on to you and your Shahni friend. Radig Nardin's gone to assemble a guard force to come here and pick both of you up."

Daulo felt his mouth drop open. "Over here? But how did they know we were coming here?"