"That's why we have no real body of doctrine for its employment. Our current estimates are that the . . . target will be covered by somewhere between a minimum of four and a maximum of ten of the new frigates the Manties have been supplying to the system. Our tech people's analyses suggest that they're probably pretty damned nasty for anything anyone else would call a 'frigate,' but they wouldn't pose any significant threat to your forces even without the Cataphract. It's also possible, however, that the Erewhonese Navy will have detailed a division of light cruisers or even heavy cruisers to back up those frigates. We don't really expect it, but it's clearly possible, given Erewhon's strong support for the . . . earlier incident in the system. If that should be the case, we're going to be confronting at least some Manty-grade hardware, which could make the entire operation substantially more expensive. With Cataphracts in the tubes, however, we anticipate that you should succeed with zero or at least negligible damage."

He paused, looking around the table, and reflected that everything he'd just told them had the highly unusual status of actually being the truth. Not the whole truth, perhaps, but still the truth.

"That's all I have, Sir," he said, nodding respectfully to Luff.

"I'm sure we'll all bear it in mind, Captain," Luff replied, then waved one hand at Citizen Commander Hartman.

"And now, Millicent, I believe you and the rest of the staff have a few points you wanted to make, as well?"

"Yes, Sir, we do." Hartman looked around the table. "First," she began, "there's the question of—"

Chapter Forty-Five

"Hali Sowle, you are cleared to leave orbit." E.D. Trimm checked the screen again, more out of habit that anything else, just as a final precaution against the very remote possibility that an unauthorized flight—or possibly even a bolide, as statistical unlikely as that was—might have blundered into the freighter's projected course.

"Hali Sowle, signing off."

Just routine. By now, two weeks later, Trimm had only a vague memory of having done an additional check on the Hali Sowle. That was in the records, of course. But she was no more likely to check old records for no reason—the volume of traffic in and out of Mesa was truly enormous—than she would be to start going to work with a hop, skip and a jump rather than taking the perfectly functional tube.

Besides, this shift she'd had the good luck to be partnered with Steve Lund, and they'd been in the middle of a friendly argument about the latest fads in women's apparel when the call from the Hali Sowle had come in. As soon as the freighter starting moving, E.D. went back to the debate.

There were times she regretted Steve's sexual orientation. In some ways, he'd have made a better husband for her than the one she had. But it wasn't a perfect universe, after all.

"Well, I'd say that went perfectly." Elfride Margarete Butre sagged back in her seat a little. She'd been more tense than she'd needed to be, a phenomenon she ascribed to her advancing years. In her youth, she'd have thought nothing of taking risks far greater than this one had been.

"À bientôt, Anton and Victor. Good luck."

"What does that mean, Ganny? A ban-ban—" Brice Miller struggled with the unknown word. He was perched on one of the other seats on the freighter's command deck. Like everything else on the Hali Sowle, the seat—like Ganny's own—exhibited those characteristics which were euphemistically referred to as having seen better days.

"Ah byan-toe. It's French. It means 'see you later.' Well, more or less. Like most words in other languages, it doesn't translate perfectly neatly. Some people might translate it 'seeyou soon.' "

"How soon will we see them? And where did you learn to speak French?"

"Answering the questions in order, I have no idea when we'll see them again. Maybe never. But if you're asking what you should have been asking, we'll probably be back here in the Mesa system within ten days. Two weeks, at the outside, but I'd bet on the ten days. The variable is whether or not the Imbesi arrangements work as planned, and those people strike me as well-organized. As for where I learned French . . ."

She pursed her lips, studying the astrogation screen. Looking at the screen, rather. Her mind was elsewhere.

"It's a long story, youngster."

"We got time. Tell me."

"You've got cruddy tastes in clothes. Of course, I guess that's to be expected, growing up in Nouveau Paris."

"You should talk. Do you ever wear anything other than Scrag chic? Which seems to run entirely to leather."

"I look good in leather. Hey, that's an idea. Maybe we should try it."

"Don't be vulgar."

"I'm not vulgar, I'm bored. You are really lousy in bed."

"Of course I'm lousy in bed. I don't do anything. And that's hitting below the belt."

"Big deal. Far as I'd know, there's nothing down there anyway."

Anton heard a slight choking sound. At a guess, he thought Victor was trying to suppress a laugh. Fortunately, the momentary lapse was small enough that the scrambling equipment would disguise the slight break from what was supposed to be the body language of a couple having a quiet but rather fierce argument.

The equipment they had wasn't really top of the line. For that, they'd have needed Manticoran gear which could potentially cause trouble. But the stuff they'd obtained on the black market in Neue Rostock—Victor's contact Thiêu Chuanli was a veritable cornucopia of handy items—was plenty good enough for their purposes. The equipment not only protected against sound detection efforts, which any well-designed scrambling equipment would do, but it also produced just enough in the way of visual distortion to make lip-reading impossible and even interpreting body language all but impossible for any but a trained expert—and then, only if the people being interpreted were incapable of acting at all.

Victor Cachat, on the other hand, was a pretty decent actor. As you'd expect from a secret agent. And Yana had a natural flair for it.

They wouldn't have to keep it up for much longer, anyway. Anton was almost done. He kept his head down, concentrating on the personal com device in his hands. To any observer, the little not-so-dramatic scenario in the underground passageway would appear to consist of a couple having a quarrel, which their friend and companion was politely ignoring by taking care of some personal business while he waited for them to be done.

Unlike the scrambling equipment, the com device was top-of-the-line, cutting edge equipment. More precisely, it was bleeding edge equipment, specially designed for Anton by own of Manticore's top electronics firms, for a cost that was normally associated with the price of air cars, not personal handheld communication equipment.

Anton could afford it. Or, rather, Catherine Montaigne could afford it. Anton was stubborn about not relying on Cathy for his personal financial needs, but he didn't hesitate to tap into her enormous fortune when it came to his professional work.

"—you manage that, anyway?"

"Not my fault that you—"

Anton keyed in the final instructions. "We're just about done with the sandbox, kiddies," he murmured, loud enough for Victor and Yana to hear him.

That done, he slid the com into his pocket. He made no attempt to disguise the motion, or the device itself. He was just a man finishing some routine work. To anyone who examined it, the com unit would seem to be a perfectly normal if somewhat expensive item produced in the Solarian League. Only if someone really attempted to break into the device would they be able to discover otherwise—and, by then, the com unit's self-destruct mechanism would have been triggered and there'd be nothing to examine but a small pile of smoldering slag.