By the time he'd put away the com unit, Victor and Yana were embracing each other. Nothing passionate, just the sort of embrace with which a pair of lovers resolve a quarrel. Or, at any rate, end it for the moment.

"Okay," he said, almost as softly. "One more to go."

They walked off, the three of them side by side. There was plenty of room, since the underground passageway was more in the nature of a large open space. The area was primarily used for the storage of private vehicles.

"I'm sick of arguing with him," muttered Yana. "It's like trying to pick a fight with a rudabaga."

"Save it for the next stop, Yana," cautioned Anton.

"What's a rudabaga?" asked Victor.

That night, in Anton's room—not the one he still maintained in the back of Turner's restaurant, but another one he'd obtained without using Saburo's contacts—he and Victor and Yana held another of the meetings they tried to hold at least every three days.

"It still seems like sorcery to me," Victor complained. "And spare me that tired old cliché about a sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. This is not all that advanced, damnation."

"Yes and no," said Anton. "The technology itself isn't especially advanced, true enough. State of the art, is about the best you can say for it. But the specific programs that we developed are . . . I don't know if 'advanced' is the word I'd use. It's more like 'esoteric.' There just aren't very many people who work on this level of security programming, Victor. Sure, there are plenty of people who could have figured out how to bypass the security systems and implant false records, but so far as I know there are only two people in the whole galaxy who'd know how to prevent anyone from being able to detect that it was done afterward, even with a thorough investigation. One of them is named Anton Zilwicki and the other is Ruth Winton."

"Modest, isn't he?" said Yana. "At least he gave the woman some credit too."

Anton smiled. "In some ways, she's better at this that I am. The truth is, Ruth's reached the point where she's operating on a plane I don't even usually reach. I'm mostly acting as what you might call her crosscheck and rudder, these days. She's still prone to being over-confident."

Victor ran fingers through his hair. "And you're sure it'll work?"

"Yes. When we run—assuming we do, but we'd be fools not to count on it—we'll have left a completely false trail. Assuming you can get Carl Hansen and his people to take care of their end of the deal, so far as anyone on Mesa will ever be able to figure out, you and I and Yana exist only as scattered molecules."

Victor grunted. "The technical side of it's not a problem. That bomb will vaporize anything within two hundred meters. Whatever DNA traces they'd expect from a normal explosion will simply be too scattered to be usable, even with Mesan or Beowulfan techniques and equipment. The real problem is . . ."

He shook his head. "Let's just say that the people Saburo put us in contact with aren't as tightly wrapped as I'd like. They're not crazy, as such, but . . ."

"Fanatics," said Anton. "I do hope you notice that I didn't add any wisecrack such as 'and coming from Victor Cachat, that's saying something.' "

"Very funny. The problem is that tepid, wishy-washy people like you, whose commitment to anything beyond immediate personal matters is like mashed potatoes, just don't grasp all the fine distinctions between 'fanaticism' and 'fervor' and 'zeal.' "

Victor took a deep, slow breath. Not to control any anger—by now, the banter between him and Anton produced nothing more intense than occasional irritation—but to give himself time to try to figure out how to explain his concern.

"You just . . . don't really know, Anton. That's not a criticism, it's just an observation. From the time you were a kid, you lived in a world with wide horizons."

Zilwicki snorted. "Not usually the way the highlands of Gryphon are described!"

"Try growing up in a Dolist slum in Nouveau Paris. Trust me, Anton. The difference is huge. I'm not talking in terms of any scale of misery, mind you. I'm simply talking in terms of how narrow a view of the universe you're provided with. When I entered StateSec Academy, for all practical purposes I had no real knowledge of the universe beyond what I'd grown up with. Which wasn't much, believe me. That's . . ."

He paused for a moment. "I know a lot of people think I'm inclined toward zealotry. I suppose that's fair enough. What has changed, as the years have passed, is that my understanding of the universe has become . . . well, very large. So while I still retain the fundamental beliefs I had as a teenager, I can now put those beliefs in a much better context. I can, for instance, spend hours discussing politics with Web Du Havel—as I have, any number of times—listening to his basically conservative views without automatically dismissing those views as the self-serving prattle of an elitist."

Anton smiled. "Web just doesn't fit that pigeonhole, does he?"

"No, he doesn't. And while I still disagree with Web—for the most part, though by no means always—I do understand why he thinks the way he does. To put it another way, my view of things hasn't changed all that much, but it's no longer monochromatic. Does that make sense?"

Anton nodded. "Yes, it does."

"All right. If my view of the world was monochromatic, growing up in a Nouveau Paris slum under the Legislaturist regime, try to imagine just how little there is in the way of subtle shadings for a young man or woman who grew up here, as a seccy under the thumb of the Mesan regime."

Anton couldn't help but wince.

"Yeah," said Victor. "That's the problem, Anton. It's not that these kids are too fanatical. Frankly, I don't blame them one damn bit for their zeal and fervor. The problem is that they see everything in black and white. Forget the colors of the spectrum. They don't even recognize the color gray, much less any of its various shades."

A frown had been gathering on Yana's forehead, as she listened. "I don't get it, Victor. Why do you care in the first place? It's not as if you have any doubts any longer about their loyalties or dedication. Unless you've changed your mind over the last two days."

He shook his head. "It's not that I don't trust them. It's that I don't entirely trust their judgment."

Anton leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table, and considered Victor's words. He understood what was concerning the Havenite agent. The group of young seccies—a fair number of them outright teenagers—with whom they'd established a relationship, using the liaisons provided by Saburo's contacts, had been very helpful. They provided Anton and Victor with a group of natives who knew the area extremely well, especially Neue Rostock. And they could also provide Anton and Victor with the assistance they might need in the future, depending on the way things developed.

Furthermore, while they were young, and suffered from the haphazard education that all seccies received, they were very far from dull-witted or incapable. To Anton and Victor's surprise, for instance, when the group had been asked to provide them with a powerful explosive device, they'd proudly presented them a few days later with a low-yield nuclear device. Nothing jury-rigged, either. The device was a standard construction type used in terraforming, designed and built by a well-known Solarian company. The best Anton and Victor had expected had been something chemical and home-made.

So far, so good. But the same capability, when coupled to the narrow viewpoint Victor was describing . . .

He made a face. "You're worried they'll go off half-cocked."

Victor shrugged. "Not exactly. They're not fools, far from it. I'm mostly worried that, first, they'll slip on security. To really do counter-espionage properly you need to be patient and methodical more than anything else. That's . . . not their strength. So I think they're more open to being penetrated than they think they are. Secondly, I'm worried that if things do start to come apart, they're more likely to react by helping the process than trying to dodge it, if you know what I mean. Especially some of them—like David Pritchard. Who was just assigned the task of handling the device, if we need it."