"May I call you Herlander, Dr. Simões?" he asked after a moment, and the other man surprised him with a brief, tight smile.

"You're the Center's security chief," he pointed out in a voice which sounded less harrowed than it ought to have, coming from a man with his eyes. "I imagine you can call any of us anything you want!"

"True." McBryde smiled back, easing carefully into the possible, tiny opening. "On the other hand, my mother always taught me it was only polite to ask permission, first."

A brief spasm of pain seemed to peak in a Simões' eyes at the reference to McBryde's mother. It obviously reminded him of the family he'd lost. But McBryde had anticipated that, and he went on calmly.

"Well, Herlander, the reason I wanted to see you, obviously, is that there's some concern about how what you've been through—what you're still going through—is likely to affect your work. You've got to know the projects you're involved in are critical. Actually, they're probably even more critical than you realize already, and that's only going to get more pronounced. So the truth is that I've got to know—and my superiors have to know—how well you're going to be able to continue to function."

Simões' face tightened, and McBryde raised one hand and waved it gently in a half-soothing, half-apologetic gesture.

"I'm sorry if that sounds callous," he said levelly. "It's not meant to. On the other hand, I'm trying to be honest with you."

Simões gazed at him, then shrugged.

"Actually, I appreciate that," he said, and grimaced. "I've had enough semi-polite lies and pretenses out of all those people so eager to 'save' Frankie from how terrible her life had become."

The quiet, ineffable bitterness in his voice was more terrible than any shout.

"I'm sorry about that, too," McBryde told him with equally quiet sincerity. "I can't undo any of it, though. You know that as well as I do. All I can do, Herlander, is to see where you and I—and the Gamma Center—are right now. I can't make your pain go away, and I'm not going to pretend that I think I can. But, to be brutally frank, the reason I'm talking to you is that it's my job to help hold the entire Center together. And that means holding you together . . . and recognizing if the time ever comes when we can't do that anymore."

"If the time ever comes?" Simões repeated with a heartbreaking smile, and despite his own training and experience, McBryde winced.

"I'm not prepared to accept just yet that it's inevitable," he said, wondering even as he did if he truly believed that himself . . . and doubting that he did. "On the other hand, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I'm not going to be making contingency plans in case it does come. That's my job."

"I understand that." For the first time, there was a flicker of something more than pain in those hazel eyes. "In fact, it's a relief. Knowing where you're coming from, and why, I mean."

"I'll be honest with you," McBryde said. "The last thing I really want to do is to get close, on a personal level, to someone who's in as much pain as I think you are. And it's not as if I'm any kind of trained counselor or therapist. Oh, I've had a few basic psych classes as part of my security training, of course, but I'd be totally unqualified to try and cope with your grief on any sort of therapeutic basis. But the truth is, Herlander, that if I'm going to feel confident I understand you, and the security implications you present, you're going to have to talk to me. And that means I'm going to have to talk to you."

He paused and Simões nodded.

"I don't expect you to be able to forget I'm in charge of the Center's security," McBryde continued. "And I'm not going to be able to promise you the kind of confidentiality a therapist is supposed to respect. I want you to understand that going in. But I also want you to understand that my ultimate objective, however we got where we are, is to try to help you stay together. You can't complete the work we need completed if you fall apart, and it's my job to get that work completed. It's that simple. On the other hand, that also means you've got at least one person in the universe—me—you can talk to and who will do anything he can to help you deal with all the shit coming down on you."

He paused again, looking into Simões' eyes, then cleared his throat.

"On that basis, Herlander, let's talk."

Chapter Nineteen

Rear Admiral Rozsak looked up as someone knocked lightly on the frame of his office door.

"I think I may have something interesting here, Luiz," Jiri Watanapongse told him. "Got a minute?"

"Just about," Rozsak replied with an undeniable sense of relief for the interruption as he looked up from the paperwork which obviously reproduced by cellular fission. He leaned back in his powered chair and beckoned for Watanapongse to step into the office and let its door slide shut behind him.

"And just what new interesting tidbit have my faithful espionage minions turned up for me today?" he asked after the commander had obeyed the silent command.

"I haven't been able to confirm this yet," Watanapongse said. "I know how much you just love hearing things that 'can't be confirmed yet,' but I think confirmation for this one's probably going to be a while coming. Under the circumstances, I thought you'd want to hear it anyway."

"And those circumstances are?"

"You remember Laukkonen?"

"How could I forget?" Rozsak said sourly.

Santeri Laukkonen was one of those unsavory sorts people who were all too often involved in the basically unsavory sorts of business the Office of Frontier Security sometimes had to deal with. Not even Rozsak was positive where Laukkonen had come from in the first place, although if he'd had to guess, he would have put his money on an origin somewhere in the bowels of the Solarian League Navy's Office of Procurement. For a Verge gunrunner, the man was extraordinarily well tapped in when it came to "surplus" Solarian weaponry, at any rate. And not everything he handled came in the form of the legally licensed "export varieties" approved for extra-League sale, either. Not by a long chalk.

For the last several years, he'd been operating out of the Ajax System, whose proximity to the Maya Sector made it of more than passing interest to the people in charge of Maya's security. Over those years, he and Luiz Rozsak had found themselves involved in some extremely discreet—and very much arms-length—transactions. The most circuitous of all had involved supplying munitions to a "liberation movement" in the Okada System. The order for that operation had come all the way from Old Chicago itself, and the liberation movement in question had provided the pretext for Frontier Security's urgent need to extend its benevolent protection to the unfortunate citizens of Okada.

And I still don't understand why the hell they wanted to do it, he thought sourly now. It's not like it's the first time people got killed—in relatively large numbers—in the furtherance of some sort of half-baked strategy, but they didn't even hang on to the system afterward! Oravil's right—I really don't like black ops very much, but if I've got to carry them out for a bunch of Old Earth assholes anyway, I'd at least like for them to make some kind of sense afterward. It doesn't even have to be good sense.

Actually, he'd come to the conclusion that Frontier Security itself had been played in this case. The "reform government" OFS had installed had just happened to be tailor-made to allow Admiral Tilden Santana to trade in his admiral's uniform for the presidential palace. And President for Life Santana appeared to be making some substantial contributions to the personal accounts of two senior bureaucrats back in Frontier Security's HQ.