"Possibly not one at all," Rozsak replied.

"I hate that word 'possibly' almost as much as I hate 'little problem area.' " Barregos sat back in his chair. "Go ahead. Tell me the worst."

"It's not a case of 'worst,' but we are turning up significant—and, Jiri and I are both inclined to think, reliable—indications that Manpower is planning to mount an operation directly against Torch."

"It is?" Barregos abruptly sat back up, eyes narrowing.

"That's what it looks like," Rozsak said. "We're still working on trying to confirm the intelligence. Frankly, I don't think it's going to be possible to positively confirm it one way or the other, but if we're right, what's happened to the Manties and to the Republic is only going to make their job a lot easier. Especially if Erewhon's going to keep all of its heavy units home the way I expect it to. Unless, of course, someone else does something about it."

"The 'someone else' in question being the someone else who has a defensive treaty with the Kingdom of Torch, by any chance?" Barregos inquired.

"Pretty much," Rozsak replied.

"And what sort of position would we be in to do anything of the sort?"

"A lot better one than we would have been a year ago," Rozsak said frankly. "I'm not going to say we're anywhere near what I'd consider full readiness yet, of course. We've got significantly more capability than I really expected to have by this point, though. Which, of course, raises the interesting question of exactly how much of that capability we want to risk revealing by actually using it."

"Um."

Barregos frowned thoughtfully. He sat silently, obviously thinking hard, for several seconds, then refocused his attention on Rozsak.

"How much of the new stuff would we have to trot out if we wanted to defend Torch?"

"That depends on the exact force level Manpower would be able to commit against us." Rozsak shrugged. "I'm not trying to waffle; it's just that we don't know, at this point, exactly what kind of resources are involved from the other side. Before the Battle of Monica, I would have felt fairly confident we wouldn't be facing anything except the ex-StateSec ships we know they've recruited and probably another double handful or so of other pirates or mercs. Nothing bigger and nastier than two or three backgrounders, in other words, and mostly getting pretty long in the tooth, as well As things stand now, I'm not prepared to rule out the possibility that they've got a few more Solarian Navy—or ex-SLN, at least—warships to make available to them. Against the level of opposition I'd have anticipated before Monica, I think we could probably do a pretty good job without bringing everything we have to the party. Against what we may actually be looking at, we'd probably need just about all of our new units."

"But, Governor," Watanapongse put in diffidently, "we need to bear in mind where we'd be using them. If we intervene to defend Torch, there's no way the Torches would be telling anyone anything about how we intervened if we asked them not to. And assuming this really would be a Manpower operation, the other side wouldn't have any powerful motive that we can see to make Old Chicago privy to whatever information might get back to it with the survivors."

"So you're saying you think letting the cat out of the bag in Torch would constitute an acceptable risk, Commander?" Barregos said.

"What he's saying, and I happen to agree with him, is that risking letting the cat out of the bag in Torch is a more acceptable risk than depriving ourselves of the firepower we might need to win in Torch," Rozsak said, and Barregos nodded.

"Before we start reaching any firm decisions, though," the admiral continued, "I think you should go ahead and hear Edie and Jiri's full brief."

"I think you're right," Barregos agreed, and Rozsak leaned back and waved one hand at his subordinates.

"That's your cue, Edie," he said.

Chapter Forty

"He doesn't look like much," said Jurgen Dusek, after studying the holopics on his desk. But the man who was the acknowledged boss of the Neue Rostock seccy district of Mesa's capital city was simply making a comment, not a reproach. Triêu Chuanli was his top man. He wouldn't have brought this matter to Dusek's attention if he hadn't had good reason to do so. "What's the guy's name?"

"Daniel McRae. What he claims, anyway. He also claims to be another StateSec on the run. I couldn't tell you if that's true either, but he does have a Nouveau Paris accent. That's hard to fake."

"Did you send him to Cybille and her people?"

"Yeah. They spent hours with him. Cybille says his story checks out down the line and he's okay." Triêu made a face. "Well . . . 'okay' is not exactly the right word. She's says McRae's probably a psychopath. Most of those really hardcore StateSec guys were. But this one's pretty tightly wrapped, she figures. The fact that he was that close to Saint-Just means he can't just be a screwball. Whatever else he was, Saint-Just was thoroughly practical. He wouldn't have tolerated anyone around him who was so crazy he couldn't keep the lid on."

Jurgen Dusek nodded. Over the past few years, he'd become a lot more familiar with the history and inside practices of the former People's Republic of Haven's security forces than you'd expect anyone on Mesa would be. More familiar than he wanted to be, for that matter. But the business of brokering between StateSec mercenaries and the people who'd been hiring so many of them had turned out to be a more profitable line of business than anything else he was engaged in.

Damn risky, though. Not because he was dealing with ex-StateSec toughs and thugs—Jurgen had been handling people like that since he was fourteen—but because of the people on the other end. Those still-very-murky individuals or organizations whose exact identity Dusek didn't know and didn't want to know. "Still-very-murky" suited him just fine. If everything worked out well, they'd stay nice and murky.

But that was the problem. There was always the danger, dealing with "murky people" on Mesa, that you'd eventually discover you'd climbed into bed with Manpower. Or, even worse, the really murky people whom Dusek sensed were lurking somewhere within Manpower, or behind it.

It wasn't that he had any moral objection to the idea of being tied to Manpower. Either today or at some point in his life, Jurgen Dusek had been a knee-breaker, a contract killer, a pimp, a drug dealer, a counterfeiter (of welfare chits, not money; nobody in their right mind tried to pass fake money on Mesa), a brothel-keeper—several brothels, in fact—a gambling overlord, a smuggler—the list went on and on. His capacity for accepting and taking advantage of immoral business opportunities was well-nigh infinite.

No, it was the damn risk. Getting involved too closely with Manpower had a history of turning into a nightmare for the person foolish enough to do it. At the very least, you wound up losing your independence and becoming just another one of their flunkies.

Risk or no risk, though, the mercenary business really was profitable. And if this new guy . . .

"She's sure he was part of Saint-Just's inner circle?"

"Absolutely and positively certain. She says McRae knows far too many things—details, specifics, not generalities—than anybody possibly could without having been right in the middle of things. In fact, she figures he probably knows more than she ever did, when it comes to field work. Cybille stresses that McRae would have been a very junior member of that inner circle. He wasn't any sort of high level StateSec official, or even mid-level like she was. But she says she recognizes the type. Saint-Just had the habit of cultivating young protégées for field work. People whose dedication and ruthlessness were . . . well, 'extreme' is the word she used. Coming from Cybille . . ."