“Then kiss it goodbye.”

“I don’t—”

“Look, Matt, think about it. Once the Council finds out we have this, they’ll claim it. They’ll probably make it a security issue. You won’t have it long enough to get it out of the container.”

For a long time he said nothing. She watched him stare at the artifact, and then look out at the sky. “You’re right,” he said. “Okay. Let’s figure out who we can trust. We’ll keep it down to an absolute minimum number of people. Rent a lab somewhere, away from the Institute.”

“That’s better.”

“We can tell Phil.”

“No.”

“Kim, he’s a son of a bitch, but he knows how to keep a secret. We can trust him.”

“I don’t care whether we can trust him or not. There’s no reason he needs to know.”

They argued back and forth. In the end Matt caved in when she simply refused to go along with the idea.

He sat staring out the window all the way back to the hotel, clinging to the Valiant, not speaking, his jaw set, his eyes by turns exultant and wintry. “Kim,” he said, as they settled down onto the roof, “let me ask a question: Why are you so concerned about all this? The Council would recognize your part in the recovery; you’d become famous; you’d be wealthy before it was over. What more do you want?”

“I want to be part of the team that looks at it,” she said. “I want to be there when things happen.” She hesitated.

“—And?”

“I want to find out about Emily. How it happened that she was killed and dumped overboard. And who did it—”

The afternoon out on the lake had stimulated both their appetities. “The Blue Fin?” she suggested. It was a restaurant down on the mall, specializing in west coast cuisine.

“What do we do with this?” asked Matt.

“It’s starting already, isn’t it?” she said. “We’d better take it with us.”

They were early for dinner and the restaurant was almost empty. They found a table in a corner, and set the carrying case down on a chair against the wall. Kim asked for a shonji, which had a rum and strawberry base. Matt, who rarely drank, stepped out of character and ordered a Tyrolean Pistol. And they both went for the catch of the day.

Matt had a strong voice. It was a rich basso profundo, and when he got excited people could hear him at a considerable distance. So he made a conscious effort to speak low. “What do you think?” he asked. “What’ll the Council do about all this?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think the celestials are psychos. So Woodbridge is right to be worried. After we’ve been able to get the information we want out of it—” she glanced at the container, “—we’ll turn it over to him.”

“How are you going to explain it?”

“We won’t have to. We hand him the ship, and we give the public whatever advanced technology goes with it.” Their drinks came and they toasted each other. “I don’t think there’ll be much anybody can do. He’ll be annoyed that he wasn’t brought in. But he’ll know why, and it won’t matter by then anyhow.”

That night, in her hotel room, she connected with Shep and had him bring up Solly.

“You’re playing with fire, Kim.”

“I know.”

“I have no faith whatsoever in any of your experts to keep this quiet.”

“Solly, I don’t know what else to do. I’ve thought about talking to Woodbridge—”

“No. Your first instincts about Woodbridge are correct. You give it to him, you’ll never see it again.”

“So where do I go from here?”

“There’s no way to plan until you know what really happened out there.”

“You’re talking about the logs again.”

“Right.”

“I still don’t know where they are, Solly.”

“Who would? Somebody must know.”

“Yeah.” She looked into his eyes. “I can only think of one person who might.”

To Matt’s dismay, Kim reclaimed the Valiant when they returned to Seabright. She allowed him to hold it while they were on the train, and to ride shotgun with it when, on arrival, she took it to Capital University. There, she imposed on friends to get some private lab time, and took a complete set of virtuals, inside and out. Then she used a public phone to rent a United Distribution delivery box in Marathon under Kay Braddock’s name. “Not sure who’ll be collecting my mail,” she told the clerk, and asked for an ID number. She then inserted the microship into a plastic container with plenty of padding and shipped it off to her delivery box.

In the morning she reported for work and received an assignment to write a series of articles for Paragon Media on Institute activities. Matt was in and out of her office all day. Was the Valiant okay? He kept looking over his shoulder and referring portentously to the vessel as the bric-a-brac. Where was it? Was someone watching it? What was she planning to do next?

It was fine, she assured him, neatly stashed where nobody would find it. Ever. That might have been a whopper, but it seemed to have the desired effect, both soothing and disturbing him. Suppose something happens to you, he argued. What then?

She shrugged. I’ll be careful.

Matt had names, people they should consider bringing in. She took the list and promised to get back to him.

As to what she was planning, Kim was going to break the law once again. She sighed at the prospect, thinking how she’d come a long way from the very proper and respectable young woman who’d spoken to the gathered guests on the occasion of the first nova. Would he like to help?

“No. I will not. And I think you should forget it. Whatever it is.” He looked disapprovingly at her. “Don’t tell me anything,” he said. “I don’t want to know.”

That afternoon she went into an electronics shop at the Seabright Place Mall. “I need a universal tap,” she told the autoclerk. The universal tap was standard equipment for Veronica King.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” it responded. “But we don’t carry anything like that.”

“Do you have any idea where I can get one?”

“Not really. They’re illegal. Available only to law enforcement agencies.”

She tried a law enforcement supply shop, which carried uniforms of various designs, a wide variety of nonlethal weapons, and all kinds of communications equipment. Here she found a microtransmitter, known in the field as a tag. She talked casually with the clerk about universal taps. He confirmed that they could not be routinely purchased. “There’s a form,” he explained, showing her one. It was required for equipment normally unavailable to ordinary citizens, like surveillance gear.

The Institute funded an electronics laboratory at Hastings College, about forty kilometers up-country from Seabright. The Hastings affiliate was run by Chad Beamer, whom Kim knew quite well, and who liked her.

“It could cost me my job,” Beamer said, after she’d told him what she wanted.

“I’ll never tell,” she replied.

He squinted at her. Beamer had a reputation as a heartthrob, apparently well-earned. But he was also a good technician. “What’s it for?”

“I don’t want to lie to you, Chad,” she said. Chad was smaller than the general run of males of his generation. His parents had opted for longevity rather than altitude. He would get an extra few decades.

“Okay. Are you chasing a guy?”

“That’s as good an explanation as any.”

He nodded. “Give me a couple of days.”

Matt wasn’t happy with the way she was proceeding. He asked her to stay, closed off his office, and directed that they not be disturbed. “This is taking forever,” he said. “When are you going to give me access to it?”

“When I can, Matt,” she said smoothly. “When we’ve got the lab up and running.”

“That’ll take another few weeks, Kim.”

She held her ground. He gave up and let her go after she’d assured him that she’d provided for the possibility that something might happen to her. And she had: She’d written down a complete set of directions on how to recover the Valiant, folded it into an envelope, and given it to one of the Sea Knights, with instructions to see that it was turned over to Matt if necessary.