Scientists developed the means by which those early humans living and working on Talisia could do so without bringing down a hailstorm of pots and pans on their heads or sending complex mining equipment into a mechanical arm-waving frenzy. The treatment proved effective on the Talisian home world. Unfortunately, when the treated humans left Talisia to venture out into the rest of the galaxy, their altered kinetic energy fields were likely to send luggage skimming over the heads of hapless hotel clerks.

Later, scientists discovered that, given the human propensity to adapt to their surroundings, the third generation of humans born on the planet had the peculiar kinetic energy field encoded into their systems. They were able to live and work on Talisia without having to take the treatment. But they hit the rest of the galaxy like small tornadoes.

There are not many opportunities on Talisia for employment, if one does not want to work in the mining industry. Young Talisians looking for other career opportunities have to seek them in the galaxy beyond. Medication helps some to function normally, but it does not work well with all and Talisians were often the victims of discrimination. Antidiscrimination acts had made it illegal to refuse employment to aliens in the human workplace, humans in alien workplaces and Talisians anywhere.

Thus Petronella, who had wanted to go into law enforcement since the days of her childhooda"when she had been punished for locking up the neighbor boy in the closet until his parents could produce baila"had applied to FISA and had been accepted.

She had worked for Internal Affairs for five years now, ferreting out bad apples, although, according to her cover story for this particular job, she was a new recruit, eager to prove herself. She let it be known that the medication she took controlled her kinetic fields fairly well, but sometimes a tendril of energy would escape, whip out, and fling a wastebasket at someone's head.

Such an infirmity tended to limit her social life.

Petronella didn't care. She was interested in her career, not in relationships. The reason she often worked late was to obtain advancement in her chosen field, not to go home to an empty apartmenta"literally empty; Talisians don't indulge in knickknacks, for obvious reasons. What furniture they own is solid, heavy, and bolted to the floor.

Following the explosion of the flower urn at the suspect Tampambulos's house, Petronella had voluntarily removed herself from field a.s.signments, offered to return to the job of systems operator. Since her strange energy fluxes had no effect on computer operations, and maintenance had seen to it that the machine itself was firmly fixed in place, her superiors had been only too happy to accede to her request.

The hour was late, so late that most of her co-workers had already gone for the day. Petronella hadn't noticed the time, nor the fact that she hadn't eaten anything except a bagel s.n.a.t.c.hed at lunch. She had come across an oddity that aroused her curiosity, and with her characteristic tenacity, she was determined to find a solution before she left for home.

On her terminal were displayed the contents of her most recent search on the transmission logs of the FISA satellite uplink. She had backed them up, as customary. The problem was, the backup had taken less time than usual. A lot less time.

The backups always took the same amount of time, give or take a second, because there was always a similar amount of data to back up. Why was the time shortera" significantly shortera"today? Petronella soon discovered the answer. The transmission log for the satellite uplink was only a twentieth of the size that it should have been. The report should have contained a complete list of Bureau activities for the day. Instead, in essence, all it said was: Today, nothing happened.

Unless the whole d.a.m.n Bureau had suddenly taken an unscheduled holiday, that wasn't likely.

Petronella saved the file, removed it from the disk, and then tried to recover the file as if it had been accidentally erased. She succeeded in bringing up a second log file that had probably been the original filea"it was about the same length as normal. But why had it been overwritten?

She studied the file. Buried deep amid transmission requests and routine permissions was a request from a Naval shipyard for high-level permissions access. The request had been denied immediately, but while the error routine for the denial had been running, a second attempt by the same shipyard had come in. The system should have kicked this second attempt out as well, but apparently it hadn't.

Petronella investigated further and discovered a bug in the system that allowed only one subprocess to access the error routine at a time. Since the subprocess was already busy denying the first request, the other request slipped by unnoticed. The second request sp.a.w.ned another subprocess, and then left before the first subprocess was completed with the error system. When the error system finally came back on-line, it found nothing there. The second request from the shipyard was gone. Everything went on as normal.

Petronella had been about to sign off when she discovered that the system had sent out a series of data files to a particular net access, requesting a certain number of named files. These files had been sent. Since the system itself had requested the new files, the permission system allowed them to come in. Petronella tracked them down, found to her amazement that the names of the newly transferred files had been erased.

Feeling a stabbing pain in the back of her shoulders, Petronella realized that she'd been sitting hunched and tense over her computer for so long that her shoulder muscles were in knots. She did a few stretches, rolled her head from side to side, tried to ease the stiffness. All the while she wondered: Why bother to erase data from a log that had been erased and hidden anyway?

There could only be one reason. She was peeling off layers of an onion, had gone through two and found a third. Yet another log had been overwritten. There could only be one explanation.

Someone outside the Bureau had hacked into the system, inserted new files, then was trying to cover his or her tracks.

This was the first time Petronella had ever run across a real computer break-in. Excited, she forgot the pain in her shoulders and told her growling stomach to go get a life. She tried the same trick of recovering the original log, found that the area of the halo-array used to store the file had been partially reused. She could only reconstruct a small amount of the original log.

She compared the two logs. There was only one area in which the two logs differed. One of the logs contained a name for a file and the other didn't. The new file was labeled: HUNG ACTIVITIES FOR THE PERIOD 1412232D TO 1412266D.

Petronella did a search for the file and found it easily. The file was a deep archive, used only for retrieval of out-of-date information on closed cases.

Petronella brought up the file. It had been decla.s.sified, but no one had requested the file for perusal since de-cla.s.sification. She read it over. The file detailed the movements of weapons from a factory in the TISor system to Hung operatives on other worlds. The information contained in the file was nothing but tracking data and appeared to be of no significance.

Unless, of course, you had just happened to have arrested a former agent who had been caught in the explosion of that very factory.

"Curioser and curioser," Petronella muttered.

Just to make certain, she asked for the names of the agents working on the TISor weapons factory case and cross-referenced them with any recent activity for the Bureau. Two names came up.

Dalin Rowan and Xris Tampambulos. Petronella already had Xris's file on hand. She called up Dalin Rowan's file. It was labeled DECEASED.

Dalin Rowan had been a brilliant computer expert, Petronella read. He had worked for the agency to crack the crime syndicate known as the Hung. Xris Tampambulos had been the lead field agent on the case.

Just to refresh her memory, Petronella brought up Xris's file and read through it. She reached the enda"or what should have been the end. But it wasn't the end. Not anymore. Something had been added.

Startled, she reread the last paragraph, realized it sounded familiar, and went back to Rowan's file.

Yes, that was it. The last two paragraphs were new and they were identical.

Typed in neatly, concisely, at the end of both files was the fact that Xris Tampambulos had pleaded guilty to the murder of Dalin Rowan in return for a plea bargain of twenty years' hard labor on Sandusky's Rock.

Petronella considered the possibility that she herself had typed in that information and, due to lack of sleep or PMS, didn't remember having done so. That was possible, she supposed, though not very probable. Besides, she knew darn good and well that she hadn't added that paragraph to Dalin Rowan's file. That wasn't her job. Whoever handled records in the main Bureau would take care of that.

Further investigation convinced Petronella that she wasn't crazy, wasn't suffering from a nutritional imbalance or hormonal changes. According to the time stamps, the files had been appended within a second of each other, yet the files had been housed in two separate computers in different areas of the building in which she herself was working.

Petronella rubbed her eyes. She'd been staring at the screen so long the letters were starting to blur. She left the computer, went to the break room to pour herself a cup of coffee, absently pausing on the way out to right an overturned potted palm.

The break room was dark, the coffeepot empty. Petronella brewed another pot; the agents liked their coffee real, not replicated, though Petronella thought personally that this was mere affectation. She couldn't tell the difference and she didn't see how anyone else could, either. Still, waiting for the coffee to brew gave her time to think.

This was all very strange. d.a.m.n strange. Someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble just to insert two innocuous paragraphs at the end of two files. Why? What was the reason? To prove that they could crack FISA's security? Well, they'd done that, all right. Petronella would see to it that the bug in the system was eliminated....

"Wait a minute!" Petronella said aloud.

She set down the coffeepot and hurried back to her office, ignoring the crash that sounded in the break room after her departure and the peeved voice of security demanding to know what the h.e.l.l was going on up there, ending with, "Is that you, Rizzoli?"

Petronella was back on her computer, pulling up text-book files from a high-level course she'd taken on computer security.

And there it was. Fifteen years ago, an agent had discovered a bug in the main terminal access system of the Model 233. He had found a way to confuse the error-handling system and, in so doing, gain access to the main file, which would otherwise have kicked him out. He had discovered that the error-handling system could only deal with a single error at a time. While its attention was fixed on the first error, a second illegal command could be given and the system would honor it. The error system that should have caught it was busy with its first job and would never notice.

This was exactly what had happened to her transmission log.

The agent who had originally discovered the bug had come across it in a mainframe computer system. Apparently the agent had not checked to see if the security risk would be the same for a transmission system.

Either that or he'd known all along that it was the same, that he'd left this door open in case he ever needed to use it.

And there was the name of the agent who had discovered this bug. Not only discovered it but had received a meritorious citation for research excellence from the Gibbons Foundation for Computer Security.

Dalin Rowan.

By G.o.d, Petronella thought, exultant. Robison was right! Rowan's taken the bait.

CHAPTER 11.

Suspicion all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes; For treason is but trusted like the fox.

William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1.

All she had to do was reel in her fish. Her hands were on the keyboard preparing to do another search when hot coffee sloshed over her fingers, deluged the keyboard.

"s.h.i.t! Ow!" Petronella s.n.a.t.c.hed her hands back, sucked on a burned knuckle, and swore. She righted the overturned cup, regarded the soaked keyboard in dismay. The system had shut downa"safety precaution. She would have to dry out the keyboard, find another, replace it, retrieve all the files....

The h.e.l.l with it. Obviously, the G.o.ds were trying to tell her something. Go home, Rizzoli. Go to bed, Rizzoli. You're too tired. The medication's not working anymore. She had learned long ago that exhaustion seemed to have a p.r.o.nounced effect on her kinetic energy fluxes.

She wondered what time it was, guessed it was probably close to midnight. She looked at her watch, but couldn't read it. The numbers were a green blur. She rubbed her eyes.

She had just enough energy left to clean off the keyboard and leave it upside down to dry. Keeping a tight grip on her kinetic energy field, she moved carefully down the hallway, trying not to leave disaster in her wake. Her boss's office was next door. Sometimes he worked late. She supposed she should report this break-in. He'd be certain to find out about it and it would look strange if she hadn't told him first.

No one in the department, not even her boss, knew she was working for Internal Affairs.

Petronella knocked on the cubicle door, but no one answered. Glancing outside, she saw that it was pitch-dark. No hovers zipping past. Not even a cop. She squinted at a clock on the wall.

0330.

She tapped her watch, spoke into it. "Connect me with voice mail for Senior Agent Tom McCarthy, Computer Operations." She waited a moment, then heard a faint beep. "Agent McCarthy, this is Agent Rizzoli. I found some strange inconsistencies in the log tonight during backup. I think someone tampered with our transmission logs. It looks like the work of one Dalin Rowan, a former agent. I'd lay odds of a thousand to one that it was him, but then I'd guess I'd lose. He's dead, you see."

Petronella laughed at her own joke, realized it wasn't particularly funny and that Agent McCarthy would think she'd been out drinking.

"Look, sir, I've been awake for twenty-four hours now, and I have to get some sleep. Look over the files I've saved in my home directory. See what you think. I'll be in again when I wake up, which may be next month."

As an afterthought, she added, "If you need me, call me. Only please not before noon!"

She tapped on the watch, ended the transmission. Ten minutes later, she exited the building through the last security checkpoint. The guard at the main gate stopped her.

"You look like h.e.l.l, Rizzoli. No offense."

"Thanks. I love you, too, Henry."

"You know that we got other agents on the payroll, Rizzoli. You don't have to crack every case yourself. You ain't gonna drive home, are you?" he added in concern, seeing her fumble for the remote that would send her hover skimming up from the parking garage.

Petronella rubbed her red eyes, trying to clear her blurred vision. "Yeah," she said carelessly. "I have to. I gave the chauffeur the night off."

"And we'll end up picking pieces of you off the transmission tower." He took the remote from her hand. "Let me get the duty driver to take you home."

"No, please. Don't bothera""

"No bother. He's got nothing to do this time of night. Just sittin' around watchin' the sports mags."

A minute later, a hover pulled up. Petronella climbed in, gave the driver her address, made certain he knew where it was. Then she sank back thankfully into the leather cushions. This was real luxury, usually reserved for the higher-ups.

"I could get used to this," Petronella said, and prepared to enjoy the ride.

A microsecond later, the driver was jostling her shoulder.

"Wake up, ma'am. You're home."

There was an irritating buzzing sound in her ear. A childhood experience involving a bee and a doctor with long pincers disturbed her dreams. She could still feel the bee flying around inside her skull.

Except it wasn't a bee. It was her watch. She'd fallen asleep with her wrist beneath her head.

Rolling over, she tapped the watch. "'Lo?"

"Good morning, Rizzoli," came a d.a.m.nably cheery voice. "McCarthy here. We're sending a hover to pick you up."

"Huh? Wait! Ia""

The connection ended.

Petronella climbed out of bed, noticed that she was still dressed. She had no memory of entering her apartment, much less going to bed. The buzzing started again. This time, it was the front door. She peered through the security hole.

"Yes?"

"Driver from the Bureau, ma'am." He flipped his identification.

Interesting. They weren't wasting any time. Petronella opened the door, invited him inside.

"I just woke up," she said apologetically.

He glanced at her rumpled clothes and tousled hair and the red marks on her cheeks, marks left by her blanket "Yes, ma'am. McCarthy sent me. He figured you'd need a ride, since according to the log you left your hover in the parking lot."

"What time is it?"

"It's 1430, ma'am."

Petronella sighed. Well, at least he'd let her sleep past noon.

"I can't go into the office looking like this. I'm going to take a shower and change my clothes. Help yourself to coffee or whatever you want." She waved a vague hand in the direction of the kitchen. A standing floor lamp, perhaps taking her gesture as an invitation, wobbled about two meters that direction.

The driver looked at the meandering lamp and said he thought he'd wait in the car.

"Suit yourself." Petronella headed for the shower.

Twenty minutes later, the driver dropped her at the front entrance to the FISA building. She thanked him and went inside, feeling much better than she had when she'd left.

She pa.s.sed through the two security points, rode the lift to her level, reported to Senior Agent Tom McCarthy's cubicle.

He was sitting behind his desk, reading a report. Petronella stood quietly, not wanting to interrupt him. A chair slithered across the floor, making an odd sc.r.a.ping sound.

McCarthy didn't even look up.

"That you, Rizzoli? Have a seat."