Soille was impressed. "That sounds like rather a good deal, Caroline, I think I'll take you upon that."

They sipped the coffee and then went their separate ways.

Soille was going to think it all over and get back to her with details of what sort of credit Soille would want.

Caroline went home, keeping to different paths than usual, afraid that the count was waiting for her.

She had to admit she was nervous. He was an aristo from Pat-Do. His world was one of a near-savage feudalism where he was an absolute monarch. The way he treated his people! She'd seen the rack and whipping posts in the backyard of the farm. She knew the way things were.

Complicating matters horribly was that he obviously had good connections of his own right here at the university. For all she knew he was an alumnus, an important contributor to the sports program.

Could he possibly just force her to obey him, and go back to Pat-Do with him?

She had already decided that she would not let that happen.

She would take the discovery and she would make them both rich and famous. All he had to do was to keep out of her way while she was doing it. She had no intention of trying to cheat him of his money.

But she was never going back to that awful place without her own expedition.

At Shingle Street she walked down the right hand side past the shops and then cut through to the rear passage to her building. Once she was securely in her apartment with the door locked and the security link on she felt much, much better. She made herself a drink, popped a meal into the microwave, and watched news TV for a while.

There were amazing scenes from the Festival at Frentana Beach this year. Astonishing costumes from the Frentas and the Costas. The Blue Queen was forty feet high.

Meanwhile, the Sisters Cowdray had been elected to the chief office of Cowdray County for the fortieth time. Their rule thus rolled on unbroken over a territory of five hundred thousand square kilometers.

Commercials came; she grabbed the food from the microwave and tucked into lasagna and broccoli while the news shifted to the nightly rundown of Wexel's current wars. DeJon, Luc, Nairac, Benfica-these were the names of regions and cities racked by the sputter of rebellions, repression's, and the astonishing violent crimes of both Liberators and Regulators.

Eventually, however, the news TV generated a pleasant feeling of numbness. All these terrible things were happening, but they were happening to someone else. Things in the immediate vicinity remained safe and comfortable.

She finished her snack, recycled the packaging, and went to bed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE NEXT MORNING CAROLINE WOKE WITH THE SUN. She breakfasted early, showered, and headed for her office.

No one appeared to be following her, she breathed a sigh of relief.

She passed the Security at the front entrance of the Life Science Building. There bad been no sign of the count there that morning. However, when she opened the door to her office she found that the space had been ransacked during the night. The analyzer was gone. Her computer had been raped and the main drive erased.

The data modules with copies of the work on the alien find were also gone.

Dumbfounded, she stared at the wreck and then sat down heavily. An appalling despair settled over her. The count had destroyed her work, just like that. A sudden shiver of fear ran up her spine. The man was dangerous, no doubt about it.

She called Soille. There was no answer from her home phone, so Caroline left a message on her work phone.

She wondered whether she dared call the police. How might she maneuver it so that Karvur be arrested without triggering an investigation into the material he had stolen?

It seemed it would be a difficult feat.

Then she realized that Karvur was probably already back in Patash-Do, and that once there he was virtually immune to criminal justice in CK City.

There was virtually nothing she could do. Her rage drove her to the edge of tears. Everything was gone, there was nothing here to substantiate her paper, she had nothing to present, and thus she had nothing at all.

In fact she was back to where she'd been before all this started, except she'd lost a week's work and Gottschallc was furious with her. And there was the matter of the stolen analyzer. That was going to be an expensive item to replace.

Then the phone clicked. On her screen was an unfamiliar man saying unfamiliar things, words like "Police" and "Did you speak to Soille Benuki yesterday evening?"

The gyre deepened, the tornado swept her up in its embrace. She, it appeared, was the last person to have seen Soille Benuki alive. Soille had been found, beaten to death with a metal pipe, in the shrubbery of the little park near where she lived.

Stunned, Caroline stared at the man on the screen.

Now the nightmarish details tumbled in upon her. When asked questions she responded as vaguely as possible. She told them that she and Soille had gone out for a drink and that Soile was going out with a man named Eric Karioka. He was a research chemist, a Crooker from the Isles. No, she did not know of anything between them that would have provoked this kind of an attack. No, she could not think of a single person who even disliked Soille Benuki. Not enough to kill her, that was for sure.

Eric and Soille had been seeing a lot of each other. They had been thinking of moving in together. Soille had mentioned children more than once. Eric was a pleasant type; Caroline had met him only once or twice. She recalled a tall, fair-haired Crooker, with a pronounced Island accent and an easygoing manner.

Now the police were searching for him; it seems he was not at his office this morning.

She gave the police what details she could. She promised to stay in touch.

When it was over she fell on her couch and wept bitter tears of sorrow for her friend. Poor Soille, doomed to a horrible death because of Caroline's greed. For the moment she thoroughly hated herself Eventually, however, she stopped crying and woke up with a burning anger in her heart toward Count Karvur. She knew it had to be his work, just as he had burgled her office. It seemed he was prepared to kill people to keep his secret safe.

She vowed to seek revenge for Soille.

Her problem was that she had no weapon bandy. Abruptly she realized her own vulnerability.

Caroline had never carried a weapon in CK City before. In fact, she'd gotten completely out of the habit since she'd left North Trios way back when. She was used to civilization. Now she needed a gun because she realized how fragile was the shield that civilization had to protect her with.

Fortunately she knew where to go.

She quickly cleared her schedule for the day-something she knew Gottschalk would give her hell for-and checked out a town car from the university car park, and drove into the city.

At Schneider's Guns on Melborne Avenue she parked and shopped. Eventually she bought a "ladies"

Faud .38 and sixty rounds of man stoppers, plus a pair of grade-three AP gas grenades that came on an aluminum clip.

In the car she loaded the handgun-an illegal act, as she was well aware-and drove back to the campus slowly.

It was past noon now, and she checked the car back in and headed for her apartment.

The building security system reported no intruders, but she kept her hand on the little Faud .38 in her bag as she went through her front door. Karvur had had no problem with the university security system; perhaps he had access to secret codes.

Nothing had been disturbed; everything was as it should have been. Carefully she locked the door behind her and scanned the windows. Their seals were untouched. The kitchen-and-dining nook was empty. There was no one in the bedroom, or the closet. At last she relaxed and let the gun drop. She went back to her living room and set the gun on the coffee table and then dumped out the white ammo boxes from her bag.

She kicked off her shoes and removed her jacket.

She was going to fight back. Soille would be avenged, she was going to make sure of that.

For a few moments she rested there, hardening her resolve to take some action, although as yet she was unsure as to what it might be.

Perhaps she might publicize the find, go to the media. She knew someone who knew Darel Hopester of WEXnet 7; she'd go to him. Get this story out and get the ITAA involved. Karvur would end up in an ITAA prison in the end.

She'd make some phone calls, she decided. But first she needed to go to the bathroom.

She wandered in and was surprised by Count Karvur, who emerged from the shower stall with a handgun, which he pressed against her head.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

THE DESERT AIR WAS DRY AND WARM, AND FLYING OVER THE empty vastness in the Skua turboprop was actually a pleasure. Chang realized she was enjoying herself for the first time in days and tried not to think of anything else.

She wasn't entirely successful, but it was still a relief after the last few days' tension.

The Skua was a turbo subsonic fixed-wing that she had sequestered for her personal use. She had also given it an exhaustive overhaul to be sure it was clean of bugs as much as anything.

Chang had flown Skuas before; she was familiar with their steadfast sturdiness. She also liked the fact that they were capable of such long-range journeys on a single fueling. This one was an ancient 800 series, which could only reach 600 mph but could cover eighteen thousand kloms at a jump.

As passengers she had an interview team from WEXnet 7 in CK City: a camerawomen named Lei, a glamor talk-head named Darel Hopester, and a minder named Urami, who sounded to Chang as if he came from Dao. Already she was becoming sensitive to Wexel accents, which were often peculiarly strong.

They were headed into the Suukup desert to visit an ITAA unit that was putting in a deep well for the Skuzoi nomads and their flocks. The visit would give them an active background for the interview, and the interview would give Chang a chance to speak to the elite audience of WEXnet 7. Maybe she could dispel the "image problem" that her day out with Blake in the Skullas Hills had created. That there was an "image problem" she had no doubt. Since her return to Doisy-Dyan she'd had three threatening phone calls, from different people if the Strand's analysis could be believed. That there were that many potential assassins already was somewhat ominous, she had to admit.

Darel Hopester was WEXnet 7's star. He had the stereotypical talk-head look with clean-cut features, brown blow-dry, and an ability to be various shades of "concerned" in front of a camera.

Most of the way down they chatted about the various great cities of Wexel and how they compared.

Chang discovered that Hopester had visited several of the nearby worlds in the Scopus cluster; he had even spent some time at Cluster Central, the habitat world in Scopta system where she herself was based.

They both shared fond memones of the city of Krettchen on Heimworld. Its graceful bridges and the spires of thousands of philosophers' temples were an unforgettable experience.

Luisa decided that she actually quite liked Hopester; he was more than just the surface flash of his video personality.

They were deep in the heart of the desert when the approach beacon finally lit up to announce their arrival at the well site.

The Skua descended to five hundred feet and circled the site, a drill rig and three tents, then came in for a short-stop landing nearby. Chang was met by the drill team, Lieutenant Yasoda and officers Sakomi and Hikado, all of the 624 OSF, tech-brigade.

She inspected the site. They had gone down two hundred meters so far, through very hard rock, to reach an aquifer. The word would go out soon to the thirsty nomads. The ITAA was at work here, providing assistance where it was needed.

While she examined the work, the camerawoman, Lei, kept her cameras in motion around Chang.

Then Hopester began the interview itself. Chang deliberately spoke in a quiet, no-nonsense voice. She tried to be as bland as possible.

Wexel had problems, she agreed; they were old problems, they were hard-to-solve problems. The ITAA could only do so much, she told Hopester. Furthermore, she didn't see her role as that of some "appointed savior," as some right-wing medianauts in Frentana Beach were saying.

One person just couldn't achieve that much, she maintained throughout.

Which, she already knew, was absolutely true. Every day brought her closer to despair.

Captain Cachester stood squarely across her path. The Fleet Command here had been on top for a long time, and everything had developed under its control. Prying the levers out of Cachester's hands was proving difficult.

Beyond that there was this crazy planet. The State of Patash-Do had hardly any prisons. Death squads were the preferred alternative. Doisy-Dyan was racked by bombs on a weekly basis, with shootings and murders in the slums most nights.

Turning this situation around was going to take an awful lot of work. That's what they'd meant back at Sector Command when they'd told her that she only had to be "the first stone in the avalanche."

When she thought of the maddening obstructionism of Cachester, the whole thing seemed almost overwhelming.

Fortunately the interview was soon over. The drill team had made a special lunch and afterward they posed for pictures with a small group of nomads who had wandered up out of the wastes.

Luisa felt the interview had gone about as well as one could hope for. She thought she looked proficient and pretty damn calm when she looked over some of it with the vid team.

On the way back to Doisy-Dyan in the Skua 800 she and Hopester found themselves enjoying one another's company.

Their conversation roamed willfully around. Hopester's video makeup was gone; he seemed smaller, older, rumpled, even nice.

He was also surprisingly bright and candid. Almost the first thing he wanted to know was whether she'd checked the plane for surveillance bugs.

"It's clean," she said. "I keep this Skua in its own locked hangar. I do all the maintenance on it myself, and I screen the machine very carefully before I take it up."

"You must have had an, uh, experience, already then."

"You could say something like that."

"If you anger them too much they'll get you. They'll find a way."

"I was told they rarely kill ITAA officers."

"Oh, they don't just kill them, they turn them into broken animals here. There was one famous one about forty years ago. A Colonel Baptiste, who succumbed to a bioweapon passed him by a prostitute in Doisy-Dyan. He didn't die, he became a thrashing shambles, no muscular control, a great spasming idiot.

He was still able to think, but not talk, or control his bowels, poor bastard. And then there was one they infected with a fungus; he died, eventually. No, they've had their way with ITAA officers pretty much the same way they've had it everywhere here."

"Baptiste's crime was?"

"He wouldn't bend over and accept the check, I think. He was part of some reform effort. I think it originated in Scopus Central."

Chang felt a slight chill. They'd tried this before and failed?

She hadn't known that. Why hadn't they told her that? Did they think she would've backed out?

"I don't intend to accept the check, as you put it, either," she said with a sudden intensity.