As they came near the old-members barracks, the other two packs both started gobbling. Various voices responded from within, and the packs were both racing off toward the building. The stonemason stayed with Johanna. As they came near the entrance, it spoke again: "You don't remember me, but except for my puppy, I was with you and Pham Nuwen when you entered the New Castle. You know, the day Pham made the sun go dark."

Johanna turned to the pack, struck by its sudden fluency. An old, balding member had limped out of the shadows. The stonemason had flowed around it, and now all heads were pressed close together. The pack must have been one of Woodcarver's guards at the Battle on Starship Hill.

Jo smiled. She didn't remember this particular pack, but-"I do remember the day. You were outside? You actually saw the sun go out?" Almost any technology could overawe a pre-tech civilization such as on Tines World, but what Pham had done, twisting the laws of nature across hundreds of lightyears ... that was something that awed even the Children. It was no surprise that the act had sucked up all the output of the sun.

The five-even the little puppy-were nodding agreement. "A thousand years from now, it may only be a myth in the mind of the pack of me, but it will be the greatest myth of all. When I looked up at the dark of the sun, I felt the Pack of Packs."

The stonemason, now including the halt member who lived in the Fragmentarium, was silent for a moment. Then it gave a shiver. "It's too cold out here for some of me. Why don't you come inside? There are several whole packs tonight. They don't speak Samnorsk, but I can translate for them."

Johanna started to follow the other into the hall, but then she realized that most of the critters within were not reunited. They really were falling behind. If she stayed more than a minute or two she would start blabbing about what Harmony had in mind ... and too many would understand. She stopped at the door, and waved the stonemason through. "I'll come here another night," she said.

The pack hesitated a moment. "Okay, then, but you should know. I'm grateful to you. Part of me is very sick, but with her I am much more clever. I can plan better. Every night I come here, and I work better the next day. It's partly the planning I do when I'm smart. It's partly what my new puppy learns from my old part. Rich people do this all the time." All the heads looked up at Johanna. "I think that's part of how they stay rich. Thank you for suggesting this place to Queen Woodcarver."

Johanna bobbed her head. "You're welcome." Her words came out strangled. She turned and walked stiffly away, into the dark. Damn, damn, damn.

She wandered in the mists for some minutes, long enough for the guilt to boil back into rage. She needed a proper act of creative revenge against Harmony and all of his traditionalist ilk. Something that would kick even Woodcarver in the teeth if she couldn't see sense.

Eventually she ran into the high fence that surrounded the exercise yard and the able-bodied barracks. She walked along the barrier, trailing her fingers against the wooden slats. So Harmony figured there wasn't enough room. Yeah, it was crowded. Helping one's old members was more popular than anyone had predicted. No doubt Harmony was also complaining about the various resources consumed too. That would make more of a difference to Woodcarver. But Woodcarver was rich. If she wasn't rich enough, Ravna could kick in some of Oobii's tech rents. This world was so poor, so stupid. In the High Beyond, caring for individual sophonts was one of the smallest costs of operations, handled invisibly for the most part. Wealth went for other things....

She almost tripped over the creature that was digging under the fence. The Tine pulled its head and paws out of the dirt. Its jaws snapped shut just where Jo's face had been before she startled back-but there was no further attack. The critter had no backup; it was a singleton. No, wait. There were a couple others, lurking about in the misty moonlight. They were all Tropicals. Glares were exchanged, but then the mangy critters backed down. The three wandered off-and in different directions. You'd never see a pack casually lose itself like that. How many of these troublemakers were lurking around the Fragmentarium? The notion of bundling the Tropicals off to a separate camp wasn't completely stupid.

Jo continued toward the entrance to the able-bodied barracks. There was plenty of noise from inside the building. Outside, on her side of the fence, she saw occasional shadows move, heard an occasional howl. Harmony must still have his broodkenners playing dogcatcher all over the valley; she was here all by herself. The thought was not frightening, quite the opposite. The Tropicals weren't especially friendly, but they also seemed to be total scatterbrains. And the fragments in the barracks ahead were Johanna's friends-at least to the limits of their intelligence.

In fact ... being alone here, she was in a position to get that proper revenge she'd been thinking of. She walked faster, purpose informing her direction. The idea was crazy, but it would create plenty of the precious "room" that Harmony was complaining about. It would show that sonsabitches and Woodcarver, too, that the fragments weren't to be pushed around.

The racket from within the barracks was really loud. Johanna came up here a lot, and in the wintertime her visits were necessarily after dark-but she had never heard this much angry gobbling. Of course, these frags were never as civil as whole packs. They had the moods and whimsies of hundreds of separate animals. Most in this barracks were big and healthy, and desperate to be part of whole packs. That was why the fence and the barred gate were necessary. Most of the time, most of the frags were a little bit frightened of escape-even at the same time they yearned to run out into the wide world and find some likely pack. Over the last two years, Jo had made such matchmaking her business. Carenfret actually called Johanna the "littlest kenner." Johanna could walk right into the barracks and chat with singletons and duos who knew a little Samnorsk. Even when speech wasn't possible, the frags enjoyed having something as smart as a pack that they could come near to, that they could pretend with. Any number of times, she had started new packs by pairing duos or getting a singleton together with a duo. At least as often, she had chatted up damaged packs on Hidden Island, or Newcastle town, or Cliffside, and persuaded them that she had an ideal completion for them.

It was that sort of effort, both by her and the decent broodkenners, that made the escape attempts very half-hearted.

Tonight sounded very different.

The wick lamp mounted over the gate showed dozens of fragments milling around just inside the entrance. More were coming by the second, pushing and shoving against the fence.

As she came into view (or hearing, which perhaps was more important for Tines) there were the usual calls of "Hei, Johanna!" "Hei, Johanna!" Those shouts were drowned out by angry gobbling, by howling and yapping that almost sounded like the baying of dogs.

The more articulate actually made sense. The occasional Samnorsk matched what Interpack she could understand: "Let us out. We want to be free!"

Now she saw what might be the explanation for all the incautious wanderlust: the Tropicals that had sneaked inside the fence. She could spot only a couple, but they were in the loudest clusters. Apparently, their attitude had tipped the overall consensus.

She'd never seen so many fragments simultaneously eager to break out. Besides banging the fence, some were digging at the foundations of the barrier. Right at the entrance, a knot of singletons had piled up, trying to reach over the top. If they had been a coordinated pack, wearing jackets with paw straps, they could have boosted some of themselves out. As it was, the pyramid would reach about two meters fifty and then fall back on itself.

"Hei, Johanna! Help us." The voice came from those piling against the entrance.

"Cheepers!" said Johanna. She recognized the white splash of fur on the back of its head. This was the most fluent of the Samnorsk speakers; sometimes he actually made sense. The poor guy would have been a big plus to almost any pack, but he was from one of Steel's recycled monster packs. He had memories that eventually repelled whomever he was intimate with. Cheepers himself was gentle and friendly, and as smart as a singleton can be, which made his situation that much sadder to Jo. She went to one knee so she could look at the singleton eye to eye, through the tiny gaps in the fence. "What's up, Cheepers?"

"Get us out, get us out!"

Johanna rocked back. How could she explain? Nuance was rarely a singleton's strong point. "I-" she started to make some excuse and then thought, Well, why not? Slowly, she stood up. Yes, she really could have revenge. And it would end the crowding, and it would give Cheepers and his friends what they wanted.

She looked at the gate. It was barred on the outside, but with a simple timber and clasp. It was almost two meters off the ground. An escaped singleton couldn't reach the bar. She was vaguely aware of the three Tropicals on her side of the fence, watching her. No doubt they were too scatterbrained to figure out the mechanism, but any coherent pack on this side of the fence could have opened the gate easily, just by climbing up on itself. Johanna could open it most easily of all.

Jo stepped forward, already gloating about imagined consequences. She reached for the gate bar, then hesitated. Consequences, consequences. There was a reason these poor creatures had been brought here. Where else could they go? In the towns of the Domain, a very few might find new minds, but the rest would be cuffed about, some killed, some enslaved. There was a reason for having the Fragmentarium. She herself had fought to make Woodcarver's wartime field hospital into this institution. Releasing the patients would be vengeance mainly on these patients themselves. She glanced to her left, at Cheepers bouncing up and down, urging her on. If they hadn't been all whipped up tonight, these frags would mostly shrink from escape.

Johanna stepped back from the gate. No, there were some things too loony even for her, even in a rage. But I could have, and the look on Harmony would have been- Something came streaking in from her left, knocking her off her feet. All three Tropicals bounded past. They clambered over each other even as she scrambled to her feet. Maybe they had seen what she was going to do, maybe they were that smart by themselves. In any case, the top one eased its snout under the bar and flipped it loose. The pressure from within swung the gate open, knocking the three's pyramid in all directions. The crowd within stampeded through, some of them knocking Johanna down again, most flowing smoothly around her. Some even said "Hei" on their way past.

Johanna curled forward, protecting her face behind her knees and arms.

Finally the thundering herd had passed. Their shouts and caroling echoed back from the hills as they chased themselves both south and north along the Queen's Road.

Jo got back on her feet. The damp ground had been trampled into mud. The open gate hung at an angle. She saw a half dozen figures near the entrance.

"Guys?" Johanna walked toward the remaining Tines. It wouldn't be surprising if the departure had left some injured behind.

Even close up, she didn't see any blood. None of the Tines were limping, except the one she called Dirty Henrik, and he'd had a bad forepaw ever since the rest of his pack got squished in a rock fall. No, these six just couldn't decide whether they were staying or going. They milled in and out of the entrance, making nervous noises as they looked out into the dark.

Jo stood by the gate for a moment, feeling just as uncertain as the remaining Tines, and thinking through her reasoning of moments before-before the Tropicals had put everyone on the other side of the question. Finally she said, "You gotta make up your minds, guys, cuz I'm gonna close this gate."

None of them understood Samnorsk, but when she put her hands on the gate and began to push it shut, they seemed to get the message. All but Dirty Henrik quickly slipped inside. Henrik remained half in and half out, his nose twitching as he smelled the night air. His pack had been a lumberjack; maybe he could do all right in the outside. Dirty Henrik wobbled back and forth, then realized the gate was still closing on him. He gave a little squeak and retreated within.

Jo had to force the gate upwards to overcome the bent hinge, and then it was shut. She left the lock bar on the ground. Hell, if he wanted to badly enough, Henrik could probably push his way out.

And now ... Johanna stood in silence for a moment, trying to make sense of what had happened and decide how she should feel about it. Finally she shook her head and started up the steps that led to the admin building. She had some phone calls to make.

The other Children called the events of that night "Jo's great jailbreak." Some of them thought it was all very funny. The consequences? Maybe they were as bad as Johanna had imagined, though not quite so obvious and visible. For the next year or so, the back alleys and garbage dumps of villages all around had a surplus of singletons and duos, aimless beggars who importuned and incompetently burgled and robbed. A few came back to the Fragmentarium. A very few found refuge in the new Tropical "embassy," though the Tropicals seemed much less happy to have recruits than they were to raise hell with the local singletons.

The majority of the runaways simply disappeared into the awesome wilderness. Pilgrim thought that more than a few of the disappeared had survived and made packs of themselves. "I can tell you from personal experience," he told Jo some tendays later, when he caught her crying, "when times get really tough, you'll patch up with parts you could never imagine sharing even a single thought with. Hei, look at me." That turned her sobs into a hiccupping laugh; she knew what he meant better than most humans. Nevertheless, she was sure that the wide, deep silence of the northern forests had swallowed the lives of most of the runaways.

And consequences for Johanna Olsndot herself? Leave aside her most idiot classmates who thought it was all a joke. Her little brother seemed to regard the incident with uneasy awe. She was the sister who corrected his foolishness. In his view, this situation upset the natural order.

Woodcarver actually stopped talking to Jo for a time. Her Majesty knew the odds against singletons in the wild. She had allowed the Fragmentarium from the same good will that she extended to her war veterans-and Harmony's plans had been an attempt to make room for those healthy singletons to remain in safety. More, she knew that the escape was a slap not just at Harmony Redjackets but at Woodcarver herself.

Maybe it was because of good words from Pilgrim to Woodcarver, but the Fragmentarium remained open. Indeed, one happy consequence was exactly as Johanna had imagined: now there was plenty of room in the institution. Woodcarver did not move to boot the old members out of the place. Mr. Stonemason and the others had a place for their elderly parts, even doomed as they were. That crowding problem was postponed for a while-and Harmony looked like the ineffectual, pompous assholes that he was!

Any time in the first days after the Breakout, Johanna could easily have proclaimed her innocence. After all, the evidence against her was circumstantial, with Harmony the loudest proclaimer of her guilt. The only eyewitnesses were very confused singletons, and some of them apparently thought she had been the one to throw the gate open. She almost told Pilgrim the truth-except that she soon guessed that he already knew. Johanna came even closer to telling Ravna Bergsndot. It hurt to think that Ravna saw her as just a stupid little teenager; the poor lady had to deal with too many of those already. But the days passed, and Johanna's reputation grew and solidified. Yeah, she was very glad she hadn't done what people thought she had. But hell, it had happened-and in the future, maybe people like Harmony would think twice before they crossed the Mad Bad Girl of Starship Hill.

Ten years after the

Battle on Starship Hill

CHAPTER 04.

Remasritlfeer had been working for the Great Tycoon for more than two years. This was a constant source of surprise to Remasritlfeer, who had never taken kindly to fools, even ones as rich as Tycoon. The two years had been one crackbrained mission after another, some more dangerous and exciting than the explorer in Remasritlfeer would have ever dreamed. And maybe that was why he continued to work for the madpack.

This latest piece of insanity might finally bring an end to their relationship. Exploring the Tropics! The assignment was more dangerous, more insane-literally insane-than anything Tycoon had demanded before. But truthfully, the first few days had been magnificent: Remasritlfeer had totally survived and in two ways he'd matched or exceeded the triumph of any explorer in the history of the world.

Unfortunately, that was four tendays ago. Tycoon just didn't know when to give up. Glory had degenerated into deadly tedium, tenday after tenday of failures.

"There has to come an end to it, you know." The words expressed Remasritlfeer's heartfelt opinion, but they were spoken by his passenger on this flight. This final trip, if there was any mercy in the world. Chitiratifor was a well-dressed sixsome who barely fit in the balloon's passenger platform. The Sea Breeze's gondola was a cramped place where every pound had to be accounted for. The insulation round the passenger platform was so thin that Chitiratifor's anxiety was painfully loud. Remasritlfeer could see claws and jaws here and there through the partition. His passenger was gouging the frame of the gondola with all his strength. There were retching sounds, some of his members barfing into the muddy water below.

Remasritlfeer waggled a semaphore at Tycoon's sailing fleet below. They paid out the tether a bit faster, let the sea breeze blow the Sea Breeze steadily toward the swampy inland. This had been the routine twice a tenday since the beginning of this horrid exercise. All through the predawn, Tycoon's support vessels would puff away, mixing iron filings with various corrosive poisons, filling the gas bag of the Sea Breeze or its alternate. Then, as the morning wind picked up, Remasritlfeer would lift off, sailing through the air like no one in history, like no one in the world (if you didn't count the Sky Maggots).

"We'll be over land in a matter of minutes now, sir," he said cheerfully to Chitiratifor.

Chitiratifor made some more mouth noise. Then he said, "This has to look good, you know. My master says that Tycoon is still claiming the Tropics will make him rich beyond the dreams of all packs past. If we are not convincing today, he'll be sailing around down here forever, pissing away our treasure."

Our treasure? Chitiratifor and his master Vendacious were a presumptuous pair. They had some reason. They had provided critical fixes that made Tycoon's inventions-including these balloons-workable. Remasritlfeer could sense their contempt. They figured they could use Tycoon; it seriously upset them when the Boss could not be swayed.

It was too bad that in this particular case Chitiratifor and Vendacious were absolutely right. Remasritlfeer looked inland. The weather had been perfect so far, but there were high clouds ranked to the north. If those clouds marched south, this afternoon could get exciting. At the moment, they simply blocked the far view, the jungle basin that fed the River Fell. Even on the clearest days, one pack's eyes could not see the all of that. The Fell stretched northward to beyond the horizon. Its fringes were a vast network of great rivers descending from smaller and smaller ones, ultimately from mountain streams at the edge of arctic cold. Those lands had their own mysteries and threats. They were the scene of endless deadly stories and many of Remasritlfeer's own explorations-but they could not compare to the Lower Fell, to the mystery and the threat of the ground below him now. Their balloon wasn't more than a thousand feet up. Details were lost in the humid mist-except when he looked almost straight down. There was the muddy water, the occasional swamp grass. It was hard to tell just where the outflow of the Fell ended. Normal ships ran aground on barely submerged mudflats that extended more than a hundred miles out. The color of the shallows and their smell had given the Fell its name before any pack set eyes on the river mouth itself. You needed rafts or special-built ships to get as close as Tycoon's fleet. And I am even closer yet! thought Remasritlfeer. It was a rare privilege, one that he would treasure-after he was far away from here. As for now, well, he'd seen cesspools in East Home with much the same appearance as the murk below, and the smell was like nothing he had ever experienced, a mix of rot and body odor and exotic plants.

The Sea Breeze moved steadily northwards, not much faster than a pack might walk. The wind and the tether combined to keep them at altitude, sparing them the awful death that had claimed all previous explorers-and incidentally keeping them out of the heat and damp of the tropical jungle. The grass below had taken on its tree form. The trunks might still be below water, but yard by yard, as the balloon drifted north, those trunks became thicker, holding more silt from the Fell. "Most of what we're seeing now stays above sea level except during storms and the highest tides," said Remasritlfeer.

More of Chitiratifor's snouts were visible now. The pack was peering down. "How far still to go?" he said.

"We just have to move a little eastwards." Remasritlfeer had been watching the ground, and Tycoon's ships, and the payout of the tether. You could be sure Tycoon was watching back. If Tycoon had stayed back in East Home, they all could have abandoned this foolishness by now. Directly below, he recognized a pattern of trees that he had used on the last few flights; he signalled for the ship to stop the payout and move eastward. The Sea Breeze bounced gently against the limit of the tether. The ground below slid sideways. Remasritlfeer took on the manner of a tour guide: "And now you'll see the lost city of legend, the Great Choir of the Tropics." Maybe it was a city. There were hundreds of Tines wherever he looked. As the balloon took them across higher ground, they could see more. Thousands of Tines. More. Perhaps as many as legend claimed. And nowhere was there even one coherent pack, just the simple mindlessness of the vast crowd. The sound ... the sound was tolerable. The Sea Breeze was several hundred feet up, too high for mindsound to reach. What Tinish sounds did reach the gondola were in the range of normal Interpack speech. Some of it might be language, but the chords that sounded from thousands of tympana were smeared of any meaning they might have had. It was an eerie dirge of ecstasy.

And it squashed Chitiratifor's arrogance. Remasritlfeer could feel the gondola shift as the fat sixsome huddled in on himself. There was fascinated horror in his voice: "So many. So close. It ... really is a Choir."

"Yup," Remasritlfeer said cheerfully, though he had been similarly affected the first few times he'd been here.

"But how do they eat? How can they sleep?" In endless debauchery went unsaid, but Remasritlfeer could almost hear the thought.

"We don't know the details, but if we go lower-"

"No! Don't do that!"

Remasritlfeer grinned to himself and continued. "If we go lower you'd see that these creatures look half starved. And yet there are buildings. See?" He made a pointing sound. Indeed, there were mud structures visible, some reduced to worn foundations peeking out from below later structures, and those submerged beneath still later mounds. No coherent pack would ever make such random things, barely recognizable as artificial constructions.

In places, the generations of mud structures were piled five or six deep, a chaotic mixture of midden and pyramid and multistory hovel. There must be holes and crannies within; you could see Tines entering and emerging. Remasritlfeer recognized the neighborhood from previous flights. There were patterns, as if some fragment of conscious planning had worked for a few days and then been swept away by noise or some other plan. In a couple of tendays, all the landmarks would be changed again.

"Another hundred feet will do it," he said, and signalled to Tycoon's ship to drop anchor. Actually, navigating the tethered balloon was rarely this precise. Today's sea breeze was as smooth as fine silk. "Coming up on the Great Trading Plaza."

There was some shifting around on the passenger platform above him, Chitiratifor screwing up his courage to poke additional snouts over the railing. Then an unbelieving, "You call that a plaza?"

"Well, that's Tycoon's term for it." More objectively, it was an open patch of mud, fifty feet across; Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality. For several moments, Remasritlfeer was too busy for chitchat. He reached over the edge of the gondola to cast a mooring line downward. At the same time he shouted a big halloo to the Tines below. Of course, there were always watchers down there, though sometimes they seemed to forget the point of this exercise. Today, the response was almost immediate. Three Tines ran toward the center of the open space. They came from widely different points and were clearly singletons. Only when they got within a few feet of each other was there any sort of coordinated activity. Then they scrambled around clumsily, snapping at the rope that Remasritlfeer dangled down to them. Finally, two stood steady and third scrambled up and got the rope. Then all three got jaws on it and dragged the cord round and round a mud pillar.

Chitiratifor did not seem encouraged by this show of local cooperation. "Now we're trapped, are we? They could just pull us down."

"Yup, but they don't try that so much anymore. When they do, we just drop the rope and fly away home."

"Oh. Of course." Chitiratifor said nothing for a moment, but his mindsound was intense. "Well then, let's proceed. We have a failure to observe, and I want some details for my devastating report to our employers."

"As you say." Remasritlfeer was at least as anxious as anyone to dump Tycoon's Tropical fiasco, but he didn't feel like agreeing with the likes of this rag-eared thug. "One moment while I prepare the trade." Remasritlfeer ducked down to the bottom of the gondola, opened the drop door. Their cargo was in a bannerwood kettle hung just below. It didn't look like any water had slopped over during the balloon's ascent.

"Are you guys ready?" Remasritlfeer focused his words into the kettle.

"Yessir!" "Righto." "Let's go!" ... The words coming back were all piled up, the response of dozens-perhaps all-of the creatures in the kettle.

Remasritlfeer ladled a dozen of the wriggling cuttlefish into a trade basket. Their huge eyes looked up at him. Their dozens of tentacles waved at him. In all the jabbering, he did not hear a particle of fear. He stuck a snout down to just above the rippling surface of the basket. The cuttlefish were very crowded in the small space, but that was the least of the problems they would soon face. "Okay, guys. You know the plan." He ignored the tiny cries of enthusiastic agreement. "You talk to the folk below-"

"Y-ye-yes, yes, y-yes! We ask them for safe landing for you. More trade. Harbor rights. Yes, yes! Yes!" The chords piled up in a tinkling mass, the speech of a dozen little creatures, each with voracious memories, each smarter than any singleton-but so scatterbrained that Remasritlfeer could not decide how smart they really were.

"Okay then!" Remasritlfeer gave up on his attempt at guidance. "Good luck!" He latched the trade basket's rope to the mooring line and paid out the cord.

"B-b-b-bye, g'bye!" The tinkling of chords came from both the basket and from the crowd in the bannerwood kettle, comrades calling to one another. Way beyond the tiny basket, the muddy space below was still empty of all but a few Tines. That was normally a good sign.

Chitiratifor's voice came from above: "So why not send down the whole kettle of fish?"

"Tycoon wants to see how this goes, then maybe send down a few more with different instructions."

Chitiratifor was silent for a moment, perhaps watching the trade basket as it swayed down and down along the mooring line. "Your boss is freaking insane. You know that, don't you?"

Remasritlfeer made no reply, and Chitiratifor continued, "See, Tycoon is a self-made patchwork. Half of him is a skinflint accountant. But the other half is four mad puppies the accountant picked just for their crazy imaginations. That might be a good idea, if the miser was the dominant half. But this miser is driven by the lunatic four. So do you know the reason he's mucking around here?"

Remasritlfeer couldn't resist showing that he understood something of the matter. "Because he counted the snouts?"

"What?-Yes! The accountant in him estimated the number of Tines in the Tropics."

"It could be more than one hundred million."

"Right. Then his lunatic four realized that dwarfed any other market in the world!"

"Well," said Remasritlfeer, "Tycoon is always on the lookout for new markets, the larger the better." In fact, new markets were Tycoon's greatest obsession, the driver of almost everything he did.

Two of Remasritlfeer continued to watch the descent of the cuttlefish. Their multiple monologues were still clearly audible. The basket would touch down in just a couple of minutes.

Angry talk continued to come from the passenger platform: "Tycoon has lots of stupid ideas, including the notion of getting power by selling things. But this time ... so what if the Tropics has-what crazy number did you say? The point is, those millions are animals, a mob. Unless we could kill them all and exploit the land, the Tropics are worthless. I'm telling you, in confidence of course, my boss is getting tired of this tropical adventure. It's bleeding from our essential strengths, the technological advances that Vendacious is providing, the factory base at East Home. This foolishness has to stop, now!"

"Hmm, I hope your boss has not been this emphatic with my boss. Tycoon doesn't react ... favorably ... to being ordered around."

"Oh, don't worry. Vendacious is much more the diplomat than I am. I'm just an honest worker, much like yourself, um, sharing my doubts and irritations about our betters." Remasritlfeer himself was far from being a diplomat, but he could tell when someone was feeling him out. He almost blasted back, telling the six assholes above him where he could stuff Vendacious and his treacherous plans. No. Be cool.