He patted her shoulder. "Don't judge them by first night out," he warned. "Anyway, you haven't exactly been working hard to elbow your way into conversations."

She let her lip twitch in a coquettish smile. "And how would you know that?" she challenged.

"Unless you'd been watching me, that is."

He smiled back. "I might have noticed you," he acknowledged. "But only because I happen to like looking at beautiful women."

"Flatterer."

"Connoisseur," he corrected with a slight bow.

She laughed. "My name's Chandris Adriessa," she told him. "I don't suppose that in and around all that looking you happened to find the dining room?"

"I did indeed," he said, gently but firmly taking her arm. Not big-brotherly, like the engineer had, but like a hunter who's caught his prey. "All six of them, in fact. Come; I'll show you which one's the best."

He insisted from the start on charging her dinner to his bill, a gallantry she accepted with a maximum of verbal gratitude and a minimum of token protest. The issue had never been in doubt, of course; no one at this end of the ship seemed to use money or cards, and she could hardly charge her meal to an unoccupied stateroom. But by making the offer up front he saved her the trouble of maneuvering him into doing so later.

The food was good enough, though not as filling as she might have wished. As they ate she worked at getting her companion talking about himself, with an eye toward filling in some of her ignorance about upper-class life.

No hard task, as it turned out. Toomes was a braggart—a refined and cultured braggart, but a braggart just the same—and after the first couple of questions all Chandris had to do was listen and nod and act fascinated by it all. By the time he remembered his manners and began asking her about herself, she had everything she needed to puff him a convincing spider web of lies, right down to a convoluted story about how her parents' manufacturing firm on Uhuru had made enough the past year on superconductor contracts to send her to college on Seraph.

Not that he was in any shape to notice small slips anyway. It was clear even before they got to the dining room that Toomes had gotten an early start on the Xirrus's supply of reeks, giving him a slight mental haze that the alcoholic drinks he'd washed his dinner down with had made even hazier.

It was a personality type Chandris had had more than her fill of back in the Barrio: men who measured themselves by how much they could drink or sniff or swallow before their brains were so nurked they couldn't see straight.

She'd lost track of how many evenings Trilling and his friends had ruined for her with those stupid contests of theirs. It was only fair that, just this once, it should work to her advantage.

And so she talked, and listened, and kept the floaters and relaxers and drinks coming; and by the time they headed back to his stateroom he needed to hold onto her arm to keep upright. She got the door unlocked and maneuvered him to the bed, sitting him down there and helping him off with his jacket and neck clasp.

He was fumbling with the fasteners on her dress when he fell asleep.

She took his shoes off and, with some effort, managed to get him straightened out on the bed. For a moment she considered stripping him all the way down, then decided against it. If he woke up thinking he'd already scored he might drop her back at square one and go looking for someone more challenging. Better to keep him dangling, at least for another day or two, before considering any alterations to the script.

Kicking off her own ill-fitting shoes, she snared a chair and pulled it over to the room's computer terminal. A minute later she'd pulled up the Xirrus library's complete index of articles pertaining to spaceship operation. With Toomes snoring gently behind her, she called up the first article on the list and began to read.

"...But first I'd like to clear up any questions about how I see this new job you're sending me off to do. The first duty of a High Senator, it seems to me, is to the whole Empyrean. Not one district or another, not even one world or another; but to all the people."

The man on the screen paused, and Arkin Forsythe took a moment to let his eyes trace out the other's face. A care-lined, middle-aged face, with receding sandy hair, blue-gray eyes, and an oddly intense set to the square jaw. A serious face; a face whose strong aura of professionalism formed a perfect counterpoint to the casual, common-man pattern of his speech. A face that would inspire loyalty in some and contempt in others, but nothing in between.

Across the room, there was a knock on the door. "Come," Forsythe called, tapping the freeze button and looking up. The door opened, to reveal Ranjh Pirbazari. "Have you a minute, High Senatorelect?"

"Sure, Zar, come on in," Forsythe waved him over, noting the data cyl in the other's hand. "What have we got?"

"The official follow-up report on that Pax incursion out in the belt three days ago," Pirbazari told him, crossing to Forsythe's desk and handing him the cyl. "They've done some more analyses of the ship and the battle, but there's nothing really new in the way of fresh data. They were able to pull a name off the bow, though: the Komitadji. It was the name of some guerrilla or mercenary group in the Balkans, I'm told, sometime in Earth's distant past."

"Mm," Forsythe said, eyeing the slender cylinder distastefully. Official follow-up reports, in his experience, were nearly always a waste of time for everyone concerned. "Any fresh excuses as to why it took them so long to kick the damn thing out of the system?"

Pirbazari shook his head. "They still say the catapult simply wasn't designed for anything that big, and that it took them that long to recalibrate." He hesitated. "I'd have to say, though, that that's probably more an explanation than it is an excuse. There's really no way anyone could have anticipated the Pax having a warship that big. Certainly they never showed anything even approaching that size during the contact negotiations. From everything I've read about the incident, EmDef did as well as could be expected under the circumstances."

Forsythe nodded, still not happy but experienced enough to recognize a dead-end when he found himself driving down one. Finding tails to pin the blame on was standard political instinct; but Pirbazari had twenty years of Empyreal Defense Force service under his belt, and if he said they'd done all they could then they probably had. "Subject closed then, I guess," he grunted. "Any fresh ideas as to what the Pax was trying to prove with this stunt?"

Pirbazari shrugged. "Number one theory is still that they've decided to escalate their little psychological pinprick campaign and wanted to see what kind of reception they could expect if they sent in a warship and started shooting. Second place goes to the possibility that they wanted to map out the net's physical configuration and figured that using a ship outside our normal catapult range would buy them more time to study it."

"Or maybe they wanted to drop something and hoped all the noise and smoke would hide it?"

"If they did, it worked," Pirbazari said dryly. "EmDef had ships quartering the area for several hours afterward and none of them picked up anything but normal asteroids. If anything was dropped, it had to have been pretty small."

"Or else shielded like crazy," Forsythe said.

"True," Pirbazari agreed. "Still, we're talking an awful lot of trouble and risk just to smuggle in a spy or two. Especially given that they've already got either a spy or data-sifter system in place here already."

Forsythe nodded sourly. "One at the very least. I don't suppose there's anything new on that datapulse transmission?"