I decided to wake up slowly. When I finally reached for my jeans, I found they were gone. On a nearby chair I found a new set of clothes, including a nice pair of khaki work pants, a button-down shirt and fresh underclothes. I could have concluded that to have things in my size there they had been watching me for a while, but I’m pretty much a pure medium, so outfitting me from some all-night department store wouldn’t be that much trouble.

That, and the shoes they got me were a half size too big.

With my eyes barely open, I shuffled to the desk and appropriated a carton of fruit juice. I fumbled with it, growled, then opened it and drained it. Setting it down, I let one eye open fully. “Coffee?”

Her glare suggested I might as well have asked for lemur blood.

I came round and stepped up to her fast, far faster than she expected me to, and yet again faster than she could react to. “Okay, Letitia, you and I need to come to an understanding. You don’t like me, and I get that loud and clear. You don’t like me because I busted your jaw and your nose, but that’s personal, you and me. You’d have that under control, too, I know, except for the other thing.”

She took a half step back and I didn’t pursue. “The other thing is this, sister: you’re angry with yourself for the people who died on that mountain. Because I busted you up, you weren’t there. You weren’t in command, so people got stupid and got dead. I was the one who killed them, sure, so you hate me for that, and that’s fine. You can’t be putting on me your anger at yourself, though. You know it isn’t right and it’s the sort of thing a sniveler like Reis would do.”

Letitia planted a hand on my chest and shoved me back. She mumbled something at me that I didn’t quite catch, which is fine, since it was hardly ladylike language. If I related it verbatim this chronicle would plunge from the exalted realm of literature and I would be accused of pandering to the prurient interests of the lowbrow masses.

I could have done a variety of things, from grab that hand, twist it around and drive her to the floor, to use it to drag her forward and plant a kiss on her. The latter would certainly have been pandering, and would have even been an assault, given the state of her jaw. As it was I opted for the easiest of choices and let her turn away to sulk in silence.

That suited me fine because I wanted some time to think, too. My interview with Reis had revealed the presence of a Constabulary agent within the GGF. This was something that Letitia would know all or nothing about. She would know all about it if she were the mole, and nothing if she wasn’t. The case for her being the mole was good, since a quick report to Reis about the altercation at the Eyrie would get things going to leave me hanging out there as bait. My assaulting one of his officers would make me a perfect target, though, as much as I wanted to hate him for hating me, I’d made myself the perfect target anyway. Reis would have found me convenient no matter what.

If Letitia was the mole, her anger at me could be born out of the deaths of the CDRF folks. Had she not been sidelined by the broken jaw, she could have been at the ambush and prevented anyone getting killed. While she probably was happy at the death of the GGFers who got smooshed, the loss of comrades would have hurt. Even so, she’d have to see pretty quickly that there had been nothing I did, save decking her, that contributed to their deaths in any way.

There was a further problem, however, with the way the ambush had gone down. Reis sets me up to be bait after he learns of the fight. GGF learns I’ll be out there and decides to move against me, which is also communicated to Reis. Reis plans his ambush and brings in a handful of people and one small hovercar. The GGF, on the other hand, was packing explosives, had two hovertrucks and some heavy weaponry. The GGF, it could easily be concluded, had known he was going to be there and had gone gunning for him.

The only conclusion to be drawn from those facts was that the GGF had someone inside the CDRF. The easiest link to make, and again Letitia could fill the bill, was that Reis’ agent was really a double agent. Presumably that double agent would only report to Gaia-guy. No one inside the cell would know who she was. Letitia, if she was Reis’ agent, wouldn’t have been told of the counteroperation prep since she wouldn’t be involved and everything could have devolved into a complete massacre of the CDRF troops had I not intervened.

There was a slender possibility that Reis’ agent had been killed when I dropped a tree on the hovercar. This would, in some ways, explain his anger with me. Despite my dislike for Reis, I didn’t dislike his people, and the idea that I might have killed one of them made me uneasy. Still, the way the hovercars opened up on the CDRF troopers suggested Reis’ agent was either a double agent and did nothing to stop the attack, or wasn’t present at all. I was okay with either of those cases.

So, what it all boiled down to were these things. First, cop or crook, Letitia had ample reason to hate me. I had to assume that if she had a chance, she would hurt me. Second, anything we planned would be leaked to Reis. Third, anything leaked to Reis would be leaked back to Gaia-guy.

I tried to look at things from Gaia-guy’s point of view. He knew this cell was contaminated with a Constabulary agent, so it was expendable, unless the agent was a double, in which case it could be trusted. Because he knew this cell was compromised, any plans he made would require two phases. The first was the overt operation, against which Reis would be expected to move. The second would be a reaction operation designed to punish Reis for going after the first op. Properly set up, the secondary operation would seem to have been bad luck on the CDRF’s part, and would allow Reis to point out how diabolical his enemy was.

I had to assume that whatever we were going to be doing, then, would be the primary op. If that was it, we were being used as bait. Gaia-guy’s CDRF source wouldn’t be one of us, so we could be wiped out and it would be cool: more martyrs for the cause.

If, on the other hand, we were part of the secondary op, we could only be employed that way if Gaia-guy thought we were completely secure. This idea pleased me because it meant we’d be getting the resources needed to do our job, and that would greatly shrink the chances of my ending up as the autopsy du jour at the coroner’s office.

This led to a further thought that bothered me a bit. Gaia-guy had offered me five K stones for an op. That’s not the kind of money you make strumming a bazuki on a street corner for tips. I’d only been on Helen four months and never during that time had I seen PADSU hold a bake sale, much less some thousand-stone-a-plate dinner with the glamorati all sparkling on in for the cause. My fee and Gaia-guy’s promise to make arrangements for getting me a ride suggested someone had deep pockets. I was fairly certain that it wasn’t Gaia-guy himself. I was also pretty sure his talk of doing it for the lemurs was nonsense, too. While I didn’t know much about him, his fingernails had been freshly manicured and the chronometer lurking up his left sleeve would have paid my fee several times over.

So, it was pretty much at that point that I realized I’d landed on both feet deep in a minefield I’d not known existed. Getting out with all my ancillary bits intact was not going to be easy. I shrugged. If this whole thing was going to kill me, at least I’d be wearing clean underwear.

I asked Letitia about a shower. She pointed me out the door and to a corner with drains set in the floor. A hose had been rigged, but no shower curtain or anything, so I just stripped down and washed myself. I used my old shirt to dry myself off, then pulled on fresh underdrawers and returned to my prison.