Blumlein put his glass down, leaned closer, his pupils dilating slightly. Portia mirrored his gestures, becoming the confidante. “Tell me what Scott was working on in that sector,” he said quietly. “And what you think you might have done with it in his stead.”

“The—” Her eyes swiveled sideways.

The overdepartmentsecretary caught her glance and nodded. “They won’t remember any of this tomorrow,” he said.

“Good. I’d hate to be responsible for spoiling such well-trained dancers.”

“I thank you for your attentiveness to my estate, but would you mind returning to the matter in hand? We don’t have all evening.” There was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there a moment before, and Portia cursed silently, nodding.

“Very well. Scott’s official task was to take over Moscow and divert it to serve the purposes of the Defense Directorate by developing munitions types forbidden to us by the Enemy. Then he was to prepare Moscow for assimilation. His agents infiltrated the government of Moscow quite effectively using only routine puppetry and a modicum of bribes. But in addition to the official project plan he paid special attention to their Defense Ministry. This paid off with the entire attack plan for the system’s deterrent force, at which point Scott started getting ambitious. He got the lot — go codes, stop codes, waypoints, and insertion vectors for every possible target — and when the Zero Incident occurred that data was safely filed away in his office.”

“Ah.” Blumlein nodded and smiled, his expression thawing. “And now.”

“Well.” She considered her next words with care. “I trust the copies of the go codes and stop codes arrived at your office satisfactorily. And Moscow itself is a nonissue, thanks to the failure of certain technological initiatives. But there’s still the issue of how to clean up after Scott’s little adventure. Not to mention the issue of how you want to deal with the leverage this situation places in your hands with respect to the neighbors.”

Blumlein nodded carefully. “In your assessment, how good was Scott’s final plan?”

“The general theory is audacious — nobody has ever done anything quite like it before — but the substance I wouldn’t touch with a pointy stick.” The words came out automatically. “He got sloppy with Moscow, sloppy enough that he left loose ends dangling. Exfiltration witnesses, basically, but it could all unravel from there if somebody with enough time and resources got their hands on the details and backtracked to find out where the bodies were coming from, or going to.”

She took a breath. “And while the basic scheme was interesting, his second-stage scheme relied too much on synchronicity — and took enormous risks. What makes it worse for us is that he’d actually begun to implement it. The moves against the Muscovite diplomatic team, for example — they’re already in progress, if not completed. We can’t tell until the telegrams come in, but my guess is that they’ll succeed, and they’ll make every chancellery within a hundred light years shit themselves. Not to mention what will happen when the High Directorate finds out. To take a whole planet for himself, then use its weapons of mass destruction to set himself up as an interplanetary emperor — it’s insanely audacious, I’ll grant you that. But his plan relied on the bystanders believing that a bunch of democrats would willingly do what he wanted. And I think it was only wishful thinking that made him contemplate such a dependency.”

“Then that brings me to my next question.” Blumlein paused for a moment, looking thoughtful, then snapped his fingers; a moppet minced forward, knelt to present a small silver box atop a velvet cushion. He took the box, flipped the lid open, and removed the inhaler within: “Dose?”

“Thank you kindly, no.”

He nodded, then bent over it for a few seconds. “Ah, that’s better.” Cold blue eyes, pinprick pupils. “The core of the matter. In the hypothetical case that I was to charge you with implementing U. Scott’s plan and carrying it to completion, for the greater good of the clade—” he sent a flickering glance in the direction of the stage, and at that moment Hoechst realized that despite every protestation of privacy, he believed the Propagators or the Arm might be watching, might have corrupted his own puppet master — “how would you go about it?”

Oh. Oh. Portia shivered, appalled by the vista of opportunities before her. This could mean her elevation to parity with Blumlein, to board level for an entire planet if she played her hand successfully. An almost sexual thrill: Then nobody could touch me! To be in control of the mechanics — she clamped down on the thought immediately, before it could form. First things first. The cost would be high, the temptation to Blumlein to have her executed before she could become a threat would be enormous …

Composing herself, she nodded slightly and picked up her glass. “I would first have to assure myself that I had the approval of the Directorate,” she began, not glancing at the stage. “Then, once I had that, I’d pursue U. Scott’s general plan, but directing events on-site in person rather than entrusting control to an extra layer of subordination. I don’t believe you can have a sufficiently tight grasp on an action if you try to exercise remote control; every level of authority you delegate adds delay and an additional risk of failure, and the plan has too many contingencies to entrust command to a junior puppeteer who lacks the big picture. And I’d divert the target of his enterprise to a, ah, more acceptable one…”

Centris Magna was a boringly average asteroid colony, built to a classic design that didn’t rely on gravity generators: a diamond tube fifty kilometers along the main axis and eight kilometers in diameter, spinning within the hollowed-out husk of a carbonaceous chondrite somewhere in Septagon Four’s inner debris belt. The inner core consisted of service facilities while the outer, high-gee levels were mostly zoned as parklands or recreational zones: the occupants lived in multilevel tenements in the mid-gee cylinders. It was a pattern repeated endlessly throughout the Septagon systems, among the hundreds of worldlets that made up the polity that had taken in most of the refugees from Moscow. And three years after her arrival, Wednesday had learned to hate it, and the grinding poverty it rubbed her nose in every minute of every day.

“Wednesday?” Her father’s voice was attenuated by her barely open bedroom door: if she pulled it shut, she could block him out completely. But if she pulled it shut -

“Wednesday. Where are you?”

Biting her tongue in concentration she finished tying her bootlaces, getting them perfect. There. She stood up. Boots, new boots, nearly knee high, gleaming like black mirrors over her skintight cloned pantherskin leggings. “Here, Dad.” Let him find her. A last look in the window, set to mirror-mode, confirmed that her chromatophores were toned in: blood-red lips, dead white skin, straight black hair. She picked up her jacket and stroked it awake, then held out her arms and waited for it to crawl into place and grip her tightly at elbows and shoulders. Nearly ready—

“Wednesday! Come here.”

She sighed. “Coming,” she called. Quietly, to herself: “Bye, room.”

“Goodbye,” said her bedroom, dimming the lights as she opened the door, feeling tall and slightly unbalanced in her new boots and headed through to the living room, where Dad would probably be waiting.

Morris was, as she’d expected, in the main room of the apartment. It was a big open space, a mezzanine floor upstairs on top of the dining room providing him with an office from which he could look down on the disordered chairs and multiforms of the communal area. Jeremy had been trying to undo amah’s housekeeping again, building an intricate dust trap of brightly colored phototropic snowflakes in the middle of the antique dining table that Dad periodically insisted they sit around for formal meals. The dust trap writhed toward her when she opened the door. Her father had been watching a passive on the wall; it froze as he looked round at her, ancient avatars looking impossibly smooth and shiny in the perspective-bending depths. “What’s that you’re wearing?” he asked wearily.