Portia collected Kerguelen from Noctis herself, ordering a diversion that cost the DD-S17 almost a day’s headway while it stooged around pretending to be a luxury yacht. She wore a watered silk gown of blue and violet to the police station where the unfortunate Kerguelen was being held, along with a blond wig and a king’s ransom in precious stones; she had the mannerisms and giggle down to perfection for her role as the second wife of a rich ship-owning magnate from al-Turku. Franz and Marx and Samow marched behind her stiffly, wearing the archaic uniforms and pained air of superiority of her household retainers. The show ended about five milliseconds after they got the anxiously grateful Ker across the boarding tube threshold and behind a ’lock door. Then she was at his throat.

“Bastard!” she hissed, wrist muscles standing out like steel bands as she choked him. It was a deadly insult among the ReMastered, but nobody was interested in Ker’s reply. Marx and Samow held his arms as he bucked and kicked against the bulkhead while she crushed his larynx. When he stopped moving, Hoechst looked round their small circle, sparing Franz such a malice-filled glare that he shuddered, sensing how close his own neck was to those strong hands, but then she relaxed slightly and nodded at him. “He showed me up,” she said coolly. “Worse, he made the Directorate look foolish. You also.”

“I understand,” he said woodenly, and that seemed to satisfy her.

“Samow, see that his neural map is reclaimed, then ditch the remains. Marx, give my compliments to the pilot and tell her it’s time to execute Plan Coyote. U. Bergman, come with me.” She turned and stalked toward the lift up to the crew decks. Franz followed her, his mind blank. Kerguelen had worked for him for three years, a happy-go-lucky youngster on his first out-of-system assignment. He was prone to living it up, but not self-consciously sloppy, and there seemed to be a serious ideological commitment underlying his actions. His self-evident belief in the cause, in the unborn god and the destiny of the ReMastered, had sometimes left Franz feeling like a hollow fraud.

Kerguelen had lived life as large as he was allowed to, as if he were working in the early days of a better universe. To see him broken and discarded rubbed home Franz’s own inadequacy. So he didn’t protest, but followed Hoechst, wafting in her trail of rustling silks and expensive floral triterpenoids and volatile oils. The faint smell of old-fashioned powder cosmetics stung his nose.

The DepSec’s suite was larger than the cubbyhole Franz was bunking in. It held a pair of chairs, a rolltop desk, and a separate folding bed. Perhaps it had once been the friggatenfuhrer’s quarters, back when the yacht had been a warship. Hoechst shut the door and waved him to a seat, but remained standing and busied herself with something at her table. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was beautiful, in a feral, ex-Directorate sort of way, but also frightening. Intimidating. A predator, beautiful but deadly and incapable of behaving any other way. She eased her wig off and placed it on the desk, then ran her fingertips through her close-cropped pale hair. “You look as if you need a drink.”

She was offering him a glass, he realized through a cloud of befuddlement. He accepted it instantly, his instinct for self-preservation kicking in. “Thank you.” She poured herself another from a cut-crystal decanter, some kind of amber fluid that stank of alcohol and ashes. “Is this an imported whisky?”

She curled her lower lip thoughtfully, then replaced the decanter stopper and sat down on the chair opposite him. “Yes.” She smoothed her gown over her knees and looked momentarily abashed, as if she couldn’t remember how she came to be there, a fairy-tale princess aboard a warship of the ReMastered race. “You should try it.”

He raised his glass, then paused, trying to remember the formula: “To your very good health.” He silently appended a less flattering toast.

She raised her glass back to him. “And yours.” Her cheek twitched. “If that’s your idea of a toast to my health, I can’t imagine what my painful death would warrant.”

Her words struck home. “Boss, I—”

“Silence.” She watched him over the rim of her glass, green eyes narrowed. Sweat-spiked black hair, high cheekbones, full red lips, narrow waist: a warrior’s body held in a sheath of silk that had taken master couturiers a month to stitch. She had the inhumanly symmetrical features that only a first-line clade could afford to buy for the alpha instances of their phenotype. “I brought you here because I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot when we were first introduced.”

Franz sat frozen in his chair, the glass of scotch — worth a small fortune, for it had been imported across more than two hundred light years — clutched in his right hand. “I’m not sure I understand you.”

“I think you do.” Hoechst watched him, unblinking except for the occasional flicker of her nictitating membranes. “I’ve been following your profile. You would be surprised how much information on their subjects even the privacy fetishists of Septagon manage to collect. Our target refugee, for instance. I think I’ve got a handle on her — she made the mistake of talking to some friends after her unfortunate run-in with that waste of air, and I think I know where she’s bound for. But she’s not the only one.”

Now it comes, he realized, the muscles in his neck tensing involuntarily. She’s going to — what? If she wanted him dead, she could have executed him along with Ker.

She kept her eyes on him, avaricious for information: “You were ‘in love’ with U. Erica Blofeld, weren’t you?”

A stab of unreasoning anger provoked him to speak frankly: “I’d rather not talk about it. You’ve got what you want, haven’t you? My undivided attention and the liquidation of an elite countersub agent from Scott’s personal cadre. Isn’t that enough?”

“Perhaps not.” Her cheek muscles tensed, pulling the sides of her mouth up into something that resembled a smile but didn’t touch her eyes. “You’ve been in Septagon space for too long, Franz. In a way it’s not your fault. It could happen to anyone, spending too long on their own without backup and indoctrination, forming their own little schismatic reality, wondering if perhaps the Directorate was really the only way of doing things, wondering if you could possibly ignore it and pretend it would go away. Isn’t that it? You don’t need to admit anything, by the way, this isn’t an inquisition. I’m not going to feed you to the Propagators. But you can express yourself freely here. I don’t mind. You have my permission to shout at me. Remember what I said earlier?”

“You…” His fingers tightened on the glass. For a despairing moment he thought about smashing it and going for her throat, before the reality of his situation struck home. “So what? Nothing I can say matters. You wouldn’t believe my denials.”

“Well then!” She smiled, and it filled him with anger, because her expression was so genuine — she looked joyously happy, and grief and envy said that nobody should be allowed to look that way, ever again — when Erica was dead. And even though he knew it was just his glands speaking, that this, too, would pass, it goaded him. “I have a problem,” she said, continuing as if nothing was wrong. She rubbed her right knee through the sheer fabric of her gown. “We’re about to go and close down some loose ends. If we succeed, the sky is the limit. Not only will everybody in this unit be rehabilitated, but I will be — well, promotion is not the most of it.” She leaned toward him, confidingly. “At the higher levels, Franz, things are a little different. Unforgivable disciplinary errors become understandable personality flaws. The Propagators become tools with which the garden is teased into a pleasing shape: servants, not masters. Quite possibly, expedient termination orders become reversible.”