The sad fact was that the Makish assassination might be Team 491’s last operation. The secret government and its operatives amounted only to three people, and if they kept risking themselves, they would be caught.

She knew that Team 491 had to recruit other operatives, which meant trusting other people, some of whom by their nature would be untrustworthy. Others would be captured and give up everything they knew under torture.

It might make more sense to cease all activity and wait for the Fleet to drive the Naxids away.

But Sula didn’t want to quit. Even as she looked at the piece of propaganda designed to take advantage of the deaths of the hostages, her blood simmered with anger against the Naxid executioners.

She rose from her desk and ordered the video wall to switch on and turn to the channel reserved for punishments. It took a long time to kill five hundred people, and the executions were still ongoing. The Torminel, Terrans, Cree, Daimong, and Lai-own were herded against the blank wall of a prison, followed by the long hammering volleys of automatic weapons, the spray of blood, the fall of bodies.

The executioners were clear in the video: the grimfaced, helmeted figures behind the tripod-mounted machine guns; the others, in their lawn-green uniforms so much brighter than the somber green of the Fleet, herding the captives with stun batons and placing them against the wall; and before them all, the thin-faced officer who gave the order to fire, a man with the consciousness of high duty blazing from his eyes.

All the executioners were Terran. The Naxids hadn’t even had to do their own dirty work; they’d found others more than happy to do the job for them.

The executioners were nervous or blank-faced or merely dutiful, but the officer seemed different. His eyes glittered and his voice was pitched high, with odd hysterical overtones. Sula realized he was in a state of exaltation. This was his defining moment, the chance to commit slaughter in front of a planetwide audience. His eyes betrayed him by occasionally flicking to the camera, as if he was assuring himself that his time of glory was not yet over.

After the machine guns rattled, the officer walked slowly amid the bodies, finishing off the survivors with his pistol. His chest was inflated as he walked, a self-important spectacle, conscious of his starring role.

Pervert,Sula thought. The things people would do to get on video.

The door opened and Spence entered just as the machine guns fired again. She winced and passed through the room with her eyes turned away from the video.

“You’ve heard about the hostages?” Sula said.

“Yes. It’s everywhere.”

“Any trouble getting down from the High City?”

“No.” She stiffened as the officer shouted out commands to throw the bodies on a truck. Her mouth tightened in a line. “We’re going to get that bastard, aren’t we, my lady?”

“Yes,” Sula said, her mind made up at that moment.

Fuck caution.

A wild sensation of liberation began to sing in her heart. In a lifetime full of risks, this would be the most insane thing she’d ever done.

She didn’t know the officer’s name or where the executions were taking place. All she knew was that it had to be a prison on the planet of Zanshaa. She focused on the video, watched it intently, and was eventually rewarded with a glimpse, over the prison wall, of the baroque ornamentation of the Apszipar Tower, which would place the action somewhere in the southwest quadrant of Zanshaa City.

The Records Office computer had the maps that showed the only prison in that part of town, a place called the Blue Hatches, and also a list of personnel assigned to that prison.

The officer in charge was a Major Commandant Laurajean, and the picture appended to his ID showed that he was the thin-faced officer who, even now, was grinning his intense joy as a crowd of Torminel were killed on his orders. Laurajean, who was forty-six years old, had been married for the last eighteen to a plump, pleasant-looking wife, an elementary school teacher, with whom he’d had three children and lived a middle-class life in a middle-class part of the Lower Town.

Some people, Sula thought, just needed killing.

Macnamara entered as Sula—having looked up Laurajean’s address—was calling up the plans of the building, just in case she needed them. He dropped his bag of cheap iarogüt on her desk and looked over her shoulder at the three-dimensional image of Laurajean rotating in a corner of the display, next to the architects’ schematics.

“He’s our next?” Macnamara asked.

“Yes.”

His answer was to the point. “Good.” He picked up the bottles and walked to the kitchen.

Does the Major Commandant take public transport home?Sula wondered.Or does he have an auto? Waiting at his local tram stop and shooting him as he stepped off would be a prosaic but efficient way to accomplish his demise.

Laurajean had an auto, the records showed, a mauve-colored Delvin sedan suitable for his entire family. Sula wondered if he drove it to work or left it at home. His wife didn’t have a driving permit, she found, and Laurajean himself had been granted a parking permit for use at the Blue Hatches facility.

She rose from her desk, stretched her limbs, and walked to the kitchen, where Spence and Macnamara chatted while pouring iarogüt down the sink, flooding the small room with the sinus-stinging herbal scent.

“We’ll take him today,” she said. “Before they decide to put guards on him.”

They looked at her in surprise, then Macnamara laughed. There was a wild look in Spence’s eyes. They’d caught Sula’s mad, defiant spirit.

Fuck caution.

Because the arrangement had worked the first time, they decided that Sula and Macnamara would be the shooters and Spence the lookout. Macnamara got weapons out of storage and cleaned, assembled, and loaded them, while Spence rented a small, gray six-wheeled cargo van under a backup identity. Sula polished her essay one more time, sent out the third edition ofResistance while public indignation was at its height, then began researching the Blue Hatches prison and its immediate environs, maps of which were in the Records Office computer.

A problem existed with the rented van, the workings of which contained computers that regularly reported their location to the Office of the Censor. When a crime was reported, any vehicles in the area could be pinpointed.

When it had originally been equipped, Team 491 was given a Hunhao sedan with the ability to switch this feature off. The Hunhao was an ideal getaway vehicle, and Sula wanted to use it for the escape, not for the assassination itself.

All put on gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. Spence turned the van over to Macnamara, the best driver, and herself drove the Hunhao down the main artery beneath the Apszipar Tower, where she parked four streets away from the prison. She then jumped into the van—Sula was in the back, with the weapons—and the van headed for the prison secure behind its azure ceramic walls.

Team 491 had been tense during the Makish killing. Now they were casual almost to the point of mirth. Sula’s fey spirit had spread to them all. Two killings in the period of a day—why not? The first had been overplanned, and now the second wouldn’t be planned at all. They were throwing their months of training to the winds, and the relaxation of discipline was like wine in their veins.

There was chaos outside the prison, with swarms of grieving next-of-kin milling in a anxious mass, waiting for the chance to claim their relations. Sula noted the big main gate, the large garage attached to the administration block by a ramp. The van edged through the crowd and dropped Spence off at the fringes, where she wouldn’t stand out amid the mourners. Macnamara swung the van through a series of turns and parked so they were ready to intercept Laurajean on his way home. He and Sula sat in the front, the windows open, and waited through the long hot afternoon.