She offered him dessert, gratis. As if he were Ardath. He didn’t know what to do about that. He hoped he hadn’t encouraged her too much—that she didn’t have further plans.
He made his selection, a burnt cream. “I don’t think my patronage is going to bring in floods of Fashionables.”
“No,” she said with a wink. “But you know people that will.”
Damn. Damn and double-damn. It wasn’t his personal attractiveness. It was Ardath the girl was courting.
Tag, Ardath would say, long-distance, you’re it.
NO SEALED GLOBE. A light panel and rows of orchids. Forgiving plants—they survived drought long enough to live when business was routine, and they survived being overwatered and overtended when a crisis came. That meant they survived in Brazis’s office. Nothing else could.
A crisis had arrived, and he watered his plants, one and all, distracted into the hope of a bud stem emerging. The new cattaleya had proven amazingly cooperative, even luxuriant. The oncidium had produced a new plant, and rested, and now that trouble showed up, and a temporary glut of water, he was sure a number of the rest of the collection would soon think about blooming.
He fed his darlings. He carefully removed an old leaf. He discarded the detritus and wiped down the lighted shelves himself. Housekeeping, fearing for their lives, refused to touch them. He refused to have cleaner-bots anywhere in the office.
Agent Magdallen had been busy when he called on him to come in. Busy,Magdallen had had the temerity to inform him.
Agent Magdallen might have been extremely busy, Brazis began to think, ever since that inbound ship made the news.
But his plainclothesmen had nabbed the man and outright laid down an ultimatum: come in, or spend the next ten days in confinement.
“Agent Magdallen is here,” Dianne informed him sweetly—his dragon at the gate, Dianne, who would also have assured that Magdallen entered the secure offices inconspicuously, on some other office’s summons, and without untidy items in his possession, or she’d break his fingers.
What happened inside this set of offices, Governor Reaux’s security couldn’t penetrate, often and earnestly as it tried.
The door opened. A weary-looking older Fashionable in a black coat came in—stood for a moment observing the orchid-tending.
“You needed me?” One shoulder straightened. The other did. Magdallen stood a little taller. Brazis watched the reflection in an aptly placed mirror strip, and saw hawk-nosed Magdallen grow subtly younger and slimmer by the moment. The long hair slowly lost its white streaks in favor of healthy black.
Needed him. Hell. Magdallen had never been on his needed list, among gifts the CG had sent him, but he was stuck with him. Talent came in from the Chairman General and a local chairman dealt with the offering until it decided to go away and spy elsewhere.
“This ship,” Brazis said, sparing a sidelong glance. A very sharp glance. “Do you know why this ship is coming in?”
“No.”
Short and sweet. “Not our local business?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. I can’t examine its origins. Or its passenger lists.”
Magdallen was here on a ghost hunt, and was surely powerful, but not as powerful as Magdallen thought, that was the point Brazis meant to make.
“Tell me. Does ‘sir’ ever pass your lips?”
“Sir.”
The tone did it. It finally did it. Brazis put down the watering pitcher on the edge of the credenza and brushed off his hands, facing the subject squarely.
“Agent Magdallen.”
“Sir.”
One suspected sarcasm. Magdallen might be used to local authorities running scared of him and his backers. Brazis didn’t personally run scared of man or devil. As head of the PO, technically entitled to a seat on the High Council, he didn’t flinch at an inquisitive auditor, not in any particular. Nor did he worry too much who was currently sitting behind the Chairman General’s desk at Apex. CGs came and went, and might fall from office. So might a local chairman; but from his position as Project Director, only Ian and Luz acting together could remove him, so long as he lived.
“Don’t parse missing negatives with me, Agent Magdallen. You may have come in here with the High Council’s blessing and a kiss on the cheek from the Chairman General himself, but I assure you the Council won’t appreciate a foul-up here, and if that ship and you or your business here have any remote causal relationship that’s going to touch me in either of my offices, I want to know it before I set my local security into motion. Let’s not treat Earth authority to the spectacle of two Outsider investigations tangled in each other’s operations, shall we not?”
“I remind you you have no binding authority over me.”
“No binding authority. But a preventative authority—that I do have, and you’re within a hair’s breadth of discovering it. You may be the Chairman General’s personal valet for all I care, but you’re a damned nuisance to the Project Director in this moment of crisis, and if you’re determined not to cooperate with our needs, you’re about to annoy me in ways that won’t possibly benefit your career in the future—trust me. I want to know definitively what you’re nosing about in on Blunt, I want to know why you have at least two apartments and two alternate identities down there. I want to know the gist of that investigation and what it’s turned up, and especially I want to judge for myself whether Earth might have launched an investigatory mission bearing some remote relationship to what you’re doing. My clearance is higher than yours. In my capacity as Project Director, I want to know. It’s moved beyond your orders from Apex and into a crisis on my desk. Is that a clear enough request for you?”
The business about the alternate identities was a little secret Magdallen hadn’t expected to have laid in front of him, Brazis bet on that. There had been just a little change of expression.
“Someone else shouldknow,” Magdallen said slowly, as if he’d reached a decision. “The Chairman General said you were capable in a need-to-know situation.”
“I’m incredibly flattered. Compliments to the CG’s foresight in telling you so. I assure you this is that situation. Talk. What the hell are you doing messing with the Freethinkers?”
“I don’t know what this ship is. I hear the word ambassador. I think that’s cover. I think this intrusion is more inquisitory than representative. I’m not sure what agency might have sent this person and given him this cover.”
“And the Freethinkers?”
“Rumors run the little channels, among the petty smugglers. There’s been a whisper of illicits that Earth’s detected at Orb. It’s possible that’s brought an inquiry in.”
“Smuggling.” It was too ordinary. Brazis didn’t buy it. He hadn’t liked Magdallen before, and he liked him less for hedging after promising him the truth. But in truth, there was one kind of smuggling that would involve Earth in two seconds. “Are you talking about biostuffs?”
A hesitation. “Yes.”
That actually couldexplain it. It wasn’t, however, the only conceivable answer, even for Magdallen’s presence, and he wished he hadn’t steered Magdallen so conveniently into suggesting it was the obvious—and maybe misleading—problem. “All right. So I’ll play along with this theory. But it’s a theory, not ascending to fact. What else do you know?”
“Nothing, at this point. I must point out, sir, your bringing me in like this jeopardizes my several identities and makes it less likely I’ll find out anything.”
“I’m sure you’ll recover handily. Know nothing, do you, after all this time ferreting about in our understructure?”
“Nothing solid, I regret to say. I’m pursuing the theory I named.”
Brazis saw he wasn’t going to get cooperation, and would probably get a cover story if he pressed. He hesitated to divert Magdallen’s energies by giving him one more falsehood to manufacture and maintain. And if he gave the man space, and let him know he was allowing him that, he might get more from the man in future. “All right. Chase your private theories. Do your job—whatever it is. But hear this. I want information from you in return for my patience. And if you make any policy-threatening move without telling me, I’ll send my own message to the CG, and it won’t be understanding of your difficulties. I’ll warn you now, I’m doing a quiet crackdown on the street. You’re hearing this advisory a quarter hour before I send the pick-them-up message—an hour, if you’d answered my original summons. If the pickup is likely to disrupt your operations, you’d better identify those operations to me before I give that order, and I’ll make a few careful exceptions.”