Yanni blinked, then shrugged. “Clavery is a name not in the computers. Ergo a nonperson, a construct, a codeword, or an alias.”

“Possibly someone she knew by sight.”

“We’re running checks on everybody who was ever in contact with her. But just occasionally, in Novgorod, there are places where you aren’t being logged, and people can make contact off the record. Restrooms. Subways. Standing on a street. At the theater. If she was ever accosted by somebody named Clavery it wouldn’t be in her apartment building–not until that night.”

“A hollow man?”

Yanni drew a deep breath. And gazed at her directly. “I’m not even asking where you learned that term. Myself, I’m strongly betting on Paxer involvement in the murders, but I’m not a hundred percent certain.”

“I’m worried about people running around the halls of Reseune putting cards in people’s pockets. And no camera caught them, either?”

“We’re working on it. Just say we’re working on it. Jordan favors very crowded, dark little restaurants where the chairs are jammed up together and people are moving all over the place. We don’t have good imaging. Right now we’re investigating a lot of people.”

“Jordan’s a magnet for blame. You never thought Jordan killed the first Ari, did you?”

Yanni shook his head. Took a drink of wine. “For one thing, he was in the hall when the electronics went out, and the system was very selective with what went dead at that point. –Are we going to starve?”

“Sorry.” She silently cued Haze, and said, “Yanni, will you support me if I do take over?”

“I’d support you, yes.”

“What if I’d asked you to drop the Eversnow project? Would you do that?”

“I wouldn’t be at all happy about it.”

“But would you do it if I asked it?”

“Actually,” Yanni said, “I’d probably go full ahead until the hour you nuked my accesses, because I believe in it. And I think you’d be quite wrong. So I’d fight you on that.”

“Good. I like it when somebody tells me the truth. Why do you think I’m wrong?”

“Because Eversnow solves the employment problem on Fargone.”

“Doesn’t help Pan‑Paris at all.”

“It still solves one critical unemployment problem and makes Pan‑Paris less critical. No, it doesn’t help Pan‑Paris and they’ll be mad about it and we’ll have to find something to give them pretty fast.”

“Not on this year’s budget.”

“We’ll let Pan‑Paris stew and protest and get jealous of Fargone, and then we’ll agree to do something. That makes it evident we’re listening.”

“You’re a total cynic.”

He shrugged. “Works. We’ve got worse potential problems on the horizon. We have an important alliance on this bill: us, Citizens, Defense. We can get Information and Trade in on it, and that’s our majority. But Defense is in mid‑election and Corain’s getting old. He could see himself challenged for the seat in Citizens, and believe me, a lot worse could come out of that huge electorate than Corain. It’s diverse. It may be true that if there hadn’t been a Corain to hold Citizens together, we’d have to invent one, but in any given year, we could see something nasty develop there. Another reason– anotherreason to pursue a major population burst at Fargone. Population in an area farthest removed from Alliance Space…most of them will end up voting in Citizens, supporting, we hope, moderates like Corain.”

“All right, let’s discuss it. You think that Eversnow is still an asset. I frankly see it having serious problems.”

“I think it’s a safety factor. If there’s another war, Alliance will think twice. If we toss their merchanters out of that route, we can enforce a ban, and we can protect it. It’s a very narrow corridor.”

“No great abundance of jump points in the region?”

“Scarce. Just about what we’re developing as destinations, places we’ll be able to defend. That’s the word from Defense.”

That was certainly a point in favor. “How soon is your population burst at Fargone?”

“All right. This is getting to be in your need‑to‑know, one more reason why it’s not good for you and me to have a contest for power this year. There’s a station onworld, already. That’s all military and classified to the hilt: it’s been black‑budgeted for decades, since your predecessor’s time. We’ve kept its secrecy because we use its facilities pretty freely, but there’ve been some issues over the years, too.”

“That’s how you got the samples! It wasn’t a robot. You lied on that, too.”

“Well, it was a robot, but we have people down there, as we speak. Very cold, very lonely people, in company with a lot of cold, lonely Defense people, and not an azi in the lot. Defense has been damned worried we’d tamper–so they haven’t allowed azi down there. Just a nice little born‑man society.”

“What are we, for God’s sake? At war?”

“During the War, it was a lot friendlier. Lately it’s gotten political and full of rules and restrictions. The restrictions on our information‑gathering and on our flow of personnel to and from is one motive on our part. We very much need a Reseune presence down there, an expanding presence in our own facility before the whole planet becomes a military zone where they make the rules.”

“Hence Patil’s project. Hence this whole thing. Patil’s an excuse. Terraforming never was it. It’s the population burst. It’s a colony, never mind what the rest of the planet is like! they can sit on an iceball. Terraforming’s just what you’re paying to enlist Corain’s people.”

“Well, not altogether,” Yanni said, “because ultimately, we want that planet, we want to colonize freely there, and we don’t want Defense controlling that real estate. Terraforming’s the excuse we use to get a base of our own down there. Right now Defense has themselves a nice one‑thousand‑kilometer‑wide salt water puddle they’re using Beta Labs nanistics people to work with, long‑distance, which is no way to run a laboratory. We need to be self‑sufficient down there, we need to be on‑site and in charge of anything genetic. We’re going to need integrations on foundational sets for Eversnow residency and some CIT volunteers pretty quick. We have that in part: we have the orbiting station and the military has the onworld base, which gives us the capability to land, and it’s kept them moderately cooperative, because they need us for supply–rather than them having to build their own station. But right now we only have the kernel of a star station in orbit. It needs to grow. Fast. It needs the onworld lab. We keep the military from owning the whole planet, we boot them entirely out of nanistics research, and Union gets a highway to new stars. I’ve needed you, young lady; I’ve desperately needed you to get up to speed on integrations. We need azi that can face down military CITs and say no, ser, that’s Reseune territory. Keep out.”

“You’re doubling the size of Union. You’re handing us problems we don’t even imagine yet!”

“It’s not me that’s running that onworld presence. Not at the moment. The elder Ari died at an inconvenient time and I couldn’t get Giraud to move faster. Not to mention youate up a lot of budget, young lady–your new wing, hell, your budding township’s nothing against what you’ve already cost Reseune in lab time, in research, set‑up. But we’ve done our Eversnow research, in budget masked behind the Fargone lab we already have. We’ve surveyed stars down that strand. There’s no likelihood of sapience down that route unless it comes a long way to meet us. Several planeted stars. Resources. Jobs. Habitat. New genetics, at least at Eversnow, not likely much at the gas‑balls and ice moons we’ll be dealing with further along. A lot of advantages. And as you say–prime opportunity for a major population burst that would solve several problems, including the Citizens electorate, within the next two to three decades. That could be of incalculable value.”

“Look, I’m sorry for what I cost–”