Through three terms as a UNE representative, a subsequent two terms as UNE senator, and now his appointment as Secretary of Defense, Bob Pope had developed a reputation as being strong on defense and tough on the Nidu. Pope wouldn't argue the first of these—it was a bedrock position that got him elected five times, appointed once, and earned him truly fantastic honoraria whenever he was between political gigs.

But the fact of the matter was he personally couldn't give a shit about the Nidu one way or another as a people. He'd met more than his share of Nidu in his time in Washington, of course, and they were decent enough as intelligent nonhumans go. They all had a pole up their reptilian ass about personal status, but that just made them like everyone else in Washington.

What he didn't like about them, ironically, was their status in the Common Confederation, and by consequence, the status of Earth, its colonies, and humans in general. As Pope saw it, the Nidu, for all their obsession about castes and status and class, were bottom feeders in the grand CC food chain. If the CC were the United Nations, the Nidu would be Burkina Faso, a tiny, shitty little country on a chronically backwards continent with no hope of ever doing anything but pounding dirt the long merry day.

The problem was that the Nidu were Earths closest allies in the Common Confederation. In politics as in high school, who you are is to a large extent defined by who you sit with at lunch, and there was no doubt about it, the Earth was sitting at the loser table. It was not, Bob Pope thought, the true destiny of the Earth in our universe to be counted among the diplomatic equivalent of the acne-ridden and the furtively masturbating.

A necessary step in escaping this fate was to turn Nidu from a nominally friendly ally to a vaguely hostile one. It wouldn't do to have the Nidu as a full-fledged enemy, of course; despite Pope's opinion of the Nidu's station in galactic diplomacy, Nidu was still significantly more powerful than Earth and her tiny colonies. Burkina Faso or not, she could still squash the Earth like a bug. But an edgy relationship made for better defense allocations. Better defense allocations made for better ships, better soldiers, and better weapons. Better weapons made for more diplomatic respect. More diplomatic respect meant a chance to trade up on allies.

Pope was aware there were other ways to get more diplomatic respect than bigger guns, of course. But while other diplomatic maneuvers sometimes worked and sometimes didn't, ultimately a big damn gun always commanded respect. It was a simple diplomatic equation, and Bob Pope was not one for unnecessarily complicating things.

However, if it was necessary to complicate things, Pope could live with that, especially if in doing so he got close to his own goals. But especially if he were complicating things for someone he didn't like. Like, say, that smug bastard Jim Heffer at the State Department.

Which is why, after Phipps had gotten him up to speed on the sheep issue, Pope made an executive decision. "We need to force State's hand," he said.

Phipps raised an eyebrow. "Why do we need to do that? They're already going to come up empty. Relations are already going to be damaged."

"It's not enough," Pope said. "They won't be damaged enough. Heffer can still convince the Nidu they made the good faith effort. We need to poke a stick through that wheel."

"Okay," Phipps said, doubtfully; he wasn't quite sure he followed the allusion. "What do you suggest?"

"The girl is going to be handled," Pope said.

"Right," Phipps said. No more need be said on that issue; from that point forward it was best that Pope didn't know the specifics.

"Then we let the Nidu know she exists," Pope said.

"We can't do that," Phipps said.

"We can't," Pope agreed. "But I'm sure that there are others who would be delighted to share the information."

Phipps brightened. "I know just the man for the job."

Deception, as practically manifested, succeeds because of two things. First, the object of deception is convincingly deceptive in its design; i.e., it looks/feels/acts like the real thing. Second, and equally important, the subject of deception must be predisposed to believing that the object of deception is indeed the real thing. These two criteria work in an inverse relationship with each other; a sufficiently deceptive object can convince a skeptical subject, while a subject who sincerely wants to believe will be able to overlook even gross flaws in the object onto which he or she confers belief.

Ted Soram, Secretary of Trade, desperately wanted to believe.

And why not. He'd had a bad week. Any week in which one of your trade negotiators kills his opposite number at the trade table, in front of witnesses from both sides, was not one destined for the all-time list of classic weeks.

But that's not what was bothering Soram. Well, it was, but few people knew all the details. For as much as controversy was swirling around Soram and his department, Heffer and State had done a grand job of cleaning things up. It was galling to have had State's flunkies crawling through Moeller's office, but on the other hand it was better than having either the US or UNE Federal Bureau of Investigation driving their forensics microscopes up Trade's ass. As bad as Moeller's murder attempt (attempt? Success!) was, it was, quite literally, a State secret.

No, what was really chafing Soram across the ass was how little support he was getting during this particular moment of crisis. He didn't shove a whatever-the-hell-that-was up Moeller's bum and send him off to kill someone. He wasn't the one that made the Nidu get up and walk out on trade negotiations, causing the markets to take a dump and everyone from Ecuadorian banana farmers to Taiwanese video game manufacturers to howl in protest. And yet it was he getting burned on the political shows and in the editorials, and, in at least one report he'd seen, in effigy at some fisherman protest in France.

He couldn't even respond—President Webster's folks had asked (read: told) him to avoid unscripted appearances after he told that joke about the Pakistani, the Indian, the pig, and the cow on a news show early in the administration. He still thought the reaction to that was overblown; he was just trying to make a point about cultural differences and trade. It wasn't worth a week of riots. In his absence from the talk shows, Trade's press secretary Joe McGinnis had been fielding the grilling on the cameras, that goddamned ham. Soram suspected that at least half of Washington's reporters believed McGinnis was the trade secretary. Soram made a note to fire McGinnis after this all cooled down.

Weighed down as he was in scandal and unpopularity, Soram was looking for some way to redeem himself. He just hadn't the slightest idea what that might be.

This was Sorairis curse. The scion of a family whose ancestors invented the individually packaged moist towelette (it took two of them, which precipitated an astounding amount of sibling bitterness that ricocheted through the family to this very day), Theodore Logan Preston Soram VI was very rich, occasionally charming in an Old Main Line Family sort of way, and entirely useless in every sort of way except as a cash machine for charities and politicians. For the better part of three decades he'd been on Philadelphia's "Stations of the Cross"—the stops hopeful senators and presidents made to pick up contributions and unofficial endorsements from the city elite. Soram had wanted to see what it was like on the other side of the table for a change.

So he'd made a deal with Webster He'd deliver Philadelphia, and Webster would deliver a cabinet position. Soram preferred Trade, as he assumed it would be the best fit since he (well, his broker) had done so well with his international and interplanetary investment portfolios, and even Soram realized that asking for Treasury would be overreaching. But everyone knew it was an extraordinarily tight election, and Webster needed Philly if he was going to get Pennsylvania, a battleground state.