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know?" Louie answered phlegmatically. "But I thought you might want to meet him in a vertical position."
    "Thanks, Louie, I owe you one," Kim said, slipping into a fresh set of clothes and pulling on her boots.
    "Does that mean you'll have dinner with me Saturday evening?"
    "Of course not," Kim replied matter-of-factly. "Your idea of dinner is a naked food fight."
    "Picky, picky," Louie said as the intercom went dead.
    Kim moved quickly. She cared and wasn't sure why. Call it professional pride, call it vanity, call it what you will, she didn't want Corvan to see her the way she was. Kim was in the third sub-basement of a forty-six-story building, and unless the elevators were running a helluva lot faster than usual, she had just enough time.
    Grabbing a small toilet kit, Kim ducked down the hall to the ladies room, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, and renewed her makeup before dashing back to the editing suite, where she ordered Val to put something, anything on the screens.
    By the time Corvan knocked on the door, Kim had her feet up on the console and a don't-screw-with-me look all over her face. "Come in."
    Corvan liked what he saw as he entered the room. The straight black hair, the slightly Asiatic cast to her features, and the quick bright eyes. "Hi, Rex Corvan, cold-blooded bastard at your service."
    Kim wanted to dislike him, wanted to keep him at a distance, but his smile and the direct reference to what she'd called him made that impossible. Much to her own surprise Kim found herself smiling in return. She swung her feet down from the console and stood to greet him. The hand which enclosed hers was strong and gentle. ' 'Kim Kio, engineer and defender of the weak."
    Corvan chuckled and indicated a chair. "May I?"
    "Of course," Kim replied, suddenly curious as to the purpose of his visit.
    When both were seated, Kim forced herself to look him in the eye. It was hard at first, because she had a natural tendency to avoid the lens and focus all of her attention on the other eye. But after a minute or two she felt the awkwardness disappear, as she began to see the camera as a part of him, a natural extension of what he was.
    Corvan picked his words carefully, needing her help, and wanting her to like him. "Kim, I'm sorry about the wounded trooper. I know what I did seemed cold-blooded, and maybe it was, but I felt something worse was taking place up ahead and hoped my presence might stop it."
    Kim found herself believing him. There was something in his face, a sincerity, which she found refreshing. Right or wrong, Corvan cared, and she liked that. "The death of your friend?"
    Corvan nodded. "Yes, but something more than that, the whole situation. It had the feel of a setup, a made-to-order crisis, with a made-to-order solution."
    "You think the WPO killed those people on purpose? Why?"
    Corvan shrugged. "I don't know. That's why I came. I'd like to review all of your footage and see if there's proof. If we can prove the raid was staged, maybe we can find out why."
    Kim's eyes were large and solemn. For reasons she didn't entirely understand, she wanted to help this man. But that desire was at war with a more fundamental urge to protect herself, to stay out of matters which didn't concern her, to play it safe. It didn't take a Rhodes scholar to figure out that if Corvan was right, the government was wrong, and that the friction between the two was bound to generate some heat. Lots of it. Enough to burn him and her as well. On the other hand, she was an editor-engineer, an innocent tweaker of electrons, a nonentity, and therefore immune to political fallout. Or so she hoped. The distant-observer part of herself shrugged as she spoke. "All right, let's take a look."
    Reaching up, Kim pulled the cord and slipped the jack into her head. As she did so she felt none of the strangeness that usually went with wiring up in front of a stranger. After all, the reop's bod-mods made hers look like kid stuff, and Corvan had the