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back in her chair and raised her eyebrows as she steepled her fingers across her chest, and Pokriefke felt her jaw tighten.
    Of course she didn’t want to be the one to tell Hieronim Mazur anything of the sort! Krzywicka might be the most powerful person in Włocławek’s government, but as the head of the Stowarzyszenie Eksporterów Owoców Morza, Mazur was the most powerful person on Włocławek…period. The “Seafood Exporters’ Association’s” name was even more innocuous—and misleading—than many another Włocławekan institution’s title, but it was the true stronghold of the Oligarchia. It was just over three hundred T-years old, and despite its name it actually represented a broadly diversified alliance of fishing interests, bankers, industrial magnates, and interstellar shipping houses.
    And Wiktoria Lewandowska, the head of Mazur’s personal security—and the SEOM’s in-house security forces—also happened to be Hieronim’s third cousin. That would have been enough to inspire any self-respecting oligarcha to quash any investigation into her actions, and the fact that Mazur knew he could count on her to follow any instruction he gave without questioning it or even thinking about it—assuming she could think, which seemed even more doubtful than usual, given recent events—only made him even more…disinclined to permit anything like an honest inquiry. He certainly wasn’t going to allow anything that concluded she had not, in fact, warned the airbus before she ordered her people to shoot it out of the sky. And especially not when it had been in a public transit lane across privately owned airspace rather than in the closed spaceport airspace cited in the soon-to-be completed inquiry.
    Which also just happened to conclude that it had been an SZW sting ship covering the air above the Lądowisko spaceport which had fired the fatal shot rather than the SEOM private security air car two a half kilometers outside the spaceport’s eastern perimeter.
    Of course, it also didn’t mention what had happened to that air car ten seconds later, did it? That sting ship pilot had better be thanking his lucky stars Mazur was more interested in keeping the heat off Lewandowska than in hammering him. Bringing that lieutenant up on charges for shooting the bastard who’d pulled the trigger out of the sky would risk opening the entire can of worms to public scrutiny, and they couldn’t have that, could they? No, no. Best to handle this discreetly and quietly, one hand washing the other, as always.
    But this one’s different, Pokriefke thought bitterly. This time it’s kids who got killed. Maybe just a load of kids from the Projects, but still kids, damn it! People’re willing to accept a lot—or to at least keep their heads down, their mouths shut, and their opinions to themselves—but this one’s different. There’s a lot of anger out there already, and there’s going to be more. Especially when people start comparing the official conclusions to that bootleg copy of the air-traffic transcript. And wouldn’t I love to know how the hell that got out!
    She thought about saying that out loud, but not very hard. She hadn’t headed Biuro Bezpieczeństwa i Prawdy for so long without learning how the game was played. And she really didn’t want Krzywicka or Mazur to ask her how the files in question had been hacked. Technically, security for those files belonged to the Policja Federalna under the umbrella of Teofil Strenk’s Wydział Kryminalno-Dochodzeniowy, the Criminal Investigation Department. But the Policja Federalna had never had custody of the files in question, and the last thing Pokriefke wanted was to give the KOD an opportunity to go poking around inside her files, instead. Once upon a time she’d been Strenk’s junior partner and protégé in the Wydział Kryminalno-Dochodzeniowy. She knew exactly what he thought of what she’d done with her life since then, and the thought of how an