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paperwork for less than a second as she adjusted her position to sit, and with a slow blink she digested the information that she had taken in. As she did so, Pellerito continued to speak, running his hand across the papers to tidy them into a neat pile. It was a nervous gesture, contradicting his facade of confidence.
    Then Pellerito picked up a metal nail file that lay beside his notes, working its roughened length over his fingernails as he spoke. “We’re producing some stuff here that your old Magistrate buddies wouldn’t appreciate very much,” he explained.
    “So we saw,” Kane acknowledged.
    “But it’s a big operation, and there’s a huge market for this stuff out there now,” the pockmarked trader went on, his eyes still fixed on the fingernail he was filing down. “Seems everyone’s arming themselves up the wazoo just now. Between the fall of the baronies and all that religious crusade stuff that floated around, who can blame folks for being scared?”
    “It can be brutal out there,” Kane agreed, and Pellerito laughed.
    “Yeah, it’s scary once you’re outside of ville walls, ain’t it?”
    “Touché,” Kane replied.
    As the two men sparred verbally, Brigid Baptiste stared blankly at Pellerito, apparently offering him the politest minimum of attention. In her mind’s eye, however, she was mentally reviewing what she had seen on his desk. The tables of figures gave an idea of the scale of the operation. More interesting, however, were the line drawings she had seen. These showed the inner workings for two different types of antiaircraft missile launchers, with blowback projections and comparisons.
    There had been a third sheet, Brigid saw in her mind, obscured by the others. It looked like a construction diagram for some sort of road vehicle, but all she had made out were the tire treads and suspension information for the back wheels before Pellerito had covered it. That information suggested the vehicle was designed to take a lot of weight—something big, then.
    “So, what are we looking at?” Kane probed, glancing across to the bald accountant. “You need investment for what exactly?”
    Pellerito fixed him with his pale eyes. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
    With that, Pellerito pocketed the nail file and got to his feet. Buchs and the two sec men waiting by the door stiffened. Taking his cue, Kane pushed himself away from the table and stood as Pellerito ambled toward the door, and Grant and Brigid joined him a moment later. Remaining seated, the accountant in the corner didn’t even bother to look up from his busy paperwork.
    * * *
    T HERE WAS NOTHING INSIDE the Cerberus mat-trans chamber now, just the same six walls, tiled ceiling and floor that Domi had seen a hundred times before. Behind the riblike struts of the ventilation ducts, fans whirred, filtering the rank-smelling air from the room. It still retained the faint odor of rotting meat.
    “Smells bad, but there’s nothing else here,” Sela Sinclair confirmed as she followed Domi, the 9 mm Smith & Wesson in her hand. The metallic lines of the handblaster glinted beneath the harsh lights as Sinclair trained it across the room, turning in a smooth arc to check the familiar staging area that she had used dozens of times before.
    Outside, Edwards was kneeling down at the oily pool of gunk that had moments ago been a woman. The pool was spreading across the floor at his feet, shimmering lines of red, gold, green and blue webbing across its oily surface, reflected from the Mercator map. “Let’s get this...leak...contained,” Edwards growled, shuffling back as the puddle oozed gradually closer.
    Behind Edwards, the ops room remained in a shocked silence, almost two-dozen personnel still trying to process what they had just seen. A woman had died here, disintegrating before their eyes.
    Standing by his desk, Lakesh cleared his throat, drawing everyone’s attention. “Okay, people,” he said. “We’ll get a cleanup crew in