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forest in his office, but a trout stream. Right now sun was pouring through the rooftop glass of the conservatory side of Hagen’s office, and the man himself was coming around from behind the desk. “Lee. Gelert. Thanks for calling.”
    “No problem at all,” Lee said, looking Hagen over nonjudicially for a second as he sat on the front of his desk. It had been six months now since the end of the Xainacom antitrust trials, and Hagen looked a little less harried, had put on a little weight—though it didn’t show that much on his big-boned six foot two.
    He was well turned out as always, in a fashionable one piece suit that nonetheless betrayed its off-the-rack origins and its wearer’s too-busy-for-fittings attitude, looking as if someone had applied it to Hagen with a shovel. The dark shaggy hair and the little, close-set, thoughtful eyes in the man’s blunt face always made Lee wonder if Hagen had any Midgarthr blood in him, and whether the human seeming might be a courtesy-covering over something more basic, a formal suit allowed to fall away for short periods when the Moon was right.
    “It’s been a little while,” Hagen said. “You two been all right?”
    “Busy,” Gelert said.
    Hagen grinned, and again Lee saw bear, and had to put the image aside. “Here, too,” Hagen said.
    Lee nodded. At the end of a legal case lasting years, Xainacom had been forced into a massive corporate divestiture in the Earth universe. The truth was that the defeat for the company was a minor one—the market in Earth’s universe being nothing like the size of those in Xainese home space, spread across thousands of planets—and when the appeals process was exhausted, the “home office” hadn’t considered the affair worth going to war over. Xainacom Earth had been fractured into a number of still-huge communications and media-related companies, and those of its competitors who had spent vast sums of money assisting with the prosecution were now circling the staggering survivors with an eye to either absorption or destruction. Of all the competitors, ExTel was by far the biggest, and it was wasting no time assuring itself of the best pickings among the divestitures. Lee could believe that Hagen, as the company’s CEO for extracontinual affairs, had been a lot more than “busy.”
    “We got a call from Matt Carathen just now,” Lee said. “He suggested that you had asked for our services.”
    “That’s right. Omren dil’Sorden is one of my local people. I don’t have time for some anonymous flunky at Parker to fiddle around with it and maybe get a result, maybe not—I want this thing cleaned up  before  it gets high-profile enough to make the company’s PR people have to start spinning God knows what to the national press. We have enough going on around here at the moment. So right now, I need Parker’s best, and right now, that looks like you.”
    Lee smiled gently at the flattery, while thinking that “cleaned up” was a strange way to put it, but she supposed she could see his point. “What was dil’Sorden’s position, exactly?” she said.
    “R&D,” Hagen said. “He was working on network development, especially intercontinually gatewayed links—you’ll have to check his personnel records for the details; the technologies he was working on were still pretty theoretical. They could have been very important, though, and I want whoever did this identified and locked up.”
    “Do you have any suspicions?” Gelert said.
    The irony in his tone caught Hagen just short enough to make him laugh. “You mean Xainacom?” he said.
    “I doubt they’d be so obvious. No, they’re being good enough losers…insofar as they’ve actually lost anything but face. It’s the other companies hereabouts I’d wonder about. We’re the biggest target left standing, and if you check dil’Sorden’s intelligence file, you’ll see references to a couple of failed headhunts in the last few months—ConAmalgam and