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was immediately rewarded.
    “ . . . damage assessment, as soon as possible. We needed those rounds to fulfill a contract coming due. We’ll have to make up the difference in cash, if this gets out.”
    Eppie, Mergau thought. It was a daring act of espionage to have planted a snoop on the Admiral. As it was, she could only afford one of the timed sneakers. One quarter of an eight, and then it would disintegrate into anonymous and untraceable dust. With luck, no one would even have discovered that there had been a transmission.
    “That means an inventory of all the stations. Not just to discover what went up. To be sure we know what’s where.” Admiral Brecinn’s voice, annoyed and anxious. From the way the others’ voices rose and fell in volume, Mergau guessed that the Admiral was pacing.
    “We’ll have to cover for it somehow, Admiral. After all. Command Branch. Bad luck all around.”
    She’d suspected Brecinn’s command of black marketeering from the moment she’d arrived. She recognized some of the names and faces from the secured files at Chilleau Judiciary. Here was evidence; but more than evidence, perhaps.
    “Our counterparts are counting on us to be well placed for the new regime. We lose their confidence, we lose everything. We’ve got to contain this somehow.” The Admiral again, and she sounded just a little — frightened. Mergau Noycannir knew what frightened people sounded like. She recognized the subtle quavering behind the fine false front.
    “Admiral, it was an accident. It could have happened to anyone.” Mergau knew better. Brecinn apparently did, too.
    “People who conduct business with professionals don’t have accidents, Eppie. No. We can’t afford to let it be an accident. We need a cover, and we need it fast.”
    Mergau knew her time was running out; the snooper would stop transmitting at any moment. She could extrapolate well enough from what she had heard, however, and with that she could build the perfect solution to the Admiral’s problem. Her problem as well.
    Admiral Brecinn needed to cover the fact that the explosion that had just killed the Ragnarok ’s acting Captain had resulted from the illegal stockpiling of stolen armaments for sale on the black market; Mergau needed all the protection she could get.
    Admiral Brecinn only knew that Mergau was a Clerk of Court at Chilleau Judiciary. She didn’t know how low on the First Secretary’s table of assignments her placement had become. Mergau naturally had not hastened to explain how sadly reduced her position was from the days when she had brought the Writ to Inquire back from Fleet Orientation Station Medical at the First Secretary’s desire; and she did have contacts, even yet.
    That was how she had arranged for the forged entry of Andrej Koscuisko’s name on an unauthorized Bench warrant.
    Had the Bench warrant been exercised, it would not have mattered, in the end, whether it had been forged or not. Once the thing had been done, the Bench would have been forced to stand behind it, or admit to the falsification. The Bench couldn’t afford to do that. They’d have had to defend the warrant as true, if anyone ever found out about it — not that there’d been any reason to fear that anybody ever would.
    But the Bench specialist to whom it had fallen to execute the warrant had recorded it as written against somebody else entirely, and that raised all kinds of difficulties.
    Someone had said something that Mergau hadn’t quite caught, handicapped as she was by the directional nature of the snooper. Admiral Brecinn’s response made the nature of the question clear, however. “Ap Rhiannon. Priggish little self–important bitch. Crèche–bred. Of all the luck.”
    A tiny spark of heat against the skin at the back of her ear, too brief to be painful; the snooper died, and destroyed the evidence of its existence. Where she’d tagged Brecinn, the Admiral would not even notice the snooper’s disintegration.
    Mergau