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and went home.”
    “You think they would?” Her gaze met his archly. She didn't inconvenience herself to reply, and Valens rolled his lower lip between his teeth before he nodded. “It's not the done thing to say so, Prime Minister. But I want some kind of retribution for that.” He gestured to the wasteland, but his gesture meant more—PanChina, Unitek, sabotage, and betrayal. “That's not the kind of blow you can turn the other cheek on and maintain credibility.”
    Her sigh ruffled the oily black surface of her coffee, chasing broken rainbows across it. “I know. We try the legal route first.”
    “Forgive an old soldier's skepticism.”
    She gave him an eyebrow and turned again, looking out the window, leaning away from whatever she saw under the snow. “You're not the only one who's skeptical. But we're showing we're civilized. And we've managed to stall the hell out of their space program, since they can't know how limited Richard's ability to hack
their
network is. So we have the jump on them when it comes to getting a colony ship launched . . . once we figure out if we can get one past the Benefactors without them blowing it to bits.”
    “We could try a Polish mine detector.”
    Reil chuckled. “Not only is that politically incorrect,
General
Valens, but we can't exactly afford to waste a starship.”
    “There's always the
Huang Di,
” he replied, going for irony and achieving bitterness. “She's ours by right of salvage—”
    “Fred!”
    He spread his hands to show that he was kidding. Nearly. “Meanwhile, China tries to hack Richard, and the worldwire. Have we thought about how much damage they could do?”
    “That captured saboteur—Ramirez—was surprisingly forthcoming about PanChinese nanotechnology, once we convinced him to be. And Richard and Alan seem to think we have the situation under control.”
    “So we're at the mercy of a couple of AIs.”
    “Fred,” she said, and paused to finish her coffee. He shifted on the seat, vinyl creasing his trousers into his skin, and waited until she handed the mug back to her aide, who stowed it. “You're
always
at somebody's mercy. It's the name of the game. My job is to minimize the risks.”
    “And mine is to identify the threats,” he answered, provoking a swift, shy grin, an almost honest expression.
    She didn't look at him again. Instead, she leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Take us home,” she mouthed when he turned to her, and he nodded and brought the chopper around. She lowered her head and rubbed her temples with her palms. “Don't worry, Fred. We'll get this figured out somehow.”
    He could have wished there was more than a politician's conviction in her tone.
     
    HMCSS Montreal , Earth orbit

Friday September 28, 2063

Noon
     
    If the conference room chairs hadn't been bolted to the floor, Elspeth would have pushed hers into the corner and gotten her back to the wall. She hated crowds, and crowds involving strangers most of all. Not that Drs. Tjakamarra, Forster, and Perry, Gabe Castaign, and Patricia Valens—sitting quietly staring out the port with that distracted I'm-talking-to-Alan expression pulling the corners of her pretty mouth down—made much of a crowd. But she was reasonably certain they would start to seem like it soon.
    At least they're all scientists. Well, almost all.
Which shouldn't have made a difference, but—on some deep-seated, instinctual level—made all the difference in the world.
    Because scientists are part of your tribe,
she told herself.
They're a part of your kinship system, and so they don't feel like strangers and threats. What's the old saying, the stranger who is not a trader is an enemy?
She smiled at her fingernails. “I hope the Benefactors are here to trade something.”
    “Look at the bright side.” Gabe Castaign, all gray-blond ragamuffin curls and hulking shoulders, had materialized at her shoulder as silently as a cat. She startled, and then sighed and leaned