Cyteen Station results flashed up, lopsided. "That's it," Abban said. "He's got it now."

"Absolutely. I told you. Jacques is in."

xiv

Catlin brought sera coffee in the home office, while sera was feeding the guppies in the little tank she had moved in from the garden-room—sera was quite, quite calm, doing that: it seemed to makeher calm, sometimes, a sort of focus-down. Catlin could figure that. She also knew that it was a bad time, sera was waiting for answers from a protest she had filed with Administration; sera—outward evidence to the contrary—was in a terrible temper, not the time that Catlin wanted at all to deal with her. But she tried.

"Thank you," sera said, taking the mug and setting it on the edge of the desk, and fussing with the net and a bit of floating weed.

Sera never even looked her way. After a while Catlin decided sera was deliberately ignoring her, or was just thinking hard, and turned and walked out again.

Or started to walk out. Catlin got as far as the hall, and found herself facing her partner's distressed, exasperated look.

So Catlin stopped, drew a large breath, and went back to stand beside sera's desk, doggedly determined that sera should notice.

She had, she thought, rather have run a field under fire.

"What is it?" sera said suddenly, breaking her concentration.

"Sera, —I need to talk to you. About the Planys thing. Florian said—I was the one who heard. So it's mine to say."

It took a moment, sometimes, for sera to come back when she was really thinking, and especially when she was mad, and she brought some of that temper back with her. Because she was so smart, Catlin thought, because she was thinking so hard she was almost deep-studying, except she was doing it from the inside.

But that was a keyword—Planys. That was precisely what sera was mad about; and sera came right back, instantly, and fixed on her.

"What aboutPlanys?"

Catlin clenched her hands. You'rebest at explaining things, she had objected to Florian. But Florian had said: You're the one heard it, youshould tell it.

Because Florian came to pieces when it came to a fight with sera.

And it could.

"This Paxer group in Novgorod," she began.

There had been another subway bombing in Novgorod. Twenty people killed, forty-eight injured.

"What's thatto do with Planys airport?"

"In security. They're—" She never could go through things without detail. She never knew what to leave out with a CIT, even sera, so she decided to dive straight to the heart of it. "Sera, they're pretty sure there is some kind of contact. The Pax group—they're the violent part. But there's a group called the Committee for Justice—"

"I've heard about them."

"There's overlap. Security is saying that's definite. One is the other, in a major way. They're doing stickers in Novgorod, you understand—someone just walks through a subway car and puts one up. Most of them say Committee for Justice. Or Free Jordan Warrick. But a few of them say No Eugenics and Warrick Was Right."

Sera frowned.

"It's very serious," Catlin said. "Security is terribly worried."

"I understand how serious it is, dammit. —What does this have to do with Planys airport security?"

"It's complicated."

"Explain it. I'm listening. Give me all the details. Whatdoes Security know?"

"The Novgorod police know the Paxer explosives are homemade. That's first. There's probably just a handful of people—real Paxers—in Novgorod. The police are pretty sure they're a front for Rocher. But they can't find Rocher. So they're sure he's living on somebody else's card. That's not hard to do. Nothing's hard to do, when there are that many people all crowded up in one place. There's probably a lot of connection between the Committee and the Paxers and Rocher—everybody. So the Novgorod police got the Cyteen Bureau to get Union Internal Affairs on it, on the grounds it's a problem that crosses the boundaries between Reseune and—"

"I know Reseune Security is on the case. But tell it your way."

"—and Cyteen. Which lets the Justice Bureau call on us to help the Novgorod police. They can't do the kind of stuff we'd like to—Novgorod is just too big. The police are talkingabout card-accesses on every subway gate, but that just means they'll always have somebody else's keycard, and they'll kill people to get them. A lot of things they could do to stop the bombings are real expensive, and they'd slow everybody down and make them take hours getting to and from work. They say Cyteen Station is getting real nervous and they aredoing keycard checks and print-locks and all of that. So they've decided the only real way to get the Paxers is to infiltrate them. So they have. You just send somebody inside and you get good IDs and you start searching the keycard systems on thosemarkers and you start taking a few of them out, you aggravate whatever feuds you find—make them fight each other and keep increasing your penetrations until you can figure their net out. That'sthe way they're working it."

"You mean you know they're already doing it."

Catlin nodded. "I'm not supposed to know. But yes, sera, they are. And they know the airports are one of the places where some of the illegal stuff they get is getting through security, and that's how it's going to spread outsideNovgorod, which is what the rumor is. That there's going to be a hit somewhere else. That'swhat's going on out there."

"They're not grounding traffic, are they?"

"No, sera. People don't know it's going on. They don't need to know. But they're most worried about Planys and Novgorod. Novgorod because it's biggest and there's the shuttleport. And Planys because they think there's a problem there."

Sera closed the lid on the tank and laid the net down. "Go on. Take your time."

"They're terribly worried," Catlin said. "Sera, they're not talking about Jordan Warrick in the posters. It's against you.People are scared about the subways. That's the Paxers' job. People aren't being very smart. They have all these signs to tell them to watch about people leaving packages, and there's a rumor out that the police have installed this kind of electronics at the subway gates that'll blow any explosives up when it passes through that point, but that's not so. People are calling the city offices and asking about more ped-ways, but that's stupid—you can leave a package in a ped-tunnel that can kill just as many people. So all they can do is put up with it, but people are getting really upset, that's what they're saying, and when they're upset enough, the Committee comes out more and agitates with some lie they'll make up about you when they need it. They're not sure even this isn't something Khalid's behind, but that's just something Security wishes they could prove. But that'swhy they're doing all this stuff with the airports, and that's why Justin can't get a pass. And that's not the worst, sera. There issomebody who's getting stuff in and out of Planys. It's connected to Jordan Warrick. That's what's going on. That's why they're stopping Justin and Grant from going there."

Sera stayed very still a moment. Mad. Terribly mad and upset.

It was not hard to figure why sera partnered with Justin Warrick: Catlin knew the reasons in that the way she had known, after she had seen Florian attack a problem, that Florian was everything she needed in the world.

And when somebody was your partner, you felt connected to them, and you had rather anything than think they could fail you.