attack us like wolves," Taliaferro said simply, "and that'd be just as good as their scattering like sheep. But we can't touch her. She can't be bought, she can't be blackmailed, she can't be intimidated, and she's headed the Fringe Caucus for fifteen years. After hst deek, she might as well be in God's hip pocket!" "True," Fouchet said, his lips curving slowly, "but accidents do happen, don't they? And Granyork isn't like a colony world. Why, we're right in the middle of the Northeast Corridor Conurbation, and that's a sort of jungle Fringers aren't well equipped to deal with.

"What are you saying?" Dieter's horror cut the sudden silence like a saw. "You can't possibly suggest--was "I didn't hear Mister Fouchet suggest a thing, Oskar," Taliaferro said coldly. "I only heard him speculating idly on matters totally beyond our control. And, of course, he's quite right. If Ms. MacTaggart were to suffer an. accident, it could only help us on the floor.

Unless, of course, our enemies were able to... invent... a connection between her accident and us." "Oh, of course" Fouchet agreed. "Of course." Fionna MacTaggart considered the face in her mirror critically. It wasn't quite as young as she still liked to think of herself, and she'd never been--comin her opinion--a beauty, but her image had nothing to apologize for. She nodded companionably to herself. "Just you and me, girl," she said softly. "No one else has to know how hard we worked for that, do they?" She chuckled and reached for her small evening bag.

She glanced into her bag at the snub-nosed and chunky two-millimeter needler and debated leaving it behind, for if it was small, it was still heavy. And it wasn't as ff she were headed into the back islands.

Granyork was the epicenter of the ultracivilized Heart Worlds. Still, she knew how Lad would react if she went unarmed.... She sighed and closed the bag.

She keyed her bedside terminal and the screen lit briefly with an attention pattern, then with Ladislaus"