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Big Jacques made a fist and struck the table. “Press on, then!”

“No,” said Dawshoo.

And that silenced everyone. Oschous sat slowly. Egg lowered himself to the floor, where he squatted cross-legged. Big Jacques looked left and right at the Ten and resumed his seat. “What then?” he asked in a voice like an earthquake.

“I said there were two paths,” said Dawshoo Yishohrann. “But we can blaze a third. We do not merely press on. We break through! We have been fighting our colleagues, the ones who remained slaves to the regime. The time has come to attack the Names themselves, to lay siege to the Secret City. Victory, or death!” He spread his arms wide. Grand gambles required grand words and grand gestures.

There was a moment of silence. Then Big Jacques struck the table once more and the table, big as it was, shuddered.

“Victory, or death!”

The cry was taken up around the room, by a few at first, then by all. Some, Dawshoo noted, called on victory; but others, and by no means the fewer, called on death.

* * *

After the meeting, they broke into small groups and each group discussed what would be needed for the planned offensive. Dawshoo, Oschous, and Gidula circulated among them, collecting and collating their ideas, encouraging their thinking. “Don’t stop with the obvious,” Oschous told them. “The mad ideas are the best.”

When they broke for lunch, Dawshoo excused himself and crossed town, where he stealthed into the governor’s compound by an unexpected route and waited in Mashdasan’s office until the swoswai returned from his own lunch. The governor, when he saw the Shadow occupying his desk, hesitated an instant at the door. Then he allowed the door to slide closed behind him and hung his cap casually on the hat tree. Dawshoo admired the sangfroid. Whatever their cognitive shortfalls, the boots did not lack for bravery.

“Well?” the swoswai said. He stood, awkwardly, before his own desk. He did not waste time blustering or asking for identification. He knew what he faced.

“Stop trying to listen.”

Mashdasan thrust chin and chest forward. “You don’t think we’d learn anything?”

“On the contrary, I am very much afraid that you might.” Dawshoo paused, then added, “You ought to fear that, too. The man who knows things makes of himself a target for all. One side may destroy him to silence what the other side would destroy him to hear. What man is so foolish as to place his generative organ in the buzz saw? Wiser, he is to know nothing.”

The swoswai’s hand had moved protectively at Dawshoo’s pithy image, but he checked the motion. “I could order this planet destroyed, and all of you with it,” he said. Now came the bluster. He was compelled to say something of the sort, Dawshoo knew, because he knew he was afraid and did not want to know that.

Dawshoo shrugged. “And I could order you destroyed. It would last longer and hurt more, and it would certainly be less impersonal. But I bear you no ill will, Swoswai. I would regard that passage no more happily than you, and so, we both having the same objective, some accommodation might be reached.”

The governor swallowed. “Some may ask later why I did not listen. I have my duties.”

He was answered by a guileless smile. “Perhaps you did not suspect who we were.”

“Then I would have been a blind man.”

“Then perhaps your devices were detected and disabled. No one can fault you for being bested by the likes of us. We found all four this morning.”

The swoswai blinked. Then he nodded. “Perhaps we will continue to hide them and you will continue to find them.”

Dawshoo understood his meaning. The motions would be gone through, but the military would restrain themselves. He rose from behind the governor’s desk and, as he circled it to the right, the swoswai edged around to the left. Seated once more in his proper place, Mashdasan seemed to grow more confident. “I will have my men show you out,” he said, reaching for the summoner.

But Dawshoo demurred. “Don’t trouble yourself. I will leave the way I came.” As he faded toward the door, Mashdasan bent over his reports. “Oh, one thing,” the governor added just before the Shadow touched the door plate. He looked up from the desk. “We only planted three.”

* * *

In the afternoon, the group meetings produced success trees and idea boxes. The trees detailed the sequences of contingent events required to ensure a successful operation. The boxes listed on their stubs the essential features an operation must possess—facilities, assets, materials, time lines, and so forth—and along the rows multiple alternatives for each. Dawshoo turned copies of these over to Oschous and Gidula, who would generate random combinations of alternatives as a way of seeding their own creativity.

“Nothing too pedestrian,” he warned them. “A coup is as much an art form as it is a decapitation. Future generations should admire the craft of our blow, and not merely the cause in which it was struck. Besides, anything too ordinary has already been anticipated. Our erstwhile colleagues will have analyzed the failure modes of their defenses. We must identify some unexpected weakness; some blind spot in their foresight.”

When Oschous Dee Karnatika smiled he resembled a fox. He belonged to that race of men whose faces bore a fine, red, downy fur. The magicians of the old Commonwealth had in their pride toyed with the genes of men; and what they had learned before consequence brought them low was that genes were like a dangling mobile. If you jiggled one of them, others jiggled in response, and often in surprising and undesired ways. Dee Karnatika’s ancestors had been engineered for enhanced cleverness and—on the broad average—successfully so. The price had been paid in face fuzz and protruding lower facial process, so that their fellow men recognized them immediately as the clever sort and responded with increased wariness. So does yin excite its yang.

“Gidula and me, we’ll work the problem separately. Then score each of our plans against the goals and objectives and hybridize what we can. We may go several rounds before we come up with something invulnerable. Do you want a plan before we leave the planet?”

“A fisherman impatient catches naught. Hasten slowly, my friend.”

The Fox struck his breast in salute and left the meeting room, leaving Dawshoo with Gidula. A few moments passed in silence. Then the old man said, “Oschous is a clever man. Far more clever than I. He will devise a good plan.”

“So will you. His will be clever; yours will be wise. The child born of their mating will be the superior to both.” First Speaker paused and looked away. “How clever is he, do you think?”

Gidula hesitated and cocked his head. “Is there a problem?”

“Mashdasan told me that MILINTEL planted but three bugs.”

“Ah.” The old man tugged on his beard. “And we found four.”

“Yes. Who planted the fourth bug?”

“Mashdasan. He lied. He wanted to upset you.”

“If so, a point for him. But it seems more clever than his wont. What if he spoke truly?”

“I could visit him tonight and learn.”

Dawshoo shook his head. “No. We have a truce, an understanding. If we break it, the garrison will take revenge. They have not our talent for retail mayhem, but for wholesale they do well enough.”

“You think perhaps an agent-in-place is here on Henrietta and we were misfortunate enough to meet here in his lap?”

“That, or a colleague of ours still embraces the Names.”

“Twenty years is a long time for undercover work. Pretend too long and … can it remain pretense?” Gidula thought about the matter and walked to the window, where he looked out over the harbor. Gulls shrieked over the naval craft and pleasure boats. “If a Deadly One had planted the fourth bug,” he said finally, “would Little Jacques have found it so easily?”