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some yellow journalist's take on whatever minuscule evidence there was at that point?" He lay down on
his cushion and sagged back, yawned. "So do we play this as usual?"
"We may as well start that way," Lee said. "We'll sniff the scene together, anyway. But after that you'd
better see what you can do with prediscovery."
"You always do this to me when Alfen are involved," Gelert said. "I hate it."
"You're better at data search than I am," Lee said. "It's not my fault you take every opportunity to rub my
nose in your competence. And with those people's data protection laws, any tricks you've got, we're
going to need."
Gelert looked briefly glum. "Mass?" Lee said.
"Two minutes, Lee."
"Not that. Cut a copy of the usual discovery-and-litigation agreement and sim it over to Matt's office
before he thinks of a way to weasel out of the commitment."
"There before you, boss-lady. You're slipping."
Lee smiled slightly. "Heads up, he's on," Mass said.
The commwall went bright with the view into Charl Hagen's office. This could have been mistaken for a
view of the outdoors, for Hagen was fairly "old management" in what was now the biggest of the
telecomms multiuniversals, and Lee remembered her astonishment at discovering that the witness she had
been dispatched to interview had not only a forest in his office, but a trout stream. Right now sun was
pouring through the rooftop glass of the conservatory side of Hagen's office, and the man himself was
coming around from behind the desk. "Lee. Gelert. Thanks for calling."
"No problem at all," Lee said, looking Hagen over non-judicially for a second as he sat on the front of his
desk. It had been six months now since the end of the Xainacom antitrust trials, and Hagen looked a little
less harried, had put on a little weight—though it didn't show that much on his big-boned six-foot-two.
He was well turned out as always, in a fashionable one-piece suit that nonetheless be-trayed its
off-the-rack origins and its wearer's too-busy-for-fittings attitude, looking as if someone had applied it to
Hagen with a shovel. The dark shaggy hair and the little, close-set, thoughtful eyes in the man's blunt face
always made Lee wonder if Hagen had any Midgarthr blood in him, and whether the human seeming
might be a courtesy-cover-ing over something more basic, a formal suit allowed to fall away for short
periods when the Moon was right.
"It's been a little while," Hagen said. "You two been all right?"
"Busy," Gelert said.
Hagen grinned, and again Lee saw bear, and had to put the image aside. "Here, too," Hagen said.
Lee nodded. At the end of a legal case lasting years, Xainacom had been forced into a massive
corporate divesti-ture in the Earth universe. The truth was that the defeat for the company was a minor
one—the market in Earth's uni-verse being nothing like the size of those in Xainese home space, spread
across thousands of planets—and when the appeals process was exhausted, the "home office" hadn't
considered the affair worth going to war over. Xainacom Earth had been fractured into a number of
still-huge com-munications- and media-related companies, and those of its competitors who had spent
vast sums of money assisting with the prosecution were now circling the staggering sur-vivors with an eye
to either absorption or destruction. Of all the competitors, ExTel was by far the biggest, and it was
wasting no time assuring itself of the best pickings among the divestitures. Lee could believe that Hagen,
as the com-pany's CEO for extracontinual affairs, had been a lot more than "busy."
"We got a call from Matt Carathen just now," Lee said. "He suggested that you had asked for our
services."
"That's right. Omren dil'Sorden is one of my local peo-ple. I don't have time for some anonymous flunky
at Parker to fiddle around with it and maybe get a result, maybe not—I want this thing cleaned up before
it gets high-profile enough to make the company's PR people have to start spin-ning God knows what to
the national press. We have enough going on around here at the moment. So right now, I need Parker's
best, and right now, that looks like you."
Lee smiled gently at the flattery, while thinking that "cleaned up" was a strange way to put it, but she
supposed she could see his point. "What was dil'Sorden's position, exactly?" she said.
"R&D," Hagen said. "He was working on network de-velopment, especially intercontinually gatewayed
links—you'll have to check his personnel records for the details, the technologies he was working on
were still pretty theoretical. They could have been very important, though, and I want whoever did this
identified and locked up."
"Do you have any suspicions?" Gelert said.
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