Cobra Alliance

was more powerful than even a Cobra.

'He'll see me,' Jonny said. 'Tell him I'm here.'

The other guard glanced at his partner. 'The Committe's quite busy, sir, with the departure tomorrow and all —'

'Tell him I'm here,' Jonny repeated.

The first guard pursed his lips and touched a control at his throat. His conversation was brief and inaudible, but a moment later he nodded. 'The Committe will see you, Syndic,' he told Jonny. 'Your escort will be here shortly.'

Jonny nodded and settled down to wait; and when the escort arrived, he wasn't surprised to see who it was.

'Jonny,' Jame nodded in greeting. His smile was cordial but tight. 'Committe D'arl's waiting in his office. If you'll follow me....'

They passed through the heavy kyrelium steel entryway and between another pair of armored Marines. 'I was hoping to see you again before we left,' Jame said as they started into a maze of short corridors. 'Your office said you were on vacation and couldn't be reached.'

'Chrys thought it would help me to get away for a couple of weeks,' Jonny told him evenly. 'Try to come to grips with what your Committe's done to us.'

Jame looked sideways at him. 'And... did you?'

'You mean do I intend to attack him?' Jonny shook his head. 'No. All I want is to understand him, to find out why. He owes me that much.'

Ahead, two more Marines—this pair in dress uniforms—flanked an obviously reinforced door. Jame led the way between them and palmed the lock, and the panel slid soundlessly open.

'Syndic Moreau,' D'arl said, rising from the desk that dominated the modest-sized room. 'Welcome. Please sit down.' He indicated a chair across the desk from him.

Jonny did so. Jame took a chair by the desk's corner, equidistant from the other two men. Jonny wondered briefly if the choice was deliberate, decided it probably was.

'I'd hoped you'd come by this evening,' D'arl said, sitting back down himself. 'This will be our last chance to talk—shall we say 'honestly'?—before the tedious departure ceremonies Zhu has scheduled for tomorrow.'

' 'Tedious' ? I take it it's not the public acclaim or adoration that makes all this worthwhile to you, then.' Jonny took a moment to glance around the room. Comfortable, certainly, but hardly up to the standards of luxury he would have expected in a Dominion Committe's personal quarters. 'Obviously, it's not the wealth, either. So what is it? The power to make people do what you want?'

D'arl shook his head. 'You miss the whole point of what happened here.'

'Do I? You knew the gantuas would be going on a rampage just at the time you came dangling your Cobra bait in front of our faces. You knew all along it was the dehydrated blussa reeds, yet you said nothing about it until I forced your hand.'

'And what if I had?' D'arl countered. 'It's not as if I could be blamed for causing the situation.'

Jonny snorted. 'Of course not.'

'But as you said outside,' D'arl continued, as if he hadn't noticed the interruption, 'the important question is why. Why did I offer and why did Aventine accept?'

'Why the council accepted is easy,' Jonny said. 'You're a Dominion Committe and what you say goes.'

D'arl shook his head. 'I told you you were missing the point. The gantua problem helped, certainly, but it was really only part of a much more basic motivation. They accepted because it was the solution that required the least amount of work.'

Jonny frowned. 'I don't understand.'

'It's clear enough. By placing the main burden and danger of Aventine's growth on you Cobras, they've postponed any need to shift the responsibility to the general population. Given a chance to continue such a system, people will nearly always jump at it. Especially with an excuse as immediate and convenient as the gantuas to point to.'

'But it's only a short-term solution,' Jonny insisted. 'In the long run—'

'I know that,' D'arl snapped. 'But the fraction of humanity who can sacrifice their next meal for a feast two weeks away wouldn't fill this city. If you're going to stay in politics, you'd damn well better learn that.'

He stopped and grimaced into the silence. 'It's been years since I lost my temper in anything approaching public,' he admitted. 'Forgive me, and take it as a sign that I'm not any happier than you are that this had to be done.'

'Why did it?' Jonny asked quietly. Two weeks ago he would have shouted the question, putting into it all the frustration and fury he'd felt then. But now the anger was gone and he'd accepted his failure, and the question was a simple request for information.

D'arl sighed. 'The other why. Because, Syndic Moreau, it was the only way I could think of to save this world from disaster.' He waved his hand skyward. 'The Troft threats to close the Corridor have been getting louder and more insistent over the past year or so. Only one thing keeps them from doing it tonight: the fact that it would mean a two-front war. And for Aventine to be a credible part of that two-front threat, you must have a continued Cobra presence.'

Jonny shook his head. 'But it doesn't work that way. We have no transport capability to speak of—we can't possibly threaten them. And even if we could, they could always launch a pre-emptive strike and wipe us out from the sky in a matter of hours.'

'But they wouldn't. I once thought that myself, but the more I study the indirect psychological data gleaned