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half decades ago, cancelled a guaranteed program, shoved me into a teaching position, which is another honor I’d rather not have had. So now you want me to set up a lab, and I suppose you expect I should gratefully vote for you, if you stand in the next elections.”
    Oh, she was absolutely everything his aides had said. Brilliant, a Special, a mind ranked as a national treasure. Specials weren’t necessarily nice people—a lot of them were downright eetee. The woman’s students either worshiped or hated her—according to their skills and personal tolerances. But they still enrolled. Nobody cared about a Special’s manners, where it came to her work.
    “We haven’t said a thing about your voting your conscience, which I trust, being an ethical woman, you will do wherever you’re based. Hell, stand for Science yourself. You always could have done that.”
    “Correction. Not easy in a military bubble, where politics has kept me for decades. Equally inconvenient to do that from a Reseune Security bubble at the end of space, where you want to send me. I detest the military. I detest Reseune. And you want me to work under a local Reseune director who’s absolutely guaranteed to be a by-the-book rule-follower.”
    Ah. That was the concept. Maybe not an entirely irrational prejudice.
    “If you knew Ollie Strassen you wouldn’t hold that opinion. And I’d have thought you’d gotten tired of graduate theses. You got caught in a situation, let me remind you, I didn’t personally choose. I still support the decision, for the record, but this post I’m offering you is vastly different; and it may, I hope, make some amends for your time in purgatory. Far-gone is a very comfortable place.”
    “And I’d be under stringent security.”
    “You were under that security at Beta, which has far fewer amenities than Fargone.”
    “And how long would I be there? Eventually I foresee a hardscrabble station orbiting a snowball.”
    “A living laboratory. Your laboratory, should you ever choose to view that world in person. But I think the proposal makes it clear—you’ll never be required to leave Fargone Station. You’ll work in a civilized, state of the art laboratory, handling everything from there…a three-month lag in information, necessarily, six on a query to the object of your operations and back again, but you’ll be in civilized surroundings, under perfectly innocuous cover, so long as you yourself choose to be.” Give it a few years, and he’d bet that Eversnow would draw her out to the site. Hands-on work, a whole world for a lab, would draw Sandi Patil like an addiction: he knew her history She’d eventually get exasperated with the six-month timelag on her results and go to Eversnow herself…if she’d take the post in the first place. And nothing he had thus far heard from her discouraged him from enlisting her. “Let me be perfectly open with you,” he said quietly. “Yes, you got an infamously bad deal during the War—”
    “I got an infamously bad deal, damned right. Yanked out of my own research. Lured onto this dustball for a huge program I worked on for fifteen years—that got canceled six weeks before it implemented, largely thanks to Reseune. Pardon me if I have just a little apprehension about agreeing to another Reseune operation.”
    “There’ll be no going back on this.”
    Patil stared at him, dark eyes in a pale face surrounded by pale hair, and right now there was no beauty, nothing but harsh, hard assessment. “And how long will you stay in office, Proxy Councillor? And how long until this kid comes along and cancels everything I’m working on, just the way her predecessor did?”
    Blunt question.
    “We advance it now,” he said carefully. “We get the project implemented. That way there’ll be no profit in not going ahead, and there’ll be, let me remind you, nothing like the die-off zones, nothing like woolwood. Or platytheres.”
    “It’s a damn snowball!”
    “It’s