Why anyone would want to serve a stone was beyond her, but Jamie Anderson just took the news with a shrug, and reached for her kit.

  “What’s the aim?”

  “You have to keep the rock alive for the next forty-eight hours,” Lassiter told her.

  Jamie stopped, not sure she’d heard him right. Lassiter was looking at her expectantly.

  “It’s a rock,” she said.

  “It’s a living rock,” Lassiter told her.

  “Riiight. And what kills it?”

  “That’s not something they were willing to divulge. I tried to explain that it would be difficult to keep their Pinnacle alive, if we didn’t know what posed a threat to it. The only thing I could get from them was that it wouldn’t be a good idea to let the Pinnacle get wet.”

  Jamie quirked an eyebrow.

  “As in water causes erosion, and might cause premature aging?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But you said they’re visiting a water world.”

  Lassiter gave a short laugh.

  “I know. Ironic isn’t it?”

  Jamie put her hands on her hips.

  “Okay, boss. What did I do, this time?”

  She watched as Lassiter’s face went from amused, to surprised, to a complete and utter blank.

  “Come on, boss. What was it?”

  “Well, there was that little matter on Deloran III.”

  “Yeah, and how was I supposed to prevent that from becoming a train wreck? HQ got the wrong information. They didn’t verify it before they sent me out. They didn’t let me verify it, and hoots-ma-toot, suddenly we’re ass-deep in baby alligators.”

  “Which you promptly shot.”

  “They were tryin’ to eat me, at the time.”

  “HQ did point that out to the client, and it saved us some of the penalty fee.”

  “And the duff gen?”

  “Well, that saved us some more.”

  “Oh, give it a rest, boss. That allowed them to be able to impose counter-penalties and the client then—”

  “Took his custom elsewhere, and our reputation suffered.”

  “That should not be my problem.”

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  “Let’s just say HQ thinks your horizons need expanding.”

  “Uh, huh. You mean HQ would like me to solve their next bit of misinformation with something other than my gun.”

  At least Lassiter had the grace to blush.

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t suppose the client gave you any information on who its enemies might be?”

  Lassiter cleared his throat, and looked down at his shoes.

  “Well, that’s just fine and dandy. We don’t know what would kill the rock, we don’t know who, and. I don’t suppose we have any inkling why, or why they want to do it in the next forty-eight?”

  “Now that you mention it,” Lassiter said.

  Now that she’d finished waving them around, Jamie put her hands back on her hips, and glared. Lassiter continued to stare at her for a long minute, and then he turned on the television in the corner of the room. Clicking through the channels, he finally settled on one that opened on a swirl of brightly colored fish, and then zoomed in on solid stone structures bedecked with corals, anemones, and seaweed.

  One side of the structure looked built into a cliff, above a sheer drop into an underwater trench. The other walls of the centre vanished into coral growth, or vanished into the edge of a seaweed forest, growing on the plateau on which it was built. The building was fitted with clear plascrete windows, which looked in on a conference room.

  Jamie blinked and then took another look. The view through the conference-room windows was a little distorted, but she could still see the odd arrangement of a table that stood in the centre of the hall. Around the inside of the table was the usual array of seating for air-breathing delegates, but the other half of the table itself protruded into a tank that ran down the centre, and which was set with an array of equipment meant for water-breathing delegates.

  The television showed several underwater craft moving through the depths on approach to the city.

  …delegates arriving for the inaugural meeting of the Cetacean worlds. This is the first face to face conference between delegates from both air- and water-breathing factions in any of the known galaxies, the commentator said.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Jamie said, her voice barely above a breath. “Nothing I did is deserving of this.”

  Lassiter glanced back at her.

  “You know I don’t like water, boss.”

  “HQ said it would be good for you to face your fears.”

  With an effort, Jamie suppressed the flash of anger, and words that not even Lassiter, for all his understanding, could overlook.

  “But I just blew the last mission. Surely there are other operatives more qualified.”

  “No one knows Askreya better than you.”

  Jamie’s heart plummeted. Askreya. Officially, her home world.

  “There’s a reason I left home as soon as I came of age,” she said. In truth, she had hoped never to see the world again.

  “I know. You said it was because there was too much water.” He left the news report running in the background and gave her his full attention. “Is that the truth?”

  Now, it was Jamie’s turn to blush. As he had no doubt guessed, that was indeed not all the truth. Lassiter waited, his calm brown gaze never leaving her face. Finally, Jamie found an answer that best explained it.

  “There’s a reason I don’t like water, boss.”

  “You nearly drowned?”

  “I was nearly drowned.”

  “Hard to imagine you irritating anybody that much.”

  “Is that meant to be a joke?”

  Lassiter didn’t dignify that with a reply, but his half-suppressed smirk said it all.

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Did I tell Recruiting?”

  “You should have.”

  “I didn’t want them to send me back.”

  “It might have made them think twice about assigning you to anything on that world.”

  “When I’m the one that knows it best, and a galaxies’ first conference is going on? Give it a break.”

  “True.” Lassiter’s smirk disappeared. “Tell me what contingencies I need to have in place.”

  “You mean you actually want me back?”

  This time, Lassiter looked sympathetic.

  “Despite what HQ wants to believe, you’re one of my better agents.”

  “Gee thanks.”

  “So, spill.”

  Jamie did.

  “I was sixteen,” she said, “when one of the corps worked out I could hear the fish.”

  From Lassiter’s suddenly raised eyebrows that was news, too.

  “Yeah, I know. I didn’t tell HQ. Anyway, the corp decided they wanted me to work with them to track down the purple divers.” She hesitated, then made a wide armed gesture toward the television. “It was wrong. The corp was hunting them for their oil and their scent. I pretended to be willing to accept their offer, and started packing, but they found my blog and figured out I wasn’t about to help them.”