"Easy, brother," Corwin cut him off, hands held palm outward. "You're preaching to the converted, remember?"

"Sorry," Justin growled. "Priesly's pack has a way of getting under my skin. I wish someone had realized sooner that the Jects were a political powder keg waiting for a flicker to come along. That should have been obvious as soon as we found out about Cobra Syndrome."

"Hindsight is wonderful, isn't it?" Corwin said dryly. "What would you have done, then?"

"Given them the regular nanocomputer and made them full Cobras in the first place," Justin growled. "It's just a waste of time, energy, and expensive equipment to have them running around with bone laminae and servos their computer won't let them use."

Corwin cocked an eyebrow. He'd heard variants of that argument before, but never from Justin. "You don't really mean that."

"Why not?" Justin countered. "Okay, so the training period uncovered psychological problems the pre-screening had missed. So what? Most of the glitches weren't all that severe; given time, they'd probably have worked things out eventually by themselves."

"And what about the harder cases?" Corwin asked. "Would you really have taken the risk of turning potentially unstable Cobras loose on the general population?"

"We could have handled that," Justin said doggedly. "They could have been assigned out of the way somewhere-permanent spine leopard hunting duty, maybe, or the really tricky cases could have been sent toCaelian. If they didn't work out their problems, eventually they'd have done something stupid and gotten themselves killed."

"And if they weren't so cooperative?" Corwin asked quietly. "If they decided instead that they were being dumped on and went after revenge?"

Some of the energy went out of Justin's face. "Yeah," he sighed. "And then it would be Challinor all over again."

A shiver went up Corwin's back. Tors Challinor's attempted treason had occurred well over half a century ago, before he'd even been born... but he remembered the stories his parents had told him about that time. Remembered them as vividly as if he'd been there himself. Jonny had made sure of that; the incident had carried some vital truths, and he hadn't wanted them to ever get lost.