Nor were these two the sort to build confidence. As Sula watched from the window, one ear cocked for the sound of the announcer on the video, she saw one of the cops collect some graft from the lottery seller on the corner, and the other help himself to some spiced fry bread from a vendor.

 Choke on it,she thought at him, and withdrew into the apartment before they could see her.

 The executions went on. Sula’s stylus jotted names and numbers as she busied herself with calculation. Lieutenant Captain Hong had led Action Group Blanche, which was composed of eleven action teams, each of three Terrans, plus his own headquarters group of six, with his extra servants, runners, and a communications tech. Action Group Blanche therefore had thirty-nine personnel. There were four other action groups, one each for the Cree, Daimong, Torminel, and Lai-own species, and though Sula hadn’t met any of their members, she assumed they were organized the same way as Action Group Blanche, so that Eshruq’s whole command would have constituted 195 members, plus his own headquarters group.

 Those identified as members of the action groups—“rebel anarchists and saboteurs,” as the Naxids called them, as opposed to the mere “rebels” of Pahn-ko’s administration—amounted to only 175. Ten, the announcers said, had been killed while resisting arrest, or in Hong’s luckless engagement on the Axtattle Parkway.

 Three more—Sula’s own Action Team 491—were supposed to have died in an explosion in their apartment at Grandview, a booby trap that Sula had set off to catch the security forces she knew were closing in. The story of their deaths was pure propaganda—unless by some miraculous coincidence the Naxids actuallyhad found three burned Terran bodies in the wreckage—but Sula supposed she might wring some advantage in being officially dead.