“You could’ve screened to let us know you’d be delayed.” There was an unpleasant edge in Nathan MacArtney’s reply. Then again, they’d expected him almost an hour earlier.

  “It’s not like we don’t all have plenty of ‘urgent appointments’ of our own we could be using our time on instead of sitting twiddling our thumbs,” MacArtney added.

  Kolokoltsov frowned at him, his eyes cold. Of all the people in this room, MacArtney, as Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Interior, bore the most direct responsibility for the unholy mess they faced. Kolokoltsov was prepared to admit he’d contributed his own fair share to the making of that mess, but none of the others could rival the string of disasters MacArtney and his ally, the late, unlamented Fleet Admiral Rajampet, had brewed up before Rajampet’s overdue suicide.

  “I decided it wasn’t a very good idea to discuss highly sensitive matters over the com, Nathan,” he said after a moment. “We’ve got enough alligators biting us on the arse without letting anything…unfortunate get leaked.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Innokentiy!” Malachai Abruzzi, the Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Information, shook his head. “Our coms are the most secure in the entire galaxy!”

  “Really?” Kolokoltsov crossed to the table, settled into the chair at its head, and turned it to face the others. “You’re confident of that, are you?”

  “Of course I am!”

  “Then perhaps you’d care to explain how the conversation you and Nathan had last month about how to handle the Hypatian situation happened to hit the public boards in Hypatia last week?”

  The silence in the deeply buried, heavily shielded conference room was as total as it was sudden, and he looked around his colleagues’ faces.

  “What conversation was that?” Omosupe Quartermain asked after a long, still moment. MacArtney, in particular, had been on the Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Commerce’s personal shit list ever since the situation in the Fringe began deteriorating, since she and her colleague Agatá Wodoslawski, the Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Treasury, were the ones trying desperately—and unsuccessfully—to cope with the catastrophic fiscal consequences.

  “The one in which they considered how much simpler things would get if we dropped an intervention battalion or two into Hypatia to ‘encourage’ President Vangelis to call off the referendum. Something about shooting every tenth senator until they got it right, I believe.” Kolokoltsov’s voice was even colder than his eyes, and Wodoslawski joined him and Quartermain in glowering at Abruzzi and MacArtney.

  “Oh, come on, Innokentiy!” Abruzzi protested. “That was never a serious policy suggestion!” He shook his head, expression disgusted. “For God’s sake, there are over two billion people on Hypatia, and another million-point-two in the Alexandria Belt! Someone really thinks a couple of intervention battalions are going to turn something like that around? Give me a break!”

  “Of course I don’t think that. That doesn’t mean someone else might not. And let’s be honest here, it wouldn’t be all that different from quite a few interventions OFS has pulled off out in the Protectorates, now would it? Did it ever occur to either of you that with feelings running as high as they are—and enough people on the other side primed to jump on any opening we give them—finding out that two of the ‘Mandarins’ are even talking about what would amount to a coup against a legally elected system president would play right into the hysteria mongers’ hands?”

  “First, we were on a secure government com. Who the hell was going to hear about it?” Abruzzi demanded. “And, secondly, it should’ve been totally clear from the context of our entire conversation that we were venting our frustration, not recommending some kind of serious policy!”

  “Malachai, you’re the Permanent Undersecretary of Information! You know, better than anyone else in this room, how easy it is to strip something out of its context and turn it into a soundbite that says exactly the opposite of what whoever said it actually meant. And that’s just what some bastard in Hypatia’s done with your and Nathan’s little conversational…faux pas.”

  Abruzzi had opened his mouth to respond. Now he shut it again, his expression thunderous, because Kolokoltsov was right. The Ministry of Information spent far more of its resources on “shaping the narrative”—what an earlier and more honest age might have called “producing propaganda”—than it ever did on straight news releases.

  “How the hell did anybody get their hands on it in the first place?” MacArtney demanded, glaring at Abruzzi with a certain self-righteousness. He wasn’t the one who’d just proclaimed the inviolability of their communications channels, after all.

  “If I knew that, whoever’s responsible for it would be roasting on a slow spit,” Kolokoltsov replied grimly. “All I know is that the latest courier boat from Hypatia came in about three hours ago, and your conversation—shorn of anything that could conceivably suggest it wasn’t a serious policy suggestion, or at least a serious consideration—had been on the boards for two days before it left. In those two days, according to Stephanos, it logged over nine hundred and seventy-two million hits. I’ve done the math, by the way. That works out to forty-nine percent of the total population of the star system, including every babe in arms. And for your information, that’s seventy-five percent of the adult population. To say it isn’t playing well with the voters would be something of an understatement, Nathan.”

  “Oh my God.” Quartermain’s tone couldn’t seem to decide between disgust, anger, and resignation. “So how bad is the damage, Innokentiy?”

  “Well it isn’t good.” Kolokoltsov popped a data chip into the terminal in front of him and the header of a report appeared on his colleagues’ displays. “This is Nye’s initial take on it. He’s doing a more deliberate analysis, and the numbers may get a little better, but I doubt it’ll make much difference in the end. And the conclusion he’s reached is that what was going to be a squeaker that would probably go against us is in the process of turning into something just a bit more…emphatic. The word he used was ‘tsunami,’ actually.”

  “All over what couldn’t be more than three or four seconds of a com conversation?” Wodoslawski looked as if she would have liked to be incredulous.

  “Oh, it’s more than three or four seconds.” Kolokoltsov spared MacArtney and Abruzzi a fulminating glare, then looked at Wodoslawski. “It would seem there was quite a bit of ‘frustration venting’ in the conversation, and whoever handed it over to the Hypatian newsies must have edited all the choicer bits together, because the actual soundbite runs almost six minutes. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying this is the only thing driving Hypatian public opinion. There were already a lot of negative factors in the mix, and we all know it. But it looks as if this could be the emotional trigger that turns a vote that already looked dicey into an outright disaster.”

  “Shit.” Omosupe Quartermain seldom used colorful language, but she’d clearly decided to make an exception, and Kolokoltsov didn’t blame her.

  With less than a third of Beowulf System’s population, and perhaps a fifth of its gross system product, Hypatia was on the small size for what was technically a Core System of the League. For that matter, as a full member system, Hypatia’s contribution to the Solarian League’s federal budget was limited, aside from the relatively modest duties levied on its interstellar shipping. It was a useful bit of cash flow, but there were probably a dozen Protectorate systems which contributed at least as much. So from that perspective, Hypatia’s potential defection was unlikely to make an already grim situation much worse.

  But Hypatia, like Beowulf, had been a founding member of the Solarian League when the League Constitution was proclaimed right here in Old Chicago seven hundred fifty-seven T-years ago last month. Not only that, the system was only forty-four light-years—less than six days, for a dispatch boat—from Beowulf and the Beowulf Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. If Hypatia opted to secede and, even more disastrously, to throw in its lot with its longtime neighbors, trading partners, and friends, it would expand the “Grand Alliance’s” bridgehead at the very heart of the Solarian League dangerously. Worse, a successful secession—another successful secession, since Beowulf’s was a foregone conclusion as soon as the Beowulfers got around to holding their own vote—would go a disastrously long way toward validating the right to secede in the court of public opinion.

  And that could not be allowed.

  “Perhaps you can see now why I didn’t screen you about this,” Kolokoltsov observed. “In fact, I know it’s going to be an incredible pain, but in addition to assuming anything we say on our nice, secure com system is likely to be overheard and watching our tongues accordingly, I think any sensitive information will need to be couriered back and forth between us, at least for the next few days. For that matter, it’d probably be smart of us to handle really sensitive information that way for the foreseeable future.”

  “That’d make it almost impossible to coordinate properly,” Wodoslawski objected.

  “No, it won’t.” Kolokoltsov shook his head. “It’ll make it difficult, granted, but all of us—except you—have our offices here in George Benton. I don’t know how they got to Nathan and Malachai’s com conversation, but this conference room is only a lift shaft away from our private offices, and it’s shielded against every form of eavesdropping known to man. For that matter, so are our offices. I’ve already found you twenty-four thousand square meters of floor space here in the tower, and if you need it, we can free up twice that much in seventy-two hours. I know moving your entire staff over would be a pain in the arse, but I don’t really see an option if we’re going to keep you in the loop.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Dead serious,” he said flatly. “Look, maybe this is an exercise in paranoia on my part, but we’re about to get handed our heads in Hypatia, people. So far, most of the Core Worlds aren’t especially worried about all this, which is a mixed blessing. They’re not champing at the bit to throw their support behind us, but we don’t have a couple dozen Beowulfs bolting from the League…yet. But that’s why we can’t—we just can’t—go on with this kind of crap hitting us in the face every other week.”

  He looked around the conference room for a long, silent moment and saw it in their faces. So far, the majority of Core Worlders still regarded the conflict with Manticore as only one more “escapade” in the Fringe. They were used to that sort of thing—so used to it that they took it for granted. True, this time the Manties’ wormhole seizures were starting to pinch many of the inner member systems enough to hurt, but what was pneumonia for the federal government’s revenue stream was little more than a minor cold for the various system economies, and that was especially true for those in the Core, who had plenty of domestic industry. And despite the enormous death tolls the SLN had suffered, there was little moral outrage, either. For one thing, the public at large didn’t know how high those totals were. For another, the SLN was a professional military force which represented an incredibly tiny demographic of the League’s total population. Those deaths simply weren’t impacting any significant percentage of the civilian population—not yet, at least—and in many ways, he and his colleagues were just as happy about that. There were a few talking heads trying to “view with alarm” where the navy’s losses were concerned, but they were gaining remarkably little traction, especially with Abruzzi managing the news flow so carefully. All of which meant the Manties were managing to strangle the Mandarins to death without enraging Solarian public opinion—outside the Sol System, where the professional governing class lived, at least.

  That was both a good thing and a bad thing from the Mandarins’ perspective, but so far, the good outweighed the bad. And if they went on shedding the member systems which were paying attention, some of those other fat-and-happy member systems were going to wake up and smell the coffee. And if that happened…

  “I’ve talked to my tech people,” he went on. “That’s one of the reasons I was so late. And they say that if we’re all here in the tower, they can run secure, shielded, hardwired com lines that could only be tapped with direct physical access to the cables. I know it sounds like Dark Ages technology, but if it’ll work, I don’t really give a damn how ‘antiquated’ it is. And if all the cable involved is here in the same tower, it’ll be a lot easier for us to make sure nobody’s getting that physical access to it.”

  Wodoslawski sat back, shaking her head, and Kolokoltsov couldn’t blame her. In truth, he wasn’t certain himself how much of his proposal was rational and how much was the product of his own increasing desperation. The worst thing about it, he thought, was that he proposed to turn Benton Tower into a fortress, and people living inside fortresses developed fortress mentalities. If he and his colleagues retreated into a bunker, even one as splendidly equipped as this one, it might encourage them to retreat into a deeper and deeper disconnect with the galaxy about them, as well.

  But where’s the option? he asked himself. Whether we like it or not, somebody hacked our coms, and none of our techs have found any fingerprints pointing at who it might’ve been or how the hell they did it. And I don’t have to explain all the implications to the others. They know as well as I do that if someone can hack our coms, God only knows what else they can break into! And really, the only one who’d be physically moving would be Agatá. The rest of us’re already in George Benton! For that matter, most of the ministries have been here since the day it was built, so it’s not even like the rest of the League will realize we’re forting up in the first place!

  No, they wouldn’t. George Benton Tower was indelibly associated in the public’s mind with the might and majesty of the League’s Federal Government. Moving the other ministries out of George Benton would have generated far more speculation than moving Treasury into it. But he and his colleagues would know, and so would their most senior and trusted subordinates. And from there, the awareness would seep downward with the inevitability of a winter freeze in Tarko-Sale, his hometown in ancient Siberia.

  He looked around the shielded, guarded conference room once more and wondered how often his fellows reflected upon the name of the two-kilometer tall tower which housed the Solarian League’s heart and brain. Thought about the fact that it had been named for one of the dozen or so most famous human beings in history, the man most responsible, in many ways, for the League’s creation. The co-leader of the medical teams—the teams from Beowulf—which had preserved human life on Old Earth itself after the Final War. The man who’d seen the need for a coordinating authority that could span hundreds of light-years, recognized its necessity in the wake of the catastrophic damage he’d done so much to repair, and spent the last thirty-five T-years of his life bringing that authority into existence.

  The man whose distant descendant headed the Beowulf System government which was about to stab the Solarian League in the heart. Of course, he must have literally billions of “distant descendants” after the next best thing to eight hundred years, and it was only logical for them to be concentrated in Beowulf and its closest galactic neighbors. Yet it was bitterly ironic that even as Chyang Benton-Ramirez prepared to oversee the referendum which would supply the dagger, yet another of those descendants commanded the “Grand Fleet” which might well drive it home.

  It was, perhaps, fortunate so few Solarians were sufficiently aware of their own history to ask why that man’s descendants had chosen to destroy all he’d built.

  “All right,” Wodoslawski said at last. “My analysts and accountants need more space than we’ve got over at De Soto Tower, anyway. We’ve been looking at possible solutions for the last couple of years, really, in a desultory sort of way. For that matter, we’ve already considered moving into George Benton, and it looks like I can free up everything they need back in De Soto by moving my administrative personnel over here. That should at least keep it from looking like some kind of…panic reaction.”

  “And how long is it going to take to install these ‘hardwired’ coms of yours?” MacArtney demanded. For someone whose loose lips had contributed so much to the need for those selfsame coms, he sounded remarkably belligerent, Kolokoltsov thought.

  “They’ll be running the first lines to all the offices here in the tower within two or three hours,” he replied. “It’d be faster to just reprogram the wall molycircs, but a lot less secure, so they’re running actual cable through the air ducts and service shafts. According to my security chief and the building executive, they should complete the installation within eight days or so. After that, we can probably go back to electronic conferencing for everything but the most sensitive data.”

  “‘Probably,’” Abruzzi repeated sourly, then shrugged. “All right. I think you may be jumping at shadows—or, at least, closing the barn door after the cow’s left—but I also didn’t think a frigging joke with Nathan would turn Hypatia into a damned disaster, either! So I’m not going to tell you you don’t have a point, Innokentiy!”

  Kolokoltsov nodded and turned his gaze on MacArtney.

  “All right. All right!” The permanent senior undersecretary of the interior raised both hands. “If everyone else’s ready to go along with this, who am I to argue? And,” he added grudgingly, “Malachai’s right. If something he and I tossed off in a casual conversation can have the kind of effect your analyst’s describing, it’s probably time we all got paranoid as hell!”

  Not the most gracious assent in history, Kolokoltsov reflected, but he’d take it. Now if only he could figure out some way to toss MacArtney off the troika before he did something even more regrettable. Unfortunately, every single one of them knew where too many bodies were buried for the others to safely feed him—or her—to the wolves.