Chapter 2
Halan Follard: TRUSTWORTHLESS
Twisting the control yoke through a partial figure-eight, Halan Follard shifted the car’s airflow from the high portside fans to the low starboard ones, rocking the body across its center of gravity. The same move also boosted the bow thirty degrees, then dropped it off to the left.
The little aircar made a rolling turn that reversed direction and slid it 500 feet under the pattern of other cars coming onto the Government Block’s airlip.
Follard gave himself a tight smile, proud of his mechanical kinesthesia. Then he focused attention on his passenger.
Bertingas was splayed across the seat, panting. His tunic collar was loosened to catch the stream of cool air from the dash. His fingers plucked at the stiff material of the uniform pants, trying to lift it from his perspiring thighs. Follard helped by turning down the air conditioning two more notches and stepping up the blower. The cabin dropped ten degrees in ten seconds and a grin spread slowly across Bertingas’ face.
“There are fresh collar tabs in the map box,” Follard said. “They should cover for your rank and department.”
“Why, thank you,” Bertingas said, popping the lid. “But how did you—?”
“Intuition,” Follard replied, smiling. A Kona Tatsu Inspector General sometimes had to pass for a member of the middle ranks in the halls of Government Block. Let Bertingas think what he might.
Most of the people in Follard’s circle, the outer circle, thought of Taddeuz Bertingas as a harmless fool. Pedantic, foppish, self-centered, soft-centered. A career climber who never would reach the top rung. An innocenti, not a cognoscenti.
The inner circle didn’t think of Bertingas at all.
Follard himself thought he detected some steel in the man. Not a lot. A sliver, not a shard. And it was well padded by the attitudes and affectations that anyone would acquire after ten years in Aurora Cluster’s Government Block. That sliver was doubly padded, because Bertingas was in the mind-manipulation business. Deluding and self-deluded. He slithered around with the kind of people who make a word mean exactly what they choose it to mean . . . the last Director of Communications, for instance.
Bertingas was soft, like this planet.
Of the 4,000 or so Pact worlds, Palaccio was the strangest—but Humans had to luck out just once.
It was a severely oblate globe, squashed like a pumpkin grown on one of the high-gee worlds. In addition to that, Palaccio’s axial inclination was nil: the north and south poles were a true ninety degrees from the plane of orbit around the primary. Consequently, there was almost no climatic variation: eternal winter and darkness at the two poles; eternal summer in the broad band around the equator; spring and fall passing through 50 to 70 degrees of latitude north and south.
The planet had a strong magnetosphere, with its magnetic poles coinciding precisely with the rotational axis. So radiation from the local solar wind hardly affected the climate.
Palaccio was larger than Earth—by several diameters. The internal structure, however, was much less dense: silicon and potassium at the core instead of nickel and iron. So the surface gravity was 0.92 gee, making everyone feel good and strong, if a little light-headed.
It was the only planet where the natural ground cover was a mass of tightly packed tendrils which never grew above 4 cm, was invariably an emerald green, and was called “grass.” Where every tree was either a stately Sequoia sempervirens—perfect for roofbeams and ship’s keels—or a spreading, leafy apple tree, complete with ruddy, edible fruit. Where every cliff was columniated marble, topped with your choice of Ionic scrollwork or the Corinthian acanthuslead pattern. Where the air was as pure as oxygen and nitrogen mixed from cylinders. Where the water was as sweet and flat as fresh-burned hydrogen.
For the Humans, who had discovered this planet—there were no indigenous intelligences—it was a Mediterranean paradise. Hence the name “Palaccio.”
For the Pact aliens who had immigrated, it was a hell world.
The sunlight was too bright and the wrong color for delicate alien eyes raised under red giant primaries. The light was too dim for eyes grown in the blue-white actinic glare of brighter stars. Tree pollens irritated delicate membranes or grated in delicate joints. Chlorophyll from the “grass” burned under delicate alien feet. The gee-pull was too strong for spidery alien frames from the moonlets or for gliding membranes from the heavy-gas worlds. The gravity was too weak for robust alien circulatory systems and molecular bonds developed on high-gee worlds. The water lacked essential trace elements necessary to delicate alien metabolisms—or water itself was an alien poison. The microbes that Human settlement had brought attacked everything.
The non-Humans suffered from sores and burns, allergies, aches, falls, sniffles, and fits of homesickness. Quietly, interspecially, the multiple races that congregated with Pact Humans called the planet Porifera, the smelly sponge. Or just “Stinkworld.”
However, it was inevitable that Palaccio, being equidistant from the other Aurora worlds, would become a center for government and communications. It was, after all, perfect for Humans.
And so Taddeuz Bertingas—after ten years in a desk job, in a Human-dominated government, on a paradise world, in a cluster with almost no dissidents, not even commercial pirates—was bound to be well-insulated, self-centered, self-deluding, soft-centered, and all the rest.
Well, it was time to wake him up.
“This isn’t the way to the Palace,” Bertingas said, lifting his head and pushing himself up in the seat.
“No, it isn’t. I thought we’d take a little detour. Enjoy some scenery.”
“Those are the Palisades. I’ve seen them—and beyond. Nice car you’ve got here. Fast. Now, shouldn’t we be getting on to that all-hands meeting?”
“Look at the cliff structure,” Follard prompted. He tipped the aircar and pointed down through Tad’s window. “Huge blocks at the base there, supporting those strong white columns, which in turn support the Uplands Plains . . .
“Or that’s the way it seems. But if you look hard, and if you know anything about geology, it’s just illusion. The blocks at the bottom support nothing. They’ve simply broken off from above and landed at the foot of the cliff. The real strength, the native rock of the planet, is hidden by those crumbs of white stone.
“Those columns that we can see,” Follard continued, “they support nothing either. They only stand out because the background rock is weathering away. They’re simply what’s left.
“No, the strength to support the Uplands is not on the face of the cliff, but deep inside, with the native rock and the web of the planet, which we can’t see.”
“You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you?” Bertingas teased. He wore a soft, superior smile which occasionally made Follard want to strike him.
“Call it a parable of the stones,” Follard said. “You know the high secretary’s been assassinated?”
“Ahhh . . . No, I didn’t. That’s terrible. Who did it?”
“Doesn’t matter. His friends, retainers, or next of kin. All of the above. None of the above. He had no enemies, so it must have been his friends who did it. As I said, it does not matter. Stephen ten Holcomb is like those white blocks out there. He seems to be the foundation of the Pact. He has told us, in his usual flood of words, that he is the ‘binding link’ of our political structure—but he binds nothing, supports nothing. He’s just a piece of stone that fell down long ago, when his family line happened upon the Secretaryship.”
“I see. That explains a lot. Can we go to the Palace now?”
“Listen well, little man,” Follard said, intentionally putting a hiss and a rasp into what he called his Inquisitor’s voice. “There are others who would like to take the throne at Central Center. They would say they were ‘ascending’ to the Secretaryship. But you and I know that, from our parable here, they are only pieces of stone, falling where gravity takes them.”
“What others? Who are you talking about?” Bertingas sounded petulant, as he would after that “little man” jibe.
“The pillars, the forces that seem to support the Pact. The heads of the commercial conglomerates. The loosely allied cluster commanders. The cluster governors who have been in place too long and are years removed from the give-and-take of any real political arena. Every one of them has a plan, a plot, a daydream that, with luck and help and the right conjunction of forces, he—or she—can step up to the throne. And what would that be? In the context of our parable?”
“Another block of marble, falling off the cliff to land in the rubble heap at the bottom,” Bertingas said sullenly. “That heap does have a lot to say about who we’ll salute, what we’ll be doing, how we live, what we believe—”
“Salute, maybe. But when was the last time you changed your socks, let alone your mind, because of something Stephen VI said? He’s a peacock on display. A figurehead.”
“Possibly. However, he does select the cluster governors and all the rest. They have the real power in our lives.”
“Nonsense, Tad. They select themselves. The high secretary makes about three key appointments a day, just by nodding his head. They merely put themselves in the way of that nod and they’re in. That’s all.”
“You have microphones in this car,” Bertingas said loudly. “You’re trying to trap me into sedition. Well, it won’t work. I’m loyal to the Pact. I’m loyal to the high secretary, whoever he will be. To Governor Sallee. To the Director of Communications, if and when he’s appointed. To the—”
“Why don’t you just say you’re loyal to the Pact and be done with it?”
“I am loyal.”
“You can be loyal to our society, can’t you, to the ancient forms that make this interspatial empire work, without wasting your time or tears on the fools who appear to hold power.”
“Eh?”
“The fabric of our society. The daily agreements and transactions that put food on the table, water in the pipes, power in the overhead, and jingle in the pocket. Those are the things that support our lives—the things to remember when the rocks start falling on the cliff face. Put your trust, your loyalty, in the people around you.”
“Why is the inspector general of the Kona Tatsu telling me this? I would have thought it was your business to, ahh, inspire loyalty to the high secretary. At least here in Aurora. And to his chosen governor.”
“That’s my field of duty, of course—when the high secretary is alive and fulfilling his obligations, however competently, to govern. But His Excellency is by now formally couched under marble in the Hall of Ages. The safety of the Heir is in doubt, and strong forces are at work to determine Roderick’s affairs once and for all.”
“Which forces?” Bertingas sounded genuinely curious.
“Ask yourself who owns or controls half of Aurora Cluster and even more in her nearer neighbors.”
“Haiken Maru?”
“Yes, our dominant conglomerate. With a charter for trade only—not to farm freeholds, not to provide banking or other contract services, not to hold administrative office . . . We all know how closely those charters are monitored.”
“You think they will try to influence the succession?”
“Do stones roll downhill? We of the Kona Tatsu believe they will try to buy the succession. The only question is, with what coin?”
“Not with money, you mean?”
“Will Haiken Maru influence the political side? Will they maneuver to install an overt innocent—but one of their own choosing and purchase? Or will they support another candidate, one whom they can influence indirectly? Or will they simply launch a war, funded with their considerable resources, to take the throne for their Centrist chairman, Villem Borking?”
“Well, what are they going to do?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Oh. So, again, why are you telling me all this?”
“We do know a thing or two,” Follard said, maneuvering the aircar away from the cliff and turning toward the Palace precincts. “For instance, who the next Director of Communications will be. His name is Selwin Praise.”
“I’ve heard of him.” Bertingas said. “He’s part of the entourage that Deirdre Sallee brought from Central Center. On the face of it, he’s a Playmate: wealthy family, subsenatorial, no distinction for about five generations. Educated at New Harvard. Took his degree in time-lapse financing. Graduated in the class following Roderick’s. Did some freelance banking with the family inheritances until those blew away. Then he went to the Forum and became a drinking buddy, presumably an Old acquaintance. All of that’s in the public knowledge.”
“Clearly,” Bertingas said, “this Praise is the choice to head a sophisticated technological department. Like mine. Thank you.”
“What isn’t public is that Selwin Praise is a Kona Tatsu light operative. Under direct report to Avalon Boobur.”
I see.
“Normally that would be none of your business. None of mine, either. Trouble is, Boobur is supposed to share such details with his cluster chiefs. Just as a courtesy. I found out about Praise from my own contacts in Central Center, people I tend to trust. They have nothing good to say of your new boss. No definitives, just a lot of circumstantials that suggest a cabal within a cabal. The implication is that Boobur isn’t running his man with too close a rein, either. So Selwin Praise, who on inspection is a just jolly boy and a no-count, wears a very big question mark on his back.”
“What do you want me to do?” Bertingas asked. Too eagerly, for Follard’s taste.
“Nothing overt. Follow his orders. Treat him at face value—or better. But keep your eyes and ears open. And share with me, on a secure line, anything that looks suspicious.”
“And, in return . . . ?”
“I’m treating you as a friend, Tad. You may need one soon.”
Follard brought the car in high over the Palace perimeter. Below them was a stretch of parkland, dotted with low, porticoed buildings; silvery reflecting ponds; a few deeper, bluer lakes; white-graveled walkways and carriage drives; and small, square formal gardens, some of them buried in hedge mazes.
Halan knew from personal inspection that some of those hedges concealed radar transponders. The pools covered automatic missile/anti-missile defenses.
At the center of all this idyllic beauty, like a black thunderhead over green pastures, was the Dome. It was the Palace’s electromagnetic screen against ground- and space-borne plasma weapons. Normally as clear as summer air, it now floated an opaque layer of ionized particles. That was the official warning to all air traffic that an alert was on and the Dome was up to its full, killing power. It also blocked all outside peeping, whether optical, electronic, or mimetic.
Unfortunately, when the particle layer was deployed, no natural light could enter the area covered by the Dome. A starless midnight fell, and the Palace’s illuminations came on automatically.
As Follard’s aircar approached, sending the correct recognition signals for the day, the black chord facing them began to swirl and a seam, a pair of vertically aligned lips, opened. The car passed between their roiled edges. Bertingas turned his head and looked behind, where a flicker of blue daylight was dying in the night sky.
“What would happen,” he asked, “if they didn’t open that patch for us? I mean, it’s just an e-mag field with some dust in it. It might damage our electrical systems. Might scratch the paintwork. But if we were moving fast enough, it wouldn’t stop us. Could it?”
“I once examined a car that one of the Pang Fasters tried to crash a dome with. Not this dome, but one like it. The field is computer controlled. It stays passive when it has to handle a plasma burst—just absorbing and shedding it, absorbing and shedding. However, when anything metal gets past the missile defenses and pierces the shield, the control becomes overt. The electromagnets divide and reverse the field, which sets up a shearing counter-current and shreds anything caught in it.”
“Anything ferrous, you mean. But who would build an aircar out of iron? Aluminum and resins”—Bertingas tapped the dashboard—“are not magnetic.”
“Hemoglobin is.”
Below them in the nighttime darkness, the street lamps and building floods lit the intersection of two major thoroughfares in a gauzy, jeweled cross. It was four kilometers long, end to end. Follard took the car down to the deeper shadows near the inside perimeter of the Dome. As he approached on instruments, a square of blue edge lights came up around his parking space.
“I never saw this before,” Bertingas said. “Most of the Government people drop off in Chancery Lane. I thought permanent parking wasn’t allowed inside the Dome. Is this new?”
“No, just special.” Follard switched off the engine and closed the fan vents, and the car settled on its extensible jacks. “We’re on the roof of the Kona Tatsu Hall of Justice.”
“Oh.”
The dying whine of the turbine seemed to suck all other noise out of the cabin.
Follard led him at a brisk walk—because they were already latish—over to the roofs private elevator (concealed as an air conditioning tower), past sentries whose somber uniforms blended with the darkness, down to a public loggia off the main entrance hallway, and out into the pseudo-night of the street. It was a fast two-kilometer trot to Nero’s Golden House, where the current governor preferred to hold her meetings.
The House was much more impressive in the full light of noon, when its mirrored glass and fourteen-carat spider buttresses fairly glittered with reflections from the four petal pools surrounding it. However, a million watts of tuned halogen lamping could simulate the effect well enough, at least, that a fond memory could carry it off. In his thoughts, Follard called this building the Jewel Box. Open the lid, and a mechanical tone fork would begin to chime Esmonee.
It was far too civilized a setting for the squabble they were going to hear this morning.
Follard and Bertingas showed their credentials to the frocked herald at the West Door. He lowered his nose a fraction to peer at the holo likenesses, sniffed, and waved them through. In the outer circular hallway, they walked around to the ten o’clock entry door. Follard cracked it, looked through with one eye. They were not as late as he had thought.
Beyond the low curtain wall that backed the corridor, the Golden House was a single egg of space. A neo-Faberge egg. Tiny golden ribbon lights picked out the arches that soared upward among the glass panels, toward the crested finial. Tiny silver footlights picked out the ramps that descended past the gallery and mezzanine seating to the amphitheater stage. Well-diffused pinlights and backgrounders filled in the shadows. The overall effect was one of mellow brightness without direction and without glare.
On the stage was the council table with its parallel lines of high-backed, red-upholstered chairs. They looked like theater props for a banquet scene. Except there were too many people standing around it for the number of places. From a distance, the stage appeared to shimmer in a heat haze—sign of a portable dome on low power. When Sallee rapped the meeting to order, the aides and sideboys would retreat to the gallery and the dome would go opaque. More darkness. That’s why the stage was also set with a ring of free-standing, self-powered floor lamps, refugees from some grand hostel. The long table had a central row of crook-necked reading lights, again self-powered.
The whole rig was probably as secure as Governor Sallee’s staff thought they could make it, on short notice. To Follard, however, who knew about security, the effect was hurried and graceless. Opaque magnetic shielding was hardly the connoisseur’s approach to privacy.
He and Bertingas hurried down the ramp and climbed the six steps to the stage level.
“Well, Follard! Going to join us at last?”
Halan turned to see Valence Elidor moving toward him majestically, like a land yacht under sail with outriders—his body guards, bestboys, and staff admirers. The inspector general knew for a fact that Elidor carried fifty-eight years. Yet the appearance he gave was of a tanned and athletic forty year old. Biceps like a wrestler. No belly. Slim hips. His hearty grin and that hand-clap on the shoulder were meant to be manly, friendly, and at the same time dominating. Elidor had the firm jaw, flinty eyes, and trained expressions that executives pick up at conferences with each other and practice in front of the mirror.
“Had a bit of a detour. Business.”
“More important than the you-know-what?” Elidor winked at him.
“What do I know?”
“Ahhh, Halan! Spoken like a real cop.”
“Why not? That’s what I am.”
“And who’s this up and coming young man?” Elidor turned a twenty-kilowatt smile on Follard’s companion.
“Tad Bertingas, of Cluster Communications, currently the acting Director . . . Tad, this is Valence Elidor, Haiken Maru’s Trader General for Aurora Cluster.”
Bertingas made his manners with a gleam—of awe? of opportunity?—in his eyes.
Elidor shook hands with a vacant politeness, his attention already turning elsewhere.
Follard and Bertingas made their way toward the table. At either end government functionaries and various military brass were sorting themselves out. Near the head—which was reserved for Governor Sallee—the new and yet-to-be-announced Director of Communications, Selwin Praise, had claimed the first chair on the left.
With a nudge and a covert finger gesture, Follard pointed him out to Bertingas.
Praise was defending his seat against the Protocol Master’s polite suggestions that he find a lower place: the Chief of Staff was due any minute. The ex-Playmate and Kona Tatsu operative was a small man, pale, with thin hair combed straight back from a too-high forehead. He had little eyes and a narrow mouth that, when opened in protest, showed pointed, mouselike teeth. The P.M. looked just about ready to push him sideways out of the chair when the Chief breezed in, nodded a greeting to Praise, and took the seat on the right. With a flap of his arms the P.M. walked off. Praise smiled to himself.
“There goes your chair, Tad,” Follard observed.
“I’d better go find a place in the orchestra then.” Bertingas touched his shoulder. “Thank you for the ride, Halan . . . and the advice.”
“Ni’evo,” he smiled, and the other hurried off the stage.
Bread upon the waters, Follard thought. We’ll see how fast Bertingas sinks.
The chair at the bottom of the table, opposite Sallee’s—which made it the number two seat on the stage—had been taken by General Pollonius Dindyma, the Cluster Commander. He officially held a rank equal-to-but-slightly-below Deirdre Sallee’s, his authority derived from military rather than political appointment. Another squabble broke out at this end of the table when Captain Malcolm Thwaite arrived feeling he was entitled to sit opposite the governor.
As senior representative of the Pact’s Central Fleet on Palaccio, Thwaite contended—and always had—that his minor rank was superior to any in the merely local administration. After all, as he liked to say, the Fleet’s Base Gemini, in the otherwise uninhabited Kali system, was home to eight cruisers and more than twenty destroyers, while the Cluster Command could field no more than four overage destroyers and a planetary monitor whose hyperspace drive had been written off for years. All very well, Dindyma would be saying, but those four destroyers were just a whistle away, while who knew where Admiral Koskiusko was patrolling with his gunboats this week? Thwaite countered that those “gunboats” were the cluster’s first line of defense in uncertain times, and furthermore . . .
Follard’s attention drifted to the middle ranges of the council table. No little fights marred the order there. Valence Elidor claimed the central chair on the right side and flanked himself with two Haiken Maru staffers. The other leading conglomerates—Baranquilla, Daewoo, and Mitsui—took the remaining places at the table, and the lesser traders docilely drifted back off the stage to find seats beyond the ring.
On the left side, the latifundistas and small estate holders ranked themselves by precedence after Amelia Ceil, the matriarch of Greengallow Holding. Again, when the chairs ran out the little fish retreated to the auditorium seats.
Follard approached that side, coming up behind Rebus Jasper of Prentiss Fief, who was sitting on the edge of the military reservation. He tapped Jasper on the shoulder and, when the man turned, gave his humorless gestapo smile. The landholder popped out of the chair as if it had been wired. Follard sat down without a nod or thank you.
Everyone at the council, he noted, was full Human. Not even the Gowta, the Deoorti, or the other “passers” with semi-illegal Pact citizenship had the coin to buy their way in here: the trust and tolerance that the red-blooded proto-primates from Planet Earth gave to their own, first and foremost.
The two o’clock door opened with a bustle of pages and heralds, and Deirdre Sallee breezed down the aisle with her entourage.
She was a tall woman with a straight, mannish figure. Iron-gray hair was pulled back from her face in a coif that, even here in Aurora Cluster, was several years out of date. Her face was weathered granite: hard lines across the brow; deep dents beside her mouth; nose prominent, like a ship’s prow; eyes dark and weary. She was seventy-two standard years old. All of that.
The dossier said she had borne three daughters, though not to her current husband, Regis Sallee, who trailed her like a small white poodle. She had six grandchildren—four boys, two girls—who remained at Central Center “for schooling purposes.” Hostages against Sallee’s good behavior in office, no doubt.
Who would hold the strings on those young lives now, he wondered. Avalon Boobur? Someone closer to the Heir? Someone secretly in the pay of Haiken Maru? Follard made a mental note to find out.
She took her chair at the head of the council table, helped not by Regis but by a liveried footman from the Palace precincts who stood two and a half meters tall and was muscled in proportion. He handled the high-backed, dark oak chair like a cane-bottomed stool.
Sallee sat there for a moment in silence, like a hooded hawk, appraising—with senses other than sight—those around her. Her shoulders were squared against the old brocade of the chair, her hands resting down in her lap.
“All right, let’s have the dome,” she said.
The stage went dead dark. The echoes of the Golden House died away. Like smothering . . . Then, one by one, hands found the switches on the table and floor lamps. New, smaller noises—tap of finger, rustle of fabric, scrape of shoe—defined their space.
“Some of you will already know why I’ve called this extraordinary meeting. Most of you will not. In ten words, then: the high secretary is assassinated; the succession is in doubt.
“The remaining members of the Proto Council have demanded that, as an electrix supremator, I register my nomination in favor of Roderick. Immediately. Further, that all of you—as Pact military, administrative, trading and holding members—second that nomination. Also immediately.
“My staff has prepared coding for the appropriate signals. All that’s required is your personal—”
“Aren’t we being a bit hasty, Deirdre?” The rich, reasonable voice of Valence Elidor cut across her gravelly monotone. Its echo left a deep silence.
“Wait until I call for discussion and recognize you, Haiken Maru,” the governor said formally.
“Discussion didn’t seem to be on your agenda, my dear. However, I think this group has much to discuss. Our choices, for example, and how we can improve them . . .”
“We have no choice but to offer our—”
“Come, come, Your Excellency! If we voted according to the pro-formas of a mere caretaker council, who represent none but themselves and a group of decadent hereditaries and hangers-on—your pardon, Madam!—whose competence the entire handling of this assassination has called into question, and who happen to be a thousand light years and twenty-one jumpseconds away, why, then we would well deserve the political chaos that will follow throughout this interspatial agglomeration. We would be courting a—dare I say it?—a civil war that will make the Years of Ascension seem like peaceful negotiations.”
As Elidor spoke this set piece, Follard watched not him but the others around the table. He saw agreement and doubt mixed in those faces.
“Are you quite through?” Sallee asked.
“I think others share my feelings.”
A restless shuffling around the table bred first a word here and there, then a spoken aside to a neighbor, then a murmur of not-quite-dissent. “What’s this about a civil war?” Captain Thwaite asked, into the lapping tide of voices. “Not while the Fleet’s on guard.”
“Merikur,” Amelia Ceil said aloud, to the table at large. “He’s all but taken control of Apex Cluster. He now holds fifteen others in fief if not in name. He makes open war upon Haiken Maru. Do you think he will sign these pro-formas?”
“Governor Merikur is no threat to Haiken Maru,” Elidor replied.
“Haiken Maru is a threat to us all!” Abel Peller, a junior latifundist, shot back. “You promote this war, Elidor.”
“If war comes here—however it comes—there will be no place for neutrals,” the Trader General replied smugly. “Friends or foes. Take your pick. But choose the right friends quickly. Or earn yourselves a lot of trouble.”
“Is that a threat?”
“If Aurora takes sides, she is lost,” General Dindyma declared. “I haven’t ships enough to defend Palaccio from a determined attack, much less this whole cluster.”
“I have enough ships,” Thwaite grinned.
“Don’t think we’ll forget the Ponsable Massacre, Captain,” Ceil told him. “An entire planet fused—”
“They had aligned themselves with aliens. Wogs from beyond the Pact perimeter, another order of technology which—”
“So you say! None here ever saw them.”
Tap, tap. Sallee’s ring beat against the tabletop.
“We displayed the skeletons, the new metals, evidence of inHuman logics.”
Tap, tap, RAP! The governor brought her hand down flat.
“Forgeries!” Ceil said. “Inept ones at that.”
“Order!” Sallee barked out.
“No one ever—?”
“I said order!” the governor shouted. The table fell, silent. “If this council cannot decide where its loyalty lies,” she said, “I shall be forced to reply for it. Our loyalty—”
“Not without our consent codes!” Elidor spoke through his teeth. His lips were twisted into the grim parody of a smile.
“This is bootless!” The governor stood up and half the table rose with her.
“Take care how you decide and what sides you choose, Madam,” the Trader General warned.
“And you take care with your treasons, Sirra!” Deirdre Sallee gathered her skirts and swept off toward the edge of the stage. Two seconds ahead of her, the tall footman dropped the dome. The dark tensions around the table seemed to dissipate as mellow, gold-and-silver light flooded in to mark her exit.