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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jalal Station

Jalal System

Terran Federation

December 11, 2552


Rajenda Thakore looked up as the admittance signal chimed.

It chimed again, and his mouth twisted in a sour smile.

I wonder what they’d do if I just ignored them? he wondered. Somehow I doubt the polite fiction that I have a choice would last very long.

It chimed a third time, and he grimaced and tapped the lock icon on the suite’s control panel.

The door slid open, and his grimace disappeared into iron-faced immobility as his brother-in-law stepped through it. Looking past Murphy, he saw an armed Marine against the far bulkhead and snorted in bitter amusement. His palatial quarters were located in the flag officers’ section of Jalal Station’s transient quarters and were about as pleasant as a cage came. But they were still a cage. He could open their door only when someone asked for admittance from the outside, and that Marine in the passage didn’t just happen to be standing there.

Murphy walked into the comfortably furnished day cabin and looked around, then turned his gaze back to Rajenda.

“Good morning,” he said.

Rajenda gazed back in stony silence, and Murphy’s lips twitched.

“Not talking to me won’t accomplish much, Rajenda,” he observed in an affable tone. “Except, I suppose, to give you some sort of obscure satisfaction. Besides”—the lip twitch turned into something that could only be called a smile—“think of all the really cutting things you want to say to me now that the opportunity’s fallen in your way, as it were.”

“There are quite a few things I’d like to say to you, now that you mention it,” Rajenda replied after a moment. “I don’t see much point, though. I’d only be wasting my breath on a dead man.”

“Oh? You really think so?” Murphy strolled across the compartment and settled into an armchair that faced Rajenda’s across a crystoplast coffee table that supported an ornate tea set. “And here I thought you were the POW and I was the admiral who’d kicked your sorry ass up one side and down the other.”

Rajenda’s upper lip curled back in a snarl before he could stop it, and his eyes blazed.

“You’ve just killed over a hundred thousand Federation military personnel,” he said in a voice of frozen lava. “You’re a mutineer, a traitor, and a mass murderer, and you’ve led all these other poor bastards into treason with you, which is going to end with them on gallows or breathing vacuum and their planets slagged by K-strikes! I don’t really think you’ve got much in the way of accomplishments to brag about, Terry.”

“Maybe all those things will happen…someday,” Murphy said calmly. “But they aren’t happening today. And the reason those thousands of Federation spacers and Marines are dead is because you were too fucking stupid to take me at my word. If I’d had my druthers, no one would’ve been killed. Hell, no one would even have stubbed his toe! But you couldn’t let it happen that way, could you? You couldn’t stand down even temporarily, long enough to talk. No, you had to make your attack run.” His calm voice turned to iron. “How’d that work out for you, Rajenda? Refresh my memory.”

Rajenda came halfway to his feet with a snarl, and Murphy looked at him with cold gray eyes.

“Sit…down,” he said with icy, measured precision.

“Why?” Rajenda demanded. “Because you’ll whistle up your Marine attack dog if I don’t?”

“No, because I will take immense pleasure—believe me, at this moment you have no frigging idea how much pleasure—in personally ripping off both your arms and shoving them up your ass,” Murphy told him, and Rajenda abruptly realized just how much fury truly blazed behind those level gray eyes.

For a moment—briefly—he thought about pushing it. But only very briefly. Rajenda Thakore was no coward, but he was a realist…and, like his sister, he had not inherited his father’s height. He was well-muscled and fit, but so was Murphy—who was also twenty-two centimeters taller than he and outmassed him by over thirty percent. And whereas Rajenda had gone out for track and tennis at the Academy, Terrence Murphy had been captain of the unarmed combat team in both his junior and senior years.

Stillness hovered for a moment, and then he settled stiffly back into his chair and glared at his brother-in-law.

“Better,” Murphy said, then pinched his nose and drew a deep breath.

“Actually, I’m sorry I said that,” he continued. “Not because it’s untrue, and not because there haven’t been plenty of times before today when I wanted to say it. But because it’s unproductive. And because as deeply and utterly as you have pissed me off on more occasions than I can count, I know you have a pretty damned good brain. The only challenge—and it’s a big one—is getting you to use it.”

“Funny, I was just thinking the same about you.”

“Oh, I’m sure you were.”

“So why are you wasting time talking to me? Where’s the firing squad?”

“There isn’t one.” Rajenda widened his eyes, and Murphy snorted. “Trust me, there are plenty of people who’d pay good money to be included in your firing squad. For that matter, I’ve already shot half a dozen people who were ‘executing’ Heart Worlders after kangaroo courts, and I’ve got a dozen more under arrest awaiting trial. I’m pretty damned sure I still haven’t caught up with all of the ones who’d like to’ve done that, either. So if I were interested in that sort of thing, I could find plenty of volunteers to wax your arrogant ass. Fortunately—for you, anyway—I’m not.”

“So all of a sudden you’re worried about blood on your hands? What about all of my spacers you murdered a few days ago?”

“I tried my damnedest to convince you to stand down,” Murphy reminded him. “And after the battle, we recovered every single life pod and shuttle.”

“Oh, really? In that case I guess you’re not—technically—a war criminal; only a murderer. That’s lots better!”

He sneered at Murphy, then shrugged brusquely.

“So, if you’re not going to shoot me, what’ll it be? A show trial, and then your Fringer lackeys get to hang me the way I understand they hanged Lipshen? That’d keep my blood off your hands, wouldn’t it? Technically, at least. Or do you plan on holding me and all my surviving people for ransom?”

“Your ‘surviving people’ will be treated exactly as the Articles of War say we’re supposed to treat POWs. Mind you, the Federation’s record in that regard is almost as execrable as the League’s. My ‘Fringer lackeys’ have had a little more practice with it than most of our personnel, though, since Crann Bethadh’s currently babysitting over sixty thousand League spacers who surrendered to me in New Dublin. We’ve seen to it that the Articles of War were actually honored in their case, and we’ll do the same for your people until this…unpleasantness can be cleared up and they can be repatriated.”

Rajenda stared at him. Over sixty thousand Leaguie POWs? He was lying. He had to be lying! Even if there’d really been as many enemy carriers at New Dublin as he’d claimed, he’d have had to capture the League’s entire parasite force effectively intact to have that many prisoners, and that was ridiculous! It had never happened anywhere! Those numbers had to be inflated. Besides…

“And me?” he demanded, shaking free of his thoughts.

“And you I’m sending home, Rajenda. Safe and whole. No conditions, except that I want you to take a message back to Fokaides and Schleibaum. One I want them to see, and the Oval to see, and the Cabinet to see, and everyone else in the Heart to see.”

“Really?” Rajenda eyed him narrowly. “All right. You have my attention.”

“I’ve had Lelantos’s magazines emptied, and I’ll be putting you aboard her. And when I do, you’ll go back to Sol with the evidence of Rishathan lethal aid to the League and—”

“Please.” Rajenda shook his head. “Don’t insult my intelligence, Terrence. This isn’t about the Rish, and it never was. This is entirely about the ego of a Survey officer at the ass-end of his relevance. Your governorship was the pinnacle of your mediocre career, and when you realized you’d return to whatever bottom-of-the-totem-pole position my father was willing—”

Murphy slammed a palm against the coffee table. One of the tea set’s cups leapt into the air, then crashed to the floor, and Murphy shook pain from his hand as he glared at his brother-in-law.

“Raj, you’ve been an asshole since the first day I met you. I’ve always wanted to tell you just how big an asshole you are, but I’ve been married to your sister long enough to know how much hell she’d’ve given me for telling you off. And that juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Now? Now the equation’s different.

“It must be incredibly difficult for someone as smart as I know Simmy’s brother has to be to turn himself into such an invincibly asinine idiot, although I suppose arrogance helps. God knows you’ve got plenty of that! But do you seriously think I chased down Rishathan smugglers out past the Blue Line just for the hell of it?” He barked a laugh. “I reported what we found aboard the Val Idrak—or did they send you out without bothering to share that with you?”

“Oh, please!” Rajenda rolled his eyes. “One tramp freighter, from which you claim to have recovered one singularity manifold which you claim ‘someone’ was supplying to the League out of the goodness of their hearts and that might have been manufactured by someone besides the League. And on the basis of that you took an entire goddamn sector out of compliance, Terrence!”

“And because of that, the League attacked New Dublin prematurely with the largest task force the TLN had committed to a single operation anywhere outside the Beta Cygni front in over forty years,” Murphy replied. “And my people and I destroyed that fleet. Then we hunted down its lair and seized the shipyard that built it—and that was building another fifty FTLCs. That would have given them sixty-two carriers before New Dublin, Rajenda, and Eighth Fleet had exactly twenty-six. Even if Fokaides had called in everything else within fifty light-years of Sol, he could only have gotten it up to forty. So what do you think would have happened if a fleet fifty percent bigger than anything we could throw at it had gotten loose in the Federation’s rear?” He glared at his brother-in-law. “I’ll tell you what would have happened—they’d have killed billions of Federation citizens, Rajenda, and they’d have cut their way clear to Sol before anyone could have stopped them!

“And you think I did all of that, prevented that, just for the hell of it? Just because ‘a Survey officer at the ass-end of his relevance’ didn’t have anything better to do? I did it because it was about frigging time at least one governor actually did his job and protected the people he was supposed to be protecting. And because I was willing to do the work to prove the Rish have been pulling strings in the background, probably since this entire war started.”

Rajenda rolled his eyes.

“You’re a smart man, Terrence. How you can possibly buy into all these lunatic conspiracy theories is beyond me, but—”

“Mostly because it’s the truth,” Murphy snapped, cutting him off sharply, then drew a deep breath.

“As I say, I’m sending you home,” he said in a calmer tone, “and the trip’s long enough that even someone like you may have time to recognize the truth when it bites you on the ass. You’ll have plenty of time to review all the data logs and the scans, anyway. And all the yottabytes of data we pulled off the Diyu servers. And I’m sending Rish-designed components we recovered from the Diyu yard along with you.”

“Oh, goody. Homework!” Rajenda shook his head. “Excuse my skepticism. When I received orders from the Oval to wormhole out and put down your little rebellion, they somehow neglected to give me any details about Rish or League superweapons. How odd. I would have thought that if there’d been any evidence, they’d have shared it with the fleet commander sent out to deal with you. Oh, wait—I used that ‘evidence’ word, didn’t I? And I didn’t put the word ‘manufactured’ in front of it.”

“So all of this is a fabrication?”

“Catching on, are you?” Rajenda’s tone oozed sarcasm. “But if they didn’t tell me all about your…let’s be polite and call them ‘fantasies’ instead of ‘out-and-out fucking lies,’ they did tell me about how you’d abandoned your oaths to the Federation. And that was true even before you murdered Federation officers and marshals when they tried to arrest you for it.”

“Schleibaum and the Oval tried to arrest me on false charges, and the attempt left several good men dead, including the President of New Dublin.”

“Mm-hmm.” Rajenda cocked his head. “I could swear I’ve heard something like that before. Taking notes from Governor Butler, are you?”

“Jerome Butler was at best a fool and at worst really was a traitor,” Murphy said. “Gobelins didn’t deserve what it got, but whatever their motives, he and his supporters really were trying to secede from the Federation and he really was trying to set up as a warlord. That’s not what I want, Rajenda. I want the truth about the Rish to come out, and after that—”

“Will you please stop blathering idiotic conspiracy theories at me! At least respect my intelligence enough to admit what you’re really after!”

“It’s not a ‘theory’ where the Rish are concerned,” Murphy said flatly. “Not anymore, anyway. It took them and the League at least—at least, Rajenda—ten years to build the shipyards we took out. And that means the Rish have been helping to prop the League up for a minimum of ten years, and probably a hell of a lot longer, and the Federation’s bled every day for it.”

“You say that like it should matter to me.” Rajenda leaned back. “I didn’t come home from the Beta Cygni front because of the Rish. Hell, I didn’t come home from it because of you! Your insanity was only the welcome home prize waiting for me when I got there to tell the Oval Admiral LeBron and First Fleet had broken through to Kellerman. Kellerman, Terrence! We haven’t been that deep into League territory since the first three years of the war. Lebron sent me home for reinforcements to exploit the opening, to drive all the way to Kaoshing. We were that close—and now it’s all gone! Thanks to you!”

“And taking out Diyu and the fleet they were building there’s hurt them even worse than your idiocy here has hurt the Federation!” Murphy snapped. “We’ve cut the main conduit for Rishathan support for the League, and one look at the size of the Diyu yards is proof of how close to the bone they have to’ve cut their forces out in Beta Cygni. They couldn’t have freed up the resources any other way. Hell, that’s probably the reason LeBron was able to break through to Kellerman! And we can end the war with the League when we expose the Rish. Anyang won’t have any choice but to come to the table when we point out how their logistical support’s been—”

“Stop with the ‘we’!” Rajenda snarled. “There is no ‘we.’ There’s the Federation, and there’s your rebellion. You think the Oval or the Five Hundred will give two shits about the League when they find out you’ve carved away more sectors and more planets in four months than the League’s taken in fifty years? And let’s not forget the domino effect, Terrence! I’d bet my rank the Five Hundred would let the League have everything from Kellerman to Bellerophon if it meant keeping the Fringe under control. They’ll call home however much firepower it takes, and the hell with Beta Cygni, and when they do, the Leaguies will smash right through the front. That’s what you’ve done, Terrence. You’ve lost the entire war with the League. Decades of sacrifice, all flushed away because of your ego.”

“This isn’t just about me, Rajenda.” Murphy’s voice was calm now, almost dispassionate. “The Free Worlds Alliance didn’t secede from the Federation because I asked them to follow me. They did it because they’re sick of sacrificing their lives, their futures, and—especially—their children to the Five Hundred. If I’d surrendered to Lipshen, New Dublin and the rest of Concordia would still have done exactly what it’s done. And if I’d surrendered to you here in Jalal, when you demanded it, nothing would be different. Except that the Five Hundred would have to contend with the fact that it had given the Fringe a martyr instead of a living, fallible man like me.”

“Oh, it is about you. Don’t shield yourself behind those traitors. There’s a warrant for your arrest for malfeasance, corruption, and theft. You were looking at decades in prison when you finally had to face the music! But now this rebellion you’ve whipped up gives you an excuse to avoid the consequences of your own actions, doesn’t it?” Rajenda shook his head again, his expression disgusted. “I told Simron not to marry you.”

“You really are a one-trick pony, aren’t you, Rajenda?” Murphy asked wearily. “Still that pissed off because she told you to pound sand?”

“I told her not to marry you because there was nothing remarkable about you, Terrence. Your sole claim to fame was your grandfather’s legacy. Survey? Seriously? My sister married a Survey Corps bevakoof? Not even a Battle Fleet officer? I told her it was demeaning—humiliating! But you! Father gave you a path to actual relevance. To a spot in the Five Hundred—towards the bottom, even married into my family, to be honest, but still a spot—which was more than you’d ever have achieved on your own. And that wasn’t enough for you?”

“You’ve been a Battle Fleet officer since you were a midshipman,” Murphy said. “Remind me which one of us just won the second or third largest fleet engagement the Federation’s fought in the last forty years?”

“You—You miserable—” Rajenda cut himself off. His jaw clenched and his nostrils flared. “There were variables I couldn’t allow for,” he bit out, finally.

“It was my impression that a competent officer did his damnedest to make sure there’d be ‘variables’ his opponent couldn’t allow for. And to assume his opponent was doing the same thing to him.”

Rajenda glared at him, and Murphy sighed.

“Look, one more time, this isn’t about my ego, Raj. We can stop the Federation from tearing itself apart—and end the war with the League—if we just keep our minds open and commit to an honest dialogue that tries to reach some sort of compromise.”

“‘Compromise’?” Rajenda repeated incredulously.

“Compromise,” Murphy repeated. “Passions within the FWA are…elevated, right now. Their star systems have tried for decades to get some sort of redress from the federal government and from the Five Hundred. And every time they’ve tried, the best that happened was that they got ignored. Most of the time, they got another kick in the teeth, or another Gobelins. So, finally, they’d had enough. It wasn’t the Battle of New Dublin that kicked this off, Rajenda—it was Inverness. It was another inhabited Fringe planet abandoned to die by the Navy that was supposed to defend it. What the Battle of New Dublin did was to put me in a position to at least try to be a restraining influence, but the secession Olympia is looking at right now would have happened whether I’d been sent to New Dublin or not.”

“Oh, of course it would have.”

“If you’ll stop and use the brain that—Jalal Station aside—is normally capable of analyzing tactical data, you’ll realize exactly why that’s true,” Murphy said. “And you’d also realize the Free Worlds Alliance can still be brought back into the fold if Olympia—and the Five Hundred—are willing to change.”

“Are you telling me this as the Alliance’s warlord?” Rajenda asked.

“I’m telling you this as the voice of sanity. Look, the Fringers—the Alliance—aren’t fools. Even if every Fringe sector united to form a single star nation, its economy would be a train wreck compared to the Heart, given the way the Five Hundred’s kept most of the Federation’s heavy industry deep in the Heart. Amazing how that just happened to deprive the Fringe of the industrial muscle that might have let it break away.”

“You mean it ‘just happened’ to keep critically valuable assets out of range of League attacks, don’t you?” Rajenda shrugged. “Seems like a sensible policy to me.”

“That made a nice, tight rationalization, at least in the beginning, didn’t it? But over the last thirty years?” Murphy snorted contemptuously. “The Five Hundred haven’t been protecting their assets from the League, Rajenda—they’ve been putting them out of range to be seized and nationalized by Fringe System governments!”

Rajenda started to reply, then sat back with another shrug, and Murphy leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs.

“What the Free Worlds Alliance really wants are peace talks with the League,” he said. “They want amendments to the Constitution to protect the Fringe, keep its citizens—its sons and daughters—from paying the blood price of the Five Hundred’s war. Yes, the Five Hundred would have to make economic concessions, as well, some that might cost them as much as—oh, ten, even fifteen, percent of what they’ve squeezed out of the Fringe. But if there’s any hope at all of healing this breach, then the Federation has to be willing to make those concessions.”

“Which would undoubtedly include amnesties all around?” Rajenda smiled thinly. “Do you want a crown, too? A laurel wreath?”

“I want the dying to stop, Rajenda. Trust me, I’ve seen way too much of it already.

“I walked the streets of Inverness. I smelled the bodies of ninety-six percent of a Federation planet’s population, rotting despite the cold. The body bags were stacked up like cordwood, in piles taller than I am, and when there were too few left alive to stack them, they just rotted where they fell. That’s what I saw on Inverness, and I saw it because a frigging coward used the cover of his standing orders to run for it instead of defending them.

“And then I saw…I saw my own son taken off a broken cruiser on the edge of death, when the same murderous bitch came after Crann Bethadh. And now I’ve fought a pitched battle with you, and between us we’ve killed another hundred thousand people. I won’t lie and say I’ve never disliked you, Rajenda—you’ve been way too arrogant an asshole ever since I’ve known you for me to pretend I haven’t. But I’ve never hated you, and I sure as hell never wanted to be firing the odd thousand missiles at your flagship. I’d just as soon not repeat the experience.”

“The consequences are starting to compound, are they?” Rajenda smile turned even thinner. “You ever think what your actions have done to my family? Your wife?”

“Of course I have. But whatever I may think of you—or vice versa—I know your father will do everything in his power to protect her and our children.”

“What? Is this your attempt to rope Father into your madness? Set him up as up some sort of back channel for communications?” Rajenda’s eyes narrowed. “We’re much too prominent for that, Terrence, and there’s no way in hell I’m going there for you. Have O’Hanraghty or whatever cabal of conspirators is running at your heels try that.”

“I’m not asking you—or Kanada—to be a back channel,” Murphy said. “I’m sending you back to the Oval openly, with my evidence. And, frankly, if Schleibaum or Fokaides—or the Five Hundred—have the brainpower of a gnat between them, they’ll realize the Rish connection is the key to settling this. It’s the rallying point they can throw out for the Heart and the Fringe, the common threat—besides war against the League—that can refocus their animosities and hatreds. It’ll have to be approached side by side with those concessions, but it can provide a unifying focus, one with none of the sideband issues of the League War, if they’ll only take advantage of it.”

“You’re an idiot.” Rajenda shook his head. “No one will believe any of this. You think the Five Hundred will give up one iota of what they control because of your claims about the Rish?”

“What part of it don’t you believe?”

Any of it!” Rajenda waved both hands in frustration. “Even assuming the odds at New Dublin were remotely as heavy as you’re claiming—which I doubt—it still could’ve been a Hail Mary from the League because it knew the Beta Cygni front was beginning to crumble. Which—” he added pointedly “—LeBron’s breakthrough to Kellerman demonstrates it is—or was, before your…minor diversion of combat power.”

“The hulls we destroyed at New Dublin were all new construction,” Murphy replied. “You don’t have to take my word for it; the evidence is right there in the orbital breakers over Crann Bethadh. And at the moment I occupy the League’s shipyard at Diyu.” He shrugged. “I don’t know how much longer that’ll be true, because it’s too close to the League. My picket doesn’t begin to have the firepower to stand off a serious League effort to retake it, and one of those just about has to be in the offing. When it comes, my people are under orders to destroy the yard before they pull out, because that’s the best we can do. For that matter, that could already have happened and we just don’t know about it yet. But if it hasn’t, what if you could see it all with your own eyes before I send you back to Earth?”

“You could have a Rishathan matriarch lay an egg in front of me and then hatch out the League President and have him admit everything, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. The Fringe is in revolt, Terrence. The lizards don’t matter.”

“They matter a hell of a lot more than you seem to realize.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion,” Rajenda said sardonically.

They sat in silence for over a minute, and then Rajenda raised an eyebrow.

“So, you’ll send me home in Lelantos,” he said. “Then what?”

“I thought I’d made that clear. I’d rather negotiate an end to this madness than see a new war that lasts decades and accomplishes only more bitterness and death. So, obviously, I want you to tell them to send somebody back out here to do the negotiating. I realize they aren’t going to fall all over themselves to do that. Not after they’ve pushed themselves so far into the corner. I imagine the panic when they find out what happened to you to throw a little grit into the works. So you can tell them I’ll give them a thirty-day window before I assume they’re unwilling to do that.”

“And when your time window runs out and they tell you to piss up a rope, instead?”

“That would be just about par for the course for them, wouldn’t it?” Murphy grimaced. “Let’s just say I’m prepared to take this to the next level if I have to.”

“Which would be…what?” Rajenda asked, and Murphy snorted.

“If I told you what my next move will be, would you believe me?”

“You’re an idiot, but you’re not a big enough idiot to tell me that. For that matter, I’m not a big enough idiot to believe anything you did tell me. Not sure why I bothered to ask,” Rajenda said, and, for the first time, they actually smiled at one another.

“You said Callum was hurt,” Rajenda said after a moment. “How’s he doing?”

“Nothing a trip to a cloning clinic can’t fix once we get him home, but at the moment, he’s still in a lot of discomfort.” Murphy grimaced. “Even the prostheses out here aren’t as good as those in the Heart, and he’s refused the more expensive augmentations that are available until every vet can have the same opportunity. Just tell Simron he’s well. The more details she hears, the more she’ll worry.”

Rajenda sniffed and leaned back, resting his right ankle on his left knee.

“Simron,” he said. “You ever consider what all this is doing to my little sister?”

Murphy looked away and his mouth tightened.

“I only ask because this—” Rajenda waved a hand over his head “—is the end of her life, Terrence. She’s a pariah now, thanks to you. She’ll never have a career in any business connected to the Five Hundred, or anywhere else in the Federation, again. Not when her husband’s a traitor.”

“You don’t know that,” Murphy said, and Rajenda laughed.

“The hell I don’t! I’ve been neck-deep in the Five Hundred’s backstabbing and whisper campaigns for my entire life. She’s done, Terrence. You flushed her life away for this. So what’s she going to do now? Her only hope is that my father can convince her to publicly denounce you and get a speedy divorce. And don’t think you’ll get anything in the settlement, in case you’re hoping.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Murphy’s voice was icy again.

“Of course I would! She never should’ve married someone outside the Five Hundred in the first place. Your grandfather’s family name sure as hell isn’t worth the suffering you’re putting my family through!”

“You probably won’t believe it, but I’d prefer not putting even you through this wringer,” Murphy said. “I definitely regret what it’s doing to your father. And I’d give my right arm not to have done it to Simmy.” He looked into Rajenda’s eyes. “But some things are bigger than me. They’re even bigger than my love for her. I’ve had Simron’s support for our entire married life, and unlike you, she’ll understand—and admit—the truth when she hears it.”

“You go on and convince yourself of that,” Rajenda growled. “Deep inside, you know better. But at least Father can probably shield her from any direct repercussions, as long as she shows even a modicum of good sense. Vyom, too, probably.”

“Have you heard anything from them?”

“Nothing dated after your mutiny.” Rajenda shrugged.

“Well, when you do, you’ll find out it’s not all bad news,” Murphy said. “Vyom’s engaged.”

“What? To whom? The Kirchner Dynamics girl he brought to that launch celebration at the yards?” Rajenda snapped his fingers several times. “Ingrid,” he said as he came up with the name.

“To her, yes.” Murphy nodded.

“Well, I didn’t know. But I do know it’s over now,” Rajenda shook his head. “The Kirchners haven’t married for love since the first Fasset drive went online. And then you went and did all this?” He waved a hand in a sweeping gesture. “Didn’t consider that, did you?”

“I was kind of preoccupied trying to save the odd billion or so human lives,” Murphy said. “To be honest, I didn’t know about the engagement until after we hit Diyu, but even if I had, I couldn’t have put my son’s happiness ahead of my responsibility to save lives and try to finally end this bloodbath. You keep talking about my ambition and my ego, but you’ve known me for thirty years. You know this hasn’t been an easy decision for me, Rajenda, and you know Simmy is the reason it hasn’t. It sure as hell wasn’t any sense of loyalty to the Five Hundred! So don’t pretend you don’t know I thought long and hard about it—and her—before I made it. You, though...Did you pause for even a moment to consider what would happen to your relationship with her before you accepted the order to come out here and blow me out of space?”

“What I considered was that it was an opportunity for her to save face and a way for me to protect my family and Venus Futures,” Rajenda said. “A man shoots his own dog.”

“I was never your responsibility, Rajenda. But now you’re mine.”

“Obviously.” Rajenda shrugged. “So do with me as you will.”

“I’ve already told you what I’m doing with you. And I’ve told you what I want you to do once you get home.” It was Murphy’s turn to shrug. “What’s so mysterious about that?”

“That’s it? No parole? No gentleman’s agreement that I won’t return to the battlefield?”

“Why would I want that? I know how to beat you, after all,” Murphy said with a smile. Then the smile faded. “No gentleman’s agreement. And I’m not sending back any messages for Simron or the kids with you. It’d be too easy for the Five Hundred to manipulate my words for their own purposes. But tell them I love them…if you’re willing.”

“I’ll do that,” Rajenda said. “For them, more than for you.”

“Thank you,” Murphy said with quiet sincerity, and Rajenda grimaced.

“This could go easier—for them, at least—if you don’t come any closer to the Heart Worlds,” he pointed out.

“I already told you I don’t intend to do anything of the sort…as long as the Five Hundred’s willing to send someone out here with the power to look at my evidence and negotiate with me.”

“And after they refuse to do that, which you and I both know they inevitably will?”

“In that case, you—and they—will find out what I’ll do next when I do it, won’t you?” Murphy showed his teeth for a moment, then stood.

“Take care, Rajenda,” he said. “Godspeed.”

Then he turned and walked back out the door.



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Framed