"You have more faith than I do," Jane said.

"If we don't get traction there, we may have other options," I said, looking at Hickory. I started to say more but noticed Savitri and Zoe corning toward us. I broke off toward them, mindful of Jane's wish not to let Zoe get too close.

Savitri has out her PDA. "You've got some mail," she said.

"Jesus, Savitri," I said. "Now is really not the time. Forward it on to Jann." Since Roanoke had been officially rediscovered, Jane and I had been contacted by every possible media outlet known to man, begging, cajoling or demanding interviews. Five hundred such requests came in with the first official skip drone data packet Roanoke received. Neither Jane nor I had the time or inclination to deal with them, but we knew someone who had both, which is how Jann Kranjic officially became Roanoke's press secretary.

"I wouldn't bother you with a media request," Savitri said. "It's from the Department of Colonization. It's marked 'confidential' and 'extremely urgent.'"

"What is it about?" I asked.

"I don't know," Savitri said. "It won't let me open it." She handed the PDA over to me to show me that her access was blocked. I signed her out of the PDA and signed me in. A year's worth of going without a PDA made me realize both how much I relied on the thing before, and how little I wanted to rely on it now. I still didn't carry one with me, relying on Savitri to keep me in the loop.

The PDA accepted my biometrics and password and opened the letter.

"Fucking wonderful," I said, a minute later.

"Is everything all right?" Savitri said.

"Of course not," I said. "I need you to tell Jane to finish up here as soon as she can and meet me at the administration building the minute she's done. Then I want you to find Manfred Trujillo and Jann Kranjic and tell them to meet me there as well."

"All right," Savitri said. "What's happening? Can you tell me?"

I handed her back her PDA; she took it. "I've been relieved as colony leader," I said. "And I've been summoned to Phoenix Station."

"Well, you've only been temporarily relieved of your job, so that's a positive," Manfred Trujillo said, passing the PDA and its letter over to Jann Kranjic. The two of them, Jane, Savitri and Beata, who had accompanied Kranjic, were all jammed into my office, challenging its capacity to hold us all at once. "The fact it's temporary means that they haven't already decided to lynch you. They'll want to talk to you first before they make that decision."

"Looks like you might get my job after all, Manfred," I said, from behind my desk.

Trujillo glanced over at Jane, who was standing at the edge of the desk. "I think I would need to go through her first, and I'm not sure that's going to happen."

"I'm not going to stay in this job without John," Jane said.

"You're more than capable of doing the job," Trujillo said. "And no one would oppose you."

"I'm not questioning my competence," Jane said. "I just won't keep the job."

Trujillo nodded. "In any event, it's not clear they intend to remove you permanently," he said, pointing at the PDA, which was now in Beata's hands. "You're being hauled up in front of an inquiry. Speaking as a former legislator, I can tell you that the point of an inquiry is usually to cover someone's ass, not to actually inquire about something. And also speaking as a former legislator, I can tell you that the Department of Colonization has a lot of things to cover its ass about."

"But they still wouldn't recall you unless you did something they could point to," Kranjic said.

"Nice, Jann," Beata said. "We can always count on you for support."

"I'm not saying he did anything wrong, Beata," Kranjic snapped. Kranjic had rehired Beata as his assistant after he was made the colony's press secretary but it was clear their personal relationship had not vastly improved post-divorce. "I'm saying he did something that they can use as an excuse to pin something on him, to get him in front of an inquiry."

"And you did, didn't you?" Trujillo asked me. "When you were with General Gau, you offered him a way out. You told him not to call his fleet. You weren't supposed to do that."

"No, I wasn't," I said.

"I find it a little confusing myself," Trujillo said. "I needed to be able to say I made the offer," I said. "For my own conscience."

"The moral issues aside," Trujillo said, "if someone wanted to get fussy about it, they could accuse you of treason. The Colonial Union's plan required getting the Conclave fleet here. You intentionally put their strategy at risk."

I turned to Kranjic. "You're talking to other journalists," I said "Are you hearing anything about this?"

"About you being floated as a traitor? No," Kranjic said. "There are still a lot of journalists who want to talk to either you or Jane but it's all about the night the Conclave fleet went down or how we've survived here. I've turned a lot of these journalists over to Manfred and the other council members. Maybe they've heard something along that line."

I turned to Trujillo. "Well?" I asked.

"Nothing like that on this end, either," Trujillo said. "But you know as well as anyone that most of what the Colonial Union is planning or thinking isn't ever discussed outside of its own halls."

"So they're going to pin you as a traitor because you weren't hopping up and down to kill a couple hundred thousand intelligent beings," Savitri said. "I'm suddenly reminded why I loathe the Colonial Union power structure."

"It might not just be that," Jane said. "John may be being made a scapegoat, but if that's true then it begs the question of what he's being made a scapegoat for. Alternately, if his behavior with Gau is being examined, the Colonial Union is looking at how his behavior affected events."

"You think something didn't go according to plan," I said to Jane.

"I think you don't look for scapegoats when your plans go off without a hitch," Jane said. "If the Conclave is behind tonight's attack, it suggests that it's gotten itself reorganized more quickly than the CU expected."

I looked back over to Kranjic, who picked up the meaning of my glance. "There's nothing in the media reports I've seen about the Conclave, positive or negative," he said.

"That doesn't make any sense," I said. General Rybicki had told me that part of the plan was to introduce the Conclave to the colonies in its great moment of defeat. Now they had the moment of defeat; it should be all over the media. "There's nothing about the Conclave at all?"

"Nothing by name," Kranjic said. "The media reports I've seen mention that the Colonial Union discovered the colony had been threatened by a number of alien races, which made the CU pull its deception. They also mention the battle here. But none of it has the Conclave described as the Conclave."

"But we know about the Conclave," Savitri said. "Everyone here knows about the Conclave. When our people send letters or video back to family and friends, they're going to talk about it. It's not going to remain a secret for long. Especially after tonight."

"There are lots of ways for the CU to spin that if they want to," Beata said, to Savitri. "We don't know who attacked us tonight. It could be any number of races, and there's nothing in the attack to suggest an alliance of races. If the Colonial Union wants to minimize the idea of the Conclave, it could just tell the media it intentionally fed us bad information for our own protection. We'd be more willing to look after our own safety if we thought the entire universe was out to get us."

Savitri pointed to me. "And his encounter with General Gau was just some sort of delusion?" she asked.

"He's being recalled," Beata said. "It's entirely possible his inquiry is going to be him being told to revise his memory of the incident."