Sanchez still seemed less than delighted at Konidis' decision to abandon what had been the primary mission objective from the outset, but his expression showed his complete agreement with the citizen Commodore's last sentence. For that matter, Egert nodded emphatically, as well.

"All right," the citizen Commodore went on briskly, "first, I think we—"

"Excuse me, Citizen Commodore."

Konidis frowned at the interruption and turned his head.

"What is it, Jason?" he asked rather more sharply than he normally spoke to his ops officer.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, Citizen Commodore." Something about Citizen Lieutenant Commander Petit's expression sent a sudden icicle down Konidis' spine. "I'm sorry to interrupt," Petit repeated, "but CIC's just picked up three fresh impeller signatures breaking planetary orbit."

"And?" Konidis asked when Petit paused. The planet was still well over a hundred million kilometers away, far outside any range he would have had to worry about even if he'd still had Cataphracts in his magazines.

"And CIC's has tentatively identified them, Citizen Commodore," the operations officer said quietly. "They make it two more of those Erewhonese cruisers . . . and another ammunition ship."

It took Santander Konidis almost five seconds to realize he was staring numbly at Petit, and the silence on PNES Chao Kung Ming's flag bridge was absolute.

Late 1921 and 1922 Post-Diaspora.

(4023 and 4024, Christian Era)

Leonard Detweiler, the CEO and majority stockholder of the Detweiler Consortium, a Beowulf-based pharmaceutical and biosciences corporation, found himself with a great deal of money and not a great deal of sympathy with the Beowulf bioethics code which had emerged following Old Earth's Final War and Beowulf's leading role in repairs to the brutally ravaged mother world. Almost five hundred years had passed since that war, and Detweiler believed it was long past time that mankind got over its "Frankenstein fear" (as he described it) of genetic modification of human beings. It simply made sense, he believed, to impose reason, logic, and long-term planning on the random chaos and wastefulness of natural evolutionary selection. And, as he pointed out, for almost fifteen hundred years, mankind's Diaspora to the stars had already been taking the human genotype into environments which were naturally mutagenic on a scale which had never been imagined on pre-space Old Earth. In effect, he argued, simply transporting human beings into such radically different environments was going to induce significant genetic variation, so there was no point in worshiping some semi-mythic "pure human genotype."

Since all that was true, Detweiler further argued, it only made sense to genetically modify colonists for the environments which were going to cause their descendants to mutate anyway. And it was only a small step further to argue that if it made sense to genetically modify human beings for environments in which they would have to live, it also made sense to genetically modify them to better suit them to the environments in which they would have to work.

November, 1921

Queen Berry looked a little bewildered by the flag bridge of the Chao Kung Ming. The Spartacus, rather, as the government of Torch had decided to rename her.

"Let me get this straight. You manage battles from here?"

"I can assure you, Your Majesty, that after you've spent some time in one of these"—Admiral Rozsak swept his hand around—"all of this actually makes sense, instead of seeming like a gazillion flashing lights and weird-looking icons. With experience, for instance, this"—here he pointed to the tactical plot—"is a most handy gadget. And quite easy to interpret, believe it or not."

Berry study the gadget in question, very dubiously. "It looks like a vid I saw once. A documentary about deep-sea luminous fish, looking really bizarre and moving around completely at random, so far as I could tell."

He chuckled. "I know it's a bit much, at first sight. I was nineteen years old the first time I came onto a flag bridge—that was the old Prince Igor—and I almost walked into the tactical plot, I was so confused. One of the worst ass-reamings I ever got followed, if you'll parson the crude expression."

Berry smiled, but the smile faded away soon.

"You're sure about this, Luiz?"

She spoke informally because in the weeks since what had come to be called the Battle of Torch, a quiet but profound sea change had swept through the small number of Torch's leaders who knew the truth about the Stein assassination and the events that had followed on The Wages of Sin and elsewhere. A change in the way they looked at Rear Admiral Luiz Rozsak.

Before the battle, they'd considered Rozsak an ally, true enough. But it had been purely an alliance of convenience and not one of them had personally trusted the admiral. No farther than I could throw him—when I was a toddler, was the way Jeremy had put it. Indeed, not only had they not trusted Rozsak, they'd been deeply suspicious of him.

Today, it was still unlikely (to say the least) that anyone was going to confuse the admiral with a saint. But it was impossible to match the previous assessment of Rozsak as a man driven solely, entirely and exclusively by his own ambition with the admiral who'd led the defense of Torch at such an incredible cost to his own forces and risk to his own life.

A man driven by a fierce ambition, yes. Solely by ambition, however . . . No. That, it was no longer possible to believe.

At that, the growing warmth of Torch's inner circle toward the admiral was a candle, however, compared to the enthusiastic embrace with which Torch's population had greeted the Mayan survivors of the battle. Any officer or enlisted person in the fleet who went down to the planet—and there none who didn't, except for those still too badly injured to make the trip—swore then and thereafter that there was not, never had been, and never would be a shore leave better than the one they enjoyed on Torch in the weeks that followed the battle.

No one on Torch doubted that those Mayan fighting men and women had saved the planet's population from complete destruction. Not once the State Sec officers who survived the battle and the ones who surrendered afterward started talking.

And they started talking very quickly, and they talked and talked and talked. Their immediate fear had been that Torch would hand them over to the Republic of Haven. Then Jeremy X and Saburo started interrogating, and within two days it was the profound hope of every State Sec officer that they would be turned over to the Haven navy.

Jeremy X's notions concerning "the laws of war" and the proper rules governing the treatment of POWs would have met with the approval of Attila the Hun. And while Berry Zilwicki might have squelched Jeremy, she wasn't going to squelch Saburo.

He started every interrogation by placing a holopic between himself and the person being interrogated. "Her name was Lara. And her ghost really, really, really wants you to tell me everything you know. Or her ghost is going to get really, really, really peeved."

So, within a few days, they knew everything—at least, everything that had been known by Santander Konidis and the other surviving officers. But that was enough to know the three critical items.

First, that Manpower had surely been behind the whole plot. Second, that the Mesa System Nay had played a major part in providing training and logistical support. And, third, and beyone any faintest shadow of a doubt, that Manpower had planned and ordered a complete violation of the Eridani Edict.