Renne gave a shrug. “I suppose so. I can ask Jennifer Seitz, the director.”
“Do that. Let me know.” He smiled in satisfaction. Good clean decisions, proper leadership: everyone profited.
“Sure.” She took another sip of her coffee.
“Some good news for you, Chief,” Tarlo said. He shot Renne a malicious smile across the table.
“Go.”
“We’re making headway on McFoster’s financial data records. I need a warrant to open his accounts at Pacific Pine Bank; they’re guarded. Once we can study his spending pattern we can draw up a profile of his movements. We’ll also find out where his money came from.”
“Onetime account, cash deposit,” Renne said, and grinned over the top of her mug. “They always are. Untraceable.”
Tarlo showed her a stiff finger.
“You’ll get the warrant in an hour,” Alic promised. “All right, this isn’t as bleak as it looked back there in the junction. We can crack this, I know we can.”
CHAPTER TWO
Technically the War Cabinet should have had its meeting in the Presidential Palace on New Rio because the President herself was the chair, and ultimately held responsibility for all Commonwealth policy. That was the structure laid out in the Commonwealth constitution. Realpolitik was a little different.
None of the Intersolar Dynasty leaders present—Nigel Sheldon, Heather Antonia Halgarth, Alan Hutchinson, and Hans Braunt—were keen to be absent from their respective planets for long. And as Earth provided direct train links to all the Big15, it was their preferred choice of world. The senators—Justine Burnelli, Crispin Goldreich, and Ramon DB—were based on Earth anyway. And the two admirals, Kime and Columbia, certainly didn’t have the clout to nominate a different location, not after the public beating the navy was taking after the Lost23—however unfair it might have been.
Patricia Kantil had no option but to bow to the majority. It might have been the navy that was taking the brunt of the criticism in the media, but the unisphere polls were revealing a significant percentage questioning the overall leadership. Much as it irked her, she arranged for the meeting to be held at the Senate Hall in Washington, DC.
The participants assembled in one of those secure underground rooms so beloved of governments whenever they constructed emergency facilities. In an age when force fields could deflect atom laser shots and hundred-megaton blasts with relative ease, Patricia didn’t really see the point of digging out warrens of rooms a hundred meters below the aging Senate Hall building. But for the lack of windows, the chamber could have been any high-status corporate boardroom. A long tarnwood table sat atop an emerald carpet patterned with a huge Intersolar Commonwealth seal. Portraits of every past Senate First Minister gazed down at the table with various expressions of superiority. All very somber and expensive; typical of a budget that would never be held up to public scrutiny.
The War Cabinet all stood when Elaine Doi entered the room. Following two paces behind her, Patricia was quietly pleased to see that courtesy was extended, at least; the true powers in the Commonwealth were still acknowledging formal procedures—for the moment. None of the other cabinet members had aides with them; Patricia was the only one. She couldn’t actually recall being in the physical presence of quite so many masterclass players before. It was intimidating, even for someone as familiar with the process of high government as she. And she knew Elaine was nervous; for once not just about her own term. The latest batch of statistics from the Prime assault was shocking.
Elaine took her place at the head of the table and asked the others to be seated. Patricia sat at her left, with the First Minister, Oliver Tam, on her right. The tall double doors closed, and the chamber was automatically screened. Everyone lost contact with the unisphere.
“Isn’t the SI attending?” Crispin asked churlishly.
Elaine glanced at Patricia and gave a small nod of permission. “Not at this stage,” Patricia said. “Although it appears to be as disturbed as we are by the invasion, and it provided a great deal of assistance at the time, we still cannot be certain about its ultimate allegiance. As it is humans who are facing the brunt of the Prime attack, we feel that we alone should determine our response. If we decide we need its aid or advice, we will of course ask. Until then, the fundamental decision-making process should be ours and ours alone.”
If Crispin was annoyed at her reply, he didn’t show it.
“Thank you,” Elaine said. “I now call this first meeting of the War Cabinet to order. It is here today that we must determine the nature of our response to the clear and absolute threat posed by the Prime aliens. I don’t feel I under-state the enormity of the task we face when I say the outcome of this meeting could well determine not just the future of humanity as a species, but even if we have a future. The decisions we are faced with will be extremely difficult, and no doubt unpopular in some quarters. I for one am quite prepared to sacrifice popularist action in preference to do what is both right and necessary. I would like to call on Admiral Kime to give us a brief summary of the terrible assault we have endured, and then the navy’s analysis of what we might expect next from the Primes. When we have all absorbed that, I shall open the floor to policy decisions. Admiral.”
“Thank you, Madam President.” Wilson Kime looked around the table, saddened at the lack of friendly faces. “We all know it was bad. We knew the size of the Prime civilization at Dyson Alpha, and the kind of resources it has available to it, yet our initial preparation was wholly inadequate. The reason for that is quite simple: we refused to believe that an attack on this scale would ever happen. There simply is no rational explanation for it. We have seen that the Prime civilization’s industrial capacity is probably equal to if not larger than that of the entire Commonwealth. If they needed expansion space and more material resources, then it would be considerably cheaper for them to exploit star systems next to their own, rather than come after ours. Yet they chose not to follow a logical development pattern. They found out about us from Bose and Verbeken, and almost the first thing they did was build a series of wormholes to reach us. It looks as if the worst-case scenario for the envelopment was right: someone set up the barrier around Dyson Alpha to keep them contained.”
“What about Dyson Beta?” Alan Hutchinson asked.
“It remains an unknown,” Wilson said. “As does the reason for the Dyson Alpha barrier coming down. What we have to address today is the consequence of the Primes being freed. As a result of their attack, we now estimate the human death toll on the Lost23 planets to be approximately thirty-seven million.”
There was total silence around the table. Most of the cabinet stared down at the glossy wooden surface, not wanting to make eye contact with each other.
Wilson cleared his throat self-consciously and continued. “From the nature of the attacks, and the intelligence we have gathered subsequently, it appears that the aim of the Primes is to secure the industrial facilities on the Lost23 planets. Unlike us, they don’t appear to care about preserving the planetary environments. What we saw of their homeworld seems to support this; it was massively industrialized, and the pollution was orders of magnitude beyond anything we experienced here on Earth during the worst of the twenty-first century. Their priorities, therefore, are completely different from ours. That made them very difficult to predict. However, now they are in the open and we’re able to observe their activities directly, we can determine what actions they will have to pursue next. For instance, they will have to build up their occupation forces on the Lost23 in order to utilize them properly and secure them against any counterstrike we make. They will also mount a second attack against the Commonwealth, then a third, and a fourth. They will keep on attacking and pushing us back and back onto fewer worlds until we have none left.”