Chapter Twenty-Three

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Kavilkan is in a meeting and can't be disturbed."

Jali Kavilkan's private secretary spoke with more than a hint of frost, and when frost appeared in Linar Wiltash's voice, most men cringed. Davir Perthis didn't. He was SUNN's Chief Voice, and he was too busy resisting the compulsion to tear out his hair with both hands to waste time cringing. Instead, he leaned forward, planted both hands on her desk, and thrust his jaw out.

"If you don't disturb him for this, you'll be looking for another job by supper. Move, damn it!"

Wiltash's eyes widened. Then she stood, spine stiff with outrage, crossed her palatial office with obviously irritated strides, and tapped at the door of the sanctum sanctorum of the Sharonian Universal News Network.

"What?" The predictable bellow rattled the door on its hinges, and Wiltash eased it open just a crack.

"Voice Perthis says it's urgent."

"It had fucking well better be! Get in here, Perthis!"

The Voice scooted, and he felt a sudden spike of satisfaction as he stepped through the door. The meeting he'd interrupted was providential, because Tarlin Bolsh, SUNN's division chief for international news, sat across the ship-sized desk from the executive manager of the largest news organization on Sharona. Or, in the entire multiverse, for that matter.

Jali Kavilkan didn't seem to feel there was anything providential about the moment, however. Kavilkan lacked any kind of physical grace. Short and broad, with the square, heavy-child face, he moved as ponderously as a Ternathian battleship, overflowed any chair Perthis had ever seen him sit in, and somehow contrived to loom larger than men a foot taller than him. And, at the moment, he had his patented bellicose, take-no-prisoners glare focused directly upon one Davir Perthis.

"Well? What the hell's so godsdamned important?" he demanded.

Perthis closed the door behind him, pulling until the latch clicked with reassuring solidity. Wiltash had ears in every pore of her anatomy, which she used to keep Kavilkan informed of everything that happened in SUNN in's headquarters. For once, though, Perthis was privy to information she didn't have yet, and he wanted to keep it that way.

Once he was certain the door was closed, he met Kavilkan's angry stare with a level gaze of his own.

"Sharona's at war, sir," he said flatly.

"What?" Kavilkan's bellow actually lifted him to his feet, jerked up like some immense marionette. It came out half-strangled, the oddest sound Perthis had ever heard from him, and he half-crouched across his desk.

"Just what the hell do you mean by that?" he demanded an instant later.

"Exactly what I said, sir. We're at war. One of our survey crews has been slaughtered by soldiers from an unknown human civilization. The Portal Authority hasn't released the official word yet, and it won't release details until families are notified, but Darl Elivath's got confirmation from three of his best sources."

He paused briefly, and Kavilkan jerked a brusque nod for him to continue. Elivath was SUNN's senior Portal Authority correspondent. His strength as a Voice was much too limited for service in the long-range Voice network, but his sensitivity and ability to capture nuances was enormous. And his talent for cultivating inside sources was legendary. No one could remember the last time Darl Elivath had been willing to go on the record with one of his sources and been wrong.

"According to Darl, there were no survivors from our crew." Perthis heard the harshness, perhaps even the denial, in his own voice as he continued. "Orem Limana has blood in his eye, and he's already redeploying the PAAF. And that's not all. He's ordered a full Voice Conclave on his own authority. Every head of state on Sharona?and all of our inner-ring colony universes?got the word maybe twenty minutes ago. The Conclave's set for three-thirty, Tajvana time, over the EVN."

For three solid heartbeats, Kavilkan stood rooted in place, as if Perthis had just turned him into stone, and Tarlin Bolsh's jaw eddied towards the floor. Then the executive manager shook himself like a rhino heaving up out of a dust bath somewhere on the Ricathian plains.

"Darl is sure of this?" he demanded.

"I wouldn't be here if he weren't," Perthis replied. "And you know Darl."

"What about confidentiality?" Bolsh asked. Perthis looked at him, and the international news chief grimaced. "You know what the Authority will do to us if they think we've breached Voice confidentiality on something like this, Davir."

"This is Darl we're talking about, Tarlin," Perthis more than half-snapped.

"I know that," Bolsh replied. His tone wasn't exactly placating, but there was definitely a … soothing edge to it. Perthis' defense of his Voices was proverbial. "I'm not saying he has breached confidentiality; I'm just asking if we're in a position to prove he hasn't if the wheels come off."

"I'm sure he'll be able to demonstrate it for any Voice Tribunal he might have to face," Perthis replied, and Kavilkan nodded sharply.

"That's good enough for me," he pronounced. Then he frowned, finally straightening his spine while the acute brain behind his eyes spun up to full speed.

"Three-thirty, you said?"

"Yes, sir." Perthis nodded. "And they're going to play hell getting a conclave set up that quickly, too."

"You're telling me?" Kavilkan snorted. "But the question's how soon we break the story."

"I think we have to be a little cautious with this one, Jali," Bolsh said. The executive manager looked at him, and the division chief shrugged. "If it's big enough for Limana to call a conclave, then it's really, really big. It's not just a question of pissing people off if we break the story sooner than they want; it's a question of knowing what the hell we're talking about before we a splash a report like this over the entire planet. At the moment, all we've really got is Darl's heads-up, and with all due respect for his normal reliability, I think the possibility that the entire planet might find itself at war with an entirely new trans-temporal civilization needs to be thoroughly checked out before we go public."

Kavilkan scowled, but he didn't jump down Bolsh's throat, either. Instead, he squinted his eyes in deep and obvious thought for several seconds. Then he nodded to himself and refocused his attention on Perthis.

"Tarlin's right. We've got to doublecheck everything on this. Is there any sign anyone else's picked up on the same story?"

"Not yet," Perthis said a bit unwillingly. This was the biggest scoop of any newsman's career, and the thought of sitting on it for one second longer than he had to was almost more than he could stand. "It won't be long, if they haven't already, though," he pointed out. "Limana's used the EVN to set up a conclave. The fact that he activated the EVN at all is going to become public knowledge pretty damned quickly. Once that happens, other people are going to be digging, too."

"Granted," Kavilkan agreed. "And I'm not saying we don't start setting up for it right this minute."

He yanked open a file drawer and hauled out a folder Perthis recognized as SUNN's crisis-communications tree?the list of names of every SUNN office on Sharona, the men and women who represented the first tier of people they would need to contact. Each of those people, in turn, had his or her own list of people to contact, comprising the second tier in the system that would send a priority message worldwide within minutes, via SUNN's own Voicenet.

"Pass the preliminary alert now," he instructed the Chief Voice, handing across the file. "And start roughing voicecast copy, too. Go with two versions. Number one assumes we have a clear scoop; number two assumes we're neck-and-neck with at least one of the minors."