I glanced over at Ho and saw he'd gone pale. No wonder.

I'd heard the euphemism "executive action" before. It generally meant "assassination."

"And where do you stand, Jacques?" the young ex-king asked softly. "Where does Yamatetsu stand?"

"In the middle ground, where else?" Barnard said with a shrug. "A very lonely middle ground, as it turns out. A 'wait-and-see' attitude isn't particularly popular with the Court at the moment."

"What about Donald?" Ho asked suddenly.

"Your great-uncle is finding it especially uncomfortable," Barnard told him. "Zurich-Orbital doesn't give him much chance to avoid contact with the others."

I blinked at that. So Gordon had some relative up on Zurich-Orbital? I filed that little gem away for future consideration… assuming there was a future.

"How is the Court leaning?" Ho queried.

Barnard's smile faded. "The direct action proponents seem to be ascendant," he said quietly. "There will be a… a message sent. A demonstration." On the screen the corporator checked his watch. "At midnight, local Honolulu time. If that fails to bring the government to heel…" He shrugged eloquently.

"A demonstration," I echoed. The word had a frightening sound to it, a bitter taste. "What kind of demonstration, Barnard?"

"Thor," he said quietly.

We stood shoulder to shoulder, the ex-Ali'i and I, our noses millimeters from room 1905's picture window. None of the respectable media had said word one about the Corporate Court's scheduled demonstration, but the word had certainly gotten out nonetheless. Part of that, was due to the fact that a media lockdown simply isn't possible when parties with a vested interest in getting the word out-in this case, the corporations-can beam their message directly down from the high ground of low Earth orbit. Ground-based pirate stations had done their part, too, gleefully reporting on the Hawaiian government's attempts to muzzle the commercial media outlets. Back in the Dark Ages-the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, for example-it might have been possible to keep this kind of genie in the bottle. These days? No fragging way, hoa, as the government was finding out.

I knew the word had gotten out thanks to reports that filtered in to the Ali'i from his few trusted assets still on the streets. Even without that source of data, though, I'd have guessed that people were getting the message. Normally Kalakaua Avenue, stretches of which I could see from my window, was two ribbons of slowly moving car lights until two or three in the morning. Tonight, at a couple of minutes to midnight, Waikiki's main drag was next to deserted. Idly, I wondered where everyone was. Holing up, terrified that the sky was going to fall on their heads? Or doing what Gordon Ho and I were doing, finding a good vantage point from which to watch the show.

"Twenty-three fifty-eight," Pohaku announced quietly from behind us. As if driven by the same mental impulse, both Ho and I took one big step back from the transpex of the window.

It was a perfect night for it. Since sunset dark clouds had been piling up along the southeast horizon. Now they hung heavy over the ocean, black on black, flickering with lightning bolts, a dozen klicks offshore. An impressive background for what would probably be a bloody impressive show. Directly over Honolulu and Mamala Bay, the sky was clear. A couple of stars burned against the blackness.

At a signal from Ho one of the bodyguards killed all the lights in the apartment. Outside, along Kalakaua Avenue, other people had gotten the same idea. All along the shoreline, lights were going out. I blinked a couple of times, to help my eyes night-adapt faster.

"What's the reaction going to be?" Ho asked quietly. His voice was so soft, I wasn't sure if he even knew he'd spoken.

The question was an important one in both our minds, of course. The megacorporations' little demonstration was like a cop's warning shot. As I'd been taught at the Lone Star Academy, a warning shot's always going to provoke a reaction. Sometimes it's the one you want-abject surrender, when the perp you're chasing realizes you could have put a round into his ten-ring. Sometimes it's the exact opposite-a kind of "Oh yeah? Well, frag you!" response that turns into a blazing firelight. I couldn't shake the worry that the high muck a mucks of the Corporate Court hadn't given much thought to the second possibility.

"Thirty seconds," Pohaku announced. I felt movement behind me as the bodyguards pressed as close as they dared to their ex-sovereign's august presence, staking out their own view-spots. Mentally, I counted down.

T-minus three, two, one, zero… Nothing. Plus one, plus two, plus three…

I'd reached T-plus five when Gordon Ho gasped softly beside me and pointed toward the sky. A new star burned in the heavens, harsh and brilliant. It flickered, it moved. For an instant it had dimension, more than a perfect geometric point…

And then the Thor shots rained down, perfectly parallel bars of light, lancing down from the zenith to the black ocean a couple of klicks offshore. They were impossible to count, they were there and gone so fast, an impression of unbelievable speed. Like a burst of tracer fire from God's own machine gun, but faster than any tracer bullet I'd ever seen… and immensely larger. There was a flash of light where they hit, a single strobe pulse-like a secondary explosion, but without the fireball. I think that was the most chilling part of the whole demonstration. There'd been nothing under those descending bars of light, nothing but water. Still, the impact from the Thor projectiles had been enough to strike sparks off the ocean itself.

It was over in less than a second. I let out the breath I didn't know I'd been holding. My God, I thought dully, how fast did those things come down? I ran a quick mental calculation. Assume they were traveling at orbital velocity when they hit the atmosphere. What would that be? Something like 35,000 kilometers per hour-in other words, 10 (clicks per second or thereabouts, maybe 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet. And Thor projectiles were a lot bigger than rifle bullets, of course. I'd heard them described as "smart crowbars." Assume each one massed a nominal one kilo. How much kinetic energy was contained in one kilo of mass traveling at 10,000 meters per second? If I remembered my high-school physics-and hadn't slipped a decimal place somewhere-that would be something like 100,000,000 joules of energy: one hundred megajoules. Per crowbar. And how many crowbars had been in the burst we'd just seen?

I felt cold. No wonder the Pacific fleet had turned back when the megacorps had fired a warning shot like that across their bows back in 2017.

I heard a sound behind me and turned in surprise. Pohaku was glaring out the window, lips drawn back from his teeth in a rictus of rage… and he was growling. I shrugged. I suppose if this had been my country, I'd have been pretty torqued off about the whole thing, too.

"Lights, please," Gordon Ho said softly. As a bodyguard flicked the lights back on, the ex-Ali'i turned away from the window and slumped down in a chair. He picked up a whiskey glass from the table beside him-mine, as a matter of fact, but I wasn't going to give him grief about it, not now- and polished off the contents in one swallow.

"What's the reaction going to be?" he asked again, and this time I knew the question was directed at me.

I shrugged. "You know your people better than I do," I pointed out.

He smiled at that. "I thought I did," he amended quietly. He paused, then went on, "It depends on how well ALOHA's managed to stir them up… and how crazy ALOHA is, when you get right down to it.

"It's possible to pull it back," he continued with a sigh. "Na Kama'aina doesn't want war with the corps. If the government can keep ALOHA under control, if it can prevent any more provocations, it should be possible to get things back under control."