“I am and I do,” Washington said. “Some cops tend bar on the side. This is what I do.”

“You’re joking,” Birnbaum said.

“That’s entirely possible,” Washington said.

“Why are you here now?” Birnbaum asked.

“Because we have unfinished business,” Washington said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Birnbaum said. “You asked me to pimp a pro–Colonial Union story. I did that.”

“And you did a fine job with it,” Washington said. “Although at the end things were beginning to flag. You had fewer people at your rally than you had anticipated.”

“We had a hundred thousand,” Birnbaum said, weakly.

“No,” Washington said. “But I appreciate you making the effort there.”

Birnbaum’s mind began to wander, but he focused on Washington again. “So what unfinished business do we have?” he asked.

“You dying,” Washington said. “You were supposed to have been assassinated at the rally, but our marksman didn’t make the shot. He blamed it on a gust of wind between him and the target. So it fell to me.”

Birnbaum was confused. “Why do you want me dead? I did what you asked.”

“And again, you did a fine job,” Washington said. “But now the discussion needs to be brought to another level. Making you a martyr to the cause will do that. Nothing like a public assassination to embed the topic into the national consciousness.”

“I don’t understand,” Birnbaum said, increasingly confused.

“I know,” Washington said. “But you never understood, Mr. Birnbaum. You didn’t want to understand all that much, I think. You never even really cared who I worked for. All you were interested in was what I was dangling in front of you. You never took your eyes off that.”

“Who doyou work for?” Birnbaum croaked.

“I work for the Colonial Union, of course,” Washington said. “They needed some way to change the conversation. Or, alternately, I work for Russians and the Brazilians, who are upset that the United States is taking the lead in the international discussions about the Colonial Union and wanted to disrupt its momentum. No, I work for the political party not in the White House, who was looking to change the election calculus. Actually, all of those were lies: I work for a cabal who wants to form a world government.”

Birnbaum bulged his eyes at him, disbelieving.

“The time to have demanded an answer was before you took the job, Mr. Birnbaum,” Washington said. “Now you’ll never know.” He held up a syringe. “You woke up because I injected you with this. It’s shutting down your nervous system as we speak. It’s intentionally obvious. We want it to be clear you were assassinated. There are enough clues planted in various places for a merry chase. You’ll be even more famous now. And with that fame will come influence. Not that youwill be able to use it, of course. But others will, and that will be enough. Fame, power and an audience, Mr. Birnbaum. It’s what you were promised. It’s what you were given.”

Birnbaum said nothing to this; he’d died midmonologue. Washington smiled, planted the syringe in Birnbaum’s bed and walked out of the room.

*   *   *

“They have the assassin on video,” Jason from Canoga Park said, to Louisa Smart, who had taken over the show, temporarily, for the memorial broadcast. “They have him on video injecting him and talking to him before he died. That was when it happened. When he revealed the plot of the world government.”

“We can’t know that,” Smart said, and for the millionth time wondered how Birnbaum managed to talk to his listeners without wanting to crawl down the stream to strangle them. “The video is low resolution and has no audio. We’ll never know what they had to say to each other.”

“What else could it be?” Jason said. “Who else could have managed it?”

“It’s a compelling point, Jason,” Smart said, preparing to switch over to the next caller and whatever theircockamamie theory would be.

“I’m going to miss Al,” Jason said, before she could unplug him. “He called himself the Voice in the Wilderness. But if he was, we were all in the wilderness with him. Who will be that voice now? Who will call to us? And what will they say?”

Smart had no good answer to that. She just went to the next caller instead.

EPISODE FIVE

Tales from the Clarke

“So, Captain Coloma,” Department of State Deputy Undersecretary Jamie Maciejewski said. “It’s not every starship captain who intentionally maneuvers her ship into the path of a speeding missile.”

Captain Sophia Coloma set her jaw and tried very hard not to crack her own molars while doing so. There were a number of ways she expected this final inquiry into her actions in the Danavar system to go. This being the opening statement was not one of them.

In Coloma’s head a full list of responses, most not in the least appropriate for the furtherance of her career, scrolled past. After several seconds, she found one she could use. “You have my full report on the matter, sir,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” Maciejewski said, and then indicated with a hand State Department Fleet Commander Lance Brode and CDF liaison Elizabeth Egan, who with Maciejewski constituted the final inquiry panel. “We have your full report. We also have the reports of your XO, Commander Balla, of Ambassador Abumwe, and of Harry Wilson, the Colonial Defense Forces adjunct on the Clarkeat the time of the incident.”

“We also have the report of Shipmaster Gollock,” Brode said. “Outlining the damage the Clarketook from the missile. I’ll have you know she was quite impressed with you. She tells me that the fact that you managed to get the Clarkeback to Phoenix Station at all is a minor miracle; by all rights the ship should have cracked in half from material stresses during the ship’s acceleration to skip distance.”

“She also says that the damage to the Clarkeis extensive enough that repairs will take longer to make than it would take for us to just build an entire new Robertson-class diplomatic ship,” Maciejewski said. “It would possibly be more expensive to boot.”

“And then there is the matter of the lives you put at risk,” Egan said. “The lives of your crew. The lives of the diplomatic mission to the Utche. More than three hundred people, all told.”

“I minimized the risk as much as possible,” Coloma said. In the roughly thirty seconds I had to make a plan,she thought but did not say.

“Yes,” Egan said. “I read your report. And there were no deaths from your actions. There were, however, casualties, several serious and life-threatening.”

What do you want from me?Coloma felt like barking at the inquiry panel. The Clarkewasn’t supposed to have been in the Danavar system to begin with; the diplomatic team on it was chosen at the last minute to replace a diplomatic mission to the Utche that had gone missing and was presumed dead. When the Clarkearrived they discovered traps had been set for the Utche, using stolen Colonial Union missiles that would make it look as if the humans had attacked their alien counterparts. Harry Wilson—Coloma had to keep in check some choice opinions just thinking the name—took out all but one of the missiles by using the Clarke’s shuttle as a decoy, destroying the shuttle and nearly killing himself in the process. Then the Utche arrived and Coloma had no choice other than to draw the final missile to the Clarke,rather than have it home in on the Utche ship, strike it and start a war the Colonial Union couldn’t afford at the moment.

What do you want from me?Coloma asked again in her mind. She wouldn’t ask the question; she couldn’t afford to give the inquiry panel that sort of opening. She had no doubt they would tell her, and that it would be something other than what she had done.