“This is Defense! He’s a Marine officer!”

“He did his fighting mostly behind a desk, if you recall.”

“Well, I don’tpersonally recall the whole War, and you do, and that’s just one of the reasons why I need you not‑dead at the moment, Yanni. Call Jacques: tell him hold pat. Get them to hold the job for him. If anybody killed Spurlin, it’d look really peculiar if Jacques drops dead next, so he’s safe. Tell him that. Maybe that will encourage him.”

A silence on the other end. “I’m not sure it’s quite illegal to bribe Jacques with a job, but it’s not the sort of thing we want on the news, Ari.”

“Well? We already have, haven’t we, to get him not to run again? So now we change our minds and we bribe him to keep it until somebody besides Khalid can organize another challenge. Send Frank to tell him so. Frank doesn’t get the attention you do.”

“I’m not sending Frank.”

“Why not? Because it’s dangerous?”

“Ari, you’re taking up my time and I’ve got business to do.”

“That plane’s not moving. Think of other ways to do it.” She hung up on him. And immediately used Base One to put an executive hold on Reseune One, and to forbid fueling.

Then she put in a call to Amy and Maddy, and told them individually, but they’d already gotten the news, Amy had called Maddy, Amy and Maddy were both taking the morning off and stood ready to come back home. So did Tommy Carnath, Maddy said, who’d told Mischa, and most everybody else must be getting it on the news by now. Sam–Sam was still out on site. “Come here,” she told Maddy. “Bring everybody.”

And she called Rafael, and briefed him, with orders to stand by. Florian and Catlin were more than briefed: they were in the security station with Wes and Marco, pulling up Novgorod data as fast as they could and monitoring police reports, which was all they could get out of Defense. Military Police were investigating, standing off the Novgorod authorities, Military Police currently under Councillor Jacques’ direction… thatwas a damned uneasy arrangement. But there was one other investigative authority, and that was the Council of the Nine itself, with its Office of Inquiry, which couldcross jurisdictional lines, and which reported straight to the Council.

She called Hicks. Personally. “We’ve heard the news,” she said straight off to Hicks. “We want every whisper out of that situation, as fast as you get it. Route it to my security office. No matter if it’s raw.”

“I understand you, sera,” Hicks said. “You’ll have it as fast as we can produce it. Councillor Jacques has requested a Council inquiry, seconded by Councillor Lynch.”

Lynch hadn’t made a move in months–notoriously didn’t act, deferring consistently to his Proxy, namely Yanni, who was Councillor in all but name: but Lynch had waked up this morning and made an actual motion to get at the facts, fast, and locally.

“Lynch is probably scared,” she said disingenuously. “I’ll imagine Yanni is moving to protect him.”

“He is, sera,” Hicks said.

“Yanni is in charge,” she said. “I’m holding Reseune One ready, but it’s staying grounded. Security concerns. Protect Yanni. He’s not looking at his own safety. I’m looking at it for him.”

“We’re in agreement,” Hicks said. “I’ll trust if you hear anything, I’ll get that advisement.”

“I trust I’ll hear it from you fastest,” she said, and let him figure out what thatmeant, whether it was a compliment or an order. “Thank you, ser. I’ll let you get on it.”

She broke the contact. Sat staring at the police report. The Novgorod Police had the body; the Bureau of Defense wanted it; the Office of Inquiry demanded it be sent to the University, its usual recourse for scientific questions, and it was going on two hours since a frightened housemaid had found the body. By the minute, evidence was being lost.

At least the Bureau of Defense wasn’t investigating it as an internal matter, and the Office of Inquiry was going to win. Nobody trumped them; and currently they’d sent a hearse to the District Coroner’s office to collect Spurlin’s remains. The COI had also put a lock on the potential crime scene, and taken steps to secure all computer records and recent communications. She drew part of that from the news and part from the Office of Inquiry itself, which she could get to by passive inquiry, just riding Yanni’s authority. She didn’t lodge any requests. She just read.

And frowned at the screen, and asked herself what in hell they were going to do about it if something happened to Lynch, or worse, Jacques.

“Sera,” Florian said from the doorway of her office. “The COI has taken physical custody of the body. They’ll be at the University inside half an hour. They’ve assembled a team of experts.”

“This is just bad,” she said. “This is bad, Florian.”

“Catlin would say there’s a solution for it, sera.”

“What? Go to the station and assassinate Khalid? And then somebody else comes after us?”

“We have no idea regarding that, sera.”

“Come here.” Her tone had been sharp. She regretted it. It was loss of control, but she felt less safe than she had felt a certain number of days ago. People died. Every time things reached a point of decision, people died, and everybody shifted places. Denys. That was her fault. His own fault. But Patil, and Thieu, upset Yanni’s plans for things, and now Spurlin? Everything Yanni had put together was getting hammered by successive events, and the Eversnow business wasn’t even underway yet.

Worse, much worse, it began to raise a specter of who‑benefitted, and that answer was beginning to shape up in a very ugly fashion.

Florian came close. She got up from her desk and hugged him, took his face between her hands and saw slight puzzlement. “I’m not criticizing,” she said. “Doing that is a possibility, a real one, if anything should happen to Yanni. If I take over, they’ll be after me, and I don’t trust that man.”

“We think they already are after you,” Florian said. “They surely plan for contingencies. And, more than a contingency, you’re a certainty, sera. You’re a hundred‑percent certainty unless someone stops you. And we won’t permit that. None of us will permit that.”

She certainly was a target. The first Ari had been. And it was the same thing she’d said to Yanni: she didn’t remember the War. She didn’t remember the Treaty of Pell. She just read about it. The fine textures of history just went away, the fabric lost its tensions and shredded until it didn’t make thorough sense any more, and nobody knew now what the deeper part of the issues had been, except what they’d recorded during the actual negotiations.

But how could anybody of her generation pull all those hours of recorded history up, and listen to all of it, and understand it? You’d have to live all the hours of all those negotiations, and all the simultaneous other hours of every other record, and you still wouldn’t get the gestalt of having grown up in it. You knew more, viewing it from the perspective of another generation, because the hidden things came out, but you knew less, too, because the context that made it all make sense had gone away. The first Ari had been somebody’s target, and she’d died, but how could you know why she’d died without being there, and only Yanni and Jordan, of the people still living, had been real close to the facts…

And if Abban had done it, how had Abban gotten the notion? Abban was Giraud’s shadow, not Denys’. And Giraud had mourned the first Ari. He’d loved her, she knewGiraud had loved the first Ari, so how had Abban possibly been the instrument of the other brother’s policy?

“Sera?” Florian said in a hushed voice, and touched her hair, and looked at her the way she looked at him, only with more awareness than she’d had in the last few seconds. She felt half paralyzed, the way she felt when the brain started working and working and working, pulling things together from one side of flux and the other, nothing matching…nothing making sense.