"Well, I still have to. You go on back."

She did not. But he walked away down the hall like he was really going somewhere.

She wished she could. She wished he would be nice. She was bored and she was unhappy and when she saw him she remembered the glittery people and everybody being happy, but she could not remember when that was.

Only then Ollie had been there all the time and maman had been so pretty and she had played with Valery and gotten the star that hung in her bedroom.

She walked back to ser Peterson's office very slow. Kyle didn't even notice. She sat down and she drew a star. And thought about Valery. And the red-haired man, who was Grant. Who was Justin's.

She wished Ollie and maman had more time for her.

She wished maman would come out. And they would go to lunch. Maybe Ollie could come.

But maman did not come anytime soon, so she drew lines all over the star and made it ugly. Like everything.

vi

The documents show,the report came to Mikhail Corain's desk, the operation involved a clandestine military operation and the landing of 40,000 Union personnel, the majority of them azi. The mission was launched in 2355, as a Defense operation.

There was no further support given the colony. The operation was not sustained.

The best intelligence Alliance has mustered says that there are thousands of survivors who have devolved to a primitive lifestyle. Beyond question they are descended of azi and citizens. The assumption is that they had no rejuv and that after sixty years the survivors must be at least second and third generation. There are ruins of bubble-construction and a solar power installation. The world is extremely hospitable to human life and the survivors are in remarkably good health considering the conditions, practicing basic agriculture and hunting. The Alliance reports express doubt that the colonists can be removed from the world. The ecological damage is as yet undetermined, but there is apparently deep penetration of the colony into the ecosystem, and certain of the inhabitants have retreated into areas not easily accessible. It is the estimate of Alliance that the inhabitants would not welcome removal from the world and Alliance does not intend to remove the colony, for whatever reason.

The estimation within the Defense Bureau is that Alliance is interested in interviewing the survivors. Defense however will oppose any proposal to retrieve these Union nationals as an operation which Alliance will surely reject and which would be in any case counter-productive.

The azi were primarily but not exclusively from Reseune military contracts.

See attached reports.

The majority of citizens were military personnel.

Nye will offer a bill expressing official regret and an offer of cooperation to the Alliance in dealing with the colonists.

The Expansionist coalition will be unanimous in that vote.

Corain flipped through the reports. Pages of them. There was a sub-sapient on the world the colonists called Gehenna. There were a great many things that said Defense Bureau, and Information Unavailable.

There was no way in hell Alliance or Union was going to be able to retrieve the survivors, for one thing because they were scattered into the bush and mostly because (according to Alliance) they were illiterate primitives and Alliance was going to resist any attempt to remove them, that much was clear in the position the Alliance ambassador was taking.

Alliance was damned mad about the affair, because it had been confronted with a major and expensive problem: an Earth-class planet in its own sphere of influence with an ecological disaster and an entrenched, potentially hostile colony.

So was Corain angry about it, for reasons partly ethical and partly political outrage: Defense had overstepped itself, Defense had covered this mess up back in the war years, when (as now) Defense was in bed with Reseune and gifted with a blank credit slip.

And if Corain could manage it, there was going to be a light thrown on the whole Expansionist lunacy.

vii

Gorodin—was not accessible. That was not entirely a disaster, in Giraud Nye's estimation. Secretary of Defense Lu had sat proxy so often in the last thirty years he had far more respect on Council and far more latitude in voting his own opinion than a proxy was supposed to have, the same way the Undersecretary of Defense virtually merged his own staff with Lu's and Gorodin's on-planet office: it was in effect a troika at the top of Defense and had been, de facto,since the war years.

And in Giraud's unvoiced opinion it was better that the proxy was in and Gorodin was somewhere classified and inaccessible at the other end of Union space: Lu, his face a map of wise secrets as rejuv declined, his dark eyes difficult even for a veteran of Reseune to cipher, was playing his usual game of no authority to answer thatand I don't feel I should comment,while reporters clamored for information and Corain called for full disclosure.

Full disclosure it had to be, at least among political allies.

And Giraud had heard enough to upset his stomach all the way from Reseune to this sound-secure office, the sound-screening working at his nerves and setting his teeth off.

"It is absolutely true," Lu said, without reference to the folio that lay under his hands. "The mission was launched in 2355; it reached the star in question and dropped the colonists and the equipment. There was never any intention to return. At the time, we knew that the world was there. We knew that Alliance knew, that it was within their reach, or Earth's, and by the accident of its position and its potential—it would be of major importance." Lu cleared his throat. "We knew we couldn't hold it in practicality, we couldn't defend it, we couldn't supply it. We did in fact purpose to remove it from profitability."

Remove it from profitability.Alliance had sent a long-prepared and careful survey to the most precious find yet in near space—and found it, to its consternation, inhabited, inhabited by humans not their own and not plausibly Earth's—leaving the absolutely undeniable conclusion, even without the ruined architecture and the fact that the survivors were azi-descended—

Union had sabotaged a living planet.

"Forty thousand people," Giraud said, feeling an emptiness at the pit of his stomach. "Dropped onto an untested planet. Just like that."

Lu blinked. Otherwise he might have been a statue. "They were military; they were expendables. It was not, you understand, my administration. Nor was there, in those days, the—sensitivity to ecological concerns. So far as anyone then was reckoning, we were in a difficult military position, we had to reckon that a Mazianni strike at Cyteen was a possibility. There were two possibilities in such a move: first, the colony would survive and maintain Union principles should we meet with disaster, should Earth have launched some suicide mission at Cyteen itself. The secrecy of the colony was important in that consideration."

"It was launched in 2355," Giraud said. "A year after the war ended. Lu folded his hands. "It was planned in the closing years of the war, when things were uncertain. It was executed after we had been confronted with general calamity, and that disastrous treaty. It was a hole card, if you like. To let either Earth or Alliance have a world potentially more productive than Cyteen—would have been disastrous. That was the second part of the plan: if the colony should perish, it would still contribute its microorganisms to the ecology. And in less than a century—present Alliance or whatever new owner—with a difficult problem, which our science could handle and theirs couldn't. I might say—some native microorganisms were even—engineered to accept our own engineered contributions. At your own facility. As I'm sure your records will say. Not mentioning the azi and the tape-tailoring."