Though looking back at the Rhein’s still waters, where he had buried the tank and crew in a watery death, Conner knew.

The Republic was hardly done with him.

“Is the boy mad?”

Jonah Levin stomped through the Chamber of Paladins, eschewing his high seat and circling the array of monitors where the paladins often met, discussed, voted and planned. His footsteps echoed back from the empty corners of the grand room. All but four stations were dark at the moment. At the manned consoles, only one face looked up from her work to answer what should have been a rhetorical question.

“Angry, yes,” Heather GioAvanti said. Her voice was calm, but far from soothing. “But not insane. That we could deal with far more effectively.”

David McKinnon never bothered to look up, but his weathered voice carried through the room easily enough. “We can handle this. I can haul the Seventh Hastati Sentinels back to Terra within the month.”

Escalating the struggle quickly past a point the nobles could not match. That was always McKinnon’s advice. Victory at any cost. The Founder’s Movement—of which the venerable paladin was an open supporter—did not hold with half measures.

Ad Securitus Per Unitas. Through security, freedom. The Republic motto taken to its extreme conclusion.

Even in the face of the attempted assassination against him, Jonah had refused such a solution. Disbanding the Senate had edged The Republic right up to the brink of disaster, where the exarch had hoped to bring his fracturing realm back under control. The only other option had been to accept a decentralized government with no clear voice or direction, at a time when outside forces threatened The Republic of the Sphere with invasion and conquest. Ten individual Prefectures, governed by the greediest nobles, looking out for themselves rather than the common good. That way lay disaster. That much he recognized.

To paraphrase Victor Steiner-Davion: The Prefectures must hang together, or they would certainly hang separately.

So Jonah continued to ground his frustration into shards and splinters beneath the heels of his dress boots. He felt the crushing weight of so many troubles and so little sleep riding on his back, adding to each heavy footfall until they might have been the thunderous, mechanical steps of a BattleMech. A wounded one. One day he’d simply stop; his feet welded to the floor wherever he had finally come to rest.

They could winch him out into Magnum Park and set him as a statue. A warning for future exarchs.

Beware an excess of optimism. No good deed goes unpunished.

Having stormed quickly through the dregs of anger and self-pity, Jonah was finally able to thrust aside his black musings for a clearness of thought. He needed those dark moments, at times. They reminded him of his own weaknesses, but also his strengths. They made him think about the kind of damage another paladin, one with less pure designs on The Republic, might have wrought.

Not that they wouldn’t have all likely ended up in the same place anyway.

“All right,” he conceded. “We’ve already lost or are likely to lose… what? Half of the Tenth Triarii and nearly the same from the Principes Guards? And ten… fifteen percent of the Tenth Hastati?”

“Twenty,” McKinnon promised. He would know. After Victor Steiner-Davion, he had the most experience with military coups and the fracture lines that built into civil wars.

“Terra’s garrison is a prestige posting for half of the sons and daughters of The Republic’s nobility. The Senate loyalists have gut-shot our officer corps on planet and all but shattered the chain of command.”

It still seemed wrong, turning the Chamber of Paladins into a command post. But as Gareth Sinclair had demonstrated, it was a too-convenient rallying spot. From here, GioAvanti worked on the logistics of isolating and dealing with senators and their forces still on planet. Maya Avellar and Otto Mandela ran simulations to predict the likely outcome of any hard fighting. And McKinnon extrapolated on their findings to other worlds and Prefectures, working with the chaos swarming throughout the rest of The Republic.

And Sir Gareth Sinclair had been looking into wild-card stunts, off-the-wall solutions that didn’t fit into the expected responses. At the moment, however, he was taking his watch over Victor Steiner-Davion’s body at the Republic Cathedral. The paladins took all of their duties very seriously.

And just as well. Only Jonah knew that Sinclair’s efforts paled next to the plans drawn up in Stone’s files. Radical solutions to some of the most complex problems likely to face the young realm.

Those times might be fast approaching.

“Why the Seventh Hastati?” he asked McKinnon. His mouth had dried to cotton, but his voice was still strong. Decisive.

The eldest paladin stepped away from his console to face the exarch, in order to pitch his plan with all the serious attention of a cadet called to his academic boards. “The Hastati are less susceptible to political pressures. We’ve seen that in the forces sent to Prefecture V to fight the Capellans.” He might just as well have called them “the Liao hordes” for all the contempt he layered into “Capellans.”

“I would counter that we saw massive defections in Prefecture IX,” Maya Avellar said. She jumped in to play devil’s advocate. She also had a way of getting beneath McKinnon’s thick skin very quickly. “When Jasek Kelswa-Steiner formed the Stormhammers, he stole away better than half of the Hastati.”

“Cult of personality.” McKinnon waved off her concerns. “The Isle of Skye region has always been an unstable area, from before The Republic was formed.” He looked to Heather GioAvanti for support, and the Skye native nodded reluctantly.

Jonah had no need of fancy imaging chambers or holographic tanks. He held a perfect picture of The Republic in his head. The worlds, and the presumed strength of their commitment to The Republic. He knew which were under assault, which in rebellion, following the lead of the disgraced senators, and which were stalwart Republic strongholds.

A dwindling number, this last.

“Prefectures II and III are threatened by Katana Tormark’s campaign to provoke House Kurita,” Jonah said, working it through. “VIII, IV, and I are compromised by the stronger senators and our uncertain Lord Governor Sandoval. V, VI, and IX are under attack, or”—for Prefecture VI—“holding firm in the face of imminent attack.” Which left VII. “We are not worried about the Marik-Stewart Commonwealth?”

“I’m not,” McKinnon said, folding his arms over his chest.

The tough-as-nails paladin never worried for tomorrow when he had an enemy to defeat today.

Avellar backed him up. A rare occurrence. “I think the ‘pieces of Marik’ are all too concerned about each other, at the moment. Thaddeus is the real expert on that region, and he’s down on New Aragon, but his opinion has been fairly consistent, and proven right, over the years.”

But why invite disaster? How many supports could The Republic have kicked out from beneath it before it collapsed under its own weight? House Liao from one side. Clan Jade Falcon, another. Rumblings from along the borders with Houses Kurita and Davion.

Davion…

“If we ignore Senate loyalist positions in the Americas and leave ComStar to enforce a rigid blockade of Australia, and push at their local strongholds in Spain and Germany… what would it take?”

Maya Avellar returned to her console, typing rapid input on the holographic keys, joining Mandela in a brief skirmish of probabilities. The dark-skinned man looked up once, locked eyes with Avellar, and nodded. She shrugged. Waggled her head. Silent communication between two people who knew and respected each other’s work, and had been comrades for a long time.