.II.
Henke reflected upon her earlier comments vis-à-vis protocol as the Queen of Torch and the leader of the Manticoran Liberal Party converged upon the newest arrival for their own highly informal greeting. On Queen Berry’s part, it mainly consisted of a hug any uninformed observer might have mistaken for a determined attempt to strangle him. On Catherine Montaigne’s part, it consisted of the sort of long, lingering kiss which normally saw beer mugs thumping on tabletops while the raucous crowd whistled shrilly.
The admiral waited patiently, then cleared her throat and pointed at one of the still unoccupied chairs.
“Have a seat, Captain,” she invited with a small smile, and Zilwicki settled into the indicated place with only the slightest trace of color in his cheeks. Well, she thought, he’d had years of practice with Montaigne’s…idiosyncrasies. No doubt he’d learned to take them in stride. However…
“Do we need anyone to leave, Captain Zilwicki?” she asked, glancing around the compartment. “I’m not sure anyone here besides Admiral Tourville, General Hibson, Captain Lecter, and me has the proverbial ‘need to know.’”
“Actually, Admiral, some of what I have to report—even more, the proposals that come with it—will require the input of everyone here, to one degree or another.”
“One of Anton’s positive qualities, Admiral,” Cachat said. “He’s not obsessed with security for its own sake. Still, I wonder if Her Mousety needs to be present.”
“Since when did you go all formal on me, Victor?” Berry demanded with a look of disapproval, and Zilwicki shrugged.
“There’s no point in excluding her. She’d just wheedle it out of someone we didn’t exclude, eventually. Better she gets it straight from the horse’s mouth.”
“I never understood that particular cliché,” Henke said. “Unlike Cousin Elizabeth, I never really liked horses very much. And I certainly never met one with anything interesting to say.”
“And I’m not sure you ever met one at all, Anton,” Cathy said, regarding him skeptically.
“Hey!” Zilwicki protested. “We have horses on Gryphon—and not just in zoos, either.” He nodded toward Cachat. “He’s even ridden one.”
Henke and Lecter both looked at Cachat.
“When and where?” the admiral asked.
“And why?” Lecter demanded.
“Sorry.” Cachat’s normally expressionless face looked slightly smug. “Need to know.”
“He did it on a dare, by the accounts I heard,” Zilwicki said. “I don’t believe them, though. Victor’s not a gambler except for really, really big stakes.”
“I’ve heard that about him,” Henke agreed with a nod. “On the other hand, why don’t you go ahead and tell us what you’ve discovered?”
“Of course, Milady.” Anton leaned forward a bit. “For the past several weeks, I’ve been analyzing the curlicues and oddities from the wave of explosions. Most of my time’s been spent at my computers, because I had two very capable agents—Damien Harahap and Indiana Graham—to do whatever field work was needed. For the past stretch, though, I’ve been out in the field myself, and the upshot of it all is that I think I’ve found several…ah, let’s call them nexuses, all of which put together start giving a picture of what happened.”
“Really?” Henke tipped back in her chair, her expression intent. “I don’t suppose your analysis was able to determine the origin point for the detonation signal?”
“Not from the timing of the explosions themselves, if that’s what you mean, Milady, and we’re not going to, either, I’m afraid. Lieutenant Weaver and Captain Lecter were correct that the planet-side explosions were deliberately randomized. I’m less certain of Lieutenant Weaver’s suggestion that it was to conceal their point of origin—I’ll get to that in a moment—but they were definitely intentionally randomized. I was, however, able to determine the origin point for the explosions elsewhere in the system.”
“Let me guess,” Henke said. “It came from one of the planetary orbital habitats that was destroyed itself?”
“Exactly. And again, Lieutenant Weaver’s analysis was correct about that, although he hadn’t determined the actual habitat from which it came, since all of the ones in planetary orbit went up at virtually the same moment. No one really tried to disguise the actual source, though, so it was simply a matter of plotting the explosions and backplotting at the speed of light. And the answer was that it came from the biggest of them all—Station Delta.” Zilwicki shrugged. “What I can’t be positive of is whether the planetary detonation commands were also sent from Delta. I think it’s very probable that they were, however. That a signal sent from somewhere on the surface of Mesa activated a timed detonation sequence from Delta, which triggered everything else. That’s why I say that no matter how we analyze the timing of the planetary explosions, it’s not going to tell us where the order to blow everything the hell up actually originated.”
“Sounds reasonable.” Lester Tourville nodded. “Except for the fact that if they’d done that, they wouldn’t have had to bother with ‘randomizing’ anything down on the planet, either. They could have just detonated everything simultaneously, since they were going to blow up the transmission point, anyway.” He grimaced. “Would’ve been a lot simpler, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t think the…stretched out envelope for the planetary explosions was intended to conceal the location of their HQ, Admiral,” Zilwicki said. “I’m pretty sure it was actually intended to play into the notion of a Grand Alliance Eridani Edict violation. Missiles and KEWs don’t arrive simultaneously on target unless some ops officers invest the time and effort to make sure they do, so if they wanted to make it look like an irrational, impulsive, driven by hatred, ‘just kill the bastards’ order, staggering the explosions…”
He raised an empty, cupped hand, and Tourville nodded.
“Good point,” he acknowledged. “That would appeal to these bastards’ twisty thinking, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s one way to put it,” Zilwicki agreed. “Of course, another way to put it would be to call it wringing every possible advantage out of something they figured they had no choice but to do anyway.”
Tourville grunted sourly, and Zilwicki shrugged.
“Anyway, no matter how much I massaged the detonation times on the planetary surface, I couldn’t turn up any pattern that would lead me to their secret headquarters. However, while analyzing when things were blown up wasn’t very helpful, analyzing what things were blown up proved…rather more informative.”
He tapped the controls on his briefing room chair’s armrest to bring them online, inserted a chip into a data port, then entered a string of commands, and a holographic globe of Mesa appeared above the table. The surface was transparent, so that all places on the planet could be seen from any vantage point. The continents were delineated by glowing traces.
“Should I call for a drumroll?” Henke asked with a quirky smile.
“It would be nice.” Zilwicki smiled back. “But…no. In retrospect, it was obvious enough we all should have seen it.”
He tapped another key, and the globe was suddenly stippled with incandescent pinpoints in an explosively expanding net. They leapfrogged crazily across Mesa’s surface, connected by thin strands of light to indicate sequence, and Henke’s smile disappeared. She’d seen that same data displayed far too many times, and every time she had, she’d thought about the millions of lives that had vanished into those blinding pinpoints.
The net stopped expanding. It burned steadily, and Zilwicki waved a hand at the globe.
“A lot of those explosions were in places that don’t seem to make any sense at all,” he told them all, rather unnecessarily. “But what occurred to me was that the reason they don’t seem to make any sense is because we don’t know what they were blowing up. What I mean is that they obviously would make sense if we knew what had been there before the explosions. These people may be vicious, and they may be callous, and they’re sure as hell ruthless, but not even they would be erasing things they didn’t figure needed to be erased.”
“Makes sense.” Henke nodded.
“There are two basic approaches to hiding sensitive installations,” Zilwicki continued.
“One is to put them in a place where there’s so much other traffic, so many other people and so much other infrastructure, that all of your activities disappear into the background noise. The problem there is that so many possible things can go wrong, so many random bystanders who may notice something you don’t want noticed. Not only that, any modern urban area is so heavily monitored that there are scads of stored data a suspicious analyst can sort through looking for patterns that shouldn’t be there, and the longer you keep your HQ in one place, the more likely you are to generate a pattern he can spot.
“The second approach is to stick your installation somewhere where there is no other traffic or infrastructure, no inconvenient monitors or bystanders to notice anything they shouldn’t, and camouflage hell out of it to keep anyone from even realizing it exists. The problem there is that if anyone does notice your comings and goings, it’s a lot more likely to cause them to wonder what the hell is going on.”
He looked around the compartment to be sure everyone was with him, then shrugged.
“We’re all pretty much in agreement that these people have been around a long, long time and that they’re very good at hiding. It’s also evident that they’re really into…concentric levels of security. That they’ve built what Duchess Harrington calls an ‘onion’ around their most critical facilities. All of which suggested to me that they probably had what you might call an operational HQ and a strategic HQ. The former would be the communication and coordination nexus and might be moved periodically; the latter would be the long-term, secure site where they kept their really senior—their generational, let’s say—leadership. There’d have to be a lot of traffic in and out of the operational HQ, and it would have to have a lot of communication links, but they’d do their damnedest to limit traffic in an out of their secret, strategic HQ to the barest possible minimum, and it would probably have only a single link of its own. It would communicate—directly—only with the operational HQ, which would relay anything that needed relaying.
“Bearing that in mind, it seemed likely their operational HQ had been in one of the urban or habitat sites that got nuked. It was possible I was wrong and that they’d done the same thing with their strategic HQ, or even collocated them. But if they hadn’t—if they’d separated them the way their modus operandi suggested they probably had—then the strategic HQ might well have been one of those ‘nothing to see here’ sites we’ve been unable to explain. So, I started looking at the most obviously ‘unimportant’ explosions, instead. And, this—” he touched a key “—is what I found.”
A single pinprick, in the middle of the McClintock Sea, flashed suddenly red.
“The island?” Tourville said, and Cachat barked a laugh.
“You’re right—it’s obvious!” he said.
“It was obvious that it could have been what I was looking for,” Zilwicki corrected. “There were quite a few other targets where the official records insisted there was nothing to be blown up in the first place, but this one stuck out for several reasons, once I really started looking at it. One of the major points in its favor was that the nature preserve around it covers almost a million square kilometers, and it’s in the middle of the McClintock, not one of the coastal preserves. It’s completely closed to development. Nobody’s allowed to live there. So—”
“So if they had any traffic in and out there wouldn’t be any of those bystanders or traffic monitors to see it,” Henke said, her expression thoughtful.
“Exactly,” Zilwicki agreed. “And none of the other ‘empty spots’ had that kind of complete geographic isolation from human habitation. That could have appealed to them for any number of installations they really wanted to hide, but it was so perfect for their needs that I couldn’t shake the conclusion that they wouldn’t have ‘wasted it’ on anything less important than their central headquarters.”
“That may be a bit of a leap, Captain Zilwicki,” Lecter said, but her tone was thoughtful, not dismissive.
“Agreed. So I sent Damien and Indy to look it over on the ground. Judging from the size of the hole it left behind, the nuke that took out the island had to be buried pretty damned deep. Our best estimate is that it was about two hundred meters below ground level. That’s an awful deep hole to dig if all you’re going to do is put a bomb at the bottom of the shaft, so my belief is that whatever they’d built there went down two hundred meters and they just parked the bomb in the subbasement. That indicates that its target was probably pretty damned big, especially given the challenges of going that deep on an island, with all the seepage issues that implies.”
He entered another command, and the transparent globe disappeared, replaced by an overhead view of a large, semitropical island. A deep, almost perfectly circular and obscenely beautiful blue “lagoon” dominated its center, and its once luxuriant tropical tree cover lay like the petulantly scattered jackstraws of some enormous child. The parts of it that hadn’t been incinerated by the fireball, at least.
“As you can see, the crater’s already almost entirely full of water,” Zilwicki continued. “And it hasn’t been possible to form any detailed picture of whatever they needed to blow up. But not even a nuclear explosion really obliterates everything, and there are the ruins of a handful of…satellite structures.” He tapped a key and an icon in the holograph highlighted the outlines of what might have been relatively small foundations in a ring, spaced equidistantly around the central crater. There were a couple of gaps in that ring, where the destruction had been worst. “And Damien and Indy also found the ruins of an extensive—and very well camouflaged—detached boathouse. They used a separate—and smaller—bomb on it, so there are a few more traces of it left, and unless we miss our guess, it was about the farthest thing imaginable from ‘utilitarian.’ We’re talking about first-class luxury here, and that further supports the notion that this was an important site and that the people assigned to it were stationed there for the kind of extended period that would justify amenities like that. In short, the sort of site where a generational conspiracy might park its core leadership.
“And they also found this.” He reached into a pocket, produced a scrap of what looked like silvery fabric, and handed it across to Henke.
“And ‘this’ is exactly what?” she asked quizzically, turning it in her hands as she examined it. “Heavy, isn’t it?” she added, looking up at him.
“It is. And what it is, Milady, is a very advanced piece of smart fabric. When it’s attached to a power source, it’s completely transparent to light and every other form of radiation…from one side. The other side, however, becomes what’s effectively a highly flexible, easily configured flat screen. An HD screen, one might say. I never saw anything quite like it before, so I don’t have any idea how expensive it might be, but the mere fact that they have it—and that no one else does, to the best of my knowledge—and chose to use it here—” he jutted his chin at the holo of the island “—certainly seemed to underscore how important they thought the place was.”
Henke considered that for a moment, then nodded, and Zilwicki sat back once more.
“Once I got Damien and Indy’s report, I started searching for imagery of the island,” he said. “At which point I discovered another interesting thing. The most recent overhead imagery in the official Park Service archives is well over two hundred T-years old. Apparently, no Park Service ranger has overflown the island in the last two centuries. Not only that, but there’s no more recent imagery in any official archive anywhere on the planet. Or none we’ve been able to access yet, at any rate. And that is not something that could’ve happened by accident.
“So I extended my search beyond the official records. At the moment,” he smiled thinly, “the system constitution’s prohibitions against warrantless searches of full citizens’ electronic data are…in abeyance, let’s say. That was one hell of a lot of data to crunch, and it turned out that there was a fair amount of imagery of the island in private hands. A ‘fair amount’ given that it’s in the middle of an enormous nature preserve which just happens to not be crossed by any commercial air routes, at any rate. Which is to say, not a vast treasure trove, but one hell of a lot more than I really expected. Most of what I found is pretty bland and useless for our purposes, but my algorithms finally turned up something very interesting from a privately owned shuttle that overflew the area about five years back.”
The desecrated view of the crater disappeared, and Henke and Tourville leaned forward as one as it was replaced by a low-angle view of a gorgeous gem of greenery afloat upon a sea of deep blue water. And almost at the center of that gem—exactly where the lagoon now lay, in fact—was a luxury air car.
Rather, there was half a luxury air car. Its rear half was hidden inside an obviously solid canopy of treetops.
“That is an air car passing through an opening in the middle of a hologram,” Zilwicki rumbled. “You can’t tell there’s a gap in it because the opening’s too small and the angle is so oblique. It seems pretty clear they opened a hole just big enough for the limo…and closed it again as soon as it was clear. But the hologram as a whole is maintained in every single stray bit of imagery I’ve been able to find. I’m pretty sure those satellite structures Damien and Indy found were footings for the masts supporting a canopy of that—” he gestured at the scrap of fabric still in Henke’s hands “—that covered the entire center of the island and the holo projectors that produced the image it displayed. And that—” his gaze swept the people seated around the table “—is a lot of work to hide a structure on an island in the middle of nowhere that no one was going to be visiting anyway. The sort of work I might expect out of, oh, say a paranoid, megalomaniac, secret conspiracy that’s managed to hide itself for centuries.”
There was silence for a moment. Then Henke shrugged and dropped the fabric on the tabletop.
“It’s all circumstantial and conjectural, but it sounds to me like you’re probably right, Captain. If you are, is it likely to lead anywhere else?”
“That’s…possible, although not anything I’d call likely.” Zilwicki picked the fabric back up. “We’re busy analyzing the hell out of this stuff, hoping we can track it back to a particular nanotech outfit, for example. Frankly, I don’t see much chance at all of that panning out. On the other hand, I’m still running a search of all the existing air traffic records. I don’t expect to find anything in the island’s immediate proximity, but we’re looking for any air cars that just pop into existence on the theory that they had to come from somewhere, and it might just have been this black hole in the middle of the planetary airspace. If they did, finding out where they were headed might be sort of helpful.
“And, speaking of traffic records, that brings me to my next point.”
He paused, and Henke shook her head at him.
“Do you have any idea how much I hate unnecessary pauses for emphasis on the part of smug briefing officers?” she inquired with a smile.
“I do believe Captain Lecter might have mentioned something about that to me, now that I think about it, Milady.”
“Then I suggest you get to it.”
“Of course.” Zilwicki bobbed his head to her, then continued in a more serious tone.
“As our capture of that single air car’s image demonstrates, even the most cunning super-genius villains aren’t gods. They can’t control everything that happens on a planet inhabited by billions of people. They can’t keep track of everything, either. And it occurred to me that the entire ‘blow everything to hell’ plan and its timing were too elaborate to have been improvised at the last moment. They must’ve been in place for quite a while. And one thing about longstanding plans is that the assumptions upon which they rest are subject to change, especially in a system as chaotic as an entire star nation filled with naturally chaotic human beings. That means someone needs to check periodically, to review their underlying assumptions and be sure all of their preconditions stay in place. Which, in this case, they hadn’t.”
He tapped his armrest controls, and a different hologram appeared above the table.
“This is Station Delta, before it was destroyed,” he said. “I’m positive that one reason it was used as the nexus for relaying at least the off-planet demolition signals was because this is the habitat where the Mesa System Traffic Control Service hung its vac helmet. Like our Astrographic Service back home, the TCS keeps track of all extra-atmospheric traffic in the entire star system. Originally, TCS was located here—”
He highlighted a position near the center of the huge, sprawling orbital habitat. Like most such—the Beowulf System habitats were an exception to the rule—it had long since departed from whatever neat and tidy design it had originally possessed. In the vacuum of space, streamlining and gravity were equally irrelevant, so whenever a new addition was needed, it was simply constructed wherever it was convenient. By the time of its destruction, Station Delta had become a jumble of erratically sized structures and subsections haphazardly attached to one another by the sort of spindly booms a spider would have shunned.
“But a year ago,” he continued, after they’d had a moment to look, “the decision was made to expand and upgrade the TCS’s capabilities. While the work was going on, TCS’s traffic control facilities were moved to…”
He adjusted the highlight.
“Here.”
“Way out from the center—and on the other side of that big…whatever it is,” Henke said.
“Exactly. And ‘whatever it is’ is basically just a warehouse boom.” Zilwicki’s smile was almost broad enough to be called a grin. “In fact, a warehouse boom big enough it—”
“Shielded the new TCS facilities from the explosion,” Henke concluded with a nod. From her long naval experience, she understood something many civilians didn’t. Even a powerful detonation in space—even a nuclear blast—generated no shockwave to anything not physically connected to it. There was no air, no water, no fluid of any kind to serve as a blast-conducting medium. There definitely were radiation effects, including the radiant heat energy of the explosion, but it wasn’t at all uncommon for portions of a structure—especially ones which had been shielded in some way—to survive an external blast, which was effectively what it had been for the TCS facilities, given how far from the primary blast site they were located and how…flimsy the intervening structure had been.
Which hadn’t been the case with the murdered Beowulf habitats. They had been built, and updated, to a coherent plan, and the explosions which had killed them had been located near their hubs. There might not have been any atmosphere outside those habitats, but there’d been plenty inside them to transmit blast and generate disastrous overpressures. The only reason Hamish Alexander-Harrington and Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou were still alive was that even Beta had been fringed by industrial booms, and they’d been stuck on one of them, far enough from the primary blast zone to survive.
Barely.
Tourville grunted, a sound that resonated with his own understanding…and satisfaction.
“There were survivors,” he said.
“Better’n that,” Zilwicki replied. “There were surviving TCS operators and all their records.”
“That’s what you meant about no one checking the prerequisites.” Victor Cachat was not given to effusive displays of emotion, but his satisfaction was just as evident as Tourville’s. “You think that’s why they used Delta as the relay point. Or blew it up, anyway. By destroying it, they also erased their own tracks—some of them, at least. Just like—” He broke off. “Let me guess. The blast was centered right about where the TCS facility was originally located.”
“Within a hundred meters of it, as near as we can reconstruct.”
Cachat nodded, but Berry was looking puzzled.
“I’m not clear why you’re all so pleased about that,” she said. She sounded a bit plaintive, and Zilwicki looked at his adopted daughter.
“The reason I’m so pleased about it, Berry, is that I’ve been convinced for quite a while that the Alignment has been—had been—evacuating their people off-planet. And doing it in a way designed to cover their tracks. Wrapping one onion ring around another, you could say. The main ring they used—” his face turned hard “—was as ruthless as it gets. They launched a series of so-called ‘terrorist attacks’ to disguise the fact that many of the people supposedly killed were actually taken off-planet. And then they concluded the whole business with a monstrous wave of nuclear detonations. Not just so they could blame them on Admiral Gold Peak—they didn’t have time to put together something this elaborate after Tenth Fleet got here, so it had to have been orchestrated well in advance. They used it to help tar the Grand Alliance with responsibility for an Eridani violation when the opportunity presented itself, but its true purpose was always to wipe out their physical footprint here…including anyone they hadn’t been able to get off-world in time.”
“Always the nice thing about nuclear explosions, or fuel-air bombs—or sinking a cruise ship in kilometers of water.” Cachat’s tone was mild, his hands lightly folded on the table. “They don’t leave any awkward and untidy remains.”
“Oh.” Berry made a face. “That’s gross.”
“These are very gross people we’re dealing with,” Cachat replied. “Slick and subtle in their methods and means, but in the end they’re just a pack of vicious mass murderers.”
He turned toward Zilwicki.
“Do you want me to interrogate the Traffic Control people?”
Berry’s face tightened. She’d once witnessed Cachat’s interrogation methods. They’d been…extreme. Thandi Palane only laughed, though.
“For Pete’s sake, we’re talking about civil servants who’ve probably never wielded anything deadlier than a tablet. I really doubt it’ll be necessary to use the Black Victor spill-your-guts-or-you-die-in-five-seconds-and-counting-now-four-seconds interrogation technique.”
Zilwicki chuckled as well.
“Not hardly,” he said. “They were rescued by a Manticoran destroyer, and they’ve been in our custody ever since. They’re babbling like a brook.”
“What records do they have?” Cynthia Lecter asked. “Anything beyond ship movements and flight plans?”
“Oh, yes, indeed.” Zilwicki worked at the controls again, and the hologram of the now-destroyed Station Delta vanished, replaced by what seemed to be a corridor aboard the station. Or possibly aboard a vessel, although it seemed too spacious for that.
“One of the things TCS was assigned to monitor,” Zilwicki explained, “were the movements of all people transferring to or between ships at places like Delta. The records would be kept on the TCS servers for one T-year, and then transferred to an archive down on the planetary surface. An archive which just happened to be located at Ground Zero of one of the other nuclear explosions blamed on Tenth Fleet.
“The next transfer was due a bit less than three months from now, however, so there were still six T-months worth of records aboard the station at the time of its destruction. That period is plenty long enough to cover most—maybe all—of the so-called ‘terrorist incidents.’”
The image of three people appeared in the display: a man and two women, coming around a corner and moving toward the camera. Their faces were quite visible. A few seconds later, they’d passed out of the camera’s field of view.
“And speaking of the Devil, we’ve just seen the ghosts of two such victims. Not sure about the third.” Zilwicki backed up the recording to bring the three figures into view again, then froze it. “We haven’t been able—yet—to identify the tall woman with the reddish hair. But the shorter woman is Lisa Charteris. She was the head of a mysterious scientific project about which we still haven’t learned anything. More to the point, she and her husband Jules were supposed to have died in the ‘terrorist’ blast that killed more than nine thousand people in Saracen Tower. Her husband was killed, in fact. We found recorded imagery of him entering the auditorium where she was supposed to be one of the speakers at a scientific conference on the servers of one of the full citizen news channels that had a team in place to cover it. The blast happened about two minutes after his arrival, so we know he went up with it. Lisa Charteris was presumed to be one of the unidentifiable bodies in the wreckage. But—”
He nodded toward the holographic image.
“Here she is, aboard Station Delta, about to board a luxury liner headed out-system. Two days before the blast that supposedly killed her.”
“But here’s what’s really interesting.”
He expanded the image of the man, and I looked around the table.
“Milady, Admiral Tourville, Your Mousety, ladies and gentlemen—meet Zachariah McBryde.”
Cachat twitched upright in his chair, and Zilwicki nodded to him, then looked back at the others.
“This is the fellow whose brother Jack, with our help, smuggled the scientist Herlander Simões off Mesa. And then, when his own defection was stymied, blew up what we’re now certain was one of the Alignment’s central security facilities. To put it another way, someone we know—know for sure and certain—was a high-ranking member of the Alignment. The real alignment, not those poor souls on Mesa—poor saps, rather—who think they are the Alignment.”
Zilwicki leaned back in his own chair, gripping the armrests.
“Zachariah McBryde supposedly died in another terrorist incident. His remains were never found—terrible, what a fuel-air bomb will do—but a couple of items of his jewelry survived the blast and were given to his grieving family, all of whom were members in good standing of the Alignment. And one of whom—”
In a rare dramatic gesture, he paused, raised his fist to his mouth, and coughed portentously.
“One of who,” he continued, “his youngest sister Arianne, just so happens to have been both a highly qualified adviser to the system CEO under the old regime as well as an influential figure in the other Alignment. That is to say, the very outfit I’ve become convinced is the key to…well, not everything. But certainly one hell of a lot.”