“It hasn’t been the Seven Worlds for a hundred and seventy-five years,” Nickolai said. “It’s the Fifteen Worlds now.”
“Of course it is. We’ve been out of touch.” He walked around them, keeping what he must have assumed was a safe distance. “A lot of you on Bakunin now? Since it became ‘officially’ part of the Sev—Fifteen Worlds?”
Nickolai wondered what was going on. When this man first saw them, it seemed clear he had no idea who or what Nickolai was. Now he seemed to be aware of the history of Nickolai’s people, at least up until one hundred seventy-five years ago. He wondered if he was in radio contact with someone else. He didn’t see signs of the man wearing a radio, but that didn’t mean anything. He could have anything implanted, could be in contact with anyone on the planet as far as they knew.
“There aren’t very many; most are exiles, like me.”
“Bakunin’s still a great place to run away from something?” He turned and looked up at Kugara, who was a good head taller than he was. “That your story? You running away from something?”
“I retired.”
“From?”
“Dakota Planetary Security.”
The man paused and took a step back, looking at her. He whispered to himself. Nickolai heard his nearly- subvocalized words, “Oh, boy, Gram.” Then, after a pause, “Go right ahead.”
There was a strange and abrupt shift in the man’s body language. His grip on the shotgun changed, so he was now a lot more able to bring it to bear quickly. The cock of his head, and even his facial expression seemed different.
Most different was the voice. It suddenly seemed older, more confident. “Forgive me if I’m a little incredulous that my long-lost sister from Dakota just walked into our little no-man’s land. You got some convincing to do, chicky, starting with what in the name of Jesus Christ on a unicycle you’re doing a hundred light-years from what’s left of the ass-end of the Confederacy.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Zealots
War does not exist when all parties have perfect knowledge.
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
Alexander sat in his impromptu command center within the Ashley Hall of Minds, trying to improve the glacial response time of the Salmagundi government. Even in the face of his coup, and his direct control of every police department, security agency, and militia on the planet, events conspired to move faster than Salmagundi could react.
On the screens before him, he could see the recon team securing the last lifeboat site. Three of the six lifeboats had been unoccupied, and they had secured the occupants of two others. The teams had sterilized the sites, using plasma grenades to reduce the lifeboats themselves to slag.
It was the kind of direct action the Triad spent days debating, worrying over its effect on the general population. As if the presence of offworlders and offworld artifacts would be somehow
At least that concern was moderated by the fact that they had already evacuated the civilian population from the forest east of Ashley in preparation for using their nuclear stores on Flynn Jorgenson’s alien invader. The evacuation was fortunate on many levels. It helped ensure that no civilian agency came across the lifeboats before the militia got there—even with the intolerable delay caused by the Grand Triad’s debate.
Alexander idly wondered if they were
The preliminary abbreviated debriefing conducted by the on-site commander with the four
