The President wasn’t nearly as worked up as Jed, but you could see he was puzzled by the suggestion. That was a relief. To Culver’s dismay, though, Ritchie took up the role of explaining Humboldt’s idea, confirming any suspicions about his prior knowledge of it.

‘The frontier militias’ chain of command runs up through Reconstruction, not Defense. They’re an armed force, but an irregular one. The duties can vary from securing the boundaries of small settlements, just like a garrison force, to riding shotgun on reclamation crews in the big cities, or scouting wilderness in the Declared Zones. It’s dangerous work. Very dangerous. And a lot of it is done in small teams, thousands of miles away from civilisation. If we were to take in a small number of these fighters, break them up, and scatter them through the militia, making sure they were posted well out into the badlands, and impose, say, a ten-year probationary period, we could sell it as both punishment and redemption. Their families would become, well . . . our hostages, to be brutally frank. If their men gave us any trouble, we’d just toss them all on Jed’s garbage scow and wave them off at the dock. For lesser infringements, we’d cancel home leave, maybe transfer the women and children to some more godforsaken hole – that sort of thing.’

The sleet slapping against the window behind the presidential desk had thickened up into a serious dump of snow. Gusting, contrary winds whipped fractal patterns through the white haze and rattled the old wooden window in its frame. Kipper frowned and searched around in his desk drawer for some notepaper. As he ripped out a piece, folded it, and folded it again a few times, he turned his back on them to jam the makeshift wedge into the window and muffle the rattling, talking while he did so.

‘Is there any reason any of these guys would agree to this?’ he asked. ‘I imagine you’d be planning to break them up completely so that you only had one of Baumer’s fighters attached to any particular unit. But really, how’s it going to work in practice? Ten years? That’s a hell of a long time. A hell of an incentive to cut and run the first chance you had.’

Having fixed the window, he returned to his desk and a cup of coffee that had gone cold. Kipper grimaced when he tried it.