The President took his time mulling it all over. Nobody spoke while he was deep in thought. Jed used the brief interlude to examine the idea from all the worst possible angles. His main concern was not that a handful of nutjobs would run wild in an empty city. They’d been smashed flat in NYC when they were part of a much larger, well-organised fighting force. No, as individuals rattling around the interior of a nearly empty continent, there just wasn’t much mischief they could get up to, and his reading of human nature led him to believe that Humboldt was probably right – most of these former grunts for hire could be reformed and even assimilated, given enough time. As for the true believers, Baumer’s hard-core jihadi, they had no future here. And Jedediah Armstrong Culver, of the Louisiana Bar, would not rest until they were gone or dead. After all, war crimes trials were in the offing for a number of them. Even the more moderate elements of President Kipper’s Garage Cabinet were agreed on this point, thankfully.

The main threat, however, as always, was Jackson Blackstone. It made your head spin to think about the merry hell he would play with something like this. It was almost a lay-down certainty he’d have his lapdog State House pass a law banning the presence of any former enemy combatants within the borders of Texas and its protectorate territories. Having done that, the sneaky little fuck would probably want to make sure a couple of them actually wandered over the state line . . . just so he could be seen to hunt ’em down and string ’em up.

On the other hand, a merciful, peacemaking gesture would play very well here in the Northwest, especially with Sandra Harvey’s Greens. They weren’t running a candidate in the presidential election. Sandra was smart enough to know she could only ever play the role of a spoiler for Kip’s chances. And for all of her many, many issues with his administration, she regarded the possibility of a Blackstone-led government with visceral horror. He was just running the math in his head on whether a Green endorsement would bring in more votes than it burnt off when Kipper broke the silence.

‘The women and the children should be allowed to stay, with certain . . . provisos,’ he began. Everybody seemed to lean forward just a little bit. ‘It’s reasonable, I think, that we require of them everything we require of any other settler, and more. English-language proficiency. Civic education. Training in whatever base-level skills we deem necessary. All the usual. And, because of the circumstances under which they came here, we need to ask – no, we need to demand – more of them.’