Humboldt straightened herself in the armchair, gathering the courage to speak her mind. ‘Jed, I must say I find the way you characterise these things to be very unpleasant and often unnecessary.’

‘Unpleasant, I’ll give you. Unnecessary is a moot point. But since we are on the topic, I wanted to talk about the unpleasantness down in Texas. Specifically, about the attacks on some of our settler families in the Federal Mandate.’

He could see he’d taken her by surprise. The incidence of settler families being run off their properties, and in some cases even murdered, wasn’t really high enough to have registered with the public, the efforts of the blogistan irregulars notwithstanding. Not when so many people had died in the Battle of New York. Not when a few thousand freebooters and pirates still roamed around the dead cities of the eastern seaboard, despite the efforts of the military and militias to drive them off. A family missing here, a homesteader there – it wasn’t much when laid against the butcher’s bill in Manhattan. Bloodshed was the one thing they had an ample surplus of and it saturated the media, numbing the much-reduced masses to anything but the most insensate savagery.

‘Do you propose to do something about the security arrangements?’ asked Humboldt. ‘My office has been arguing in favour of a Mandate militia for nearly two years.’

Jed smiled grimly. Technically, they did have federal troops in Texas, elements of the regular army and air force. Their ability to act, however, was strictly limited to territorial defence only; they were not a police force or a militia. The responsibility for internal security lay squarely on the shoulders of Governor Jackson Blackstone, who simply claimed to be doing the best he could with what he had.

‘I totally agree with you, Sarah. If we had our own troops down there, instead of having to rely on the Texas Defense Force, I think you’d see these attacks drop away completely. There’d still be a few raids and even killings in some of the more remote locations, because a lot of genuine bandits come up north through Mexico. But make no mistake, I believe some of the bandits, particularly these road-agent gangs, are indulged by Fort Hood, even if they’re not directed by them. I know things aren’t as bad as they were last year, but these gangs still make life difficult for our people. They create a lot of fear and uncertainty in the Mandate, and that makes them a good thing in Blackstone’s book. It doesn’t take much effort to do nothing, after all, and that’s what he’s been doing on this issue. Sweet fuck-all.’

He waited to see how she would react to such a bald-faced accusation of villainy. The Secretary for ICE nodded quietly, her lips pressed together.