In the waiting room behind the Throne Hall, Basil Wenceslas grumbled, frightening the King with his naked anger. “Damn! I would have preferred to keep this matter classified for a while. We don’t know how to assess what’s happened. We don’t have any answers. Everything was destroyed—but why? Was it an outside attack, or some sort of… cosmic event, like an aftershock of the Klikiss Torch?”

“You can bet it was an attack,” said General Lanyan, who stood stiffly at attention while Basil paced the floor. He had been recalled from the EDF base on Mars to discuss the crisis.

Frederick brushed at a speck of lint on his robes and looked around for a goblet of sweet wine. He had offered Basil a strong drink, but the Chairman shook his head, refusing to let anything cloud his thoughts. In contrast, King Frederick very much wanted to numb the dread he felt. “Basil, I can make an announcement that we’re investigating, but we still have no answers. Will that put them at ease?”

Basil slammed a flat palm against a fluted Corinthian column and said sarcastically, “Good idea. Let’s tell every person in the Hansa that we’re helpless and ignorant.”

“But we really don’t know what happened,” Frederick said.

“And neither do they,” Basil retorted. “A King must never let anyone see that he’s in the dark.”

Frederick took a gulp of his sweet wine and didn’t answer. He looked at the uniformed military man—Lanyan, not Lanson, he chided himself—and tried to shore up his confidence that the Earth Defense Forces would respond to this disaster. The General wanted to retaliate and crush the mysterious aggressors so that peace could return to the human colony worlds.

“I may be stating the obvious, Chairman Wenceslas,” Lanyan said, “but it might have been the Ildirans. Their Solar Navy was present at Oncier, watching our test. Maybe they felt threatened because we have such powerful technology. Who else could it have been?”

“It’s a big universe, General, filled with many things we don’t understand,” the King said. “We’ve explored only a portion of one spiral arm in our galaxy—”

“Frederick,” Basil interrupted, sounding exasperated, “even the Ildirans with all their history have never encountered another alien race. I don’t want to muddy the issue by making up bogeymen. The threat of war with the Ildirans is frightening enough. On the other hand, General, I am also highly skeptical that the Solar Navy has weaponry approaching the power necessary for such destruction.”