Kalico walked over, looked down at the man. “We live with and rely on over-extended equipment. Our aircars, electronics, mining machines, medical technology, all of it is patched together and jury-rigged. I heard the new contractees laughing at our light bulbs, about our crude foundry, and the tire-molding machine. How it’s nineteenth-century technology grafted onto the twenty-second. We make our own copper wiring and inefficient batteries instead of n-dimensional qubit matrixes and powerpacks. It’s called survival. A word The Corporation may have forgotten.

“Should I immediately have swapped my old A-7 for one of Turalon’s new birds? Sure. Didn’t think of it. Instead of taking care of business, greeting the new contractees, and processing my people who wanted to transit home on Turalon, I had a Board Appointed Inspector General who told me my first priority was to personally attend to him and his Four.”

She paused. “Even without your First, you do remember that, don’t you?”

Soukup winced, uncomfortable with the mention of his Four.

Kalico pressed on. “But let’s put that new A-7 in perspective: Had I commandeered one of Turalon’s birds, you’d probably be accusing me of violating some obscure regulation by taking a new A-7 for my own use when it could have been better employed in the transportation of the next fifty trillion worth of SDRs up to orbit.”

“Prudence would have dictated—”

“Prudence?” Kalico demanded, bending down, staring into the man’s face. “You’re alive because Ensign Juri Makarov was talented enough to set you down on the slope of that mountain. He paid with his life. And when Kylee Simonov and Falise Taglioni pulled you out of the wreck, you stole their airtruck and left them to die. And you accuse me of malfeasance? You’re a shit-sucking coward!”

This time the pandemonium was a riot. Kalico had to stand by Talina’s shoulder, waving the crowd down, shouting for order. The banging of Abibi’s gavel was drowned in the din.

Kalico reached into her belt pouch again, produced the device Bogarten had recovered from the main busbar on the downed A-7. This she displayed before Soukup’s disdainful gaze. “You ever seen this before, Inspector General?”

“I have not.”

Kalico turned to the officers behind the bar. “I had a tech check it out. It’s a field damper. It’s supposed to ground an entire electrical system. Fenn Bogarten found this in my A-7 after the wreck. Now, here’s the oddity: I was told by a Shuttle Tech III from Turalon that my A-7 couldn’t have so much as powered up the thrusters if this had been installed on the busbar in the main control unit. So how did it get there? Bogarten thinks one of the Inspector General’s people placed it there after my bird went down.”

“That’s . . . insane!” Soukup cried.