“I certainly explained it to him using nice, short, simple words,” Kolokoltsov said bitingly. “But he’s been pushing this confrontational stance against the Manties from day one, and he never has explained why Crandall picked the Madras Sector, of all damned places, for her training exercise. Or exactly why he failed to mention her presence in the vicinity to us after what happened at New Tuscany. Or even how Filareta just ‘came to be’ so conveniently placed at Tasmania when he came up with Raging Justice in the first place. I know he’s an arrogant prick who despises every neobarb ever born, and I know he takes the Manties’ attitude as a personal affront to his Navy, but I’m starting to wonder if there might not be more to it even than that.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re buying into this grand conspiracy nonsense the Manties are spouting!”

“I’m not,” Kolokoltsov said, yet his tone lacked a little something, Quartermain thought.

“Centuries-long conspiracies?” She threw up both hands. “Fleets of invisible starships? Plans to replace us all with genetically engineered super-Scrags of some sort? Some kind of mind-controlling nanotech? And the entire institution of genetic slavery’s only a front for all of this ‘Alignment’s’ evil plans? We’re supposed to believe the nasty Mesans managed to keep all of this completely secret for six hundred years when all the ‘proof’ the Manties can provide is the unsupported testimony of a single lunatic scientist? One who actually threatened to kill one of Mesa’s leading geneticists—not one of Manpower’s hacks, but the Chairwoman of Maternal and Fetal Genetics at one of the finest hospitals on Mesa!—over his daughter’s death?”

“I agree it sounds insane,” Kolokoltsov replied. “But parts of it are going to make people wonder, if they really stop and think about it. Like the fact that the Republic of Haven of all people believes it, too. That Haven actually brought the entire story to Manticore in the first place!”

“That’s what the Manties are telling us happened,” Quartermain shot back. “And if I were them, I’d have damned well been telling us anything I could think of that might have convinced us to go ahead and send somebody to Manticore to order Filareta to stand down the way Carmichael kept demanding!”

“You think they’re lying?”