“I’m sure he’s actually getting some work done while he’s out there—if only to cover his ass when the newsies start hounding him. But it is convenient for him, isn’t it? For now, at least.”

Hyperion One was the SLN’s primary Sol System space station. It was not only the Navy’s largest single construction and service platform but the HQ location for its Logistics Command. LogCom was responsible for the vast number of superdreadnoughts mothballed not only there but at Battle Fleet installations in half a dozen other star systems. Hyperion One also orbited the planet Mars, not Old Terra, which left it roughly four light-minutes inside Sol’s hyper limit yet much closer to the asteroid smelters which still produced the bulk of the Sol System’s industrial resources—a compromise between security and convenience which was looking a little less secure, in Kolokoltsov’s opinion, given the preposterous missile ranges the Manties were supposed to be attaining. At the moment, however, it offered Rajampet a different sort of security. The current distance from Old Chicago to Hyperion One was just over four light-minutes, which made any sort of real-time conversation impractical, to say the least. Coupled with the admiral’s concern over the security of their communications, it put him safely beyond reach of the pointed interrogation he obviously knew awaited him.

“Convenient or not, he’s for the long drop,” Abruzzi said flatly. MacArtney looked as if he wanted to argue, but the permanent senior undersceretary of education and information went straight on. “No matter how we try to spin this one, someone’s got to take it in the neck. You don’t have this kind of disaster without determining who’s responsible for it and giving him the ax, Nathan, and you know it. He’s the senior uniformed officer of the Navy. That makes him the logical choice. For that matter, he’s the one who really is responsible for it!”

“That’s going to touch off a firestorm in the Fleet,” MacArtney said after a moment. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying the Navy’s going to see it as a bunch of civilians stabbing the uniforms in the back to cover their own backsides.”

“Of course they are!” Agatá Wodoslawski snorted. “If they don’t see it that way, they’ll have to admit their precious Navy couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse!”

More than one other person attending the high-security electronic conference winced. That sort of language was rare out of Wodoslawski, but it did capture the gist of their collective opinion rather neatly.

“What I want to know is what the hell Filareta thought he was doing,” Kolokoltsov said flatly.