“That’s my reading, too,” Hadley said, her expression troubled. “Especially with Mesa stirring the pot the way it is. Absent some probably impossible change at the center, the League’s going to start shedding Verge systems pretty damned quickly, and it won’t be long until the Shell follows suit.”

Carmichael nodded, wondering if Hadley had been as fully briefed as he had on events in the vicinity of the Congo System and the Maya Sector.

He looked back out at the mob.

Aside from the mental myopia of mistaking Old Terra’s public opinion for the entire League’s public opinion, Abruzzi and his minions had actually done a workmanlike job, he reflected. The suggestion that the Grand Alliance had deliberately sucked Filareta into a death trap with false offers of honorable surrender terms just so it could be certain of wiping him out had actually struck a chord in at least a sizable portion of Old Terra’s population. The Mandarins’ pet newsies had come out swinging in support of the official line, and the Solarian Navy’s refusal to uncategorically back that same official line had actually lent it additional credibility. It gave the story an aura of deliberation, of a refusal to rush to judgment which befitted sober minded, thoughtful leaders doing their best to pick their way through a minefield of confusion and other people’s misrepresentation.

As far as Carmichael could tell, at least part of the people who were embracing Abruzzi’s version so enthusiastically had done so because it explained how the invincible Solarian League could have been defeated so completely by a patchwork coalition of neobarbs. What made it even more convincing to them, he suspected, was that it suggested the Grand Alliance was really afraid of the League. That it had resorted to such chicanery and treachery because whatever it might claim, it was actually terrified of facing the SLN in fair, open battle. After all, Spindle had been primarily an ambush engagement, hadn’t it? And now there was Filareta’s massacre in a similar situation. Surely that demonstrated that the League’s defeats were primarily due to neobarb treachery and deceit, not the fundamental rot at Battle Fleet’s core! There was no doubt in his mind that such an analysis was comforting to those frightened of admitting the League was in a position of hopeless inferiority. Not to mention those who simply resented the hell out of the way the Solarian Navy had been slapped aside like a bothersome mosquito.