“Well,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said with a shrug that was just a bit more philosophical than his mind-glow tasted, “I guess there’s one way to find out.”

“And that’s what I’m afraid of, Uncle Jacques,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Four

Felicia Hadley sat once more in the Beowulf delegation’s box in the Chamber of Stars.

Her head was erect, her shoulders squared, and anyone looking at her could have been excused for not recognizing the mixture of anger, weariness, frustration, grief, and…emptiness behind those outwardly tranquil eyes. After all, she couldn’t sort out all those feelings herself, so why should she have expected anyone else to understand the way she felt?

The two weeks of scheduled debate on Tyrone Reid’s motion had been the ugliest Hadley could remember ever having seen. That was hardly a surprise, given the position Kolokoltsov and the rest of the Mandarins faced. They’d pulled out all the stops to focus the League’s fear and anxiety on someone else in order to save themselves, and they knew all the tricks of the game. The attacks had been carefully orchestrated, aimed from every imaginable quarter and endlessly repeated by flocks of coopted newsies and media talking heads, to give them maximum credibility with the public. There were a few reporters, like Audrey O’Hanrahan, who genuinely seemed to be trying to cover both sides of the debate, just as there were some Assembly delegates who’d tried to get the truth out. But those delegates, like the newsies trying to do their jobs, were drowned in the tide of attackers. There were simply too many members of the Assembly—and too many in the media—who owed the Mandarins too many favors (and about whom Malachai Abruzzi’s operatives knew too many secrets) for there to be any other outcome.

Two things had surprised her, however. One was the degree of genuine hatred some of her fellow delegates had spewed out in their attacks on Beowulf. Reid’s allies had placed their darts carefully, wrapping their fiery denunciations around a core of cold calculation, but others had joined the assault on their own, lashing out in an almost incoherent fury that didn’t care what the law might say, wasn’t concerned with why Beowulf might have done what it had done. No, that fury fed only on panic stricken reports of the Manticorans’ superior weaponry and fear that Beowulf’s “treason” had somehow freed that weaponry to ravage the entire Solarian League. Of course, no one had bothered to explain how Beowulf’s permitting Imogene Tsang’s fleet to be massacred would have averted that threat, now had they?