“The Assembly will return to order!” Her tone was sharp, chiding, and the delegates who were still out of their seats, still celebrating their victory, looked up at her in surprise. Then they—slowly—obeyed the command, and she waited another few moments before she looked in Hadley’s direction.

“The Chair recognizes the Honorable Delegate from Beowulf,” she announced.

Hadley didn’t bother to stand as her image replaced the Speaker’s. She simply sat there, looking out of the display as a silence settled over the thousands of delegates. She could feel all those other eyes, almost taste the burning curiosity behind them. How would defeated Beowulf respond? What could she possibly say in the wake of this totally unprecedented public humiliation…and scapegoating? She let them wonder for several endless seconds, and when she spoke, her voice was cold and hard.

“I have served as Beowulf’s representative to this Assembly for almost forty T-years. In that time, I’ve tried without success to find some trace, some fragment, of the power and the responsibility and the high standards of personal conduct envisioned for it by the drafters of our Constitution. There’s no question of what the drafters intended, what they expected from this Assembly. The words are there for anyone to read and understand. The expectations are clear. Yet instead of finding those things, I’ve become intimately familiar with the ‘business as usual’ mentality of this Chamber. Like all of you, I’ve also become aware of where the true power in the formulation of federal law, regulations, and policy lies. Even if I hadn’t, even if I continued to cherish the slightest illusion that the elected representatives of the League’s citizens had one shred of authority at the federal level, this vote has just demonstrated the true owners of power in the Solarian League once again. It is nothing more nor less than a rubberstamped approval of the unelected bureaucrats who illegally wield power far beyond anything the Constitution ever granted them. A rubberstamp dutifully affixed to their effort to silence all internal opposition to the disastrous policy—and war—to which they’ve committed the League. Beowulf’s reward for attempting to prevent that war—or to at least cut it short before it consumes still more millions of lives and trillions upon trillions of credits—is to be investigated for ‘treason’ because it asserted the autonomy guaranteed to every member star system of the League. The same autonomy the home star system of every delegate who just voted in favor of this motion takes for granted every single day.”

She paused, brown eyes hard with contempt and disdain. The Chamber of Stars was deathly still, its quiet broken only by a handful of voices shouting denials of her assertions.