Hadley’s bombshell announcement had completely blindsided him. He admitted it. He’d envisioned quite a few possible outcomes of Reid’s motion, but never that Beowulf would simply walk away from its seven centuries of membership in the League. No one had ever done that, and most people had assumed that, like so much more of the original Constitution, the right of secession had withered and was no longer applicable.

Beowulf’s government obviously didn’t see it that way, and while the system’s secession had not yet become a fact, there seemed to be very little chance of the plebiscite failing. Benton-Ramirez and his fellow directors undoubtedly had better access to polling data on Beowulfan public opinion than anyone on Old Earth did, but what the Mandarins did have access to made grim reading. At least eighty-two percent of the system population supported the Board of Directors’ decision to accept Manticoran assistance to prevent Imogene Tsang’s transit of the Beowulf Terminus against Beowulf’s wishes. An only slightly lower percentage—seventy-five to seventy-eight percent, depending on whose poll one chose—firmly believed it had prevented thousands of additional Solarian deaths. And somewhere around eighty-five percent favored an outright military alliance with the Star Empire against the boogie man of this “Mesan Alignment” figment of the Manties’ imagination. It was only a very short step from an alliance against Mesa to one against anyone perceived as serving the “Mesan Alignment’s” purposes, and while Kolokoltsov hadn’t seen any specific data on the question of outright secession from the Solarian League, against that sort of public opinion background, he was sickly certain Hadley was right about the final vote on the question.

Worse, there seemed to be very little the federal government could do to stop it from happening. Not with the Royal Manticoran Navy and its allies only a single wormhole transit away. That was bad enough, but according to his agents within the Assembly, it appeared the system delegations of Strathmore, Kenichi, and Galen were strongly inclined to recommend that their own star systems follow Beowulf’s example! He didn’t know if any of them had actually made their recommendations yet, but their system governments certainly seemed angry enough to take the plunge once they did, especially if Beowulf succeeded in its defiance of the entire League, and the thought was terrifying. The average population of the four star systems was over six billion, and the decision of twenty-four billion Solarian citizens to withdraw would be a body blow to the federal government’s authority and prestige.