“You’re waiting to see who’s safe, aren’t you?” Tully was hoarse from preaching, weak from standing, our warmonger still unequal to Earth’s 1G embrace. “You’re hoping your own Hive will be exonerated when J.E.D.D. Mason and Papadelias present their findings to the Senate, as if only the guilty Hives will suffer. You still think this is a trial, where the bad guy will be punished and the innocent will go home and sleep snug in their beds. It isn’t. No one sleeps snug anymore. The Censor knows it. That’s why they’ve frozen the stock market, and set a cop on every street corner in Romanova. The exposure of this assassination system isn’t just a scandal coming to light, it’s the end of the system which has kept the peace for two hundred and fifty years. The end of peace!”

Tully paused, expecting the crowd’s voice to rise in agreement, criticism, shock, some noise, any noise, but the spectators crowding the Forum stood in sickly quiet, like children dragged from their predawn beds, not yet ready to register the waking world.

“The Censor’s doing their best,” Tully continued. “They’ve called this emergency Senate session, so at least we’ll get it over with, and get the story from neutral investigators instead of all the Hives accusing each other at once, but that’s not enough. Nothing’s enough. When that door opens tonight,” he pointed, “and the Senate session ends, the worst won’t be over, it’ll be beginning!”

The crowd’s eyes followed Tully’s gesture to the bronze doors of the Senate House, a stone’s throw to his left, where the Senate Guard in Romanovan gold, white, and blue stood pale with awareness that they were no longer ceremonial. How did this day come, reader? This nightmare day, when the Enemy, the Mardis’ spokesboy, stands, not on his soapbox in some mildewed alley, but on the Rostra! That high, wide, marble-covered podium in Romanova’s Forum, where Tribunes and Senators announce the conquests of science, the triumphs of Olympians, the births of laws, and the deaths of heroes, and where now Tully harangues the thronging thousands, while floating cameras feed his words and gestures over the tracker network to another billion souls. The Forum had not been so packed in living memory. Downpour had ended, and drizzle had no power to deter the curious swarm, who filled the nooks and streets as plaster fills a mold. The marble porches of the law courts, the Hive embassies, the secular temples where Quaestors and secretaries trembled at their desks, even the Sensayer’s Conclave, silent with panic after Julia’s arrest, all were solid crowd. A pack of daring students had even climbed the triumphal arch which framed the steep steps of the Capitolium at Tully’s back, hanging off the reliefs where our stone heroes—Thomas Carlyle, Jean-Pierre Utarutu, Sofia Kovács, and King Juan Valentín—turned forests of rifles into plowshares, and poured cornucopias of aid over what the world’s mistakes had left of her poorer regions. Papadelias’s Alliance Officers, more used to desks than mob scenes, joined the City Prefect’s outnumbered force to carve out lifelines through the crowd, standing as living dikes around the landing patch for the arriving Senators. The elected representatives of Earth did not march into today’s session, but dribbled from their cars, clumping in groups, Cousins clinging to Cousins, Japanese Mitsubishi to Japanese and Korean to Korean, most silently cursing the day they had been selected by the stockholders, suggested to the CFB, appointed by the Emperor, elected by the mob, whatever means each Hive preferred to fill those seats reserved for it in the illustrious body which oversees the Universal Free Alliance.