“What do you think you’re seeing there?” Schmidt said.

“A strong case for not letting trainees drive a battle cruiser,” Harry said.

“It’s an image taken during the recent Korban coup,” Schmidt said. “There was a disagreement between the head of the military and the Korban civilian leadership. That skyscraper is—well, was—the Korban administrative headquarters.”

“So the civilians lost that particular argument,” Harry said.

“Pretty much,” Schmidt said.

“Where do we come in?” Harry asked, handing back the PDA. “Are we trying to restore the civilian government? Because, to be honest about it, that doesn’t really sound like something the CU would care about.”

“We don’t,” Schmidt said, taking back the PDA. “Before the coup, the Korba were barely on our radar at all. They had a non-expansionist policy. They had their few worlds and they’d stood pat on them for centuries. We had no conflict with them, so we didn’t care about them. After the coup, the Korba are very interested in expanding again.”

“This worries us,” Harry said.

“Not if we can point them toward expanding in the direction of some of our enemies,” Schmidt said. “There are some races in this area who are pushing in on us. If they had to worry about someone else, they’d have fewer resources to hit us with.”

“See, that’s the Colonial Union I know,” Harry said. “Always happy to stick a knife in someone else’s face. But none of this has anything to do with me getting punched in the face.”

“Actually, it does,” Schmidt said. “We made a tactical error. This mission is a diplomatic one, but the new leaders of Korba are military. They’re curious about our military, and they’re especially curious about our CDF soldiers, whom they’ve never encountered because our races have never fought. We’re civilians; we don’t have any of our military on hand, and very little in terms of military capability to show them. We brought them that field generator you’ve been training our technicians on, but that’s defensive technology. They’re much more interested in our offensive capabilities. And they’re especially interested in seeing our soldiers in action. Negotiations up to this point have been going poorly because we’re not equipped to give them what they want. But then we let it slip that we have a CDF member on the Clarke.”

“We let it slip,” Harry said.

“Well, I let it slip, actually,” Schmidt said. “Come on, Harry, don’t look at me like that. This mission is failing. Some of us need this mission to succeed. My career’s not exactly on fire, you know. If this mission goes into the crapper, I’m going to get reassigned to an archive basement.”

“I’d be more sympathetic if saving your career didn’t require blunt force trauma for me,” Harry said.