“Hopefully that won’t take too long,” Wilson said, to his coffee. His coffee was mute on the subject. Wilson slurped some of it and then called up the data he’d transferred from Vasily Ivanovich’s data card into his BrainPal. They were indeed entirely pedestrian reports on colony life, but Wilson had already found something important in there. He didn’t want to miss anything else. He suspected he didn’t have all that much time left to go through the data before he was ordered to delete all of it.

*   *   *

Schmidt didn’t know what strings Ambassador Abumwe had to pull to get her way, but she pulled them. Across the table from her and Schmidt were Anissa Rodabaugh, chief of the mission for the Bula negotiations, Colonel Liz Egan, the liaison between the Colonial Defense Forces and the Department of State, and Colonel Abel Rigney, whose exact position was not known to Hart but whose presence here was nevertheless slightly unsettling. The three of them eyed Abumwe coolly; she returned the favor. No one was paying attention to Schmidt, and he was fine with that.

“We’re here,” Egan said, to Abumwe. “You have five minutes before you and Ambassador Rodabaugh have to get back to it. So tell us why you so urgently needed to see us all.”

“You haven’t been entirely forthcoming with me about this wildcat colony on Wantji,” Abumwe said. Schmidt noted the clipped tone that Abumwe’s voice took on when she was especially irritated; he wondered if it was noticeable to anyone else at the table.

“In what way?” Egan asked.

“In that it’s not a wildcat colony at all, it’s an under-the-radar Colonial Defense Forces outpost,” Abumwe said.

This received about ten seconds of silence, with Rodabaugh, Egan and Rigney studiously not looking at one another. “I’m not entirely sure why you think that is,” Egan said.

“Are we going to waste the next five minutes with this sort of bullshit, Colonel?” Abumwe said. “Or are we actually going to talk about how this is going to affect our negotiations?”

“It’s not going to affect the negotiations at all—,” Rodabaugh said.

“Really,” Abumwe said, cutting her off. Schmidt noted the chagrin on Rodabaugh’s face at this, but she and Abumwe were technically of the same diplomatic rank, so there was little she could do about it. “Because, Anissa, I have a Bula sub-ambassador I’ve been talking to for the last day who I am almost entirely certain knows more about this so-called colony than I do. I think as a result I’m being led down a very short pier. I think when I get pushed off, the entire negotiation is going to go down with me. If I fail at a negotiation because of my own failures, I accept that. If I fail because I’m being screwed by my own side, that I will not accept.”