“Terra ignota for murder!” I half screeched the words as the wraiths around me churned in protest.

I deserved the glares the others fixed on me.

The president spoke first. “What O.S. did was ordered by the Humanist government through its own due process, and served legal mandates: O.S.’s to serve the Humanists, the Humanist government’s to serve its Members, and the Hives’ contract with Romanova to support the good of all Hives and the human race. I can’t say with certainty whether or not such Hive-authorized homicides were, or should have been, illegal. Neither can you.”

Prospero watched contented as these facts flowed from his new commander’s lips.

“But, Censor,” I cried, “even back in the days of geographic nations, assassination was—”

“And if we still lived in those dark ages, that might mean something,” Ancelet snapped, too much in haste to chide me for letting his old title slip. “A nation could kill to protect its sovereign soil. Can you define a Hive’s sovereign soil, Mycroft? Can you define the limits of Hive self-defense?”

Had I a more yielding soul, it should have been Ancelet whose wise words silenced his troublesome apprentice. It was not. Instead it was the Great Specter Thomas Hobbes, who loomed suddenly over my mind, as he had loomed over Europe in those grim decades after 1651, when all the lights of scholarship united in the struggle to forge some mental weapon that could pierce logic’s armor and slay the dread Leviathan. Perhaps no mind has ever so united all the spearpoints of philosophy in one phalanx against him, but the Beast of Malmesbury—Hobbes’s title, as saturated with dread as the Patriarch’s with honor—used Reason’s highest arts to paint portraits of Nature, God, and Man so perfect that not one brushstroke could be criticized, yet so abominable that they left the reader unable to respect humanity. So desperately Hobbes’s readers cried, “We are not brutes! We do not hate and fear each other so! Humanity is a fair race! Noble! Good!” But they could not prove it, not against Hobbes’s flawless descriptions of the realities of human malice. All the land’s horses and all the land’s men could not cure the Hobbesian infection, not for the twenty years it took John Locke to develop his Blank Slate, the only antitoxin. And even with that antitoxin in our reading list, Leviathan looms still from time to time, when some new dreadful deed of humankind reminds us how well Hobbes’s cold, aggressive war of all on all describes our state. Our selves. We in 2454, with two thousand secret O.S. victims shoring up our near-utopia, can we prove we do not live on murder? Now I felt anew this shadow, conjured by Ancelet’s words—the nation’s right to kill in self-defense—which summoned in my mind some lines of Hobbes which slipped out of me—lines which, try as I might, I can neither unread nor refute: “Hobbes says that neither passion nor action may be called a sin until they know some law that forbids them, and that, where there are no man-made laws, the immutable and eternal Laws of Nature and Reason state that all men must and may, by whatever means we can, defend ourselves.” I shivered, finding myself stared at. “Such a Law of Nature could not convict O.S. Can Romanova?”