Dawn’s kindling on April sixteenth saw fresh crises in the Senate, with the Mitsubishi at the heart of both. Up for debate first came Minister Cook’s hateful reintroduction of the Set-Set Law, which heightened the fervor around the Mitsubishi strike. While the Mitsubishi administration claimed that the Odessa land redistribution edict was their only provocation, the world remembers the Set-Set Riots, and knows that the entrepreneurial Mitsubishi train and employ the lion’s share of set-sets. The same session saw the first discussion of Natekari’s motion to declare Sniper an enemy of the Alliance to be killed on sight, a proposal which spread bloodlust farther than any but myself had done in living memory. I want to tell you, reader, that the world was noble in restraint, like Spain and MASON. I want to tell you there were no more skirmishes, no toddler set-sets delivered bewildered to orphanage doorsteps. I want to tell you that when Voltaire Seldon next visited my office-cell his coat did not keep flickering with mourning static, that the photographs Martin failed to hide from me were fake, that these eyes never saw the rainbow-leaking limbs of a lynched dragon, nor its master’s scarlet blood commixed. May I, please, master? May I gently lie?

No, Mycroft. Never. Not and still call this a chronicle.

Then pray, master, let me at least be brief. These days were darker, I think, than Martin let me know, if not yet dark enough for Achilles to call them war, as Hobbes does. I cannot tell all that happened. What I can deliver is a patchwork, more holes than cloth, of Dominic’s maneuvers as the Mitsubishi walked the tightrope between strike and war.

Martin received the call first, one of hundreds I half tried not to listen to as he carried on his duties as Minister Porphyrogenito, and bearer of the Imperium Vicarii. “Am I correct, Acting Director,” I heard him ask, “that this proposal actually comes from Acting Chief Director Seneschal?” Pause. “Tell them to call in person. Caesar does not deal with intermediaries.” Another, patient pause, then, “Caesar also does not deal with lies. Tell Dominic to call directly.” There was no malice in Martin’s face as he ended the call, just mild efficiency, as when rain moves in to work its life-giving duty, parade or no.

The consequent conversation I received in transcript later:

Dominic: “Thank you for taking my call, Votre Majesté Impérial.”

MASON: “Don’t waste my time.”

Dominic: “I need your help to end the Mitsubishi strike.”

MASON: “Your hold is too weak?”

Dominic: “The stakes are too high for me to win them over.”

MASON: “Tell them they’re destroying themselves. The people who are out of work or losing money because of the strike are spending their lost hours watching Tully Mardi’s videos. Every minute this drags on brings another hundred people to the edge of riot, not anti-set-set riot, anti-Mitsubishi riot.”