But I must find Ojiro Sniper. We sit on a steaming volcano as we trust to Lesley Saneer’s impersonations, text announcements, and the excuse that the two-time silver medalist intends to minimize public activity while training for the gold. Any hour someone could pierce the deception, so no hour holds peace. Human Saneer, Senator Quarriman, and Hiveless Mardi Mojave are working on strategies to break the news gently to the public if we despair of recovering Sniper, but even should the public accept it, that would solve only half the problem. Dominus Jehovah is only recently reconciled with the cosmic pattern they refer to as their Peer, and to have that pattern snatch Sniper away, and so thwart this great test of human dignity, has sown doubt where doubt must not be.

And a third task presses too. The Universal Free Court at Romanova requests my industry in the investigation of O.S., whose history remains still half opaque. The case must, in a matter of days, be presented to the High Court Tribunal as we enter terra ignota. This mandate from a power outside the Empire may seem of least import, but I do not hold it so. What I have read of war suggests that the most devastating mistakes are often made either in war’s inception, when the front lines take their shapes, or after the surrender. In the latter case, exaltation and vendetta often have clouded victors’ judgments as they laid the architecture of their postwar worlds. When this war ends, all Hives, except perhaps the Cousins, Utopians, or Gordian, will have taken many lives, and we will have no precedent to establish the rights of Hives to kill except the bitter memory of nation-states, and this terra ignota of Human Ockham Prospero Saneer, which will naturally discuss the Hive leader whose tool Saneer was, former Humanist President Duke Ganymede Jean-Louis de La Trémoïlle. MASON’s Capital Powers derive from Mandate and IMPERIUM far older than Thomas Carlyle and their Hives, but, since the Empire has so long consented to be treated as a Hive by the Alliance, I sympathize with those who argue that the Emperor must either submit to the same rules which bind other Hives’ sovereigns, or else surrender the pretense of the Empire being part of the Alliance. If the questions I help the Court ask of La Trémoïlle may, after the war, be asked of my Emperor, then I consider this as weighty a task as I may ever receive.

Yet it is on a fourth mystery that my mind dwells. Who stabbed Mycroft Canner the second time? Instinct and intuition are mere nicknames for conclusions one cannot yet consciously justify, and something in me has concluded that whoever stabbed Mycroft the second time is at the heart of all.

Progress of Investigation: