Digital eyes caught mine, so kind and unkind. “You don’t have the power to determine who gets blamed, Mycroft. This war won’t be about what you say in your book. It won’t be about how others twist what you say. It won’t even be about O.S. It’ll be about a hundred different things for different people, and a month into the fighting it’ll be about different things yet. The one power you do have is to let those few who will find comfort in it know that, whoever wins, the destruction is protecting something better.”

Apollo waited, let me think now, and we listened together to the judges’ admonitions to the chamber. The best was Xiaoliu Guildbreaker, as stone-faced as his Emperor, who talked of geographic nations. “There are acres of precedent if we dig into the laws and cases of the old nation-states. There are international treaties, charters and conventions, codes of conduct, honor and chivalry, manuals of statecraft, ancient trials. These have no place in this courtroom. We are Hives, our ever-changing members voluntarily united by shared ideology. This is not the place for such geographic concepts as homeland, foreignness, citizen, subject, nation, patrimony, birthright, birth-debt, or territory, nor is it the place for language or thought which privileges those Hives which do have geographic nations as part of their background. You will not find one case from the geographic era which treats the justness of government-ordered assassination without relying on several of these concepts. We are Hives. We will not import to this true terra ignota the junk we left behind in making this more perfect age.”

How long had I been shaking? “This world is so good, Apollo. It’s far from perfect but it’s so good. How can you expect them to forgive you for—”

“Worlds,” his instant answer. “Maybe they won’t be better. Maybe no time in human history will be as comfortable as this one. Or maybe they’ll be better someday, but for a long time they’ll be hard, scraped out with plow and sweat and stuffy rockets. But there will be more than one. There will be Mars, Europa, Titan, more and more, safeguarded by this war. You must let those who are about to die know that, have that. You must tell them what I did, and tried to do.”