Chapter Twenty-One

“I DON’T care what the intelligence ‘experts’ have to say,” Arnold Giancola grunted. “I’m telling you that the damned Manties don’t have any intention in Hell of giving us back our star systems.”

He pushed back in his chair and glowered around the table in the palatial, expensively paneled private meeting room in what had once been the Hall of the People. That edifice had once more reverted to its even older title—the Senate Building—and technically, the Secretary of State was here to address the Foreign Affairs Committee. But that committee meeting wasn’t due to begin for another hour and a half. Since he seemed to have arrived a bit early, however, he’d decided to spend a few minutes passing the time in idle conversation with a few personal friends.

Now one of those friends, Senator Samson McGwire (who just happened to be the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and an old Giancola crony), managed almost visibly not to sigh and shook his head, instead.

“You’ve said that before, Arnold,” he said. “And I don’t say you’re wrong. But let’s face it—there’s no reason I can see for the Manties to want to keep most of those systems, either. Hell, all but half a dozen of them were economic liabilities to the Old Regime! Why should a bunch of money-grubbing plutocrats want to hang onto money-losing possessions?”

“Then why haven’t they gone ahead and given them back?” Giancola demanded irately. “God knows we’ve been negotiating about it with them long enough! Besides, according to the latest estimate I’ve seen, some of those systems’ economies are beginning to turn around already. Oh, sure—they’d do even better participating in our own economic turnaround. And don’t think for a minute that the people who live in them wouldn’t prefer that to being no more than wage-earners in what are essentially Manty-owned enterprises and investments. But their economies are beginning to generate a positive cash flow—for the Manties, at least, if not the people the Manties stole them from. And if the Manties turn the occupied systems into still more money-makers, then there goes your argument for why they’d want to give them back.

“And don’t forget the military considerations,” Senator Jason Giancola put in sharply. “They seized those systems in the first place to use as jumping off points for operations deeper in the Republic. So I can see at least one reason for them to want to hang onto them that has nothing at all to do with their economies.”

“I know,” McGwire agreed heavily. Unlike most of the Republic’s senators, McGwire had been a member of a minor Legislaturalist family before the Pierre Coup. His family hadn’t been important enough to draw the People’s Court’s attention during the purges, but he’d lost two cousins and a nephew in the war against Manticore, and his hostility towards—and suspicion of—the Star Kingdom were profound. “In fact, that’s why I’m inclined to support you, Arnold, despite the fact that I’m not at all sure your ideas make economic good sense.”