Oglesby beamed at Howell and the HD cameras, and Reynaud reminded himself that it would never do to strangle the pompous, fatuous opportunist in front of so many witnesses. And at least he wasn’t as poisonous a personality as Makris. For a moment, the admiral considered the alternative of asking Oglesby to brief the newsies about the… ambiguities Reynaud’s own staffers had discovered in the Agency budget statements Makris had approved. But, no, that would never do, either. And so he simply waited until Oglesby had stepped back from the podium, and then looked directly at Howell, ignoring the Prime Minister’s press secretary entirely.

“Since Sir Clarence has done such an… admirable job of answering your second question, Mr. Howell,” he said, “I’ll confine my own response to the first one. The simplest answer is that there was a flaw in the most widely accepted models of our Junction—one which Dr. Kare and his team at Valasakis University first identified only about six T-years ago. To be perfectly honest, it was his work there which led to his selection to head this project.

“The discrepancy they identified wasn’t really a fundamental error, but it was sufficient to throw all of our predictions as to the probable loci of additional termini off to a significant degree. The Manticoran Wormhole Junction is a spherical region of space approximately one light-second in diameter. That gives it a volume of approximately fourteen quadrillion cubic kilometers, and any given terminus within the Junction is vastly smaller than that, a sphere no more than three thousand kilometers across. Which means that a terminus represents less than seven hundred millionths of a percent of the total volume of the Junction. So even a very small error in our initial models’ predictions had an enormous impact. In addition, this terminus’s ‘signature’ was extremely faint, compared to those of the termini we already knew about. Our theoretical studies had always suggested that would be the case, but that faintness meant we required further advances in the sensitivity of our instruments and their computer support before we could realistically hope to detect it.”

The admiral shrugged.

“Compared to the difficulties associated with the hunt for this terminus, the proverbial needle in a haystack would have been no challenge at all. Indeed, honesty compels me to admit that even with the strong support RMAIA has received, it was as much old-fashioned luck as anything else which allowed us to detect the terminus this quickly.”

“I trust that answers your questions, Mr. Howell?”

The reporter nodded and sat down, and Reynaud moved on to the next holographic halo.

· · • · ·

“Well, I thought Clarence did rather well,” Baron High Ridge remarked as he held up his cup. He’d brought his own butler to the Prime Minister’s official residence with him, and now that well-trained servant responded instantly with his coffeepot to the silent, peremptory command. High Ridge sipped the fragrant brew appreciatively. He did not, of course, thank the man or even acknowledge his existence.