“Stole?” Aren said. “I’m offended. Do you know how much money Taam and Fenrik siphoned from the Kingfisher budgets to secure those? We bought the Sefalan ones off the raiders and had to bribe some civilians for the others. You could say we bought them fair and square.” He patted the case. Jainan couldn’t feel anything, but didn’t know if that meant lead worked as a shielding material or not; he felt so wrung-out that he might not have registered it if a full-size link opened up next to him.

“You don’t just want to start a war with Thea,” Jainan said flatly. “You want to start a war with the Resolution. You’re mad.”

“Tell that to General Fenrik,” Aren said, grinning. “You can see his point.

First we deal with the vassals, then when Iskat isn’t distracted by all this compromising, we get independence from the Resolution. We only have one link to defend, after all—a natural chokepoint. What’s the use of having an army if you never let them fight?”

“The Galactics will laugh,” Jainan said, with a rising sense of dread that nothing he said was cutting through the madness. “This will help you take Thea, but every weapon in the sector will do nothing against a power that has a million

ships. We’re an afterthought to them.”

“Oh, forget the conventional weapons. These”—Aren made an expansive, dismissive gesture at the military hardware stacked around them—“are going to be obsolete once we’ve dealt with the vassals. The remnants let you get into people’s minds. Give us a few months to develop weapons around them, and imagine what we can do with that. We can defend the link as long as we like.”

“These were General Fenrik’s orders?” Jainan asked. The drugs made his tongue thick and dry in his mouth. “To annex Thea and sabotage the Resolution treaty?”

“Fenrik’s an old-school bully,” Aren said reflectively, “but he’s right, you know. Why should we hamstring ourselves when other powers get away with it all the time? The Resolution is a collection of hypocrites. They go after the weak sectors and leave the others to do as they like. Other planets have worked out how to weaponize their remnants, you know. An Orshan commander can take over your mind from across the room. The ruling class of the High Chain are near gods. The Resolution itself uses remnants to train their scouts—how else could they pilot ships through the link? They only enforce the rules on backwaters like us.”