Regenesis

“I should,” Ari said, but she didn’t actually mind the hug, she was just startled by it. “I’m glad you’re safe. Did you come up all the way by barge?”

“To Moreyville by plane,” DeFranco said. “Then the barge.” DeFranco had to be past her hundreds, and it was still a long, hard pull, deFranco and this crowd of people, some of whom must be younger relatives. “Has Ya

“How?” she asked.

“Filed and legal,” deFranco said, and sank onto a convenient counter edge. “Ya

“Here. On the twelfth. Why are they waiting that long?”

“There’s preparation to make. Contacts. People to be felt out…some of them inside Defense. Those still there are working that angle, making contacts as best they can, pulling every string they’ve got–of which I don’t have enough left to matter. I’m getting too old for this, nearly as old as Lao, and she’s dead. We’re in a war, sera. We’re in an outright war for control of the government. Khalid can’t call Council to get a declaration of martial law; he needs eight Councillors, and I, my dear, and now you, are sitting here preventing that from happening, no matter how he threatens us. He can haul in every Councillor left in Novgorod and without us, he won’t have sufficient votes either to get seated or to declare martial law.”

“And if he comes here?”

“There’s a practical limit to what he can order the military at large to do. Individual units, individual arrests, yes, he’s got his people. But he can’t move divisions. Not what it would take to get in here. Some things he doesn’t dare order, because he isn’tseated.”

Yet, Ari thought, chilled by the thought. What Khalid would and wouldn’t dare once he had enough power and legitimacy was another matter–but she didn’t say that. DeFranco, an old ally of her predecessor, deserved accommodation in Wing One, too, along with her relatives or staff or whoever they were. “I’m very sorry we’re so tight on space,” she said. “It’s not adequate. But we can settle you up the hill. Close to Mikhail Corain’s family.”

“It will be absolutely adequate,” deFranco said, “if we can all get warm showers and beds that don’t bob up and down. Beds with sheets. That would be wonderful.”

“Come with me,” she said, and gave? orders and personally took them all back up the hill on the bus, giving other orders via Florian and Catlin on com. “We’re going to have visitors,” she said, “the whole Council, eventually, maybe their families and relations. More worrisome, we may have the military making a move on us. Tell Wes to go down to the green barracks. He’s going to be liaison down there for the next few days. Tell ReseuneSec to put the bots on a hair trigger. Tell Tommy–hell, tell Tommy do something about the logistics in Wing One. We can’t put part of these people in luxury and part of them in rooms with scaffolding. They’re Councillors. They need beds, sheets, towels, ID, and a charge tab for the restaurants, everything you can think of.”

Tommy acknowledged. That would happen and she didn’t have to worry about it. She did have to worry about Ya

She chose to host the media at the airport. That meant keeping them happy–in all senses. They were an asset. They were also apt, as Catlin put it, to become an issue with the opposition–possibly a target, if certain forces decided they didn’t like the news reports coming out of Reseune. And there were a great many i

There were storm tu

She reached her desk and said, “Base One. Defense of the precip towers. Specifics.”

Base One delivered information. She mined it at deeper and deeper levels and stored the result. She called Catlin in and then called Rafael.

“Review this,” she said. “You and Florian both. Rafael, you too. See what they’ve got, what we’ve got. Tell me how bad it could get.”

She didn’t have people tapped into the military, to know what they had. From orbit–Defense had everything, including warships. They could turn Reseune into a smoking ruin if they wanted to, and nothing could stop it, no shelter withstand it. But deFranco said Khalid didn’t dare…politically speaking. DeFranco believed some people wouldn’t take his orders.

Bet on it? She didn’t dare. Not with all they had at risk.

And finally–pause for breath in a day in which she’d skipped lunch, and now remembered she hadn’t had breakfast–she ordered up a sandwich and a tea, and sat there thinking, and thinking–about Amy, up there in the middle of something Amy didn’t understand and was having to learn fast; and Ya

She didn’t truly understand the i

Giraud had been upset when she’d gone after Khalid.

Maybe she had, in some way, brought this on. She’d certainly made an enemy that day.

Maybe. Nothing proved Khalid was more of an enemy than he’d ever been, just that Khalid, for some reason, was moving before he had full support inside his own Bureau–that argued he was in a hurry for some reason. Mainly Khalid hadn’t wonthe election. That would have given him a tougher position. And people still defied him. Corain had outright called on elements of Defense to defy him.

Right now, deFranco might be right. She hoped so.

God, she’d done everything she could think to do, and if she hyped up on stayawakes to try to keep thinking, she’d be increasingly crazier, especially after all the deepstudy she’d done on the AK‑36 case. It was time to let bodily chemistry do what it had to do for a few hours. It was time to get some rest. If they were lucky, they had a few days before Khalid got really upset or really desperate.

There wasHicks, who’d dealt with Defense. She could let him loose, dust him off, reinstate him, give him a chance to be a hero, and hope that resentment didn’t make him a highly irrational personal enemy.

There was Ya