“Start at the beginning…” Mike said, frowning. “What does James have to do with not getting funding?”

“The beginning…” Tam said. “The problem is, we don’t know the beginning.”

“If you’re talking about the Darhel,” Mike said. “I’d go with first contact.”

“Which was when?” Tam said, raising an eyebrow. “I’ll start with that, though. When it became apparent that the Darhel knew a lot more about us than we knew about them, the U.S. military formed a small group to try to penetrate their information systems and figure out exactly what their background was in regards to humans. And, hell, just stuff about what the Darhel and the other Galactics were. They’ve always been less than forthcoming about their history and background.”

“Hume,” Mike said, frowning. “Why does that name stand out? Standard academic type one each. Crazy hair, head in the clouds. I was less than impressed.”

“Which was the intent, from the information I’ve gotten,” Tam said. “And it didn’t work. He was assassinated along with his top xeno guy about the time you shipped out for Diess.”

“Assassinated?” Mike said, frowning. “You sure?”

“There was a lot of that for a while,” Tam said. “DoD ended up losing over six teams of investigators over the period of the war.”

“To whom?” Mike asked angrily. “That’s insane.”

“The Darhel tried to pin it on another group, which I’ll get to,” Tam said. “But it was the Darhel. They really don’t like us prying into their background. But then we sort of called a truce. Have you ever heard of the Protocol?”

“Plenty of protocols,” Mike said. “But that has a capital on it, doesn’t it?”

“Big one,” Tam agreed. “I know you remember when General Taylor was assassinated.”

“Clear as day,” Mike said. “Despite the fact that I was in the middle of a murthering great battle. And I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist but I never bought that it was Free Earth. He told me he’d been investigating the hack during the battle of Daleville and then he’s taken out. I put it on Cyber, frankly.”