“No, Sir.” Wang smiled back, but her own surprise—at the strength of his reaction, as much as at the news itself—still showed in her blue eyes. “I don’t think anyone would be, under these circumstances.”

“Maybe not, but there’s going to be hell to pay over this one,” he told her, completely unnecessarily. He wondered if he’d said it because he still hadn’t recovered his mental balance.

“Get hold of Wodoslawski, Abruzzi, MacArtney, Quartermain, and Rajampet,” he went on. “I want them here in Conference One in one hour.”

“Sir, Admiral Rajampet is meeting with that delegation from the AG’s office and—”

“I don’t care who he’s meeting with,” Kolokoltsov said flatly. “Just tell him to be here.”

“Yes, sir. Ah, may I tell him why the meeting is so urgent?”

“No.” Kolokoltsov smiled thinly. “If the Manties are telling the truth, I don’t want him turning up with any prepared comments. This one’s too important for that kind of nonsense.”

“So what’s this all about, anyway?” Fleet Admiral Rajampet Kaushal Rajani demanded as he strode into the conference room. He was the last to arrive—a circumstance Kolokoltsov had taken some care to arrange.

Rajampet was a small, wiry man, with a dyspeptic personality, well suited to his almost painfully white hair and deeply wrinkled face. Although he remained physically spry and mentally alert, he was a hundred and twenty-three years old, which made him one of the oldest human beings alive. Indeed, when the original first-generation prolong therapy was initially developed, he’d missed being too old for it by less than five months.

He’d also been an officer in the Solarian League Navy since he was nineteen, although he hadn’t held a space-going command in over half a T-century, and he was rather proud of the fact that he did not suffer fools gladly. (Of course, most of the rest of the human race was composed almost exclusively of fools, in his considered opinion, but Kolokoltsov could hardly quibble with him on that particular point.) Rajampet was also a formidable force within the Solarian League’s all-powerful bureaucratic hierarchy, although he fell just short of the very uppermost niche.