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claim diplomatic immunity. However, a cabinet-level Yavi reduced to traveling from Rand to his own homeworld incognito aboard a Trueborn starship would be a gross embarrassment, even though the practice was the worst-kept secret in the universe.
    But—had Cutler been a Trueborn Intelligence plant? The meeting a set-up? No ruse was too petty for the shadowy Hibble’s legions. A cabinet-level Yavi caught spying would be beyond embarrassing, it would be a propaganda coup for the Trueborns. To say nothing of the reaction of the Central Committee.
    The guard, wearing the chevrons of a Trueborn Marine Lance Corporal, pointed at Polian’s gut. “Turn ’em out.”
    “What?”
    “Your vest pockets, sir. Would you turn ’em inside-out for me? Please?”
    Please? Polian stifled an eye roll. When, as a young vice cop, Polian had been in the kid’s position, there would have been no “please,” just an order. And a mailed fist to the jaw if that order wasn’t immediately obeyed. Hibble’s minions aside, trusting these people with the fate of five hundred planets was like allowing a child to conduct a symphony.
    Polian reached slowly into the waist pockets of the souvenir leather Rand hunting vest the Lodge had provided, with its crest on the left breast. Polian had worn the thing to flesh out his tourist image. He plucked the linings and tugged them out. With them came a half dozen large-bore cartridges that Polian hadn’t realized were there. Polian left his hands in the fabric so that the guard wouldn’t notice that they quivered.
    “Hunters forget leftover ammo all the time, sir.” The Marine pointed at an open bin alongside his boot. “If you dump no-carry items here, no sweat.” The kid smiled, jerked a thumb at the scanner arch ten paces up the gangway. “If the scanner catches them, there’s paperwork. Strain for you, strain for us. Sorry.”
    Polian exhaled, managed a smile back, dropped the cartridges into the indicated bin. “No apology needed, Corporal. An old man already strains enough.”
    The Marine guard’s earpiece chirped, and the kid turned away, hand pressed to his ear, nodding. He had already forgotten the forgetful old fool in front of him.
    Before he continued aboard, Polian looked up at the vast cruiser within which he would begin his circuitous voyage back to Yavet. The vessel, with the others that comprised Earth’s fleet, connected the five hundred worlds of the Human Union. And—he clenched his jaw at the thought—allowed Earth to dominate mankind in general and Yavet in particular.
    He had seen cruisers before this trip, drifting at orbital mooring, tethered to the Ring, two hundred miles above Yavet. They resembled skeletal, mile-long white whales, and their projected power intimidated him.
    Max Polian, like any vice cop who had worked the downlevels, understood physical intimidation. A head, and usually much more, taller in his armor than the little people, simply raising a mailed fist had usually been enough to get any question answered.
    But here on Rand, one of the worlds where cruisers like HUS Emerald River actually descended from space and hovered at the surface, the enormity of a C-drive star cruiser, the simple reality of a movable object so vast, didn’t merely intimidate, it overwhelmed.
    To his left, the conical C-drive booms tapered down to tips that ended eight hundred yards aft of the vessel’s midpoint. In front of him the vessel’s midsection rose, windowed with thirty-six midpoint bays that had once harbored a full wing of interceptors, ground-attack ships, and transports. To his right, the great tube of the cargo and passenger spaces tapered forward, ending another eight hundred yards distant, in the blunt crystal tip of the forward observation blister.
    With such ships, Yavet would be more than equal to the Motherworld. Without them, Yavet would always be shackled.
    After Polian cleared the embarkation sensors he passed an entry hatch that led aft. A pair of