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required to comply with your ‘official policy’ under threat of physical coercion. I’m sure the Board will have a response for you as soon as possible.”
    She turned and walked out of the hearing room without a single backward glance.

    Pei Kau-yung sat in another chair, this one on a dock extending into the enormous, dark blue waters of Lake Pei. A fishing pole had been set into the holding bracket beside his chair, but there was no bait on the hook. It was simply a convenient prop to help keep people away.
    We knew it could come to this, or something like it , he told himself. Kau-zhi, Shan-wei, Nimue, me, Proctor—we all knew, from the moment Langhorne was chosen instead of Halversen. And now it has .
    There were times when, antigerone treatments or not, he felt every single day of his hundred and ninety standard years.
    He tipped farther back in his chair, looking up through the darkening blue of approaching evening, and saw the slowly moving silver star of the orbiting starship—TFNS Hamilcar, the final surviving unit of the forty-six mammoth ships which had delivered the colony to Kau-zhi.
    The gargantuan task of transporting millions of colonists to a new home world would have been impossible without the massive employment of advanced technologies. That had been a given, and yet it had almost certainly been the betraying emissions of that same technology which had led to the discovery and destruction of the only other colony fleet to break through the Gbaba blockade. So Operation Ark’s planners had done two things differently.
    First, Operation Ark’s mission plan had required the colony fleet to remain in hyper for a minimum of ten years before even beginning to search for a new home world. That had carried it literally thousands of light-years from the Federation, far enough that it should take even the Gbaba scouting fleet centuries to sweep the thicket of stars in which it had lost itself.
    Second, the colony had been provided with not one, but two complete terraforming fleets. One had been detached and assigned to the preparation of Safehold, while the other remained in close company with the transports, hiding far from Kau-zhi, as a backup. If the Gbaba had detected the ships actually laboring upon Safehold, they would undoubtedly have been destroyed, but their destruction would not have led the Gbaba to the rest of the fleet, which would then have voyaged onward for another ten years, on a totally random vector, before once more searching for a new home.
    Hamilcar had been with that hidden fleet, the flagship of Operation Ark’s civilian administration, and she’d been retained this long because the basic plan for Operation Ark had always envisioned a requirement for at least some technological presence until the colony was fully established. The enormous transport, half again the size of the Federation’s largest dreadnought, was at minimal power levels, with every one of her multiply redundant stealth systems operating at all times. A Gbaba scout ship could have been in orbit with her without detecting her unless it closed to within two or three hundred kilometers.
    Even so, and despite her enormous value as administrative center, orbiting observatory, and emergency industrial module, her time was running out. That was what had prompted the confrontation between Shan-wei and Langhorne and Bédard this afternoon. The Safehold colonial enclaves had been up and running for almost sixty standard years, and Langhorne and his Council had decided it was finally time to dispose of all the expedition’s remaining technology. Or almost all of it, at any rate.
    Hamilcar ’s sister ships were already long gone. They’d been discarded as quickly as possible, by the simple expedient of dropping them into the star system’s central fusion furnace once their cargoes had been landed. Not that those cargoes had been used exactly as Mission Control had originally