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continued in her thoughtful meditative stroll, heading for the water–garden outside the canteen. There was a great deal to think about here. Admiral Brecinn needed help. Mergau needed protection. Mergau didn’t know quite how it was going to play out, not just yet. But she was confident.
    Somewhere in this morning’s events she was going to find the key to her salvation, and defense against the chance that some Bench specialist would turn up some day to confront her with her failed attempt to satisfy her vengeance against Andrej Koscuisko with a Judicial murder.

    ###

    The observation deck cleared out. The Admiral had left the room; her staff had melted away into the figurative woodwork. The Clerk of Court that Chilleau Judiciary had sent to observe the exercise had similarly excused herself. That meant that the room was as clean as any on station just now, and General Dierryk Rukota had no particular desire to go anywhere.
    The technicians were still here, of course, working the boards: status checks, population reconciliation, traffic analysis. All to try to determine for a fact whether the Ragnarok ’s Command had been on that observation station when it had exploded.
    Someone brought him a cup of bean tea, and Rukota accepted it with a nod of grateful thanks. Good stuff, too. He had no grievance with technicians. He just didn’t think he liked Fleet Admiral Brecinn, or her pack of scavengers.
    Everybody knew that the Ragnarok ’s research program was due for cancellation with the selection of a new First Judge. It was traditional. New First Judges needed all the leverage with Fleet that they could get, especially during the early formative years of their administration — leverage a new research program, with a generous provision of funding from tax revenues, could provide. That didn’t mean they had to be so obvious about it.
    The Ragnarok ’s black hull technology was the culmination of twenty–four years of technical research, hundreds upon thousands upon millions of eights of markers Standard, untold hours of labor, and the product of the focused intellect of some of the finest mechanical minds under Jurisdiction.
    It was bad enough that the program had to be at least suspended while the new First Judge, whoever she was, decided exactly what to do with it. Rukota wanted to see Fleet concentrating on doing what it could to harvest the lessons learned to date, rather than blowing it all off as yesterday’s news. The ship had performed well in test and maneuvers. There were solid innovations there in its design.
    Flying on the order of that last fighter’s run spoke for esprit as well; people who didn’t care about where they were and what they were doing couldn’t be bothered to shave their fuses like that. So the ship had more than just its experimental technology going for it. And Fleet would throw that away, too, dispersing the crew in every which direction when the time came to decommission the hull.
    It was a very great shame to put so much into a battlewagon and never let it meet the enemy. And yet the enemy — the Free Government — was not one that could be met with at all, by even the greatest of battleships. They were small and only loosely organized, poorly armed, ill provisioned.
    Fighting the Free Government with great ships like the Ragnarok was a little like deploying a field gun against the small annoying birds that were forever mocking one from the trees downrange. They were always long gone before a round could impact. All a person ended up with was wasted ammunition, and an overabundant supply of surplus toothpicks.
    Rukota sipped his bean tea and stared into the great sweep of the observation screens, brooding. Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Ragnarok . He knew an officer on board that ship; he’d been young ap Rhiannon’s commander not too long ago, when he’d had a stubborn pocket of resurgent civil resistance to deal with and she’d been sent to command his advance scout ships. It