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planets to go it alone and get the hell kicked out of them. That would bring the rest of them back into line.”
    “But that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Lambert said. “It’s not just one of them. Not just one planet. It’s a bunch of them, all at the same time.”
    “It’s that thing,” Salcido said. “That group. Equilibrium. Showing up and doing that data dump.”
    “What about it?” Powell asked.
    “Well, it makes sense. All of these planets with people getting worked up all of a sudden.”
    “They’re not getting worked up all of a sudden, ” Lambert said. “That rebellion in Kyoto was long-cooking. And the lieutenant here made the point about putting down a rebellion a year ago, on … where?”
    “Zhong Guo,” I said.
    “Thank you. Maybe that Equilibrium thing is crystallizing action now, but whatever it’s tapping into has been there already for years.”
    “Then the Colonial Union should have been preparing for this for years,” Powell said, bored now with this conversation. “But it didn’t, and now we and everyone else on the Tubingen are shuttling from one stupid internal crisis to the next. It’s stupid and it’s a waste.”
    “No, it makes sense,” Lambert said.
    “You figure? How’s that.”
    “We’re not attached to this place. We’re not attached to Kyoto. We weren’t attached to Franklin. We’re not attached to any of the colonies because we originally came from Earth. So it’s not difficult for us to come in and stomp around if we have to.”
    “We’re handing off the work here to the Kyiv police,” Salcido pointed out.
    “Right, after we handled the hard part. That’s our job. Handling the hard parts.”
    “But you just said that this isn’t a long-term solution,” Salcido said, waving out to the funnels. “In which case the hard part is still here, which means we’ll be back. Or someone like us.”
    “Yeah, funny, I remember talking about not addressing root causes a couple of weeks ago, and got shouted down with ‘who cares’ and a song about pizza.”
    “It was a great song.”
    “If you say so.”
    “All I’m saying is that what we’re doing now is increasingly full of bullshit,” Powell said, bringing the discussion around. “If this is what we’re doing now, fine. So be it. But I’d rather be shooting aliens. I think everyone else would too.”
    “She’s not wrong,” Salcido said, to me.
    “No, she’s not,” Lambert agreed.
    “I know,” I said.

PART FOUR
    Friday.
    “Root causes,” Lambert was saying. “You all kept mocking me for talking about them and now look where we are. Another colony planet. Another uprising. Except this time the planet’s already declared independence.”
    The shuttle rocked on the way through Khartoum’s atmosphere. This time it was not only the four of us but my entire platoon, as it was on Rus. We weren’t doing protest suppression this time. This time we were making a surgical strike on Khartoum’s prime minister, who had declared the planet independent, encouraged mobs to occupy Colonial Union buildings, and then hidden himself, with a circle of advisors, in an undisclosed location, presumably because he knew that the Colonial Union wasn’t going to be particularly happy with him.
    Indeed it wasn’t. It wasn’t happy with him, or in fact any of his party’s leadership, all of which had endorsed the independence—without, it should be noted, actually presenting it to the entire parliament for ratification.
    “They learned from Franklin,” Lambert continued. “This time they knew not to give us a chance to respond first.”
    “Which makes their independence illegal,” Salcido noted. He was sitting next to Lambert.
    “It was always going to be illegal,” Lambert said. “By which I mean there was no possible way the Colonial Union would accept the legality of their independence. So there was no reason for them to put it up to a vote.”
    “But now it’s also illegal by their own system