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privy to the information, and besides, the two of them were brothers. At times Jacopo wished they had been closer, but it hadn’t been in the cards. Now Gio was gone … probably killed on one of the destroyed merchant prince planets. So many deaths in this war. So many innocent lives lost.
    Nehr cursed at the situation in which he was caught, and shut off the transceiver. The resulting silence held no answers for him.

Chapter Eight
    There is great skill in concealing your feelings of antipathy from someone you must deal with on a regular basis.
    —Jacopo Nehr, confidential remarks
    Throughout the Merchant Prince Alliance—on the seven hundred ninety-two surviving planets—there had been no appearances of podships whatsoever. On every one of those pod stations, sensor-guns were ready to fire, but they remained silent. People expected something to change at any moment, something big to happen. Time went by slowly and painfully for everyone, as if the clock of the universe had a sticky mechanism.
    On every planet the citizens felt isolated, that they would never see distant loved ones again, and would never again be able to journey to their favorite places around the galaxy. It was like a cruel, galactic-scale version of an old party game. Wherever a person happened to be when the podships stopped was where they remained, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
    When podships first appeared long ago, Humans and other galactic races had been hesitant to trust alien craft that they could not control, especially since they had no idea how they worked and couldn’t gain access to their inner workings without causing violent reactions. But as decades and centuries passed, and podships (left to their own devices) kept transporting the various races safely to far destinations, the races had come to trust them. The sentient spacefarers became familiar to everyone, as their regular appearance at pod stations became a fact a life and of the heavens … like the sun seeming to rise in the sky each morning.
    For a long time there had been talk of improving other space-travel technology, and recently there had been a rumor that Doge Lorenzo was calling for a massive research and development program to do so. Even barring that, it was still possible for people to travel on factory-made ships. But the hydion drive engines transported them so slowly in comparison to podships that it wasn’t even worth comparison. It might be decades, if ever, before engineers came up with comparably fast vessels.
    At least the Mutatis, with their solar sailers, were even farther behind. That provided some measure of comfort.
    And, though Jacopo Nehr could not go directly to Doge Lorenzo with his startling discovery, at the risk of agitating Pimyt, he had decided to take another course of action. One that would not subject him to court martial and execution for hiding important military information during a time of war. As the Supreme General of all merchant prince military units, he had to walk a tightrope.
    He was convinced that Doge Lorenzo could not be kept in the dark about this, but there were necessary channels to go through, to protect himself.
    With a recording device hidden on his person, Nehr located Pimyt in the Royal Attaché’s private exercise room, in the basement of the administration building. It was certainly the most unusual workout facility that Nehr had ever seen, and after passing through security he saw Pimyt on a machine that was a prime example of this.
    The furry little Hibbil was on a stretching rack, resembling a torture machine of medieval Earth, except that this one stretched the body sideways, not head to foot, and there was no “victim.” Pimyt, connected to straps on the machine, operated the controls with a brass-colored, handheld transmitter.
    Nehr knew why. The Royal Attaché was one of a small number of Hibbils who had a chronic disease known as LCS—lateral contraction syndrome. Hibbils had a secondary vestigial