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embargoed world like Tressel was a geosynchronous parking orbit, she would off-load in orbit her remaining cargo. That consisted of a minimal volume of unembargoed humanitarian items, mostly medical supplies and the freely distributed Trueborn holy books called Gideon Bibles.
    Emerald River would also off-load a personnel pod carrying the twenty liars who sat on the other side of the dining salon.
    The cargo, human and otherwise, would be shuttled down aboard old-fashioned chemical-fueled space planes operated by neutrals under contract with the Union.
    Once on Tressel, the twenty liars would not distribute holy books. They would do what Yavi covert military parties did on every outworld. Build Yavi influence, at the expense of Earth’s influence, by espionage and violence.
    Not that Weddle and I were much better. We were supposed to be tourists. He wore a flower-print shirt and kept poking his own cheek with the umbrella garnish that stuck up out of his drink.
    Neither we nor the Yavi were fooling the other. The charade had teetered at an uneasy balance point for decades.
    Neither the Trueborns nor the Yavi wanted Cold War II to explode into Interstellar War II. The Yavi had the Human Union’s largest population and correspondingly largest gross planetary product. The Trueborns had the smug prestige of being the cradle of mankind. More importantly, the Trueborns controlled the starships that connected the worlds of the Union.
    Like any other belligerent couple, each of the two cultures thought it held the moral high ground.
    Earth had waged and won the war that eradicated the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony and saved the human race. In the process, Earth had lost sixty million people and had stolen starship technology from the Slugs fair and square.
    For its part, Yavet had produced mankind’s most numerically prolific and technically advanced society, albeit one that executed unpermitted babies at birth, raped the environment, and generally made Earth’s last-century Nazis look soft.
    The Trueborns refused to share C-drive with Neo-Nazis. The Yavi refused to be judged by holier-than-thou hypocrites. The only thing stupider or worse than the rivalry would have been all-out war. Avoiding which was, therefore, the overriding goal and sworn duty for which every spook case officer would joyfully sacrifice his or her life. And/or the life of his or her partner. It said so right in the oath.
    I forked up my last bite of blueberry pie, then glanced at my ’puter. My new junior looked across at me like a puppy.
    I suppose I looked at Kit that way when I was the green junior case officer and she was my senior. Weddle and I would henceforth be, as Kit and I had been, as every case officer team was, closer than siblings. Well, not exactly. If Kit had been my sister, our off-duty, uh, interaction would have gotten us arrested some places in the Union. But Weddle and I would train together, eat together, study together, and depend on one another for our very lives.
    I slapped my palms on the tablecloth, like the impatient older brother I was about to become. “Weddle, time to save the universe. Or die trying.”
    Part one of universe-saving for a case officer team is insertion prep. Prep was normally conducted on dirt, and took months. Weddle and I were being prepped for this insertion on the fly, in weeks.
    Mostly, that didn’t bother me. A kid who grows up denied the right to go to school, which was how I had grown up on Yavet, grows up thirsty for knowledge.
    During my two years on Earth I had read everything I could lay hands on. Mostly, a soldier can lay his hands on military history, but I had sponged up other things, too. A playwright named Shakespeare came highly recommended. They said he wrote in the language that became Standard, but at first I barely recognized it. I even read a Gideon Bible once.
    I always enjoyed the classroom segments of an insertion prep. Say that for Howard. He had been a professor before the Slug War. So