He considered a question, shot a sidelong glance at Demas and asked pointblank: “And Porey? Where does he fit?”
Demas broke eye contact, just momentarily. Saito’s face was absolutely informationless.
Saito said, then, “Porey is highly successful.”
“At what!” Anger betrayed him into that bluntness, anger and the memory of dealing with them differently. “At covering his trail, evidently.” If they were Porey’s or about to be, he was laying a firetrack in his own path, he knew he was, but he had his personal limit of tolerance. And he disturbed them. Even Saito flinched, looked down, saying:
“Some things are excused, as long as the results are evident. Some patterns of behavior simply do not come through in social context….”
“Other things,” Demas said with unexpected harshness, “are blindly ignored. The captain is head of Strategic Operations. The captain is too valuable to assign back to Hellburner, so says the EC. Porey is available. He could be promoted into qualification. That is what happened, J-G, plain and simple.”
He looked at Demas, saw fire-flags left and right of this conversation and knew he could self-destruct here. He took a chance on them—a last chance. “Who wanted him? Who?”
“—promoted him? Who does promote by executive order these days?”
Mazian. Who wasn’t the best of the militia captains: Keu was; or Kreshov, maybe. But Mazian was the promoter, Mazian was the one who could smile his way through corporate and legislative doorways, Mazian could say things the way they needed to be said…
“The Earth Company,” Saito said, “has SolCorp, LunaCorp, ASTEX, all space-based entities. But it also has its hands deep into the whole EuroTrust industrial complex— Bauerkraftwerke, Staatentek… the list is extensive—that have very good reasons to want extension of their facilities outside the reach of pressure groups and watch committees— meaning, into space. Those Earth-based companies give the EC an enormous influence inside the Joint Legislative Committee. The citizen pressure groups are enormously naive, usually single-issue. They think they move events. But in general the JLC is riddled with influence-trading, purchase decisions made on relationships, not quality….”
“Ancient terrestrial lifeform,” Demas said. “Dinosaur. Vast body. Little brain. It flourished in an age of abundant food supply.”
“I’ve heard the word,” Graff said.
“Not to overwhelm you with local history,” Saito said, “but the UDC is a composite creature that never did function well. The Earth Company created us to oppose Cyteen’s secession; but it never imagined a splinter colony could raise a population base of Union’s size and it never imagined the light barrier would fall so quickly.”
“More,” Demas said, “it didn’t understand the shipbuilding capacity of an enemy with no social debt. Ships cost Union nothing but sunlight, ultimately. Do you want more facilities? Create more workers.”
“But now the EC understands,” Saito said, “at least enough to frighten them. The special interests understand enough to see their interests are threatened. Now everybody wants to manage the crisis. Everybody wants to safeguard their power base. Everybody believes there’s fault, but it’s most certainly someone else’s. The free-traders are making headway.”
“Union-run merchanters,” Graff muttered. “Long we’d last. And they’d be nothing to Union but a supply source. Cyteen manage Earth? There’d be short patience.”
“Possibly they’d founder of bewilderment. —But that is the truth, J-G: the Company brought us here because Earth doesn’t believe in star-travelers unless it sees us: and its own problems absorb its attention. The EC needed the demonstrable presence, the face and the voice to make the outside real to these people. And whether they’ve believed their own myth, or simply view Mazian as manageable—he’s gotten far more important than we planned.”
He was listening to sedition. To conspiracy. The captains had sent Mazian downworld, they’d chosen their spokesman— who excelled mostly at salving over wounded egos, at getting the captains to make unified decisions. It was merchanter command structure: Mazian was only the Fleet’s Com One….
“They’re putting him in single command,” Demas said.
“God.” He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it. But Demas went on:
“The EC stamps his personnel choices as a matter of course. Yes, he does the things mat have to be done. But he’s not following the rules we laid down.”