The men in the room nodded and smiled.
They’ve heard this story many times, Odal thought. This was the first time he had been privileged to listen to it. If you closed your eyes, or looked only at the star map, the plan sounded bizarre, extreme, even impossible. But if you watched Kanus and let those piercing, almost hypnotic eyes fasten on yours, then the Leader’s wildest dreams sounded not only exciting, but inevitable.
Odal leaned a shoulder against the paneled wall and looked at the other men in the room.
There was fat Greber, the Vice Chancellor, fighting desperately to stay awake after drinking too much wine during luncheon and afterward. And Modal, sitting on the couch next to him, was bright-eyed and alert, thinking only of how much money and power would come to him as Minister of Industry once the rearmament program went into full speed.
Sitting alone on another couch was Kor, the quiet one, the head of Intelligence and—technically—Odal’s superior. Silent Kor, whose few words were usually charged with terror for those whom he spoke against. Kor had an unfathomed capacity for cruelty.
Marshal Lugal looked bored when Kanus spoke of politics, but his face changed when military matters came up. The Marshal lived for only one purpose; to avenge his army’s humiliating defeat in the war against Acquatainia. What he didn’t realize, Odal knew, was that as soon as he had reorganized the army and re-equipped it,
Kanus planned to retire him and place younger men in charge. Men whose only loyalty was not to the army, nor even to the Kerak Worlds and their people, but to the Leader himself.