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.“Take us back to the city,” he ordered.The pilot nodded and obeyed, pulling the shuttle around so Coffey could see the smoke rising from the distance.Thankfully, there had been no indiscriminate bombardment, but what there had been had been quite bad enough.Over two thousand civilians dead, mostly for being too close to military targets.Coffey wondered, bitterly, if they’d even heard the warnings.Or if they’d been confident that the planet was secure until it was far too late.He looked up towards the darkening sky and scowled.Twenty-one Colonial Militia starships were in orbit now, but he knew that the raiders wouldn’t bother to return.Why would they when they’d hit their targets and withdrawn in good order? They’d flattened the alien camp with dirty warheads – the one survey team he’d dispatched towards the camp had reported that it would be weeks before it could be approached without proper protective gear – and looted the spaceport.What else did they want?The shuttle dropped down and landed next to the schoolhouse, where the surviving members of the government had assembled, along with their senior military leaders.It had shocked Coffey to realise that the senior survivor was a mere Captain; the others had died, either in orbit or during the fighting on the ground.Captain Bester had been lucky; he’d been in one of the emergency fallback locations, which had been completely unknown to the raiders.That secret, too, had never been shared with anyone off-world.“Mr.President,” the Vice President pro tem announced.She’d been a junior congresswomen, seventeenth in the line of succession.Now, she was Vice President.and utterly unqualified for the post.“Welcome back.”Coffey nodded brusquely, then sat down at the head of the table.Someone had doodled on it, he noted, as the others sat too.Half of them were still stunned, either at the devastation or at their sudden elevation to power.Even Captain Bester looked exhausted.Yesterday, he'd been a junior supply officer.Now, he was effectively the CO of what remained of the planet’s military.“We have completed our preliminary investigation,” Bester said.He was a surprisingly fat man for a military officer, but supply officers weren't held to the same standards as combat troops.“We now know how the enemy took out the orbital battlestation.They used security codes from Fairfax to dock with the station, then triggered an antimatter mine.It was a major security breach, sir.”“I thought those bloody stations were supposed to be damn near indestructible,” the President snapped, angrily.“Or was that just bad propaganda?”“The station wasn't designed to contain an antimatter explosion inside its shields,” Bester admitted.“Normally, no ship would be allowed to dock without verification of her bona fides.In this case, they used codes from Fairfax to bypass the standard security checks.”“Which leads us back to Fairfax,” Coffey said.“The leak came from there?”“No one else should have had the codes,” Bester said.He swallowed, nervously.“Someone on the planet must have been bribed or threatened into handing them over.”“Change all of our codes,” Coffey ordered.It might well be locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen, but they had to learn from the whole disaster.“I want absolutely nothing shared with Fairfax until we have this damn leak plugged, understand?”He glared from face to face, thinking hard.It had to be a leak; the chances of Fairfax authorising the attack were less than zero.They'd have to be completely out of their minds, particularly as such an attack could shatter the Bottleneck Republic.But he didn't know who he could trust any longer.If there was such a high-placed leak.“I will speak to Representative Asimov personally,” he continued.“He will demand answers for us – and we will get them - or we will look to our own protection.”“Mr.President,” Bester said carefully, “our best case estimate gives us ten years before we can replace everything that was lost.Right now, we probably could not afford to replace the battlestation without going into serious debt.And that assumes that we don’t get into a trade war with the rest of the republic.”Coffey scowled.Xenophon had gone, within hours, from being an important world in the republic to being a charity case.Bester was right; the last thing they needed was a political tussle that could affect their ability to rebuild.But he was damned if he was trusting Fairfax with anything that impacted on his planet's security, not any longer.Their leak had cost thousands of lives.God alone knew how many more would be lost in the coming weeks and months.“I know,” he said, “but we have no choice.Right now, we don’t know who we can trust.”Chapter ThirtyGeneral Gustav Mannerheim knew that he was an uncomplicated soul.It had all seemed so simple during the war; stop the Dragons or the Dragons would crush the colonies and turn any survivors into slaves.And the Dragons themselves had never been particularly subtle, or inclined to sneak around; they’d just charged at their targets and tried to hammer them flat.Why not? They’d always had the biggest hammer in space, at least until the TFN had taught them that there were bigger powers out there.They hadn't needed to be subtle.His life had been shaped by the war.Starship commander, squadron commander, fleet commander.and finally supreme military officer in the Bottleneck Republic.It had made a stranger of his daughter, particularly when he’d cast such a long shadow that she’d transferred to the Federation Navy to make a career of her own; it had cost him his first wife when she’d died while he'd been fighting on the front lines.And, along the way, it had cost him thousands of brave men who had died facing the Dragons.There were days, he admitted silently, that he’d considered putting his pistol to his head and ending his life.Why not leave the troubles of peace to the next generation?But he knew his duty.Indeed, he had nothing else left.The farm was well-maintained without him, his daughter had her own career.it was a shame that she hadn't managed to produce grandchildren yet, but she had decades of life ahead of her.Maybe one day she would meet a worthy man – if such a paragon existed – and get married, then pregnant.But until then
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