“You have more faith than I do,” Jane said.
“If we don’t get traction there, we may have other options,” I said, looking at Hickory. I started to say more but noticed Savitri and Zo? coming toward us. I broke off toward them, mindful of Jane’s wish not to let Zo? get too close.
Savitri has out her PDA. “You’ve got some mail,” she said.
“Jesus, Savitri,” I said. “Now is really not the time. Forward it on to Jann.” Since Roanoke had been officially rediscovered, Jane and I had been contacted by every possible media outlet known to man, begging, cajoling or demanding interviews. Five hundred such requests came in with the first official skip drone data packet Roanoke received. Neither Jane nor I had the time or inclination to deal with them, but we knew someone who had both, which is how Jann Kranjic officially became Roanoke’s press secretary.
“I wouldn’t bother you with a media request,” Savitri said. “It’s from the Department of Colonization. It’s marked ‘confidential’ and ‘extremely urgent.’ ”
“What is it about?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Savitri said. “It won’t let me open it.” She handed the PDA over to me to show me that her access was blocked. I signed her out of the PDA and signed me in. A year’s worth of going without a PDA made me realize both how much I relied on the thing before, and how little I wanted to rely on it now. I still didn’t carry one with me, relying on Savitri to keep me in the loop.
The PDA accepted my biometrics and password and opened the letter.
“Fucking wonderful,” I said, a minute later.
“Is everything all right?” Savitri said.
“Of course not,” I said. “I need you to tell Jane to finish up here as soon as she can and meet me at the administration building the minute she’s done. Then I want you to find Manfred Trujillo and Jann Kranjic and tell them to meet me there as well.”
“All right,” Savitri said. “What’s happening? Can you tell me?”
I handed her back her PDA; she took it. “I’ve been relieved as colony leader,” I said. “And I’ve been summoned to Phoenix Station.”
“Well, you’ve only been temporarily relieved of your job, so that’s a positive,” Manfred Trujillo said, passing the PDA and its letter over to Jann Kranjic. The two of them, Jane, Savitri and Beata, who had accompanied Kranjic, were all jammed into my office, challenging its capacity to hold us all at once. “The fact it’s temporary means that they haven’t already decided to lynch you. They’ll want to talk to you first before they make that decision.”
“Looks like you might get my job after all, Manfred,” I said, from behind my desk.
Trujillo glanced over at Jane, who was standing at the edge of the desk. “I think I would need to go through her first, and I’m not sure that’s going to happen.”
“I’m not going to stay in this job without John,” Jane said.
“You’re more than capable of doing the job,” Trujillo said. “And no one would oppose you.”
“I’m not questioning my competence,” Jane said. “I just won’t keep the job.”
Trujillo nodded. “In any event, it’s not clear they intend to remove you permanently,” he said, pointing at the PDA, which was now in Beata’s hands. “You’re being hauled up in front of an inquiry. Speaking as a former legislator, I can tell you that the point of an inquiry is usually to cover someone’s ass, not to actually inquire about something. And also speaking as a former legislator, I can tell you that the Department of Colonization has a lot of things to cover its ass about.”
“But they still wouldn’t recall you unless you did something they could point to,” Kranjic said.
“Nice, Jann,” Beata said. “We can always count on you for support.”
“I’m not saying he did anything wrong, Beata,” Kranjic snapped. Kranjic had rehired Beata as his assistant after he was made the colony’s press secretary, but it was clear their personal relationship had not vastly improved post-divorce. “I’m saying he did something that they can use as an excuse to pin something on him, to get him in front of an inquiry.”
“And you did, didn’t you?” Trujillo asked me. “When you were with General Gau, you offered him a way out. You told him not to call his fleet. You weren’t supposed to do that.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said.
“I find it a little confusing myself,” Trujillo said.
“I needed to be able to say I made the offer,” I said. “For my own conscience.”
“The moral issues aside,” Trujillo said, “if someone wanted to get fussy about it, they could accuse you of treason. The Colonial Union’s plan required getting the Conclave fleet here. You intentionally put their strategy at risk.”