HAPPY BUT EXHAUSTED, GLORIA AND PETRA returned to the suite at the Imperial Cantabragian sometime after two in the morning. During the limo ride, Petra had alternately stared off into space with a distracted half smile on her face and babbled almost incoherently. The prospect of becoming Lady Petra of Weehawken had all but unhinged her. At the same time, she was well aware that Gloria had not made up her mind about becoming Empress.

“Maybe you could do both,” Petra had suggested. “Be Empress Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends, and Director of OSI Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”

“I don’t think that would work very well.”

“Then alternate weeks? Or months?”

“You really want that title, don’t you?”

“Well…yeah, I guess so. Spirit, Gloria, I don’t know. I mean, I’d hate to leave Dexta, but…well, you know…”

“Yes,” Gloria said, “I do.”

“And the Emperor!” Petra gushed. “I mean, he’s just so handsome and tall and dreamy. How can you resist him, Gloria?”

“I’ve had plenty of practice.”

“Oh. Yeah, I see what you mean.” Petra had lapsed into silence for a while and stared out the window of the limo. Then a goofy smile crept over her face and she said, “I danced with the Emperor!”

They walked into the suite, with Petra humming “Moonlight Serenade,” and Gloria noticed the message light on the pad she had left on the coffee table. It proved to be a message from Norman Mingus, asking her to come upstairs to see him when she got in, no matter how late.

After a moment’s indecision, Gloria reluctantly removed her diamonds and slipped into some jeans and a tee shirt. She knew Mingus liked to see her in full flower, but she had a feeling that this was not the right time. She said good night to Petra and went to the elevator.

There was still a gaggle of Bugs upstairs, but she breezed through them, was met by an aide, and directed into Mingus’s bedroom. She found him there, in pajamas, robe, and slippers, sitting quietly in a comfortable chair. On the table next to him stood a bottle of what appeared to be Belgravian whisky, reputedly the best in the Empire. No milk and cookies on this night. Gloria walked over to him, gave him a kiss on the cheek, then sat down in a chair next to his.

“You missed a good party, Norman,” she said. “I’m sorry you weren’t there, but I understand.”

“I saw some of it on the vid,” he said. “You looked very enticing. And I’m pleased for Ms. Nash. She deserved that medal.”

“And she gets to be Lady Petra of Weehawken if I go back to Charles,” Gloria said. “But I think it would be nice if she also got something from Dexta.”

“Yes,” said Mingus, “I had thoughts along the same line. She’s a Thirteen now? Very well, in the morning, you can tell her she’s a Twelve.”

“Thank you, Norman. That’s very sweet of you.”

“Nonsense. She’s earned it.” Mingus turned a little in his chair to look directly at Gloria. “As for you, young lady, I ought to demote you for that harebrained stunt.”

“You gave me the job, Norman,” Gloria said placidly, “and harebrained stunts were always a part of it.”

“I never meant for you to put yourself at risk like that.”

“If I hadn’t been there, it would have turned into a stalemate, or worse. I did what I thought was necessary, and it worked.”

“I can’t deny that,” said Mingus. “Nevertheless, I would prefer it if your personal interventions remained strategic rather than tactical.”

“Don’t get too attached to me Norman,” Gloria advised. “You could lose me, one way or another.”

Mingus stared at her for a moment. “Charles?”

“I’m still considering it,” she said. “I’m going to spend some time with him tomorrow after his speech. Maybe I’ll be able to make up my mind.”

“I see,” he said. “Naturally, Gloria, I hope that you’ll decide to remain with Dexta. But you must do what you think is best for yourself. Forgive me, would you care for some whisky? Or anything else?”

Gloria shook her head. “No thank you. I’m fine.”

Mingus lifted a tumbler to his lips and took a slow sip of the Belgravian whisky. He held the glass there for a moment, wordlessly staring off into the mid distance.

“Norman? I’m awfully sorry about what’s happened.”

“As am I,” he said as he put the glass back down on the tabletop. “Oh, I’m certain I shall survive the storm, personally. Internal Security has seen to it that those who are aware of what transpired between Ms. Nash and my grandson will keep their mouths shut. What scandal there is will quickly dissipate. My grandson’s trial will be a private affair, under Imperial Security, and no one will ever learn the full truth of the matter. Except for you, Gloria. That’s why I asked you here tonight. I think you deserve to know.”

“Petra told me what Whit said, so I think I have some idea of what actually happened.”

Mingus shook his head. “No,” he said, “you don’t. Only four people ever knew the whole truth of it, and now one of them is dead. Cornell DuBray and my daughter are the others.”

“You don’t need to tell me, Norman,” Gloria said.

“Yes,” he said, “I do. I need to tell it, and you need to hear it. If you truly intend to run Dexta someday, you should know what that entails. You should know what it might cost you.”

Mingus poured some more whisky, then took a healthy swig of it. “Belgravian,” he said. “Are you sure you won’t have some?”

“Maybe a little.” Mingus reached for a second tumbler and poured a couple of fingers of the amber liquid into it. Gloria took a sip of it and let its silky smoothness caress her tongue for a moment.

“You know that I was Quadrant Administrator here in the summer of 3163,” Mingus began. “I already had prospects of rising to the position of Secretary, but that was not yet a certainty. My predecessor, Tom McIntyre, still had a few good years left in him, and I had a potential rival or two. Still, my prospects were good, and I intended to make the most of them. I tell you this because it’s important that you keep in mind as you hear what follows the central fact of my personal ambition. Whatever my other motives and justifications for what happened, they cannot be separated from my sense of self-interest, my sense of entitlement. If you are to judge me—and you will—you must keep that in mind.”

“I have no intention of judging you, Norman,” Gloria protested. “I don’t want to do that.”

“You must,” he said. “And inescapably, you will.”

Mingus drank some more whisky and focused his gaze on the darkness in a far corner of the room. “We were going to have a war,” he said. “A big one. Everyone knew it. We had been fencing with the Ch’gnth for hundreds of years, and by the middle of the last century, conflict had become all but inevitable. The Emperor, Edward III, had been on the throne for more than thirty years and had just a few more years to live. He was not a bad Emperor, and he had some competent people around him. And Tom McIntyre was, at his best, quite capable. Yet there was a pervading sense of drift in those final years before the war, a lack of focus. We were not truly prepared for the war we knew was coming. I suppose no one quite believed that it would really happen. The Empire hadn’t fought a major war in nearly a century, and the prospect of one seemed unreal, somehow. We stood on the brink of a precipice, idly playing lawn croquet as the ground crumbled beneath our feet, and wondered only how that would affect our next shot. It’s one of those things that historians and posterity can never truly understand because they weren’t there and didn’t breathe the same air as we did.

“So there I was, Administrator of a Quadrant that was about to explode. And I knew, to a near certainty, that when the Ch’gnth attack came, it would be focused on Savoy, just seventy-five light-years from where we sit. Just three days away for a battle fleet. Ch’gnth space was closed to us, of course, but we had some scattered intelligence reports from neutral traders, and we knew that the Ch’gnth were assembling a powerful strike force in the region. And, of course, galactography virtually dictated that they would attack Savoy. It was a salient, intruding into space that was rightfully theirs. Once they had it, the entire Empire position in this Quadrant would be at risk. Their next target would surely have been New Cambridge, and from there, they would have had a clear path leading to Earth itself. Thus, the strategic position.”

Mingus took some more whisky, then continued.

“We weren’t blind to it, of course. I had been sending warnings to Earth for years. I was rather strident about it, in fact, and I suppose that contributed to their tendency to discount my recommendations. In any event, little was done to strengthen materially our position here. Oh, there were plans aplenty, the occasional Fleet Exercise and what have you, but somehow the essential gravity of the situation never truly penetrated. It wasn’t until negotiations finally broke down in June of 3163 that anyone in authority on Earth fully appreciated the urgency of the situation. So they quickly threw together a shipment of arms and sent it to New Cambridge, for transshipment to Savoy. It arrived here in August. But by then, it was too late.” Mingus looked at Gloria and added, “Or so I believed.”

“The history books say that you were the only leader at the time with the vision to see what was coming,” Gloria said.

Mingus allowed himself a marginal smile. “The history books,” he said, “are wrong. As usual. There were others. Even as I sat here dithering on New Cambridge, Admiral Bryant was already pulling together the pieces of what would become the Second Fleet. That’s important for you to understand. For all my presumed vision and foresight, I was only viewing things from my own limited perspective. Here in Quadrant 4, things looked truly desperate. But there were three other Quadrants, you see. The Empire was never quite as fragile and vulnerable as it appeared to me. Others, with a broader vision—like Admiral Bryant—had a more comprehensive and realistic understanding of our position. But I could see no farther than Savoy. And what I saw was that Savoy was doomed.”

Mingus shook his head sadly and sighed. He took another sip of whisky.

“I couldn’t see it then, of course, but from the distance of half a century, it’s clear to me now that in August of 3163, I was in an advanced state of panic. I envisioned the swift and final destruction of Savoy, followed by an inexorable, irresistible attack on New Cambridge. In my mind, Savoy was already lost. Gone. All that mattered was to preserve New Cambridge. Savoy could not be saved, but New Cambridge might be, if we could husband what strength we had and do what was necessary for our defense.”

Mingus looked at Gloria. His blue-gray eyes were misted and shining.

“And so,” he said, “I didn’t send that final shipment of arms on to Savoy. I kept it here, for the defense of New Cambridge. I knowingly decided to sacrifice a hundred million lives on Savoy in order to save my own skin.”

“No,” Gloria insisted. “You’re being too hard on yourself. You already said that you didn’t think Savoy could be saved, no matter what you did. Given what you knew and believed at the time, you did the right thing. The only thing possible.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?” Mingus said. He poured himself some more whisky. He took another sip and so did Gloria.

“Norman, you can’t—”

Mingus raised his hand. “Hear me out, Gloria.”

“All right, but I refuse to believe you panicked.”

“Call it what you will. If you prefer, say simply that I tragically misjudged the situation. For when the Ch’gnth attack came, on September 8, those weapons were stored in an orbital warehouse above New Cambridge, when they should have been deployed on and around Savoy, where they might have done some good. We heard about the attack from a courier that got through a day later. I fully expected that Savoy would fall within a few days, a week at most. And if it had, I suppose my decision would have been fully justified. That single shipment of arms would not have changed the outcome of the battle. The Ch’gnth force was overwhelming, and would surely have prevailed in time. But time”—he shook his head sadly—“time was what mattered above all.

“Savoy did not fall within a few days. Nor within a week, or even two. It held out for nearly three weeks. Three desperate, bloody, heroic weeks.” Mingus shook his head again. For a moment he seemed too overcome with emotion to continue. Gloria made a point of looking away as Mingus dabbed at his eyes.

“Afterward,” Mingus went on, “we were able to reconstruct what had happened. To truly understand it, you need to know something about the tactics and weaponry that were employed at the time. In the initial wave of the attack, the Ch’gnth engaged and defeated Savoy’s orbital defenses. That was inevitable and nothing could have prevented it. They were just too strong, and Savoy was too weak—in space. But on the surface of the planet, Savoy possessed formidable defenses—and a will to fight that, even now, makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end when I think of it.”

“Mine too,” said Gloria. “I remember learning about it in school when I was a little girl. My teacher cried when she told us about the defense of Savoy. We all did.”

Mingus cleared his throat. “Savoy,” he said, “has a single major continent, and most of the population was concentrated around Savoy City, on the northern coast. The city was impervious to attack from orbit. The point defenses against space-borne or ballistic projectiles were simply too strong. The only way to get at the city was from the surface. The task facing the Ch’gnth was to establish a bridgehead on the surface, then launch terrain-following missiles aimed, ultimately, at the city. They made three landings. The first was repulsed. So was the second, after a pitched battle that lasted six days. But the third landing succeeded, and the Ch’gnth established a defensible perimeter in a weakly defended desert region, about two thousand kilometers southeast of the city.

“From there, they were able to unleash their terrain-following missiles and literally blast their way forward, toward the city. I saw it from orbit a few months later, and you could see each crater, each blast zone, marching straight as an arrow aimed at the heart of the city. They’d launch a missile and detonate a plasma bomb perhaps twenty kilometers beyond their lines. There simply wasn’t time to defend against such an attack; by the time the defenders spotted the launch, the warhead had already exploded. One after another, day after day, more than a hundred of them. Until finally, nineteen days after their initial attack, they reached the city. And annihilated it.”

Mingus closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and took a deep, slow breath. Then he went on. “By then, of course, they had already exterminated the outlying settlements. And on the nineteenth day, they killed every remaining human being on the planet.”

“A hundred million of them,” Gloria said softly.

“One hundred and three million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and ninety-one,” Mingus said, “according to the 3160 census. Of course, by September of 3163, it would have been more. But for a round figure, I suppose one hundred million will do.”

Mingus poured himself some more whisky and took a big swallow. Gloria sipped some more of her own drink.

“Nineteen days to kill a planet,” Mingus said. “And on the twenty-first day, Admiral Bryant and the Second Fleet popped out of Yao Space, suicidally close to the planet, and blasted the Ch’gnth fleet to perdition. They speak of Salamis and Lepanto, Midway and Caliban Four, but really, there had never been anything quite like it. If the navigation had been off by a thousandth of one percent, they’d have smashed into the planet or missed it entirely. If the timing had been off by a tenth of a second, they could not have hit the Ch’gnth fleet. The Spirit must have been with us.” Mingus shook his head.

He looked at Gloria. Tears were running down his cheeks. “Do you see now what I had done?” he asked her. “Do you understand the enormity of my crime?”

“Norman—”

“Two days!” Mingus shouted. “Two Spirit-forsaken days! That last shipment of arms, which I, in my vast wisdom, withheld because Savoy was already doomed and could not have been saved—can you tell me that it would not have made a difference? Can you tell me that it would not have given those poor, brave souls the time they needed? A hundred million people, who might have lived, died because of what I did! No, that’s wrong. A hundred and three million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and ninety-one. I mustn’t shortchange them. They all counted. Every man, woman, and child. They all counted.”

Mingus put a hand over his face and sat there, quietly sobbing. Gloria wiped tears from her own cheeks.

“Norman,” she said, reaching for his hand, “you couldn’t have known.”

“Well, I damned well should have known, shouldn’t I?” Mingus took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his robe and wiped his face. He cleared his throat and helped himself to more whisky.

“Anyway,” he said, “the outcome of the Battle of Savoy left me in a rather embarrassing position. The weapons that might have saved Savoy, the weapons I had withheld, were sitting up there in those orbital warehouses. What was I to do with them? If what I had done ever came to light, I’d have been pilloried…lynched. As I should have been. I couldn’t just hand them over to Admiral Bryant and say, ‘Here, old boy, you might need these,’ now, could I? The survival of Savoy had become a moot issue, and all that mattered was the survival of Norman Mingus.”

Mingus drank some more whisky. Gloria thought he was getting a little drunk; his words were slightly slurred and his face looked unnaturally red and puffy.

“If I was to avoid disgrace, or worse, I had to dispose of those weapons. Fortunately, I happened to know a man who had the means to do that. His name was Whitney Bartholemew, and he was the neighborhood distributor for organized crime. The zamitat. I’d had dealings with him, of course—it’s unavoidable.”

“I know what you mean,” Gloria said quietly. Mingus ignored her.

“So I approached him and explained my situation. He was not unsympathetic, and offered to help me in my hour of need. I asked him what he desired in return. Money? Official protection? His for the asking! Only he didn’t ask for that. He wanted only one small, inconsequential thing in return for his assistance. He wanted my daughter.”

Mingus turned to Gloria and offered her a self-deprecating smile. “Poetic, don’t you think? Downright Shakespearean. I was like Shylock, crying, ‘Oh, my daughter! Oh, my ducats!’ Only I was the borrower, not the lender, and life was extracting its pound of flesh from my very heart. I was properly shocked and offended, of course, like the good father I pretended to be. But I knew as soon as he asked what my answer would be.

“Saffron was betrothed, at the time, to my friend and assistant, Cornell DuBray. I knew that Saffron would never understand, but that DuBray would, so I went to him. And like the master politician and bureaucrat I was, I proposed a plan that I knew would be acceptable to him. In return for my protection and patronage throughout his career at Dexta, he would break off his engagement to my daughter. And it would be done in such a way—as finely calculated as Admiral Bryant’s attack at Savoy—that Saffron would, with my subtle encouragement, be thrown directly into the waiting arms of Whitney Bartholemew. And that is precisely the way it happened. A masterpiece of creative plotting, if I do say so myself—some of my finest work. Saffron was never to know, of course. And in the meantime, Bartholemew disposed of the weapons. I never knew just how or where until you and Ms. Nash unraveled the mystery this past week.”

Mingus allowed himself some more whisky. “All very neat and tidy, you must admit. Except for one thing. After they were married, for some petty reason or another, Bartholemew told Saffron what had happened. You can imagine how she reacted. No, I suppose you don’t have to imagine it. You already know. She hated me. And, whether intentionally or not, she passed that hatred on to her son, my grandson…with the tragic results you have seen. So you can add a few more to my score of one hundred and three million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and ninety-one blighted lives—another two hundred from the terrorist attacks on Central. Plus two more.”

Gloria squeezed his hand. She badly wanted to help him, to ease his pain, but she could think of nothing to say.

“I tried to speak to Saffron after my grandson was arrested,” Mingus said. “But she wouldn’t speak to me. She probably never will again. As for Whitney, there is little I can do for him. It’s an Imperial matter, and the outcome of his trial is a foregone conclusion. They’ll execute him for what he did and tried to do. Perhaps, in his perversity, that will even make him happy. He’ll get to be a martyr.”

Mingus sniffed and wiped away some more tears. “There is, perhaps, one thing I could do for him, and I briefly considered doing it. I could make a clean breast of it. Confess. Tell the Empire the truth about Savoy and my crimes.”

“Norman, you can’t do that!”

“Of course not. And I won’t. Just an idle fantasy. No, I shall continue as before, but with the additional burden of knowing the irreparable harm I have done to my own family.”

He looked into Gloria’s eyes. “For fifty-four-and-a-half years, Gloria, not a single day has gone by when I have not thought of Savoy, when I have not felt the pain and guilt and remorse. I shall feel them to the end of my days.”

“I’m so sorry, Norman,” she whispered.

“Do you still want to run Dexta?” Mingus asked her. “Spirit willing, nothing like Savoy will ever happen to you. But if you truly seek that power, then it is all but guaranteed that something else will happen. Something uniquely yours, heartbreaking and inescapable. Having power means making decisions, Gloria, and because you are human, some of those decisions will be wrong—perhaps fatally so. And you will have to live with the consequences, with the responsibility for whatever tragedies are unleashed by your mistakes and frailties. With the best of intentions, I condemned a hundred million people, and because I was clever and selfish, I managed to evade the direct consequences of my actions. They fell, instead, on my family, and on total strangers. And yet, I know. I know. And you will, too.”

“Oh, Norman,” Gloria said softly.

Mingus managed to smile at her. “Thank you for listening to an old man’s lachrymose confession, Gloria. I needed to tell someone. I’m sorry to have burdened you with this knowledge, and yet, perhaps it will help you to make the decision that you face. I love you, Gloria…like a daughter. And if you truly were my daughter, I think I would tell you to forget about power and responsibility and simply to live a happy and carefree life. Go be a smiling, glamorous Empress, and avoid the kind of pain I have known. That is what I would wish for you.”

“You want me to leave Dexta?”

“I want you to be happy. And now, I find that I am very tired. Sweet dreams, Gloria.”

“And to you, Norman.”

He shook his head. “My dreams are never sweet,” he said.