"Vid off," Justin said, and the Minder cut it. He sat in his bathrobe on the couch. Grant wandered in, likewise in his bathrobe, toweling his hair.
"What's the news tonight?" Grant asked, and Justin said, with a little unease at his stomach:
"There's some kind of flap in Novgorod. Something about a star named Gehenna."
"Where's that?" There was no star named Gehenna in anybody's reckoning. Or there had not been, until tonight. Grant looked suddenly sober as he sat down on the other side of the pit.
"Over toward Alliance. Past Viking." The news report had not been entirely specific. "Seems there's a planet there. With humans on it. Seems Union colonized it without telling anybody. Sixty years ago."
"My God," Grant murmured.
"Alliance ambassador's arrived at station with an official protest. They're having an emergency session of the Council. Seems we're in violation of the Treaty. About a dozen clauses of it."
"How big a colony?" Grant asked, right to the center of it.
"They don't know. They don't say."
"And nobody knew about it. Some land of Defense base?"
"Might be. Might well be. But it isn't now. Apparently it's gone primitive."
Grant hissed softly. "Survivable world."
"Has to be, doesn't it? We're not talking about any bail of rock. The news-service is talking about the chance of some secret stuff from back in the war years."
Grant was quiet a moment, elbows on knees.
The war was the generation before them. The war was something no one wanted to repeat; but the threat was always there. Alliance merchanters came and went. Sol had explored the other side of space and got its fingers burned—dangerously. Eetees with a complex culture and an isolationist sentiment. Now Sol played desperate politics between Alliance and Union, trying to keep from falling under Alliance rule and trying to walk the narrow line that might leave it independent of Alliance ships without pushing Alliance into defending its treaty prerogatives or bringing Alliance interests and Union into conflict. Things were so damned delicate. And they had gotten gradually better.
A generation had grown up thinking it was solving the problems.
But old missiles the warships had launched a hundred years ago were still a shipping hazard. Sometimes the past came back into the daily news with a vengeance.
And old animosities surfaced like ghosts, troubling a present in which humans knew they were not alone.
"It doesn't sound like it was any case of finding three or four survivors," he said to Grant. "They're saying 'illegal colony' and they admit it's ours."
"Still going? Organized?"
"It's not real clear."
Another moment of silence. Grant sat up then and remembered to dry his hair before it dried the way it was. "Damn crazy mess," Grant said. "Did they say they got them off, or are they going to? Or what are they going to do about it?"
"Don't know yet."
"Well, we can guess where Giraud's going to be for the next week or so, can't we?"