The expected verdict

It's been busy on our little slice of Heaven. Between x0x0 wrecking her Osprey and then turning out to be ok, the wreck in part a cover for her bringing Aurora home. Aurora herself making fleeting appearances, at one point making a comment about not having any friends because Krenshar taught her to snap their necks. And everyone and their brother crawling around our colony looking for some kind of clue to some kind of key to some kind of place that no one seemed to understand. It's been busy.

When you end someone you cross a metaphorical line. Once you cross that line, you can never come back. Most folk who've been across that line never look back. It's not so much an innocence lost, but the karmic weight of ending someone's span. In some cases it's not such a bad thing. Ending a Reaver is a kindness. Setting someone free from the madness. Ending an innocent is a different matter. It's the kind of thing a Shepherd'd say you were going to hell for, if you followed their Way. You took on that weight every time you ended someone's span. How much weight was on which side of the scale wasn't always so easy to determine.

I'd tried to instill in Aurora a respect for life, Organic or otherwise. I didn't want her to bare the same karmic weight I carried. If she chose it for herself when she was grown, so be it. But she was too young still, in spite of having knowledge far beyond her years, to cross that line. Only she'd chosen Krenshar as her role model, and Krenshar didn't have the same feeling on the matter as I did.

Seems I wasn't so good at this Motherhood thing.

Of course, that was personal. What wasn't so personal was the coverage the Cortex was giving to the Mikie and Sentry terrorism trial. I hadn't even checked the casualty count from Londinium when the first reports came in. I hadn't realized that the warehouse district in Aberdeen city was at the heart of an urban slum, so half a million dead wasnt' out of the question,

Was the kind of thing that left a knot in the pit of your stomach. It was the kind of thing that started wars, which was inevitably what the real perpetrator was after.

I had no doubt, at all, that this was a False Flag operation. The Dust Devils, the only faction in the Independence movement who'd consider popping a nuke on a core world, knew as well as anyone that the Alliance's urban poor were their best ally in the Core. Nuking them was the sort of thing a Hardliner might do. Would do. You'd foment a good deal of unrest in the Alliance population with the raw number of dead, and the fear and anger would override most folk's common sense when anyone who was Indie friendly protested they hadn't done it.

It was a good set up. Evil. But a good setup nonetheless if starting a war was what you were after.

The trial was for show. While I wasn't especially friendly with either Mikie or Sentry, history aside, they weren't bad folk. Neither of them were the kind of folk who'd resort to blowing up civilians to make a point. Military base, or a Cruiser? Maybe. An urban slum? Not a chance.

This was pure reflex reaction by the Powers that Be. Quick arrest and a show trial to make the public see just how powerful and unitized the Justice Department was, and then bury the real investigation under a few layers of red tape.

While I personally wanted to dig in and find out who was behind it, I resisted the urge. Not everyone in Parliament, the Military or Intel, were going to let this slide. Someone back there was investigating. Chances were they'd find the real culprit and quietly end their span. The public would think that Justice had been done, while Justice really was done behind the scenes.

Thing was, it wouldn't save Mikie or Sentry. They were as good as dead. Even if they somehow managed to avoid execution, there'd be folks hunting them down for the rest of their lives. Most Indie minded folk I knew hated the Alliance. But not a one of them considered blowing up half a million innocent poor acceptable. Either of them show their face on any of the Rim worlds, chances were pretty good someone would put a bullet in it.

Their only hope was being publicly vindicated, and even then someone was apt to take a shot at them. People were apt to believe that first report and act in kind. Either way, they were both likely to have a short span from here. Not something I envied.

Fact was, I had a measure of sympathy for them both. Didn't know Sentry's past well, but I knew Mikie had her share of history with the Alliance. None of it pleasant. Not that I could do much to help them. Though I had a gut feeling that some of the activity we'd been having around here of late was related to this whole thing.

Just being kept out of the loop. Plausible deniability.

Best I could do now was get a wave off to Tag and see if any of the Core units were on this. With all the compartmentalization, chances were he'd only be able to tell me a "Yes" or "No." If even that. Reality was there were probably several units looking into it, and none of them would know about the others.

There was more though. There were still some reasonable voices in Parliament. There were still some folk willing to listen to reason. It might take some time and favors, but there were still a few things I could do. A whisper in the right ear and maybe, just maybe, we could avert a war.

Butterfly wings flap
Voices of reason whisper
Dragon's gentle touch