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pulled off a rather major coup within the Chapalii political scene, by taking over the Keinaba merchant house?”
    “Not yet finalized, I might add.”
    “Not yet? Lady’s Tits, Marco, Charles spent long enough at the Imperial palace. Almost two standard years, he spent there. I thought it was finalized, all legal, with the emperor’s approval.”
    “The emperor approved it, but he didn’t—oh, what is that phrase? Tess translated it so neatly. ‘Seal the braid of fealty.’”
    David sighed and sagged back against the seat. “It’s all too convoluted for me. I’m just an engineer.” Marco chuckled. They had known each other for so long now, he and Marco and Charles, that they spoke as much with what they didn’t say as with what they did. David levered out an armrest, tilted his head back, and shut his eyes. The conversation between Charles and the prime minister continued across from him like a murmuring counterpoint. They were talking about Rhui.
    The whole thing was far too convoluted for David’s taste. He liked something he could get his hands on, something concrete, malleable, something that had answers that were correct based on fixed laws. Not something that was mutable. David hated politics. He’d never liked history much, either. That’s why he had gone into classical engineering—the design and construction of three-dimensional, utilitarian structures like buildings and bridges and transport facilities.
    Everything he knew about the Chapalii made him anxious. They didn’t follow the rules. Humanity had discovered spaceflight and then discovered cousin humans on neighboring worlds. Earth and their cousin humans on Ophiuchi-Sei-ah-nai had formed the League, a kind of parliament of space-faring humanity. Then, human exploration ships had run into Chapalii protocol agents, representatives of the Chapalii Empire; soon after, the emperor had simply co-opted League space as part of his dominion. But their rule was benign; some people even called it enlightened, and certainly the Chapalii did not begrudge sharing some—if not all—of their technological expertise with their subject races.
    But were humans ever content with being ruled? Not really. Charles Soerensen led a rebellion against the Empire that failed. But instead of arresting him and executing him, the Chapalii ennobled him. They made him a duke. The emperor granted him two stellar systems as his fief, one of them the newly-discovered system Delta Pavonis—discovered, that is, to possess two habitable worlds. The planet Odys was ravaged by Chapalii modernization; Rhui was interdicted by Charles’s order, an order that the emperor agreed to despite the fact that the interdiction closed off access to Rhui’s abundant natural resources. Just as it closed off access to Rhui’s native population.
    And that was the other thing that bothered David. That’s what Tess Soerensen had found out; she had discovered ancient Chapalii buildings on Rhui. The half-mythical Chapalii duke, the Tai-en Mushai, had built a palace on Rhui. He had seeded the planet with humans from Earth. It must all have happened long, long ago, millennia ago in the human span of years, or so Charles and his experts guessed, though they knew nothing for certain. Even so, how could the Chapalii have lost track of these buildings? How could they have lost track of an entire planet?
    David did not like equations that didn’t add up.
    And now Charles was going with a small party to Rhui, to find Tess and to investigate these ancient remnants of a Chapalii presence on Rhui. David supposed he was looking forward to going to visit an interdicted world where the living conditions would be, at best, primitive. At any rate, he’d be happy to see Tess again.
    The prime minister left them at Staten Island, and they transferred to a secured line in to Manhattan, which had been razed and rebuilt by the Chapalii and was now a private Chapalii enclave, barred to most humans.
    David had once