Yeah. It got a little complicated in the USNA, for a while. You feel me?
Had a working breakfast with Bill to discuss Frye’s… offer, I suppose. He surprisingly thought it was a good idea. “You gotta understand this place, Ray,” he told me. “This isn’t like the Weave, where everybody’s hooked up with everybody else, all the time. People lump up in here. We’ve got networks. Frye isn’t in mine, and neither are a lot of the people he knows.”
“So, he’s some kind of official, then?” I frowned, because that didn’t sound right at all — and then I had a horrified thought. “Wait. He wasn’t a, ah…”
“Rebel?” Bill bit his lip to see my reaction to that particular word. “This ain’t the Thirties, Bill. The snoops are gone, buddy. Not that they liked coming in here, anyway.”
“Sorry. Old habit.” I shook my head. “Besides, they must’ve transported all the Free State rebels to one of the colony worlds after they quashed the rebellion.”
“Probably,” agreed Bill. “Before my time, though. I got cycled in here the year after the clean-up sweeps. All the old F-SOB guys still around swore up and down that they put everybody hinky on a one-way trip to Zheng Ho, and would they lie to us?” He used his toast to scoop up the last of his fried eggs. “We never found any mass graves, so they were probably telling the truth.”