The meeting room had been cleared for emergency business, but no one had removed the painted map of the prosperous city from its rear wall.
Clean avenues crossed an intact market. The reservoir approaches were represented by a decorative blue border. Eli stood beneath it with Juno’s comparison in his hands and looked at a street he had spent the afternoon helping people leave. The discrepancy was not a lie somebody had just invented. It was an old picture left in place while its authority expired.
The regional official opened by pointing to a recent success.
“The neighborhood gate held because trained hunters followed the emergency assignment. What would have happened if they had waited for Eli Voss to approve their actions?”
The commander’s quartermaster sat among the witnesses. The commander had kept her crew on its own rest and gate duties; she had authorized the quartermaster to speak to the preserved record, not to enlarge the private story of her dependent. She watched Eli without expression.
“They didn’t need my approval,” Eli said. “They made their decision with the information available.”
“And your coalition had no replacement ready.”
“We didn’t have the correct manual jacks at that gate in time. I don’t know whether another manual response could have arrived before the failure. The local engineer can describe what was actually available.”
