The Wiggin Family Home, Greensboro, North Carolina, Monday, 2171
To: Locke%espinoza@polnet.gov
From: Chamrajnagar%%@ifcom.gov
Subject: Do not write to me again
Mr. Peter Wiggin,
Did you really think I would not have the resources to know who you are? You may be the author of the "Locke Proposal," giving you a reputation as a peacemaker, but you are also partly responsible for the world's present instability by your jingoist use of your sister's identity as Demosthenes. I have no illusions about your motives.
It is outrageous of you to suggest that I jeopardize the neutrality of the International Fleet in order to take control of children who have completed their military service with the IF. If you attempt to manipulate public opinion to force me to do so, I will expose your identity as both Locke and Demosthenes.
I have changed my idname and have informed our mutual friend that he is not to attempt to relay communication between you and me again. The only comfort you are entitled to take from my letter is this: The IF will not interfere with those trying to assert hegemony over other nations and peoples -- not even you.
Chamrajnagar
Admiral Chamrajnagar was an idiot. A short-sighted, bureaucratic, bloody-minded fool who had absolutely no idea what he had just done.
Peter was trembling just a little bit. Part of it was fear: if the IF brass knew who he was, then there was no accounting for who else might know. And even if nobody else did, Chamrajnagar now had the ultimate tool to keep him sitting here uselessly - treating him like a child! - while God knows what happened after next weekend.
Not only had the admiral refused to give him help, but he had now effectively tied Locke's-- Peter's-- hands.
The other part of it was knowing that these children would go unprotected upon release, beyond what their home countries could scrounge up. If some of their home countries had anything to scrounge up at all. And even then, the strongest would take the spoils. Take all these little geniuses, or kill them, and attempt to claim supremacy.
And he would have to sit idly by, watching his worst nightmare come to fruition. Unless he found some other way to stop it, something less public, something...
He let his head sink in his hands. "Kuso," he muttered. "Churchill wouldn't have had this problem, the fat bastard."
[[ NFB, NFI, email taken from Shadow of the Hegemon. ]]