Luna Marine. Ian Douglas

      Cheseaux sighed. How much of what David wanted was classified for honest reasons of legitimate state security, and how much was due to the shortsighted scrabblings of small-minded and paranoid UN bureaucrats?

      Just what was it that had divided the world for these past two years, anyway? The United States refusal to hold a UN-mandated plebiscite on the question of independence for some of its Southwestern states. Cheseaux snorted. He scarcely blamed Washington for refusing that one, especially since the vote was to be limited to the American states involved and would have included the populations of Mexico’s northwestern states—a stacked deck if ever there’d been one. That wasn’t even worth a decent riot or two, to say nothing of the war!

      What else? Russia’s refusal to back down to China’s demands for parts of Siberia; those land claims went way back and could have been settled in other ways. The fear that the United States and Russia were using their superiority in spaceflight technology to grab the newly discovered archeological discoveries and exotechnologies for themselves. The willingness of the United States to actually publish some of those discoveries prematurely, without weighing the impact they would have on religious, political, and social systems worldwide.