First Casualty by Mike Moscoe

The room was silent; here he would get no dropped scrap of information to sell. Are my five minutes ticking away? Desperate, he forced himself to quiet.
    “How goes our little war?” a familiar voice spoke from a corner of the highest tier.
    “Your war, Henry, not ours,” someone in the opposite corner dared to interrupt, and interrupting, to correct—and to challenge. Trevor held his tongue.
    “Edward, when all of humanity groans in birth, of course we will be there. We raped her fair and square. The little bastard will fall right into our tender clutches. Of course it is ours.” The voice held a chuckle ... empty of mirth.
    “Thank you, Henry. I love your poetry. But let us not forget, the colony planets are throwing their full weight behind their tin dictator. On several fronts their Red Banner fleets advance, spewing their songs of 'One Humanity, United together. The only coin the sweat of the worker. The only just pay what you've made with your own hands.'“
    “And I do love your poetry too, Edward, even if it is all secondhand. Yes, they do press us here and there, but they are like any new entrepreneur with a penny vision. They overreach, and just moments before they might have realized a profit, they go bankrupt. That is when we step in with a takeover bid. There is nothing they plant that we cannot reap.”
    Trevor risked a glance at his patron. Heat swirled around him. Beneath his words were fire, enough to cut down a dozen CEO's of transplanetary corporations. Still he leaned back against the wall, talking coolly, body frozen in a posture of good cheer. Not even a finger twitched.
    “You put much at risk.”
    “Because you were blind, Edward. People seeped out to the frontier like water under a dam. And you ignored them.”
    “They paid their bills. Living off the interest made you fat, Henry, and left them nothing.”
    “Nothing, Edward. One moment you speak of fleets pressing in on us. Another moment you call them nothing. You have ignored the frontier worlds too long. It is time to bring them back into the wide river of humanity, to let them grow wealthy and comfortable like Earth and her seven sisters, like Pitt's Hope and the other two score that came after. The colonies must be brought into the family, not by some foot-stamping messiah, but our way. Peacefully, profitably, comfortably. There is no profit in surprises. Left long enough on their own, anyone can dream up a surprise. Edward, we must eliminate surprises.”
    “And so you play with a war, Henry. Brute force follows no laws, physical or economic. The hounds of war nip at any heel they choose, not just the one you want. You gamble.”
    “When I gamble, Edward, the fix is already in. Mr. Crossinshield, the fix is in, is it not?”
    “Yes, sir.” Trevor wasted no time on the gulp he desperately wanted. His button pushed, he spewed his contents in words too rapid to be interrupted. “We have multiple contacts in all major and minor theaters of operations on both the colonial and Earth sides. Information is being received, collated, and analyzed daily. If President Urm's Unity Movement cannot be properly guided, we have subcontractors in place to cancel him.”
    The woman rolled over, propped herself on one elbow, and crossed her legs. “And there is no one to take his place among the collection of thieves with whom he has surrounded himself.” She grinned. There was no humor behind it, no evidence of any feeling at all. “Of course, some of those thieves are our thieves. Very good, Henry.”
    Trevor's patron opened his lips in an empty smile and went through the motions of a thank-you before turning back to the man across the room. “You see, Edward, this is a restructuring, not war. A growth of franchises that will be handled delicately. Before the next annual reports are due, we will have closed out our wartime contracts profitably and plunged into the next economic expansion fueled by the unmet needs of the colonies on the