Getting to my feet, just for a moment I had the traceries of fire at Innenin across the back of my vision, the screaming deaths heard at a level that was bone deep, and suddenly Bancroft's elegant understatement rang sickly and grotesque, like the antiseptic words of General MacIntyre's damage reports . . . for securing the Innenin beachhead, a price well worth paying . . . Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing.