With the matter of rewards and spoils settled, the meeting turned at last toward home.
The development of Neo Terra.
It was Klea who began, as vice leader and the one who had held the faction together through the long year of his seclusion.
In the span of a single year, she reported, the city had transformed almost beyond recognition. Its population had swelled from two million to nearly ten million.
Fortunately, the city had been built to bear it. The careful planning of recent years — the wide thoroughfares, the ordered districts, the housing raised faster than there were people to fill it — meant Neo Terra had been ready to absorb such an influx rather than buckle beneath it.
The refugees from Baeldum had played their part in that growth, though they were not its true cause. More than two-thirds of those immigrants had already returned to their home worlds once reconstruction made it possible.
The real reason lay elsewhere.
Reputation.
