Meanwhile, the wartime communications center behind Kashgar, consisting of three news trains and an entire network of fiber-optic relays, welcomed another group of guests who appeared on no public military roster.
Detter Haruth had initially thought they had come to confiscate the live broadcast footage.
He had already made seven copies of the raw Kashgar footage: one hidden in the Great Han Court Television Bureau's technical archive, one sent into Area 11's civilian network, and two dispatched to different cities through Britannia's commercial news networks. As for the remaining three, even their exact destinations had never been written on the same sheet of paper.
He knew all too well how power handled history. Once a battle ended, heroes needed to become more heroic, the Field Gendarmerie's executions were best recast as the restoration of order behind the lines, and the Regent's vomiting, gasping, and delirious rambling inside the Hive, along with his public remarks about a Britannian Princess's long legs and the Great Han Son of Heaven's ice cream, naturally ought to disappear from the official record.
So when a group entered the editing studio wearing iron-gray uniforms, all political insignia removed from their collars and sleeve patches, leaving only department numbers, Diethard had already worked out how to deal with them.
Leading them was Friedrich Kessler, a man in his forties wearing thin-rimmed glasses, with none of a journalist's excitement on his face. He had previously worked in another world's broadcast coordination, news documentary, and wartime mass mobilization systems before being transferred to the secretariat of the Total War Mobilization Committee. He knew how to reframe a military defeat into social mobilization, and how to make cinemas, radios, station loudspeakers, and factory noticeboards all say the same thing at the same moment.
Of course, Lin Cuo had not been