Ch. 14 — How the Mighty Have Fallen

It was a little disheartening and, personally, alarming at how easy it was to quit her job at the Ministry. All she had to do was to tell her superior, and that was it, really. They didn't ask her why, didn't try to persuade her to stay, no one even appeared the slightest bit interested.

It was all very impersonal. Her manager, a pure-blood, had worked with her since she had been hired. He was no friendlier to her today than he had been back then on her first day. Based on how rarely she saw him — never — she probably could have simply stopped coming in to work, and he might have noticed some time later in the month. Maybe. Perhaps.

As it was, she counted herself lucky that she found him in his office. Probably because it was Friday, and payday.

He gave her a very annoyed look as she came into his office. He placed the book he had been reading onto his desk, and stared at her with narrowed eyes.

"I'm quitting," she said, "effective at the end of the day."

He didn't say a word. He just sighed, opened a drawer in his desk, took out a piece of parchment, and made a notation. He replaced the parchment, took out another, and started reading. "Please empty your desk before you hand in your ministry ID. Any personal items left behind will not be returned, and will not be available for retrieval at a later date, so please make sure to be thorough," he said in a monotone, and didn't even look up at her. "Please be sure to inform your co-workers of any projects or assignments that need to be completed. You will be paid for the current pay period right up until you turn in your Ministry I.D., or the end of your current shift, whichever comes first. Your pay will be delivered by owl at the end of the month. Do not ask for it in person at the payroll office, they cannot help you." He placed the paper back in the drawer and stared at her. "Is there anything else?" he asked with a slightly hostile tone in his voice. At her head-shake, he went back to reading his book.

She had never seen him do anything else. Not for the first time, she wondered just what he was supposed to be doing, if he ever did it, and who was responsible for hiring him in the first place.

Maybe his job was like that of the Tube traincar drivers. The trains were completely automatic, but people got nervous if they didn't see anyone in the driver's compartment, so the Authority had hired Uni students to sit there. That's all they did. Just sit there. And do their assignments or read books. People felt safer because someone was in the driver's compartment — even if he, or she, had absolutely no control over the trolley, whatsoever. Or maybe it was simply someone had created a do-nothing position for a friend.

And that, incredibly, was all there was to quitting.

If she hadn't had a job already waiting for her, if she had been just fired, the indifferent coldness of it probably would've broken her, the same way it had broken so many other former ministry employees.

"I'm soo sorry, Josephine," Fiona from the Creatures Department said. How she had heard already that Josephine was leaving was anybody's guess. She sounded sympathetic, but not in the least surprised. "It's not right, what's happening here." she shook her head sadly.

"Yeah," Josephine agreed gloomily. Her superior's apathetic attitude, the attitude of the entire Ministry, really, had left her depressed. It wasn't right at all, and a spark of some old, borderline teenage rebellion, made her regret that her thoughts about what Marietta's crew were up to had proved to be wrong. The Ministry was shedding muggle-borns and "wrongly-minded" half-bloods off as if they were bits of unwelcome dandruff. It stung on some deep level where she could still feel indignation over these sorts of things.

"Mind you," Josephine said, "I wasn't fired — I quit." Then she shrugged. "But I guess it was coming anyway, wasn't it?"

"Hm," Diana nodded, folded her arms, and leaned against the door-frame to the department. She looked at her curiously. "Are you going to be alright?" she asked kindly.

"I've another job already — it's why I quit." Josephine shrugged. "There's a new store in Diagon Alley, they aren't open just yet. They took me on as a store clerk." She was almost done. There really wasn't all that much in her desk, in actual fact. Mostly stuff they would throw away if she left it.

Diana nodded slowly. "Do they . . . do they know you're . . .?"

"A half-blood? They know," Josephine said and shrugged again. "They don't seem to care. In fact, I think that was why I was hired. I think I'll be fine, there."

Diana looked dubious about that, but she nodded anyway. "Well, I hope it turns out well for you," she said consolingly, and looked around in the Josephine's tiny office. "It's not going to be the same Ministry, you know, without you here." She sighed and looked at the floor, dejectedly for a moment. "Things are changing, here, Josephine. And not for the better, I fear."

"Yeah," Josephine agreed, and nodded. She put the last of her things in the box. Honestly, though, she would probably be throwing most of them away, herself. She just didn't want anyone at the Ministry going through her things making snide remarks, and laughing.

She hesitated for a moment and then glanced at Diana. She chewed her lower lip for a moment. She wondered if she should tell her about the Enterprise. No, she decided, better not.

The whole thing was rather innocuous, and not really a threat of any kind to anyone. But there was always someone like that Umbridge woman, someone who would deliberately distort the facts and make it out to be some kind of menace that the Ministry had to confront and remove.

Instead of focusing on the return of You-Know-Who, whom, Granger had assured her, really had returned. The girl had promised to show her Harry Potter's memory of the horrifying event, if she wanted to see it. Which she had declined. Her daughter's word that she had seen it, and subsequent deep shudder, was enough for her, thank you very much.

Which hadn't stifled her surprise at Granger, a school-girl, having access to a pensieve! The one the Ministry owned was closely guarded as one of only a few that were known to exist! Where had she gotten one? Had it belonged to the Potter family?

It would be much better not to spread a word about the new business inside the ministry itself.

The people the Enterprise was hoping for would come to it, anyway. She didn't need to do anything.

"Well, then," Josephine said. She looked around the office one last time, shrank the box of her things, and put it in her pocket. "I guess I'll be off then."

"Take care," Diana said with a worried-looking nod, and then headed back to her own office, her head down to not attract any curious looks.

Josephine did the same, and though she felt like holding her head up proud. She didn't. Otherwise, she might attract unwanted attention.

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The Enterprise was still empty when Josephine headed there the next morning, at ten, to start on her new job. Granger had given her a key, but she didn't need it as it turned out. The front door was unlocked, but there was no one there that she could see when she went in. "Hello?" she called out, "Anyone here?"

"Ah!" came a voice from deeper inside the building. "You're here! Excellent!"

Two red-heads came into the front of the store.

"I'm George," said one, and held out his hand.

"And we already met," said Fred.

Not that she could tell that. The twins were . . . well, twins. They looked as alike as if they were copies. You couldn't tell which was the original.

"We have your uniform."

"Lt. Marietta told us your approximate sizes."

"But it's a proto-type."

"So, we want your impressions on improvements"

"First, is this lovely blouse." Fred held out a grey pull-over that had the distorted Star Trek othila emblem over the heart area.

"And these slacks," George said removing his hand from his back to reveal the hanger he was holding.

It was the classic Star Trek uniform, in grey. She looked at them uncertainly.

"There's a complete bathroom, with shower, in the back where you can change."

"And run your finger like this," Fred ran his finger from the middle of the blouse's collar to the shoulder and then down. The blouse on the hanger peeled apart as he did so.

"After you put it on, just place the bottom to edges together, and it will self-seal itself."

Hesitantly, she took them, and George pointed out the bathroom. The bathroom was rather elegantly appointed, and surprisingly, held two large shower stalls, two toilet stalls, and three sinks. There were a series of full-length lockers at one end. She wondered why the store had such an extensive bathroom, and just what kind of business had it been?

Moments later, she was back in the front room, standing awkwardly as the two Weasleys walked in opposite directions around her. The clothes felt rather comfortable, a bit lighter than she was used to wearing as a robe.

"A little tight in the bust."

"Holds nicely to the trousers."

"The sleeves are a tad too short."

"The trousers appear a bit long, but the shoes cover that."

"Can't even see the pockets."

"How do they feel to you?" they asked simultaneously.

"Er," she said, startled. "Okay?"

"Excellent!" they both said.

"We'll provide you another set tomorrow that will be a better fit, we hope."

"You can tell us if you have any complaints or suggestions."

She no longer knew who was speaking.

"And then we'll provide a full week's sets for you."

They nodded together. It was rather creepy.

"And here is a robe we'd like you to wear, too."

It was a very thin and short robe, almost a smock, and it barely reached her knees. It was designed to be a tad open in the front, with only a belt for closure. It was also a slightly different shade of grey that blended with what she wore underneath. It had two large pockets, one on each side. And it was oddly heavy for the material's thinness.

The ensemble was an interesting blend of both Wizarding and Muggle cultures.

This time, a patch that duplicated the sign outside was sewn on each shoulder, with her name sewn over the heart area.

Again, the two circled her several times before nodding approvingly. "That should do nicely," one said.

"If you have any complaints, critiques,"

"suggestions, improvements, or comments,"

"be sure to write them down and tell us."

"Finally, how are you at runes?"

She shrugged, a bit overwhelmed. "They were important in the Ministry."

The two exchanged looks, then one took what looked like a small hardback book that was barely as thick as his finger out of a pocket.

It was a duplicate of Granger's notebook.

"Here," he said, handing it to her.

"We use runes almost exclusively on the ship."

She quietly filed that titbit of information away. Ship.

"You need to be fluent in reading and writing them, not just know them."

She took the book from the twin that held it, and opened it. It was, as he had said, a book on runes. But they were old runes, she could see. A quick flip through showed her several runes that she had never seen before.

"It'll give you something to do while waiting for inquiries."

"If you have any questions on anything, related to the Enterprise Store, the ship, us, the runes . . ."

"Just write them on the inside front-cover of the book and someone will get back to you."

They grinned.

"The inside-cover and opposite page are sort of tied to other books, what you write in one goes to the others, and vice versa."

She looked at the book with more interest, now. That was a bit of clever and complicated spell work. And, now that she thought of it, she did remember seeing her daughter with a book that looked suspiciously like this one. Had that been how she had passed word to Granger that they were coming to the store yesterday?

"Well, we'll be off."

"See you later."

Then they headed into the back rooms.

She stood there for a few minutes, wandered around, exploring what little there was that was visible, and then sat in the remarkably comfortable counter-chair behind the register at the back. She experimented with both for a few moments. She was surprised, but realized she shouldn't have been, when the drawer opened and she saw that each bin of coins was half-full of knuts, sickles, and galleons, respectively.

Then she just leaned back in her chair and thought about things.

It was refreshing . . . she decided. No worries about getting fired for saying or doing the wrong thing was surprisingly freeing. Things were definitely looking up! She didn't think George would be happy just quitting his job, he'd want to do something. But with a year's wages at hand, he could look for something he enjoyed doing without worrying it would wreck their finances. And if the price being paid for gold by the Goblins fell enough, they could simply sell the gold on the muggle side and then convert that to galleons.

She lost herself in daydreams for a few minutes.

There wasn't much activity all morning. That is to say, literally nothing happened. She started reading the rune book, watched people stroll by the shop, and contemplated her family's future.

At lunch, she affixed a sign she had found in a drawer under the register to the front door that said, simply, "Out for Launch, Will Rocket Back." It had a small clock-face on it. She moved the hands to point at one-o'clock.

The twins didn't come back up front — she wasn't sure if they were still here or had just apparated or floo'd out. No one else who might work at Enterprise or the D.S.F. had arrived. So, after bringing her lunch back and eating it, nervous and curious, Josephine decided to look around.

They hadn't told her she couldn't, after all.

Besides the employee bathroom she had seen, there were two much smaller ones that were clearly marked for customers — the drawings of a man and woman with legends that read "wizard" and "witch" kinda gave those away. Most of the rooms after those two were like the office where Granger had interviewed her. Mostly empty except for furniture that she thought had to have come from Hogwarts. Stacked in the corner of a roomful of empty shelves was a full set of display cabinets she was bloody positive she'd seen in a Hogwarts corridor — only they looked new. Another had tables and chairs that, if she didn't know she was in Diagon Alley, would make her think she was in a Hogwarts classroom. All the furniture she saw in her explorations, comfortably-used armchairs, plush couches, benches, and less-cushioned chairs, appeared to be from Hogwarts.

She did find a sparse room with a desk, probably the former manager's room, which held a floo.

How they'd transported that stuff to Diagon Alley with no one in Hogwarts noticing the theft, not even the elves, she had no idea. Except . . . Granger had said the originals were still there and these were copies. If they were copies, they were masterfully done copies! But only gemino could make such exact replicas, and that spell wore off in under a day, unless cast by a very powerful wizard. Even then, though, the copy wouldn't last weeks or months. Not without a lot of magic shoved into it.

There were almost no hints about what services or items the Enterprise store would be selling, though. No obvious boxes of what might've been merchandise — the only thing she could find was a box of astronomy books. And those? They were all muggle books, complete with non-moving photographs, and informative graphs that wizards rarely, if ever, used.

The only hints or clues about the real purpose, however, were name of the store, the logo they'd used, and her uniform . . . only certain astute muggle-borns and half-bloods would ever notice those subtle hints. A pure-blood could search the premises from top to bottom and front to back and leave with absolutely no idea what Enterprise did as a business.

She, on the other hand, had more clues in their vague references, the astronomy books, the photo Granger had shown her . . . she knew what those pointed at. What she didn't know was the how of it. Nor how the gold bars — and the Enterprise store — really fit into it all.

A sudden influx of interest in magical space exploration was one thing, but . . . what she had seen seemed to imply more than just a really rich sponsor!

At the far back of the building, the corridor stopped at a door which didn't open when she tried it. If it was locked, she reasoned, there had to be a reason for it. She left it alone and headed back to the front.

She was almost there when she heard, "Oh, good morning," from behind her. She whirled around in alarm. There was a blond girl standing there, smiling absently up at her. "Are you the saleswitch? I heard Marietta's mother had been hired. Are you her?"

"You startled me," Josephine said, hand on her chest, then she took a breath. "Yes. Yes, I am. I'm Josephine Edgecombe." She nodded politely. The girl held a large, framed picture of some sort, almost as big as she was, in both hands.

If it weren't for the distorted othila rune on her chest, Josephine never would have been able to separate her from any other witch in Diagon Alley. Only . . . her rune wasn't embroidered or a patch. It appeared to be a stone stuck to her robe.

The girl interrupted her thoughts. "I brought a thing for the store."

"Oh?" Josephine answered hesitantly. "Right, um. What did you bring?" she asked, curious.

The painting was amazing, as amazing as the photograph Granger had shown her. It was a magical, moving painting of a planet in space. The top of an enormous, luminous-blue planet stretched across the canvas, arcs of darker and lighter blue shifted slowly as they watched, as if they were looking down on part of the top of the planet. There were spots, Josephine noticed, of darker blue amidst the bands. Gigantic storms.

Occasionally, tiny bits of lightning seemed to flash deep inside the banks of clouds.

"Uranus," the blond girl said, almost affectionately — she pronounced it "Oh-ran-us, instead of the more popular way that referred to a person's rear. She held the magical painting up against one of the open walls at the front of the shop.

"Would you mind attaching this?"

"It's beautiful," Josephine said honestly, as she used her wand to spell the painting to stay on the wall. "The top part is pretty desolate though."

"That's how space is," the girl said, and shrugged. She stepped back and admired the painting. "Empty and desolate . . .. Wait a couple of days and you'll see Miranda pass through."

"Miranda?"

"The smallest of her five big moons. Miranda orbits every one-point-four days. So, she pops in rather frequently," the girl said with a smile. "The other five take up to thirteen days to orbit. And there are thirteen smaller ones, too. You can see them more by their shadows on the planet, mostly. Some of them are quite small." She sighed. "There are nine others, but they take too long to orbit, so I didn't include them."

Josephine nodded slowly and stared at the painting. Like the photograph of Jupiter, it looked as if it the artist had been there, right on top of the planet. And the things she said about all those smaller moons, too — they sounded . . . accurate.

It looked less like an artist's representation and more like an artist's life-like depiction.

Josephine swallowed dryly and looked at the girl. "You're part of the crew, then?" She wanted to make sure.

"I'll be a Combat Officer once the Captain settles on a rank system," the girl said. "I don't mind. Lieutenant Lovegood has a nice ring to it, I think."

"Combat officer?" She thought Granger had said they weren't looking to make an army?

"Oh, yes. We're bound to meet someone out there. The ship proves that. Heliopaths won't be a problem, but we need to be ready in case someone isn't nice," she said airily. A trace of a frown seemed to flit across her face. "Some people aren't nice at all, no matter how hard you try."

Josephine stared. The girl just smiled at her. "Er," Josephine said finally and held out a hand. "Nice to meet you, Lieutenant Lovegood. Josephine Edgecombe, at your service."

The girl almost glowed as they shook hands.

That evening, Marietta missed dinner. Josephine spent the evening discussing with her George what he wanted to do now that he really didn't have to work. They decided he would give his two-week notice at his current job, then take a little time off to consider what to do next — and read up on astronomy and runes.

It sounded like they were becoming rather important.

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Lieutenant . . . Lovegood wasn't the only one who brought things into the Enterprise store. The next day, a dark-skinned boy came in carrying a model of the galaxy. It didn't look like much, being barely hand-sized, until he removed the reducio charm. The oblate glass ball was almost half as tall as he was, and the intricately-carved pedestal brought the whole thing to eye-level. He set it up to one side, where it could easily be seen from outside through the front windows. He attached a sticking spell to the floor so that it wouldn't be knocked over. Then he stepped back and surveyed the large, shining orb, and its position, with satisfaction.

"There," he said firmly and approvingly. "I think that'll do nicely." He nodded for emphasis.

"It's . . . very nice," Josephine said faintly. It was also probably worth its size in gold, or more — glass and wood weren't very heavy compared to gold, after all. And astronomical models were expensive, especially these types. "Um . . . How much is that going to be?"

The boy turned to her with a grin and offered a hand. "So, you're our new saleswitch? I'm Lee Jordan, how do you do?"

"Josephine Edgecombe," she answered automatically, and shook his hand. "You're . . . one of the people who own the store, right?" She raised an eyebrow inquisitively.

"It is in our names," Jordan agreed amiably. "But only because we've graduated. It would be really odd for someone in Hogwarts to launch a business when they couldn't be here in Diagon Alley to run it, after all. Fortunately, it's not too weird for Hogwarts graduates to try their hand at an . . . enterprise." He grinned widely at his own joke. "But it's the Captain who calls the shots, really."

"So I've heard," Josephine said. She looked between the boy — because, really, he was still a boy — and the galaxy model. "I suppose you'd know what we're actually . . . selling here?" she asked hopefully.

"We haven't fixed it, yet." Lee shrugged. "The twins are working on stuff they want to sell here — space-themed candies and stuff, I think. And people are coming up with . . . things that we'll probably sell, too." He glanced at Lt. Lovegood's painting of Uranus. "But all we have right now," he shrugged, "is a general theme, really."

"Space," Josephine guessed.

"Yes," the boy agreed with a grin. He looked back at his galaxy. "It moves, you know," he said. "If you pick a star at the very edge and then look away, when you look back it's moved. It's set to do one revolution per week, right now. That's adjustable, too. The real thing takes two hundred million years, you know." He grinned at her awestruck expression. "Do you think that a hundred galleons is too much to ask?"

She goggled at him, gobsmacked. "They'll think it's fake," she managed to squeak out.

His expression fell a bit. "A thousand," he said hesitantly.

She stared at him a moment, then slowly shook her head.

He sighed and rubbed his forehead over his right eye. "Well, let's try five hundred, anyway. After all, you can tell them it's not a one-of-a-kind." He reached into his other pocket and handed her the box he took out. "There're twelve more in here, in boxes. Just tap them with a wand to cancel the reducio." He looked at the counter. "You can put it in a drawer for right now, until we decided which room to use as a storeroom."

She took the head-sized, fist-thick box with shaking hands.

He gave her a sympathetic look. "I know you're not yet in on all of this stuff," he said ruefully as he shook his head. "It must be so weird, sorry about that — but we can't really . . . bring you in, yet." He paused. "There are things in the way."

"Not before your Captain says so?" she ventured carefully.

"Not exactly. It's more that we need to figure out a new method of transportation," Jordan said sheepishly. "So far, Hogwarts is the only way in and out — and that's just a bit too awkward to consider as a standard method of access. Once we figure a way around that, things will be easier."

Josephine blinked and looked around the shop. "I see?" she said, though she didn't. Access to where? "I don't suppose you're talking about the Floo network, are you?" she said with a faint of hope of normalcy.

"I'm afraid not," the boy said and patted her shoulder. "You don't have to worry about it. The shop won't really open until we have everything settled. You don't have to deal with any of it, yet. We'll just . . . drop things off as we think of stuff people might like, for those few people who do wander in." He grinned at her brightly.

"So, what do I do until then?" Josephine asked, with bit of frustration. Caretaking an empty shop, not doing anything, was surprisingly grating. Especially after a decade of always being busy at the Ministry. And she knew so little about the Enterprise store that she couldn't even prepare things for future use.

Maybe she could put a selection of cheese in the one-and-only counter?

The boy hummed a bit, considering. "Brush up on Astronomy and learn runes, if you don't know them, yet," he said. "That'll help you in the long run."

Josephine stared at him in disbelief. "Just . . . astronomy? And runes?" she asked. She could only study that rune book for so long and then they all started to blend together. She was sure George would complain about that, too, when he started learning them. You can only cram for so long . . ..

"Especially the runes . . . the language of our people," the boy agreed solemnly.

After he left, she admired the galaxy model for a long time. And he was right. If you looked away for a few minutes and looked back, the galaxy had moved. It was subtle, but there. Then she looked at the painting on the wall. She had never asked Lt. Lovegood for a price. She took her runes book out of her pocket and made a quick note on the inside cover about asking her the price of the painting the next time she saw her.

Then she sat down and started studying the rune-words she didn't know. An hour later, she happened to glance at the inside-cover and saw an answer written below her question — ten galleons.

She closed her eyes in shock. They really didn't know how rare such items were in the wizarding world.

She sighed and rummaged through the drawers, again, looking for parchment and a suitable quill for large lettering. Five minutes later, both pieces had their prices displayed.

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Saturday morning was chaotic . . . for the Ministry. The Quibbler came out with a new story, a real block buster. The Senior Undersecretary for the Minister, Dolores Umbridge, had apparently been torturing the students with a blood quill, and many students had scars on their writing hand — some permanent. Most of the students were muggle-born and half-bloods, which the Ministry might have been able to hide in the paperwork, but there had been several prominent pure-blood children, too — such as the editor of The Quibbler's daughter, Luna Lovegood.

It was the talk of the Alley at lunch.

A special evening edition of the Daily Prophet came out with a corroborating story — several of the wizards running the press were half-bloods with children in Hogwarts. Their story portrayed the witch as a loose wand, a rogue actor, who abused the Minister's trust and lied to him about what she was doing. The Minister was horrified at the incident. The copious quotes about her many over-reaching Educational Decrees, and how petty they were, came as a shock to the reading public.

It was clear to Josephine that the Minister had decided the best course of action was to throw the woman under the bus. Combined with the scandal from two months ago, it sealed her fate.

The article concluded with a paragraph about how she was currently in a holding cell until her trial the following week.

Teen Witch came out the following Monday, with an extensive article on dealing with scars, both normal and cursed. And a companion piece on how awful it was that that hag of a witch had scarred an entire generation of witches! It concluded by demanding that the ministry right this wrong, immediately, and come up with a cure. Never mind that St. Mungo's and the Ministry Unspeakables had been trying to find a cure for curse scars ever since both divisions had been created. Individual wizards and witches — especially witches — had been trying for even longer.

Also on Monday were more articles in the Daily Prophet regarding the woman, with the additional scandal that she wasn't a pure-blood. She had been lying to her sponsors for years. They dragged out the sordid details of her Ministry Janitor father, Orford Umbridge, and his wife, Ellen Cracknell, a muggle. She wasn't even a muggle-born, but a muggle! Worse, she had a son — Dolores' had a younger squib brother. That Ellen and her son returned to the muggle world, never to be heard of again, while Dolores was still a Hogwarts student, was not a surprise. Not when you read the companion stories about how the witch and her wizard father had treated the two. Stories that his former co-workers were only too happy to re-tell.

What pure-blood support in the Ministry Dolores might have had, vanished into the ether with those revelations. No more protection against the truth drug veritaserum.

The next day's Daily Prophet had quite a few more details on how Dolores had used blackmail and other criminal activities to secure her place in the Ministry, and advance through the ranks. They detailed how it was an open secret among the lower personnel that crossing the woman was Ministerial career-suicide. She had been ruthless, and considered nothing too dirty to use to get her way.

Josephine and George could only shake their heads in dismay at what they read. They thanked Merlin that Josephine had never attracted the woman's attention at Hogwarts.

Now that the woman was on the outs, the wands and daggers were coming out in force. It was a foregone conclusion that she was going to end up in Azkaban, the only question was, for how long?

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For the next few days, the two Caltech astronomers concentrated on collecting the data they needed to complete Eric's Ph. D. thesis, the study of H2 in the atmospheres of Neptune and Uranus. They managed to adapt a mask over the aperture of the instrument so that they only observed the planet and not the tantalizing mystery beside it.

Still, there was constant communications with the other long-wave astronomers as they tried to nail down just what was happening at that distant gas-giant. They had determined a cycle for the outbursts — ten hours, exactly. Each one started at nearly seventy degrees Kelvin, about the temperature one would expect from a moon at that distance from the sun. It rose steadily over an hour to four-hundred-seventy-five Kelvin, then slowly rose over the next five hours to five hundred, where it held steady at over the next hour-and-a-half. Then it sharply increased to five-hundred-fifty. It then began dropping over the next hour-and-a-half to seventy degrees Kelvin and steadied there for half an hour.

Then the cycle repeated.

"Sounds like my grandfather's car when he was my age," Gene joked. "He lived in Arizona and could only drive it for an hour and then it would overheat. He'd have to park at the side of the road for half an hour and wait for it to cool down enough to drive again."

Eric shook his head. "Sounds like a pain."

"It was all he could afford at the time, he told me."

The European Space Agency had used their Infrared Space Observatory's Long Wave Spectrometer to take a look, and quite a few ground-based telescopes had joined the search. Whatever it was, was clearly orbiting Uranus. But it was far too small to be directly observed by visual telescopes.

Which was quite a quandary. Only internal thermal events could produce natural, massive, temperature outflows. A moon had to be at least five hundred kilometres in size before volcanic-style activity could occur, where it was driven by internal heating via gravitational tides from the gas-giant it orbited. Such a moon would be easily detected.

Which presented a problem. The Hubble telescope could find no such moon in the orbit indicated. In fact, from Earth, the smallest object that could be imaged at Uranus would have to be fourteen or fifteen kilometres in size. Nothing even that small could be detected in that orbit, at present.

What could possibly be smaller than that and generate such heat at such regular intervals?

In the meantime, all anyone could do was watch and map the results with the hope that inspiration, or luck, would provide an answer.

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The trial on Thursday was as anticlimactic as it was crowded, according to the Wireless Wizarding Network — she had brought the radio from home. They read the charges to a large and booing crowd, the prosecutor read the evidence — which took several hours — the crowd shouted over the lone solicitor's vain attempt at a defence, and the Wizengamot voted her guilty.

That the Ministry condemned her to a month in Azkaban for owning and using a dark artefact — the actual minimum sentence — stunned the audience when it was read out. Before a riot broke out, though, the judges had elaborated that that sentence was for each use of a blood quill on a child. The veritaserum had forced her to reveal that she had used the vile things hundreds of times.

Then there were the other sentences, to be served consecutively, for bribery, extortion, and malfeasance. Those, too, were relatively short, but culminated in a longer, much longer, time in Azkaban.

She wouldn't get out before she died of old age. If she survived that long.

All of her decrees and decisions at Hogwarts were quickly reversed, and her estate confiscated and vault emptied via fines. The proceeds would be divided among her victims, with the children getting the majority.

Minister Fudge, for all his protests of not knowing what his Undersecretary was doing, was operating under a cloud of suspicion. How could a wizard in a position of such importance, the Minister of Magic, promote someone to the position of Undersecretary, and not know anything of their reputation and background? He had selected her for the post. It just rang false. Which meant he was incompetent, or extremely corrupt.

It wouldn't take much more to get him removed.

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