It's a subtle manipulation, but for this time, there are few more serious than messing with democracy. The lockdown gets done, though there are casualties and bloodshed in the process, but they asked for it. After all, they were messing with democracy.

The Glitter Band's habitats operate autonomously as city-states, and what each does internally is of no concern to the prefect, but there are limits. Those limits do not exclude tyranny, torture as an industry, societies where everyone has been reduced to heads in jars, or habitats full of professional voters who's votes are proportionally counted above the rest of the Band because history has proven them right. As we follow the characters through the story, especially Thallia Ng, who is installing a patch to the security hole found in House Perigal in four test sites, you get a very Gulliver's Travels tour of the range of societies here. Range is just what the Band allows room for, and in fact it's "the most complex, variegated human society in human history...a machine for surprising people." Even for Deputy Prefect Thallia, it does a pretty good job.

But if voting irregularities are a serious threat to the Band, the destruction of a nine hundred person habitat counts as pretty serious as well, and that's what's waiting for Dreyfus when he returns from the lockdown. Indeed, the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble had been sliced nearly in two by what could only have been the energy in a starship drive, and only one ship had been in it's vicinity, negotiating for the purchase of a piece of artwork, a negotiation that did not go well. It seems like an open and shut case. Possibly a bit too open and shut.

Dreyfus knows that there's more here than meets the eye, but he has no idea how vast and tangled a web has been spun and what his role in the drama about to unfold is.

The Prefect is a book with a lot of complex reveals, and Dreyfus peels back the layers of this onion bit by bit until he comes face to face with the choice between unleashing his own personal nightmare on the Band, or letting it fall to the control of a force that has no regard for humanity, let alone the niceties of ballot boxes.