"All of us, I think," Onasis said, nodding firmly. Then she cocked her head at Frederick Carlson. "One thing I wanted to ask you, Captain Carlson. I thought there was already a Quentin Saint-James in the ship list?"

"There was," Carlson said. "In fact, she was one of the early Saganami-As . She was transferred to the Zanzibar Navy, though, as part of the program to try and rebuild their fleet after Tourville trashed it. Since Quentin Saint-James is on the List of Honor, Zanzibar renamed her to release the name for my ship." He shook his head. "I'm flattered, of course, but it does give all of us a bit to live up to."

"Ah." Onasis nodded. "I thought I was remembering correctly. Still, with all the ships coming out of the yards, I don't suppose it's any wonder that some of the names are getting flipped around without warning."

" Everything's getting flipped around without warning, Shulamit." Khumalo's tone was considerably grimmer than it had been, Helen noticed. "Which probably means we should go ahead and get down to our own latest installment of what's-going-on-now, I suppose. Ambrose, would you care to take the floor and brief Commodore Terekhov and Commodore Chatterjee on all of our own recent fun and games?"

" . . . so that's about the sum of it, so far, at least," Ambrose Chandler finished up the better part of ninety minutes later.

"Thank you, Ambrose," Khumalo said, then looked at Terekhov. "As you can see, things are looking up over most of the Quadrant. In fact, when Minister Krietzmann gets back on-planet tonight, he and Loretta will be giving us a complete joint brief—not just for your benefit, Aivars; Baroness Medusa and Prime Minister Alquezar will be attending, too—on how well the local system-defense forces are integrating with the new LAC groups as we get them deployed forward. We're in pretty good shape on that front, according to our original schedule, but the LACs are still spreading out from the Lynx Terminus. It's going to be at least another month or so before we can get decent coverage around the northern periphery. And, frankly, our original deployment plans gave much lower priority to the areas around Pequod and New Tuscany because we figured the San Miguel and Rembrandt navies could handle security in the area. Now that the situation in Pequod is getting so . . . touchy, we really want to expedite the deployment of a LAC group to that system. Unfortunately, we're not going to have the transport platforms for that for at least two months, because the only CLACs available to us have already deposited their groups at their assigned destinations or are still in transit.

"Which still leaves us in a . . . less than ideal situation, shall we say?" Khumalo's office was silent for several seconds after he finished speaking, and Helen glanced surreptitiously sideways at Terekhov's profile. His eyes were half-closed, his lips pursed in obvious thought, and she noticed the way both Khumalo and Van Dort were looking at him, both obviously waiting for him to surface with his own impression of Chandler's briefing. Van Dort's reaction didn't surprise her a bit, after the way he and Terekhov had worked together to stymie the entire Monica-based operation. Khumalo's still did, just a bit, although she was delighted to see it.

"I don't like the sound of this New Tuscany business at all, Sir," Terekhov said finally, eyes opening wide once again and focusing on Khumalo. "I didn't have the opportunity to actually visit New Tuscany in Hexapuma, but everything I've ever heard, seen, or read about the New Tuscans only makes me even unhappier about these latest shenanigans of theirs."

"So you agree that they're up to something we're not going to like very much, Aivars?" Van Dort asked with a quizzical smile, and Terekhov snorted.

"I can see how that razor-sharp brain of yours helped impel you to the top of the local financial heap, Bernardus," he said dryly. "Nothing much gets past you , does it?"

"One tries to keep up," Van Dort admitted modestly, and more than one of those present chuckled. But then expressions sobered again, and Van Dort leaned slightly forward. "What do you think we should do about it?"

Helen's eyes flicked sideways to Khumalo, wondering how he would react to having a civilian ask the opinion of one of his subordinates directly. But Khumalo only tipped his head slightly to one side, obviously listening for Terekhov's response as closely as Van Dort was.

"Give me a break, Bernardus!" Terekhov protested. "I just heard about this for the first time. What makes you think I've had long enough to formulate any kind of an opinion about it?"

"I'm not asking for an opinion. I want that first impression of yours."

"Well, my first impression is that we need more than just a LAC squadron or two in the system. More platforms would be good, of course, but if New Tuscany really is working to some concerted plan, I doubt that that alone would cause them to back off. In fact, my most pressing thought right this minute is that we ought to put someone senior to Commander Denton into Pequod. And that someone senior, whoever he is, should be authorized to kick any New Tuscan in the ass if that's what it takes to get them backed off."

Both Khumalo and Shoupe looked very much as if they agreed with the commodore, Helen decided. Not that agreeing with him was the same thing as being happy about the notion.

"That's pretty much the way we've been looking at it ourselves," Khumalo said, as if deliberately confirming Helen's impression. "The problem is that we can't help wondering if that's exactly the reaction they're hoping to draw. Mind you, none of us can think of how that would help them, but that's the problem, isn't it? Since we don't know what the hell it is they're trying to accomplish, we can't know how what we do is going to fit into their plans and objectives. Frankly," the vice admiral admitted, "one reason I haven't tried harder to divert one of the CLAC deliveries to Pequod is that ignorance."

"No, we can't know how any move on our part is going to affect their plans," Terekhov agreed thoughtfully. Then he shrugged slightly. "On the other hand, I don't think we can afford to allow our current ignorance to paralyze us, either. I'm certainly not recommending that we send someone into play bull in the china shop, because if what we're looking at really is a deliberately orchestrated set of manufactured provocations, the last thing we want to do is actually give them the mother of all provocations. But by the same token, I don't see how anyone here in the region could possibly have guessed how much firepower the Admiralty is ready to begin transferring in this direction. I'm willing to bet that all of New Tuscany's calculations are based on the sort of shoestring force structure they gave you before Monica, Sir. In that case, I think it could be a very good idea to let them know there are going to be more and more modern ships out here in the Quadrant—and not just LACs. Let them see the kind of trouble they're going to be buying themselves if they push too far."

"I think there's quite a bit to that, Admiral," Van Dort said soberly.

"Agreed." Khumalo nodded. "And, to be frank, it's a thought that's occurred to my people, as well as to Minister Krietzmann and Baroness Medusa. I just hate the sense that somebody's getting ready to hit me right across the top of the head with the other shoe instead of just dropping it on the floor!"

"After what those Manpower and Monican bastards tried to do?" Terekhov showed his teeth briefly.

"Admiral, I'm right with you on that one!"

"Now why," Khumalo asked almost whimsically, "does that fail to fill me with bubbling optimism, Commodore Terekhov?"

"Excuse me, Ensign Zilwicki."

Helen paused as the extraordinarily attractive blonde touched her elbow in the hallway outside Vice Admiral Khumalo's dirt-side office.

"Yes?" she replied courteously, wondering who the other woman was and how she happened to know who Helen was.

Aside, of course, from the fact that I wear my name on the front of my tunic. D'oh .

"I'm Helga Boltitz," the blonde said in a sharp-edged accent which reminded Helen somehow of Victor Cachat's. "Minister Krietzmann's personal assistant," she added as she clearly recognized the blank expression in Helen's eyes.

"Oh. I mean, of course," Helen said. She glanced down the hall, but Commodore Terekhov and Commodore Chatterjee were still engaged in some sort of last-minute personal conversation with Captain Shoupe, and she returned her attention to Ms. Boltitz. "Is there something I can do for you, Ma'am?"

"Well, as I explained to Admiral Gold Peak's flag lieutenant not so very long ago, you can start by not calling me 'Ma'am,' " Boltitz said with an impish grin. "It makes me feel incredibly old and entirely too respectable!"

"I'll try to remember that, Ma—Ms. Boltitz." Helen smiled back at her.

"Good. And, for that matter, given the fact that I do for the Minister basically what you do for the commodore, I think it might actually be simpler if I call you Helen and you call me Helga. How's that?"

"As long as I still get to call you 'Ms. Boltitz' in public . . . Helga."

"I suppose I can live with that under those circumstances . . . Ensign."

"Well, in that case, let me rephrase. Is there something I can do for you, Helga ?"

"As a matter of fact, there is," Helga said with a rather more serious air. "The Minister will, of course, be present with the Prime Minister and the Governor General for the formal dinner before tonight's full-scale briefing. He's asked me to inform you that he's going to be bringing along a couple of guests—just for dinner, not for the briefing—who represent fairly important components of our local system-defense forces. One of them is from Montana, and he's requested what . . . well, what amounts to a photo op with Commodore Terekhov. My impression is that it has something to do with what Captain Terekhov—and your entire crew, of course—accomplished there. At any rate, Minister Krietzmann would greatly appreciate it if Commodore Terekhov could attend in mess dress uniform." Helen managed to stifle a groan. It wasn't particularly easy. If there was one thing Aivars Terekhov hated, it was what he called the "fuss and feathers" side of his duties. Personally, Helen suspected it had something to do with all the years he'd spent in the Foreign Office's service, with their endless succession of formal dinners and political parties, before he returned to active naval duty. On the other hand, she told herself rather hopefully, that same Foreign Office experience means he'll probably understand the importance of Krietzmann's request. After he gets done pitching a fit, that is .

"Is anyone else planning on attending in mess dress?" she asked after a moment. Helga quirked an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged. "He's not going to be happy about climbing into his 'monkey suit,'

Helga. But if I can tell him he's not going to be alone . . ."

She allowed her voice to trail off hopefully, and Helga chuckled.

"Well, I doubt we could get everyone all dressed up," she said. "If it will help, though, I can go and have a word with at least a few of the others—Admiral Khumalo, Captain Shoupe, Commander Chandler, Captain Saunders—and suggest that the Minister would appreciate their attendance in mess dress, as well."

"Oh, good!" Helen made no particular effort to hide her relief. "If you can do that, I'll exaggerate a little myself and suggest that the Minister would appreciate it if Commodore Chatterjee and Captain Carlson came the same way. I mean, it wouldn't exactly be a lie. Minister Krietzmann would appreciate it, wouldn't he?"

"Oh, I'm sure he would," Helga agreed.

* * *

Getting Aivars Terekhov into full scale mess dress had been almost as hard as Helen had been afraid it would. He'd started to dig his heels in the instant she opened her mouth, pointing out that nobody had mentioned anything about stupid mess dress uniforms to him in the original invitation. She'd headed that one off by reminding him that although the request was a late change, it was also one which had been made at the Quadrant's Minister of War's personal request for important political reasons. He'd glowered at that one, then brightened and pointed out that he didn't have a commodore's mess dress uniform . . . at which point Chief Steward Agnelli had silently opened his closet and extracted the captain's mess dress which she had thoughtfully had re-tailored for his new rank during the voyage out from Manticore.

Balked on that front by his underlings' infernal efficiency, he'd tried arguing that Chatterjee probably didn't have the right uniform, and he wouldn't want to embarrass the other officer. Helen and Agnelli had simply looked at him patiently, rather the way Helen supposed a nanny looked at a rambunctious child. He'd looked back at them for a moment or two, then heaved a deep sigh, and surrendered. It was really a pity it took so much work to get him into the uniform, Helen reflected, since it could have been purposely designed to suit him. His height, blond hair, blue eyes, and erect, square-shouldered posture carried off even the archaic sword to perfection, and she saw eyes turning toward him as he followed her out of the official Navy air car on the landing stage of the downtown Thimble mansion that was the temporary Government House while the Governor General's permanent, formal residence was being built. There were quite a few air cars already there, or in the act of lifting off again after disgorging their passengers, and she saw Vice Admiral Khumalo—also in mess dress—waiting for them. The vice admiral couldn't carry off his resplendent uniform—and sword—the way Terekhov could. Few could, after all, Helen thought just a tad complacently. But from his posture, it was obvious that he was quite accustomed to putting up with it, and Captain Shoupe, standing at his shoulder, looked almost as resplendent as Khumalo did as he extended his hand to Terekhov with a chuckle.

"I had a side bet with Bernardus that Ms. Zilwicki wouldn't manage to get you into mess dress!" he said.

"Well," Terekhov half-growled, glaring humorously at Helen, "you almost won. Unfortunately, she used to be Bernardus' aide. That's probably why he had a more realistic appreciation of her ability to . . . convince me than you did, Sir."

"He did say something about the ensign's extraordinary persistence," Khumalo agreed with a smile. He glanced at Helen, but it was obvious even to her that at this particular moment, silence was the best policy.

"Well," Khumalo continued after a moment, "I suppose we should head on in. In some ways, you're the guest of honor tonight, Aivars, so they can't get this dog and pony show off the pad until you turn up."

"Wonderful." Terekhov sighed. Then he shook himself. "All right, I'm ready. I don't suppose it can be much worse than the Battle of Monica!"

The initial description of the evening as "an informal little supper with the Governor General and the Prime Minister" seemed to have been somewhat in error, Helen thought as she followed her commodore and Vice Admiral Khumalo down a broad hallway and into what was obviously the mansion's main ballroom. It was stupendous, and the tables which had been arranged in it filled it to capacity. There must have been at least three hundred chairs at those tables, probably more, and most of them were already filled.

Only someone who knew Aivars Terekhov well would have recognized the way his neck stiffened ever so slightly, the way his shoulders squared themselves that tiny bit further. He continued chatting with Vice Admiral Khumalo as the two of them headed for the head table, pausing occasionally for a brief aside with someone Terekhov had met on his original deployment to Talbott. From the vice admiral's expression, he wasn't surprised, Helen noticed, and began to wonder exactly what was going on. As they finally approached the head table, she recognized three other commodores waiting for them. One of them—Commodore Lázló—she'd expected, as the senior officer of the Spindle Space Navy. The second startled her a bit, although she supposed that Commodore Lemuel Sackett, the uniformed commander of the Montana Space Navy, legitimately qualified as "a guest from Montana." How he'd happened to be there was something of a puzzlement, of course, but not as big a puzzle as the presence of Commodore Emil Karlberg, the senior officer of the Nuncio Space Force.

This time, Terekhov couldn't quite hide his surprise. Spindle was scarcely conveniently located for either of them—transit time between Spindle and their home systems was better measured in weeks than days; Montana, the closer of the two, lay eighty-three light-years from the Quadrant's capital system—but it would scarcely have been good manners to ask what they were doing here. Especially not when the two of them were so obviously delighted to see him .

And they damned well should be , Helen told herself. The commodore and the Kitty cleaned those Peep "pirates" out of Nuncio when nothing Karlberg had could even have found them, much less fought them! And it's obvious Sackett isn't going to forget the way the commodore and Mr. Van Dort convinced Westman to hang up his guns in Montana, either. Still, I wonder why nobody mentioned they were going to be here?

She was still wondering when a polite usher separated her from her astronomically superior officers and showed her to a much humbler table to one side. Helen was delighted to go with him and get her junior rank (and absurd youth) out of the spotlight of attention focusing on Terekhov and the others. The table to which he led her was close enough that she could keep an eye on him, in case he needed her, and the unobtrusive earbug in her left ear meant he could summon her anytime he wished to. She was pleased to see Helga Boltitz seated at the same table, although Helga didn't seem quite as delighted by their location as Helen was. On the other hand, that might well owe something to her table companion. Well, Helen's, too, she supposed, since he was seated between the two of them. She didn't know who the dark-haired, brown-eyed man with the pencil mustache and the Rembrandt accent might be, but she recognized his bored, superior expression from too many of the political dinners she'd attended as Catherine Montaigne's adopted daughter. Some people, she thought dryly, didn't need cheering sections; they took their own with them wherever they went.

She was still reflecting on that point—and trying to decide if it would be cowardly of her to abandon Helga to the Rembrandter rather than trying to draw fire from the other woman—when a sharp, musical tone sang through the background rumble of side conversations. All heads turned toward it, and she saw Baroness Medusa standing in her place at the head of the master table still holding the table knife with which she had just struck a crystal pitcher.

The rumble of voices died almost instantly, and Medusa smiled.

"First," she said, "allow me to thank you all for coming. Some of you"—she glanced in Terekhov's direction—"were quite possibly under the impression that tonight's dinner would be a somewhat smaller and more humble affair. I apologize to anyone who received that mistaken impression. Actually, tonight represents a rare opportunity for all of us. As Her Majesty's personal representative here in the Quadrant, it is my privilege—as well as my pleasure—to welcome all of you on Her Majesty's behalf. We are fortunate tonight in having several of the Quadrant's senior naval officers present, and equally fortunate that they were able to take time away from the official conferences which brought them here to join us for dinner tonight. And, in addition, we are particularly fortunate to have with us tonight a man to whom the entire Quadrant owes a tremendous debt of gratitude. Ladies and Gentlemen, please join me in extending my heartfelt thanks to Commodore Aivars Terekhov!"

The stillness of the ballroom disappeared in a roar of applause. Vice Admiral Khumalo was probably the first person to come to his feet, applauding sharply, but if he was, it could only have been by half a heartbeat or so. Helen found herself standing, as well, clapping wildly, and it was all she could do to restrain a jubilant whistle as pandemonium erupted.

She hadn't realized until that moment how much she'd resented—on Terekhov's behalf, not her own—the way the rush to redeploy him had deprived him of the public recognition back home that he had so amply earned. Yet now that the moment was here, she realized how much more fitting it was for him to receive that recognition here , in the Cluster and from the people his moral courage had served so well.

The applause lasted quite some time, and Helen could see the heightened color in the commodore's face as the sound of all those clapping hands battered his ears. She didn't doubt that it embarrassed him, but she didn't really much care about that. He deserved it—deserved every decibel of it—and her smile felt as if it were going to break her face as she recognized how cunningly Khumalo and Medusa had arranged things so that he couldn't avoid it.

But the clapping died at last, people sat back down, and the Governor General waited for silence to fall once more. Then she cleared her throat.

"By now," she said, "I'm sure it's occurred to most of you that we got Commodore Terekhov here under what might be called false pretenses. Frankly, we were a little concerned that he might have bolted if he'd realized what we had in mind."

Laughter muttered across the room, and she smiled.

"I'm afraid, however," she continued then, "that we're not quite finished with the Commodore tonight." She glanced at Terekhov, who looked back at her with an expression which could only have been described as wary.

"There is a phrase with which Queen's officers become altogether too familiar, ladies and gentlemen," she went on, her tone much more serious. "That phrase is 'the exigencies of the Service,' and what it means is that those men and women who have chosen to wear the Queen's uniform and to guard and protect all of us—you and me—frequently find their own lives being stepped upon by the demands of the service they have chosen to give. They do not simply risk life and limb for us, ladies and gentlemen. They also sacrifice the rest of their lives—sacrifice time as fathers and mothers, as wives and husbands. Commodore Terekhov was spared less than one T-week in Manticore before he was sent back to us. Less than one T-week, ladies and gentlemen, after all of the tremendous risks and dangers he and the men and women of HMS Hexapuma and the other ships of his squadron in Monica endured for all of us."

The huge ballroom was completely still, now. Completely hushed. Baroness Medusa's voice sounded clear and quiet against that backdrop of silence.

"There can be no true, adequate compensation for the sacrifices men and women in uniform make for the people they serve and protect. How does one set a price on the willingness to serve? How does one set a proper wage for the willingness to die to protect others? And how does one honor those who have honored their oaths, given the last true measure of devotion, in the service of their star nation and the belief in human dignity and human freedom?"

She paused in the silence, then shook her head.

"The truth is, that we cannot give them the compensation, the honor, they have so amply deserved of us. Yet whether what we can give them is what they deserve or not, we recognize our obligation to try . To try to show them, and everyone else, that we recognize the sacrifices they have made. That we understand how very much we owe them. And that they are to us pearls beyond price, men and women we cannot deserve yet must always thank God come to us anyway.

"Those were the men and women of HMS Hexapuma . Of HMS Warlock , HMS Vigilant , HMS

Gallant , HMS Audacious , HMS Aegis , HMS Javelin , HMS Janissary , HMS Rondeau , HMS

Aria , and HMS Volcano .

"We cannot individually honor those men and women. Too many of them are no longer here for us to honor, and most of those who survived are somewhere else this night, somewhere else in the Queen's uniform, serving her—and all of us—yet again as 'the exigencies of the Service' demand. But if we cannot individually honor each of them, we can honor all of them collectively in the person of the man who commanded them."

Aivars Terekhov looked straight before him, and it wasn't simple modesty. He was looking at something only he could see—the men and women of those ships. The faces no one would ever see again.

"Commodore Terekhov," Medusa said, turning to address him directly for the first time, "you were not aware that among the dispatches you carried when you returned to Spindle was a letter of instruction from Her Majesty to me. Please stand, Commodore."

Terekhov obeyed slowly.

"Come here, Commodore," she said quietly, and he walked across to her. As he did, Augustus Khumalo, Lemuel Sackett, and Emil Karlberg rose in turn and followed him. Sackett carried a small velvet case which had apparently been hidden under the table at his place. Karlberg carried a small cushion which had been similarly concealed.

The four of them came to a halt in front of Medusa, and Sackett presented the small case to her. She accepted it, but she also looked at Khumalo.

"Attention to orders!" the vice admiral's deep voice announced, and Helen felt herself coming to her feet in automatic response, accompanied by every other uniformed man and woman in that vast ballroom.

"Commodore Aivars Terekhov," Medusa said in a clear, carrying voice, "on the sixteenth day of February, 1921 After Diaspora, units of the Royal Manticoran Navy under your command entered the Monica System, acting upon intelligence which you had developed consequent to your previous actions in the Split System and the Montana System. In the course of developing that intelligence, and of suppressing violent terrorist movements in both of those star systems, you had become aware of an additional, potentially disastrous threat to the citizens of those star systems then known as the Talbott Cluster and to the Star Kingdom of Manticore. Acting upon your own authority, you moved with the squadron under your command to Monica and there demanded the stand down of the ex-Solarian League Navy battlecruisers which had been delivered to the Union of Monica by parties hostile to the Star Kingdom who were determined to prevent the annexation of the star systems now known as the Talbott Quadrant by the Star Kingdom, for which the citizens of those star systems had freely and democratically petitioned.

"When the senior officer present of the Monican Navy refused to comply with your demand and opened fire upon your vessels, although surprised by the heavy volume, weight, range, and accuracy of that fire, and despite heavy damage and severe casualties, you and the units under your command successfully destroyed the military components of a massive industrial platform and nine of the battlecruisers in question, which were there moored. And, when subsequently attacked by three fully operational and modern battlecruisers, the six remaining units of your squadron engaged and destroyed all of their opponents.

"At the cost of sixty percent of the vessels and seventy-five percent of the personnel under your command, your squadron destroyed or neutralized all of the Solarian-built battlecruisers in the Monica System. Subsequently, although your surviving vessels were too severely damaged to withdraw from the system, you neutralized all remaining units of the Monican Navy, prevented the withdrawal or destruction of the two surviving Solarian battlecruisers, and maintained the status quo in the system for a full week, until relieved by friendly forces.

"It is now my duty, and my enormous honor, by the express direction of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of Manticore, acting as Her Governor General for the Talbott Quadrant and Her personal representative, to present to you the Parliamentary Medal of Valor."

Helen inhaled sharply as Sackett opened the case and Medusa extracted the golden cross and starburst on its blue and white ribbon. Terekhov was much taller than she was, and she rose on tiptoe as he bowed to her so that she could slip the ribbon around his neck and adjust its fall. She positioned the gleaming medal carefully, then looked up at him and—in a gesture Helen was certain hadn't been formally choreographed—touched him very gently on the cheek.

"Her Majesty awards this medal to you, Commodore," she said, "both because you have so deeply and personally merited it, but also as a means of recognizing every man and woman who served with you in Monica. She asks you to wear this medal for them, as much as for yourself." Terekhov nodded without speaking. Frankly, Helen doubted that he could have spoken at that moment. But Medusa wasn't done with him yet, and she nodded to Karlberg who stooped and placed his cushion on the floor.

"And now, Commodore, there's one more small matter of business which Her Majesty has requested that I take care of for her. Kneel, please."

Terekhov's nostrils flared as he inhaled sharply. Then he obeyed her, sinking to his knees on the cushion, and Augustus Khumalo drew his dress sword and extended it, hilt-first, to Baroness Medusa. She took it, looked at it for a moment, then looked down at the officer kneeling before her.

"By the authority vested in me as Her Majesty's Governor General for the Talbott Quadrant, and by Her express commission, acting for and in Her stead," her quiet voice carried with crystal clarity throughout the ballroom, "I bestow upon you the rank, title, prerogatives, and duties of Knight Companion of the Order of King Roger."

The gleaming steel touched his right shoulder, then his left, then went back to his right once more. She let it rest there for a moment, her eyes meeting his, then she smiled and stepped back, lowering the sword.

"Rise, Sir Aivars," she said softly in the hush before the cheers began, "and may your future actions as faithfully uphold the honor of the Queen as your past."

Chapter Thirty-Six

"I hope we know what we're doing here, Junyan," Commissioner Lorcan Verrochio of the Office of Frontier Security said, giving his vice-commissioner a glance which was less than totally happy.

"So far everything's going exactly to plan," Hongbo Junyan pointed out.

"Refresh my memory, but wasn't everything 'going exactly to plan' last time right up until the very moment that son-of-a-bitch Terekhov—who'd somehow been left out of the plan—blew the entire Monica System straight to hell?" Verrochio inquired with a certain undeniable acerbity.

"Yes, it was." Hongbo tried very hard, and mostly successfully, to keep a note of over-tried patience out of his voice. "This time, however, instead of counting on a batch of battlecruisers manned by neobarbs who hadn't even managed to get more than three of them refitted and back into commission, much less trained up to any sort of real proficiency, we've got three squadrons of Frontier Fleet immediately on call. And then there's Admiral Crandall at MacIntosh, as well. I'd say that's a significant difference in the balance of available forces, wouldn't you?"

Verrochio nodded, although it was evident he remained something short of completely enthralled by the current state of affairs.

It was odd, Hongbo reflected. He'd known Verrochio for more T-years than he really liked to contemplate, and the commissioner was hardly the most complex individual he'd ever met, yet the man could still surprise him upon occasion. He'd expected Verrochio to jump at the potential opportunity to pay Manticore back for the way the Star Kingdom had embarrassed him and damaged his powerbase among the only people who really mattered to him. And there was no doubt in Hongbo's mind that Verrochio did, indeed, want exactly that.

Yet Verrochio's initial ardor, the white-hot fury which had possessed him in the immediate wake of the Battle of Monica, had cooled noticeably. At the time, Hongbo had been entirely in favor of that change and had worked hard himself to encourage it. Unfortunately, his priorities had altered—or been altered—somewhat since, and he was finding it considerably more difficult than he had anticipated to switch the commissioner's choler back once again. In no small part, he thought grumpily, due to Commodore Francis Thurgood.

Hongbo was no expert on naval matters, but he knew Verrochio's senior Frontier Fleet officer had spent days interviewing Monicans who'd survived the engagement and several weeks analyzing the sketchy data available on exactly what had happened. The amount of information available was extremely limited, of course. In fact, when Hongbo thought about it, he supposed the only real surprise—given how the Manties had blown the hell out of every military sensor platform in the system—was that there'd been any data for Thurgood to examine.

The disturbing conclusions Thurgood had come to based on what was available, however, had produced a chilling effect on Verrochio which all the official intelligence analyses from the SLN hierarchy hadn't quite served to dispel. Hongbo didn't know whether or not Thurgood had shared his own analysis with Admiral Byng's staff. He was a conscientious officer, surprisingly so, even for Frontier Fleet, so Hongbo suspected that he had . . . not that anyone Task Group 3021 was likely to have listened to him. Given Byng's boundless contempt for all things Frontier Fleet, any warning from Thurgood would most likely have been counterproductive. In fact, it would probably have convinced that arrogant prick to believe exactly the opposite!

He'd definitely shared it with Verrochio, however, and as his report had pointed out, the Manties hadn't had a single ship bigger than a heavy cruiser, and they'd completely trashed Monica. In fact, Thurgood had suggested (although it was evident to Hongbo he hadn't much cared for his own conclusions), it was entirely possible that it wouldn't have mattered one bit whether Horster's battlecruisers had been manned by Monicans or Solarians.

Lorcan Verrochio hadn't liked the sound of that at all. For that matter, neither had Hongbo Junyan. In one sense, the vice-commissioner didn't really care how nasty the Manticoran navy might be. Even if every spacer in it was three meters tall, covered with long curly hair, immune to vacuum, and had to be killed with silver bullets, there couldn't possibly be enough of them to stand up to the Solarian League. Hongbo couldn't remember who it was back on Old Terra who'd said that "quantity has a quality all its own," but the cliché still held true, especially when the quantitative difference was as vast as it was in this case. So Hongbo nurtured no fears about what would eventually happen to the Star Kingdom of Manticore if it got itself into a shooting war with the League.

But there was that one word, " eventually." That was why Thurgood's analysis worried him, as well as his nominal superior. "Eventually" wasn't going to do very much to save Lorcan Verrochio—or Hongbo Junyan—in the short term if it turned out Thurgood was right. And even if the Solarian League absorbed its losses and eventually squashed the "Star Empire of Manticore" like a bug, it wasn't going to forget who it was who'd managed to get the war in question started. Especially not if the war started with the sort of unmitigated disaster Thurgood was warning might well result.

Still, Thurgood doesn't know about Admiral Crandall, Hongbo told himself. I don't care how nasty the Manties' heavy cruisers or battlecruisers are; they aren't going to stand up very well to sixty or seventy of the wall!

"At any rate," Verrochio said, turning to look out his office windows at a panoramic view of the city of Pine Mountain as his voice pulled Hongbo back to the surface of his own thoughts, "at least it hasn't bitten us on the ass yet."

Hongbo didn't comment, since it was obvious Verrochio was actually speaking to himself. Verrochio folded his hands behind him, gazing out across Pine Mountain. The city, the capital of the Kingdom of Meyers before the Office of Frontier Security had moved in and liberated the Kingdom's subjects from its obviously tyrannical rulers (they were all tyrannical rulers, after all, weren't they?), was the central node of his personal satrapy. There were well over two million people in that city, which might make it little more than a pinprick on a map somewhere in one of the League's venerable old Core systems but was still a more than merely respectable population out here in the Verge. Like any OFS

commissioner, Lorcan Verrochio was always ambitious when it came to improving his position, but at this particular moment he was actually more aware of all he had to lose if things turned out as badly as Thurgood's analysis suggested they just might.

Oh, come on, Lorcan! he told himself bracingly. You know Thurgood is an old woman at heart. Do really think he'd still be just a commodore at his age if he had a clue about how things really work? They sent him out here to get rid of him, not because of his brilliance! And of course he's been running scared ever since Monica. Until Byng showed up, he was the one who'd have had to go up against the Manties, and the biggest thing he had under his command was a division of heavy cruisers. No wonder he didn't want to cross swords with the big, bad Manties!

"I take it," he continued to Hongbo, never removing his eyes from the pastel towers of Pine Mountain,

"that your good friend Mr. Ottweiler is satisfied so far?"

"So far," Hongbo replied, noticing that Ottweiler had suddenly become his"good friend," despite the fact that Verrochio had actually known him considerably longer than Hongbo had.

"Should we consider briefing Byng at this point, do you think?"

"I don't see any particular need to do that, Lorcan." The commissioner turned his head at last, looking over his shoulder at Hongbo with one eyebrow arched, and the vice-commissioner shrugged. "Byng doesn't need any prompting from us to be thoroughly pissed off with any Manty unfortunate enough to cross his path. That much is pretty obvious, wouldn't you say?"

Verrochio considered for a moment, then nodded.

"Well, my 'good friend' as you've just described him, hasn't asked us to explain exactly what's going on to Admiral Byng," Hongbo pointed out. "I don't think he sees any need to do that, and my thought is that if he's comfortable with that, then that's where we should leave it. If things work out for him and his superiors, then they work out for us, too. And if they don't work out, if it all goes south on us, then it's occurred to me that not having anything on record that could possibly be construed as our pushing Byng is probably a good idea. If he's prepared to take unilateral action against the Manties already, then let him. If it works out for us, good. If it doesn't, then it's the Navy's fault, not ours." Verrochio obviously thought about that for a moment, then nodded. In fact, his expression became considerably more cheerful than it had been.

"In that case," he said, turning away from the desk to pick up the hard copy of the first formal request from New Tuscany for Solarian assistance against Manticore's systematic harassment, "I suppose we should just file this for right now. No sense running off half-cocked, after all."

"No, Sir. No sense at all," Hongbo agreed.

No one familiar with the customary workings of the Office of Frontier Security was going to be fooled after the fact, of course, but that didn't really matter. The reason no one was going to be fooled was because tried and true tactics were the best—and safest—ones. The New Tuscan note was the first step in a familiar dance, and it would never do for the vast and impartial might of the Office of Frontier Security to allow itself to be pushed into premature, ill-considered action. It was necessary to build up the proper groundwork, first. Let several notes and requests from the current OFS proxy accumulate, thus emphasizing the serious and long-standing nature of the problem once they were released (or leaked) to the newsies, before Frontier Security acted. Given a sufficiently fat file, Frontier Security's spinmeisters could turn almost anything into a noble and selfless response to an intolerable situation. After all, look how much practice they'd had.

"All right, then," Verrochio said, flipping the hard copy across the desk towards Hongbo. "Go ahead and open a file. Somehow," he smiled thinly despite a lingering trace of uneasiness, "I don't think this will be the last entry in it."

"Good afternoon, Valery," Hongbo Junyan said a couple of days later as his secretary ushered Valery Ottweiler into his own office.

Hongbo's office was marginally smaller than Verrochio's, and without quite as good a view of Pine Mountain, but it was still luxurious, and he crossed the enormous room to shake Ottweiler's hand, then escorted him to a pleasant conversational nook arranged around a stone coffee table. An insulated carafe of coffee, a teapot, and a tray of fresh croissants sat ready on the table, and Hongbo gestured for his visitor to be seated.

"Thank you, Junyan," Ottweiler responded.

The Mesan settled into the indicated chair, waited while Hongbo personally poured him a cup of tea, then watched the vice-commissioner pour coffee into a second cup for himself. It was a homey, domestic little scene, Ottweiler thought, and most people might well have been fooled by Hongbo's calm demeanor. Ottweiler, however, knew the Solarian much better than "most people" did, and he recognized the other man's inner core of nervousness.

"I was a little surprised by your request for a meeting," Hongbo said a few minutes later, sitting back with his coffee. "We received the first note from New Tuscany day before yesterday, you know. Under the circumstances, I would've thought that perhaps a . . . somewhat lower profile, perhaps, might have been indicated."

"I didn't exactly send any announcements to the 'faxes to tell them I was coming to visit you," Ottweiler pointed out with a slight smile. "And, let's be honest with one another here, Junyan—is anyone who really knows what's going on in the galaxy going to be fooled if I try to maintain a 'lower profile'? For that matter, even if I weren't up to Mesa's and Manpower's normal nefarious machinations, everyone would assume I was, anyway. That being the case, why go to all the inconvenience and inefficiency of trying to creep around in the dark?"

Hongbo wasn't amused by his guest's apparent levity, but he only shrugged and sipped more coffee. Then he lowered the cup.

"I'm not going to pretend I agree with you completely about that," he said levelly. "On the other hand, there probably is something to it. And, in any case, here you are. So, what can I do for you?"

"I've just received a somewhat lengthy dispatch from home," Ottweiler said in a much more serious tone. He put his teacup back on its saucer and set the saucer in his lap.

"What sort of dispatch?" Hongbo's eyes had narrowed, and he couldn't quite suppress the note of tension in his voice. Ottweiler arched one eyebrow, and the vice-commissioner snorted harshly. "You wouldn't be telling me about it unless it was likely to affect our . . . arrangement, Valery. And somehow I rather doubt it's going to tell me something I'll like hearing."

"Well, it does affect our 'arrangement,' " Ottweiler conceded. "And I won't pretend I was entirely delighted with it myself, when it arrived. "

"In that case, why don't you just go ahead and tell me about it rather than look for some way to candy-coat it?"

"All right. Without candy-coating, I've been instructed to tell you that we need to move the schedule up."

"What?" Hongbo looked at him with something approaching incredulity.

"We need to move the schedule up," Ottweiler repeated.

"Why? And what makes you think I can just turn some kind of switch and pull that off?"

"They didn't tell me exactly why." Ottweiler seemed remarkably immune to the scathing sarcasm of Hongbo's last question. "They just told me what they want to happen. And, exactly as they instructed me to, I've just told you ."

Hongbo half-glared at him for a moment, then made himself draw a deep breath and step back from his instant flare of anger.

"Sorry," he said. "I know you're only the messenger. But that doesn't change the realities, Valery. There's only so quickly we can move on something like this. You know that."

"Under normal conditions, I'm sure I'd agree with you. In this instance, though, that doesn't really matter. I'm not trying to deliberately provoke you by saying that, but the truth is that I have my instructions, and there's not any leeway in them this time."

"Be reasonable, Valery! You know how hard I had to work to get Lorcan on board for this in the first place! That idiot Thurgood has him scared half to death with all those bogeyman stories about the Manties' new super weapons. He's terrified that Byng is going to take significant casualties if it comes to an actual exchange of fire. Which, coupled with what already happened at Monica, isn't exactly going to be conducive to his future career prospects. Or, for that matter, mine . Under the circumstances, it's more important than ever to have all of the requests for assistance safely on file before we move."

"I can understand that point of view completely," Ottweiler said soothingly, but his expression was inflexible. "And I'm sure bringing Commissioner Verrochio around isn't going to be the easiest thing you've ever managed to pull off. But I'm afraid it has to be done."

"I don't think it can be!" Hongbo waved one hand in frustration. "Even if Lorcan were prepared to move on this tomorrow—which, I assure you, he isn't— Byng's split up his battlecruisers and sent them haring off all over the sector and to visit half a dozen independent systems outside this new Talbott Quadrant on flag-showing missions. He's only got one division here in Meyers. There's no way in the galaxy, I don't care how urgent it is, that I'm going to be able to convince Lorcan Verrochio to send a single division off to New Tuscany after all of the horror stories Thurgood's been pouring into his ears. Especially not now that we know the Manties have deployed at least some modern battlecruisers to the Quadrant. If he was worried about heavy cruisers, he's terrified thinking about battlecruisers! He's not going to sign off on facing that kind of firepower unless he's confident that Byng has a significant numerical advantage to offset it. It's just not going to happen, Valery!"

"I didn't say we need to send Byng off today ," Ottweiler replied. "But we do need to accelerate our preparations."

"I can't do it," Hongbo said flatly. "Not without more time to bring Lorcan around."

"Well, then you're just going to have to change that," Ottweiler said, equally flatly. Their eyes locked for a moment, and the Mesan continued. "New instructions have been sent to our people in New Tuscany, as well, Junyan. They're going to be accelerating the schedule from their end, whatever happens at your end."

"Then somebody should have asked me about how much accelerating I can do first!" Hongbo half-snarled back.

"There wasn't time, obviously," Ottweiler said, as if explaining something to a small child. "I don't know everything that's going on back home. Hell, I don't know half of what's going on back home! But I do know they're taking it very seriously, and they're obviously responding to something I don't know about yet. And they aren't going to be very happy with anyone who screws up their plans."

"Meaning what?" Hongbo's eyes were narrow again, and Ottweiler shrugged.

"Meaning I'm going to pass along their instructions, whatever they are, and that anyone they wind up being unhappy with isn't going to be me ."

Hongbo glared at him, but at the same time, the vice-commissioner knew Ottweiler had a point. It wasn't as if the other man had thought all this up on his own just to screw up Hongbo's week. Which, unfortunately, also meant Valery Ottweiler wasn't the person whose potential wrathful reaction he had to worry about it he didn't produce like an obedient little pawn. He remembered certain reports about Isabel Bardasano and her attitude towards those who failed to comply with her instructions. Then he thought about Ottweiler's not-so-veiled references to the Audubon Ballroom when this whole fresh round of lunacy began, and a distinct chill ran through the magma of his anger.

"There are going to be limits to what I can do," he said finally. "Not to what I'm willing to do, but to what I can do. I'm telling you right now, it doesn't matter what kind of leverage you have with me, if I tell Lorcan he has to change his schedule, he's going to freak out. And if he does that , then your entire operation's going to go straight into the crapper, Valery. It won't matter what other pieces you have in place, it won't matter what happens to me or to Lorcan after the fact. The operation will be blown out of space."

"I see."

Ottweiler sat back in his chair, regarding Hongbo with rather more respect than usual. The vice-commissioner was obviously unhappy and equally obviously frightened, but that only gave added point to his observation. And he was probably right, Ottweiler conceded. In Ottweiler's own opinion, Lorcan Verrochio had always been the most likely failure point in the entire plan. Unfortunately, he was also the one man they couldn't work around. Or could they?

"Suppose," he said slowly, "that something were to happen to Commissioner Verrochio. What would happen then?"

A considerably deeper and darker chill ran through Hongbo Junyan. He looked at the Mesan for a moment, then shook his head.

"Officially, if . . . something happened to Lorcan, I'd take over from him until the Ministry could get a replacement out here." He looked at Ottweiler, trying to conceal his icy tingle of dread at what the other man was obviously suggesting. "The problem is that everyone would know I was only a temporary replacement, and nobody would want to piss off whoever eventually wound up as the new commissioner. Which doesn't even mention the people who'd be opposed to what you want for reasons of their own. Thurgood, for example, would drag his heels just as hard as he could, and I don't begin to have Lorcan's personal contacts—not officially, at any rate—with the Gendarmerie and the intelligence community. I might be able to pull it off, but I'd say the odds were actually better that the wheels would come off completely."

Ottweiler eyed him thoughtfully, and Hongbo looked back as steadily as he could. What he'd just said was true, and he hoped Ottweiler was smart enough to accept that.

"All right," the Mesan said finally. "I can see that, I suppose. But in that case, we still have the problem of . . . properly motivating him. What would happen if I were to apply a little more direct pressure , shall we say?"

"I honestly don't know," Hongbo replied. There wasn't much doubt in the vice-commissioner's mind what Ottweiler meant. Especially not in light of the pressure which had been brought to bear upon him in the first place.

"So far," he continued, "he's done more or less what you wanted because I've been able to convince him it was in his own best interests and that, ultimately, he'd find it was more profitable to have Manpower owing him a favor than the reverse. If we start threatening him at this point, there's no telling how he'll respond, but there's at least a significant chance he'd panic and do something neither one of us would want to see."

"All right," Ottweiler said again, this time with a sigh. "You say there are limits. Tell me just what you can do in that case."

"The one thing I can't do is go to him and tell him we're changing the rules he thinks he knows about. In other words, I'm going to have to find a way to get him to do the things we need him to do without his realizing why I'm doing it."

"And you think you can actually pull this off?" Ottweiler looked skeptical, and Hongbo didn't blame him. Despite that, though, and despite his own serious misgivings, the vice-commissioner actually smiled.

"I've been managing him that way at need for a long time," he said. "I can't absolutely promise I can steer him into doing exactly what you want, but I think I can probably nudge him into doing mostly what you want."

"The biggest thing of all is that we have to be positioned as quickly as possible," Ottweiler said. "I know the original plan was to wait for at least a couple of more 'spontaneous complaints' from New Tuscany. Unfortunately, the timetable I got with my latest set of instructions is that the key incident is going to occur within less than one month."

"Less than one month?!" Hongbo stared at him. "What the hell happened to our six-month schedule?"

"I don't know. I told you I've been instructed to accelerate things, and that's all I do know. So, what do we do?"

"And we're still not going to tell Byng what's really going on?" Hongbo asked, watching Ottweiler's eyes very closely.

"No, we're not. My instructions are very clear on that point," the Mesan replied, and Hongbo nodded internally. Ottweiler's eyes said he was being honest with him—on this point, at least, and to the best of his own knowledge. Which meant . . .

"In that case, I think all we can do is to move Byng to New Tuscany ahead of schedule and hope his attitude towards Manties is as . . . unforgiving as you seem to think it is. I can probably convince Lorcan to send Byng out early as long as he's convinced we're still on that famous six-month timetable you gave me initially." Hongbo showed his teeth in a thin smile. "I'll sell it to him as an opportunity to get Byng's toes into the water in New Tuscany, as it were—establish Byng's contacts with the locals, that sort of thing. Lorcan will see it as more pump-priming."

"That might actually work," Ottweiler said slowly, his mind racing while he considered possibilities. Byng's rabid anti-Manticore attitude was the reason he'd been maneuvered into his present assignment in the first place. If he were on-station when the critical incident occurred, he'd probably react the way Ottweiler's superiors wanted all on his own. He'd better, anyway, since there was no way Verrochio was going to explicitly tell him what was really going on or even give him the sort of firm "take no-nonsense" instructions the original plan called for. Not if the commissioner thought he still had months to go before anyone actually pushed the button.

"If we go ahead and send him out, though, we need to make sure he has enough of his task group available to bolster his confidence," the Mesan said, thinking out loud now. "I know what his attitude is going to be, but if he should actually find himself outnumbered, he might decide to back down after all."

"That's what I was thinking myself," Hongbo agreed. "Which means we can't send him out tomorrow. But we can still get him there a hell of a lot sooner than the original schedule called for. And, frankly, I think that's the best we can possibly hope for under the circumstances. So, tell me, Valery." He looked at Ottweiler very levelly. "Bearing in mind that practical limitation, do you have a better idea?"

Chapter Thirty-Seven

"Good morning, Mr. Commissioner." Admiral Josef Byng bestowed his best gracious, depress-the-bureaucrat's-pretensions-without-stepping-on-him- too-hard smile on Lorcan Verrochio as he stepped into the Frontier Security commissioner's Meyers office. "How can the Navy be of assistance to you today?"

"Good morning, Admiral," Verrochio replied. "I appreciate your getting back to me so promptly." Verrochio's smile was far less patronizing than Byng's, although not, perhaps, for the reasons the Battle Fleet admiral might have believed. That entrance was just like Byng, Verrochio thought. The man was a native of Old Earth herself, and like quite a few citizens of the ancient mother world, he gazed down from that lofty pinnacle upon all those smaller, inferior beings born of lesser planets as they clustered around his feet. And although Verrochio suspected Byng thought he was concealing it, the admiral's unmitigated Battle Fleet contempt for the bureaucratic plodders of OFS and the jumped up, bumptious policeman of Frontier Fleet followed him around like a second shadow.

But that was just fine with Lorcan Verrochio. In fact, the commissioner was delighted to see it, because he felt far more nervous about this entire arrangement than he'd let on to Hongbo Junyan. He wanted his own back against Manticore—oh, yes , he wanted his own back! And he intended to have it. On the other hand, he'd come to the conclusion that Commodore Thurgood's warnings about the efficiency and effectiveness of the Royal Manticoran Navy were probably justified. None of the evidence he'd seen from Monica argued against the Frontier Fleet officer's conclusions, at any rate, and Verrochio wished he'd had the benefit of Thurgood's insights before Hongbo had convinced him to sign on for a return match.

Unfortunately, Thurgood's report had arrived on the commissioner's desk only after he'd embraced Manpower's new designs. At which point it had inspired a bit of rethinking on Verrochio's part. The size and power of the Battle Fleet formations Manpower had managed to manipulate into position to support its new operation were still reassuring, but much less so than they'd been before the commodore's damned memo. And, Verrochio admitted to himself, they were almost equally frightening. He'd been aware for years of how Mesa's tentacles in general—and Manpower's in particular—extended into and permeated Frontier Security's upper reaches. He hadn't realized until now that Manpower also had the pull to actually manipulate the deployment of such powerful Battle Fleet formations. Oh, get a grip, Lorcan! he scolded himself yet again. Sure, it looks like a huge diversion of combat power to you , but that's because you're a Frontier Security commissioner, not a frigging admiral. You're used to seeing penny-packet squadrons of destroyers—a cruiser division or two, at most—from Frontier Fleet. All of Crandall and Byng's ships between them are hardly even a light task group for Battle Fleet!

That was undoubtedly true, but it still didn't change the fact that Manpower had somehow managed to gather up more firepower than ninety-five percent of the galaxy's formal navies could have massed and get it deployed to an out-of-the-way corner like Lorcan Verrochio's. Which suggested to him (although he'd been very careful not to mention it to Valery Ottweiler or Ottweiler's buddy Hongbo) that it was past time for him to reevaluate just how deep into the League's bureaucratic and political structures the various Mesan corporations really could reach . . . and what that meant for him . In the meantime, however, that recognition of Manpower's reach was one of the reasons Verrochio was secretly delighted by Byng's attitude. He'd come to the conclusion that disappointing Manpower would be even less wise than he'd originally thought, which meant there was no going back on his quiet little agreement with them. And, to be honest, he didn't really want to. Or not as long as there was anyone else around to scapegoat if things went as badly as Thurgood's analysis suggested they might, at least. And that was where Verrochio's good friend Josef Byng came in.

Despite his own trepidation, Lorcan Verrochio sure as hell wasn't going to shed any tears if the Manties got reamed, and he wasn't going to lose any sleep over what happened to a Battle Fleet asshole like Josef Byng, either. In fact, in Verrochio's private best-case scenario, Byng would shoot up the Manties, providing the incident Manpower obviously wanted, and get his own ass shot off in the process. And the commissioner intended to be very careful about exactly what the official record indicated about just which fool had rushed in where the wiser and cooler-headed angels of Frontier Security and Frontier Fleet had declined to tread.

"Well, Mr. Commissioner," Byng said with another smile as Verrochio shook his hand and nodded welcomingly to Admiral Thimár, "your memo indicated you were concerned about something the Fleet might be able to assist with. So," he waved his free hand at his chief of staff, "here Admiral Thimár and I are."

"So I see, so I see."

Verrochio ushered his visitors to chairs which gave them an unimpeded view of Pine Mountain, then settled back down behind his desk once more and pressed the button to summon the servants who were primed and waiting. They appeared as if by magic with trays of coffee, tea, and snacks which they distributed with deft, courteous efficiency before they disappeared once more. Byng and Thimár ignored them as if they didn't even exist, of course.

"Vice-Commissioner Hongbo and I," Verrochio continued then, nodding to where Hongbo sat nursing his own cup of coffee, "have just been reviewing some rather . . . bothersome information, Admiral Byng. Information regarding a situation which may end up requiring action on the part of the League's official representatives in the region. We're not quite certain how best to proceed at this point, however, and we'd appreciate your input."

"Of course, Mr. Commissioner." Byng sipped tea a bit noisily, then patted his lips and mustache delicately with a linen napkin. "May I ask what sort of information is proving so bothersome?"

"Well," Verrochio replied with an air of troubled candor, "to be honest, it concerns the New Tuscany System and the Manticorans." Less experienced eyes might not have noticed the way Byng stiffened slightly in his chair, and the commissioner continued as if he hadn't noticed it, either. "Part of my problem, I think, is that, to be perfectly frank, I'm not really confident in my own mind that I can consider anything that concerns Manticore without prejudice at this point." He produced a crooked smile. "After what happened in Monica, and after all of the wild accusations they've been hurling about at everyone concerning that business in Split and Montana, I feel a certain undeniable amount of . . . automatic hostility, I suppose, where they're concerned."

He paused, his expression pensive, and Byng cleared his throat.

"Under the circumstances, Mr. Commissioner, I doubt anyone could reasonably be surprised by that," the admiral said after a moment. "Certainly I don't see how it could be any other way. After my own visit to Monica, I'm convinced the people back home who sent me out here—partly because of their concerns over Manticoran imperialism, although I'm not really supposed to admit that to just anyone—had a right to be concerned."

"Really?"

Verrochio put a carefully measured dose of worry into his one-word response, tempered by exactly the right amount of relief that someone whose opinion he respected didn't think he was jumping at shadows. He gazed at Byng for a second or two, just long enough for his expression to register, then twitched his shoulders in a small shrug.

"I've tried to put some of that same view before my own superiors, Admiral," he admitted. "I don't believe I've succeeded very well, however. In fact, given the replies and instructions I've received, I've had the impression more than once that the Ministry feels I'm jumping at shadows. In fact, that impression's been persistent enough for me to come to doubt my own evaluation of the situation, to some extent, at least. But if the Navy feels that way, perhaps I haven't been as alarmist as my own superiors appear to believe."

Hongbo Junyan took another sip from his own coffee cup to hide an involuntary smile. It was truly remarkable, he reflected. He'd made at least a third of his own career out of manipulating and steering Lorcan Verrochio, yet Verrochio himself was one of the most consummate manipulators Hongbo had ever seen in operation. Which, the vice-commissioner reminded himself, shouldn't really have come as that much of a surprise, perhaps. No one could rise to Verrochio's rank in Frontier Security without having learned how to play the seduction and manipulation game with the best of them. Unfortunately for someone like Lorcan Verrochio, guile and intelligence weren't necessarily the same thing. He'd acquired what was still called (for some reason Hongbo had never managed to pin down) the "apparatchik" skill set, but no one had been able to give him an infusion of brains to go with it. Which was how he'd wound up with the Madras Sector instead of something juicier.

Yet Hongbo was coming to the conclusion that Byng was even stupider than Verrochio. In fact, he seemed a lot stupider, which took some doing.

"Well, we in the Navy have had to endure more Manticoran arrogance and meddling in areas far outside their legitimate spheres of interest than most people," Byng responded to Verrochio, and his thin smile was considerably uglier than either of the Frontier Security bureaucrats suspected he thought it was.

"That's probably given us a rather more . . . realistic appreciation for what they're really like than other people are in a position to gain."

He is stupider than Lorcan , Hongbo thought, then grimaced mentally at his own ability to leap to hasty judgments. Maybe not actually stupider, he thought. It doesn't seem to be a lack of native intelligence, at any rate. It's more like a mental blind spot that's so profound, so much a part of him, he doesn't even realize it's there. It's not that he couldn't think about it rationally if he wanted to. It's that it never even occurs to him to think about it at all , isn't it?

But whatever the reason for it, it was apparent to Hongbo that Josef Byng was almost eager to snap up the bait Lorcan Verrochio was trolling before him.

"You may have a point, Admiral," Verrochio said earnestly, as if he'd if read Hongbo's thoughts and decided it was time to set the hook. "And what you've just said—about what the Navy's seen out of the Manticorans over the years—gives added point to my own current concerns, I'm afraid."

"How so, Mr. Commissioner?"

"As I say, we've been receiving information about the New Tuscans' situation vis-à-vis this new 'Star Empire of Manticore' business," Verrochio said. "I'm not at liberty to disclose all of our sources—the Gendarmerie has its own rules about need-to-know, I'm afraid, and even I don't know where some of Brigadier Yucel's information comes from—but some of the reports causing me concern are based on communication directly from New Tuscany. It would appear to me after looking at all of those reports that Manticore has decided to retaliate against New Tuscany for its refusal to ratify the so-called constitution their 'convention' in Spindle voted out."

"In what way?" Byng's eyes had narrowed, and he leaned forward ever so slightly in his chair.

"The reports aren't really as comprehensive as I'd like, you understand," Verrochio cautioned with the air of a man trying to make certain his audience would bear in mind that there were still holes in his information. "From what we do have, however, Manticore started out by deliberately excluding New Tuscany from any access to the Manticoran investment starting to flow into the Cluster. Of course, if we're speaking government-funded investment, the Star Kingdom—excuse me, I meant the Star Empire— has every right to determine where to place its funds. No one could possibly dispute that. But my understanding is that this investment is primarily private in nature, and Manticore hasn't officially prohibited private investment in New Tuscany. Nor, for that matter, has it officially prohibited private New Tuscan investment in the Cluster. Not officially. Yet there seems little doubt that the Manticoran government is unofficially blocking any New Tuscan involvement.

"On a personal level, I would find that both regrettable and more than somewhat reprehensible," the commissioner continued a bit mournfully, clearly dismayed by the depths to which human pettiness could descend in the pursuit of vengeance, "but it would scarcely amount to a violation of New Tuscany's sovereignty or inherent rights as an independent star nation. Nor would it constitute any sort of unjustifiable or retaliatory barrier to trade. I think, though, that it's a clear indication of the way Manticore's policymakers—and policy enforcers—are thinking in New Tuscany's case. And that, Admiral, causes me considerable concern over reports that Manticoran warships are beginning to systematically harass New Tuscan merchant shipping."

Well, that was a bull's-eye, Hongbo thought from his position on the sidelines as Byng's mustache and goatee seemed to bristle suddenly. So far, at least, Ottweiler's private briefing on one Josef Byng and his attitude towards Manticore had clearly been right on the money.

"Harassing their merchant shipping," the admiral repeated. He sounded like a man trying very hard to project a much greater calm than he felt. "How . . . Mr. Commissioner?" he asked, remembering the title belatedly.

"Accounts are sketchy so far," Verrochio replied, "but it seems clear that they've been imposing additional 'inspections' and 'customs visits' targeted solely and specifically at New Tuscan freighters. Confidentially, I've received at least one official note from Foreign Minister Cardot on behalf of Prime Minister Vézien's government about this matter. I'm not at liberty to tell you its specific contents, but coupled with other things we've been hearing, I'm very much afraid we're looking at an escalating pattern of incidents. They seem to be becoming both more frequent and more serious, which leads me to believe the Manticorans are gradually turning up the heat in a concerted campaign to push New Tuscany entirely out of the Talbott Cluster's internal markets."

He shook his head sadly again.

"I wish I could be positive in my own mind that I'm not reading more into this than I ought to. But, you know, that kind of manipulation and exclusionary control of the local economy was exactly the sort of thing this 'Rembrandt Trade Union' was doing well before Manticore ever started meddling—I mean, before Manticore became involved in Talbott's affairs. And it was the Trade Union that was really the moving force behind the initial annexation plebiscite. I've always had a few reservations about the legitimacy of that plebiscite, and I'm afraid my distrust for the Trade Union and its practices was a large part of the reason for those reservations. Now it looks to me as if Manticore is either allowing its policies to be manipulated by the Rembrandters, or—even worse—is simply picking up where Rembrandt left off."

"Mr. Commissioner," Hongbo said quietly, obediently picking up his own cue, "even if you're right about that—and, frankly, I think there's an excellent chance you are—there's not very much we can do about it." All of the others looked at him, and he gave an eloquently unhappy shrug. "Believe me, Sir, it doesn't make me any happier to mention that than it makes you to hear it, but the Ministry's policy guides are clear on this matter."

"The League's policy is to support the free and unimpeded flow of trade, Mr. Hongbo," Byng pointed out just a bit coldly, and Hongbo nodded. After all, that was the Solarian League's official policy . . . except where any soul with sufficient temerity to compete with its own major corporations was concerned, of course.

"Yes, Sir. Of course it is," he acknowledged. "But the Ministry's position has always been—and rightly so, I think—that the Office of Frontier Security isn't supposed to be making foreign policy or trade policy on its own. Unless someone with a legitimate interest in a region requests our assistance, there really isn't anything we can do."

"Has New Tuscany requested assistance, Mr. Commissioner?" Rear Admiral Thimár asked, speaking up for the first time, and Verrochio didn't even smile, although Hongbo could hear his mental " Gotcha! " quite clearly.

"Well, technically—" he drew the word out "—no. Not yet ." He twitched his shoulders again. "Foreign Minister Cardot's note expresses Prime Minister Vézien's concerns frankly, and I think from what she's said that he hopes we'll send an observer of our own to look into these matters. For that matter, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we were to find ourselves asked to launch an official investigation sometime in the next several T-months, but no one in New Tuscany's gone quite that far at this time." The commissioner smiled with a certain sad cynicism. "I think the Prime Minister is hoping—how realistically I couldn't say, of course—that if he's just patient, this will all blow over."

"Not bloody likely," Byng muttered, then shook himself.

"Excuse me, Mr. Commissioner," he said more clearly. "That was quite rude of me. I'm afraid I was simply . . . thinking out loud."

"And not reaching any conclusions I don't share, I'm afraid," Verrochio said heavily.

"Mr. Commissioner," Thimár said after a quick glance at her superior's profile, "may I ask exactly why you've shared this information with us?" Verrochio looked at her, and she smiled dryly. "I don't doubt that you genuinely wanted a second viewpoint, Sir," she said. "On the other hand, I do doubt that that's all you wanted, if you'll pardon my saying so."

"Guilty as charged, I'm afraid," Hongbo admitted. "What I'm really looking for, I think, is a way that we could encourage and reassure New Tuscany while simultaneously communicating our unhappiness to Manticore without violating the official limitations placed on what Frontier Security can legitimately do in a case like this."

"I see." Byng nodded, and smiled again himself. It was a noticeably colder smile than Thimár's, Hongbo noticed. "Admiral Thimár and I don't work for Frontier Security, however, do we?"

"Well, that's rather a gray area in your case, I suppose, Admiral." There was a conspiratorial gleam in Verrochio's eye. "You command a Frontier Fleet task group, and out here in the marches, Frontier Fleet does—nominally, at least—work for—or with , at any rate—Frontier Security. You, however, as a Battle Fleet officer, are outside the normal Frontier Fleet chain of command. I think that would give you a valuable difference of perspective in a case like this, but it does create a certain ambiguity when it comes to the notion of my giving you any sort of formal instructions." What a crock, Hongbo thought rather admiringly. It doesn't matter where Byng comes from—not legally. He's commanding a Frontier Fleet task group, and the table of organization when he was sent out here clearly tasked him to support us in any way possible. If that's not tantamount to putting him under our orders, then I don't know what would be! But that's not the point, either. The point is that if Lorcan can maneuver him into suggesting that he isn't under our orders and get it into this meeting's official recording . . .

"I suppose that's true, Mr. Commissioner," Byng said. "On the other hand, whether you have the power to give me binding orders or not, my own superiors clearly wanted me to be aware of your concerns and to act to support you in any way I can. Perhaps I could make a suggestion?"

"By all means, Admiral. Please."

"Well, as you've just pointed out, as a Battle Fleet officer, I stand outside the normal Frontier Fleet chains of command, and I believe it would be entirely feasible for Battle Fleet to take a somewhat more . . . proactive stance than the Ministry's instructions might permit you to take."

"That sounds just a bit potentially . . . risky to me, Admiral," Verrochio said, allowing his tone to show a trace of cautious hesitancy now that he was completely confident the hook had been well and truly set.

"Oh, I don't really think so, Mr. Commissioner." Byng waved one hand. "It's not as if I were proposing any sort of preemptive military action like that Manticoran business in Monica, after all." He smiled thinly.

"No, what I had in mind was more of a simple—and quite unexceptionable—flag-showing visit designed to demonstrate to both New Tuscany and Manticore that we consider amicable relations with independent star nations in this region important to the Solarian League's official foreign policy."

"A flag-showing visit?" Verrochio repeated without a trace of triumph.

"Yes, Sir. I'm sure no one could possibly construe a simple port visit as any sort of unwarranted provocation, especially if the decision to make it originated with Battle Fleet, rather than anyone in your office. If, in the course of such a visit, I were to pass any private messages from you to Prime Minister Vézien, I'm sure that would be quite unobjectionable, as well. But a visit by a division or two of Solarian battlecruisers is likely to have a bracing effect on New Tuscany. At the least, it should convince the New Tuscan people that they don't stand alone in the face of Manticoran retaliation against them. And if the Manticorans should learn of it, I can hardly see how it could fail to have at least some moderating impact on their ambitions."

"I'm not sure 'a division or two' would be sufficient, Admiral," Verrochio said. Byng looked at him with an unmistakable edge of incredulity, and the OFS commissioner grimaced. "Oh, I don't doubt that it ought to be sufficient, Admiral. Don't mistake me about that! But we've got the example of Monica in front of us, and I've reviewed that 'conversation' between you and that Manticoran Admiral—Henke, or Gold Peak, or whoever she is." He grimaced. "They are impressed with their own jumped up little aristocracy, aren't they? But reading between the lines of what she said—and how she said it, for that matter—and the reports which have reached me from Old Terra since their attack on Monica, it's apparent to me that the Manticorans are just as impressed with their own accomplishments as they are with their titles of 'nobility.' I've had some locally generated reports about the possibility that they've increased their combat effectiveness, as well, although that's scarcely my own area of expertise. Obviously, your judgment would be superior to my own where something like that is concerned. But my own concern is more with the way the Manticorans might be thinking, and we know they've sent at least some reinforcements to Talbott since the 'annexation' went through."

"And your point is, Mr. Commissioner?" Byng's voice was just a bit frosty, and Verrochio sighed.

"Admiral, I want the situation resolved, and I want New Tuscany's legitimate interests protected, both for New Tuscany's sake and to demonstrate to the local star nations that the Solarian League, at least, is a good neighbor. But we've already had recent and painful experience of what Manticoran high-handedness and readiness to resort to brute force can mean. I don't want anyone killed, not even Manticorans, and I'm simply concerned that they could get . . . carried away again, the way they did in Monica, unless it's painfully obvious even to them that the consequences would be disastrous for them."

"I believe the commissioner is suggesting that it would be better to arrange a somewhat greater show of force, Admiral Byng," Hongbo said almost apologetically. "Something powerful enough that not even a Manticoran could misread the odds badly enough—or be stupid enough—to try a repeat performance of something like Monica."

"Against the Solarian Navy?" Byng seemed to find it difficult to believe anyone could take such an absurd concept seriously.

"No one is suggesting that it would be particularly wise—or rational—of them to do anything of the sort, Admiral," Hongbo said earnestly. "The commissioner is simply suggesting that it's incumbent upon the League to go the extra kilometer and do everything in its power to prevent such a tragic . . . miscalculation, shall we say, on anyone's part from leading to a repeat of Monica."

"Any such 'miscalculation' would have a radically different outcome for Manticore than the 'Battle of Monica' did," Byng said coldly. "On the other hand, I suppose there's quite a bit of validity to your concern, Mr. Commissioner." He looked directly at Verrochio. "Mind you, it would take a particularly stupid neobarb to make that sort of 'miscalculation,' but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. We are talking about Manticorans, after all."

The admiral pursed his lips and thought for several seconds, then looked at Thimár.

"How long would it take to reassemble the entire task group here in Meyers, Karlotte? A month?"

"More like six T-weeks, Sir," Thimár said so promptly that it was apparent she'd been running the same calculations in her own mind. "Maybe even seven."

"Too long," Byng objected—an objection with which Hongbo earnestly agreed, given his own conversation with Valery Ottweiler.

"We could recall Sigbee's and Chang's squadrons sooner than that," Thimár replied. "In fact, we could probably get both of them reassembled here in less than your original one-month estimate. And we have at least half a dozen tin-cans available as a screen. For that matter, we could tap Thurgood, as well." Verrochio started to open his mouth to protest. The last thing he wanted was for a naval force which was clearly and unambiguously under his command—and whose senior officer had reported such reservations about Manticoran capabilities—involved in something like this. Byng beat him to it, though.

"I scarcely think that's going to be necessary, Karlotte," he half-sneered. Then he seemed to remember where he was and who Thurgood currently worked for, and he glanced at Verrochio. "What I mean, Mr. Commissioner," he said just a bit hastily, "is that adding Commodore Thurgood's forces to the one Admiral Thimár is already talking about would scarcely constitute a significant increase in its combat power. In addition, of course, if I were to take the commodore or any significant portion of his order of battle with me, it would leave you with no quick response force ready to hand if something should come up while I was away."

"I see." Verrochio looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. "That's certainly sounds logical to me, Admiral. And, as I've said before, this is scarcely my area of expertise. I believe you're a much better judge of these matters than I am. By all means, make whatever arrangements seen best to you. I'll leave all of this in your capable hands."

Michelle Henke felt a wave of profound satisfaction as HMS Artemis and HMS Horatius made their alpha translations just outside the Spindle System's hyper limit the better part of four T-months after departing for Monica. Although she'd hated being gone so long, and dumping so much responsibility on Shulamit Onasis while she was away, but she hadn't exactly been sitting on her own hands all that time, and she also savored a sense of solid achievement. She'd completed her visit to Monica, placed that insufferable twit Byng on notice (in the most pleasant possible way, of course), gotten the new picket station at Tillerman up and running to her own satisfaction—well, as close to her satisfaction as she could, under the circumstances—and made port visits to Talbott, Scarlet, Marian, Dresden (where she'd discovered that Khumalo, at Henri Krietzmann's suggestion, had diverted one of the newly arrived LAC

wings to Tillerman), and Montana on her way back to Spindle.

By now, those LACs are already in Tillerman, setting up house to support Conner, she thought cheerfully, leaning back in her command chair. That ought to come as quite a surprise to any pirates who haven't gotten the word yet. And it should go a long way towards beefing up his missile defenses if Byng really is stupid enough to try something, too. Which, unfortunately, he probably is, at least under the wrong circumstances. In fact, he's the only really unpleasant surprise of the entire trip. Why couldn't even Battle Fleet have sent us an admiral with an IQ higher than his hat size? They have to have at least one flag officer with a functional brain! Don't they?

She shook her head at the thought, comforting herself with the reflection that even though Byng might be an idiot, she'd at least been able to quietly brief the system presidents in the vicinity—and their senior military officers—about him. And most of those presidents and officers had seemed reassuringly competent and tough-minded too. She'd been particularly impressed by the Montanans, and she'd also been glad of the opportunity to meet the formidable and reformed (if that was the proper word for it) Stephen Westman.

Thank goodness Terekhov and Van Dort got him on our side, at least, she thought, then looked across the flag bridge to Dominica Adenauer's station and the tallish, brown-haired lieutenant commander sitting at her side. Maxwell Tersteeg had been waiting at Talbott along with the dispatches informing Michelle about the LAC deployment to Tillerman. Augustus Khumalo had sent him forward as a candidate to fill the electronic warfare officer's hole on her staff, and so far he appeared to be working out quite well. Most importantly, he was good at his job, but he also got a long well with both Adenauer and Edwards, and he was a good "fit" for the staff's chemistry. He had a sly, quiet sense of humor and his pleasantly plain face was remarkably mobile and expressive . . . when he chose for it to be. In fact, when he wanted to, those brown eyes could effortlessly project a soulful "Aren't I pitiful?" air as good (and apparently guileless) as Dicey's food mooching expression at its best.

I think he's going to do just fine, she thought. And he pretty much fills all the gaps . . . aside from an intelligence officer . She grimaced mentally at the thought. Still, Cindy's doing well with that. It's not fair to dump it on top of her along with everything else she already has on her plate, but I haven't heard any complaints out of her. In fact, I think she likes the duty. And I know she's enjoyed "mentoring" Gwen. By now, she's got him trained up as a pretty fair deputy, really . Michelle sometimes found herself suspecting that she'd worked hard to convince herself that Lecter was satisfied with the situation because things seemed to be working out so well. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" was one of the more fundamental aspects of her professional philosophy, after all. And all justifications on her own part aside, it wasn't hurting young Lieutenant Archer one bit to have his own professional resume extended.

She glanced over her shoulder at the thought, to where Archer stood attentively just behind her command chair, hands clasped lightly behind him, gazing into the main plot. Well, however stupid Byng may be, at least Gwen's been one of the more pleasant surprises of this entire deployment , and not just because of how well he's "subbing" for Cindy on the intelligence fron t, she thought, turning her own attention back to the plot. Honor had been entirely correct about his basic ability when she'd recommended him, and although Michelle still sometimes caught the shadow of a ghost behind those green eyes, it was obvious he'd come to grips with the memories and doubts which had afflicted him the day they first met. Not that those memories or doubts had ever been permitted to affect the apparently effortless efficiency with which he performed his duties. Nor was he particularly shy about prodding his admiral—ever so respectfully, of course—when she needed prodding. As a matter of fact, he and Chris Billingsley got along with one another remarkably well for two people with such disparate backgrounds . . . and Michelle had discovered early on that they were prepared to double-team her unscrupulously. As long, of course, as whatever they wanted was for her own good. Honor told me she was going to be looking for good nannies for Raoul. If she doesn't mind corrupting influences—and the fact that she puts up with Nimitz clearly proves that she doesn't—I know where she could find two of them!

She chuckled at the thought, and Gervais raised one eyebrow.

"Ma'am?"

"Oh, nothing really important, Gwen," she told him. "I was just thinking." She started to wave one hand dismissively, but then she paused, arrested, as the imp of her evil side whispered in her ear.

"Thinking about what, Ma'am?" Gervais asked when she clearly stopped in mid-thought, and she smiled wickedly at him.

"I was just thinking about the fact that we're going to be reporting in to Admiral Khumalo and Minister Krietzmann shortly," she said. "I hope you and Ms. Boltitz are prepared to be your usual . . . efficient selves in organizing our meetings. We all really appreciated the long, hard hours you two put in, even outside regular business hours, slaving away to make our conferences a success, you know." You know, Gwen, she thought, watching his admirably grave expression, one of the things I really love about your complexion is how easily you color up when I score a direct hit. You may be able to keep a straight face, but . . .

"I mean, I understand that you actually subjected yourselves to the hardship of dining at Sigourney's just so you could set up that 'dinner party' of mine." Her eyes radiated soulful gratitude as she gazed at him. "I do hope that we're not going to be forced to demand any equally painful sacrifices out of you this time around."

"I—" Gervais began, then stopped, his color brighter than ever, and shrugged.

"You got me, Ma'am," he acknowledged. "Direct hit, center of mass. What can I say?"

"Nothing at all, Gwen." Michelle reached out a repentant hand and patted his forearm. "I shouldn't be teasing you about it, really."

"Is it really that obvious, Ma'am?"

"Probably not to someone who doesn't see as much of you as I do," she said reassuringly.

"I'm not sure it's obvious to her yet." He shook his head, his expression wry. "She's just the least little bit skittish where people from 'aristocratic' backgrounds are concerned."

"Hard to blame her, I suppose," Michelle said. "Dresden's no Garden of Eden, you know. And it's still awfully early in the day for any of the Talbotters to have a real feel for how the Star Kingdom differs from their local landlords."

"Calling Dresden 'no Garden of Eden' is one hell of an understatement, if you'll pardon my saying so, Ma'am." Gervais' expression was suddenly darker, his voice grim. "I'm glad I got to see it firsthand. There've been times I thought Helga must have been exaggerating conditions there. Now I know better."

"Welcome to Frontier Security's 'benign neglect,' Lieutenant," Michelle half-growled. "If those useless bastards would spend a tenth of the budget they spend on fur-lined toilet seats for their commissioners'

heads on the Verge planets they're supposed to be looking out for—"

She cut herself off with a quick, curt headshake.

"Let's not get me started on that one," she said in a more conversational tone, and smiled at him again.

"In the meantime, I hope your campaign with Ms. Boltitz succeeds, Gwen. If, ah, you should require any . . . senior support to communicate the honorable nature of your intentions to her, shall we say—?" She allowed her voice to trail off suggestively, and Gervais felt his face heating again.

"That's quite all right, Ma'am," he said with the utmost sincerity, eyes steadfastly locked once again upon the main plot. "Really."

"We're picking up additional transponders, Ma'am," Dominica Adenauer reported.

"Really?" Michelle turned her chair towards the operations officer. She'd expected more ships to have arrived during her absence, but it was nice to find that her expectations had been realized. "What kind of transponders?"

"It looks like a full squadron of Saganami-Cs , Ma'am. And a squadron of Rolands, as well."

"Outstanding!" Michelle smiled hugely. "I assume one of the Saganami-Cs is squawking a flagship code?"

"Yes, Ma'am. She's the Quentin Saint-James."

"Really?" Michelle quirked one eyebrow in surprise at the name. I wonder what happened to the last one of those , she wondered, then turned to Lieutenant Commander Edwards.

"Bill," she turned to Lieutenant Commander Edwards, "see if you can raise Quentin Saint-James . I'd like to speak to the squadron commander . . . whoever he turns out to be!"

"Yes, Ma'am," her com officer replied with a smile of his own, and began entering commands. Given the way dispatches tended to chase fleet detachments around without ever quite catching up, little uncertainties like that were far from uncommon. And the Star Empire's current scramble to reallocate its Navy in response to events here in the Quadrant were only making that even worse, Michelle reminded herself.

As my own recent perambulations handily illustrate, she reflected, feeling her sense of accomplishment fade just a bit. It all needed doing, but I wish to hell I could've done it faster!

She heard the soft mutter of Edwards' voice, as well, transmitting her own communications request to Quentin Saint-James , but at the moment, Artemis was still a good nine light-minutes from the heavy cruiser, and even the grav-pulse com wasn't really instantaneous. Faster than light, yes; instantaneous, no. There was a delay of almost seventeen and a half seconds built into any two-way conversation at this distance, and it took a few minutes for Edwards to get through to his counterpart in the heavy cruiser squadron.

"Ma'am," he said then, "I have that connection you asked for."

"Really?" Michelle said again, raising one eyebrow at what sounded suspiciously like a note of pleasure in Edwards' voice.

"Yes, Ma'am. I have the senior officer of CruRon Ninety-Four on the com. A . . . Commodore Terekhov, I believe."

Michelle's eyes widened, and then she smiled even more hugely than before. Jesus, she thought, they must have stuck an impeller node up his . . . um, backside and fired him back out our way before Hexapuma ever got as far in-system as Hephaestus ! Poor bastard probably didn't even have time to kiss his wife first! But they couldn't have found anyone better to give the squadron to.

"Switch it to my display, Bill," she directed.

"Yes, Ma'am."

Aivars Terekhov's face appeared on the com display deployed from her command chair just at knee level, and she smiled down at it.

" Commodore Terekhov!" she said. "It's good to see you . . . and to hear about your promotion. No one told me that was in the works when they sent me off to Talbott, but everything I saw at Monica tells me it was well-deserved. And, to be honest, having your squadron here is at least equally welcome." Michelle waited the seventeen seconds it took for the transmission to make the round-trip, and then Terekhov smiled.

"Thank you, Milady," he said. "I won't pretend I wouldn't have preferred a little bit more time at home, but the promotion is nice, and they gave me a brand-new squadron to play with to go with it. And I have to admit that I feel a certain proprietary interest in the Quadrant that makes it feel good to be back." Michelle's eyes narrowed. The words—as words—were just fine, almost exactly what she would have expected. But something about the tone, and about the quality of that smile . . . Strain, she thought. He's worried—even frightened—about something and trying like hell not to show it .

Her sudden, irrational suspicion was ridiculous, and she knew it. But she also knew that she couldn't shake it, and an icy wind seemed to blow through her bones at the thought. She knew exactly what this man had done, and not just in Monica. Anything that could frighten him . . .

"Commodore," she said slowly, "is there something I ought to know?" Seventeen more seconds passed, and then the arctic blue eyes on her com display widened ever so slightly, as if in surprise. Then they narrowed again, and he nodded.

"Yes, Milady, I suppose there is," he said quietly. "I'd rather assumed you'd have received Admiral Khumalo's dispatches about it, though. I suppose they must have passed you in transit." He paused, clearly suggesting that perhaps the vice admiral would prefer to tell her about whatever it was in person, and Michelle snorted. If he thought she was going to sit around on her posterior waiting for the penny to drop after an introduction like that, he had another think coming!

"I'm sure Admiral Khumalo and I will be discussing a lot of things, Commodore," she said just a bit tartly."In the meantime, however, why don't you go ahead and tell me about it?"

"Yes, Milady," he said again, seventeen seconds later, and drew a visible breath and squared his shoulders ever so slightly. "I'm afraid we received dispatches from the home system just over three T-weeks ago. The news isn't good. According to Admiral Caparelli, the Havenites attacked in overwhelming strength. From all appearances, Theisman and Pritchart must have decided to put everything on one throw of the dice after what happened to the Havenites at Lovett and go for an outright knockout blow before we could get Apollo into full deployment. We stopped them, but we got— both sides got—hit really hard. According to the follow-up reports we've received since, it looks like—"

Chapter Thirty-Eight

"I'm not happy about this, Maxime," Damien Dusserre said. "I'm not happy about it at all."

"I don't think you see me doing handsprings of joy about it, either, do you?" Prime Minister Maxime Vézien shot back tartly.

"Damn it, I knew this whole thing looked too good to be true from the very beginning," Dusserre grumbled.

Vézien felt a powerful urge to punch the security minister squarely in the nose, but he suppressed it easily enough. First, because the younger, larger, stronger, and physically much tougher Dusserre would probably have proceeded to remove the Prime Minister's limbs one at a time, with the maximum possible amount of discomfort. But secondly, and even more to the point, because Dusserre was, indeed, the one member of the Vézien Government who had consistently voiced his reservations about the entire operation.

Which didn't keep him from going ahead and signing off on it, anyway, Vézien thought rather snappishly. Maybe he didn't like it, but I didn't see him coming up with any better ideas!

Actually, as Vézien was well aware in his calmer moments, one of the reasons he was so easily pissed off with his Security Minister these days was that Damien Dusserre was Andrieaux Yvernau's brother-in-law. It was Yvernau's brilliant strategy at the Constitutional Convention which had gotten the entire New Tuscany System into the Star Empire of Manticore's black books in the first place, and Vézien couldn't quite suppress the ignoble urge to vent his frustration on Yvernau's relatives. And he could at least tell himself there was some justification in it, given the fact that it was Yvernau's family connections which had gotten him named to head the delegation to Spindle in the first place. Yes, there is, he reflected. But the truth is, as you're perfectly well aware, Max, whether you want to admit it, that even though Yvernau is an idiot, not even a genius could have come up with a good strategy once those parliamentary bastards back in Manticore got up on their high horse and started bleating about "repressive local régimes" here in the Cluster. And having that bitch Medusa in the driver's seat didn't help one damned thing, either. If we'd only realized where all of this was going to go when that son-of-a-bitch Van Dort came around selling us on what a gold mine that whole damned annexation idea was going to be for everyone involved . . . !

"I know you've had reservations, Damien," he said out loud instead of the considerably more cutting (and satisfying) responses which flickered through his head. "Unfortunately, reservations or no, we're where we are, not where we might want to be. So why don't we both just go ahead and admit that neither of us is happy about the situation and then do what we can to make the best of it?" Dusserre gave him a sour look, but then the Security Minister drew a deep breath and nodded.

"You're right," he acknowledged.

"Good."

Vézien tilted back in his comfortable chair and gazed up through the office's huge skylight. That skylight was one of the Prime Minister's favorite perks, one that offered refreshment and energy whenever the weight of his high political office crushed down upon him. It wasn't a view screen, wasn't an artificial image gathered from remote cameras. It was an actual, honest to God skylight , almost three meters on a side. Its thermal-barrier smart glass panes automatically configured themselves to filter sunlight, and then, under other conditions, seemed almost to disappear entirely. When it rained, the sound of the raindrops—from a gentle patter to a hard, driving rhythm—filled the office with a soothing sense of natural energy. When lightning rumbled about the heavens, he could watch God's artillery flashing in mist-walled valleys among cloudy mountains. And when it was night, he could look up through it to moon-struck cloud chasms or the clear, awesome vista of the distant stars burning so far above him. At the moment, unfortunately, the sight of those stars was much less soothing than usual.

"Do you have the feeling, Damien," he asked slowly after several seconds, "that Ms. Anisimovna is privy to information the rest of us haven't received yet?"

"I've always felt she was working to an agenda and a set of instructions we didn't know anything about—and that she wasn't about to tell us anything about, either." Dusserre sounded almost surprised by the question, as if its answer was so painfully self-evident he couldn't quite believe the Prime Minister had asked it.

"That's not what I asked." Vézien lowered his eyes from the skylight to gaze at the other man instead of the stars. "Of course we don't know what her real instructions are, and, of course, she's not going to tell us. We wouldn't tell her everything if our positions were reversed, either, would we? But what bothers me at the moment is that I have the oddest feeling that she knows more about a lot of things than we do." He frowned, seeking the words to more clearly explain what he was getting at. "I mean about things the rest of the galaxy is going to find out about in due time but doesn't know about yet ," he said.

"Things—news stories, events—that no one here on New Tuscany's even heard about yet that she's already factoring into her plans."

Dusserre looked back at him for several seconds, then snorted.

"I'll grant you the woman is fiendishly clever, Max. And I'll also point out that she's receiving regular messages via private dispatch boats from Mesa and God knows where else, whereas we're basically dependent on the news services—which don't exactly see us as one of their red-hot bureau depots—to find out what's going on anywhere else in the galaxy. So, yes, she probably does know quite a few things we haven't found out about yet. But let's not talk ourselves into thinking she's some kind of sorceress, all right? It's bad enough that we don't have much choice but to dance with her and let her lead without our deciding she somehow magically controls the orchestra's choice of music, as well!" Vézien grimaced, but he also let the point drop. His initial question had been at least partly whimsical, after all. Still, though . . . Try as he might, he couldn't quite shake that feeling—that . . . intuition, perhaps—that Aldona Anisimovna was always at least a couple of jumps ahead of anyone else in the New Tuscany System, and he didn't much care for the sensation.

"Well, anyway," he said, waving aside his own question, "I suppose what really matters is whether or not we have the assets in place to actually do what she wants as quickly as she wants it done.

"That and the question of whether or not doing what she wants on this revised schedule of hers is also going to accomplish what we want," Dusserre replied. "And, while I'm perfectly ready to concede that you're right and we don't have much choice but to continue with this strategy, the timing on it really worries me, Max."

The security minister's tone was cold, sober, and—most worrisome of all—sincere, Vézien thought. And, as usual, he had a damnably good point.

"We weren't supposed to be doing this for months yet," Dusserre continued, "and I damned well wish I hadn't told Anisimovna we'd been able to complete our arrangements for it this early."

"It wouldn't have made that much difference in the end," Vézien said, offering what comfort he could.

"The message turnaround time to Pequod is too short. Even if we hadn't done a single thing to get ready for it already, it wouldn't have taken more than a week or two to set it all up from scratch. And, frankly, a week or two either way isn't going to make that much difference."

"I know," Dusserre muttered, then puffed his cheeks out and sighed. "I know," he repeated more distinctly. "I suppose I'm just still looking for things to kick myself over because I'm scared enough to piss on my own shoes."

Despite himself, Vézien felt himself warming at least briefly towards the security minister as Dusserre admitted to the same trepidation Vézien felt.

"I know the Solly battlecruisers were supposed to already be here before we kicked off this phase of the operation," he said almost gently. "But we do have confirmation from other sources that Byng is in the Madras Sector. She's not lying to us about that. And hard as I've tried, I can't come up with any scenario where it would help Manpower in any conceivable way for her to have come clear out here and set us up to fall flat on our asses just so her people can get egg on their faces in all the Solly 'faxes all over again. There may be one, but I sure as hell can't figure out what it might be! And assuming she'd prefer for us all to succeed, I can't see why she'd lie to us about Manpower and Mesa's ability to bring Verrochio up to scratch and get Byng moving ahead of schedule. So we're just going to have to take her word that they can do that and act accordingly."

"Wonderful." Dusserre inhaled deeply. "Well, in that case we really need to be talking to Nicholas and Guédon. I know my people did most of the organizing and operational planning, and picking the merchant ship wasn't as difficult as I'd been afraid it would be. We've got all of that in place, but we didn't have the resources outside the home system to set something like this up at the other end, as well. We had to rely on the Navy for that, and we're pretty much completely outside the pipeline in that regard. We had to let them put it into place, and we're going to need their resources to actually pull the trigger, as well."

Vézien nodded. He was right, of course, and it wouldn't be all that hard to get hold of Admiral Josette Guédon, the New Tuscan Navy's chief of naval operations. Getting hold of the Minister of War was going to be a bit tougher, though, since Nicholas Pélisard had chosen this particularly inconvenient moment for a vacation trip to visit family in the Selkirk System. He wouldn't be back for at least another week, and his Deputy Minister of War hadn't been briefed in on the operation. There'd seemed no particular need to do that—or, rather, it had seemed they had plenty of time to do it, just as Pélisard should've had plenty of time to complete his vacation trip. Besides, his deputy was a . . . less than stellar choice for the coordination of any covert operation.

"I don't want to bring Challon in on this, not without discussing it with Nicholas first, at least," the Prime Minister said after moment. "I'm not confident enough in his ability to keep a secret to feel comfortable doing that. But Guédon already knows what's supposed to happen, right?"

"I discussed it with her myself," Dusserre agreed. "I left it up Nicholas to organize the nuts and bolts and get the ship properly rigged. He's the one with the connections for that side of things, after all. But I do know that he personally spoke to her directly about it, so she has to have been in the loop. In fact, knowing her, she probably wouldn't have trusted anyone outside her own office to arrange it."

"All right, then I'll take care of bringing her up to speed on the changes," Vézien decided. "One of the nice things about being Prime Minister is that I can talk to anyone I need to just about any time I want to, and with Nicholas out of the system, I don't imagine anyone will be particularly surprised if I need to talk to the CNO directly."

"Which still brings you back to deciding what to do about Challon, doesn't it?" Dusserre asked. Vézien glanced at him, and the security minister grimaced sourly. "I'm not that fond of Challon, Max. I'll admit it. But if I do, then you have to admit he's given me ample reason to be unfond of him. If he finds out you've been talking to Guédon without involving him when he's at least temporarily perched on the top of his own dung heap during Nicholas' absence, his vanity is going to demand that he figure out whatever secret you were obviously trying to keep from him. And, unfortunately, he's not a complete idiot. There's a damned good chance he'll be able to dig up enough to present a real problem if he starts blathering about it. And he will blab about it if he figures it out. Probably to a newsy he figures could make him look good, although God knows that's a challenge few mortals would care to embrace!" That, unfortunately, was an all too likely scenario, Vézien thought. Armand Challon was actually quite a bright fellow, in a lot of ways. In fact, he was very good at his job, which was one reason (if not the most important one) he was the Deputy Minister of War. But he had a shrewish, nastily vindictive nature and an inveterate need to bask in the admiration of others. It was important to him that he be perceived as important, and he had a penchant for dropping bits and pieces—what he fondly thought were

"mysterious" hints—about all of the important things he was up to. They made for good gossip material at the sorts of parties he graced with his presence . . . and the newsies had learned ages ago to hover around him with suitably admiring expressions. Which was the very reason he was normally kept as far away as possible from any secret that was genuinely important.

Unfortunately, he was also the son of Victor Challon, and Victor controlled about twenty percent of the delegates to the System Parliament's upper chamber. Which was the most important reason Armand had been named Deputy War Minister in the first place.

There are times, Vézien reflected, when I think it would actually be simpler— easier , at least—to let the Mob take over than it is to go on wading through this bottomless sea of cousins, in-laws, families, friends, and relations. Let them drain the pond and then shoot the fish flapping around in the mud. There'd have to be at least some gain in efficiency, wouldn't there?

"If I have to, I'll talk to Victor about it," he said out loud. "I don't want to, but at least he's smart enough to realize why we have to keep this completely black. And if he has to sit on Armand to keep his mouth shut, he'll do it. But let's not borrow any more trouble than we have to. Hopefully, that's one fire we won't have to put out in the first place."

"Hopefully," Dusserre agreed just a bit sourly.

"At any rate, I'll talk to Guédon tomorrow. Like you, I don't see how Nicholas could have set it up without involving her. If it turns out she's not directly hands-on with it, then I'll get back to you and we'll have to see about reorganizing things. At least the timing doesn't seem to be absolutely critical. We can hit a few days off in either direction without making Ms. Anisimovna unhappy."

"Oh, by all means," Dusserre said, and this time his tone was sour enough to curdle milk, "let's not do anything to make Ms. Anisimovna unhappy!"

Captain Gabrielle Séguin did her best to look completely calm and poised as she tucked her uniform cap under her left arm and followed the youthful lieutenant into the chief of naval operations' private office. The fact that there'd been absolutely no warning of this meeting until the order to report to Admiral Guédon's office arrived approximately fifty-three standard minutes ago was not calculated to make Séguin confident. Admittedly, the light cruiser Camille was one of the New Tuscan Navy's most powerful and most modern units, and Séguin would probably be looking at her own rear admiral's star at the end of this commission. It wasn't as if she were some junior lieutenant being called into the captain's day cabin to be reamed a new one, she told herself.

No, a stubborn part of her replied, it's got the potential to be a lot worse than that, and you know it

.

That cheerful thought carried her through the door and through the ritual handshake of greeting. Then the lieutenant disappeared, and Séguin was alone with Guédon.

Guédon was an older woman, a first-generation prolong recipient whose once-dark hair had gone gunmetal gray and whose face had developed well-defined lines. But she was still a tall, imposing figure, one who kept herself an excellent physical condition, and the stiff rings of golden braid on her uniform sleeves reached almost all the way from cuff to elbow.

"Sit down, Captain." Guédon's voice had a harsh edge, a slight rasp that wasn't exactly unpleasant but gave it a certain snap of command. Séguin had always wondered whether that was her natural voice or if she'd carefully cultivated that whiff of harshness.

"Thank you, Ma'am." Séguin obeyed the instruction, and Guédon came around to stand in front of her desk, folding her gold-braided arms in front of her while she leaned back against the edge of the desk.

"I realize you don't have a clue why I wanted to see you, Captain," Guédon said, coming to the point with all of her customary bluntness. "Well, I'm about to explain that to you. And when I'm finished, you're going to go back to your ship, and your ship is going to Pequod, and when you get to Pequod you're going to carry out a highly classified mission which the President and Cabinet have determined is vital to the interests and security of our star nation. You will not discuss this mission, its parameters, or its particulars, with anyone— ever— without my specific and personal authorization. You will not even think about this mission without my specific and personal authorization. But you will carry it out flawlessly, Captain, because, if you don't, there may not be a New Tuscany very much longer." Séguin felt herself turning into stone in the comfortable chair, and Guédon smiled thinly.

"Now that I presume I have your attention, Captain," she said, "here's what you're going to do . . ."

Chapter Thirty-Nine

"Yes, Ma'am? You wanted to see me?" Lieutenant Askew said just a bit nervously as he entered Commander Bourget's office aboard SLNS Jean Bart .

"Yes, Matt, I do," Bourget said, leaning back in her chair. The commander was a petite brunette, with hazel eyes and what would have been called a "pug nose" on someone of less towering authority than the executive officer of one of the Solarian League's battlecruisers. As a general rule, Askew liked Bourget, who reminded him rather strongly of one of his favorite grammar school teachers, but the summons to her office had been as unexpected as it had been abrupt.

"You may recall a conversation you had with Commander Zeiss a couple of months ago," the XO said now in a straight-to-the-point tone which set all of Askew's mental hackles quivering.

"Yes, Ma'am. I do," he confirmed cautiously when she paused and cocked an expectant eyebrow at him.

"Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't she say something to you about 'lying low'?"

"Well, yes, Ma'am, but—"

"But me no buts, Lieutenant Askew," Bourget interrupted in a rather colder tone. "I thought Commander Zeiss had made herself quite clear at that time. And I suppose I should add that she did so at my specific instructions, on behalf of the captain."

"Yes, Ma'am. But—"

"When I want to hear interruptions, Lieutenant, I'll let you know," Bourget said flatly, and Askew closed his mouth.

"Better," the exec said with a frosty smile. She swung her chair gently from side to side for several seconds, regarding him with cold hazel eyes, then drew a deep breath.

"In case you haven't already figured it out," she said, "I'm more than just a little bit pissed with you at this particular moment. Damn it, Matt—what did you think you were doing ?" This time, despite the fact that it was obviously a question, Askew found himself much more hesitant about replying. Unfortunately, he didn't have much choice.

"Ma'am, I didn't mean to make any waves. It's just that . . . just that I haven't been able to turn my brain off, and the more I looked at Thurgood's analysis, and the more I've looked at our own intelligence reports, the more convinced I am that we've well and truly underestimated the Manties' capabilities."

"It may surprise you to discover this," Bourget voice was somewhat gentler yet still carried an unmistakable note of asperity, "but the captain and I already entertain some modest suspicions in that direction ourselves. Suspicions which, unlike certain lieutenants I might name, we've kept rather quietly to ourselves."

Askew started to open his mouth again quickly. Then he stopped, and his momentary flash of anger dissipated as he looked into Bourget's eyes.

"I didn't know that, Ma'am," he said more quietly after a moment.

"No," Boucher sighed. "No, I don't suppose you did. And I guess that's my fault. For that matter, it's probably the reason I'm so pissed at you. People tend to be that way when someone else makes a mistake because they didn't warn her not to." She rubbed her forehead. "I should've called you in for a heart-to-heart myself instead of delegating it to Ursula. But, to be completely honest about it, given that we didn't—and still don't—know exactly how your original report came into Aberu's hands in the first place, I figured having her handle it as a purely intradepartmental matter might keep the entire conversation below Aberu's radar. Not drawing any more attention to you seemed like a good idea. And, frankly, so did distancing myself and the captain from any appearance of . . . over enthusiastically endorsing your conclusions."

Askew nodded slowly. He found himself wishing rather passionately that the exec had been willing to explain the situation to him more aggressively from the outset, but he understood her logic. It was the sort of convoluted thinking that too often turned out to be the price of survival in the SLN's Byzantine internal maneuvering.

"Now, however," Boucher continued a bit more briskly, "you appear to have well and truly loomed above the radar horizon, Matt. Apparently your latest literary effort got squeezed right through the same rathole—whatever it is—into Aberu's in-basket. And if she was less than amused with your first memo, that was nothing compared to the way she reacted to this one." Askew swallowed. He'd taken every precaution he could, short of writing the entire report in longhand on old-fashioned paper and hand-delivering it to the captain, to keep it secure. Obviously, he'd failed. That suggested among other things that it had to be some sort of unauthorized, illegal hack from someone on Admiral Byng's staff. It couldn't have come to them through what the ONI sorts called a "human intelligence source," since he hadn't opened his mouth and verbally discussed his conclusions and concerns with a solitary living soul. The only question that remained in Askew's mind was whether the hacker in question had penetrated only his own security or that of his report's single addressee: Captain Mizawa.

"Ma'am," he said finally, "I'm not going to pretend I'm happy hearing about any of this. Just between the two of us, I'm especially concerned about how Captain Aberu got access to a confidential report addressed solely to the captain."

Even here, in Bourget's office, with no other human ear actually present, that was as close as he cared to come to suggesting that someone on Byng's staff had actually violated half a dozen regulations and at least two federal laws to acquire that "access." The two of them looked into one another's eyes for a second or two, sharing the same thought, before he went on.

"Having said that, however, I wrote that memo for two reasons. One was because I really had collected some additional evidence in support of Commodore Thurgood's analysis and wanted to make the captain aware of it. But the second was expressly to give him something he could use in any discussions with Admiral Byng and his staff." He held Bourget's eyes unflinchingly. "Something he could throw out as a worst-case set of assumptions from a junior officer too inexperienced to realize how absurd they were . . . who might still have managed to stumble across something that needed to be considered."

"I thought that was probably what you had in mind," Bourget said softly, and those hhard hazel eyes warmed with approval.

"Don't get me wrong, Ma'am." Askew produced a tight smile. "If the captain didn't think he needed it, I hoped to hell that no one else—especially Captain Aberu—would ever even see it! I just wanted him to . . . have that warhead in his ammo locker if he did need it."

"I appreciate that, Matt. And so does the captain. But I'm very much afraid that it's actually had something of the reverse effect."

"Ma'am?" Askew twitched in surprise, and Bourget's eyes hardened once more—though not at him, this time—and she snorted harshly.

"However Aberu got hold of it, and whether Admiral Byng ever saw your initial memo or not, she sure as hell showed this one to him. I'm not absolutely positive about this, and under normal circumstances I wouldn't even be suggesting the possibility to you, for a lot of reasons, but I'm inclined to think at this point that Aberu deliberately chose her moment carefully for sharing it with the admiral." Askew's eyes widened, and the exec shook her head. "As I say, normally I wouldn't even suggest such a thing to you. In this case, though, to be honest, the shit you're in is deep enough that I think you need to know exactly who the players are and what they may be up to."

"Ma'am, it sounds to me like we're getting into things here that are way above my pay grade," Askew said nervously, and Bourget's laugh was even harsher than her snort had been.

"I'll keep it simple. Ingeborg Aberu and Admiral Thimár both have close personal and family links to . . . various industrial interests in the defense sector, shall we say? Both of them have spent their entire careers in the tactical track, and both of them have established firm reputations—in Battle Fleet, at least—as being on the cutting edge. Admiral Thimár, in particular, was one of the senior staffers when the Navy Ministry put together the 'Fleet 2000' initiative. As a matter of fact, she was the lead author on the final report."

Askew couldn't quite keep himself from grimacing at that. The Fleet 2000 Program had been the brainchild of Battle Fleet, although it had since spread and found adherents in Frontier Fleet, as well. Essentially, it combined good, old-fashioned pro-Navy propaganda with a more-or-less hardware response to some of the more extreme rumors coming out of the Manticore-Haven wars. Funding within the gargantuan Solarian League was far more a bureaucratic than a legislative function, and had been for centuries. Nonetheless, public opinion often played a not insignificant role in deciding how funds were split up between competing bureaucracies, and so Fleet 2000 had been initiated. At its most basic level, it could arguably have been described as a "public education" effort designed to inform a largely ignorant Solarian public about the valuable services the Navy provided as humanity entered the twentieth century of interstellar flight. As such, it had included HD features on "Our Fighting Navy" and

"The Men and Women of the Fleet," both of which had focused primarily on Battle Fleet, which had then been plastered across the entertainment channels.

Frontier Fleet hadn't had any objection to the notion of additional funding going to the Navy, but it had objected—strenuously—to the notion of that funding going to the white elephants of Battle Fleet's superdreadnoughts rather than Frontier Fleet battlecruisers, or even destroyers , which might actually do something useful. As a consequence, Frontier Fleet's Public Information Office had gotten into the act, as well, producing such features as "On the Frontiers of Freedom" and "First to Respond."

"First to Respond" had been particularly effective, concentrating as it did on the many instances of disaster relief, deep-space rescue, and other humanitarian missions Frontier Fleet routinely carried out. The other prong of "Fleet 2000," however, had been a deliberate effort to impress the public with the value—and effectiveness—it was receiving in response to its lavish funding. As a tactical officer himself, Askew had looked askance (to put it mildly) at that aspect of the program. Oh, there'd been some genuine advances, and some recognition of shifting threat levels where things like missiles were concerned, but nowhere near as much of it as the PIO releases suggested. In fact, a much greater degree of effort had been invested in what amounted to window dressing with the express purpose of making the Navy's ships and their equipment look even more impressive on HD.

Consoles had been redesigned, bridges and command decks had been rearranged, and the parts of the ships the public was ever likely to see had been generally opened up so that they looked more like something out of an HD adventure flick than a real warship. There'd actually been some improvements along the way—for example, those sleek new consoles not only looked "sexier" but actually provided better information and control interfaces. And although nothing much had been done to actually upgrade most of the fleet's tactical hardware, more recent construction had been redesigned to reflect a modular concept. It would appear that someone was at least willing to admit the possibility that improvements and upgrades might be forthcoming—someday—and the Office of Ship Design had been instructed to design for the possibility of plugging in new components. That was one of the major differences between the older Indefatigable -class ships and the newer Nevadas , like Jean Bart . Yet despite the impression which had been deliberately created for the Solarian public, and despite all the money which had been spent in pursuit of Fleet 2000, very little in the way of actually improving the SLN's combat power had been achieved. After all, the Solarian Navy was already the most powerful and advanced fleet in space, wasn't it?

To be fair, Askew had partaken of that same confidence in the SLN's qualitative edge until very recently. Now, however, he'd been forced to confront the mounting evidence that his confidence—and everyone else's—had been misplaced. Which meant that whether or not anyone had intended them as such, the Fleet 2000 public relations claims amounted to . . . untruths. In fact, if it turned out Askew's fears were justified and it really did hit the fan out here, the public was going to see them as outright lies. And if Aberu and Thimár had direct family connections to the people who'd put the entire program together . . .

"Obviously, I can't be sure about this," Bourget said now, "but I don't think I'd be particularly surprised to discover that Captain Aberu and Admiral Thimár both had . . . vested interests in quashing any

'panicky fears' about 'impossible Manticoran super weapons,' especially if those 'panicky fears' suggest that our hardware might really need some minor improvements. And if that's the case, they wouldn't be very happy to have anyone rocking their boat."

Askew nodded more than a bit sickly, and she gave him a sympathetic smile.

"Captain Mizawa never meant to put you into a possible crossfire, Matt. That initial report he asked you for was something he needed —needed for his own information—mainly because he'd already figured out that ONI's official reports on what the hell was going on out here were crap. He trusts your judgment and your integrity, and I think he figured you were junior enough no one would notice what you were up to if he sent you out to talk to people like Thurgood. And I know he didn't expect your memo to fall into Aberu's hands any more than I did.

"I also think her initial 'discussion' with the captain was her own idea. Or, possibly, hers and Thimár's. But when she got her hands on your second effort—which, let's face it, really does sound a lot more

'alarmist' than your first memo did—I think she picked a moment when Admiral Byng was already feeling . . . frustrated over the delay in getting the task force reconcentrated here at Meyers and shared it with him."

The bottom seemed to fall straight out of Maitland Askew's stomach. He stared at Bourget, and she nodded slowly.

"That's right. This time around, the admiral—through Admiral Thimár, not Captain Aberu—has expressed his personal displeasure with your 'obvious defeatism, credulity, panic-mongering, and at best marginal competence.' "

She said it quickly, a numb part of Askew's brain noted, with a sort of surgical brutality that was its own kindness.

"He also stated—through Admiral Thimár," Bourget continued with obvious distaste "—that since the

'defeatist officer' in question was a Frontier Fleet officer, rather than a Battle Fleet officer, he would leave the 'suitable disposition' of your case in Captain Mizawa's hands. There wasn't much doubt from the way Admiral Thimár delivered his message about what he had in mind, however." Askew only looked at her. It was all he could do as he felt the total destruction of his career rushing towards him.

"Aside from the personal repercussions in your own case," Bourget said, "it's pretty obvious where Admiral Byng has decided to come down on the question of Manticoran capabilities. And, unfortunately, your second memo—which, by the way, both the captain and I feel was very cogently reasoned—is now irrevocably tainted in his eyes. In fact, if the captain tries to dispute Aberu's or Thimár's views, Admiral Byng will probably automatically reject anything he says because, as far as he's concerned, it's going to be coming from your report and just thinking about it is going to piss him off all over again. From what we've already seen of him, it's pretty apparent that when his temper is engaged, it tends to disengage his brain, and that's what's going to happen any time he even suspects the captain is waving your report in his direction. Which, unless I am considerably mistaken, is exactly what Aberu and Thimár had in mind."

"Ma'am, I'm sorry ," Askew half-whispered. "I was trying to help . I never thought that—"

"Matt, neither Captain Mizawa nor I think that you're anything other than an intelligent, talented, conscientious young officer doing his dead level best to do his duty under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. If either of us has any personal regrets, it's that we inadvertently stranded you in the middle of this minefield."

Askew closed his mouth again and nodded once more, hoping he didn't look as sick as he felt.

"I've explained all of this to you for a specific reason," Bourget told him. "Normally, I would never have suggested to an officer of your relatively junior status that I cherished suspicions about Captain Aberu's and Admiral Thimár's motives. Nor, for that matter, would I have discussed with you the . . . shortcomings of Admiral Byng's own attitude towards Frontier Fleet or Manticoran capabilities. In this instance, however, you need to be aware of the fact that you've potentially made some very highly placed, and probably highly vindictive, enemies. I can't begin to estimate all of the potential professional repercussions, and I wish there were some way to deflect them from you if any of those three decide to make 'punishing' you a personal project. But at least now you know.

"That wasn't my main reason for explaining it to you at such length, though. What I especially want you to understand, Matt, is why Captain Mizawa has taken the action he's taken in regard to you."

"What . . . what action, Ma'am?" Askew managed to ask.

"You are relieved as Jean Bart 's assistant tactical officer, effective immediately," Bourget said flatly.

"Your new assignment will be as Admiral Sigbee's assistant public information officer aboard Restitution

."

Askew felt as if he'd just been punched in the gut, and his face tightened painfully.

"Let me finish before you say anything," Bourget said quickly, holding up her index finger. Her eyes met his, and after a moment, he managed to nod yet again.

"I realize exactly how this looks to you at this moment," the exec continued then in a quietly compassionate voice. "Hopefully, it will also look like that to Aberu and Thimár—and, for that matter, Admiral Byng. As far as they'll be concerned, Captain Mizawa got the message and shit-canned your entire career. And getting you aboard Restitution will also get you out of Jean Bart and hopefully out of their field of vision, as well.

"In this case, however, appearances are a little deceiving. First, Admiral Sigbee is an old friend of the captain's. He's discussed this situation with her—I don't know in exactly how much detail—and she's agreed to make a place on her staff for you, despite the potential for pissing off Admiral Byng. Second, whatever Aberu and Thimár may conclude, the captain—and I, and Commander Zeiss—will all be endorsing your efficiency report in the most positive terms. Third, there's been no official communication between Admiral Byng or any member of his staff and Captain Mizawa about the admiral's concerns about your 'defeatism.' Because of that, no mention of it will appear in your file." She paused at last, and Askew inhaled deeply.

He understood what Captain Mizawa was trying to do, and he deeply, deeply appreciated it—especially considering the distinct possibility that if Admiral Byng or his staffers did decide to personally oversee the

"shit-canning" of his career, they, too, would recognize what the captain was up to. But it wasn't going to be pleasant, whatever happened. When the number two officer in a battlecruiser's tactical department suddenly found himself assigned as an assistant public information officer, people were going to assume—usually with reason—that he had royally screwed up somehow. The efficiency reports from Captain Mizawa and Commander Bourget would probably counter that assumption in front of some theoretical future promotions board, but they weren't going to do a thing about how his new shipmates were going to regard him when he arrived aboard Restitution . Nor was there any assurance that Aberu and/or the others, would be prepared to settle for his obvious current disgrace. Which didn't mean it wasn't absolutely the best Captain Mizawa could do for him.

"I . . . understand, Ma'am," he said finally, very quietly. "Thank you. And please thank the captain for me, too."

"I will, of course," she replied. "Not that there's any need to. The only thing I regret—and I'm sure I speak for the captain, as well—is that you got caught up in all this crap and that this is the best we can do to protect you from the consequences of doing your job." She shook her head. "I know it doesn't seem that way at the moment, but sometimes, the good guys really do win, Matt. Try to remember that."

Lieutenant Commander Denton frowned unhappily as he contemplated the events of the last couple of days.

He appreciated Admiral Khumalo's official approval of his actions here in Pequod, but he hadn't needed the dispatches from the admiral and Captain Shoupe to warn him to watch his back. In fact, there were more dispatches from him already en route to Spindle, with the details of fresh confrontations with New Tuscan skippers. Now the New Tuscan trade attaché was getting into the mix, as well, registering "formal protests" over the "increasing high-handedness" of HMS Reprise and her personnel. And, to make things even worse, there were being genuine incidents and confrontations now. The New Tuscans were being increasingly sullen, insulting, and rude during routine inspections and ship visits, and even their non-officers were starting to push the limits. Denton suspected that a lot of what they were seeing out of the regular spacers was the result of their having been fed stories about Manty insults and bullying aboard other ships by their own officers. By now, most of them seemed to believe all of those alleged incidents had actually occurred, and none of them were in particularly conciliating moods. Which meant—since Denton and his people had jobs to do—that every New Tuscan ship was a smouldering powder keg just waiting for a spark, and there'd been some genuinely ugly confrontations as a result. His people were trying hard to avoid pumping any hydrogen into the fire . . . for all the good it seemed to be doing. The entire ship's company knew about the stream of complaints and protests by now, but they still had their duties to discharge. And, like their captain, they'd come to the conclusion that all of this had to be orchestrated by some central authority and that it had to be headed towards some specific climax. And, once again like their captain, every damned one of them wished he or she had some clue— any clue—what that climax might be . . . and how it might be avoided.

Unfortunately, no one had been able to come up with that clue.

Oh, how I wish the admiral would hurry up and get someone senior out here, Denton thought fervently. I don't care if it would be an escalation. I'm delighted that everyone is so damned pleased with how well I've done so far, but I'm getting awful tired of waiting for that other shoe. And I'm damned certain that whenever it finally comes down, I'm gonna find myself ass-deep in a shitstorm that's way the hell and gone above my pay grade!

He knew why his nerves were even tighter than they had been, and his eyes slid across the tactical display to the data code of NTNS Camille. The New Tuscan light cruiser was about thirty percent larger than Reprise, and the NTN had a decent tech level for a Verge star system. It wasn't as good as the Rembrandt Navy, or the San Miguel Navy, perhaps, but it was two or three cuts above the average hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth, third-or fourth-tier "navies" one normally saw out in this neck of the woods.

Despite that, and despite the fact that Reprise was no spring treekitten, Denton wasn't at all intimidated by the larger ship's firepower. The truth, as he felt quite confident Camille's captain realized as well as he did, was that the cruiser wouldn't stand a chance against the smaller Manticoran destroyer. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as deciding who can blow who out of space, he reflected grimly. Camille had arrived in Pequod almost five local days ago, and Captain Séguin had immediately informed the Pequod system authorities that New Tuscany had decided it would be both useful and advisable to permanently station one of its warships in Pequod as a formal observer. It was not, she had hastened to assure everyone in sight, viewed or intended by New Tuscany as a hostile act or as an affront to Pequod's sovereignty. Indeed, it was New Tuscany's hope, as the formal notes she'd delivered on behalf of Foreign Minister Cardot and Prime Minister Vézien made clear, that having an official New Tuscan presence in the system would help to cool things down, rather than heat them up. Sure it was. Denton shook his head. If he hadn't been convinced all of the "incidents" New Tuscan merchant skippers were complaining about had been deliberately concocted on orders from their home government, he might have been willing to at least entertain the possibility that Séguin was telling the truth. Unhappily, he was convinced that if the New Tuscan government had been serious about bringing an end to the tension, all it really had to do was tell its captains to stop doing what it had them doing. Which meant Camille was obviously here for something else, and that "something else" wasn't going to turn out to be something Denton wanted to know anything about. That much, at least, he was sure he could count on.

His mouth twitched in a humorless smile as he watched Ensign Monahan's pinnace heading for another vessel. He tapped an inquiry into his plot, and his smile disappeared as the name NTNS Hélène Blondeau appeared.

Not another of those damned New Tuscan freighters ! he thought. Dammit, they must be cycling their entire frigging merchant marine through Pequod! Don't they have a single ship still in—

His thoughts broke off as the Hélène Blondeau's icon was abruptly replaced with the flashing crimson symbol that indicated a spreading sphere of wreckage, flying outward from the point in space at which a ship had just blown up.

"—so after completing my debrief of Ensign Monahan and each member of her crew separately, it is my conclusion that their reports—singly and as a group—are an accurate account of what actually happened during their approach to Hélène Blondeau," Lewis Denton told his terminal's recording pickup fourteen hours later.

His voice was more than a little hoarse, exhaustion-roughened around the edges, and he knew it, just as he knew the report he was recording would show his weary eyes and the dark, bruised-looking bags which had formed below them. There wasn't much he could do about that, though. He had to get this report off, and the sooner the better. It was the better part of seventeen days from Pequod to Spindle by dispatch boat, but it was less than six days from Pequod to New Tuscany. He didn't really think anyone in New Tuscany would be insane enough to launch some sort of punitive expedition against Reprise or Pequod, but he was nowhere near as confident of that as he would have liked to be. Not after the most recent episode.

"Despite Captain Séguin's assertions to the contrary, there is absolutely no evidence that Ensign Monahan or her pinnace played any part in Hélène Blondeau 's destruction," he continued. "I am, of course, appending Reprise's sensor and tactical recordings for the entire time period, beginning one full standard hour before Hélène Blondeau blew up and ending one full standard hour after the ship's destruction. I am also appending a copy of the pinnace's flight log and a complete inventory of my ship's magazines, which accounts for every small craft and shipboard missile issued to us. Based upon those records, I will state unequivocally and for the record that I am absolutely convinced no one aboard Ms. Monahan's pinnace or aboard Reprise fired a single shot of any sort or for any reason.

"Indeed, I must reiterate that I have been able to find no evidence anywhere in any of our records or sensor data that indicates any external cause for Hélène Blondeau's destruction. There is no indication of missile fire, energy fire, or collision. The only tentative conclusion I have been able to arrive at is that the ship and—apparently—her entire company were lost to an internal explosion. Neither I nor any of my officers, specifically including my engineering and tactical officers, have been able to suggest any normally occurring cause for such an explosion. The vessel was so completely destroyed that little short of a catastrophic and completely unanticipated failure of her fusion bottle would appear to be a remotely reasonable explanation. I find that explanation completely implausible, however, given the observed nature of the explosion. In fact, from the admittedly partial sensor data we have of the vessel's destruction and our analysis of the wreckage's scatter patterns, it appears to me and to my tactical officer that she was destroyed not by a single explosion, nor even by a single primary explosion and a series of secondary explosions, but rather as the result of a virtually simultaneous chain of at least seven distinct explosions."

He paused, his exhausted face gaunt and bleak, and his nostrils flared. Then he continued, speaking slowly and distinctly.

"I fully realize the seriousness of what I am about to say, and I very much hope that a more thorough and complete analysis of the limited data I have been able to include with this report will prove that my suspicions are in error. However, it is my considered opinion that the destruction of Hélène Blondeau was the result of a careful, skillfully planned, and well executed act of sabotage. I can think of no other explanation for the observed pattern of destruction. I am not prepared at this time in a formal report to speculate upon who might have been responsible for that act of sabotage. I am not a trained investigator, and I do not believe it would be proper for me to make any formal charges or allegations before a more detailed analysis can be performed. However, if, in fact, this was an act of sabotage, whoever may have been responsible for it clearly does not have the best interests of the Star Empire at heart. Given that Captain Séguin, Camille, and all other New Tuscan shipping in the system have been withdrawn, I believe the potential for some sort of additional and unfortunate incident is high. I must, therefore, respectfully request that this star system be promptly and strongly reinforced."

Chapter Forty

"They're gone."

Valery Ottweiler looked up from the report he'd been reading and quirked one eyebrow at the man standing in his office doorway. Damien Harahap, late of the Solarian League Gendarmerie, was an eminently forgettable-looking man—a quality of which had served him well during his time with his former employer—but Ottweiler had discovered that there was an extremely capable brain behind that unremarkable façade.

There was also someone who had an inordinate amount of good luck. Everything taken together, Harahap was extraordinarily fortunate to be alive, but Ottweiler knew he'd proved very useful to Aldona Anisimovna and Isabel Bardasano. Despite how spectacularly the Monica operation had crashed and burned, Harahap had performed his role in it almost flawlessly, and he'd been as ruthlessly honest in critiquing his own performance as he had when critiquing that of anyone else. He wasn't Mesan, but operatives of his professionalism and ability—and intelligence—were rare, and Bardasano, who had never had any prejudices against employing "outside talent" if it proved itself valuable and reliable, had hired him away from the Gendarmerie almost before the wreckage in Monica had finished glowing. The fact that Harahap knew where all the bodies in the Madras Sector were buried had suggested he might be of particular value to Ottweiler, which was how he'd come to be a member of Ottweiler's staff here in Meyers. Of course, there were a few downsides to having him openly working for Ottweiler here on the capital world of his old stomping grounds. In fact, Hongbo Junyan had looked just a little askance at the relationship, but Ottweiler had already demonstrated who was in charge in that particular relationship, and any objections the vice-commissioner might have cherished had remained unspoken.

"I take it you're referring to the departure of the intrepid Admiral Byng?" Ottweiler said now, and Harahap nodded.

"Just translated out for New Tuscany," he said.

"And about time, too," Ottweiler muttered. Harahap didn't seem to notice, which was fresh proof of both his intelligence and his discretion, Ottweiler thought. Then the Mesan inhaled deeply and shrugged.

"Thank you, Damien," he said.

"Is there anything else you need me to do this afternoon?" Harahap asked.

"No, thank you. Well, not here, anyway. But, on second thought, it would probably be a good idea if you went and hit your Gendarmerie contacts again. Try to get a read on how the Sollies see what's going on in New Tuscany."

"Not a problem," Harahap replied, then left, closing the door quietly behind him. Ottweiler gazed at that closed door for a moment, thinking of the man who had just passed through it and all he represented.

Damien Harahap had been one of the best field men the Solarian Gendarmerie had ever recruited and trained, but he'd never felt any intrinsic loyalty to the League. Born in the Verge himself, he'd managed to claw his way off of one of the planets Frontier Security had handed over to one of its multi-stellar corporate patrons to be squeezed and exploited. He'd done it by taking service with the very people who had stripped his home world of its freedom and its dignity, and Ottweiler suspected that that still ate at him at times. If so, it hadn't kept him from doing his job superlatively, but that stemmed more from his own pride of workmanship and refusal to perform at less than his best than from any vestige of devotion to his employers. He'd always seen himself—with good reason, in Ottweiler's opinion—much more as a foreign mercenary than as a citizen of the League.

And that was ultimately going to prove the Solarian League's Achilles' heel, Valery Ottweiler suspected. Too many of the people doing what had to be done to keep the machine up and running were like Damien Harahap. Skilled, capable, ambitious, often ruthless . . . and with no sense of loyalty to the League at all. They were simply playing the best game available to them, and if someone came along and offered to change the rules . . .

Ottweiler looked back at the report he'd been reading, but he didn't really see it. His mind was too busy with other things.

He was glad Byng had finally gotten underway, even if it had taken almost an entire T-month. That was longer than his instructions had specified as the maximum acceptable interval, but only by a day or two. Unless the people who'd written those instructions were far stupider than Ottweiler expected, they would have allowed for some slippage even in their "maximum acceptable" timing delays. And whether they had or not, it was the best Ottweiler had been able to do without coming a lot further into the open and squeezing Lorcan Verrochio a lot harder—and a lot more obviously—than his instructions from Isabel Bardasano permitted.

And he was also relieved that Byng had, indeed, settled for taking only two of his three battlecruiser squadrons with him.

He tipped back in his chair, lips pursed while he whistled tunelessly. He wasn't supposed to know what was really going on. That much was obvious from the way his instructions had been written, the way Bardasano's directives had been phrased. But, like Damien Harahap, it was Valery Ottweiler's intelligence which made him so useful to his own employers. And that intelligence had been suggesting things lately which he had been very careful to keep discreetly to himself. Things which had given added point to his thoughts about the fundamental loyalty of people like Harahap. And his own.

Nobody had told him exactly what was supposed to happen in New Tuscany, but it didn't take a hyper physicist to figure out that it wasn't what the New Tuscans— or Admiral Byng—were expecting to happen. Especially after what had happened in Monica, and what that had demonstrated about Manticoran military capabilities, the only possibility Ottweiler could see was that someone wanted to reprise the Battle of Monica, but with Josef Byng in the role of the Monican Navy. No one as smart as Isabel Bardasano or Aldona Anisimovna could expect any other outcome, which meant that was the one they wanted. Which led inevitably to the question of why they wanted it. Ottweiler had asked himself that very question, and as he'd pondered it, a very disturbing thought had come to him. One which made him look at the actions of someone like Governor Barregos in the Maya Sector quite differently. One which made him wonder how someone as bright as he was could have missed the signs he saw so clearly now.

Which made him consider exactly what it was to which he'd truly given his own loyalty all these years and how much further it might turn out that the ambitions of his own employers extended than he'd ever guessed before.

And one which made him wonder how the Solarian League was going to react when it discovered the true disadvantage to hiring mercenaries to protect its life.

"You know, Father, when you first came up this brainstorm of yours, I actually found myself wondering about your contact with reality. In fact, I started to say just that, actually. But now . . . " Benjamin Detweiler shook his head as he stood beside his father in the salon of a luxuriously furnished private yacht, gazing at the needle-sharp view screen.

"Really?" Albrecht gave his son a humorous glance. "Changed your mind, did you? You do remember that one of your responsibilities is to warn me if you think I'm going off the deep end, don't you?"

"Oh, certainly." Benjamin chuckled. "The problem is that no one else really knows all of the labyrinthine—not to say Machiavellian—details rolling around inside your brain. Sometimes it's sort of hard for those of us on the outside to tell the difference between strokes of genius and wild hairs."

"Your filial respect overwhelms me," Albrecht said dryly, and Benjamin chuckled again. Although, Albrecht reflected, there was at least a tiny kernel of truth buried in his son's comments. There usually was, where Benjamin was concerned. Out of all of his "sons," Benjamin probably was the most likely to tell him if he thought he was going off at a dangerous tangent.

Probably because Benjamin's the most like me, when you come right down to it, Albrecht thought. Which is why I picked him to run the military side of things, after all. And —Albrecht's eyes refocused on the view screen— so far, he's done us all proud. Well, he and Daniel and Daniel's little shop of wonders.

Truth to tell, the view screen's images weren't all that exciting . . . unless, of course, one realized what one was seeing. There was no pressing need for Albrecht to be out here aboard Benjamin's yacht, watching it from such short range, either. He could have viewed exactly the same imagery from the security of his own office. But Albrecht did realize what he was seeing, and six hundred T-years of planning and effort, of sweat and toil, of enormous investment and even more enormous patience on the part of entire generations who couldn't be here with him, were rumbling through the marrow of his bones as he watched. He couldn't possibly have stayed away. He needed to be as physically close to the units of Oyster Bay as he could possibly be, and if that was illogical, he didn't really much care. He watched the stupendous freighters getting underway. They weren't the largest freighters in the galaxy, by any stretch of the imagination, but they were still big, solid ships, all of them of at least four million tons, and they'd been carefully modified for their current role. Their cargo doors were considerably larger than usual, and the cargo holds behind those doors had been configured to provide secure nests for the roughly frigate-sized Ghost-class scout ships they concealed.

They were something entirely new in the annals of interstellar warfare, those scout ships, and he wished they had more of them—hundreds of them. But they didn't. Their total inventory of the new spider-drive ships was extremely limited, and he'd committed virtually all of them to this operation. If they'd only had a few more months—another T-year or two—to prepare, he would have been much happier. But we've got enough of them for this, he told himself almost fiercely, and let his eyes sweep across to the other half of Oyster Bay.

The Shark -class strike ships were much larger than Commodore Østby's and Commodore Sung's scouts. Any pod-layer had to be, although these were still essentially prototype units in many ways, and they had only twenty-eight of them, divided between Admiral Topolev's Task Force One and Admiral Colenso's much smaller Task Force Two. Substantially larger units with far more magazine space were on the drawing board, designs based in no small part on the experience Benjamin and his crews had acquired working with the ships currently under Topolev's and Colenso's command. Some of those larger units were already entering the first phases of construction, for that matter. And, again, Albrecht wished they'd been able to wait until those larger ships were available in greater numbers. But the key to everything was timing, and the two admirals had enough combat power for their assigned mission. Albrecht wasn't the military specialist Benjamin was, but even he could tell the Sharks looked subtly wrong. They were too far away for the naked eye to see, but the view screen's magnification brought them to what seemed like arm's-length and made it obvious that all of them lacked the traditional

"hammerhead" design of a military starship. Indeed, the lines of their hulls were all wrong, in one way or another, as if their designers had been working to a completely different set of constraints from anyone else in the galaxy.

Which was precisely what they had been doing.

The strike ships turned slowly, and then, as one unit, they went loping away into the trackless depths of space. And that, too, was wrong. The light-warping power of a starship's impeller drive made the ship within it impossible to see, except from exactly the right angle. But there was no gravitic distortion around these ships, nothing to bend and blur light waves, because they didn't use impeller wedges. And isn't that going to come as a nasty surprise for the Manties and their friends? Albrecht thought fiercely.

He watched for several more moments, then shook himself and inhaled deeply.

"Well," he said, "that's that. I'm proud of you, Ben." He reached out to squeeze his son's shoulder. "I sometimes think I forget to tell you—and the other boys, for that matter—that as often as I ought to, but it's true. I know how much pressure I put on you when I decided to move Oyster Bay up this way. But I also knew that if anyone could get it organized and moving in that time frame, you were the one."

"Flattery will get you everywhere, Father," Benjamin said with a grin, but Albrecht could tell that his son recognized the sincerity behind his words. He gave the shoulder under his hand another squeeze, then shook his head.

"And now, I'd better get back to the house. I'm sure something else has crawled out of my in-basket while I was away, and your mom has something special planned for dinner tonight. She didn't tell me what, and I didn't ask. Sometimes I am a little afraid to ask her, actually. I'd hate to think she was getting her cookbooks mixed up with her lab notebooks!"

This time, Benjamin laughed out loud. Evelina Detweiler was one of the Mesan Alignment's top biosciences researchers, with a special expertise in bioweapons, working closely with Benjamin's brother Everett and Renzo Kyprianou. And unlike her husband, who was always sharply focused on the task in hand, Evelina was all too often the epitome of the "absent minded professor."

"Whatever it is she's planning on feeding me, though, you'd better be there too," Albrecht said now, glaring at the laughing Benjamin. "It's a special dinner to celebrate launching Oyster Bay, and I understand it's going to include seafood, somehow or other. So be there. Nineteen-thirty sharp—and no excuses, young man!"

"Yes, Sir," Benjamin said meekly.

"Well," Augustus Khumalo said gloomily, "I could wish we'd been wrong at least this once."

"If it makes you feel better to be wrong, Augustus," Baroness Medusa said with a crooked smile, "don't get too worried. I'm sure we'll be able to make enough mistakes to satisfy you while we try to figure out what to do about it!"

"I know what I'd like to do about it," Henri Krietzmann muttered just loud enough to be heard, and Joachim Alquezar gave him a reproving glance.

"While direct action has a certain primitive appeal, especially at moments like this, it isn't always the best course of action, Henri. Besides, there's a little thing called the Eridani Edict to worry about, so a nice saturation kinetic bombardment of New Tuscany is probably out of the question."

"Spoken like a true effete aristocrat," Krietzmann shot back with a twinkle, despite the tension of the moment, and Alquezar chuckled. But his momentary humor disappeared quickly, and he shook his head and looked at Medusa.

"I have to admit that I'm at a loss to even suggest what it is this was supposed to accomplish," he said, running one fingertip across the hardcopy printout of the diplomatic note lying on the conference table in front of him beside his copy of Commander Denton's report.

"I think at least part of it is fairly obvious, Mr. Prime Minister," Gregor O'Shaughnessy said. "I realize New Tuscany is actually five days closer to Spindle than Pequod is, but the fact that Vézien's nastygram got here less than twenty-four hours after Commander Denton's report still says quite a lot. Even if this Captain Séguin let the merchies make the trip on their own and went ahead of them in her light cruiser, she still burned the better part of five and a half days just getting home to New Tuscany. Which means they conducted this entire 'investigation' of Vézien's, discussed how to respond, and got his damned note off to us in less than one T-day. How many governments do you know of that could have done that from a standing start?"

"None," Alquezar said grimly. "Or not at least if there really was any sort of an investigation involved."

"I think we can take it as a given that there was no need for any investigations," Michelle Henke put in from her place to Khumalo's right, and her husky contralto was far grimmer than usual. Medusa glanced at her, and the baroness didn't exactly like what she saw. Michelle had been back in Spindle for less than a T-month, and it was obvious to Medusa that the horrendous casualties the Navy had suffered in the Battle of Manticore had hit her especially hard.

Well, of course they did! Medusa scolded herself. How many of those people did she know personally? How many close friends were killed? And even leaving all of that out of the equation, she's an officer in the Queen's Navy. The Navy that was supposed to keep anyone from ever doing something like that to the home system .

And even if none of the rest of that had been true, the baroness reflected, Michelle Henke was Tenth Fleet's commanding officer. That organization had been officially activated following the arrival of Aivars Terekhov— Sir Aivars Terekhov, she reminded herself—and his cruiser squadron at Spindle, and as Tenth Fleet's CO, Vice Admiral Gold Peak was only too well aware of how the savage losses the Royal Manticoran Navy had suffered were going to affect force availability here in Talbott, as well. It was entirely possible—indeed, almost inevitable—that many of the ships she'd been scheduled to receive were going to be delayed or even permanently diverted to other duties as the Admiralty tried frantically to fill all the holes the Battle of Manticore had blasted into its order of battle. All of which made the timing on the New Tuscans' little operation, whatever it was, even more . . . inconvenient.

"It's almost like they already knew about what happened in Manticore, isn't it?" Terekhov mused out loud, like an eerie echo of Medusa's thoughts. He sat in a comfortable armchair at one corner of her desk, the new, blue-and-white ribbon of the POV heading the "fruit salad" on the breast of his tunic.

"Let's not get carried away giving them credit for arcane powers, Aivars," Michelle said.

"Oh, I'm not, Ma'am." Terekhov smiled briefly. "It's just particularly frustrating to have this happening right now."

"Now that's what I'd call a masterful piece of understatement, Sir Aivars," Bernardus Van Dort put in wryly.

"Put it down to my years of Foreign Office experience," Terekhov replied. "But while you're doing that, those same years of Foreign Office experience are ringing all kinds of alarm bells over this one. As Gregor just pointed out, this whole thing stinks to high heaven. It's got 'Put-Up Job!' painted all over it in great big, glowing letters, and I don't like any of the reasons I've been able to come up with for why that is. You and Joachim know these people a lot better than I do, Bernardus. Are they stupid enough to think we wouldn't even notice the timing involved in their ability to get their note to us this damned quickly?"

"Well, obviously they were stupid enough to send Andrieaux Yvernau to the Constitutional Convention, which has to raise at least some questions, don't you think?" Van Dort pointed out. "If they really expected to get a constitution out of it, then that wasn't exactly what anyone would consider an inspired choice. But in answer to the question you're really asking, no, none of them—except probably Yvernau—is that stupid. They have to realize there's no way in the galaxy we're going to miss the timing on this. Which means they frankly don't care about that. The entire note isn't for our benefit at all; it's for someone else's."

"Exactly," Terekhov said, and his blue eyes swept the table for a moment before coming back to Joachim Alquezar and Baroness Medusa.

"It's Monica all over again," he said flatly. "I don't know exactly how all the pieces are supposed to fit together this time, but New Tuscany's the door knocker for someone else, exactly the same way Monica was. And as Bernardus says, the way these incidents are being stage-managed is for someone else. Does anyone in this room doubt who that someone else is?"

"Of course it's the Sollies, Commodore," Alquezar said. "Whatever else they have in mind, the New Tuscans are obviously planning on calling in some 'impartial outside power' to . . . mediate in the crisis which the Star Empire has clearly provoked for sinister reasons of its own."

"I'm beginning to wish now that we'd gone ahead and sent Chatterjee out to relieve Denton as soon as he got here with his Rolands ," Khumalo said frankly, running the fingers of his right hand through his hair in an uncharacteristic, harassed gesture.

"I don't think it would have made any difference, Sir," Terekhov said. Khumalo looked at him, and Terekhov raised one hand and made a little throwing away gesture with it.

"First of all, Sir, I don't see where you and Admiral Gold Peak had any choice but to freeze ship movements and deployments, at the very least until Admiral Gold Peak got back to Spindle, until you got a better feel for how what happened in Manticore is going to affect your force availabilities out here in the Quadrant. Even with the benefit of hindsight, I don't think any other decision was possible. But, secondly, whatever it is these people are up to, it's obvious they've been working to a detailed game plan from the very beginning. I really don't see them doing anything different just because Commodore Chatterjee was sitting there with half a dozen Rolands instead of Commander Denton with a single over-the-hill tin-can."

"Unless having half a dozen Rolands sitting there would have convinced them of the unwisdom of their actions," Michelle pointed out.

"With all due respect, Ma'am," Terekhov said, "if they can count to twenty without taking their shoes off, they already know the New Tuscan Navy in all its glory does not want to piss off the RMN. Putting more destroyers in Pequod wouldn't have changed any perceptions of the real balance of force in New Tuscany."

Michelle nodded slowly. He was right, of course, and the fact that he was only made her even happier to have him and his judgment back here in the Quadrant. Not that she felt particularly "happy" about anything else at the moment.

"All right." Medusa looked around the conference table as her quietly firm tone gathered up everyone else's attention. "What I'm hearing is a consensus that New Tuscany is acting as a front man for some party or parties unknown, although I suspect we could all put a name on at least one of the aforementioned parties if we really tried. And I think we're all also in agreement that at the moment they have the advantage of knowing what the hell it is they're trying to do while we don't have a clue. Unfortunately, I see no option but to respond rather firmly to what they've already done."

"I'd like to insert a word of caution, Milady," O'Shaughnessy said. She nodded for him to go on, and he continued. "I can't disagree with anything you've just said, but I think we need to bear in mind that responding forcefully may be exactly what they want us to do."

"It may be," Medusa agreed. "On the other hand, I see no other choice. We certainly can't ignore it, when their prime minister is sending us formal notes accusing one of our pinnaces of having deliberately fired upon and destroyed a New Tuscan merchant ship with all hands—and, by implication, accusing us of lying about it rather than admitting Commander Denton's responsibility. It's obvious from our analysis of the records that nothing of the sort happened, but nobody aside from us and the New Tuscans has any evidence to look at at all. Much as I hate it, that means this is going to be a battle for credibility, not something that can be resolved through the presentation of evidence in some sort of insterstellar court. And if that's the case, the last thing we can afford is to allow them to get their version of the facts established, unchallenged."

All of the naval officers at the table nodded soberly. They'd run the sensor data Commander Denton had sent along with his report through their tactical computers and simulators, and those computers and simulators had been far more capable than anything aboard Reprise . Unfortunately, there were still limits. As Denton had warned, there was less of that data than they could have wished. Reprise was a single destroyer whose sensor platforms had been keeping an eye on an entire star system. Nothing had warned her that she needed to be keeping a closer watch over Hélène Blondeau, and none of her platforms had been looking in the right direction at the right moment. What they had was almost entirely from her shipboard sensors, and they hadn't been focusing their attention on the New Tuscan merchant ship, either.

Despite all of those disadvantages, however, it had become glaringly evident to the analysts that Denton had been correct. Hélène Blondeau had been destroyed by an internal explosion. Or, to be more precise, the freighter had been destroyed by a single explosive event consisting of eight—not the seven Denton had identified—simultaneous detonations equidistantly spaced throughout her volume. It hadn't been a sequence of explosions spreading, however rapidly, from a single initial site, which would have been the case with almost any conceivable "natural" catastrophe . . . and would definitely have been the case if they had been the result of energy fire or a missile strike impacting on the hull. The only way that so many detonations could have occurred simultaneously throughout the volume of a ship that size was as the result of very carefully placed scuttling charges. There was no question in the analysts' minds; the New Tuscans had blown up their own ship.

"I'm not about to go to the newsies and hand them our analysis," Medusa continued. "I have every confidence that it's accurate, but saying 'They did it themselves' isn't going to play well with the 'faxes. It's the kind of 'He said; she said' defense that sounds weak at the best of times, especially when it's based on the disputed analysis of sketchy information or data. And, frankly, whoever thought this up obviously realizes how our diplomatic squabbles with Haven—which haven't gotten any better, now that we're accusing them of sabotaging the summit and they're denying they had anything to do with any assassination attempts—is going to make that particularly true in our case.

"Nonetheless, it's equally imperative that we clearly and unequivocally maintain that we were not in any way responsible for what happened. We can certainly provide our own sensor data, as well as the results of our own internal inquiry, to support our own innocence without necessarily making any allegations of guilt on anyone else's part. We need to do just that, to be sure our side of the story is presented as clearly and as forcefully as their version of events. And we also have to proceed in the way any innocent star nation acting in good faith would proceed. Which means we must respond directly to Vézien's note."

"In what way, Milady?" Alquezar asked.

"By presenting a note to them in reply. One which makes it very clear that we reject their accusations, and one which describes—in detail, using Commander Denton's recordings as corroboration of our description—what's really been going on in Pequod and demands an explanation for their increasingly provocative behavior."

"Are you thinking about sending it through normal diplomatic channels, Milady?" Michelle asked, and Medusa gave her a distinctly sharklike smile.

"They sent their official government dispatch boat all the way here to Spindle to make sure we got our mail, Admiral. The least we can do is to make sure they get our reply equally promptly. I think Amandine Corvisart would make an excellent representative, and I think Commodore Chatterjee would make an impressive postman."

"That could be viewed as a provocative action, Milady," O'Shaughnessy pointed out. Medusa looked at him, and he shrugged. "They sent a single unarmed dispatch boat. If we send an entire destroyer squadron, or even a single destroyer division, to deliver our response, it could easily be construed as some sort of 'gunboat diplomacy.' "

"A threat that they'd better shut up if they don't want us to blow their miserable little star system to pieces around their ears, Mr. O'Shaughnessy?" Khumalo said just a touch frostily. "Is that what you mean?"

"As a matter of fact, yes, Admiral," O'Shaughnessy replied unflinchingly. "I'm not slamming the Navy when I say that, either. As a matter of fact, I think gunboats or the occasional cruiser—or even the occasional battlecruiser squadron," he added, smiling crookedly at Michelle "—are legitimate diplomatic tools. I'm simply pointing out that in this particular case, we're looking at someone who's already obviously trying to provoke us. Someone who's presenting the destruction of one of their freighters as a consequence of our actions. If we appear to be overtly threatening them, we could be playing into their hands."

"I considered that, Gregor," Medusa said before Khumalo could respond, "and you may well have a point. On the other hand, I think this is one of those occasions when a small show of force is indicated. I'm sure Commodore Chatterjee will be professional and nonconfrontational, and I know Amandine will be firm without descending into overt threats. But there's no way we or any other genuine interstellar power wouldn't accompany the delivery of this sort of note with at least a modest show of force. However we choose to phrase it, we're accusing them of deliberately provoking an incident between our star nations, and if they seriously claim we destroyed their freighter and killed its entire crew, they're accusing us of an overt act of war against New Tuscany. If we don't respond with enough force to warn them there's a line they'd better not cross, then we're stepping outside those normal—and accepted—parameters of a major power's response in a case like this."

"And if their 'game plan,' as Commodore Terekhov described it, was designed on the assumption that we'd react within those normal and accepted parameters, Milady?"

"I can't read their minds, Gregor," the imperial governor said. "So if I'm not simply going to sit here and let myself be paralyzed by double-think and triple-think, I'm just going to have to do the best we can. And as long as we're operating within those normal and accepted parameters, without waving great big clubs around, on the one hand, or letting ourselves look like we're running scared, on the other, we'll be in the best position we can be in if and when this thing finally goes to the court of public opinion. That may not be much, but to be brutally honest, it's about the best we can do. If they're determined to go on pushing this, we can't stop them. And if it comes to some kind of genuine violent incident as a result, then it's going to come to some kind of violent incident, and we'd best all accept that now. In the meantime, we'll conduct ourselves as a civilized star nation dealing with a preposterous allegation. It certainly can't hurt anything, and, who knows, it might even help."

"I think you're right, Milady," Michelle said, and her expression hardened. "I don't want any kind of

'violent incident' with New Tuscany, and God knows the last thing we need is some sort of replay of Monica!" She quirked a taut smile at Terekhov and Khumalo. "I think the two of you did remarkably well at Monica—don't get me wrong about that. But I think all of us also know how ugly things would have gotten if a Frontier Fleet task force had come translating into Monica with blood in its eye. That would have been bad enough before Haven hit the home system. Now, when we're so completely off-balance strategically, the term 'disastrous' comes to mind.

"Despite that, though, or maybe even because of it, I think we need to make it very clear to the New Tuscans that, as the governor says, there's a line they don't want to step over. It might not be a bad idea to remind them that no matter how badly a 'second Monica' might work out for us in the long term, it would work out one hell of a lot worse for them in the short term! And I think it's equally important that we make it clear to the Sollies that we intend to be the mistress of our own house. Let's not forget that all of these incidents they're accusing us of fomenting are taking place in Pequod, and Pequod is part of the Star Empire of Manticore, the last time I looked. They inserted one of their warships into sovereign Manticoran territory, and they're informing us of the conclusions of a New Tuscan court of inquiry held on events occurring in a Manticoran star system, and one at which none of our witnesses or investigators were even present. That's a clear infringement of our sovereignty, on several levels, and I don't believe we can let that stand. Especially if whoever is orchestrating this thing has Frontier Security lurking in the background."

"I think those are both very good points, Admiral," Medusa said. "Of course, that may be because they'd already occurred to me! At any rate, that's how I want to proceed. I'll leave it up to you and Admiral Khumalo to structure Commodore Chatterjee's orders. That's your area of expertise, not mine. I would like a briefing on his instructions before he departs for New Tuscany, however. In the meantime, I'll sit down with Amandine. I don't intend to be overtly confrontational in my note to Vézien, but I do I intend to make the point—firmly—that New Tuscany is dealing with the Star Empire of Manticore, not with the independent star system of Pequod, and not with some problematical political entity which may come into existence at some point in the future. He's dealing with something that already exists, and something he really, really doesn't want to turn into an overt enemy."

Chapter Forty-One

Abigail Hearns sat at her station on HMS Tristram 's bridge and concentrated on radiating a sense of calm. It wasn't easy.

Abigail had never put much faith in the notion of some sort of intuition or "second sight." Not where she was concerned, at least; she'd seen and heard enough about Steadholder Harrington not to discount it in the Steadholder's case. Some other officers she'd served with, like Captain Oversteegen, had seemed to possess something very like those reputed psychic powers, as well, but Abigail Hearns' psychic antennae had always been absolutely devoid of any sort of warning signals. Which was why she felt particularly nervous today, because something was definitely twisting her nerves into a solid, singing knot of tension. She didn't know why, couldn't have explained it to a soul, but it was true. And she wasn't the only one who felt it, either. She'd seen it in several of her fellow officers, both on the bridge and off it, and she knew all of them were trying to project the same calm she was . . . and wondering how well they were doing it.

She glanced away from her own displays for a moment, checking the master astrogation plot, and the internal tension she was working so hard to conceal ratcheted up another notch or two. It wouldn't be long now, she thought.

No, it won't, and thank the Intercessor we've had the extra time to drill, she told herself. I don't imagine I'm the only person aboard who wishes we'd gotten a handle on the situation with New Tuscany sooner, but I can't honestly say the time's been wasted.

Tristram's tactical department still wasn't as well-oiled and proficient as Hexapuma 's had been on the eve of the Battle of Monica, but it was immeasurably better than it had been. In fact, she thought it was as good as the Nasty Kitty's had been at Nuncio, and she felt a warm glow of solid accomplishment as she contemplated that improvement and knew it for her own handiwork. Yet there was also something else to keep that satisfied glow company; a dangerous something she'd seen in many of the better tactical officers she'd served with and had discovered lived deep inside her , as well. Abigail Hearns had killed enough people in her youthful existence to feel no pressing need to kill still more of them, and yet she could not deny that faint, predatory stirring. That awareness of the lethality of the weapon lying ready to her hand, like a steadholder's blade. She didn't actually want to use it, and yet . . . and yet . . . There's always that "yet," isn't there, Abigail? she thought, remembering a conversation in Nuncio with Ragnhild Pavletic. There's always that hunger to test yourself, to prove you're just that little bit better than the next person. Or—let's be honest here—than anyone else . She glanced at the captain's chair, where Naomi Kaplan sat looking even calmer than any of her subordinates. Unlike anyone else on Tristram 's bridge, however, Abigail had seen Commander Kaplan sitting in the tactical officer's chair. She'd seen Kaplan's pre-battle face before, and she knew what she was seeing now.

"Excuse me, Skipper," Lieutenant O'Reilly said. "We have a com request from the flagship. It's the commodore for you, Ma'am."

"Put it on my display, Wanda," Kaplan responded. There was an almost infinitesimal delay, and then she smiled down at her small private com screen.

"Good afternoon, Commodore. What can I do for you?"

Commodore Ray Chatterjee, commanding officer, Destroyer Squadron 301, smiled back at her from the flag bridge of his flagship, HMS Roland . His smile might have been a little more tense than hers, but, then again, he was responsible for all four ships of his first division (Captain Jacob Zavala and Chatterjee's second division had been sent straight to Pequod to relieve Reprise when Lieutenant Commander Denton returned to Spindle to give Admiral Khumalo and Admiral Gold Peak his firsthand impressions of the situation in Pequod), whereas Kaplan had to worry about only Tristram .

"I've been thinking, Naomi," the commodore said, "and while that's always a somewhat risky occupation in my case, I think I may have hit on something this time. Specifically, I've just as soon keep at least one or two of our cards tucked firmly up my sleeve. Just as a precaution, you know."

"Sir, given what's been going on in Pequod, I'd be in favor of keeping a pulser or two tucked firmly up our sleeves. And preferably one in each boot, as well!"

"Well, that might be a little overkill," Chatterjee observed mildly. "After all, this is supposed to be a diplomatic mission. But I've been going over everything we have on New Tuscany, and one thing that struck me is that they don't really have any deep-space sensor arrays worth mentioning." Kaplan nodded. Any moderately prosperous star nation—or, at least, any moderately prosperous star nation which was concerned about military shenanigans in its vicinity—maintained deep-space sensor arrays. In the case of a star system like Manticore, those arrays could be literally thousands of kilometers across, with an exquisite sensitivity capable of picking up things like hyper-footprints and often even impeller signatures light-months out from the system primary, vastly beyond the range possible for any shipboard sensor.

But New Tuscany wasn't "moderately prosperous" by Manticoran standards. In fact, despite its oligarchs' often lavish lifestyles, New Tuscany was little more than a pocket of wretched poverty by the Old Star Kingdom's meter stick, and it didn't have anything remotely like modern deep-space arrays.

"These people are the next best thing to blind outside the hyper limit," Chatterjee pointed out. "I won't say they couldn't possibly see anything beyond that range, but the odds wouldn't be very good for them, and their resolution has to suck once you get out beyond twenty or twenty-five light-minutes from the primary."

"That's about what I'd estimate, yes, Sir," Kaplan agreed, yet there was an almost wary note in her voice, and he smiled again, thinly, as he realized she'd already guessed where he was headed. Well, in that case he supposed he might as well go ahead and confirm her suspicion.

"What I intend to do," he continued, "is to shift our formation to close Tristram up a little closer behind Roland and see if we can't use her footprint to screen yours. We'll make our translation at twenty-two light-minutes—if they want to think our astrogation is shaky, that's all right with me, but that gives us an extra light-minute and a half to play with. As soon as we make our alpha translation, though, I want you to go to full stealth."

"Sir, with all due respect—"

" 'With all due respect yada-yada-yada,' " Chatterjee interrupted with something that was much closer to a grin. "How did I know you were going to say that?"

Kaplan clamped her jaw tightly, although the gleam in her eyes communicated her unspoken thought quite well.

"Better," Chatterjee approved. Then his expression sobered.

"I'm not coming up with this brainstorm just to make your life hard, Naomi, I assure you. The problem is that nobody has a clue what the New Tuscans think they're going to accomplish, but we do know they've been fabricating incidents. In fact, we know they're willing to blow up one of their own freighters—which I hope to hell didn't really have a crew on board at the time—and blame it on us. I don't think they would've done that unless they felt they'd been able to cobble up at least some sort of 'sensor data' to support their claims, and Commander Denton, unfortunately, wasn't able to give us really conclusive counter evidence.

"I'm inclined to doubt that they're going to try anything with three Manticoran destroyers sitting right here, watching them like hawks, but I'm also not inclined to bet the farm on that. So what we're going to do is to use Roland , Lancelot , and Galahad to drop Ghost Rider platforms on our way in. We'll launch a few active platforms of our own to sweep ahead of us, but the others will be completely passive, won't even bring their drives up, and you'll be monitoring all of them from out beyond the hyper limit, using light-speed links so there aren't any unexplained grav pulses floating around the system. The New Tuscans won't know we're basically watching their entire star system and recording everything we see. If they try sneaking anything around outside our known sensor range, the covert platforms ought to nail them at it, which would probably strengthen Ambassador Crovisart's hand a lot if they are up to something and try to get shirty with her. So, in a way, I'd almost like for them to go ahead and try something if it let us catch them with their hand in the cookie jar. And you're the one who's going to be watching the cookies for us."

Kaplan was silent for a moment or two, and then she gave a barely perceptible sigh.

"Very well, Sir. I don't like it, but I understand the logic, and I guess somebody has to draw the duty. But the next time you come up with something like this, couldn't we cut cards, or shoot dice, or flip coins, or something to see who gets to play grandma rocking on the porch while the rest of the kids run out to play?"

"Goodness, Commander! I hadn't realized you had such a gift for imagery. But I suppose I can at least take your suggestion under advisement."

Chatterjee frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then grinned.

"Personally, I've always preferred paper, rock, scissors when it comes to serious command decisions, though."

"They've arrived, Ms. Anisimovna."

Aldona Anisimovna sat up quickly on the chaise lounge on the terrace of her temporary townhouse in Livorno. She'd been luxuriating in the warmth of New Tuscany's G3 primary like a big, blonde cat for almost an hour, and it took a moment or two for her sun-sodden brain to catch up with Kyrillos Taliadoros' announcement.

"The Manties?" she said, and he nodded in confirmation.

"According to our contacts, they turned up in a bit greater strength than we'd expected, Ma'am."

"How much greater?"

"Three of their new Roland-class destroyers," Taliadoros replied. "And according to their initial messages, they've sent no less than Amandine Corvisart to deliver their response to the Prime Minister's note."

"Really?" Anisimovna smiled nastily. Given the demolition job Corvisart had done at Monica, the opportunity to repay her for her efforts was an unanticipated bonus. She felt herself wanting to purr like a hunting lioness at the thought, yet even as she did, she felt her pulse beginning to speed. Not even a scion of a Mesan alpha line was immune to the effect of old-fashioned adrenaline. Or dread, she admitted, her smile fading just a bit. Or, for that matter, to a slight churning in her stomach as she contemplated the little detail she'd added to the plan without mentioning it to any of her allies here in New Tuscany. Stop that! she told herself firmly. It's the first move in a damned war, you silly bitch! Of course it's going to be . . . messy. But it's going to work, too, and that's a hell of a lot more important!

"You said this was according to our contacts," she said out loud. "Should I assume from that that no one from Vézien's office has passed us the official word yet?"

"No, Ma'am. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything." Taliadoros allowed himself a faint smile of complacency. "I'd be very surprised if our communications lines to the NTN—and his own office, for that matter—aren't actually shorter—or at least faster—than his are."

"Let's not let ourselves get overly confident here, Kyrillos," Anisimovna said just a bit quellingly, and her bodyguard's smile disappeared as he nodded in sober acknowledgment.

Not that he didn't have a point, Anisimovna conceded in the privacy of her own mind. Upon his arrival on New Tuscany, Jansen Metcalf had done what Mesan attachés and ambassadors always did. Even before he'd finished unpacking, he'd gone about establishing "contacts" throughout the local political and economic structure. It was always easier on planets like New Tuscany, where graft, patronage, and corruption were accepted, everyday facts of life. Anisimovna sometimes wondered if it was the relative absence of that trinity of tools which explained Bardasano's failure to penetrate someplace like Manticore—or, for that matter, Thesiman's and Pritchart's new Republic—the way she'd managed to penetrate so many other star nations.

Whatever might have been true in Manticore's case, however, New Tuscany had offered fertile soil for the standard Mesan techniques, and until Manticore had become involved in the Talbott Cluster, Metcalf hadn't had anything more important to do than to polish his network. Which meant Taliadoros was almost certainly correct—Anisimovna probably was better informed about what was happening throughout the New Tuscany System than Prime Minister Vézien. Quite possibly even better informed than Damien Dusserre, for that matter, although she'd have been less willing to wager on that possibility.

"You're probably right, though," she continued out loud. "It's more likely that Vézien is doublechecking his information before passing it on than it is that he's deliberately trying to keep us in the dark." Taliadoros nodded again, and Anisimovna flowed to her feet. She padded barefoot to the terrace wall, gazing out across New Tuscany's capital for a few more moments of thought. Then she turned back to her bodyguard.

"I think it's time that I be very carefully sitting here doing absolutely nothing suspicious," she said. "And if I'm here, you have to be here. I think it would probably be a good idea to close down any private communications channels we might have open. I trust Lieutenant Rochefort has already received his instructions?"

"Yes, Ma'am. And Ambassador Metcalf has doublechecked the communications relay. Even if anyone detected it, there's no way it could be traced back to us."

"I like a positive mindset, Kyrillos, but my own recent experience leaves me disinclined to take anything for granted."

"Of course, Ma'am."

"All right, then," she said. "Go and make sure we aren't talking to anyone Mr. Dusserre's eavesdroppers can't listen in on. Wouldn't want him getting any nasty suspicions about why we might be trying to evade him, after all. And while you're doing that," she smiled, "I think I'll go have a shower and a pre-supper martini."

"I don't believe this shit," Commodore Ray Chatterjee muttered as he studied the icons on the plot being driven by the recon platforms he'd sent in-system ahead of himself. "How the hell did these people get here, and what the hell are they doing here?"

"I don't know, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Lori Olson, his operations officer, said quietly. "Right off the top of my head, though, I doubt it's anything we'd be happy about if we did know."

"You've got that right," Chatterjee agreed grimly.

He sat back in his command chair, his expression even grimmer than his tone had been, and thought hard.

When he and Ambassador Corvisart had been sent off to New Tuscany, no one had counted on this . So just what were the two of them supposed to do when they found seventeen Solarian battlecruisers and five of their destroyers parked in orbit around the planet?

This stinks to high heaven, he thought. The only question is whether or not the Sollies know they're part of whatever the New Tuscans are up to . . . and I've got a bad feeling about that. I suppose it's at least remotely possible the Sollies don't know, but they'd have to be dumber than rocks not to realize the New Tuscans were trying to play them. Not that I haven't known a few Sollies who were dumber than rocks. Strange how that's not a very comforting reflection at the moment .

"Contact the ambassador, Jason," he said to Commander Jason Wright, his chief of staff. "Ask her to join us in my briefing room. Then get hold of Captain DesMoines and ask him to join you, me, and the ambassador."

"Yes, Sir."

"Yes, Mr. Prime Minister?" Anisimovna said pleasantly, raising one eyebrow at the view screen while she swirled ice gently in her martini glass. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"I thought you'd like to know that we've just been notified that three Manticoran destroyers or light cruisers have entered the system. They're headed for New Tuscany right now. We expect them to reach parking orbit within the next three hours."

"Indeed?" Anisimovna allowed her eyes to narrow with exactly the correct degree of sudden speculation as she leaned forward to set her glass on the edge of the coffee table in front of her. "I hardly expected them so soon, Mr. Prime Minister. Are all of our . . . special assets in place?"

"We're getting plenty of emissions and other data off them from the new platforms," Vézien assured her, although she suspected he was rather less confident than he chose to appear. "Minister of War Pélisard is in contact with Admiral Guédon right now. She says she's confident of capturing enough data for us to . . . massage however we have to for the Sollies' consumption. My only concern is having Byng right here in-system already." He shook his head and allowed a hint of concern to creep into his expression. "I wish he hadn't been in such a tearing hurry to get here!"

"I understand, Mr. Prime Minister." Anisimovna gave him a wry smile. "I never expected Commissioner Verrochio to respond so promptly to our first note, either. After all, Sollies never do things in a hurry—that's one of the things the rest of us dislike about them so much. Does Admiral Guédon expect to be able to work around them?"

"Probably." Vézien puffed his cheeks for a moment. "Nicholas—I mean, Minister Pélisard—seems to feel fairly confident of that, at any rate. But if the Sollies make a close comparison between the data their own sensors are undoubtedly recording right this minute and the 'incidents' we're going to be sending them shortly, they could very well spot the stuff we're recording right now when they see it again later."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about that, Mr. Prime Minister." Anisimovna's smile turned wolflike.

"Admiral Byng is sufficiently unfond of the Manties to overlook any inconvenient little problems, and Commissioner Verrochio and his staff are already primed to do exactly that, as well. All we need is something that's remotely plausible for anyone who doesn't have access to the data you're capturing at the moment."

"What do you make of them, Ingeborg?" Josef Byng asked, standing with his hands clasped behind him as he studied the enormous master plot on SLNS Jean Bart 's flag bridge.

"Preliminary reports are still coming in, Sir," Captain Ingeborg Aberu, Byng's operations officer, replied. She looked up from her own console for a moment and grimaced as her eyes met Byng's, as if to ask what else could be expected from a combat information center manned by Frontier Fleet personnel.

"From what we have so far, though," she continued, "it looks like three light cruisers. They're headed in-system. We believe they've already burst-transmitted to the local government, but they haven't squawked their transponders, so we don't have any definitive IDs just yet. Under the circumstances, though, I don't think there's much doubt who they belong to, Sir."

"Ballsy of them, Admiral," Karlotte Thimár observed. Byng looked at her, and the chief of staff shrugged. "I mean bringing it straight to New Tuscany this way. That's a bit of an escalation from harassing the New Tuscans' shipping in someplace like this Pequod System."

"From 'harassing,' maybe, Karlotte," Byng replied. "But from firing on and destroying an unarmed merchantship going about her lawful business?" His jaw muscles tightened. No one in Meyers before his departure for New Tuscany, not even he, had dreamed the situation could have escalated that rapidly out here, or that even the Manties would be that blatant about their behavior, and he felt a fresh wave of righteous anger go through him. "I think what we're seeing here is a direct progression of the kind of crap they've been pulling all along," he continued. "I think they've decided to come turn the screws on the New Tuscan government in its own backyard!"

"Well, if that's what they're thinking, Sir," Commander Lennox Wysoki, Byng's intelligence officer, said with an evil chuckle, "they'll probably be really unhappy when they finally realize we're sitting right here in orbit!"

"I agree that it's unfortunate, Commodore," Amandine Corvisart said. "And I won't pretend I'm happy about it, either—for a lot of reasons. But I don't see how we can allow it to interfere with our mission. We certainly can't just turn around and go home as if the mere presence of Solarian warships scared us off!"

"I think the ambassador's right, Sir," Commander John DesMoines, Roland's captain and Chatterjee's flag captain, said somberly, and Chatterjee snorted.

"Of course she is, Jack! First, because she's the ambassador and we're the people who are supposed to be supporting her mission, which makes it her call. And, second, because I happen to agree with her. What I'm trying to do is to get a feel for how we want to handle it. Do we just ignore the Sollies? Pretend they aren't even here unless they decide to talk to us ? Or do we treat this as a normal port call and follow the protocols for exchanges between friendly powers meeting in a neutral port?"

"I don't think there's any point being too disingenuous about it," Corvisart said after a moment. Chatterjee waggled one hand in a gesture which invited her to continue, and she shrugged. "There's no way this many Solarian warships would just happen to be parked in an out-of-the-way star system like New Tuscany unless they'd been invited. And the only thing that could have gotten them all the way here from the Madras Sector would have been a fairly urgent invitation. Something accompanied by a note about all of those nasty Manticoran depredations against innocent New Tuscan merchantships, for example. So I think we have to assume the Sollies aren't here by accident, that they're predisposed to be hostile to us, and that we'll have to put up with quite a bit of unpleasantness from them while we're here."

"Well, at least that won't be anything we don't have experience with!" Lori Olson's muttered comment was just low-voiced enough for Chatterjee to pretend he hadn't heard it. Not that he didn't agree with it wholeheartedly.

"On the other hand," Corvisart continued, "they're still at least technically neutral and impartial bystanders. Our business is with the New Tuscan government, not with the Solarian League Navy, and that's the way we ought to approach it. If the senior Solarian officer chooses to insert himself into the process, I'll have to deal with it as it occurs. But until and unless that happens, I'm going to ignore them completely—after all, I'm a civilian here to deal with other civilians—while you and your staff make the normal courtesies of one navy to another."

"My," Chatterjee said dryly. "Won't that be fun."

Several hours later, Commodore Chatterjee found himself still on Roland 's flag bridge. There were really two reasons for the Rolands ' huge size compared to other destroyers. One was the fact that they were the only destroyers in the galaxy equipped to fire the Mark 16 dual-drive missile. Squeezing in that capability—and giving them twelve tubes—had required a substantial modification to the Mod 9-c launcher mounted in the Saganami-C -class. The Rolands' Mod 9-e was essentially the tube from the 9-c, but stripped of the support equipment normally associated with a standalone missile tube. Instead, a sextet of the new launchers were shoehorned together, combining the necessary supports for all six tubes in the cluster. Roland mounted one cluster each in her fore and aft hammerheads, the traditional locations for a ship's chase energy weapons. Given the Manticoran ability to fire off-bore, all twelve tubes could be brought to bear on any target, but it did make the class's weapons more vulnerable. A single hit could take out half of her total missile armament, which was scarcely something Chatterjee liked to think about. But destroyers had never been intended to take the kind of hammering wallers could take, anyway, and he was willing to accept Roland 's vulnerabilities in return for her overwhelming advantage in missile combat.

The other reason for her size (aside from the need to squeeze in magazine space for her launchers) was that every member of the class had been fitted with flagship capability. The Royal Manticoran Navy had been caught short of suitable flagships for cruiser and destroyer service during the First Havenite War, and the Rolands were also an attempt to address that shortage. Big enough and tough enough to serve with light cruisers, and with a substantial long-range punch of their own, they were also supposed to be produced in sufficient numbers to provide plenty of flag decks this time around. They weren't anywhere near as big or opulently equipped as those of a battlecruiser or a waller, but they were big enough for the job and, even more important, they'd be there when they were needed.

Which was why Ray Chatterjee came to have such spacious comfort in which to sit while he stewed. I didn't really expect this to go smoothly, he thought. I didn't expect it to be quite this complicated, either, though .

He could hardly say he was surprised the New Tuscans were stonewalling to avoid making any sort of meaningful response to the note Ambassador Corvisart had delivered. They could scarcely acknowledge the note's accuracy, after all, so he supposed simply refusing to accept it was their best move at the moment, although he was a little surprised they hadn't already appealed to the Sollies to intervene on their side, at least as a friendly neutral.

Probably means they don't have all of their falsified data in place yet, the commodore reflected. Even a prick like this Byng probably wouldn't be very amused if they handed him something too crude. I wonder if they even knew he was coming this soon?

Whatever the New Tuscans' attitude towards Amandine Corvisart might be, though, there was no question about Admiral Josef Byng's attitude towards the Star Empire of Manticore. The New Tuscans'

senior traffic control officer had looked and sounded as if someone had inserted a broom handle into a certain orifice, in Chatterjee's opinion. He'd been just barely on the stiffly correct side of outright incivility, although Chatterjee hadn't been able to decide whether that was because he knew exactly what was going on and was part of it, or whether it was because he didn't know what was going on and genuinely believed his own government's horror stories about vicious Manticoran harassment. There hadn't been much doubt about what Byng believed, though.

"So long as the New Tuscan system government is prepared to tolerate your presence, 'Commodore,' " Byng had said, biting off each word is if it had been a shard of ice, "then so shall I. I will also do you the courtesy—for now, at least—of assuming that you, personally, have not been party to the gross abuse of New Tuscan neutral rights here in the Cluster. The Solarian League, however, does not look kindly upon the infringement of those neutral rights, and especially not upon the destruction of unarmed merchant vessels and their entire crews. I have no doubt you are under orders not to discuss these matters with me, 'Commodore,' and I will not press you on them at this time. Eventually, however, what's been happening out here will be . . . sufficiently clarified, shall we say, for my government to take an official position on it. I look forward to that day, at which time, perhaps, we will have that discussion after all. Good day, 'Commodore.' "

It had not been an exchange—if the icy, one-way tirade could be called an "exchange"—designed to set Chatterjee's mind at ease. Nor was his mind particularly comforted by the Solarian battlecruisers' actions. None of them had their wedges or sidewalls up, but close visual observation—and at a range of under five thousand kilometers it was possible to make a very close visual inspection, even without resorting to deployable reconnaissance platforms—made it evident that their energy batteries were manned. Sensors detected active radar and lidar, as well, which CIC identified as missile-defense fire control systems. Technically, that meant they were defensive systems, not offensive ones, but that was a meaningless distinction at this piddling range. Those battlecruisers knew exactly where every one of Chatterjee's ships were, and at this distance, it would have been extraordinarily difficult for them to miss. Stop that, he told himself sternly. Byng is an asshole, but he's not a crazy asshole . . . I hope. And only someone who was crazy would start a war just because he's feeling pissed off. Corvisart is going to finish her discussions with Vézien and Cardot one way or the other within the next day or so, at which point we can get the hell out of here. In the meantime, all we really need is for everyone on our side to stay cool. That's all we need .

He told himself that very firmly, and the reasoning part of his brain knew it was a logical, convincing analysis of the situation.

Still, he was just as happy he'd left Naomi Kaplan and Tristram to watch his back.

"I'm liking this less and less by the minute, Skipper," Lieutenant Commander Alvin Tallman murmured.

"I suppose that's because you have a functional brain, Alvin," Naomi Kaplan replied, looking up at her executive officer. "I can't think of any other reason you wouldn't like it, at any rate." Tallman's lips twitched in a brief smile, but it never touched his eyes, and Kaplan understood perfectly. The tension must be bad enough aboard the other three ships of the division, but in its own way, the tension aboard Tristram was even worse, because Kaplan's ship was over ten light-minutes from New Tuscany. Thanks to the Ghost Rider platforms, they could see exactly what was happening—or, at the moment, not happening—in the volume immediately around the planet, even if the data and imagery was ten minutes old when they got it. Even with Mark 16s, though, there wasn't anything they could do about whatever might happen that far away, and their own safely insulating distance from the Solarian ships only made them feel perversely guilty over their helpless inviolability.

Kaplan glanced around her bridge, considering her watch officers thoughtfully. She'd had time to get to know them by now, although she still knew Abigail better than any of the others—including Tallman, for that matter. That was changing, though, and she'd become aware of their strengths and weaknesses, aware of the way those qualities must be blended together so that strength was reinforced and weakness was compensated for.

For example, there was O'Reilly's continuing, festering resentment of Abigail's position. She'd managed to keep it sufficiently in check that Kaplan and Tallman hadn't been forced to take official notice—or, at any rate, any additional official notice—of it, but she wasn't convinced things were going to stay that way. At the same time, she'd found that despite O'Reilly's unpleasant personality, she was actually quite good in her own specialty. It might have taken Tallman's kick in the pants to get her off her ass to prove it, but she'd turned the com department around quite nicely since. In fact, it irritated Kaplan that the lieutenant had managed it, although she recognized that it was rather foolish of her to want the other woman to be bad at her job just because she couldn't warm to her.

And then there were the others. Lieutenant Hosea Simpkins, her Grayson-born astrogator. Lieutenant Sherilyn Jeffers, her electronic warfare officer, as Manticoran and secular as anyone was ever likely to get who nonetheless had formed a smoothly functioning partnership with Abigail . . . unlike O'Reilly. Lieutenant Fonzarelli in Engineering, Chief Warrant Officer Zagorski, her logistics officer . . . They were like the strands of steel layered through one of those swords as a Grayson swordsmith hammered out so patiently. They weren't perfect. In fact, they remained far short of that forever unattainable goal. But they were good, one of the best groups of ship's officers she'd ever served with. If she managed to screw up, it would be her fault, not theirs.

Now there's a cheerful way to look at things, Naomi , she told herself tartly. Any more doom and gloom you'd like to rain on yourself this afternoon?

Her lips hovered briefly on the brink of a smile for a moment, but then she drew a deep breath and returned her attention to the silent, glittering data codes on her plot.

Lieutenant Léopold Rochefort checked his chrono unobtrusively for no more than the five hundredth time since receiving the activation code and wished his palms didn't feel quite so damp. This had all seemed very simple when it was first described to him. After all, Rochefort was one of the small handful of New Tuscan officers who knew what was actually going on, since his older brother was Admiral Guédon's senior communications officer. So he knew, whether he was supposed to or not, that what he'd been asked to do was only another facet of the master plan. The fact that someone was prepared to pay him so handsomely to do something which could only contribute to his own government's objectives was merely icing on the cake.

That was how it had seemed when he was originally recruited, at any rate. He'd discovered, however, that now that the moment was here, it no longer seemed quite so simple. He was operating outside the normal naval chain of command, after all, which meant there would be no official cover for him if he managed to screw this up. On the other hand, he was acting under the direct authority of Minister of Security Dusserre. That ought to give him at least some protection it things went wrong. But they aren't going to go wrong , he told himself firmly . . . again. After all, how badly can I screw this up?

Remembering certain events in his career as a junior officer, he decided it would probably be better if he didn't dwell too deeply on that last question.

He looked away from his chrono, glancing around the compartment. Rochefort was an assistant communications officer aboard the space station Giselle , the primary communications and traffic control platform of the New Tuscany System, as well as a major industrial node in her own right. As the inspector from Security had explained to him, that meant Giselle was the logical place from which to insert the "Manticoran" worm into the system's astrogation computers. Rochefort had wondered why they'd chosen to use the com section rather than someone actually inside traffic control, but the nameless, anonymous inspector had explained it willingly enough. Obviously, for the Manties to be responsible for the attack on the computers, it had to come from outside. It had to be inserted into the system through a com channel, since the Manties would have had no physical access to the computers. So what would happen would be that Rochefort would send it from his station to a com satellite near the Manties'

position and parking orbit, and the satellite would relay it back to Traffic Control, where it would faithfully attack the computers.

From Rochefort's perspective, it seemed like an unlikely thing for the Manties to do. Fortunately, perhaps, it wasn't his job to critique the strategy he'd been ordered to execute, and presumably those who were in charge of that strategy had come up with some way to make it seem like a logical move on the Manties' part.

And speaking of the Manties . . .

It was time, he realized, and reached out to punch the function key he'd set up weeks ago.

Unfortunately for Lieutenant Rochefort, he had never actually been approached by a member of the Ministry of Security. Or, rather, not by a current member of the Ministry of Security. The man who had passed himself off as a Security inspector had been an employee of Dusserre's ministry some years ago, but he'd been far better paid by Ambassador Metcalf and his new Mesan employers for the last couple of T-years.

Like Lieutenant Rochefort, the bogus inspector had wondered just how Manpower was going to convince anyone to accept that the Star Empire of Manticore had wasted its time trying to insert a worm into the traffic control computers of a third-rank star system like New Tuscany. Also like Lieutenant Rochefort, however, he had decided the answer to that particular question lay at a level well beyond even his current pay grade. So he'd passed on his instructions and provided the lieutenant with the necessary prerecorded transmission and the activation code which would tell him it was time for him to do his bit for New Tuscany's national interests.

Promptly after which, he had met with a fatal accident named Kyrillos Taliadoros and quietly and completely disappeared.

That meant there was no one who could possibly have tied Lieutenant Rochefort to Manpower or Mesa before he pressed that function key.

And no one could possibly tie the lieutenant to anyone after that, since the message he transmitted was actually the detonation command for the two-hundred-kiloton device hidden inside a cargo container a Jessyk Combine freighter had transshipped to Giselle a month before . . . and which was now stored in a cargo bay approximately one hundred and twelve meters forward and three hundred meters down from Lieutenant Rochefort's compartment.

Ray Chatterjee was sipping from a coffee mug when he heard an odd sound. It took him a moment to realize it was the sound of someone sucking in air for an explosive grunt of surprise, and he was turning towards the sound, his brain still trying to identify it, when he realized it had come from Lieutenant Commander Olson. Then her head came up, and she turned towards him.