"Sir! The space station— Giselle—it's just blown up!"

" What? "

Despite his own earlier thoughts, for just an instant, it completely failed to register and he simply stared at the ops officer. He'd been focused on the Solarian ships, worrying about the future, trying to figure out the past. . . . None of that had prepared his mind for the possibility that a space station the better part of ten kilometers in length should just suddenly blow up .

His eyes whipped around to the visual display, and he froze as he saw the awesome spectacle. Sheer shock and disbelief held him there, staring at it, trying to wrap his mind around the unexpected enormity of it all. It was more than he could do as the seconds dragged past, but then, suddenly—

"Communications!" he snapped. "Raise Admiral Byng immediately!"

"What the—!"

Josef Byng was watching the visual display, not the tactical plot, at the moment Giselle blew up. The sudden eruption of light and fury that wiped away the forty-two thousand men and women aboard the space station took him totally by surprise. The view screen polarized instantly, protecting his eyes from the blinding flash, but it was so close, so powerful that he flinched back from it involuntarily.

" Sir! " Captain Aberu half-shouted. "Sir! The New Tuscan space station's just blown up!"

"The Manties!" Byng snapped, and whipped around to punch a priority key on his com. Captain Warden Mizawa, Jean Bart's commanding officer, appeared on his display almost instantly.

"Case Yellow, Captain! The Manties have just—"

"Sir, I know the station's been destroyed," the captain said, speaking quickly and urgently, "but it was definitely a nuclear explosion—a contact explosion; CIC sets the yield at at least two hundred kilotons—and not an energy weapon. But we didn't pick up any missile trace, so—"

"Goddamn it, I just gave you a fucking order, Captain! " Byng snarled, absolutely infuriated that a mere Frontier Fleet captain would dare to interrupt him with arguments at a moment like this. "I don't care what you did or didn't pick up! We're sitting here bare-assed naked, without even sidewalls, and just who the hell else d'you think would have done something like this?"

"But, Sir, it couldn't've been a missile if we didn't detec—"

"Don't you fucking argue with me!" Byng bellowed while panic pulsed through him. However the Manties had done it, they couldn't afford any witnesses, and with their wedges down even friggng destroyers could—

"But, Sir, if they'd—"

"Shut the hell up and execute your goddamned orders, Captain, or I swear to God I'll have you shot this very afternoon!"

For one fleeting moment, Warden Mizawa hovered on the brink of defiance. But then the moment passed.

"Yes, Sir," he grated. "Case Yellow, you said." He gave Byng one last, searing look, then turned away from the com to his own tactical officer.

"Open fire," he told Commander Ursula Zeiss harshly.

Chapter Forty-Two

Helen Zilwicki was still getting accustomed to the notion that, as Commodore Terekhov's flag lieutenant, her duty station when the ship went to battle stations was no longer on the bridge or manning a weapons console somewhere. Instead, it was on Quentin Saint-James ' flag bridge, with the commodore. It was a strange sensation, and one she didn't care for very much . . . probably because she didn't really have anything to do . Oh, she helped to maintain and update the log, or went to "run and find out" through the ship's data system if he needed some odd bit of fact one of his staff officers didn't already have at her fingertips, and she was always available if the commodore decided he needed to send her somewhere, but that wasn't the same thing at all. Nor was it supposed to be. It was another of those on-job-training aspects of her position, putting her inside the flag officer decision-making loop like an observant little fly on the bulkhead, and she had to admit she found that part of her flag lieutenant assignment fascinating. It was just that she felt as if she ought to be doing something, contributing something other than her mere presence when her ship needed her.

At least they'd finally managed to fill the holes in the commodore's staff, so the flag bridge didn't seem quite so empty anymore. Helen suspected that the commodore had actually picked out the officers he planned to "requisition" when he got to Spindle long before the squadron ever departed from Manticore. He'd seemed to know exactly who he wanted after they arrived, at any rate, and given his new relationship with Admiral Khumalo, it probably wasn't surprising that he'd gotten his choices, although not everyone had been delighted at the prospect of surrendering them to him.

They were a good bunch, Helen thought, and they'd shaken down well with the commodore and Quentin Saint-James' officers. She particularly liked Commander Stillwell Lewis, the new ops officer, who rejoiced in the nickname of "Stilt," and Lieutenant Commander Mateuz Ødegaard, the staff intelligence officer. Commander Lewis was a tall, rangy redhead—from Gryphon, like Helen herself—who got along well with Commander Lynch, and Ødegaard reminded Helen in some ways of her father. Physically, the slightly built, fair-haired Ødegaard couldn't have been less like Anton Zilwicki, but both of them had the same implacably patient, unremitting, logical concentration on the task in hand. Both of them seemed to know that in the battle between stone and water, water always won. The other newcomers were Lieutenant Commander Mazal Inbari, the astrogator, and Lieutenant Atalante Montella, the communications officer. Both of them were far more than merely competent, and Helen liked both of them, but she hadn't yet warmed to them the way she had to Stillwell and Ødegaard. At the moment, however, that thought was far from foremost in her mind as she sat very quietly at her own terminal and watched the master plot at the forward end of the flag bridge. It wasn't configured for tactical or astrographic mode at the moment. Instead, it was configured as a view screen, and Vice Admiral Michelle Henke looked back out of it at Helen.

In point of fact, Helen knew, Admiral Gold Peak's image was on every view screen aboard every ship of Tenth Fleet as it swept through hyper-space towards the system of New Tuscany at an apparent velocity three thousand times that of light.

"Attention all hands," the voice of Lieutenant Commander Edwards, the admiral's staff com officer said quietly. It was probably the most unnecessary announcement in the history of the Royal Manticoran Navy, a corner of Helen's mind thought, but ninety-nine percent of her attention was focused on Gold Peak's stony expression.

"People," the admiral said without further preamble, "by this time, I'm sure, all of you have a fairly accurate idea of the content of Tristram's report. For any of you who are still wondering, I can confirm that Roland , Lancelot , and Galahad have been destroyed by Frontier Fleet units of the Solarian League navy under the command of Admiral Josef Byng. Tristram had been detached to observe events in New Tuscany through her remote platforms, and we have detailed records of the destruction of all three vessels. They were attacked without warning or challenge, without wedges and with no time to raise sidewalls, at pointblank range, by the massed energy fire of seventeen Solarian battlecruisers and eight destroyers. At this time, we have no evidence of any survivors. We will continue to hope, and the recovery of any of our people will be our highest priority. It is highly unlikely, based on Tristram 's data, however, that there will be anyone to recover."

She paused, and Helen felt her jaw muscles tighten as she pictured what it must've been like aboard Commodore Chatterjee's destroyers. Unlike almost anyone else in Quentin Saint-James ' company, Helen had been aboard a vessel taken totally unawares by heavy energy fire at point-blank range. In fact, she'd been there twice, little more than a T-year ago. She didn't need to imagine the carnage as men and women suddenly found their ships ripped open to space without warning, without any time to prepare before the howling tornado of escaping atmosphere plunged them into the deathly embrace of vacuum. She knew exactly what it must have been like as the destroyers' crewmen were torn apart by splinters and fragments of their own ships' hulls, as they had fleeting instants to realize no one was going to reach a life pod in time.

There might have been a handful of survivors, people who'd found themselves trapped in pockets of life-sustaining atmosphere behind blast doors or emergency hatches, but there couldn't have been many. Not aboard ships murdered as Commodore Chatterjee's destroyers had been.

"At this moment," Vice Admiral Gold Peak continued in that same level, unflinching voice, "we have no idea what we will find in New Tuscany when we arrive. To the best of our knowledge, neither the New Tuscans nor the Solarians even realize Tristram was there, far less that we have detailed knowledge of everything that happened. Since they presumably don't know Tristram got away to tell us about it, it seems entirely possible that they won't be expecting this prompt a response from us. That, in fact, is the reason for all the rush to get underway. If they don't expect us, we want to arrive while they're still sitting there fat, dumb, and happy with their thumbs up their asses."

For the first time, the admiral showed some expression—a thin, hungry, somehow feral smile.

"We know what happened in the sense of what was destroyed and who actually fired at whom," she went on. "What we do not know is the why . There had been no communication between the Solarian battlecruisers and our destroyers for well over two hours before Admiral Byng opened fire. According to the take from Tristram 's ELINT platforms, Roland was in the act of opening a communications link with one of the battlecruisers at the time she was destroyed. It does not appear the link was ever established or that the two vessels were in communication at the moment the Solarians opened fire.

"According to the analysts, there is at least a possibility that the Solarians were responding to a perceived attack."

Helen could physically feel the wave of incredulity which swept through the flag bridge's occupants at that statement, and she shared fully. Three destroyers attacking seventeen battlecruisers plus their screen? The very idea was absurd!

"I'm not suggesting that any competent fleet commander would fall prey to such a . . . misperception," Gold Peak continued as if she'd heard Helen's very thoughts. "We know, however, that one of the New Tuscans' major space stations was completely destroyed immediately before the Solarians opened fire. That destruction was the result of a nuclear explosion. Analysis of its emissions signature makes it very clear that the explosion resulted from a relatively low yield nuclear warhead, probably in the vicinity of two hundred kilotons. It was not some bizarre sort of 'industrial accident,' but rather a deliberate action on someone's part. It is conceivable that, given the state of tension between the Star Empire and New Tuscany, Admiral Byng leapt to the conclusion that Commodore Chatterjee was responsible for the station's destruction."

She let her listeners digest that for a few moments, let them work through the implications. If it wasn't us—and I know damned well it wasn't, Helen thought— then it had to be someone else. And if the Sollies thought it was us, then it obviously wasn't them. Which only leaves . . .

"Our best estimate is that the New Tuscan death toll from this disaster was somewhere between forty and fifty thousand," Gold Peak said softly. "We can't be positive whether or not there was any crew aboard the Hélène Blondeau when she mysteriously blew up in Pequod, but we know positively that the space station in New Tuscany was fully manned and in normal operation at the time of its destruction. Which means whoever was responsible deliberately killed all of those people.

"Our intelligence people believe there is a distinct possibility that someone is attempting to maneuver the Solarian League into a shooting war with the Star Empire. I'm sure I need not remind any of you about last year's efforts in Split, Montana, and Monica. This may—I stress, may— be more of the same.

"Despite that, there is one enormously significant difference between the events leading up to Commodore Terekhov's visit to Monica and our own visit to New Tuscany. This time, Manticoran warships— Queen's ships—have been destroyed, ruthlessly and without warning, and the finger that pushed the button—for whatever reason—was Solarian. What this means, People, is that we are now effectively at war with the Solarian League Navy."

The marrow of Helen's bones seemed to freeze, and for the first time since she'd been a thirteen-year-old trapped in the lightless tunnels under Old Chicago, she felt like a small, furry creature fleeing from a hexapuma's claws. The mere thought of the League's enormous size, of the literally endless fleets it could build and man, was enough to strike terror into the hardiest soul.

"Special Minister Bernardus Van Dort is with me here on the flagship as the direct personal representative of Prime Minister Alquezar, Baroness Medusa, and Her Majesty," Gold Peak resumed after another brief pause, "and a special diplomatic mission has been dispatched to the Meyers System with Tristram's sensor records to demand an explanation from the Office of Frontier Security. Obviously, we continue to hope it may be possible to nip this confrontation with the League in the bud, but for that to happen the situation here in the Quadrant must be prevented from getting further out of hand, all evidence must be preserved, there must be a thorough investigation into these events, and there must be accountability .

"Because of those considerations, our instructions— my instructions—are to proceed to New Tuscany. When we reach that star system, I have been instructed to demand that Admiral Byng stand down his ships, that the New Tuscan System government stand down its defenses, and that both of them cooperate fully with our investigation until such time as a Manticoran court of inquiry has determined what actually transpired in New Tuscany eleven days ago. Mr. Van Dort will represent the Star Empire, and it will be he who presents our demands to the New Tuscan government, but it is Her Majesty's Navy which will see to it that those demands are complied with."

She paused again, her dark-skinned face boulder-hard, gazing levelly out of the scores of view screens aboard the ships of her command for what seemed to be endless seconds. Then she continued in a voice of measured, inflexible steel.

"To be honest, I am far from confident that Admiral Byng will willingly accede to our demands. I will attempt to give him every opportunity to do so, but I'm sure many of you have had your own personal experience of how Solarians are likely to react to such demands from 'neobarbs.' Make no mistake about this, however, People—if he does not willingly comply with our demands, then we will compel him to do so. It is one thing to be reasonable; it is another thing entirely to be weak , and we must know what happened in New Tuscany—and who was responsible for it—if we are to have any hope at all of controlling this situation. Neither Baroness Medusa, nor Admiral Khumalo, nor Prime Minister Alquezar, nor Mr. Van Dort, nor I want a war against the Solarian League. But unless we can stop it here, stop it now, the first shots in that war have already been fired, and our orders are to act accordingly."

"We've just received another dispatch from New Tuscany, Valery," Hongbo Junyan said. "Something about a ship blowing up in Pequod."

"Really?" Valery Ottweiler's expression of courteous surprise could not have been bettered by the most experienced professional actor, and he raised one eyebrow as he gazed at the com display. "And when did this event take place?"

"Almost exactly six T-weeks ago," Hongbo replied, his own eyes narrow.

"I did tell you my dispatches from home indicated that fresh instructions have been sent to New Tuscany, as well," Ottweiler pointed out.

"Yes, you did," Hongbo acknowledged slowly. There were aspects of Manpower's apparent ability to coordinate message traffic over long distances that were beginning to puzzle the vice-commissioner. At the moment, however, he had other things to worry about.

"Lorcan is going to want a recommendation from me," he pointed out, and Ottweiler shrugged.

"I think it's fairly obvious that the situation is getting steadily uglier," he said. "If I were Commissioner Verrochio, I think I'd want to be certain I had an adequate force available if something untoward should happen while Admiral Byng is away."

"And you think you might find this 'adequate force' someplace like, say, McIntosh?"

"Actually, under the circumstances, I think that's exactly where I'd look first, Junyan," Ottweiler agreed.

"Although it would probably be better to move it even closer sometime soon."

"I thought that might be your view." Hongbo smiled thinly. "Well, as always, it's been a pleasure talking to you, Valery. Thanks for the advice."

"Anytime, Junyan," Ottweiler said, reaching for the button to terminate the conversation. "Anytime at all."

"So they still don't have any better explanation at all, Karlotte?" Admiral Josef Byng never turned away from the old-fashioned armorplast viewport on Jean Bart 's observation deck. His hands were clasped behind him as he gazed out into the volume of space which had once contained a space station named Giselle . . . and three Manticoran destroyers.

"No, Sir," Rear Admiral Thimár admitted, looking at the admiral's back and wondering what thoughts were going through his mind.

"And may I assume Captain Mizawa remains his uncooperative self?"

"Well, as to that, Sir, I—"

"Please, Karlotte!" Byng shook his head, still gazing out into space. "I doubt there are any bugs or listening devices here. So, let me ask it more directly. May I assume Captain Mizawa continues to deny access to the originals of his bridge logs?"

"Yes, Sir," Thimár admitted unhappily. "He's made it clear he's willing to provide us with certified copies of the logs, but not the originals."

"I see."

Byng's mind worked busily as he continued his study of the silent stars. He felt certain there was no more doubt in Thimár's mind than in his own that Captain Mizawa was doing more than simply covering his own ass in time-honored fashion. Despite the astronomical difference in their ranks, and despite the fact that Mizawa was only Frontier Fleet, while Byng was Battle Fleet, the captain wasn't even bothering to disguise his contempt. And in addition to the bridge logs, there was also the matter of those memos by that gutless little Lieutenant . . . Askew, was that the name? If Captain Mizawa was actually building up a file to be used against Byng, he probably saw those as additional logs on the fire. They were nonsense, of course, as both Karlotte and Ingeborg had amply demonstrated, but the fact that Byng had dismissed them so summarily as a classic example of GIGO might be construed as additional evidence of . . . hastiness on his part. Of a certain tendency to dismiss other viewpoints and advice, even from his flag captain, out of hand. Possibly even as evidence that he routinely acted before thinking. Given what had happened here in New Tuscany—and how—that could be unfortunate, in many ways . . . unless it ended up being even more unfortunate for Captain Mizawa first, of course. That was one of the things friends in high places were good for.

Unfortunately, there was the matter of those bridge logs, and Byng cursed his own impetuousness. He had reacted too quickly this time—he admitted it, privately, at least—and Mizawa intended to hang him for it. The captain actually had the recording of his own voice telling Byng they'd detected no missile trace. Unless something happened to that recording—and according to Ingeborg, the captain clearly recognized that his ship's information systems were . . . less secure than he'd once thought and taken precautions accordingly—that was going to be a difficult point to tidy up in the report by the inevitable board of inquiry. Under the circumstances, given the mounting tension between New Tuscany and the Star Empire of Manticore, no reasonable board of experienced naval officers could possibly question Byng's overriding responsibility to ensure the security of his own command by neutralizing the threat those three Manticoran light cruisers had represented. The sudden, total destruction of a major space station, obviously as a consequence of hostile attack, had left him no choice but to act as he had. Any board would recognize that!

Unless some bleeding heart, or some Manty apologist, got his hands on a recording of Byng's own flag captain questioning whether or not it had been the consequence of a hostile attack at all before the order to fire was ever given.

I never should have kept him on after they gave me the task force, Byng thought darkly. I should've beached him, gotten myself a reliable Battle Fleet captain to take his place. Someone whose competence—and loyalty—I could have relied on. The bastard's resented having someone from Battle Fleet brought in from the very beginning. He's been waiting to stick a dagger in my back all along—that's what those damned memos by what's-his-name were really all about—and now the frigging Manties and the New Tuscans have handed him the knife!

He realized his jaw muscles were squeezing too tightly when his teeth began to ache again, and he forced himself to relax. Or to come as close to it as he could, at any rate. And, as he did, he wondered yet again just what the hell really had happened. He'd already written the rough draft of his official report, explaining what had to have happened, but that wasn't the same thing as what had actually happened. Much as he'd come to hate Warden Mizawa, he'd been forced to admit that the flag captain had made at least one valid point. Whatever had happened to Giselle, the damage hadn't been inflicted by a warship's broadside energy weapons, nor had it been inflicted by a laser head. It had been an old-fashioned, contact nuke, and there was absolutely no indication of how it had been delivered to the station.

Mizawa, Byng knew, inclined to the theory that it had been an act of sabotage. The reason, according to him, that no one had been able to detect or track the delivery vector was that it had probably been hidden in a cargo container somewhere and smuggled aboard for either timed or command detonation. Byng could follow his reasoning, but even Mizawa had no explanation for who might have done the smuggling, or why. Byng had no doubt that the New Tuscans might well have exaggerated the provocation the Manties had been offering. If he'd had to deal with those arrogant, neobarb pricks the way the New Tuscans had, he wouldn't exactly have wasted any effort trying to find the fairest possible light in which to view their actions when he reported them to someone else, either. But exaggerating things was a far cry from blowing things up, and he simply couldn't conceive of a planetary government which would be willing to murder forty-two thousand of its own citizens just to blacken the reputation of the other side in a trade war. He'd seen some cold, calculating cynicism in his time, but that was too much.

Yet if it hadn't been the New Tuscans themselves, who had it been? That was the question he couldn't answer . . . unless, of course, it had been the Manties all along. There was no reason why they couldn't have chosen to smuggle the warhead aboard. For that matter, the space station had been a completely non-evading target, with neither sidewalls nor an impeller wedge to protect it. They could have launched a small, purely ballistic missile at any point during their approach to the planet. If it had come in without power, with no impeller signature to give it away, it could easily have struck the space station without anyone—including the oh-so-perfect Captain Mizawa's ham-fisted sensor techs—picking it up at all. For that matter, anyone in the entire star system could have done the same thing!

Assuming they had a motive, at any rate.

He shook himself. This was accomplishing nothing, and he couldn't afford to accomplish nothing. If he wanted to preserve his own career—and to get to the bottom of what had really happened, while he was at it—he was going to have to figure out some way to turn the screws on Mizawa. Either that, or at least convince the New Tuscans to give him whatever domestic terrorist group might have been responsible for smuggling a weapon aboard the space station or launching his hypothetical ballistic missile. Personally, he preferred the notion of squeezing Mizawa. An intense, mutual, and profound hatred would have been reason enough, he supposed, but there was also the precedent to be considered. Frontier Fleet captains could not be encouraged to go around screwing over Battle Fleet admirals. Even more importantly, however, if not for that whole inconvenient business about the failure to detect missile traces or weapons fire from the Manties, there was no doubt in his mind about how the conclusions of the board of inquiry would have been shaped. The best interests of the service would have played a part, of course, as would the natural desire of a panel of senior flag officers to protect the reputation and good name of a brother officer against undeserved slander and accusations. But most importantly of all, even if the Manties hadn't actually fired the missile or planted the smuggled nuke, all of this was still their fault. They were the ones who'd been systematically harassing the New Tuscans after extending their infernal, meddling interference with free trade into yet another volume of space where they had no legitimate business. If it hadn't been for the confrontation between their so-called Star Empire and New Tuscany, Commissioner Verrochio would never have suggested Byng's visit to New Tuscany, which would have deprived the perpetrators of this heinous act (whoever they were) of the charged circumstances which had led Byng to engage the Manticorans. So, ultimately, they were the ones to blame for what had happened to them.

He simply had to find a way to make that self-evident fact clear to people who hadn't been here at the time.

"All right, Karlotte," he said, still looking out through the viewport, "I think we may have to take the offensive with Prime Minister Vézien and Mr. Dusserre. I don't want to make it an official confrontation or sound like I'm issuing any ultimatums, so what I want you to do is to contact Mr. Dusserre. Do it yourself. And when you do, tell him—as one chief of staff to another, as it were—that you think I'm getting impatient. Remind them of how important to New Tuscany the Navy's and OFS' friendship really is, and then ask them if they don't have some local batch of dissidents who might have deliberately set out to provoke what happened by sabotaging the space station."

"Yes, Sir," Thimár said, but her unhappiness was evident, and Byng snorted.

"I don't say it's the ideal solution, Karlotte. And we need to go on working on Mizawa, as well. I'm sure we can finally find a suitable crowbar if we just keep looking long enough. But if it turns out that we can't get him to see the light, we're going to need a fallback position."

"Understood, Sir," Rear Admiral Thimár said.

Maitland Askew sat in his cramped, cubbyhole of a cabin aboard SLNS Restitution and worried. He'd been doing a lot of that over the last two or three weeks.

His exile to Restitution had been just as unpleasant as he'd anticipated. Admiral Sigbee had been distantly kind to him, although she'd also managed to make it clear (without saying so in so many words) that while she was prepared to do an old friend like Captain Mizawa a favor, she had no desire to get caught in the crossfire of any disputes between Mizawa and a Battle Fleet admiral. Askew wasn't even certain if she'd seen either of the memos he'd produced. He rather doubted that she would have told him, even if she had.

As far as the other officers on her staff—or assigned to Restitution 's ship's company—were concerned, he must have screwed up in some truly monumental fashion to have been so summarily reassigned to his present duties. Captain Breshnikov, Restitution 's CO, appeared to share that view of things, as well. That hurt, since Askew was aware that Adolf Breshnikov and Captain Mizawa had been friends for many years. Although Breshnikov hadn't gone out of his way to personally step on Askew, it was apparent that he took a particularly dim view of an officer who could so thoroughly have pissed off someone like Mizawa as to be kicked off of Mizawa's ship.

Yet bad as all that was, it wasn't the worst. No, the worst was the fact that he was the only person aboard Restitution who knew that the idiot wearing an admiral's uniform—the one who'd murdered the entire companies of three Manticoran destroyers in a fit of unreasoning panic—not only didn't know but didn't want to know just how nasty a surprise the Manties might have for him when they came sailing over the hyper limit with blood in their eyes.

"I'm telling you, Max, it was that crazy bitch Anisimovna!"

"Calm down, Damien!" Prime Minister Vézien said sharply.

" 'Calm down?' " Damien Dusserre repeated incredulously. "I'm telling you that our so-called good friend and ally killed forty-two thousand-plus of our citizens, including President Boutin's second cousin, and you're telling me to 'calm down'?"

"Yes," Vézien said flatly. "And stop pacing around like some kind of wild animal and sit down, too," he added.

Dusserre stared at him for a moment, then obeyed, settling into an armchair. Actually, he settled onto it, and he seemed to be crouched there, ready to launch himself back to his feet on an instant's notice.

"Now," Vézien said, "take a deep breath, count to fifty, and tell me if you really want me to inform Admiral Byng that the Manpower operative we've been using to maneuver the Solarian League into attacking the Manticorans—which, I might add, he's just finished doing—was responsible for blowing up Giselle and getting him to do it in the first place?"

Dusserre glowered and opened his mouth, but then he closed it again, and the Prime Minister nodded.

"That's what I thought."

"Maybe telling Byng about Anisimovna isn't the best idea in the entire galaxy," Dusserre said stubbornly,

"but sooner or later we're going to have to tell him and the newsies something, Max."

"Of course we are . . . sooner or later. But in the meantime, there are a couple of things I'd like you to consider. First, are you any closer to demonstrating how Anisimovna—or anyone else—might have done it?"

"No," Dusserre growled. "We're still looking, but however she did it, and whatever conduit she used for it, it's buried deep. Really deep. To be honest, given that we haven't found anything more than we have in the first ten days, I don't think we'll ever be able to prove any of it."

"All right, that brings me to my second point. Can you think of anyone besides Anisimovna who might have done it?"

"No," Dusserre said again, but there was less certainty in his tone this time, and Vézien chuckled harshly.

"No?" the Prime Minister shook his head. "Weren't you the one in here just a few months ago presenting that beautifully detailed briefing on our home grown 'liberation fronts' and general insurrectionary lunatics?"

"Yes, but—"

"Ah-ah!" Vézien waved an admonishing index finger. "I'm simply making the point that there are possible suspects other than Ms. Anisimovna. And, to be honest, the fact that you had all of her communications links tapped both before and during the Manties' visit actually gives her a better alibi."

"Maybe it does, but that still doesn't change the fact that I'm positive, and so are a solid majority of my top analysts, that she and Manpower did it to force exactly the response she actually got out of that idiot Byng."

"To be completely honest with you, I'm inclined to the same conclusion," Vézien admitted finally, his expression bleak.

"What?" Dusserre blinked at him, then shook himself angrily. "If that's what you think, then why the hell have you been putting me through this whole dog and pony show for the last three weeks?!"

"Because it doesn't matter," Vézien said heavily. Dusserre looked at him in disbelief, and the Prime Minister shrugged.

"Look, Damien," he said. "We can't bring back the people who are dead, and we can't undo the destruction of those three Manty warships. Those are the two ugly points we're stuck with and can't change, however hard we try. So whatever we do from this point on, it has to take those two things as givens.

"Now, we can push for a big, fancy investigation if we want to. In the end, it's going to have to conclude one of two things, though. Either Giselle was blown up by 'parties unknown,' who we still haven't been able to identify, or else it was blown up on Anisimovna's orders. If we name some domestic group as the culprits, then we're also admitting a bunch of our home grown lunatics managed to blow up an entire space station and kill the next best thing to fifty thousand New Tuscans. Do you really want to give the lunatic fringe that kind of encouragement? Personally, I'd just as soon not have our own Nordbrandt running around blowing the planet up.

"But if we conclude it was Anisimovna, and if we go public with that, then we have to explain just why she might have wanted to do such a thing. I don't think we'd have a lot of success painting her as some sort of psychotic serial mass murderer who simply picked New Tuscany at random as the place to slaughter her next few thousand victims. In fact, the most likely scenario I can come up with would be that we wind up blowing the whistle on ourselves, expose all the sordid little details of our agreement with her and with Manpower, and end up becoming at least indirectly responsible for all of those deaths in the public's eye. And in Manticore's eyes, as well. Somehow, I don't think that would be conducive to domestic tranquility, either, and you know as well as I do what the standard Manty response to attacks on Manticoran warships has been for the last T-century. I don't think a visit from a squadron or two of Manty wallers would do a whole lot to help our system infrastructure recover from Giselle 's loss, and it for damned sure wouldn't do anything for your career, or mine."

"So what are you suggesting, instead?" Dusserre was watching the Prime Minister very closely. He was pretty sure he already knew exactly where Vézien was going with this, but some things had to be explicitly spoken.

"I'm suggesting that from our perspective the best possible explanation is still that the Manties did it. We take the readings we got from the sensor platforms on their way in, and we go ahead and massage them to show a possible missile trace from one of the Manties to the station. We were already planning something along those lines, anyway; now we've got no choice but to go ahead and do it right here. You can be pissed off at Anisimovna all you want. In fact, I'll help you be pissed off at her, and if the opportunity should arise a few years down the road, I'd be entirely in favor of your Ministry terminating her with as much prejudice as humanly possible. At the moment, though, she's got the only life pod in sight. We've got Byng sitting right here in the system, and he's got a strong vested interest in the Manties'

having been responsible for what happened to Giselle , as well. We work on him—subtly, of course—to make sure we're all still on the same page and he's ready to sign off on our Manty missile trace, and then we announce our findings that the Manties were, in fact, responsible. At that point, the entire plan is back on schedule."

Dusserre looked like a man who'd bitten into one of his favorite fruits, only to discover half a worm. He opened his mouth, obviously to protest, then closed it again.

"And if Manpower screws us over again somewhere down the road?" he asked sourly.

"Then we get screwed again. But at least this time we'll be looking for it, and I don't know about you, but considering the alternatives, my willingness to consider possible screwings by our Mesan friends just got enormously expanded. On the other hand, if we get Byng on board and the League comes in like it's supposed to, gives them what they've wanted out of this all along, I honestly don't see any reason for them to shaft us again."

Dusserre sat and chewed on that for a while, and the Prime Minister found himself wondering how much of the Security Minister's frustrated anger stemmed from the fact that they'd been out-thought (or at least out-betrayed) by Manpower, and how much stemmed from the massive loss of life aboard Giselle . Personally, Vézien wanted nothing more than to strangle Anismiovna with his bare hands. He'd never signed on to have his own citizens slaughtered for mere political window dressing or to force the Sollies'

hand, and he'd been dead serious about having her killed later. Indeed, he was rather looking forward to it as a simple act of justice. Yet at the moment, she had them well and truly over the proverbial barrel. They were almost certain they knew who'd done it, yet they couldn't charge her with the mass murder without disastrous political and military consequences, both domestic and foreign.

"I don't like it," Dusserre said finally, almost conversationally, admitting defeat, and Vézien barked a laugh.

" You don't like it? How d'you think I feel about it? If you'll recall, Nicholas and I were Anisimovna's strongest supporters in the Cabinet when she first brought this idea to us. I'll bet you she was thinking about doing something like this if it seemed advisable from the very beginning, and I never even noticed. Trust me, there's nothing I'd like better than to shoot the bitch myself, or just 'disappear' her into one of the reeducation camps up north and let her rot there for a decade or three. But we can't. Right this minute, she's got us by the short and curlies, and there's nothing we can do about it without making matters even worse."

Chapter Forty-Three

Aldona Anisimovna reclined in a comfortable chair, eyes closed, while haunting strains of music filled the small, luxuriously appointed compartment. She didn't simply listen to the music; she absorbed it, as if all the skin on her body were one enormous receptor.

It was odd, a corner of her mind reflected dreamily. Of all the composers in the entire galaxy, it was a Manticoran who was her favorite. A Sphinxian, in fact. She'd never really understood why Hammerwell's skeins of melody spoke to her so strongly, yet they did, and there were times she needed that. Needed to let herself simply float upon the music, to empty herself of thoughts, of schemes and plans. Of guilt.

Don't be silly, the part of her which hadn't been filled with woodwinds and the subtle interplay of brasses and strings scolded yet again. You're here as part of a strategy to provoke a war that's going to kill millions—probably billions— and you're agonizing over killing forty thousand people?

You're coming a little late to that particular party, aren't you, Aldona? It certainly didn't seem to bother you very much during the planning stages.

No, it hadn't. But that had been when she was considering it as an abstract strategy, part of a carefully crafted piece of superlative manipulation, of the grand design which was going to have the greatest, most powerful political entity in the history of mankind dancing to the Mesan Alignment's piping. From that perspective, it had been . . . exciting. Enthralling. The sheer intoxication of playing the Great Game at such stratospheric heights and for such unimaginable stakes was like some powerful drug. There was a compulsion to it, a sense of reaching out near-godlike hands to take the entire universe by the throat and force it to do her bidding.

No wonder Albrecht is so fascinated with ancient mythology, she thought. I know he says it's to remind him of how many blunders all those ancient gods made because they were so convinced of their own power and so jealous of their own prerogatives. So petty and capricious. So unwilling to work together. Given what we're trying to accomplish, I suppose he's right, we really do need to remember the dangers of convincing ourselves that we're gods. I'm sure all of that's true . . . but it's really about Prometheus for him. About daring to steal the forbidden fire, to raise his hand—

our hand—against all the established power of the galaxy and make it change . Seen on that scale, the men, women, and children who had died aboard Giselle were literally insignificant. Such a small casualty total would be lost to the simple rounding process when the statisticians began counting up the cost of the Alignment's magnificent vision. But that would only be after the Alignment had won, and this was now. This was when those deaths were fresh and immediate . . . and hers. Not a consequence of one of her strategies at a dozen removes, but deaths which she had personally ordered, personally contrived. It wasn't a Nordbrandt being provided with weapons through deniable cutouts and conduits. It was Aldona Anisimovna personally giving the order.

She'd get over it. She already knew that, although a part of her wanted to pretend she didn't. Pretend there truly was some inner core of innocence that would resist the next time something like this came along. But she knew herself too well to fool herself for long, and so she didn't even try. She simply sat back in her chair aboard the palatially furnished, streak drive-equipped "yacht" which had delivered her to New Tuscany, and let the music fill her.

"This just keeps getting better and better," Lorcan Verrochio said moodily. He sat with his elbows on the balcony table, looking out across Pine Mountain. A half-drained beer stein sat in front of him, accompanied by the remnants of a Reuben sandwich, an order of fries, and a tossed salad. Hongbo Junyan had just arrived, but he'd already eaten lunch, and he sat nursing a glass of iced tea.

"It's not exactly as if this should be coming as a great surprise, Lorcan," the vice-commissioner pointed out. "Something like this happening at a . . . convenient moment's been an inherent underpinning of everything we've done so far."

Verrochio gave him a moderately dirty look, but Hongbo only shrugged. Discussing something like this on an open balcony, without the protection of the anti-snooping systems installed in Verrochio's office, might constitute a moderate security risk. Unless the wheels came off, though, that wouldn't matter; and if the wheels did come off, there was already so much incriminating crap lying around in various files for any moderately competent investigator to dig up that any recordings of this conversation weren't going to matter.

Verrochio continued to eye him disapprovingly for several seconds, then seemed to think better of it himself, and reached for his beer. He took another healthy swallow, set the stein back on the table, and regarded Hongbo a touch less sourly.

"How much of this exploding freighter do you think is real?" he asked.

"About as much as you do," Hongbo returned with a humorless grin.

"That's what I thought you thought." Verrochio grimaced. "You know, this all seemed like a much better idea when this kind of crap was still somewhere off in the future."

"Whatever happens from here on out, our hands are clean." Hongbo gestured with his glass of tea.

"Byng is off safely in someone else's hands, and all we have to do at this point is respond to whatever requests he makes. After all, he's the man on the scene now, isn't he? And he's a full admiral in Battle Fleet, as well. Given his attitude, I don't think Anisimovna will find it particularly difficult to manipulate him into committing the actions and making the reinforcement requests she wants. All we have to do is give him what he asks for, then stand back while the Manties take the fall."

"So you think it's Anisimovna out in New Tuscany?"

"No one's specifically said so," Hongbo admitted, "but I imagine it is. She certainly seemed more than enough hands-on where Monica was concerned, and if I were looking for someone to send, I'd probably pick someone who was reasonably familiar with the Cluster."

"Your friend Ottweiler hasn't said one way or the other?"

"You know him as well as I do, Lorcan," Hongbo said mildly, if not entirely accurately. "And I already said no one has specifically confirmed that she's handling the other end of this. I'd just be surprised if she wasn't. Although I suppose it could be Bardasano."

"And aren't they a pair," Verrochio muttered, then managed a rather off-center smile. "They played me like a violin before Monica. I guess I should go ahead and admit that much. So if one of them—or even both of them, God help us all!— is the other end of this operation, I imagine you're right about Byng's doing whatever they want him to. Which means we ought to be thinking about what we're likely to need to do, I guess."

"I've already been thinking about that, as a matter of fact," Hongbo said, without mentioning the fact that a lot of his thoughts on the subject had centered around Valery Ottweiler's directives. "It seems to me that the most reasonable thing for us to do, from all perspectives, is to pass this message along to MacIntosh for Admiral Crandall's information. She's not remotely under your command, of course, but given the fact that Admiral Byng has already headed off for New Tuscany—on his own authority, of course, although as the local Frontier Security governor you obviously agreed that we ought to defer to his judgment—it would be only prudent and courteous of you to inform another Battle Fleet officer who just happens to be in the vicinity about his movements and the continuing deterioration of Manticoran-New Tuscan relations."

"And what do you think she'll do when we pass along this little tidbit?"

"That depends on her, I suppose," Hongbo said. And on what her instructions from Manpower might be, he very carefully did not say out loud. "It's remotely possible she might head off immediately for New Tuscany herself, although I don't really see it as at all likely. You want my best guess?"

"That's the reason I asked the question," Verrochio said just a bit sarcastically.

"Well, I think her most likely course of action would be to move her command from MacIntosh to Meyers. We don't have the facilities to support her task force here, but we're no worse off in that regard than MacIntosh is, and the whole reason for her deployment is supposed to be a test of the Navy's ability to sustain itself without local support. And this is our administrative hub for the area, so she could rely on the best communications here. This is where any fresh messages from Byng would be directed, and it's where Admiral Gordon Nelson is supposed to hold the rest of Byng's battlecruisers. Bearing all of that in mind, I can't really see any other logical location for her."

"Wonderful." Verrochio drank some more beer, then twitched his shoulders. "I'm beginning to feel decidedly excess to requirements, but I suppose you're right. Go ahead and have the communications center relay the information to her."

"Any last-minute thoughts, anyone?" Michelle Henke asked quietly, looking around the cool, quiet, dimly lit expanse of HMS Artemis ' flag deck. "Any last-minute suggestions?" Cynthia Lecter did her own once-over examination of the rest of the staff, one eyebrow raised, then turned back to Michelle and shook her head.

"No, Ma'am," she said for all of them, and Michelle nodded.

She hadn't really expected any, although that hadn't kept her from spending last night fretting and worrying on her own. She'd often wondered how Honor could appear so calm just before some enormously important operation kicked off. Michelle had done her own worrying before each of Eighth Fleet's rear-area attacks, but she'd always been one of the subordinate commanders. And that, she realized now, was another of the reasons she'd resisted playing the patronage game to reach flag rank sooner. Her hatred for that sort of nepotism really had been the major component of her resistance, but she knew now that there'd been another factor, as well. One that was almost—but not quite—its own form of cowardice.

Michelle Henke admired Honor Harrington enormously, but she wasn't Honor, and she knew it. She knew hers was in many ways a less complex personality, and she'd never been plagued by the soul-searching that was so much a part of Honor. When it came down to it, she'd always been more . . . direct. More black-and-white, less inclined to empathize with an enemy or agonize over the consequences to an enemy. She was comfortable with the notion of "us" and "them," and she didn't like ambiguities that could cloud and confuse her decisions.

As a captain, or even a junior flag officer, that had worked just fine for her. She'd been concerned only with the part her ship or her squadron was supposed to play in an operation planned by, coordinated by, and the ultimate responsibility of someone else. But that wasn't true this time. No, this time that ultimate responsibility was hers and hers alone, and this time, despite the relatively small size of the forces involved, the stakes were probably—no, certainly—as high as any for which Honor had ever played. Be honest, girl, she told herself tartly. That's what's really scaring the crap out of you. You're not afraid of getting killed. Well, not terrified of it, at any rate. What you're really afraid of is that you personally—you, Michelle Henke, not just the Royal Navy—are going to screw this one up. That this isn't really the right job for a woman who'd rather kill them all and let God sort them out, no matter how much an asshole like Byng deserves it. That the Star Kingdom is going to find itself fighting for its life against the Solarian League because the wrong woman was in the wrong spot and you screwed the pooch .

Yes, that's exactly what I'm scared of , she replied to herself, and no wonder! I signed on to chase pirates, to fight battles, to defend my star nation. I never expected to have something like this dumped on my shoulders!

Well, you've got it now, the first voice told her, even more tartly. Last time I looked, it came with that black beret sitting on your head. So unless you want to admit this is all to much for itty-bitty you and give the nice hat back, I guess all you can really do is suck it up and get to it. And while you're at it, let's at least try to keep the body count within limits, shall we?

"Well, in that case, seeing as how no one seems to have spotted any t's we've left uncrossed or any i's we've left undotted," the Countess of Gold Peak said calmly, "I suppose we'd best be about it."

For the first time in his naval career, Josef Byng made his appearance on his flag bridge without his uniform tunic. He felt acutely out of place in just his shirt sleeves, but that thought was distant and unimportant as he came through the flag deck door at something just short of a run and slid to a halt, staring at the master plot.

Karlotte Thimár and Ingeborg Aberu were bent over the more detailed information CIC was channeling to the operations officer's console. The rest of Byng's staff was also present, aside from Captain Vladislava Jenkins, his logistics officer. Jenkins was aboard SLNS Resourceful, where she'd gone to confer with Captain Sharon Yang about some problems with the battlecruiser's spares.

"What do we have on them?" he asked, eyes locked to the icons sweeping inward from the system's hyper limit.

"Not very much yet, Sir," Aberu acknowledged more than a bit unhappily, straightening and turning to face him. "All we really know is that we've got nineteen point sources. It looks like five of them are considerably smaller than the others—probably destroyers or light cruisers. We're tracking their impeller signatures now, Sir, and I'm assuming that the larger contacts are probably battlecruisers. Under the circumstances, I think we have to assume they're Manties."

Byng nodded almost absently, but Aberu wasn't quite through. She cleared her throat quietly to attract his attention.

"Their current velocity relative to the primary is approximately six thousand KPS, Sir," she said when she knew she had his attention. "But their acceleration is right on six KPS squared."

" What was that acceleration?" he asked sharply.

"Six KPS squared, Sir," Aberu said even more unhappily. "That's one-point-three KPS more than they showed us at Monica. Call it a twenty-eight percent difference."

"They must be running at maximum military power, Sir," Thimár said, and Byng turned sharply to look at her. "That's over six hundred gravities," the chief of staff continued. "They've got to be redlining their compensators to crank that much accel!"

Byng only looked at her for several seconds, then he nodded. She had to be right. He couldn't think of any reason for the Manties to have gone to their maximum possible acceleration, with the attendant risk of someone's suffering compensator failure and the death of every man and woman aboard the ship involved. But a Solarian ship of that tonnage would have a maximum acceleration of less than four hundred and fifty gravities. For that matter, his own ships' maximum acceleration was less than four hundred and ninety gravities, despite the fact that they were less than half as massive. And if the Manties hadn't maxed out their compensators, if they had still more acceleration in reserve . . . The ghost of that insufferable little lieutenant's ridiculous memos flickered through the back of his mind for just an instant, but he shook it off irritably to concentrate on the concrete details that mattered.

"Well, it seems they're a little faster than we thought," he observed as calmly as possible, and returned his attention to Aberu. "And what travel agenda do you project for our speedy friends, Ingeborg?"

"On their current heading and at that acceleration rate, assuming a zero-zero intercept with New Tuscany, they'll be here in about two hours and fifty-five minutes, Sir. That's about all we've got."

"I see." Byng nodded again, commanding his expression to be merely thoughtful, then glanced at his communications officer.

"How long until we could hear something from them, Willard?"

"They made translation just over six minutes ago, Sir," Captain MaCuill replied. "Current range is ten-point-six light-minutes, so it's going to be another three or four minutes, minimum."

"I see."

Byng folded his hands behind him and made himself take a deep, calming breath. Like Aberu, there wasn't much question in his mind as to who those icons belonged to, although he couldn't imagine what they were doing here this quickly. And, he admitted very privately, the acceleration they were displaying was . . . worrisome. It implied that they truly could have other surprises in store, and he didn't care for that possibility at all.

Especially, a tiny voice whispered, not if it gives Mizawa any more ammunition. He shoved that thought aside, although it wasn't as easy as he would have liked it to be, and refocused his attention on the problem at hand. Even if they were Manties, there was no reason for all this unseemly haste on his own part, he told himself severely, suffused by a sense of chagrin as he realized just how thoroughly his rush to the bridge had underscored his own tension.

"Have someone drop by my quarters and collect my tunic from my steward, please, Karlotte." He made his voice come out drolly, as if amused by his own precipitousness, and he gave the chief of staff a smile.

"If we've got a few minutes before we can talk to them anyway, I suppose I should be certain I'm properly dressed for the occasion."

* * *

"Oh, shit ," Maxime Vézien said with soft, heartfelt intensity as he stared at Nicholas Pélisard's com image. He'd anticipated a forceful reaction out of Manticore, but he'd never expected a force the size of the one which had just been detected. Nor had anyone in New Tuscany expected that it could possibly arrive so promptly.

"How the hell did they get here so quickly ?" Alesta Cardot demanded. "For that matter, why are they here at all ? It's been barely three weeks, and no one's left the system except a couple of merchantships, not dispatch boats. So how could they even know anything happened here?" Vézien's eyes slipped to the foreign minister's quadrant of the conference call display as she put his own question into words. Then he looked back at Pélisard.

"That's an excellent question, Nicholas," he pointed out. "Does anyone at the War Ministry have any suggestions about that?"

Pélisard's face tightened. He started to answer quickly, defensively—and angrily, Vézien suspected. But then he stopped and visibly got a grip on himself.

"Judging by the elapsed time," he said flatly, "their Commodore Chatterjee must have deployed at least one more ship. Obviously, we didn't pick up an extra hyper footprint when they translated into normal-space, or we would have mentioned it by now. As you may recall, I've been saying for some time that our system arrays need upgrading."

He paused for just an instant, and Vézien managed not to grimace. He supposed that a certain degree of ass-covering was inevitable, even at a moment like this one, and so he simply nodded in acknowledgment of Pélisard's point, and the Minister of War continued.

"Having said that, I think it's the only explanation. They know exactly what happened, and they must have turned this task force around from Spindle the instant they found out." Which, Maxime Vézien reflected unhappily, doesn't suggest they're here just to say hello. You don't kick a force this size loose that quickly unless you're ready to go to the mat. And if that's the way the Manties are thinking . . .

His eyes flicked to Damien Dusserre's quadrant of the display. The Security Minister hadn't said a single word, but Vézien knew exactly what he was thinking.

And he's right, the Prime Minister thought. It's a damned good thing we still haven't gotten around to faking up that "missile trace" for Byng's consumption. The Manties are going to be unhappy enough with us already, but if they decide we're that deeply in bed with the Sollies . . .

"I think you're probably right about that," he said out loud, returning his attention to Pélisard. "And I also think that whatever the Manties may have to say to the Sollies, we're staying out of it. I want you to immediately stand down every military unit we have, Nicholas. Do it on my authority, and do it now. I'll get the official presidential directive to you from Alain ASAP, but let's not do anything to even suggest to the Manties that they should consider us a target."

Pélisard nodded, his expression an inextricable mix of agreement, chagrin, anger, fear, and humiliation at the helplessness of his own utterly outclassed ships and personnel in the face of such an impending clash of titans.

"And while Nicholas is doing that, Alesta," Vézien continued, turning to the Foreign Minister, "I think you'd better be thinking about the best possible way for us to reassure the Manties that all we want to do is get to the bottom of what happened here. And how to make it very, very clear to them that we didn't have one damned thing to do with that idiot Byng's decision to open fire!"

"What do we have, Dominica?" Michelle asked. "Anything?"

"As a matter of fact, Ma'am, we do," Commander Adenauer replied with a smile, and twitched her head at the lieutenant commander sitting at the console beside hers. "Max here is actually picking up the platforms Commander Kaplan left behind."

"Outstanding." Michelle smiled back at the operations officer, then turned to Maxwell Tersteeg. "So tell me what you know, Max," she said.

"Yes, Ma'am."

The EWO input a string of commands, and a detailed schematic of the New Tuscany System's inner planets and the space about them appeared on the master plot. The schematic swelled dramatically as he zoomed in on the planet of New Tuscany itself. The planet's two moons dominated the space about it, but that same volume was dotted with the icons of merchant ships in parking orbits, industrial shuttles plying back and forth between orbiting space stations, and the bright icons of warships, color-coded by class and all circled by the blood-red rings that indicated hostiles.

"Basically, Ma'am," Tersteeg continued, "there's been no change. We have these three destroyers here"—a green sighting ring enclosed three of the icons—"that have shifted orbits. They're about eleven hundred klicks outside and well ahead of the rest of their formation. It looks like they were probably moved out towards where Commodore Chatterjee's ships were destroyed, maybe for search-and-rescue. Aside from that, they haven't moved as far as I can tell."

"Do you have Byng's flagship IDed?"

"Yes, Ma'am. I got a good read on her emissions signature at Monica. Unless he's shifted his flag to another ship, this is her, right here."

A green carat indicated the gold-edged orange icon of a battlecruiser. There was a total of three matching symbols, each indicating an identified battlecruiser flagship, but Tersteeg's confidence that he'd picked out the right one was obvious.

"Good." Michelle nodded. "What about the status of their impellers?"

"Hard to be absolutely certain about that, Ma'am," Tersteeg admitted. "Commander Kaplan didn't want to get the platforms too close when she left them behind, so we're a bit far out for definitive readings. From what I can see, though, they aren't hot."

"Good," Michelle repeated, and patted him on the shoulder. "Keep me advised of any changes."

"Of course, Ma'am."

Michelle nodded and walked slowly across to her own command chair and settled into it. Naomi Kaplan's decision to leave the stealthy Ghost Rider platforms behind had just been amply justified, although Michelle had felt a certain undeniable concern over that decision when she'd first learned of it. Ghost Rider was one of the RMN's greatest advantages, and the thought of the Solarian League getting its hands on one of the platforms and figuring out how to reverse-engineer the technology hadn't been particularly comforting. But even then, she'd felt Kaplan's decision had been the right one. They were designed with every self-destruct device and security fail-safe R&D could figure out how to build into them, which probably meant the Navy in general, and one Michelle Henke in particular, worried more than they had to about their being compromised by simple capture, and even if that hadn't been true, the things had been designed to be used. Right off the top of her head, Michelle hadn't been able to think of a more important place to have used them, and the chances of anyone's managing to localize one of them, far less snag it for study without its on-board suicide charge destroying it first, had been minuscule. So any concern she had felt had been far too small a thing to prevent her from firmly endorsing Kaplan's decision in her own pre-departure dispatches to the Admiralty.

And as it happened, that decision was turning out to have been just as good as Michelle had thought it was. In powered-down passive mode, the way Kaplan had left them, their endurance had been good for far longer than the twenty-three T-days since the destruction of Commodore Chatterjee's destroyers. Now, in response to the properly authenticated command codes, they were fully awake once more, faithfully reporting everything they'd seen over those three T-weeks via grav-pulse, which amounted to real-time reporting at this range.

So I know where you are, Admiral Byng, she thought coldly. That's nice. If I have to kill people anyway, I'd like to make sure the idiot asshole responsible for it is on my little list when I do .

"What do you make of it, Ma'am?" Gladys Molyneux asked very quietly, and Abigail Hearns glanced at her. The junior-grade lieutenant's battle station was missile-defense, which put her at Abigail's elbow. Despite the quiet, waiting hush of Tristram 's bridge, Abigail doubted anyone could possibly have overheard the nervous question.

"It's a little too early to be making anything of it, Gladys," she replied, equally quietly but with a slight smile. She saw confidence seeping back into Molyneux as the smile registered, then shook her head.

"The one thing I can tell you," she continued, "is that if those people over there"—a flick of her head indicated the icons of the orbiting Solarian battlecruisers—"have even a clue about what this task force can do, then they're a lot more nervous than we are right this moment." She smiled again, and this time it was a cold, cruel smile.

Mother Church says vengeance is the Tester's, she reminded herself, and I believe that. But I also believe He can use anyone He wants as the instrument of His vengeance. And right this minute, I'm not feeling very forgiving, Gladys.

* * *

"Sir, Captain Mizawa would like to speak to you."

Josef Byng paused in the act of slipping into the tunic someone had fetched for him and looked at the bridge communications rating who'd spoken. He managed not to scowl, although it wasn't easy.

"Did the captain say why?" he asked, sliding the tunic the rest of the way on and sealing it.

"No, Sir," the rating replied. His careful tone only emphasized the fact that everyone aboard Jean Bart knew all about the hostility between Byng and his flag captain.

"Very well." Byng tried to keep his own voice coolly professional as he acknowledged the rating's message, then took the two steps to his command chair. Rather than seat himself, he swiveled the com display around to face him and punched the acceptance key.

"Captain Mizawa," he said as the Frontier Fleet officer's face appeared.

"Admiral," Mizawa replied.

"I'm just a trifle busy at the moment, Captain," Byng said as pleasantly as he could. "What can I do for you?"

"Sir, I don't know if CIC has reported it to you, but Commander Zeiss is picking up a sudden cascade of gravitic pulses."

"Gravitic pulses?" Byng repeated just a bit blankly.

"Sir, according to the latest intelligence reports, the Manties have an effective FTL communications ability over relatively short ranges. One that's based on grav pulses."

"I'm aware of that fact, Captain." A hint of frost crept into Byng's tone in response to the patience edging Mizawa's voice, as if the Frontier Fleet officer were trying to explain Newtonian physics to a village idiot. Especially since those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned memos had touched upon the same point. Now the bastard's going to pretend that he personally warned me all about it, isn't he? the admiral thought bitterly.

"Yes, Sir. I'm sure you are," the flag captain agreed. "But what concerns me are the reports that they've built the same capability into their reconnaissance drones. I think that's what Commander Zeiss is picking up."

" Reconnaissance drones," Byng repeated carefully.

"Yes, Sir. I think the Manty destroyers probably deployed them on their way in. Now these new Manties have tapped into them, and they're receiving real-time reconnaissance reports on us."

"I see."

Byng couldn't quite keep his incredulity out of his expression, although he managed to keep it out of his voice. But really! He was willing to concede that the Manties had at least some sort of ship-to-ship FTL

communications ability—ONI had tentatively confirmed that much—but to build the same capability into something the size of a recon drone? Not even that stupid lieutenant of Mizawa's had suggested that! Or, at least, Byng didn't think he had, and he suddenly found himself wondering if perhaps he ought to have read those memos for himself rather than simply accepting Thimár's summary of their content. He brushed that thought firmly aside. There'd be time enough to worry about it later; right now he needed to concentrate on the matter at hand, and he tried—really tried—to consider Mizawa's preposterous notion dispassionately. But no matter how hard he tried, it remained just that: preposterous. R&D was beginning to experiment with the same FTL technology back home, and unlike many of his fellows, Byng had made it a point to follow at least the unclassified aspects of their efforts. According to them, just the power storage any grav-pulse installation would have required would have been impossible to fit into any drone-sized platform. And that completely ignored the fact that actually generating the pulse in the first place took the equivalent of an all-up impeller node, many times the size of any recon drone ever built!

"I appreciate the warning, Captain," he said after a few moments, choosing his words with some care as he spoke for the benefit of the flag bridge recorders, "but I strongly suspect that the reports about faster-than-light recon drone transmissions have . . . grown in the telling, let's say. As you may know, our own research people"—by which, of course, he meant Battle Fleet's researchers—"have been looking into this alleged capability of the Manties. Our own R and D indicates that it probably is possible, at least on the level of gross communication, but the sort of bandwidth which would be required for any useful reports from something like a recon drone is highly unlikely. And even if it were possible, the energy budget and the sheer mass of the hardware would almost certainly limit it to something the size of a starship."

"Sir, I haven't had access to the reports you have on the research side," Mizawa said, "but I have had access to other reports, including . . . Commodore Thurgood's. According to them, the Manties do have that capability."

White-hot anger flashed through Byng at Mizawa's obvious reference to his lieutenant's memos. He started to snap back quickly, but then he made himself pause. This had to be handled cautiously, and his chose his words with care.

"I'm familiar with the reports to which you refer, Captain." He allowed his voice to get a bit crisper, a bit more brisk. "I'm convinced that they're exaggerated, at the very least." He and his flag captain locked eyes on the com, and he saw Mizawa's jaw muscles tighten briefly. Then the captain's nostrils flared, and he shook his head.

"I'm aware that many people feel those reports are exaggerated, Sir," he said then. "As a matter of fact, that was my own opinion before we were ordered to New Tuscany. But that was my opinion where the acceleration rates ascribed to Manty warships were concerned, as well." He looked at Byng levelly, challenging the admiral, but Byng said nothing, and the captain continued. "Whether the reports about their FTL capability are exaggerated or not, Sir, something is producing the pulses Commander Zeiss is picking up, and whatever it is, it's stealthy enough that we can't find it, even with the pulses giving us an exact bearing to it. To me, that spells a very capable reconnaissance platform."

"Your concerns are noted, Captain. Thank you for calling them to my attention. Now, if you'll excuse me, I believe I'm needed elsewhere. Byng, out."

The admiral cut the circuit before his temper betrayed him into giving Mizawa the tongue-lashing his irritating insistence deserved. Reconnaissance drones! Granted, the Manties' acceleration rates were a little higher than Intelligence had believed. And granted that they might have a few other minor tricks up their sleeves, but even so—! The Solarian League was the most technically advanced star nation in the history of mankind. Did Mizawa honestly believe that a pinhead-sized "star kingdom" consisting of only a single star system up until only a very few years before could produce an R&D establishment that could actually outperform the League's ? God only knew what the man was going to come up with to worry about next! Invasions of brain-devouring hordes from Andromeda, perhaps? Or possibly a deadly revolt by the galaxy's cocker spaniels, intent on devouring their masters one toe at a time?

Byng grimaced at his own thought, but, really, what else could he expect out of a Frontier Fleet captain?

Especially one who already knew he'd made a mortal enemy of a Battle Fleet admiral ? In fact, Mizawa probably didn't believe his own doom-saying predictions, but whether he believed them or not was really beside the point, in many ways, wasn't it? The captain was going to do anything he could at this point—including predicting disaster—to rattle Byng into mishandling the situation. Making the admiral look bad would be one of the most effective ways of making the captain look good , after all!

Unfortunately for Mizawa, Byng knew all about playing that game.

"You know, Sir," Aberu spoke slowly, as if she didn't much care for what she heard herself saying, "it's just possible Mizawa is onto something."

"Good God, Ingeborg!" Byng looked at her in disbelief. "Are you going to climb onto the same paranoid bandwagon?"

"No, Sir," Aberu said quickly. "But CIC's relayed the same grav-pulse detection to me." A tip of her head indicated her console. "I agree with you that the idea of putting some kind of FTL transmitter into something the size of a drone is ridiculous, but we are picking up pulses from something, and we can't seem to find whatever it is, however hard we look for it. That's what I meant when I said Mizawa might be onto something."

"Well, whatever it is, it isn't any 'reconnaissance drone,' " Byng retorted testily. "Even assuming for the moment that they'd managed to come up with a way to meet the energy requirements, and then that they'd managed to develop something that could produce a worthwhile bandwidth, and then that they'd managed to squeeze it down into something that could be crammed into a drone's body, where the hell would the things have come from? Those Manty destroyers wouldn't have had any need to deploy them this close to us, and they sure as hell didn't have time to deploy any after we opened fire on them! And these Manties have been in-system for less than ten minutes! Whatever kind of transmitter technology they might have, they couldn't possibly have gotten reconnaissance drones this close to us this quickly. Not without producing some kind of FTL drive technology, as well, anyway, and I'd like to know what kind of stealth systems could hide that kind of energy signature at this short a range!"

"No, Sir. Of course not," Aberu said, and returned her attention to her own station.

* * *

"They should be receiving your initial transmission just about now, Ma'am," Commander Edwards told Michelle.

"Thank you, Bill," she replied, looking up from a quiet conversation with Lecter and Adenauer. She smiled at the com officer, then returned her attention to the chief of staff and ops officer.

"Uh, Admiral, we've . . . received a burst transmission from the bogeys. It's addressed to you, Sir."

"By name?" Byng asked.

"Yes, Sir." Captain MaCuill confirmed.

The communications officer didn't sound any happier than Byng felt, and the admiral glanced across at Thimár . . . whose expression was as troubled as his own. There was no way the Manticorans could possibly know he was in New Tuscany. For that matter, there was no way they could know any Solarian unit was in New Tuscany. Unless . . .

A sudden chill touched his heart as the logic chain Nicholas Pélisard had already followed flowed through his own brain.

There was only one way the Manties could have put together a force this size and sent it to New Tuscany this soon after the destruction of their destroyers, especially a force which knew to ask specifically for him when it arrived. There hadn't been three Manty ships that day; there'd been four . That was the only possible explanation. There'd been just enough time for another ship, probably another destroyer, to make the trip to their central base at Spindle and for this force to have been dispatched to New Tuscany in response. Even so, the Manty authorities must have made the decision within hours of receiving their surviving unit's report, and for anyone accustomed to the glacial pace with which the Solarian League formulated policy, that speed of decision was almost as frightening as anything else. And maybe Mizawa and Ingeborg have a point after all, he thought icily. I still don't see how anybody could have squeezed something like that into a reconnaissance drone. It just doesn't seem possible . . . unless they're using some sort of dispersed architecture? Multiple platforms, each containing only a small portion of the total system? Could that be it? But even if it is, how the hell are they powering the things?

His mind raced, trying to consider the possibilities, but it didn't really matter how they'd done it. What mattered was that they actually could have done it, in which case any drones out there wouldn't have been deployed by these newcomers. No, they would have been there all along. In fact, they'd have been deployed by Commodore Chatterjee on his way in. And if they had a standard light-speed communications link as a backup for their FTL systems, then they could have been reporting every single thing that happened via laser to that fourth ship, hiding out there in the dark, without anyone in-system suspecting or detecting a thing. Which would mean the Manties knew precisely what had happened three weeks ago. . . .

"Well, Willard," he told MaCuill, keeping his tone as light as possible, "I suppose I'd better view the message, hadn't I?"

This time he did seat himself in his command chair. He let it adjust comfortably under him, then nodded to MaCuill.

"Go ahead, Willard."

"Yes, Sir."

The communications officer pressed a button, and a face appeared on Byng's display. It was a face he'd seen before, and his lips tightened as he recognized Vice Admiral Gold Peak from their exchange at Monica.

"Good morning, Admiral Byng," she said coldly from his display. "I'm sure you remember me, but for the official record, I am Vice Admiral Gold Peak, Royal Manticoran Navy, commanding officer Tenth Fleet, and I am here in response to your unprovoked attack upon units of the Royal Navy in this star system on October twenty-fifth. Specifically, I am referring to your destruction of the destroyers Roland , Lancelot

, and Galahad , under the overall command of Commodore Ray Chatterjee, which had been sent to New Tuscany for the express purpose of conveying a diplomatic note from my Queen's government to that of New Tuscany. We have detailed sensor records of the event. As such, Admiral, we know our vessels were not even at battle readiness. Their impeller wedges were down, their side walls were inactive, and their broadside weapons had not been cleared away. In short, they posed absolutely no threat whatsoever to your command, and their personnel weren't even in skinsuits, at the moment you cold-bloodedly opened fire on them and completely destroyed them.

"This, as I'm sure you must be aware, constitutes not merely a cowardly act of murder, but also an act of war."

That cold, precise voice paused, and Byng felt his facial muscles congeal. If they truly did have sensor records showing what Gold Peak claimed, then they'd be able to make a damnably good argument—at least to anyone who hadn't been here, who didn't have the experience to set events into a proper context—that his response had been . . . unjustified. But for any so-called flag officer of a pissant little neobarb navy to accuse the Solarian League Navy of committing an act of war—!

"Neither Prime Minister Alquezar nor Governor General Medusa desire additional bloodshed," Gold Peak continued. "However, they would be derelict in their duties and in their responsibilities to my Queen if they did not take the strongest measures to clearly establish responsibility for these actions, and if they did not demand accountability of those who are, in fact, responsible for them. Accordingly, I am instructed to require you to stand down your vessels. I am not demanding their permanent surrender to the Royal Manticoran Navy. I am, however, informing you that you will stand them down; you will make arrangements with the New Tuscan government to transfer all but a skeleton anchor watch of your personnel to the surface of the planet; you will stand by to be boarded by parties of Royal Marines and Royal Navy personnel, who will take temporary possession of your vessels and custody of your tactical data; and you will not delete any tactical information relevant to this incident from your computers. Your vessels will remain in this star system, under Manticoran control, until a Manticoran board of inquiry has determined precisely what happened here and who bears the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Manticoran personnel."

Despite himself, Byng felt his eyes flaring impossibly wide in disbelief as Gold Peak rolled out that litany of arrogant, intolerable demands.

"Special Minister Bernardus Van Dort is here aboard my flagship as the direct representative of the the Talbott Quadrant's Prime Minister, Governor, and Cabinet. He will present a formal note to you, recapitulating the points I've just made. He will also present a similar note to the New Tuscan government, informing them that the Star Empire of Manticore requires its cooperation in this investigation, that none of our requirements are negotiable, and that, should New Tuscany prove wholly or partially responsible for what happened here, it, too, will be held to account by the Star Empire." She paused once more, her eyes as unyielding as her face, and her voice was harder still when she continued.

"I will reach New Tuscany orbit approximately one hour and thirty-five minutes after your receipt of this message. I require a response from you, accepting my requirements, within the half-hour. Should you choose to reject my government's requirements, I am authorized to use deadly force to compel you to change your mind. I have no more desire to kill Solarian personnel than anyone else, Admiral Byng, but Manticoran personnel have already been killed in this star system. I will not hesitate, should you choose to resist, to employ whatever force is necessary and inflict whatever casualties are required to compel your compliance. I will expect to hear from you within thirty standard minutes of now.

"Gold Peak, clear."

"Oh, fuck! "

"My own thoughts exactly," Alesta Cardot told Maxime Vézien tartly, despite the fact that Foreign Minister, who was something of a bluenose, would normally have found his language offensive. At the moment, however, she had other things on her mind, and she'd just finished playing Bernardus Van Dort's transmission—which had been remarkably like Michelle Henke's message to Admiral Byng, aside from one small variation—for the Prime Minister.

"They know we're fronting for Manpower," Vézien said bitterly.

"That isn't exactly what they said, Max," Cardot disagreed. "What they said is that they know Manpower was behind what happened last year, and that it was using Monica as a front. The implication is certainly that they believe we're doing the same thing, but they didn't say they know we are." Vézien's expression must have betrayed his opinion of such semantic hairsplitting, but Cardot shook her head.

"Think about it, Max. They were very specific about what they know about what happened here three weeks ago. They told us they have sensor data, they told us they know the Sollies fired on them, and they told us the exact status of their own ships at the moment they were destroyed. Those are facts, and they presented them as facts. If they had solid evidence that we were in Manpower's back pocket, they would have said so."

"All right, so they don't know— yet," Vézien said. "But they obviously suspect very strongly. And if we give in to these demands of theirs, any investigation is probably going to come up with the proof you've just said they don't have. In which case, we're fucked."

It was a sign of her own tension that Cardot didn't even turn a hair at his choice of verbs. What she did do was to shake her head again.

"Look, you told me to be thinking about ways to convince the Manties we didn't have anything to do with Byng's decision to kill their destroyers, right? Well, I think this is probably the best shot at that we're going to have."

"And I think it's the best way to hand them the proof that we damned well helped set it up, whether we meant to or not!" Vézien shot back.

"You're probably right about their finding the proof," Cardot acknowledged. "But I think you may be missing the most critical point of their linking us with Monica."

"Which is?" Vézien asked skeptically.

"Which is that given everything that happened in the Cluster and at Monica, they were actually very restrained in the terms they imposed on Monica. Had the Monicans surrendered those Solly battlecruisers to Terekhov when he initially demanded that, I doubt a shot would have been fired. I doubt Tyler would've been allowed to keep his battlecruisers, but nobody would have been killed on either side, and his navy wouldn't have been totally demolished. I think one of the points of this message from Van Dort is to signal us that they aren't interested in kicking us any harder than they have to. I don't think they like us very much, and I don't think we'll be getting out of this without some serious repercussions, and probably some painful reparations, but I doubt very much that they want to impose destructive sanctions against us if they can avoid it. If nothing else, I don't think they want to be responsible for what's likely to happen on this planet if they punch us so hard the government collapses. And I know they don't want to be seen as the imperialistic conquerors of New Tuscany—not after how hard they've worked on demonstrating to the galaxy that the annexation was the result of a voluntary, spontaneous request from within the Cluster. And you just put your finger on the most critical point of all a moment ago."

"I did?" He looked at her blankly, and she shrugged.

"You said that we've helped to set up what happened here 'whether we meant to or not.' I submit that the best we can possibly hope for at this point is to prove that we didn't mean for that to happen. Whether we admit it, or they find proof of it, or not, they already know we were fronting for Manpower. That's a given , Max, and they're eventually going to take action against us on that basis, whether we cooperate right now or not. If we want to have any control over what they do to us, we'd better start distancing ourselves from any intentional shedding of Manticoran blood just as fast as we possibly can. However restrained they may want to be, for whatever reasons, if we can't distance ourselves from that, they won't have any choice but to up the ante all around."

"So you're suggesting we should tell them we intend to accept their conditions? Is that what you're saying?"

"I'm giving you what I believe would be the consequences of our accepting them," Cardot replied.

"Whether or not those consequences are acceptable isn't my decision. You're Prime Minister. I think this falls into your lap, not mine."

"Oh, dear," Aldona Anisimovna murmured as she finished replaying the two messages her taps into the New Tuscan communications system had relayed to her yacht. "This is looking unpleasant, isn't it?" The excitement of playing the Great Game was upon her once more, and her eyes gleamed with malicious satisfaction as she contemplated the Manticoran demands. This wasn't working out exactly according to her playbook, but then, things seldom did. And even if it wasn't perfect, she was confident it was close enough to get the job done.

Her own analysis of the players suggested there was a better than even chance the New Tuscans would choose to comply with the demands levied against them. That was unfortunate, but the speed of the Manticoran response made it much more probable than she really cared to admit. On the other hand, it didn't come as a total surprise, either. She'd hoped to have more time in hand, more time to work at binding New Tuscany firmly enough into the Alignment's web to make it impossible for Vézien to bolt. But the space station's destruction had put the New Tuscans' backs up more than the mission planners had hoped, and she'd always estimated that the Manties were going to respond more quickly than either the New Tuscans or Byng anticipated. Unlike either of them, she'd assumed from the beginning that the Manties would be intelligent enough to leave a watchdog out near the hyper limit, and the fact that no one in New Tuscany had detected any such watchdog hadn't shaken that assumption. That was one reason she'd moved out to her yacht this early. Keeping herself safely out of the New Tuscan authorities' reach in the event of a premature Manticoran arrival (and any messy little details associated therewith) had seemed only prudent. And she'd always intended to be safely aboard when the Manties really did arrive, since it was no part of her plan to be stuck in New Tuscany when Manticore finished kicking Byng's ass and took possession of the system.

The only real question in her mind at this point was whether or not Byng was going to have his posterior kicked as soundly as the Alignment hoped before he surrendered to Gold Peak's demands. The idiot clearly still had no idea of what he was up against. Given his disposition and his attitude towards Manties in general, that meant he was unlikely to give in until he'd been properly . . . convinced. Which she felt quite confident Gold Peak would be simply delighted to do.

"I think it's time to go, Kyrillos," she told her bodyguard.

"Yes, Ma'am," Taliadoros replied. "I'll tell the captain immediately."

"Thank you," Anisimovna said, and leaned back, contemplating the possibilities once again. Her yacht was scarcely the only vessel departing New Tuscany orbit. The word had already gone out over the public information channels, and no civilian vessel wanted to be anywhere in the vicinity if it was possible warships were going to be firing missiles at each other. In fact, New Tuscan traffic control had actually ordered all civilians to clear the volume of space around the planet as a precautionary measure. That was another reason Anisimovna had made certain she was already aboard ship. And it was why the

"yacht's" impeller nodes had been kept permanently hot. It meant they could get underway immediately yet be safely hidden in the underbrush of the other evacuees, which was precisely what she intended to do.

I wonder if we'll still be in our sensor range of the planet when the first missile flies? she thought. In a way, I'll be sorry to miss it if we're not. But I don't suppose anyone can have everything .

Chapter Forty-Four

The silence in the conference room deep inside Mount Royal Palace was profound as the report from Augustus Khumalo and Estelle Matsuko ended and the holo display blanked. Simultaneity normally had very little meaning over interstellar distances, especially given how long it took simply to send dispatch boats back and forth, but this time that concept had a very real meaning. Given the distances involved, all of the watchers knew, Michelle Henke and Aivars Terekhov must even then be preparing for their alpha translation back into normal-space just outside the New Tuscany hyper limit. And that meant that even as they sat here, the Star Empire of Manticore might be firing its very first shots in the war no sane star nation could ever want to fight.

No one said anything for several seconds, and then, predictably, Queen Elizabeth III cleared her throat.

"You know," she said almost whimsically, "when you and the Admiralty sent Mike off to Talbott, Hamish, I thought we might be sending her to a relatively quiet little corner of the galaxy while she recuperated."

Hamish Alexander-Harrington, the Earl of White Haven and First Lord of Admiralty, produced a rather sour chuckle.

"We never said it was going to be a 'quiet little corner,' " he told his Queen. "On the other hand, given the way people seemed to be pulling in their horns after Monica, I never thought it was going to get quite this . . . interesting, either."

"No?" White Haven's younger brother, William Alexander, Baron Grantville and Prime Minister of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, clearly wasn't going to be producing any chuckles, sour or otherwise. His expression was profoundly unhappy, and he shook his head. " 'Interesting' isn't the word I'd choose, Ham. It doesn't even come close to what this little vest pocket nuke is going to do to us!"

"No, it doesn't, Willie," Honor Alexander-Harrington told her brother-in-law, and her expression was almost as unhappy as his. She reached up to stroke the ears of the cream and gray treecat stretched across the back of her chair. "In fact, I've got a really bad feeling about all this."

"Other than the fact that we've just lost three destroyers and their entire crews, you mean, I take it, Honor?" Elizabeth asked.

"That's exactly what I mean." Honor's mouth tightened, and she made a small throwing-away gesture with her right hand. "Don't take this wrongly, but after what happened to us—and to the Havenites—in the Battle of Manticore, the loss of life is of less concern to me than the future implications. I don't like saying that, and when I do, I'm not speaking as someone named Honor Alexander-Harrington; I'm speaking as Admiral Alexander-Harrington, the officer in command of Home Fleet."

"I understand," the Queen said, reaching out to lay one hand on Honor's left wrist. "And, to be honest, I agree with you one hundred percent. I think that may be one reason I'm making weak witticisms as a way to keep from looking at it squarely. But I suppose that's exactly what we need to do, isn't it?"

"To put it mildly," Grantville agreed.

He gazed at the backs of the hands folded on the tabletop in front of him for a second or two, then looked up at the other three people seated at the table. Sir Thomas Caparelli, the First Space Lord, sat to White Haven's right. Honor sat to her husband's left, between him and the Queen, and Second Space Lord Patricia Givens sat just to Grantville's immediate left, between him and Caparelli. Sir Anthony Langtry, the Star Kingdom's Foreign Secretary, completed the gathering, sitting between Grantville and the Queen.

"Anything new on that business in Torch, Pat?" the Prime Minister asked Givens, whose duties included command of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

"No, not really," she admitted. "All we know for certain at this point is that what looks like it must have been most of the StateSec 'refugee fleet' that had taken service with Manpower was committed to the attack. Rear Admiral Rozsak intercepted it, and it looks like he and Barregos got even more tech transfer from Erewhon than we'd thought. Or got the new stuff into production faster, at any rate. I'm sure that came as a really nasty surprise to the other side, but he still got hammered hard. Frankly, quite a few of my analysts—and I was one of them, for that matter—were surprised when he waded into them that way. I think it's the clearest evidence we've had to date that he and Governor Barregos take their treaty obligations seriously."

"But there's not much question Manpower was behind it?"

"No question at all, really," Givens agreed. "We've been aware ever since Terekhov took out Anhur in Nuncio that Manpower's been picking up every StateSec refugee it could. We never expected it to use them for something like this, but everything we already knew and interrogation of survivors all says Manpower was the mastermind behind the attack."

"I see where you're going with this, Willie," Honor said. "You're wondering if the timing is a coincidence or not, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am." Grantville snorted and shook his head at his sister-in-law. "Mind you, I'm not sure I'm not succumbing to terminal paranoia, but after what happened in the Quadrant and at Monica, having obvious Manpower proxies suddenly busy in our own backyard just at the same time things seem to be going to hell in New Tuscany strikes me as a particularly ominous coincidence."

"Are you seriously suggesting that Manpower's deliberately set out to embroil us in an all-out war with the Solarian League, Willie? That that's what they were really after in Monica?" Langtry asked, and Grantville shrugged.

"I don't know, Tony. For that matter, Manpower might simply have stumbled into all this. They may not have had any concerted plan from the get-go. For all I know, they've been improvising as they go along, and everything that's happening could be pure serendipity from their perspective. But whether they're behind what happened in New Tuscany or not—and the similarity to what happened at Monica does appear to be rather striking, doesn't it?—we're still faced with the consequences. I don't think anyone sitting at this table is likely to criticize Mike, Baroness Medusa, or Admiral Khumalo for their response to the destruction of Commodore Chatterjee's ships. I certainly don't, and I know Her Majesty doesn't. Under these circumstances, they're absolutely right; when that idiot Byng opened fire, it was an act of war."

He paused, letting that last sentence sink fully home, then shrugged.

"I know none of us really want to think about all the implications of that, but Mike, Medusa, and Khumalo had to do just that. And, frankly, I'm of the opinion that they've made the right call." He glanced at the queen, who nodded her own agreement. She didn't look happy, but it was a very firm nod.

"Everything they've proposed is in strict accordance with our own existing, clearly enunciated policies and positions. More than that, it's all in strict accordance with interstellar law, as well. I'm quite sure that no one in the Solarian League ever thought for a moment that some 'neobarb navy' would ever have the sheer temerity to even contemplate applying that particular body of law to it , but that doesn't change the fact that the people responsible for deciding what to do about it have made the right choice. I suppose it's always possible that even Sollies will be able to recognize that, and, obviously, all of us hope the Solarian units in New Tuscany—assuming they're still there when our ships arrive—will comply with Mike's demands without any further loss of life. Unfortunately, we can't count on that."

"Even if they do, there are going to be plenty of Sollies who don't give a single solitary damn about what happened to our destroyers first," Langtry pointed out. "And for those people, whether any more shots are fired or not is going to be completely beside the point. We'll still be the 'neobarb navy' you were just talking about, Willie and our 'arrogance' in daring to issue demands to them will constitute an act of war on our part, even if not a single one of their ships even has its paint scraped! After all, they're the Solarian League! They're important! Why, if the omnipotence of their Navy was ever challenged, it would be the end of civilized life as we know it! Assuming, of course, that the sheer impiety of anyone's having the audacity to even suggest that they should be held accountable for a minor thing like mass murder would probably bring about the end of the universe itself, given the fact that God is obviously a Solarian, too!"

There were times when it was easier than at others to remember that Sir Anthony Langtry had been an officer in the Royal Marines before he ever became a diplomat, Grantville reflected. The Foreign Secretary's sheer anger was bad enough, but the savage irony of his tone could have withered a Sphinxian picketwood forest. Which didn't change the fact that it was a masterful summation of exactly what the Solarian League's attitude was likely to be.

"You're right, of course," he conceded aloud. "And that means we're going to have to be careful exactly how we handle our protest to the League."

"At least we can get our diplomatic note in the first," his brother pointed out. "The message turnaround time from New Tuscany to Old Terra is only about twenty-five days by way of Manticore and the Junction. It's a lot longer for anyone trying to work around the outside of our communication loop. New Tuscany to Meyers is over five T-weeks for a dispatch boat, and it's over six T-weeks even for a message direct from New Tuscany to Mesa." White Haven grimaced, as if the system name physically tasted bad. "From there, it's another thirteen T-days or so to Old Terra by way of the Visigoth Junction and Beowulf. If they waste time following protocol and report to Meyers first, it'll take them right on eighty-six days—damned close to three T-months—just to get their first report back to Sol. Of course, assuming that we're right about Manpower's involvement, they probably will send dispatches directly by way of Mesa and Visigoth and get them there in only sixty-seven days or so, but even on that basis, our note will be there in less than half the time."

"I know," Grantville agreed. "But that leaves us with an interesting quandary."

"How public we want to go," Langtry said, and the Prime Minister nodded.

"Exactly. At this point, nobody else has a clue what's going on out there. Well, that something is going on out there, at any rate. I don't think any of us are really prepared to say exactly what 's going on." He smiled thinly. "So do we make this a very quiet note to the Solly Foreign Ministry, or do we hand Tristram 's sensor data directly over to the newsies?"

"What a wonderful set of options," Elizabeth said sourly, and her Prime Minister shrugged.

"I'm not incredibly happy about them myself, Your Majesty. Unfortunately, they're really the only two we've got. So do we try to handle this as quietly as we can in the faint hope that refraining from splashing egg all over the League's face will inspire the Solly powers-that-be to actually work with us, or do we go for maximum publicity? Launch our own offensive in the League's newsfaxes in hopes of pressuring them into being reasonable?"

No one said anything for several thoughtful seconds. Then Honor inhaled deeply and shook her head.

"Given how divorced the real decision-makers in the League are from anything remotely resembling the electoral process, I doubt that any sort of propaganda offensive is going to have much effect in the short term. At the same time, though, if we go public with it, we start backing those same decision-makers into a corner. Or that's how they're likely to see it, at any rate.

"As Hamish just pointed out, it's going to take a lot longer for any of their dispatches to get to Old Terra, unless Byng is smart enough to stand down and sends his own message traffic through the Junction. So I don't think there'd be any point in expecting the League to reach any final decisions on how it's going to respond very quickly even if it wanted to. And, frankly, I don't think it is going to want to. Sheer arrogance would take care of that, but as Tony's already suggested, they're also going to be thinking in terms of precedents. Of what's going to happen if they 'let us get away with this' sort of response. If we go ahead and start inflaming public opinion, that's only going to make them even stubborner about admitting for an instant that their man screwed up."

"All true," Elizabeth said. "On the other hand, I don't think anyone in this room really expects them to be anything but stubborn about admitting that they're at fault."

"No," Langtry said. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't appear as reasonable as possible, Your Majesty."

He grimaced, obviously unhappy at the thought of playing the part of a moderating influence. Unfortunately, that responsibility came with his present job, and he buckled down to it.

"The fact that we're demanding the at least temporary surrender of their warships—and that our commander on the spot is authorized to use deadly force if they refuse—is going to infuriate them," he continued. "There's no way around that. The fact that we're willing to infuriate them, though—that we're willing to go eyeball-to-eyeball with them over this, which no one else has been gutsy or crazy enough to do literally for centuries—is going to make a pretty firm statement about how seriously we take this. I think we could probably afford to handle it in a way that suggests we don't want to publicly humiliate the League without looking irresolute."

"I think Tony and Honor have both made valid points, Your Majesty," Grantville said after a moment.

"I'm inclined to recommend that we not go public at this point. In fact, I think we should specifically point out to them that we haven't handed the story over to the media when we draft our note to Foreign Minister Roelas y Valiente."

Elizabeth thought for a moment, then nodded.

"I think that makes sense," she said. "At the same time, though, I don't think we can afford to sit on it for too long, for several reasons."

"Which reasons are you thinking about?" Grantville asked just a little bit warily.

"The most important one to me personally is that we have a responsibility to inform our own citizens," the queen replied. "And that's not just coming from any moral sense of responsibility, either, Willie," she added a bit pointedly. "Sooner or later we're going to have to go public with this, and if we delay too long, people are going to wonder why we didn't tell them about it sooner, since it happens to involve the minor matter of the possibility of our ending up at war with the most powerful navy in the galaxy while we're already at war with the Republic of Haven. I think it's important that they understand why we're running this sort of risk, and exactly how important the principles involved really are." Grantville winced slightly. Although he'd been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the the Duke of Cromarty's cabinet, he'd never fully agreed with Cromarty's news policies during the First Havenite War. Cromarty's position had been that things could be kept secret only so long, however hard people in positions of authority tried. Since unfortunate news items were going to leak anyway, he'd reasoned, a policy of openness and honesty would be the best way to increase the public's confidence in official statements when they did. Grantville—although he'd been only the Honorable William Alexander at the time—hadn't disagreed with either of those points. His problem had been his intense dislike (actually, he was prepared to admit without any particular apology, hatred would have been a better choice of noun) for the official news establishment of the Solarian League. Anything reported in Manticore would be reported on Old Terra within the week, and the Solly newsies had not, in his opinion, wasted very much effort trying to report it factually and without bias.

There'd been a time, before the initial Peep attacks at places like Hancock Station and Yeltsin's Star, when the Solarian press had covered the looming confrontation between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the People's Republic with something approaching evenhandedness. In fact, a segment of the Solly news establishment had covered it from a pro-Manticore position, and the Star Kingdom's government and its well-established public relations organs in places like Beowulf, the Sol System, and Far Corners had deliberately played to the "plucky little Manticore" view of that portion of the press. But the Solarian resentment of the Star Kingdom's dominant position in interstellar commerce had always been there in the background, and once the actual shooting began, it had started coming to the fore. "Plucky little Manticore" had been seen in quite a different light when the Royal Manticoran Navy was winning battle after battle after battle. The fact that it was winning those battles against heavy numerical odds only seemed to make many Solarians more inclined to see the Star Kingdom as the militarily superior side, and it was only a short hop (for many of them) to somehow transforming Manticore ("I never liked those pushy Manties, anyway. Always too greedy and sure of themselves for a bunch of neobarbs, if you ask me! If I were Haven, I wouldn't much care for 'em either!") into the aggressor. And the Cromarty Government's success in getting the League to embargo tech transfers to the People's Republic had only irritated that traditional Solarian resentment. Under those circumstances, it hadn't taken the Solarian media very long to switch to what Grantville, at least, had always regarded as a revoltingly pro-Peep stance. Even the least anti-Solly Manticoran had to concede that there'd been a definite bias against the Star Kingdom, and quite a few of them would have agreed with Grantville that there was an orchestrated anti-Manticore lobby within the Solarian press corps. Yet Cromarty had stuck to his policy of openness and agreed to modify it only on a case-by-case basis and only in the face of pressing operational requirements.

That didn't mean Cromarty had been blind to the realities of news coverage in the Solarian League. Indeed, in many ways he'd been just as bitter about slanted Solarian newsfaxes as Grantville himself. But Cromarty's policy had reflected his concern with the Alliance's media. He'd accepted that the Star Kingdom was going to get hammered in the League's reportage, whatever it did, and under his premiership, the Star Kingdom's PR had concentrated primarily on making sure that a contrarian view was also presented and the accurate information from both sides was at least available to Solarians in general. Manticore hadn't exactly tried to understate StateSec's brutality in the information it fed the League through its own conduits. Nor, for that matter, had Manticoran journalists and commentators been at all shy about pointing out the fact that whereas the Star Kingdom did not censor reporters, the People's Republic did . . . and that Solarian correspondents assigned to Haven never mentioned it because doing so would get them expelled from the People's Republic.

Which, in many ways, had only made the self-appointed masters and mistresses of the Solarian Establishment even more bitterly anti-Manticore. They'd resented the Star Kingdom's and its surrogates'

efforts to debunk their more outrageous misrepresentations, and the constant reminders that they uncritically repeated the Committee of Public Safety's propaganda rather than condemn PubIn's censorship had infuriated them . . . especially since they knew it was true. The fact that the Havenite propaganda had suited their own dislike of Manticore so much better than the truth, combined with their vindictive fury that anyone would dare to challenge their version of reality, had produced inevitable consequences, of course. Given the way their version of events played to stereotypical Solarian biases, the Star Kingdom's efforts had all been uphill, especially in light of the powerful vested interests in both the League's bureaucracy and its economic establishment with their own strong motives for blackening Manticore's image.

And then, of course, along had come the High Ridge Government, which couldn't have been more effective at reinforcing the most negative possible Solarian view of the Star Kingdom if it had been purposely designed for it. The demise of the People's Republic; the resurrection of the old Havenite Constitution; the resucitation of a functioning Havenite democracy; the High Ridge refusal to negotiate seriously (or to reduce the "wartime emergency" increases in transit fees on Solarian shipping); and the fact that neither High Ridge nor his Foreign Secretary, Elaine Descroix, had seen any need to "pander" to Solarian public opinion had produced predictably catastrophic results where the Solarian media's coverage of the Star Kingdom was concerned. Which was why one of Grantville's first priorities as Prime Minister had been to authorize heavy investments in rebuilding the PR organization High Ridge and Descroix had allowed to atrophy.

Unfortunately, the sudden fresh outbreak of fighting between the Republic and the Star Kingdom had made his rebuilding task much more difficult. And, he was forced to admit, the way in which the Star Kingdom had divided the Silesian Confederacy with the Andermani Empire, had given its Solarian press critics altogether too much fresh grist for its "Manticore As the Evil Empire" mill. Which had undoubtedly been a factor in the thinking of whoever had set out to destabilize the annexation of the Talbott Quadrant in the first place.

"Your Majesty," he said carefully, "I understand what you're saying, and I don't disagree with you. But Honor's point about not making the League's leadership feel we're trying to back it into a corner has a lot of merit. And, frankly, you know about the beating we've been taking in the Solarian media ever since Operation Thunderbolt." He paused, then snorted. "Excuse me, ever since that idiot High Ridge formed a government, I mean."

"I realize that, Willie." Elizabeth's tone was, in its way, as careful as Grantville's. Unlike her current Prime Minister, she'd always been firmly in agreement with the Duke of Cromarty's media policies. "And I don't disagree with Honor or with the point you and I both know you're making. But be that as it may, I'm still convinced that we need to avoid any appearance that we're trying to keep bad news hidden from our own people. In fact, I'm even more inclined to feel that way in the wake of the Battle of Manticore than I was before it. And I'm also firmly of the opinion that if we sit on this too long, we're likely to suggest to a bunch as arrogant as the Sollies that we're afraid to 'out them' for their actions. Not only that, but we give those bastards at Education and Information more time to decide how they're going to spin the news when it finally breaks."

Grantville had started to open his mouth. Now he closed it again, and nodded, almost against his will. The Solarian League's Department of Education and Information had very little to do with education and a very great deal to do with "information" these days. The bureaucratic structure which actually ran Education and Information (along with the rest of the League) had turned it into an extremely effective propaganda ministry.

"Those are both very valid points, your Majesty," he admitted. "I'd still really prefer to sit on this at least until the Sollies have had time to receive our note and respond to it. And at the same time, I think, we need to do some preliminary spadework of our own. I think we need to spend some time deciding exactly how we'll respond if the news leaks before we're ready to officially release it—the last thing we need is to get caught off balance, without having done our homework, when or if that happens—and also of deciding how we want to break it on our own terms, if that seems like the best policy. So could I suggest a compromise? We hold the news for the moment, but we quietly contact some of our own newspeople. We brief them in on what's happening in Talbott on a confidential basis in return for their agreement to sit on the story until we release it. And to sweeten the pot, as it were, we offer them official access in Spindle. We send their reporters out to talk to Khumalo, Medusa—even Mike, after she gets back—on the record, and we promise them as much freedom of access to all our information as operational security allows."

Elizabeth thought about it for several seconds, and then it was her turn to nod.

"All right," she said. "I think that makes sense. And it's not as if our own newsies aren't already accustomed to putting holds on specific stories because of those operational security concerns of yours. I don't want to hold this one any longer than we have to, though, Willie. The reason our newspeople respect the holds we do request is because they know we haven't abused the practice."

"I understand, Your Majesty," Grantville said, and glanced at Langtry. "How soon do you think you can have a draft of our note, Tony?"

"I can have a first draft by this afternoon. I imagine we'll want to kick it around between your office and mine—and Her Majesty, of course—through several iterations before we finally turn it loose."

"I'm sure you're right about that," Grantville agreed. "But while I'm willing to admit that you and Honor are probably on the right track, or as close to the 'right track' as anyone could be in a mess like this, let's not fool ourselves here. This is a situation which can slide totally out of control in the blink of an eye. In fact, depending on how stupid this Admiral Byng really is, it could very well be sliding totally out of control at New Tuscany before we finish this meeting."

He paused, and let the silence hiding in the corners of the conference room whisper to all of them, then turned his eyes to his brother.

"A few months ago, Hamish," the Prime Minister of Manticore said, "you gave us your evaluation of what would happen if we found ourselves in a shooting war with the Solarian League. Has that evaluation changed?"

"In the longer term, no." White Haven's prompt response—and grim expression—made it evident he'd been thinking about exactly the same question. "I'll want to look at the technical appendices of Khumalo's dispatches—just as I'm sure Tom and Pat will want to do—in case they tell us anything interesting, but everything BuWeaps has turned up from its examination of the Monica prizes has only strengthened my conviction that the SLN is several generations behind us in terms of applied military hardware. Obviously, there's no way of knowing exactly where they are in terms of research and development, and God only knows what they might have in the procurement pipeline, but even for the League, putting such fundamentally new weapons technologies into mass production and fitting them into an existing fleet structure is going to take time. Lots of time. God knows it took us long enough, and we had a life-or-death incentive to make the move. The League doesn't, and its political and military bureaucracies suffer from a lot more inherent inertia than ours ever did. In fact, I'll be very surprised if the bureaucratic bottlenecks and simple ingrained resistance to change and 'not invented here' prejudices don't double or triple the time requirement the purely physical constraints would impose.

"Assuming we do have the sort of technological edge BuWeaps is currently projecting, we'll rip the ass off of any Solarian force we run into, if you'll pardon my language, at least in the immediate future. Eventually, though, assuming they have the stomach for the kinds of casualty totals we can inflict on them, they'll suck up whatever we can do to them, develop the same weapons, and run right over us. Either that, or we'll hit some sort of 'negotiated peace,' and they'll go home and pull a Theisman on us. We'll wake up one fine morning and discover that the Solarian League Navy has a wall of battle just like ours only lots, lots bigger . . . at which point, we're toast."

"For that matter, they've got another option, Hamish," Honor pointed out. "One that actually worries me more, in some ways."

"What option?" Elizabeth asked.

"They could just refuse to declare war at all," Honor said bleakly. Elizabeth looked confused, and Honor shrugged.

"If we get into a shooting war with the League and we're going to have any chance of achieving a military victory—or, for that matter, of inflicting the kind of casualty totals Hamish was just talking about, so that they settle for a negotiated peace—we're going to have to take the war to them. We're going to have to demonstrate everything we've learned about deep-area raids instead of system-by-system advances. We're going to have to go after their military infrastructure. Take out their more modern and larger system defense force components. Rip up their rear areas, wipe out their existing, obsolete fleet and its trained personnel, take out the shipyards they'd use to build new ships. In other words, we're going to have to go after them with everything we have, using every trick we've learned fighting Haven, and demonstrate that we can hurt them so badly that they have no choice but to sue for peace." Elizabeth's face had hardened with understanding, and her brown eyes were grim as they met Honor's.

"But even that won't be enough," Honor continued. "We can blow up Solarian fleets every Tuesday for the next twenty years without delivering a genuine knockout blow to something the size of the League. The only way to actually defeat it—and to make sure that we've put a stake through its heart and it doesn't just go away, build a new fleet, and then come back for vengeance a few years down the road—is to destroy it."

Elizabeth's hard eyes widened in surprise, and Sir Anthony Langtry stiffened in his chair. Even White Haven looked shocked, and Honor shrugged again.

"Let's not fool ourselves here," she said flatly. "Destroying the League would be the only way for the Star Empire to survive in the long haul. And frankly, I, for one, think that might actually be a practical objective, under the right circumstances."

"Honor, with all due respect," Langtry said, "we're talking about the Solarian League ."

"A point of which I'm well aware, Tony." Her smile was as bleak as her tone. "And I realize we're all accustomed to thinking of the League as the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful, most advanced, most anything-you-want-to-mention political unit in the history of humanity. Which means that right along with that, we think of it as some sort of indestructible juggernaut. But nothing is truly indestructible. Crack any history book, if you don't believe me. And I'm seeing quite a few signs that the League is at or very near—if, in fact, it isn't already past—the tipping point. It's too decadent, too corrupt, too totally assured of its invincibility and supremacy. Its internal decision-making is too unaccountable, too divorced from what the League's citizens really want—or, for that matter, think they're actually getting ! We were just talking about Governor Barregos and Admiral Roszak. Hasn't it occurred to any of you that what's really happening in the Maya Sector is only the first leaf of autumn? That there are other sectors—not only in the Verge, but in the Shell, and even in the Old League itself—that are likely to entertain thoughts of breaking away if the League's veneer of inevitability ever cracks?"

They were all looking at her now, most of them with less shock and more speculation, and she shook her head.

"So if we get into an all-out war with the League, our strategy is going to have to have a very definite political element. We'll have to make it clear that the war wasn't our idea. We'll have to drive home the notion that we're not after any sort of punitive peace, that we're not trying to annex any additional territory, that we have no desire to conduct reprisals against people who don't want to fight us. We need to tell them, every step of the way, that what we really want is a negotiated settlement . . . and at the same time, we have to hit the League as a whole so hard that the fracture lines already there under the surface open right up. We have to split the League into separate sectors, into successor states , none of which have the sheer size and concentrated industrial power and manpower of the present league. Successor states that are our own size, or smaller. And we have to negotiate bilateral peace treaties with each of those successor states as they declare their willingness to opt out of the general conflict to get us to stop beating on their heads. And once we have those peace treaties, we have to not only honor them, but step beyond them. We need to use trade incentives, mutual defense pacts, educational assistance, every single thing we can think of to show them that we are—and to really be , not just pretend to be—the sort of neighbor and ally they'll want around. In other words, once we break the League militarily, once we splinter it into multiple, mutually independent star nations, we have to see to it that none of those star nations have any motive to fuse themselves back together and gang up on us all over again."

She paused, and there was a new and different silence in the conference room. All of them, with the probable exception of Hamish Alexander-Harrington, were gazing at her in astonishment. Elizabeth looked less surprised than most of the others, but there was an edge almost of wonder in her expression. Not a man or woman at that table would have questioned Duchess Harrington's military insight, or tactical or strategic ability . . . in the purely military arena. Yet most of them still tended to think of her as a fleet commander. Manticore's best fleet commander, perhaps, but still a fleet commander. As they'd listened to her, they'd come to realize how silly that was—and how foolish they'd been not to recognize their own silliness much earlier. In their defense, most of the insight she'd previously shown in the field of political strategy and analysis had focused on domestic concerns, or on the internal workings of the Manticoran Alliance. It hadn't occurred to them that she might have already focused that formidable ability on the Solarian League as the Star Empire's next great challenge, and that had been remarkably blind of them.

"I think you're right," Elizabeth said finally, and managed a half-humorous grimace. "I suppose I've been so fixated on how much I don't want to fight the League, how terrifying an opponent it would be, that I've been much more aware of our own weaknesses and disadvantages than I have of any weaknesses it might suffer from."

"You're not the only one who's been guilty of that, Your Majesty," Sir Thomas Caparelli said. "Over at Admiralty House, the Strategy Board has been aware for quite some time of the need to launch all-out operations against the League in the event of open hostilities. But we'd never been able to take our planning beyond the point of somehow beating the League to its knees, taking out its military infrastructure, and then committing the Star Empire to a multigeneration occupation policy. There's no way we could possibly hope to garrison or physically occupy every system of the League, or even just the more important industrial nodes. But what we could do is to picket the major systems. To require the League to renounce a large, modern navy after defeating its existing navy militarily, and then to post observers in all of the systems where a navy like that could be rebuilt in order to keep an eye on the shipyards and call in our own heavy units at the first sign of treaty violations in the form of new warship construction.

"But the problem with that kind of strategy is that it virtually assures that at some point someone in the League is going to emerge with a revanchist policy and the muscle to back it up. They're going to figure out a way to do a Thomas Theisman on us, and they're going to be able to build a fleet big enough to at least force us to pull our pickets out of the occupied systems to deal with it. At which point other systems that won't like us very much will join the fray and then, as Hamish so succinctly put it, we're toast.

"But if Honor is right—and, actually, I think there's a very good chance she is—about the probability of the League's being much more fragile than anyone is accustomed to believing, then there's another option. Her option. Instead of occupying the League for generations, we accept that it's already moribund, break it up, and make its successors our allies and trade partners, not our enemies."

" 'I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend,' " White Haven quoted softly.

"What?" His brother blinked at him, and the earl smiled.

"A quote from an Old Earth politician Honor's gotten me interested in, Willie. I think it has to do with her views on genetic slavery."

"What politician?" Grantville still looked puzzled.

"A president of the ancient United States of America named Abraham Lincoln said that," White Haven said. "And if I'm remembering correctly, he also said 'If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.' " He smiled again, this time at his wife, much more broadly.

"I can see I haven't read him as carefully as Honor has, but you ought to take a look at him, too, now that I think about it. He was in a pretty sticky military situation himself."

"Well, maybe I've got a point, and maybe I don't," Honor said a bit more briskly, and her expression had turned bleak once again. "But assuming I do, then the most dangerous thing I can see the League doing is simply refusing to declare war on us and conducting whatever operations are going on in and around the Talbott Quadrant as a 'police action.' If they refuse to extend their operations beyond that area, no matter how intensive their operations are within that area, and if they consistently take the position that they're reacting defensively , then we can't expand the fighting into the other areas where we would need to take the war to them before they manage to duplicate our hardware advantages without becoming the aggressor in the eyes of all the rest of the League. And if we do that , our chances of breaking the League and 'destroying our enemy by making him our friend' probably go right out the airlock. Which means they get the time they need to build the steamroller they need to roll right over us."

"Wonderful," Elizabeth sighed.

"I'll admit it's worrisome." Despite his words, White Haven sounded quite a bit more cheerful than his wife had, "but I'm also inclined to think it's very unlikely the League's real leadership in the bureaucracies is truly going to recognize its danger soon enough to adopt a sensible policy like that. I realize that predicting what your enemy will do and then betting everything you have on the probability that your prediction is accurate is a really, really stupid thing to do. I'm not suggesting we do anything of the sort, either. But at the same time, I think there's a very real probability, not just a possibility , that as soon as OFS and the SLN realize just what sort of sausage machine they've shoved their fingers into, they're going to start screaming for all the help they can get. Whether they paint us as savage aggressors or themselves as liberators, they're going to take this a lot further than any mere 'police action.' "

"And they wouldn't be the only decision-makers involved in the process, either." Sir Anthony Langtry sounded much more thoughtful than he had a few moments before. "Whatever position they take, we'll always be able to edge at least a little further around their flank, push them a little more in the direction we want to go, without turning ourselves into Attila the Hun in starships in the eyes of the rest of the League. We'll have to be careful, but we've had plenty of experience dancing around the League in the past. As long as we coordinate our PR and diplomatic and military efforts carefully, I think we'll be able to shape the political and diplomatic side of the battleground much more effectively than you may have been allowing for, Honor. And it's not like we're not going to have allies inside the League, either—especially if Manpower's role in all of this becomes public knowledge. Beowulf carries a hell of a lot of prestige, and every one of her daughter colonies is going to follow her lead where anything having to do with genetic slavery is involved. I think we can count—no, I know we can count—on a powerful Solarian lobby on our side in any Mesa-engineered confrontation."

"And there's still another side to all of this, Your Majesty," Patricia Givens pointed out. "Thanks to the wormhole network, we have an enormous degree of penetration into the League. If they try to shut the network down to cut off our trade, they'll cripple themselves just as badly—possibly even worse—by effectively destroying the carrying trade they rely on. For that matter, until they do manage to overcome the advantages of our hardware—for the foreseeable future, in other words—we should be able to keep all of the critical termini open with fairly light forces. All of which means we'll continue to have a lot of contact with the League and that we're actually likely to have considerably more economic clout with quite a few of the League's sectors than the League bureaucracy itself does. Which would mean one hell of a lot more clout than anything as ephemeral as an elected League politician could hope for. If we use that clout while bearing in mind the need to make our enemies into friends, rather than letting ourselves turn predatory in the short-term interests of survival, I think we could probably pry quite a few of the League's citizens loose from it."

There was silence again, and then Elizabeth inhaled deeply.

"Honor, I have to say you've pointed my mind in a direction that makes me feel much less pessimistic about the future. Mind you, there's still a huge difference between 'less pessimistic' and anything I'd call remotely ' optimistic,' but I think you've got me headed in the right direction." She smiled at the other woman, but then her smile faded.

"In the short term, though, we have to think in terms of our immediate survival. And wherever we wind up going in the end, I think we're all in agreement that first we've got to accomplish Hamish's predictions about beating the crap out of them. Which brings me to another point, Sir Thomas." She looked at Caparelli. "What's the status on our new construction?"

"We're well ahead of projections." Caparelli shook himself. Despite the strategic insight Honor had just laid before him, his eyes were still weary looking. But if there was any defeat in those eyes, Elizabeth couldn't see it. "We've got the next best thing to two hundred brand new wallers either out of the yards or leaving them in the next month to six weeks," he continued, "and all of them have been fitted with Keyhole-Two, which makes them Apollo-capable. Coupled with what Honor has in Home Fleet, the new construction that's come forward from the Andermani, and what the Graysons have made available, that's going to give us somewhere in excess of three hundred and eighty ships-of-the-wall—almost all of them Apollo-capable—by the third week of February."

The Star Kingdom of Manticore officially ran on the Manticoran calendar, but Caparelli—like many people throughout the galaxy (and most in the Manticore Binary System)—thought in terms of T-years and the ancient calendar of Old Terra, despite the fact that all three of the home system's planetary days varied considerably in length from the standard T-day. It made things simpler than translating back and forth between multiple calendars, and given the fact that each of the Star Kingdom's three original planets had different years of different lengths, as well as days, Manticorans were more accustomed even than most to using the standard calendar. And the habit was undoubtedly going to get still more pronounced for the citizens of the new Star Empire of Manticore, given the numbers of planets—and the plethora of local calendars—which would be involved. By Manticoran reckoning, Caparelli was talking about Ninth Month of the year 294 After Landing. By the standard reckoning of the galaxy at large, he was talking about the month of February of the year 1922 Post Diaspora. And if he had been speaking to someone from before mankind had departed for the stars, he would have been talking about the year 4024 CE. But all his listeners really needed to know was that he was talking about a period seventy or so T-days in the future.

"How long for them to work up to combat readiness?" Grantville hadn't been the brother of one of the Royal Navy's more senior officers for so long without learning a few hard-won realities along the way.

"That's more debatable," Caparelli acknowledged. "The Andies and Graysons should have finished working up by the time they get here, so we don't need to worry about that. And most of the new construction's going to be out of the yards by the end of January, so they'll be at least a couple of weeks into their training cycles by the time the Andies and Graysons show up. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that it's going to take longer for us to get our own people up to speed than anyone is going to like. We took a really heavy hit when the Havenites took out Home Fleet and Third Fleet. We already had cadres assigned to almost all of the new construction, and we had pretty close to complete crews assigned to the sixty or seventy ships closest to completion. All of those are out of the yard by now, and beginning to work up in Trevor's Star. Unfortunately, an awful lot of them are having the same 'teething problems'

we've been seeing in the lighter units. We got them through the construction process in record time, but not without hitting more glitches than we'd like. Still, none of the problems we've identified so far are really critical, and I expect to have most of them ready for service within another thirty T-days. Call it the middle of January.

"After that, things get more difficult. We were expecting to find a lot of the personnel we're going to need from the old-style wallers assigned to Home Fleet. Obviously, that's not going to happen now." His jaw tightened briefly and involuntarily as he remembered the carnage of the Battle of Manticore. Then his nostrils flared briefly, and he continued.

"As I say, that's not going to happen, but despite that, Lucian and BuPers have managed to come up with most of the warm bodies we need. A lot of them are short on training and experience, of course, and that hits us hardest when it comes to officers and senior enlisted. We're looking at accelerating a lot of noncoms' promotions to fill the gaps there, and we're planning on cutting the current class at the Academy six months short and sending the midshipmen straight off to the fleet, without the traditional snotty cruise. We're probably looking at accelerating the next class the same way, and we've been forced to pull back on our LAC program simply because we need the officers we would have been sending off to command LACs. That's also why we're setting up quickie OCS courses—expanding on the ones we've always had outside the Academy for 'mustangs.' We expect a substantial return on that, as well, although it's going to cost us more of those senior enlisted when we 'suggest' that they become officers, instead. A couple of years down the road, we should be pretty much past this particular bottleneck. For that matter, once we've had a chance to run them through the appropriate remedial education, I imagine we'll be able to find a lot of enlisted and officers coming out of the Talbott Quadrant. That's going to take a while, though, and in the meantime, I have no doubt that any skipper unfortunate enough to go in for extensive yard work or overhaul is going to find his command structure picked clean by Lucian's vultures.

"By robbing Peter and Paul, though, Lucian's actually managing to fill most of the slots aboard most of the new ships as they come out of the yards. Frankly, I don't have any idea how he's doing it, and I'm afraid to ask. I also don't know how long he's going to be able to go on doing it, although the first flight of mass recalls of reservists from the merchant marine should be offering us at least some relief in the next couple of months. Even that has its downside, though. It's going to take time to run them through the necessary refresher courses, especially to update them on the new hardware. And just as bad, maybe, the merchant fleet needs them, too, and we need the merchant fleet to maintain our revenue flows." Grantville nodded, and Caparelli shrugged.

"The bottom line is that with the lower manpower requirements of the new designs, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to support the manning requirements for the fleet we're talking about. Unfortunately, that's what we were doing when Tourville came along and destroyed something like half the entire Navy. It's going to take us time to recruit and recover from the huge hole that made, so I don't think we're going to be manning any more enormous expansion waves any time soon. In the shorter run, it means we've got the bodies we need—barely—but working up periods are simply going to have to be expanded. The prewar rule of thumb was that it took three to four months for a brand new waller's crew to shake down to a satisfactory, combat-ready level. During the First Havenite War, with experienced officers who'd been there and done that, we got it down to somewhere around two and half months. But with the situation we're in now, frankly, I'll be surprised if we can do it in less than four, and I won't be surprised if it takes as much as five months, given the fact that we're going to be correcting so many minor construction faults along the way. So for the immediate future, you'd better count on basically what Honor has now—here in Home Fleet and working up in Trevor's Star—plus, say, another sixty Apollo-capable podnoughts still in the yards. And the Andies' new construction and refits, of course . . . except for the fact that we don't know if Gustav will be willing to back us if we go up against the League."

"Is that going to be enough to stop whatever the Sollies can do to us during that same time period, Hamish?"

"Probably . . . if we could aim it all at them," Grantville's brother replied. He glanced at Caparelli, one eyebrow raised, and the First Space Lord nodded in agreement with his assessment.

"To be brutally honest," White Haven continued, "and at the risk of sounding a little complacent, the main problem we're probably going to face in any early engagements against the Sollies is going to be our ammunition supply. But for at least five or six months, assuming either that we fight close to home and our industrial base or that we have a decent logistics train to keep us supplied with missiles, we should be able to hold anything they can throw at us with that many podnoughts, even without the Andies. Unfortunately, we've still got that minor problem of the war with Haven to worry about."

"Maybe yes, and maybe no," Grantville said grimly, and swiveled his eyes to Langtry. "Her Majesty and I already discussed this briefly a couple of days ago, Tony," he said, "but we were only brainstorming at the time. Now it looks like we may have to put our brainstorm into practice."

"Why does that fill me with a sudden feeling of dread?" Langtry murmured.

"Experience, probably," Grantville replied with a brief, tight smile. The smile vanished as quickly as it had come, and the Prime Minister leaned intently towards the Foreign Minister.

"Given the strength estimate Sir Thomas has just presented, we probably have the capacity to punch out the Haven System itself," he said flatly. "To do to them what they tried to do to us. But we've got Apollo, and they don't, which means we don't have to enter their effective range at all. And that we could go right on doing it to every one of their systems with a single naval shipyard. We could pound every major developed system of the Republic back to the Stone Age."

It was very quiet around the conference table once more, and this time the quiet was tense, almost brittle.

"To be perfectly honest," Grantville continued, "that's precisely what I'd like to do, and I doubt I'm exactly alone in that sentiment. There's probably not a single family here in the home system who didn't lose someone in the Battle of Manticore, and that doesn't even consider all the deaths that came before that. So, yes, there's a part of me that would love to hammer the Peeps into rubble.

"But now we've got this situation with the Solarian League, and even if we didn't, brute vengeance, however tempting in the short term, is the worst possible basis for any sort of lasting peace. We're not Rome, and we can't plow Carthage up and sow the ground with salt. So, riddle me this, Mr. Foreign Secretary. If we demonstrate that we can blow the Peeps' Capital Fleet out of space, destroy the entire orbital infrastructure of Eloise Pritchart's capital system, and then tell her we're prepared to blow up however many additional systems it requires for her to see reason, what do you think she'll say?"

Chapter Forty-Five

"I take it we haven't heard back from Admiral Byng, Bill?"

"No, Ma'am," Commander Edwards agreed.

"Somehow, I rather thought you would have mentioned it if we had," Michelle said with a faint smile. Then she turned back to Adenauer and Tersteeg. "What's the status on their impellers?" The ops officer and the EWO had maneuvered the Ghost Rider platforms closer to the Solarian ships to keep an eye on them. Now Adenauer looked up in response to Michelle's question, and her expression was unhappy.

"We were trying to get close enough to get a read off their nodes, Ma'am, but I don't think we needed to bother. We just picked up first-stage initiation on their wedges, and they're already turning on attitude thrusters. They're headed out."

"Frigging idiots," Michelle muttered under her breath, once again feeling the temptation to let God handle the sorting chore.

"All right, Bill," she sighed aloud. "I suppose we have to give these dumbasses one more try. Prepare to record."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Michelle glanced up at the master plot while she waited. Her force had been headed in-system for forty-three minutes now, accelerating towards the planet at a steady six hundred and three gravities, which left the Nikes with seventy gravities in reserve. Their closing velocity was up to 21,271 KPS, and they'd reduced the range from just over one hundred and ninety-two million kilometers to just under a hundred and fifty-six million. Given that geometry, the effective powered envelope of the Mark 23s in the pods riding the outsides of her ships' hulls was well over seventy-two million kilometers against a stationary target, and the effective range against Byng and his ships would only increase as he accelerated towards them and increased their closing velocity.

"Live mike, Ma'am," Edwards told her, and she nodded to him and turned back from the plot to face the pickup.

"Your time limit has expired, Admiral Byng," she said coldly, without preamble. "I can only assume from your current heading and the fact that your impellers are about to come on-line that you intend to engage me. I caution you against doing so. Be advised that I have the capacity to destroy your ships from far beyond any range at which you can possibly threaten us. Be further advised that if you do not immediately cease your attempt to close with my ships or flee the system rather than accept my government's requirements and standing down, I will demonstrate that capability to you in a fashion which not even you can ignore. Gold Peak, clear."

"Clean recording, Ma'am," Edwards confirmed after a moment.

"Then send it," Michelle said flatly.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am."

Eight minutes and forty-three seconds after it had been transmitted, Michelle's message reached SLNS

Jean Bart, and Josef Byng's face darkened with fury as Willard MaCuill directed the message to his com.

That arrogant little bitch! Who the hell does she think she is, talking to me — talking to the Solarian League— that way?

He felt his jaw muscles aching from the effort of restraining his snarl, and his nostrils flared wide as he sucked in a deep, angry breath. There was dead silence on the flag bridge for several seconds, then MaCuill cleared his throat.

"Will there be any response, Sir?" the communications officer asked in a painfully neutral voice.

"Oh, yes," Byng grated. "There'll be a response, all right, Willard! But not with any com transmissions!"

"Yes, Sir."

MaCuill turned back to his own displays, his shoulders tight, and Byng felt a fresh spasm of anger. Was his own staff starting to buy into the ridiculous claims about the Manties' "invincible weaponry?" He started to snarl something at MaCuill, then made himself stifle the urge. The last thing he needed was to begin sounding like some hysterical old woman himself!

"Sir," Karlotte Thimár said in a very careful tone, "Captain Mizawa would like to speak with you."

"Oh, I bet he does," Byng growled. "I don't suppose he's screening to apologize for reading mail that wasn't addressed to him?" he added, twitching his head towards his now-blank com.

"I'm sorry, Sir," MaCuill said, "but the Manties' last message wasn't addressed specifically to you. It carried a general heading . . . to all ships, Sir."

Byng's face took on a dangerously mottled coloration, and he glared at the communications officer.

"And why the hell didn't you mention that little fact to me before?" he snarled.

"I'm sorry, Sir," MaCuill repeated, "but the address block was displayed in the message header. I . . . assumed you'd seen it."

Byng bit back an even more furious response, then closed his eyes, clenched his folded hands tightly behind him, and tried to suppress the anger boiling inside him. After several moments, he opened his eyes once again and smiled tightly at Thimár.

"Well, I suppose that if the good captain wants to speak to me, the least I can do is take his call," he told the chief of staff, and slid back into his command chair once more. He paused for one more second, then tapped the acceptance key.

"Yes, Captain?" He kept his voice as neutral as possible, although he knew it was still giving away more of his inner fury than he wanted it to.

"Admiral." It was obvious Mizawa was working hard at keeping his own voice nonconfrontational, which only made Byng perversely more angry as the flag captain continued. "I realize you and I haven't exactly seen eye-to-eye on several matters of late, but I strongly urge you to consider the possibility that this Admiral Gold Peak really has the capability she's talking about."

"Captain, that's ridiculous," Byng replied. "I know about the rumors of impossible range on Manty missiles. Good God, I did read the ONI appreciations before I headed out here, you know! And I know the missiles Technodyne deployed in Monica had enhanced drive systems to increase their range. For that matter I know that R and D back home has been looking into adopting the same concept for some time now. But I also know how big the Technodyne missiles were, and so should you, if you've read the same reports. That's the main reason we haven't pursued the same concept ourselves, you know. We simply don't have the magazine capacity, or shipboard launchers big enough, to accommodate anything with drives the size of the ones Technodyne used in Monica . . . and neither does anyone else ! We saw the launch tubes on these damned big-assed 'battlecruisers' of theirs at Monica, if you'll recall. There's no way in the galaxy they could fire a missile that size out of those launchers! I'll grant you that their wallers might—conceivably—have the tubes for them, but no way in hell does one of these ships have them!

And we've got Javelins in the magazines, not those crap Pilums Technodyne supplied to Monica. Not to mention the fact that none of the Monicans had Halo, either."

"Sir, I realize all of that's true," Mizawa said. "But the Javelin is still a single-drive missile. A damned good one, yes, but only single-drive. If the reports about the Manties' cruisers at Monica having multi

-drive weapons are accurate, then these people certainly have them, too." Byng forced himself not to roll his eyes in exasperation. As he'd just pointed out, the system defense missiles Technodyne had supplied to Monica had been too big for any shipboard launcher, and they'd been single -drive missiles. Now he wanted to put something big enough to mount multiple drives through a launch tube? Good God! The man wasn't just paranoid, he was a frigging idiot! Even a Frontier Fleet officer should have been bright enough to figure out that something the size of a cruiser-range missile tube couldn't possibly fire something even bigger than those Technodyne birds!

He'd obviously given away at least some of his reaction, despite his best efforts not to, because Mizawa's expression tightened even further.

"I'm aware of the size argument against the idea, Sir. But, with all due respect, look at that last message of theirs. It was sent before we'd actually brought our wedges up, but they knew exactly what we were doing. That means they do have FTL recon capability, and they're using it. In my judgment, especially coupled with their observed acceleration rates, that demonstrates that at least a sizable chunk of the reports about Manty capabilities which ONI has been discounting are actually accurate." His eyes burned into Byng's. He'd very carefully refrained from mentioning Askew's memos, but they were there, between them, and his voice turned harder, harsher.

"Given that evidence—the proof that ONI's been wrong in at least some of its assessments—I think we have to take the possibility of the sort of missile ranges they're talking about seriously."

"Well that makes one of us, Captain," Byng said sarcastically, before he could restrain himself. Mizawa flushed, and Byng shook his head. "I apologize for that last remark," he made himself say. "There's enough going on to make anyone tense, but that's no reason for me to take it out on you." From Mizawa's expression, it was obvious he knew Byng's apology was strictly pro forma , but he gave a jerky nod, and Byng forced himself to smile.

"I've noted your concerns, Captain. On the other hand, we have twenty-two ships, seventeen of them battlecruisers, to only nineteen, total, Manties. Admittedly, their 'battlecruisers' are bigger than ours—probably tougher, too, for that matter—but each of ours has as many missile launchers as one of theirs, and they only have six, and their heavy cruisers only have twenty -tube broadsides! That gives us a significant advantage in tubes and an even bigger one in throw weight. And, with all due respect, I'm not prepared to discount intelligence appreciations formulated by analysts with access to all the information coming to us on the basis of appreciations generated independently, with partial information, by officers who—justifiably, I might add—have every reason to adopt pessimistic assumptions in order to avoid underestimating a potential enemy's capabilities. Granted, their acceleration rates are higher than Intelligence predicted, but that single point aside, there is absolutely no evidence, aside from apocryphal accounts, that the Manties have the capabilities you're ascribing to them, and I cannot in good conscience permit a third-rate neobarb navy with delusions of grandeur to even attempt to dictate terms to the Solarian League Navy. The precedent would be disastrous from any foreign policy perspective, and the insult to the honor of the Fleet would be intolerable."

"Sir, I'm not suggesting you cave in to their demands. I'm simply suggesting that it may be time to try negotiating a stand down on both sides. They say they've sent a diplomatic note to Meyers. All right, what if we were to refuse to surrender our ships to them but agreed to return to orbit and maintain the status quo here in New Tuscany while we sent a dispatch boat back to Meyers to seek Commissioner Verrochio's instructions? If they accept, then the decision of how we respond to their demands legitimately becomes a political decision to be made by the highest local political authority. And if this Gold Peak accepts, it would also give Commissioner Verrochio an opportunity to dispatch reinforcements in the event that—as would almost certainly be the case—he decides that we are correct to reject her demands. At the very least, it would allow us to play for time while—"

"Any negotiations such as you're suggesting would immediately be seen as a sign of weakness by Gold Peak," Byng interrupted. "In my opinion, she's running a colossal bluff—in fact, that's probably the reason she's accelerating so hard; to convince us that all the wild stories about Manticore's 'technical superiority'

are true—and I'm not going to encourage her to believe it's working. For that matter, even assuming for a moment that they have the weapons capability you're worrying about, she'd have to be not simply a lunatic but stupid beyond belief to pull the trigger on us! I don't care what kind of magic bullets they've got over there, Captain. Hell, they could have every single thing in Commodore Thurgood's most pessimistic assessment! That doesn't change the fact that it's the Solarian League they're fucking around with, and if they fire on Solarian battlecruisers in neutral space, they really will have an act of war on their hands. Do you seriously think any bunch of neobarbs is going to deliberately create that kind of situation?

Especially when they're already at war with another bunch of neobarbs who can't wait to wipe them out?"

"I didn't say it would be smart of them, Sir. I only said they may have the capability to do it. And, respectfully, Sir, if we give them what they initially demanded, it will be an act of war against the League, anyway. It could—and should—be construed that way, at any rate. They're obviously willing to risk that

, so what makes you assume they aren't willing to risk a different act of war?"

"Captain," Byng said frostily, "it's obvious you and I are not in agreement. Accordingly, I have to ask you whether or not our dis agreement runs deep enough that you are unwilling to execute my orders?"

"Admiral," Mizawa said, his voice equally frigid, "I am prepared to execute any lawful order I may receive. With respect, however, one of my functions as your flag captain is to offer my best judgment and advice."

"I realize that. If, however, you are sufficiently . . . uncomfortable with my proposed course of action, then I will relieve you—without prejudice, of course—of your present duties." Their eyes locked through the electronic medium of the ship's communications system. Tension hummed and vibrated between them for several seconds, but then Mizawa shook his head. It was a jerky gesture, hard with his own suppressed anger.

"Admiral, if you choose to relieve me, that's clearly your privilege. I do not, however, request relief."

"Very good, Captain. But in that case, I have other matters which require my attention. Byng, clear."

"Still no sign of sanity breaking out over there, I see," Michelle murmured to Captain Lecter. Twenty-five minutes had passed since her second message to Byng, and the Solarian battlecruisers'

velocity had increased to 7,192 KPS. Her own ships' velocity was up to over thirty thousand kilometers per second, giving them a closing velocity of better than thirty-seven thousand KPS, and the range was down to a little over one hundred and thirteen million kilometers.

"Not so anyone would notice, at any rate," her chief of staff agreed equally quietly. The two of them stood before the master plot, gazing into its depths. Around them, Artemis' flag deck was quiet, almost hushed, as the men and women manning their stations concentrated on their duties.

"You know," Lecter continued, "I've studied our dossier on Byng until my eyes ache, and I still can't figure out how much of him is bluster, how much is raw arrogance, and how much of it is simply sheer stupidity." She shook her head. "Do you think he really wants to fight, or is he just going to play chicken with us while he tries to break past and hyper out?"

"I don't know, and it doesn't matter," Michelle said grimly. "Our orders are clear enough, and so are the alternatives I spelled out to him. And I don't have any intention of waiting until he fires first."

"Excuse me, Ma'am," Dominica Adenauer said, and Michelle turned towards her, eyebrows raised.

"CIC's just picked up a status change," the operations officer said. "The Sollies have deployed some sort of passive defensive system."

"Such as?" Michelle asked, crossing to Adenauer's console and gazing down at the ops officer's displays.

"Hard to say, really, Ma'am. Whatever it is, Max and I don't think they've brought it fully on-line yet. What it looks like is a variation on the tethered decoy concept. From what the recon platforms can tell us, each of their ships has just deployed a half-dozen or so captive platforms on either flank. They have to have a defensive function, and I don't think they're big enough to carry the sort of on-board point defense stations our Keyhole platforms do. I don't want to get too overconfident, but it looks to me like they've got to be decoys, and we already know Solly stealth technology is pretty damned good. If their decoys are equally good, this is probably going to degrade our accuracy considerably, especially at extended ranges."

"Where is Apollo when you need it?" Michelle asked half-whimsically.

"When you say 'degrade our accuracy considerably,' do you have any sort of guesstimate for just how considerably we're talking about?" Lecter asked.

"Not really, Ma'am," Tersteeg replied for both of them. "Until we've seen it in action—and confirmed that it actually is a decoy system, for that matter—there's no way we could give you any real estimate." Lecter grimaced, although the response was hardly a surprise, and looked at Michelle.

"Do you want to let the range drop a little lower than we'd originally planned, Ma'am?"

"I don't know." Michelle frowned and tugged at the lobe of her right ear as she considered Lecter's question.

ONI and BuWeaps had evaluated the weapons aboard the Solarian-built battlecruisers captured intact at Monica. The energy weapons, although individually smaller and lighter than was current Manticoran practice, had been quite good. The passive defensive systems had been good, as well, although not up to Manticoran standards, but the missiles—and counter-missiles—had been another story entirely, and the software support for the ships' sensors had been sadly out of date by those same standards. For that matter, the sensors themselves were little, if any, better than the hardware the RMN had deployed at the beginning of the First Havenite War, twenty-odd T-years before.

There was some division of opinion among the analysts as to whether or not the prize ships' electronics reflected the best the Sollies had. The standard Solarian policy for supplying military vessels to allies and dependencies had always been to provide them with downgraded, "export versions" of critical weapons technologies, which suggested the same thing had been done with the battlecruisers intended for Roberto Tyler. Except, of course, that those battlecruisers had come from recent service with Frontier Fleet, which should have meant they carried close to first-line, current-generation technology, and a bunch of outlaws like the ones at Technodyne probably wouldn't have gone to the expense of replacing that technology with less capable versions for what was already a thoroughly illegal transaction. For the moment, BuWeaps had decided to split the difference and assume that everything they'd seen from Monica represented a minimum benchmark. The existence of the defensive system Adenauer and Tersteeg had just described—assuming their analysis was accurate—suggested that that decision had been wise, since none of the ships at Monica had been equipped with anything like it. But that also suggested it would probably be unwise to rely too heavily on the demonstrated range and acceleration rates of the anti-ship missiles those battlecruisers had carried, as well.

Those missiles' powered range envelope from rest generated a maximum range of just over 5,900,000

km, with a terminal velocity of 66,285 KPS. Given their current closing velocity, that equated to a range at launch of a shade better than 12,680,000 kilometers, whereas the Mark 23 had a range at launch of 85,930,000 given the same geometry. Even the Mark 16 had a range at launch of well over 42 million kilometers under current conditions. So even if she assumed Byng's battlecruisers carried missiles twice as capable as those captured at Monica, she still had better than three times his maximum powered range on her Mark 16s, much less her Mark 23s.

"What will our closing velocity be at forty-two million klicks?" she asked Adenauer, and the ops officer punched numbers.

"Approximately fifty-four thousand KPS, Ma'am. We'll be there in roughly twenty-six minutes."

"Um."

Michelle pulled harder on her ear lobe while she did the math. At that velocity, the Sollies would cross through her Mark 16s' range to her ships in just over thirteen minutes. At one launch every eighteen seconds her shipboard launchers could fire forty-three missiles each in that timeframe, and she had six hundred and twenty tubes aboard her Nikes and Saganami-Cs , alone. That worked out to better than twenty-six thousand missiles, which she suspected—decoys or no—would be a fairly significant case of overkill.

On the other hand, she could open fire with Mark 23s from the pods limpeted to the exterior of her ships' hulls better than forty million kilometers sooner. Her accuracy would be lower, but . . .

"What will our closing velocity be at eighty-six million klicks?"

"Four-four-point-four-six thousand KPS," Adenauer replied. "We'll reach that range in almost exactly eleven minutes."

"Thank you."

Michelle folded her hands behind her and walked slowly back across to the main plot to stand gazing into its depths. Lecter followed her, standing quietly at her right shoulder, waiting while she thought. After what seemed like hours but probably wasn't actually more than a handful of seconds, Michelle turned her head to look at Lecter.

"We'll send Byng one more message," she said. "That's it. If he doesn't stop this horse shit after that, we'll go with William Tell at sixty million klicks."

For a moment, it looked as if Lecter were going to say something, but then she simply nodded and contented herself with a simple, "Yes, Ma'am," and Michelle smiled faintly. It is sort of a balancing act, isn't it, Cindy? she thought dryly. Unless I'm prepared to go ahead and kill all of them, anyway—which, while tempting, would probably upset Beth just a smidgen , given the foreign policy implications and all—firing at that range is going to tell the Sollies a lot about our capabilities, and that could very well come under the heading of a Bad Thing. If this situation turns as nasty as I expect it to, given the fact that Byng is obviously even stupider than I thought, I'm sure the Admiralty would prefer to keep them ignorant of the Mark 23's real reach for as long as we can. But I'll still be holding over twenty million klicks of range in reserve, and the best way to keep this situation from going completely south on everyone is to finish up with the lowest possible casualties here in New Tuscany.

In her more pessimistic moments, she was certain the situation was already beyond retrieval, but she wasn't ready to simply go ahead and surrender to the inevitable despite the fact that, in many ways, the wholesale massacre of Byng's entire force would actually be a far simpler proposition. Instead, she was faced with the problem of convincing the idiots to surrender before she had to kill them, and that was far trickier. If she could ever break through the typically Solarian assumption of inevitable superiority, then Byng—or his successor in command, at least—might prove more amenable. That was the real reason she'd come in at such a high rate of acceleration. She wanted them thinking about that, wondering what other technological advantages she might have tucked up her sleeve. And if she had to fire on them at all, then the greater the range at which she did so, the more likely they were to recognize how outclassed they were before it was too late . . . for them.

And there's always the other factor, she thought grimly. If we open fire at sixty million and they don't begin decelerating immediately, it would take over twelve hours for us to match velocities with them. And they'd be across the hyper limit and into hyper in an hour and forty minutes. So if we can't convince them to stop and begin immediately decelerating themselves, I'll have no choice but to take them all out before they pull out of range .

She glanced at the time display, considering when to send her next—and final—message to Josef Byng.

"Admiral Byng," the face of the woman on the com display might have been chipped from obsidian, and her voice was harder still, "I have warned you twice of the consequences of failing to comply with my requirements. If you do not immediately reverse your heading at maximum deceleration, preparatory to reentering New Tuscany orbit, as per my directions, I will open fire. You have five minutes from the receipt of this message. There will be no additional warnings."

Byng glared at the display, but he was through talking to the impertinent bitch. Maybe she did have better missiles than he did, but they couldn't be enough better to back up her preposterous threats, and with Halo and the other recent upgrades in his anti-missile defenses, the odds were overwhelming that most of his ships would survive to break past her, no matter what she did. She simply didn't have enough tubes for any other outcome. And once his task force was across the hyper limit, running free and clear, her days—and the days of her wretched little "Star Kingdom"—would be numbered. There could be only one response from the Solarian League Navy for something like this, and Manticore couldn't possibly stave off the vengeful avalanche headed its way.

"Deploy the pods," Michelle said quietly, watching the time display tick down towards Byng's deadline.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Deploying pods now," Dominica Adenauer replied, and the task group's acceleration rate dropped as the pods which had been tractored tight against its ships' hulls moved beyond the perimeter of their impeller wedges.

The battlecruisers' Keyhole platforms were already deployed, but the Keyholes' mass was low enough that the Nikes' acceleration curves hadn't been significantly affected. Deploying the missile pods, still tractored to their motherships but clear of those motherships' sidewalls (and wedges), was another matter entirely, and the task group's acceleration dropped from six hundred and three gravities to only five hundred and eighty.

"Flip us, Sterling," Michelle told Commander Casterlin.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Reversing heading now."

The entire task group flipped, putting its sterns towards Byng's battlecruisers and beginning to decelerate. Even with the pods deployed, Michelle's command had an advantage of almost a hundred gravities, and the rate of closure began to slow.

"Execute William Tell on the tick, Dominica."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Commander Adenauer depressed a key, locking in the firing commands and sequence, then sat back. "William Tell enabled and locked, Ma'am."

"Very good," Michelle said, and leaned back in her command chair, watching the last few seconds speed into eternity.

Josef Byng sat in his own command chair, watching another time display count down towards zero, and his belly was a knotted lump of tension.

Captain Mizawa had tried one last time to convince him to lie down, like a dog rolling belly-up to show its submission. Now they were no longer speaking, for there was nothing to speak about. It was easy for Mizawa to put forward his arguments, Byng thought resentfully. Mizawa wouldn't be the one censored for cowardice. Mizawa wouldn't be the first Solarian flag officer in history to surrender to an enemy force. Mizawa wouldn't be known as the officer who'd rolled over for a batch of neobarbs without firing even a single shot.

It's not just"easy" for him , a voice said in Byng's brain. It's also his way of making sure I'll never be in a position to hammer him like the disloyal, traitorous bastard he is. Well, it's not going to happen, Captain— trust me! It's not going to be that simple for you . Despite his fury at Mizawa, he'd come to the conclusion that there probably was at least a little something to the flag captain's arguments. Oh, there was no way the Manties had the magic missiles Mizawa was yammering about, but they could have substantially better missiles than Intelligence had suggested. If they did, it was entirely likely he was going to lose at least a few ships on his way out of the system. That would be regrettable, of course, but with the recent upgrades in the SLN missile defense and so many targets to spread their fire between, it was extremely unlikely that the Manties could get through with enough missiles to cripple more than a handful—half a dozen at the most. And they were only Frontier Fleet units. They could be replaced relatively easily, and once the survivors were past the Manties, the decisiveness of Byng's actions would be obvious. As the admiral who'd cut his way past the Manties to carry home word of their unprovoked attack on the Solarian League, he'd be immunized against the sort of wild allegations Mizawa had threatened to make about events in New Tuscany. In fact, he'd be well positioned to crush Mizawa, after all, and he couldn't deny that he'd take a sweetly savage satisfaction when the time came.

Of course—

"Missile separation!" Ingeborg Aberu announced suddenly. " Multiple missile separations! Range, sixty million kilometers. Missile acceleration four-six-thousand KPS2! Estimated flight time at constant acceleration, six-point-niner minutes."

"Missile Defense Aegis Five!" Byng's snapped command was automatic, a response which never had to consult his forebrain at all . . . which was fortunate, since his forebrain wasn't working very well at the moment.

My God, she actually did it! She actually launched missiles at the Solarian Navy! I didn't think anyone could be that crazy! Doesn't she know where this has to end?

Yet even as that thought ripped through him, there was another, one that was darker and more terrifying by far. Gold Peak wouldn't have launched from that far out unless she genuinely had the range to score on his ships, and that meant Mizawa's concerns hadn't been so much blathering nonsense after all.

The range at launch was over three light-minutes, but with a closing velocity of 50,458 KPS, the geometry meant the Mark 23s could reach their targets without ever activating their third drive system and still have the necessary endurance for final attack maneuvers. That was the real reason Michelle Henke had closed to that range before firing. It would give her ample opportunity to make her point, but she could do so while concealing a full third of the MDMs' powered endurance. At the same time, she wanted to finish this without using her broadside launchers at all, if she could. No doubt the Solarian survivors— If there are any , her mind supplied grimly—would figure out that she'd used pod-launched missiles, and that was the way she preferred it. If the hammer was really coming down, she wanted the Mark 16's existence to come as a complete surprise to the first Solarian officer unfortunate enough to face it in combat.

"Sir, CIC estimates that these things were launched from pods, not tubes." Ingeborg Aberu's voice was harsh, tight with fear and also with something else. Something plaintive, almost petulant. An anger stoked by the sudden realization that the Star Kingdom of Manticore really could produce technology well in advance of anything the Solarian League had even considered deploying. "They must have had them tractored inside their wedges. That's why their acceleration dropped just before they launched; they had to deploy them clear of the wedge perimeter."

"Understood," Byng replied tersely.

At least I was right about that much , he thought bitterly. They can't launch things this big from the broadside tubes we saw at Monica . . . not that that's going to make things any better. Unless they don't have very many of the damned pods available .

"Sir," Aberu said a moment later, her voice flatter than it had been, "CIC is projecting that all their missiles have been targeted on a single unit." She turned her head to look at him.

"On us ," she said.

Warden Mizawa swore viciously as Ursula Zeiss reported the same conclusion to him. That fucking idiot! That stupid, arrogant, Battle Fleet prick! Now he's going to get all of us killed, and for absolutely nothing!

"Time to impact five minutes," Zeiss said harshly.

"Stand by missile defense," Mizawa said, and glanced into the display which showed him the face of Hildegard Bourget, in Command Beta. From her tight, bitter expression, she'd obviously guessed exactly the same thing he had.

Looks like getting you off the ship worked out even better than I'd expected, Maitland, a corner of his brain thought even now. Sorry I never told you personally what a job you did for me, but I guess I'm not going to have the chance to make up for it. Good luck, boy—and watch your ass! The Navy's going to need you, I think .

God, I wish I'd been wrong, Maitland Askew thought sickly, his face white and clenched as he watched the master tactical plot on Admiral Sigbee's flag bridge and thought of all the men and women he knew aboard Josef Byng's flagship. God, why couldn't I have been wrong?!

Despite all of the simulations BuWeaps and BuTrain had been able to put together after examining the hardware captured at Monica, Michelle and Dominica Adenauer were only too well aware that their knowledge of actual Solarian capabilities was limited, to say the least. They had no real meter stick for the toughness of the Sollies' missile defenses, so they'd decided to err on the side of caution. Each of their Nikes had eighty "flat pack" pods limpeted to her hull, and each of the Saganami-Cs had forty. That gave Michelle a total of nine hundred and sixty pods, or the next best thing to ten thousand missiles. Operating on her assumption that the Sollies' actual defensive capability was twice that of the captured vessels examined at Monica, Michelle had decided that two hundred and fifty of those missiles ought to do the trick. They might not destroy their target outright, but that was fine with her. In fact, she would really prefer that outcome. She wasn't the sort of homicidal maniac who enjoyed killing people, after all. She'd be more than willing to settle for demonstrating that she could destroy their vessels . . . and she'd be delighted if that convinced them to throw in the towel before she actually had to.

The Solarian League Navy had been the premier navy of the explored galaxy for centuries. Indeed, no one could remember a time when it hadn't been acknowledged as the most powerful fleet in existence. But that very preeminence had worked to undermine its efficiency. There was, quite simply, no enemy for it to take seriously, no peer against which to measure itself, no Darwinian incentive to identify weaknesses and correct them.

The nature of the Solarian League itself, dominated by the permanent bureaucrats who actually ran it rather than the political leadership which had long since lost any power to rein in those bureaucrats, was another factor. As with the civilian bureaucracies, the naval bureaucracy had become immovably entrenched, and the internecine warfare between competing departments for limited funding had been both intense and brutal. Funding decisions were fought out on the basis of who had the most clout, not the greatest need, and owed very little indeed to any impartial analysis of actual operational requirements. So it probably wasn't very surprising that the fundamental assumption of Solarian technological supremacy in all things meant R&D's budget was the smallest of all. After all, since the SLN's technology was already better than anyone else's, why waste money on that when it could more profitably be spent on prestigious things like additional superdreadnoughts . . . or quietly eased into the private banking accounts of Navy procurement officials?

All of which helped to explain why the SLN had also been one of the galaxy's most conservative navies. With thousands of ships in commission, and more thousands mothballed in reserve, its margin of superiority over any conceivable opponent had been utterly decisive. Which meant getting money even to build new ships, or to radically overhaul and modernize existing ones, had always been a difficult exercise. As one consequence, the SLN had been slow to recognize the potential of the laser head, and even slower to adopt it. And because no one had ever used similar weapons against it, its evaluation of the threat the new weapon presented—and of the doctrinal changes necessary to defeat it—had lagged behind even its own hardware.

That lag was about to have serious repercussions for SLNS Jean Bart.

"Those platforms are definitely decoys, Ma'am," Sherilyn Jeffers said flatly as she watched her displays.

"They've spun up now, and Ghost Rider's giving us good data on them."

"What do they look like?" Naomi Kaplan asked.

"It looks as if the system as a whole is pretty good, Ma'am." The electronics warfare officer tapped a few keys, her eyes intent as she absorbed CIC's analysis of the reconnaissance platforms' datastream.

"I'd say the individual platforms probably aren't quite as capable as what we've been seeing out of the Havenites lately, but their combined capability is actually better."

"Enough better that we should've used more missiles, do you think, Guns?" Kaplan asked.

"Oh, no, Ma'am." Abigail never looked up from her own displays and telemetry, and her smile could have frozen a star's heart. "Not that much better. In fact, I'd say their hardware is better than their doctrine. Either that, or their helmsmen are a little shaky. The interval between their units is at least three times anything the Havenites would accept, and that means the other ships' decoys are too far from the target to give it much cover. Our attack birds are going up against just its own platforms, and they aren't good enough to hack it against that much fire without a lot more support."

"Launching counter-missiles," Ursula Zeiss announced tersely, and Mizawa gave a jerky nod of acknowledgment.

He wasn't certain how much good the counter-missiles were going to do. The LIM-16F was a third again as capable as its predecessor, but even so, there wouldn't be time for a proper, layered defense. By the time they reached Jean Bart , the Manticoran missiles' closing velocity would be up to seventy-nine percent of the speed of light. The LIM-16's drive simply didn't have the endurance to hit the monsters the Manties had launched far enough out for an effective second launch at the same targets before they zipped right through the entire defensive envelope.

That's going to be a bitch for the laser clusters, too, he thought harshly. And they obviously know where that asshole Byng's been talking to them from. I can hardly fault them for wanting to kill his worthless ass, but I'd just as soon they hadn't decided to kill mine at the same time!

Despite everything—despite his own fear, despite his desperate concern for his ship and his crew, despite even his incandescent fury at Josef Byng—he actually smiled as the last sentence ran through his brain.

Aboard the attacking MDMs, computers consulted their pre-launch instructions, and suddenly jammers and decoys began to blossom. The Solarian counter-missiles were basically sound pieces of technology, but despite the SLN's belated awareness that something peculiar had happened to missile combat out in the Haven Sector, it was only beginning any sort of serious attempt to upgrade its active anti-missile defenses. Worse, neither the hardware nor the officers groping towards some new defense doctrine had profited from the last two decades of savage combat which had refined their Manticoran and Havenite counterparts. Their counter-missiles' software wasn't as good, the doctrine for their use was purely theoretical, without the harsh Darwinian input of survival, and the officers doing their best—not just aboard Jean Bart, but aboard all of Byng's battlecruisers—had no true concept of the threat environment into which they had intruded.

For all of its towering reputation, all of its size, all of the wealth and industrial power which stood behind it, the Solarian League Navy was simply outclassed. Even Frontier Fleet was accustomed only to dealing with pirates, the occasional slaver, or the privateer gone rogue. No one had destroyed a Solarian warship in combat in almost three centuries, and the complacency that had engendered had produced fatal consequences. Despite its preeminent position, the SLN was a second-rate power, inferior even to many of the Solarian system-defense forces it had derided as "amateurs" for so many decades. Far, far worse, the men and women of its officer corps didn't even recognize their own inferiority . . . and Josef Byng's ships found themselves matched against what was by almost any measure the most experienced, battle hardened, and technologically advanced fleet in space.

Byng stared at the master plot in disbelief as the Manticoran missiles suddenly and magically reproduced. There were no longer hundreds of incoming missiles—there were thousands , and the counter-missiles trying to kill them went berserk. Scores of them targeted the same false images, went after the same decoys, and then the EW platforms the Manticorans called Dazzlers spun up, radiating with impossible power. No one in the Solarian League had realized that the RMN had managed to put actual fusion plants aboard their missiles, so no one had even considered what jammers or decoys could do with that sort of energy budget. And, unfortunately for Jean Bart, it was far too late to start thinking about that sort of thing as the hell-bright bubbles of multi-megaton nuclear explosions spawned x-ray lasers.

Despite the Manticoran penetration aides, despite weaknesses in doctrine, despite surprise and the disastrous underestimation of the threat, the Solarian League Navy managed to stop seventy-three of the incoming missiles. Another thirty of the Mark 23s had carried nothing but penetration EW, which left

"only" one hundred and forty-seven actual shipkillers. One hundred and forty-seven missiles, each of which carried six individual laser heads designed to blast through superdreadnought armor.

A hungry, wordless sound flowed across HMS Tristram 's bridge as rapiers of focused x-rays stabbed deep into Jean Bart .

No, not "rapiers," Abigail Hearns thought from behind the hard, cold anger of her eyes as the fury of the bomb-pumped lasers ripped huge splinters and mangled chunks from the battlecruiser's hull. That's too neat, too precise. Those are axes. Or chainsaws .

The Mark 23 was designed to kill superdreadnoughts, ships with incredibly tough armor that was literally meters thick. Ships which were intricately compartmentalized, honeycombed with blast doors, internal bulkheads, and cofferdams—all designed to contain damage. To channel it away from vital areas. To absorb almost inconceivable hammerings and remain in action.

But SLNS Jean Bart was no superdreadnought.

Her wedge stopped dozens—scores—of lasers. Her decoys attracted still others away from her hull. But more dozens of them were neither stopped nor decoyed, and they blasted through her battlecruiser sidewalls and battlecruiser armor with contemptuous ease. They ripped at her vitals like the talons of some huge demon. And then, abruptly, she simply . . . came apart.

Abigail Hearns watched the next best thing to a million tons of starship disintegrate, and her stony eyes never even flickered. Deep within her, there was a sense of horror, of terrible regret, for the thousands of human beings who had just died. Most of them had been guilty of nothing worse than obeying the orders of a criminally stupid and arrogant superior. She knew that, and that inner part of her mourned for their deaths, but not even that could dim her sense of triumph. Of justice done for her ship's murdered squadron mates.

"Behold, I will make you a new threshing sledge with sharp teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and beat them small, and make the hills like chaff," her mind recited the old, old words coldly as the wreckage began to spread on her tactical plot . "You shall winnow them, the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them."

But all she said aloud was—

"Target destroyed, Ma'am."

Well, that was a case of overkill after all , Michelle thought, gazing at the spreading cloud of debris and gas which had once been a Solarian battlecruiser, but the thought was muted, almost hushed. Even for her, even after all the death and destruction she'd seen in two decades of warfare, there was something dreadful about Jean Bart 's execution. And "execution" was exactly the right word for what had happened, she reflected. She'd expected the Sollies to be fat, happy, and soft, expected to kill the ship with her single salvo, but her wildest estimates had fallen far short of just how great an edge the Royal Manticoran Navy currently enjoyed.

But that's the rub, isn't it, girl? That word "currently." Well, that and the fact that the Sollies have probably got at least four times as many superdreadnoughts as we have destroyers! But done is done, and maybe somebody on their side will be smart enough to realize just how many of their spacers are going to get killed before that size advantage of theirs lets them carry through against us . I'd really like to think sanity could break out somewhere , at any rate. No trace of her thoughts touched her expression as she turned to look at Commander Edwards.

"All right, Bill," she told the communications officer calmly. "Let's see if the next link in their chain of command is prepared to see reason now."

Chapter Forty-Six

"You know, I'd really like to meet this Anisimovna one day," Michelle Henke said as she accepted a fresh cup of steaming black coffee from Chris Billingsley. She gave the steward a quick smile of thanks, and he continued around the table to her two guests with his coffee pot, refilling and topping off, then withdrew from the day cabin.

"I don't imagine you're alone in that, Ma'am," Aivars Terekhov said grimly. "I know I'd like an hour or two alone with her."

"She does seem to get around, doesn't she?" Bernardus Van Dort agreed. "Assuming this really is the same person Tyler claims to've met with."

"Same name, same description," Michelle pointed out. She sipped from her cup, then set it back down and leaned back in her chair. "I realize there are a lot of women in the galaxy, Bernardus, but how many gorgeous, man-eating blondes with Mesan accents, Manpower credit chips, Solly task groups in their back pockets, and a taste for slumming in the vicinity of the Talbott Cluster so they can arrange operations designed to break our kneecaps are there?"

"I admit, the evidence suggests she's the same person," Van Dort replied with unflappable calm.

"Assuming she went all the way home to Mesa after Monica blew up in her face, though, she certainly got back out here in what must be close to record time. In fact, I'm inclined to wonder if they had the entire New Tuscany operation in mind from the very beginning, as well, if only as a backup. She can hardly have spent very much time at home on Mesa conferring or coming up with new strategies before they sent her back out."

"They did recover quickly, didn't they?" Michelle agreed thoughtfully, and Terekhov snorted.

"I don't think they so much 'recovered' as just 'reloaded,' " he said. "And I really don't like what Vézien and the others had to say about how the late, unlamented Admiral Byng came to be in a position to pull something this incredibly stupid in the first place."

His remark was met by a brief silence as the other two thought about all of the implications of Prime Minister Vézien's testimony. Then Michelle looked at Van Dort.

"Do you really think Baroness Medusa and Prime Minister Alquezar are going to sign off on your agreement with Vézien, Bernardus?"

"I think yes . . . probably." Van Dort smiled tightly. "I didn't really promise him all that much, you know. Basically just that the Royal Navy isn't going to come and dismantle his star system's entire orbital infrastructure as a reprisal."

"That and that New Tuscany wouldn't really be excluded from all Quadrant markets," Terekhov said in a chidingly correcting tone. Van Dort raised an eyebrow at him, and Terekhov snorted again. "That's a hell of a lot more than I would have given him, Bernardus! And, frankly, after what they tried to pull this time, I'm not sure it's a justifiable security risk, either."

He started to say something more, then broke off with a sound suspiciously like an " Oof! " as several kilos of cat launched themselves into his lap with absolutely no warning. Terekhov was one of Dicey's favorite people. Not only did his long legs give him a comfortably large lap, but Dicey's radar had an uncanny ability to differentiate the cat-lovers from those who merely tolerated a feline presence. Now he sat up, bumping his broad, scarred head against Terekhov's chin, and purred loudly to remind his admirer of what human hands had really been invented to do.

Michelle shook her head at the intrusion, but before she could call Billingsley to remove his thoroughly illegal pet, Terekhov's hands began obediently stroking the outsized beast, and she closed her mouth, instead. There was something irresistibly appealing about seeing the tough-as-nails victor of Monica firmly under the paw of a much battered and bedamned feline.

"As far as security risks go," she said after a moment, "they aren't going to risk pissing us off a second time anytime soon, Aivars, I don't think those issues are going to be a deal breaker, but I think the lack of reprisals could be. For that matter, I'm inclined to think it should be."

"Which is why we specifically left open the question of the amount of the reparations to be assessed," Van Dort pointed out. "Both sides know it's coming and that the price tag's going to be stiff, and if you'll notice, I specifically didn't rule out the possibility of reprisals against the New Tuscan industrial establishment if we can't come to a meeting of minds on that particular topic."

"I'm not too sure it's a meeting with their minds I'm concerned about," Michelle said with a wry smile. "I know the Queen a bit better than most people do, and I don't think she's going to be very happy with New Tuscany. It must've been bad enough when the initial report about what happened to Bear and his ships hit her desk a week or so ago. When she gets the one on what happened to Byng here in New Tsucany, it's going to be even worse. And when she gets our follow-up, including everything Vézien and the others had to say about Ms. Anisimovna, I think she's going to be just a bit peeved with them."

"I don't doubt it for a moment," Van Dort acknowledged, "and I'm not saying they should get off scot-free. But look at the way it worked out from their side for a moment. I don't have any great store of sympathy for Vézien, Boutin, and the others, and I'm not going to shed any tears if they get kicked out on their blood-sucking, power-mongering, oligarchical asses. But New Tuscany as a star nation's already lost in the vicinity of forty-three thousand lives. That's a pretty hefty price to pay, and I'd say the Vézien Government is just as furious at Manpower as it says it is. I'm sure that in time, he and his cabinet members will get over their current spasm of sanity and revert to type, but in the meantime why kick them any harder than we need to? We've got enough problems already without nurturing any ill will we don't absolutely have to."

"Well, that's certainly true," Michelle agreed glumly. "For the admiral who just handed the Solarian League Navy its first ever task group-level defeat, I'm not feeling all warm and fuzzy inside over my accomplishment."

Terekhov looked up from Dicey and chuckled with very little humor, and Michelle gave him a crooked smile.

After the destruction of Jean Bart , Rear Admiral Evelyn Sigbee, commanding the 112th Battlecruiser Squadron, had seen reason very quickly indeed. The fact that Michelle had made it clear she knew which ship was Sigbee's flagship might well have contributed to that, but it was obvious the woman was also considerably smarter—or at least willing to actually use whatever intelligence she had—than Byng had been. Michelle wondered how much of that was because she was Frontier Fleet, not Battle Fleet. There'd been no survivors from Jean Bart , and the other ships of the Solarian task group had returned very promptly to their parking orbit around New Tuscany. Sigbee had been a little stickier about meekly transporting her personnel down to the planetary surface and handing her ships over to Michelle's boarding parties with their computers intact, but Michelle had held her battlecruisers and heavy cruisers well outside the Solarians' effective missile range while she sent just the destroyers in to be sure Sigbee was complying with her instructions. As she'd hoped, the memory of what had just happened to Jean Bart—and her obvious willingness to repeat the demonstration—had carried the day. The anchor watches who'd been left aboard had been no more cooperative than they had to be, but they'd displayed no overt resistance, either. Again, not too surprisingly, given the heavily armed Marines who'd accompanied the naval boarding parties. And once those boarding parties were aboard, it had quickly become evident that the Sollies' computer security was far inferior to that of Manticore. On the other hand, it was also inferior to some of the civilian-market Solarian software the navy computer techs had seen, so that didn't necessarily prove anything about the tech base available to the SLN; only about the tech base of which it had actually availed itself.

Once through the fences and into the data banks, it hadn't taken very long to determine that the Sollies own tactical recordings clearly demonstrated that Commodore Chatterjee's ships hadn't had a thing to do with the destruction of the New Tuscan space station. How much good that was going to do after more recent events in the star system was debatable, but Michelle's technicians had made complete copies of the original files.

For that matter, they had some of the actual computers in which those files had been stored, since she'd also chosen to take the battlecruisers Resourceful and Impudent home with her. Resourceful was one of the Indefatigable class, like the ships captured in Monica, and she felt certain BuShips and BuWeaps would want to compare her electronics and weapons loadouts with that of the ships Technodyne had provided to President Tyler. Impudent, despite the letter with which her name began, was one of the new Nevada-class ships. As such, she represented the very latest in deployed SLN technology, and Michelle knew how eagerly the engineers and analysts back home would greet her arrival. Aside from those two units, she'd left the rest of Byng's ships in New Tuscany with Sigbee. She'd seen no reason to try to take any more of them with her, for several reasons, including the fact that the newer Manticoran designs didn't provide a lot of redundant personnel to make up passage crews for prize vessels. Besides that, she'd quickly come to the conclusion that there was no particular point in trying to refit them for Manticoran use. They were clearly inferior do anything presently in Alliance service, and the expense and effort to bring such manpower-intensive designs up to something like current standards could be far more profitably applied to other ends.

She'd considered scuttling them, and under accepted interstellar law, she would have been entirely within her rights to do so. In the end, though, she'd decided that actually scuttling them might be a case of pouring unnecessary salt into a wound. Nothing she could do was going to make the SLN happy with her, but sailing off into the sunset with every one of their ships, or blowing them up in orbit, was only likely to piss them off even worse. Not that she was any too sure that what she'd ended up doing would make them any happier. Eighty percent of their ships and ninety-five percent of their personnel were still there, and both ships and people were pretty much physically intact, but before leaving, Michelle's boarding parties had deliberately triggered those ships' internal security charges . . . which had reduced all of surviving battlecruisers central computer nets to so much slagged molecular circuitry, as inert and useless as a solid block of granite. No one would be reprogramming those computers; it was going to take physical replacement if the Sollies ever wanted one of those ships to get underway under her own power again. That wouldn't necessarily take them permanently out of service, but it would take months to get a suitably equipped repair fleet all the way out to New Tuscany. In fact, it might actually be cheaper and faster in the long run to send out a fleet of tugs and tow them back to a Solarian shipyard. And if they're not permanently out of service, at least they aren't going to be available to the other side any time soon , she reflected grimly. If this goes as far south as it could, that's not exactly anything to sneer at, I suppose .

"I wish we had a better feel for how the Sollies are going to react to all of this," Van Dort said, as if he'd been reading her mind. Not that it would have taken a genius to figure out what she was thinking.

"I wish the same thing," she said. "But what I wish even more was that we had some idea how any transstellar—even one the size of Manpower—comes up with the juice to manipulate the SLN on this level. Battle Fleet admirals who just happen to hate all Manties in charge of Frontier Fleet task groups?

Entire task forces of Battle Fleet superdreadnoughts on call, assuming Anisimovna wasn't just blowing smoke to the New Tuscans? I'd say this goes at least a little beyond most corporations' definition of

'business as usual.' "

Which, she added silently, is the reason I also handed complete copies of the depositions Vézien, Dusserre, Cardot, and Pélisard gave us over to Sigbee for her to pass on to their ONI. I doubt it's likely to make them any less pissed off with us, but I don't have any problem at all with getting the League simultaneously pissed off enough at Manpower to finally do something about it!

"You think Vézien is right about Byng?" Terekhov asked.

"I don't know," Michelle said slowly. "If he is, I'm even more nervous than I was, I think. Bernardus, you know people out here better than Aivars and I do. Who do you think was closer to right, Vézien or Dusserre?"

"Dusserre," Van Dort said promptly. "I don't like him, you understand, but for somebody stuck in a fundamentally unworkable position, he's probably the smartest of the lot. Vézien may think Byng knew what was going on, but I don't. Your own intelligence dossier on him indicates that he's never been exactly the sharpest stylus in the box, and his prejudices against Manticore are glaringly obvious. I'd say they were obvious to Manpower, as well. And assuming Anisimovna really was responsible for Giselle's destruction, it looks to me as if they planned all along on putting him in a position where his anti-Manticore attitude would trigger a spinal-reflex reaction. I don't know if they anticipated that he'd go quite so far, give them such a blatant causis belli, but they probably figured they could count on him to open fire on at least one Manticoran ship, somewhere along the way."

"I have trouble believing anyone could be that good a puppeteer," Terekhov objected. Van Dort looked at him, and the commodore shrugged.

"Your basic analysis sounds good, Bernardus, but I find it difficult to believe that anybody competent enough to put all of this together would rely on somehow maneuvering our ships close to Byng's right in the middle of the New Tuscany System, then blowing up a space station to get him to open fire. That's so far outside the KISS principle it isn't even funny!"

"I don't think that's what they did at all," Van Dort replied. "I think the 'puppeteers' relied on the fact that Anisimovna is an extremely talented and—obviously—extraordinarily ruthless operative. I think they told her what they wanted to happen, gave her the best tools for the job they could, and then sent her out to manipulate the situation however seemed best to her. From everything Vézien and his crowd had to say, she obviously had them right in her pocket. And it must have been obvious—to her, at least—that even if we hadn't responded by sending Chatterjee to New Tuscany, we'd eventually have responded by doing something that would have put our ships in close proximity with Byng's. Either that, or she and the New Tuscans would have managed to manufacture an 'incident' sufficiently serious to send Byng looking for us with blood in his eye. What's that saying from Old Terra about Muhammad going to the mountain?"

"I think you're right about that," Michelle said, "and, to be honest, that troubles me almost as much as anything else that's happened."

The others looked at her, and she waved her coffee cup in the air and grimaced. Then she set the cup down in front of her, folded her forearms on the edge of the table, and leaned forward over them, her expression serious.

"Look, we've always known Manpower hated the Star Kingdom's guts. Well, that's fair enough, because we've reciprocated. But we've also always thought of Manpower as a bunch of arrogant, money hungry, amoral bastards. They don't care about anything except money, and their arrogance leads them to do things like that business in Old Chicago when they kidnapped young Zilwicki. Or that idiotic attack on Catherine Montaigne's townhouse. Or the blatant stupidity of using slave labor , of all damned things, on Torch before the Ballroom took it away from them. Ruthless, yes. And rich, and unscrupulous as hell, but not really all that smart. Not . . . sophisticated."

"I might quibble with some of your terminology, Ma'am," Terekhov said thoughtfully. "I never really thought of them as stupid, but I guess I'd have to admit that the quality I associated with them was more . . . cunning, let's say, than intelligence."

"And their operations in the past—or the ones we've known about, at least—have all been related to the bottom-line somehow," Michelle pointed out. "Sometimes the connection's seemed a little strained, but it's always been there if we looked close enough. And they've never used major military forces—their own, or anyone else's. Even when they tried for Montaigne, they used mercenaries. And that business of yours in Nuncio, Aivars—that was using orphaned StateSec units, which was effectively just another batch of mercenaries. But this time, neither of those things is true." She shook her head, her eyes unwontedly worried.

"Arguably, I suppose, you could say both the Monicans and the New Tuscans were more 'mercenaries,'

whether they realized it or not, but what about Byng? What about the connections it took to get him assigned to a Frontier Fleet command and then sent out here? And what about this Battle Fleet task force Anisimovna claimed was stationed at MacIntosh? That's a huge escalation in force levels from anything we've ever seen out of them in the past. I suppose Battle Fleet's corrupt enough that they could conceivably have managed it with only a few people in key spots in their pockets, but even so, it shows a degree of hubris that strikes me as almost insane. And look at the timing on it. They had to have the MacIntosh deployment and Byng's appointment already in the pipeline before you hit Monica, Aivars. They literally couldn't have gotten the ships out here so quickly, if they hadn't already arranged for it. So either they really were already looking at New Tuscany—or something like it—or else they'd decided to arrange it all as a second string to their bow if Monica failed. Either way, that's a sort of multilayered strategy I don't think any of us would have expected out of them. And if we're going to talk about escalations, think of everything else they've risked here. They're headquartered on an independent planet which isn't even part of the League, but they're deeply involved in the League's economy. They depend on that involvement, and they've always relied on their connections in the League's bureaucracy and Assembly to deter any Solarian action against them. But now they start throwing Battle Fleet admirals and task forces around? Even the League is going to react—and react hard— if it figures out a single outlaw corporation—a foreign outlaw corporation—is sending entire fleets of its wallers around the galaxy!

"And even leaving that risk aside, look at the financial side of it. They have to have lost a fortune on that fiasco in Monica, but they didn't even slow down. Instead, they switched right over to this New Tuscany operation, and I'll guarantee you it didn't come cheap, either. I'll concede that they've got every reason in the world to keep us as far away from the Mesa System as they can, but after taking the hit to the bank account Monica must've represented, shouldn't simple financial pain have made them at least a little slower out of the launch tube for New Tuscany? And after such an obvious failure, and all the bad PR it's gotten them from the League newsies, I'd have expected them to keep a low profile, at least for a little while. Which, obviously, they didn't do, if they're actually manipulating major SLN command appointments and fleet movements. And to top it all off, the person they sent out to coordinate it is also the person who coordinated the Monica operation, and before Monica, we'd never even heard of her. Which wouldn't worry me as much as it does if she didn't seem to be so damned capable . If they've had her tucked away in their forward magazine all this time, why haven't we seen her—or her handiwork, at least—before? Where did this rogue corporation suddenly come up with an operative of her caliber?

And why is it acting like it thinks it's a star nation , not just a criminal business enterprise?" The other two looked back at her, and no one said another word for quite a long time.

Chapter Forty-Seven

"Thank you for finding room in your schedule so promptly, Minister," Sir Lyman Carmichael said as Foreign Minister Marcelito Lorenzo Roelas y Valiente's private secretary ushered him into the stupendous office.

That office offered enough square meters for a basketball game, Carmichael thought more than a tad sourly . . . and with very little exaggeration. Which, given that property values in the city of Old Chicago, the capital of the Solarian League, were almost certainly the highest in the explored galaxy, made the office's size an even more ostentatious statement of its inhabitant's status. Of course, he reflected, status and power aren't always exactly the same thing, are they?

Especially here in the League .

"Well," Roelas y Valiente replied, standing behind his desk—which was no larger than a standard air car—and extending his hand, "your message sounded fairly urgent, Mr. Ambassador."

"Yes, I'm afraid it is. Rather urgent, I mean," Carmichael said, shaking the foreign minister's hand. Roelas y Valiente allowed his well-trained expression to show at least a trace of concern, and indicated one of the two armchairs on Carmichael's side of his desk.

"In that case, please make yourself comfortable and tell me about it," the Foreign Minister invited.

"Thank you, Minister."

Carmichael's voice was a bit warmer than it might have been in the presence of another senior member of the Gyulay Government.

Roelas y Valiente was the youngest member of Prime Minister Shona Gyulay's cabinet—not even out of his sixties yet, which made him the next best thing to thirty T-years younger than Carmichael himself—and unlike most of his fellows, he obviously felt a sense of responsibility for the proper discharge of his office. That was a pleasant and unexpected surprise here in the Solarian League. He also appeared to be at least reasonably competent, which (in Sir Lyman Carmichael's considered opinion) was an even greater surprise in such a senior League politician.

It was unfortunate that someone who possessed both of those virtues was as much a prisoner of his office's limitations as the stupidest and most corrupt demagogue could have been. There were times when Carmichael, as a bureaucrat (or call it a "career civil servant," if it sounded better) himself, felt a certain envy for his Solarian counterparts. At least they didn't have to worry about the possibility of some unqualified buffoon (like, for example, one Baron High Ridge and his cronies) managing to delude enough voters into sharing his own fantasies of competence so that they gave him actual decision-making power. Some things were more likely than others, but the possibility of any mere elected official exercising genuine power in the Solarian League at the federal level were about as likely as water suddenly deciding to flow uphill without benefit of counter-gravity.

And that, despite any occasional whimsical fantasies Carmichael might entertain, was the true reason someone like a Josef Byng could rise to flag rank, or someone like a Lorcan Verrochio could become a commissioner in something like the Office of Frontier Security. When no "unqualified buffoon" could be given effective power by the electorate, neither could anyone else. And when those who exercised true power were unaccountable to voters, they could not be removed from power, either. The consequences of that were unbridled empire building, corruption, and lack of accountability, all of them as inevitable as sunrise, and bureaucrat himself or not, Sir Lyman Carmichael knew which type of system he preferred. Unfortunately, that wasn't the type of system the Solarian Constitution had created . . . a fact of which, he never doubted, Roelas y Valiente was even more aware than he was. The authors of the Solarian League's Constitution had represented literally scores of already inhabited, thoroughly settled star systems. Some of those star systems had been colonized a thousand years before the League's creation. All of them had seen the advantages of regulating interstellar trade, of creating a single interstellar currency, of crafting effective regulatory agencies to keep an eye on interstellar finance and investment, of combining their efforts to extradite interstellar criminals, suppress piracy, and enforce things like the Eridani Edict and the Deneb Accords. But they'd also had an entire millennium of self-government, an entire millennium of developing their own planetwide and systemwide senses of identity. Their primary loyalties had been to their own worlds, their own governments, not to some new galaxy-wide super government, and none of them had been willing to surrender their hard-earned sovereignty and individual identities to anyone —not even to the mother-world of all humanity—just to create a more effective regulatory climate. And so they had carefully crafted a constitution designed to deprive the League's central government of any coercive power. They had eviscerated the federal government's political power by granting every single full member of the League veto power; any star system had the legal power to kill any legislative act of which it disapproved, which had turned the League Assembly into nothing more than a debating society. And the same constitution had prohibited the League from imposing any direct taxation upon its citizens.