The intent had been to provide the member star systems with the ability to protect themselves from any sort of despotic central authority, on the one hand, and to systematically starve the potentially coercive arms of that central authority of the sort of funding which might have allowed them to encroach upon the rights of the League's citizens, on the other.

Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences had refused to be evaded. The universal right of veto had, indeed, eviscerated the political powers of the League, but that very success had created a dangerous vacuum. For the League simply to survive, far less provide the services which its founders had envisioned, there had to be some central power to manage the necessary bureaucracy. It was really a very simple choice, Carmichael reflected. Either some central power emerged, or the League simply ceased to function. So, since the Solarians had systematically precluded the possibility of running the League by statute, they were forced to turn to bureaucratic regulation, instead. And it worked. In effect, the bureaucracies became self-directed, and for a while—a century or two—they functioned not simply effectively, but well and even more or less honestly. Unfortunately, the people running those bureaucracies had discovered an interesting omission in the Constitution. Acts of the Assembly could be vetoed by any full member system, which meant there was no probability of a statutory despotism, but there was no provision for the veto or repeal of regulations . That would have required the statutory creation of someone or something with the power to repeal or reform the regulations, and the bureaucrats had cultivated far too many friends and cozy "special relationships" for that ever to happen. And while the federal government could enact no direct taxation measures, there'd been no constitutional prohibition of regulatory fees or indirect taxes—imposed by regulation, not statute—on businesses or interstellar commerce. To be sure, all of the League's federal funds combined represented an absurdly small percentage of the Sollies' Gross Interstellar Product, but given the staggering size of the League's GIP, even a tiny percentage represented a stupendous absolute cash flow. There'd been actual attempts at political reform, but the bureaucrats who wrote the League's regulations, who managed its appointments and the distribution of its expenditures, had always been able to find someone willing to exercise his veto authority to strangle those efforts in the cradle. And always out of sheer, selfless, disinterested statesmanship, of course.

Still, there were appearances to maintain, here in the kabuki theater that passed for the Solarian League's government. Carmichael knew that, yet he felt an undeniable sensation of regret for what he knew he was about to inflict on this particular Solarian.

"Forgive me," Roelas y Valiente said as Carmichael laid the traditional and thoroughly anachronistic briefcase in his lap. "I completely forgot to ask if I could offer you some refreshment, Mr. Ambassador."

"No, thank you, Minister."

Carmichael shook his head with a smile of appreciation for the Foreign Minister's offer. Quite a few of his fellow ministers, Carmichael suspected, would have "forgotten" to make any such offer to a neobarb ambassador, regardless of the wealth and commercial power of the star nation he represented. In Roelas y Valiente's case, however, that forgetfulness had been completely genuine. It was rather refreshing, really, to deal with a senior Solly politician who didn't seem compelled to look for ways to put

"neobarbs" in their proper place. Which only lent added point to Carmichael's regret this morning. Now, as Roelas y Valiente nodded acknowledgment of his polite refusal and sat back in his own chair, Carmichael opened the briefcase and extracted its contents: a computer-chip folio and a single envelope of thick, cream-yellow parchment bearing the Star Kingdom of Manticore's arms and the archaic wax seal tradition required. He held them both in his hands for a moment, gazing down at them. The envelope was heavier than the folio, even though it contained no more than three sheets of paper, and he found himself wondering why in the galaxy high-level diplomacy continued to insist upon the physical exchange of hardcopy documents. Since the content of those hardcopy documents was always transmitted electronically at the same time, and since no one ever bothered to actually read the paper copies (except, perhaps, at the highest levels when they were initially handed over, and it was deplorably gauche for a foreign minister to just rip a note open and read it in the ambassador's presence, anyway), why were the damned things sent in the first place?

That was a question he'd asked himself more than once over the half T-century and more of his service in the Manticoran diplomatic corps. It was also one which had become rather more relevant to his own activities in the seven T-months since Admiral James Webster's assassination had made him the Manticoran ambassador to the League. There'd been more than enough exchanges of diplomatic correspondence (although, to be fair, most of it had been exchanged at a level considerably lower than this) since the Battle of Monica. Especially once the Manticorans' discoveries about the involvement of Manpower and Technodyne in the Talbott Quadrant had come to light. No doubt Roelas y Valiente expected this to be more of the same, and despite his pleasantly attentive expression, he couldn't possibly have been looking forward to receiving it. Yet Carmichael devoutly wished that "more of the same" was all he was about to hand the foreign minister. Unfortunately . . .

"I'm afraid that I've come to call on you concerning a very grave matter, Minister," he said in a much more formal tone. "There's been an incident—an extremely serious incident—between Her Majesty's armed forces and the Solarian League Navy."

Roelas y Valiente's polite expression transformed itself almost instantly into an impenetrable mask, but not instantly enough for someone with Carmichael's experience to miss the shock—and astonishment—that flared in his eyes first.

"This," Carmichael continued, indicating the chip folio, "contains complete sensor records of what occurred. At Foreign Secretary Langtry's instructions, I've reviewed them personally, with the assistance of Captain Deangelo, my naval attaché. While I'm obviously less qualified in these matters than Admiral Webster was—or, for that matter, than Captain Deangelo is —I believe they clearly demonstrate the background circumstances, the sequence of events, and their outcome."

He paused for just a moment, letting what he'd already said settle in, then drew a deep breath.

"Minister," he said slowly, "I'm afraid we find ourselves facing the very real probability of a direct military confrontation between the Solarian League and the Star Empire of Manticore. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that we've already had one."

Despite Roelas y Valiente's best efforts, his facial muscles twitched and his nostrils flared. Aside from that, however, there might have been a marble statue seated in his chair.

"Just under one month ago, on October twenty-first," Carmichael continued, "in the system of New Tuscany, three Manticoran destroyers—"

"Jesus Christ," Innokentiy Arsenovich Kolokoltsov muttered, suppressing an urge to crumple his own copy of the official Manticoran note in his fist. "What was that goddammed idiot thinking? "

"Which one?" Nathan MacArtney asked dryly. "Byng? Prime Minister Vézien? That Manticoran klutz—what's-his-name . . . Chatterjee, or whatever? Or one of the other assorted Manticoran idiots involved in handing us something like this?"

"Any of them— all of them!" Kolokoltsov snarled. He glared down at the note for a few more incandescent seconds, then flipped it angrily—and contemptuously—onto the deck of the third member of their little group.

"I admit none of them seem to have exactly covered themselves with glory," Omosupe Quartermain observed with a grimace, picking up the discarded note as if he'd deposited a small, several-days-dead rodent in the middle of her blotter, "but I wouldn't have believed even Manties could be stupid enough to hand us something like this !"

"And why not?" Malachai Abruzzi demanded with an even more disgusted grimace. "They've been getting progressively more uppity for years now—ever since they managed to extort that frigging

'technology embargo' against Haven out of your people, Omosupe." Quartermain gave him a moderately scathing look, but she didn't deny his analysis. None of them did, and Kolokoltsov forced himself to step back and consider the present situation as dispassionately as he could.

None of the four people in Quartermain's office had ever stood for election in his or her life, yet they represented the true government of the Solarian League, and they knew it. Kolokoltsov was the permanent senior undersecretary for foreign affairs. McCartney was the permanent senior undersecretary of the interior; Quartermain was the permanent senior undersecretary of commerce; and Abruzzi was the permanent senior undersecretary of information. The only missing member of the quintet which dominated the Solarian League's sprawling bureaucracy was Agatá Wodoslawski, the permanent senior undersecretary of the treasury, who was out-system at the moment, representing the League at a conference on Beowulf. No doubt she would have expressed her own disgust as vehemently as her colleagues if she'd been present, and equally no doubt, she was going to be more than moderately pissed off at having missed this meeting, Kolokoltsov reflected.

Unfortunately, she was just going to have to live with whatever her four colleagues decided in her absence. And they were going to have to decide something , he thought sourly. It came with the territory, since—as every true insider thoroughly understood—it was the five of them who actually ran the Solarian League . . . whatever the majority of the Solarian electorate might fondly imagine. Politicians came and went, changing in an ever shifting shadow play whose sole function was to disguise the fact that the voters' impact on the League's policies ranged somewhere from minute to totally nonexistent. There were moments, although they were extraordinarily infrequent, when Kolokoltsov almost— almost

—regretted that fact. It would have been extremely inconvenient for the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed, of course, and the consequences for his personal and family wealth would have been severe. Still, it would have been nice to be part of a governing structure that wielded direct, overt authority rather than skulking about in the shadows. Even if they were extraordinarily lucrative and luxurious shadows.

"All right," he said out loud, and twitched his shoulders in something that wasn't quite a shrug. "We're all agreed they're idiots. The question is what we do about it."

"Shouldn't we have Rajampet—or at least Kingsford—in here for this?" MacArtney asked.

"Rajampet's not available," Kolokoltsov replied. "Or, not for a face-to-face meeting, at any rate. And do you really want to be discussing this with anyone electronically, Nathan?"

"No," MacArtney said after a moment, his expression thoughtful. "No, I don't believe I do, Innokentiy."

"That's what I thought." Kolokoltsov smiled thinly. "We probably could get Kingsford in here if we really wanted to. But given how close all of those 'First Families of Battle Fleet' are, he's not likely to be what you might call a disinterested expert, now is he? Besides, what do you really think he could offer at this point that we don't already have from the damned Manties?"

MacArtney grimaced in understanding. So did the others, although Quartermain's sour expression was even more disgruntled than than anyone else's. She'd spent twenty T-years with the Kalokainos Line before she'd entered the ranks of the federal bureaucracy. The others had spent their professional lives dealing with the often arthritic flow of information over interstellar distances, and all of them had amassed far too much experience of the need to wait for reports and the dispatches to make their lengthy, snaillike way to the League's capital planet. But there was more to it for Quartermain, especially this time around. Her earlier private-sector experience—not to mention her current public-sector responsibilities—had all too often brought her nose-to-nose with the Star Kingdom of Manticore's dominance of the wormhole network that moved both data and commerce about the galaxy. She was more accustomed than the others to dealing with the consequences of how that dominance put Manticore inside the loop of the League's communications and carrying trade, and she didn't like it a bit.

In this instance, however, all of them were unpleasantly aware that it was going to take much longer for any message traffic from the League's own representatives in the vicinity of the Talbott Sector to reach them. Which meant that at the moment all they had to go on was the content of the Manticorans' "note" and the sensor data they had provided.

"And how much credence do we want to place in anything the Manties have to say?" Quartermain demanded sourly, as if she'd been following Kolokoltsov's thoughts right along with him.

"Let's not get too paranoid, Omosupe," Abruzzi said dryly. She glowered at him, and he shrugged. "I'm not saying I'd put it past them to . . . tweak the information, let's say. But they're not really idiots, you know. Lunatics, maybe, yes, if they actually mean what they've said in this note, but not idiots. Sooner or later we're going to have access to Byng's version of the data. You know that, and so do they. Do you really think they'd falsify the data they've already given us knowing that eventually we'll be able to check it with our own sources?"

"Sure they would," Quartermain retorted, her dark-complexioned face tight with intense dislike. "Hell, I shouldn't have to tell you that, Malachai! You know better than anyone else how much the successful manipulation of a political situation depends on manipulating the public version of information."

"Yes, I do," he agreed. His position made him effectively the League's chief propagandist, and he'd manipulated more than a little information of his own in his time. "But so do the Manties, unless you want to suggest that they haven't built themselves a very effective public relations position right here on Old Terra? And let's not even get into the contacts they have on Beowulf!"

"So?" Quartermain demanded.

"So they're not stupid enough to hand us information that's demonstrably falsified," he said with exaggerated patience. "It's easy enough to produce selective data, especially for a PR campaign, and I'm sure they're very well aware of that. But from what Innokentiy's been telling us, they seem to have given us the entire sensor files, from beginning to end, and the complete log of Byng's original communication with the Manties when they arrived in New Tuscany. They wouldn't have done that if they hadn't known our own people's sensor records and com logs were eventually going to confirm the same information. Not when there's any possibility that the information's going to leak to the newsies."

"Probably not," MacArtney said. "On the other hand, that's one of the things about this entire situation that most bothers me, Malachai."

"What is?" Abruzzi frowned.

"The fact that they haven't already handed this to the newsies," MacArtney explained. "It's obvious from their note that they're pissed off as hell, and, frankly, if the data's accurate, I would be, too, in their place. So why not go straight to the media and try to turn up the pressure on us?"

"Actually," Kolokoltsov said, "I think the fact that they didn't do that may be the one slightly hopeful sign in this entire damned mess. However angry their note may sound , they're obviously bending over backward to avoid inflaming the situation any farther."

"You're probably right," Abruzzi said. "Of course, the question is why they might be trying to avoid that."

"Hah!" Quartermain snorted harshly. "I think that's probably simple enough, Malachai. They're accusing an SLN admiral of destroying three of their ships, and they're demanding explanations, 'accountability,'

and—by implication, at least—reparations. They're not going to want to go public with something like that ."

"For someone who doesn't 'want to go public' they seem to be perfectly willing to push things," MacArtney pointed out. "Or did you miss the bit about this admiral of theirs they're sending off to New Tuscany?"

"No, I didn't miss it, Nathan." Quartermain and MacArtney had never really cared for each other at the best of times, and the smile she gave him was thin enough to sever his windpipe. "But I also observed that they're sending only six of their own battlecruisers, whereas Byng has thirteen . Do you honestly believe they're stupid enough to think a Solarian flag officer is going to tamely surrender to a force he outnumbers two-to-one?"

She snorted again, more harshly than before, and MacArtney shook his head.

"I don't know if they are or not, Omosupe. But I do know that the mere fact that they're sending one of their own admirals off to issue what are clearly demands , not requests, to a Solarian task force is going to raise the stakes all around. If Byng's already fired on their warships, and if they send still more warships into the area to press demands against him, then they're clearly willing to escalate. Or to risk escalation, at least. And as they've pointed out in their note, what Byng's already done can certainly be construed as an act of war. If they're already making that point to us, and if they're ready to risk escalation, then I'd have to say that I don't see any reason to assume they're not prepared to see all this hit the 'faxes eventually."

His expression was unwontedly serious, Kolokoltsov realized. Then again, he might well be feeling a little excessively gun-shy at the moment. In fact, Kolokoltsov took just a bit of vindictive satisfaction from the thought that MacArtney might be feeling a certain degree of . . . anxiety. As far as Kolokoltsov was concerned, the Office of Frontier Security clearly ought to have come under the authority of the Foreign Ministry, since it spent so much time dealing with star systems which weren't officially part of the League just yet. Unfortunately, the Foreign Ministry had lost that particular fight long, long ago, and OFS was officially part of the Interior Ministry. He could see the logic, even if he didn't much care for it, since like the Gendarmerie—which was also part of the Interior Ministry—Frontier Security was effectively an internal security agency of the League.

And at this particular moment, that wasn't necessarily such a bad thing in Innokentiy Kolokoltsov's considered opinion, either, given the hullabaloo over that business in Monica. Which, now that he thought about it, probably also helped to explain why Quartermain was even more pissed than usual where Manticore was concerned. The revelations about Technodyne and its collusion with Mesa had quite a few of her colleagues over at Commerce all hot and bothered. Attorney General Brangwen Ronayne had actually had to indict several people, and that was always messy. After all, one never knew when one of those under indictment was going to turn out to have embarrassing connections to one's self or other members of one's ministry. The folks over at Justice would do what they could, of course, but Ronayne wasn't really the sharpest stylus in the box. There was always the distinct possibility that something might slip past her, or even evade Abruzzi and make its way into the public datanets, with potentially . . . unpleasant consequences even for a permanent senior undersecretary. Still, those occasional teapot tempests were a fact of life in the League. They were going to happen from time to time, and MacArtney and Quartermain were just going to have to suck it up and get on with business.

"As I say," he said just a bit loudly, retaking control of the conversation, "the fact that they haven't said anything to the newsies yet probably indicates one of two things. Either, as Omosupe says, they're trying to avoid pumping any hydrogen into the fire because of its potential for blowing up in their faces, or else they're trying to avoid pumping any hydrogen into the fire because what they really want is to get this whole thing resolved before the public ever finds out about it. In fact, those two possibilities aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, now are they?"

"Not so far, at any rate," MacArtney replied. "But if there's another exchange of fire, or if Byng tells this Admiral Gold Peak to kiss his arse, that could change."

"Oh, come on, Nathan!" Abruzzi snorted. "You know Omosupe and I don't always see eye-to-eye, but let's be realistic here. It's obvious Byng is an idiot, all right? Let's be honest among ourselves. Anyone who fires on warships just sitting there in a parking orbit without even having their wedges on line is clearly a nut job, although I'm sure that if our good friend Admiral Kingsford were here he'd find some way to explain this whole thing away as a completely reasonable action. Obviously it couldn't possibly have been the fault of one of his Battle Fleet friends or relations, could it?" He rolled his eyes expressively. Malachai Abruzzi was not among the Navy's greatest admirers.

"But unlike Kingsford or Rajampet, we're not handicapped by having to defend Byng's actions, so why don't we go ahead and acknowledge, just among ourselves, that he overreacted and killed a bunch of Manties he didn't have to kill?"

He looked around at the others' faces for a moment, then shrugged.

"All right, so the Manties are pissed off. Well, that's probably not all that unreasonable of them, either. But however pissed off they may be, they aren't really going to open fire on a Solarian task force which, as Omosupe's just pointed out, outnumbers them two-to-one. So what they're actually doing is basically running a bluff. Or, more likely, posturing. They may be prepared to 'demand' that Byng stand down and submit to some sort of Manty investigation, but they know damned well they aren't going to get anything remotely like that. So what they're really hoping for is that Byng will settle for effectively flipping them off, then pull out of New Tuscany and let them claim that they 'ran him out of town' for his high-handed actions."

"And the reason they'll do that is exactly what, Malachai?" MacArtney inquired.

"Because they need to do it for domestic consumption." Abruzzi shrugged again. "Trust me, I know how this sort of thing works. They've got three dead destroyers, they've been fighting a war for twenty-odd T-years, and they've just finished getting their asses kicked when the Havenites hit their home star system. They know as well as we do that even if they hadn't taken any losses at all from the 'Battle of Manticore,' they couldn't possibly take on the Solarian League Navy . But they also know their domestic morale has just been shot right in the head . . . and that the loss of three more destroyers—especially if it looks like the opening step in getting the League added to their enemies—is only going to hit it again. So they issue these incredibly unrealistic demands to us here in Chicago, and to Byng at New Tuscany, in order to show their own domestic newsies what big brass balls they've got. And then, when Byng basically ignores them and sails back to Meyers in his own good time, they trumpet that the big, bad Sollies have backed down. They tell their own public that the League's cut and run and that, purely in a spirit of magnanimity, Queen Elizabeth has decided to exercise moderation and settle for a diplomatic conclusion to the entire affair."

He shrugged.

"To be honest, they almost certainly realize that they've got enough economic clout that we'll decide to offer reparations—pay them off out of petty cash so they'll go away and leave us alone—just so we can get on with moving our commerce through their wormhole network. The bottom line is that it's no skin off our noses if we offer reparations as long as we make it clear that it's totally voluntary on our part and that we completely reject their right to press any demands against us. They get a settlement they can wave under their public's nose to prove how resolute they were, and we avoid establishing any actual diplomatic or military precedents that might come home to bite us on the arse later." Kolokoltsov looked at him with a thoughtful frown. It was entirely possible that Abruzzi was on to something, he reflected. That particular explanation of what the Manties were up to hadn't occurred to him, of course. Not immediately, at least. But looked at logically, especially in light of the hammering they'd reportedly taken from the Havenites barely four months ago, there was absolutely no way they could really be seeking some sort of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the SLN . He should have seen that for himself, but unlike Abruzzi, he wasn't accustomed to thinking in terms of massaging public opinion or how to shore up what had to be a badly battered civilian morale.

"I'm not so sure about that," MacArtney said with a mulish grimace. "They didn't exactly avoid an incident at Monica, now did they?"

"Maybe not," Abruzzi conceded. "On the other hand, that was before the Battle of Manticore, wasn't it?

And that captain of theirs—what's-his-name . . . Terekhov—is obviously as big a lunatic as Byng! The fact that he dragged them into what could have been a direct confrontation with the League doesn't mean they're stupid enough to want to go there. For that matter, they've got to be aware that they just finished dodging that particular pulser dart. Which is going to make them even less eager to run straight back into our line of fire."

"All of this is very interesting," Quartermain said. "But it doesn't change the fact that we've got to decide what to do about this note of theirs."

"No, it doesn't," Kolokoltsov agreed. "But it does suggest that there's no reason we have to fall all over ourselves responding to it. In fact, it may just suggest that there are some very valid reasons for us to to deal with this in a leisurely, orderly fashion. And, of course, spend a little effort depressing any pretensions of grandeur on their part along the way."

Quartermain looked noticeably more cheerful at that, he noticed, and suppressed a temptation to smile at her sheer predictability.

"As a matter of fact," he continued, "this may turn out to be useful to us." Abruzzi and MacArtney both looked a bit puzzled, and this time he let a little of his smile show. "I think our friends in Manticore have been getting just a little too full of themselves," he went on. "They got away with demanding that technology embargo against the Havenites. They've gotten away with raising their Junction fees across the board to help pay for their damned war. They've just finished dividing the Silesian Confederacy right down the middle with the Andermani. And they've just finished annexing the entire Talbott Sector and shooting up the entire Monican Navy, not to mention turning the League into the villain of the piece in Monica and the Talbott Sector. They must feel like they've been on a roll, and I think it may be time for us to remind them that they're actually only a very tiny fish in a really big pond."

"And that we're the shark in the deep end," Quartermain agreed with an unpleasant smile of her own.

"More or less." Kolokoltsov nodded. "It's bad enough that the accidents of astrophysics give such a pissant little 'Star Kingdom' so much economic clout. We don't need them deciding they've got enough military clout that they can rattle their battle fleet under our nose and expect us to automatically cave in to whatever they decide to demand from us next time."

"Don't you think it might be a good idea to talk to Rajampet before we make our minds up to tell them to pound sand?" MacArtney inquired mildly.

"Oh, I think it's a very good idea to talk to Rajampet," Kolokoltsov agreed. "And I'm not suggesting that we tell them to 'pound sand,' although I must admit the idea has a certain attractiveness." MacArtney cocked an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. "All I'm suggesting at this point is that we refuse to fall all over ourselves responding to them. We may even decide to give them a little bit of what they want, in the end, exactly the way Malachai's been suggesting. But, in the long run, I think it's more important that we make it clear to them who the big dog really is. We'll get around to handling this on our timetable, not theirs. And if they don't like it . . ."

He let his voice trail off, and shrugged.

"Ah, there you are, Innokentiy!" Marcelito Roelas y Valiente's smile was a bit more restrained than usual, Kolokoltsov noticed as he stepped into the Foreign Minister's office.

"I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, Minister," he said gravely, crossing to Roelas y Valiente's desk. He seated himself without invitation, in the same chair Carmichael had occupied earlier that morning, and Roelas y Valiente leaned back in his own chair.

"As I told you I expected it to earlier, Sir," Kolokoltsov continued, "it took a little time to consult with my colleagues in the other ministries. Obviously, we needed to consider this matter very carefully before we could feel comfortable that we were in a position to make any useful policy recommendations. Especially in the case of an incident with so much potential for setting what could be extraordinarily unfortunate precedents."

"Of course," Roelas y Valiente agreed with a sober smile.

That smile didn't fool Kolokoltsov any more than it fooled Roelas y Valiente himself. Kolokoltsov would literally have found it difficult to remember (impossible, really, without consulting the archives) how many foreign ministers had come and gone during his own tenure. Given the number of political factions and "parties" in the Assembly, it was extraordinarily difficult for any politician to forge a lasting majority at the federal level. The fact that everyone knew that any government could have only the appearance of actual power meant there was really very little reason to form lasting political alliances. It wasn't as if the continuity of political officeholders was going to have any real effect on the League's policies, yet everyone wanted his own shot at holding federal office. Status wasn't necessarily the same thing as power, and a stint as a League cabinet minister was considered a valuable resume entry when one returned to one's home system and ran for an office that really possessed actual power. All of that combined to explain why most premierships lasted less than a single T-year before the current prime minister was turned out and replaced by someone else—who, of course, had to dole out cabinet positions all over again. Which was why Kolokoltsov had so much trouble remembering the faces of all the men and women who'd officially headed his ministry over the years. All of them—including Roelas y Valiente—had understood who truly made the League's policy, just as all of them—including Roelas y Valiente—had understood why that was and how the game was played. But Roelas y Valiente resented it more than most of the others had.

Which doesn't mean he thinks there's any way to change the rule book, Kolokoltsov thought, and felt a moment of something almost like regret. But he wasn't the one who'd deliberately created a constitution, all those centuries ago, which had precluded the real possibility of any strong central government. He wasn't the one who'd created a system in which the permanent bureaucracies had been forced to assume the roles (and the power which went with them) of policy-setters and decision-makers if the Solarian League was going to have any sort of administrative continuity. But at least we can give him an illusion of authority, the permanent senior undersecretary bought almost compassionately. As long as he's willing to admit that it is an illusion, anyway.

"We've considered at some length, Sir," he said, "and it's our opinion that this is a time to exercise restraint and calm. What we'd recommend, Minister, is that—"

Chapter Forty-Eight

"You're putting me on," Admiral Karl-Heinz Thimár said.

"No, Karl-Heinz, I'm not," Fleet Admiral Winston Kingsford replied, sitting back in his chair and frowning at the commanding officer of the Solarian League Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence.

"You're serious ," Thimár said almost wonderingly, as if he found that difficult to credit, and Kingsford's frown deepened.

"I'm sorry if you find this humorous," he said. "Under the circumstances, though, I'd appreciate it if you could find the time to give at least a little personal attention to the problem." Thimár's face stiffened, and a slight flush stained his cheekbones. Anger flickered at the backs of his eyes, and his jaw muscles tightened, but he sat back in his own chair and nodded. It was a bit jerky, that nod, but Kingsford decided to let that pass. He'd made his point, after all, and there was no need to rub the other man's nose in it. Especially because despite the fact of his own seniority as the commanding officer of Battle Fleet, Kingsford wasn't blind to how high Thimár's family connections reached in the Byzantine world of the Solarian League Navy's command structure.

"Thank you," he said rather more warmly, and produced a wry smile. "And, believe me, Karl-Heinz, I found it just about as hard to believe as you did when they first sprang it on me, too."

"Yes, Sir." Thimár nodded again, and this time his expression was thoughtful.

"All right." Kingsford let his chair come back upright with an air of briskness. "I haven't had an opportunity to thoroughly review the data myself, but I've skimmed the summary and read the 'note' that came along with it, and I find myself pretty much in agreement with our civilian 'colleagues' . . . even if the assholes didn't even do us the courtesy of mentioning it to us before they settled on 'our' response." He grimaced.

"I don't think the Manties would have given this to us in the first place if it wasn't going to show what their note already says happened," he continued. "Kolokoltsov and the others want us to analyze it thoroughly, anyway, of course—give them our independent assessment of its reliability and implications—but I don't think they expect us to find any real surprises. For that matter, I don't expect us to find any. But it's also our best chance to figure out what the hell Josef thinks he's doing out there, and it's always possible the Manties have slipped up and let something useful get past them." Thimár started to say something, then visibly stopped himself, and nodded once again.

"To be honest," Kingsford continued, "what I'm most concerned about is the potential for setting an unfortunate precedent. I don't think the Navy wants to find itself with pissant neobarb navies thinking they can get into the habit of popping out of the underbrush to make 'demands' on us. If this looks likely to head anywhere in that direction, we may just need to step on it—hard. In that respect, at least, I think Kolokoltsov has an excellent point. And so does Rajani."

Thimár nodded again, recognizing an oblique instruction when he heard it.

Fleet Admiral Rajampet Kaushal Rajani was the Solarian League Navy's chief of naval operations. In theory, that made him merely the uniformed commander of both Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet, as Minister of Defense Taketomo Kunimichi's deputy. In fact, however, Taketomo's real command authority was sharply circumscribed (despite the fact that he himself was a retired admiral), and since Battle Fleet was the senior of the SLN's two branches, Rajampet was the de facto Defense Minister. On the other hand, even Rajampet's actual, direct authority over Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet was, itself, largely illusory. In no small part, that was because his time was too occupied with the day-to-day affairs of keeping the entire Ministry of Defense running to act as any sort of genuine commander in chief. In addition, however, there was the minor fact that over the centuries Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet had each become its own separate empire, currently ruled over by Kingsford and Fleet Admiral Engracia Alonso y Yáñez, the CO of Frontier Fleet, respectively. Both of them were much too jealous of their own prerogatives to surrender any of them—or any true authority—to Rajampet. Especially not if giving up any of those prerogatives might reduce their own commands' slices of the funding pie. Some navies' CNOs might have resented that attitude on the part of their uniformed subordinates. Some might even have attempted to do something about it. But the force of precedent had set iron hard over the centuries, and Rajampet had always been more of an administrator than a fleet commander, anyway. He was a hundred and twenty-three T-years old, one of the very first wave of first-generation prolong recipients, and he hadn't held a space-going command in over fifty years, so it was entirely possible—even likely—that he didn't resent it at all. But that didn't mean he was completely out of the loop. Thimár knew that . . . just as he knew that Kingsford's last remark had been deliberately intended to remind him of it.

"You know," he said after a moment, "I never have really understood why Josef accepted that command in the first place. I mean, Frontier Fleet ?" He shook his head. "That's just so wrong , somehow." Kingsford snorted in amused agreement, but he also shrugged.

"Don't ask me," he said. "As far as I know, that was Rajani's idea. For that matter, it could actually have come from Takemoto, himself. You'd probably have a better chance of finding out by asking Karlotte." Thimár looked at him for a second or so, then decided Kingsford was telling him the truth. Which only made the entire question even more perplexing, and—particularly as ONI's commanding officer—he found that irritating as hell. He supposed Kingsford was right. It would take months for him to get any letters back from his cousin, but Karlotte's position as Byng's chief of staff probably did put her in the best position to answer his question.

And maybe, while she's at it, she can explain to me just what the hell Josef thought he was doing blowing three Manty destroyers out of space , he thought rather more grimly. Not that the irritating bastards didn't have it coming, likely as not. But still . . .

He hid a mental grimace. Without any way to ask Karlotte—or Byng—what the hell had really happened, all they could do was look at the Manties' so-called data. Not that it was particularly probable that the Manties would have handed it over to Roelas y Valiente in the first place if they'd thought it was likely to give them any useful information. Still, forewarned was forearmed, and all that. And they might need all of the forewarning they could get to tidy this one up before it splashed all over everyone.

"Anyway," Kingsford said, flipping the chip folio across his desk, "here it is. Go analyze away. I'd like to hear something back in a day or two."

"So, Irene, what do you make of all this?" Captain Daud ibn Mamoun al-Fanudahi asked casually as he seated himself beside Captain Irene Teague in the Anchor Lounge, the Navy Building's 0-6 dining room, and Teague glanced at him sharply.

The Anchor Lounge was reserved solely for Navy captains, although the occasional, particularly audacious Marine colonel might occasionally invade its sacred precincts, and it was a very nice dining room, indeed. Far short of the sybaritic luxury of the flag officers' dining room, of course, but much more magnificent than mere commanders or lieutenants (or Marine majors) were likely ever to see. And, because it was located in the Navy Building, it was much less uncommon to see Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet officers rubbing elbows here, as it were. Officially, it was even encouraged, since they were all members of the same Navy. Unofficially, it was extraordinarily rare, even here, for officers in the Solarian League Navy's competing branches to actually seek out one another. It simply wasn't done. Al-Fanudahi and Teague were something of a special case, however. Although he came from an old and well respected Battle Fleet family while Teague was equally well connected in Frontier Fleet , they both worked (theoretically together) under Admiral Cheng Hai-shwun in the Office of Operational Analysis. Of course, the majority of the SLN's officers still wouldn't have socialized with someone from the wrong side of the Battle Fleet-Frontier Fleet dividing line, and Teague found herself rather wishing that al-Fanudahi hadn't quite so obviously sought her out in such a public venue. The man really is completely tone deaf, she thought. Not enough he has to put his own career at risk, now he's got to do the same thing for me!

She gave him an exasperated look, yet her heart wasn't fully in it. Although she (unlike him) was far too politically astute to openly contest official wisdom in some sort of quixotic quest, she rather respected al-Fanudahi's apparent indifference to official displeasure. Of course, he was still only a captain, despite the fact that he was twenty T-years older than she was—and Battle Fleet, at that. So while she was prepared to respect him, she really had very little desire to emulate him. Even though she did find herself quite often in agreement with at least some of his less outrageous theories.

"What do I make of what, Daud?" she asked after a moment.

"Of our latest little tidbit," al-Fanudahi said. "You know, the one from our friends in Manticore."

"I'm not sure this is the best place to be discussing it," she responded a bit pointedly. "This isn't exactly the most secure—"

She broke off as one of the uniformed stewards arrived with her soup course. The steward placed it before her, made sure both her water glass and her glass of iced tea were full, and took al-Fanudahi's order, and Teague found herself hoping that the interruption would distract her politically inept colleague from his current self-destructive hobbyhorse.

Not that she really expected it to happen, of course.

"Oh, come on," he said, confirming the accuracy of her expectations almost before the steward was out of earshot. "You don't really think the entire content of the Manties' note hasn't already hit the grapevine running, do you? I mean, security , Irene?"

He snorted and rolled his eyes. Teague glared at him, but then her glare faded just a bit as she recognized the glint of amusement in those same eyes. The rotten bastard was actually enjoying himself!

She started to say something tart and pithy, then stopped herself. First, because it was only likely to amuse him even more, given his obviously twisted sense of humor. And, second, because he was right. She had no doubt at all that the information the two of them had been ordered to keep "Most Secret" was all over the Navy Building by now.

I really ought to shut him up anyway, because I just know he's going to say something I don't want anyone thinking I might agree with. On the other hand, he's way senior to me—in fact, he's probably the most senior captain in the entire damned Navy , given how many times he's been passed over for promotion by now. There's no way anybody's going to be able to blame a wet-behind-the-ears young sprout like me just because one of the old sweats she works with decides to bend her ear over lunch.

For that matter, her lips twitched in what could have turned into a smile, if I let him run on and just nod politely here and there, I can probably convince anybody who's watching us that I wish he'd just take his ridiculous theories and go away.

"All right." She sighed, dipping her spoon into the lobster bisque in front of her. "Go ahead. I'm not going to be able to stop you, anyway, am I?"

"Probably not," he agreed cheerfully. "So, to repeat my original question, what do you make of all this?" His voice remained as amused as ever, but his eyes had narrowed intently, and she realized he was serious. She gazed at him for a second or two, then swallowed a spoonful of the rich, thick soup and looked back up at him.

"With all due respect, Captain," she said, "one of the things I make of it is that a certain Battle Fleet admiral doesn't have the brains God gave a cockroach."

It was not, she realized, the most respectful possible comment a mere captain might have made about a senior admiral, but she wasn't too worried about that. Given traditional attitudes on both sides of the divide, people probably would have been more surprised if she hadn't been disrespectful. Besides, Byng obviously was an idiot . . . even if his chief of staff was related to her (and al-Fanudahi's) ultimate boss at ONI.

"I might not have expressed myself quite that, um . . . frankly," al-Fanudahi said with a grin. "Not that I don't think the sentiment was entirely appropriate, of course. But I believe we can both take Byng's less than stellar intellect as a given. I'm more interested in your impressions of the data itself."

"The data itself?" Teague's eyebrows furrowed in genuine surprise. He only nodded, and she considered the question for several seconds, then shrugged.

"It seems fairly straightforward to me, actually," she said finally. "Something—or some one, rather—blew up the New Tuscans' space station, Admiral Byng clearly pani—" She paused, deciding there were some verbs a Frontier Fleet Captain shouldn't be using about an admiral even if he was a Battle Fleet officer.

"Admiral Byng clearly concluded that the Manties had been responsible for it," she said instead, "and responded to the perceived threat. I wasn't there, of course, but my initial impression is that he responded too quickly and . . . too forcefully, but that's not really my call." Al-Fanudahi cocked his head, his expression skeptical, and Teague felt the tips of her ears heat. While she was undoubtedly correct that it wasn't her place to make any final judgments on Byng's actions, providing the analysis on which those judgments would be based was supposed to be one of Operational Analysis' primary functions. The fact that its analysis was more likely to be used to whitewash someone than to nail actual cases of obvious incompetence was one of those little secrets polite people didn't talk about in public. On the other hand, failing in its responsibility to report unpalatable truths was hardly OpAn's only fault. They were also supposed to be the office which identified and analyzed potential foreign threats or new developments which might require modifications of the SLN's operational doctrine, and they didn't do very much of that, either. In fact, OpAn did a lot less of either of those things than al-Fanudahi—and Teague—thought it ought to be doing, although Teague (unlike al-Fanudahi) wasn't prepared to make her views in that regard officially explicit.

Not unless I want to spend the next twenty or thirty years as a captain, too, at any rate .

"That's not what I was talking about, either," the Battle Fleet officer said after a moment. "Or, not directly, anyway."

"Then just what are you talking about, Daud?" she demanded.

"They provided us with really good sensor resolution, don't you think?" he responded—rather obliquely, she thought.

"So?"

"I mean, it was really good resolution," he pointed out. Teague sat back in her chair, wondering where he thought he was going with this, and it was his turn to sigh.

"Didn't it occur to you to wonder how they happened to be able to provide us with that kind of data?" he asked.

"No, it didn't." She shrugged. "After all, what diff—" She broke off abruptly, her eyes widening, and al-Fanudahi nodded. There were very few traces of his earlier humor in his expression now, she noticed.

"I've put their data through the computers half a dozen times," he said, "and it keeps coming out the same way. That's shipboard-quality data. Actually, it's pretty damned good even for first-line shipboard sensors. Better than anything smaller than a battlecruiser—or maybe a heavy cruiser—should have been pulling in. So where did they get it?"

Teague said nothing for several seconds, then shook herself and swallowed a couple of more spoonfuls of her rapidly cooling bisque. She was only buying time, and she knew he knew it, but he waited patiently, anyway.

"I don't know," she admitted finally. "Are you thinking that maybe it's too good? That the quality of the data is evidence it's actually a fake?"

"No, it's not a fake," he said flatly. "No way. They'd have to know we're going to get our own ships'

data in the end. If they'd faked it, we'd find out eventually, and I don't think we'd be particularly amused by their little hoax."

"Then . . ." she said slowly.

"Then I only see four real possibilities, Irene." He held up his left hand, counting his points off on its fingers as he made them. "First, the Manties have somehow developed a shipboard sensor that can get this kind of resolution from outside missile range of our ships. Second, the Manties have some sort of recon platform whose stealth is so good that none of our sensor crews noticed it was there even at what must have been point-blank range. Third, they've managed to come up with some kind of stealth so good that they got an entire starship that close without anyone noticing. Or, fourth, Admiral Byng opted to blow three Manticoran destroyers out of space without warning while allowing a fourth ship that must also have been well inside his missile range to sail merrily on its way. Now, which of those do you think is most likely?"

She felt a distinct sinking sensation as she gazed at him.

"It had to be a recon platform," she said.

"My own conclusion, exactly." He nodded. "But that leads us to another interesting little question. I'm not familiar with any recon platform in our inventory that would have pulled in data this good even if it had been inside energy range, must less missile range. Are you?"

"No," she said unhappily.

"I'm trying to remind myself that we still don't have anything from Byng," al-Fanudahi said. "Maybe he did pick up something and then went ahead and fired anyway, but I find that difficult to believe even of him. And here's another interesting little point to consider. Even if it was a remote platform, there had to be someone out there monitoring its take. I'm inclined to wonder if even Josef Byng—and, by the way, I think you were doing cockroaches a disservice there a minute ago—would be stupid enough to kill three destroyers and their entire crews while he knew he was on camera!"

"Which suggests the Manties do have shipboard stealth capability good enough that he never realized this Chatterjee had deployed at least one trailer on his way in," she said even more unhappily.

"That's exactly what it suggests to me , at any rate," he agreed.

"Crap," she said very, very softly, looking down at her lobster bisque and suddenly not feeling very hungry after all.

"Listen, Irene," he said equally quietly, "I know you've been being careful to keep your mouth shut, but I also know you have a working brain, unlike altogether too many of our esteemed colleagues. You've had your own suspicions about all of those 'ridiculous' reports from the SDF observers, haven't you?" She looked back at him, unwilling to confirm his suspicions even now, but she knew he saw the truth in her eyes, and he nodded.

"What I thought," he said. Then he smiled crookedly. "Don't worry. I'm not about to invite you to commit professional suicide by suddenly announcing that you, too, believe that every spacer in the Manticoran Navy is three meters tall, impervious to pulser fire, and able to snatch speeding missiles out of space in his bare teeth. I've had a little experience myself with the consequences of being 'overly credulous' and 'alarmist.' In fact, Admiral Thimár himself saw fit to 'counsel me' on my obviously distorted pet theories. But look at this data. No, it's not a smoking gun, not conclusive proof, but the implications are there, aren't they? The Manties have to have a significantly more capable level of technology than anyone here on Old Terra is willing to even consider. For that matter, I'm coming to the suspicion that at least some of their toys aren't just better than most people think they have but actually are better than ours are, as well. When you couple that with some of the reports about their missile ranges at Monica, or the ridiculous salvo sizes some of the system-defense force observers say they can generate . . ." He shook his head, and his eyes were dark. Worried.

"They can't all be true," she protested quietly. "The rumors, I mean. Manticore's only one tiny little star system, Daud! All right, so it's a rich little star system, and it's got a hell of a lot bigger navy than anybody else its size. But it's still one star system, however many other systems it may be in the process of annexing. Are you seriously suggesting that they've managed somehow to put together a better, more effective R and D establishment than the entire Solarian League ?"

"They don't have to have done that," he said flatly. "The League could be ahead of them clear across the board, but that doesn't mean the Navy is. These people have been fighting a war for better than twenty T-years, and they started their military buildup way the hell before that. You think maybe they could have been working really hard on weapons R and D in the process? That maybe, unlike us, they've been looking at real combat reports, instead of analyses of training simulations where the 'secret details' get leaked to all the senior participants before they even begin the exercise? That, unlike us, the people building their weapons and evaluating their combat doctrines might once have heard of a gentleman named Charles Darwin? Compared to someone who's been fighting for his life for two decades, we're soft , Irene—soft, underprepared, and complacent."

"And even assuming you're right, just what the hell do you expect me to do about it?" she demanded, her voice suddenly harsh with mingled anger, frustration, and fear. Not just fear for the consequences to her career, either. Not anymore.

"At this particular moment?" He looked at her levelly for a heartbeat or two, then his nostrils flared. "At this particular moment, I don't expect you to do anything except what you've been doing. Hell, for that matter I don't propose to make the full extent of my 'alarmist conclusions' part of my official report. Even if I did, it would never get past Cheng. And if it miraculously got past him somehow, you know damned well that Thimár would kill it. Or Kingsford himself, for that matter. It's too far outside the received wisdom. I'm going to go ahead and raise the question of exactly what sort of platform could have gathered the data, but I'm not going to offer any conclusions about it. If someone decides to ask me about it, I'll tell them what I think, but, frankly, I hope they won't. Because without a lot more to go on than the inferences I've been able to draw, I'll never convince the powers that be that I'm not crazy. And if they decide I'm crazy, they'll shit can my arse so fast my head will spin, which means I'll be able to accomplish exactly nothing if the wheels do come off.

"But what I do want you to do is to keep your eyes and your mind open. I've got a strong suspicion that there are even more of those system-defense observer reports out there than ever made it to us in the first place. Unless I'm mistaken, they've been being tossed as 'obvious nonsense' somewhere between their originators and us. But if you and I both start very quietly looking around, maybe we'll be able to turn some of them up. And maybe, if we manage that, we'll be able to start drawing at least some of the conclusions we're going to need if the shitstorm hits."

"Surely the Manties aren't that stupid," she said softly, in the tone of someone trying to convince herself.

"I mean, no matter how many technological advantages they may have, they have to know they can't fight the entire Solarian League and win. Not in the long term. They're just plain not big enough—not even if they make this annexation of Talbott stand up!"

"Maybe they are that stupid, and maybe they aren't," al-Fanudahi replied. "Frankly, though, if they really did send this Admiral Gold Peak off to New Tuscany to press the demands they say they did, I'm not so sure they aren't ready to go nose-to-nose with us, however stupid that might be. And even if you're right, even if they can't possibly win in the end—and I'm inclined to think you are right about that—God only knows how many thousands of our own people are going to get killed before they lose. Somehow, I don't think that either you or I will sleep too soundly at night if we just sit back and watch it happen. Nobody's going to take any warnings from me seriously at this point, but you and I need to start pulling the truth together now, because if this blows up in our faces, somebody is going to need the closest thing to accurate information we can give them. And, who knows? Whoever that 'somebody' is, he may even realize he does."

* * *

"We're coming up on the deployment point now, Commodore."

"Thank you, Captain Jacobi," Commodore Karol Østby replied, nodding to the woman on his com display.

Captain Rachel Jacobi looked like any other merchant service officer, although she might have been just a little young for her current rank. Appearances could be deceiving, however, and not just because of prolong. Rachel Jacobi was even younger for her actual rank than she seemed, not to mention an officer in a navy the rest of the galaxy didn't even know existed . . . yet.

"Bay doors are opening, Sir," another voice said, and Østby turned from his com to look across the cramped bridge at Captain Eric Masters. If Jacobi looked young for her rank, then Masters looked far too senior to be commanding a ship little larger than an old-fashioned frigate, but, again, appearances could be deceiving. Despite her tiny size (she had no flag bridge, and Østby couldn't even fit all of his abbreviated staff onto her command deck) MANS Chameleon, Østby's flagship, was something entirely new in the history of galactic warfare. Whether or not she was going to live up to her name and the expectations invested in her remained to be seen . . . and was going to depend very heavily on the actions of Østby and Masters and the rest of Chameleon 's small crew.

"My panel shows doors fully open, Commodore," Jacobi said. "Do you confirm?"

"Confirm, Sir," Masters said, and Østby nodded, then looked back at Jacobi.

"We confirm doors fully open, Captain," he said formally.

"In that case, Sir, good hunting."

"Thank you, Captain Jacobi."

Østby nodded to her once more, then turned his command chair to face Masters.

"Anytime you're ready, Captain Masters."

"Yes, Sir." Masters looked at his astrogator and helmsman. "Take us out," he said simply, and Chameleon twitched ever so gently as the web of tractor and presser beams which had held her exactly centered in the freighter Wallaby's cavernous Number Two hold were switched off at last. A gentle puff of compressed air from the specially modified thruster packs strapped to her bow sent her drifting backward, without the pyrotechnics of her normal fusion-powered thrusters. That would have been . . . contraindicated inside a ship, Østby thought dryly while he watched the visual display as the hold's bulkheads went sliding by.

It was the first time they'd made an actual combat deployment, but Østby's captains and crews had practiced this same maneuver dozens of times before ever leaving the Mesa System. He had no concern at all about this part of the mission, and his mind strayed ahead to the rest of the mission. No point worrying about any of that yet, he told himself firmly. Not even if you and Topolev did draw the harder target. But at least you didn't have quite as far to go as Colenso and Sung just to get to your objective. Sung won't even be deploying for another week!

The deployment maneuver took quite a while, but no one was in a tearing hurry, and no one wanted to risk a last-minute, potentially catastrophic accident. Wallaby had made her alpha translation thirty minutes ago, and she was still several hours away from the wormhole junction she'd ostensibly come here to transit. At this range, even a fully conventional ship Chameleon's size would almost certainly have been invisible even to Manticoran sensor arrays (assuming its skipper was smart enough not to bring up his wedge, at any rate). Not that anyone intended to take any chances.

Chameleon slid completely free of Wallaby, like an Old Earth shark sliding tail-first from its mother's womb, and the modified packs fell away as the jettisoning charges blew. They disappeared quickly into the Stygian gloom—this far out from the system primary, even the star gleam on Chameleon 's own flanks was scarcely visible—and Østby continued to watch the visual display as the running light constellations bejeweling the cliff like immensity of the freighter's mammoth hull drew steadily away from them.

"Confirm clean separation, Sir," Masters' astrogator announced.

"Very good. Communications, do we have contact with the rest of the squadron?"

"Yes, Sir. Ghost just plugged into the net. Telemetry is up and nominal."

"Very good," Masters repeated, and looked at his executive officer. "Take us into stealth and bring up the spider, Chris," he said.

"Aye, aye, Sir." Commander Christopher Delvecchio punched in a string of commands, then nodded to the astrogator. "Stealth is up and operating. The ship is yours, Astro."

"Aye, aye, Sir. I have the ship," the astrogator responded, and MANS Chameleon and her consorts reoriented themselves and began to slowly accelerate, invisible within the concealing cocoon of their stealth fields, towards the primary component of the star system known as Manticore.

Chapter Forty-Nine

"Well, it would appear that our good friends in Chicago aren't in any tearing hurry after all, wouldn't it?" Elizabeth Winton's tone was caustic enough to make an excellent substitute for lye, Baron Grantville thought.

Not that she didn't have an excellent point.

"They've only had our note for about ten days, Your Majesty," Sir Anthony Langtry pointed out. He and Grantville sat in comfortable armchairs in Elizabeth's personal office, flanking her deck. They'd both eaten earlier, although each of them had a coffee cup, but the remains of Elizabeth's lunch had just been removed, and she continued to nurse a tankard of beer.

"Sure they have, Tony," she agreed, waving her tankard. "And just how long would it have taken us to respond to an official note alleging that we'd killed somebody's spacers with absolutely no provocation?

Especially if they'd sent along detailed sensor data of the event . . . and informed us that they were sending a major naval force to find out what the hell happened?"

"Point taken, Your Majesty." Langtry sighed, and Grantville grimaced. The Queen did have a point. In fact, she had a damned good one, he thought glumly. Assuming the League had decided to respond immediately, they could have had a reply back to Manticore at least four T-days ago. And even if they hadn't wanted to make a formal response that quickly, at the very least they could have acknowledged receipt of the note! The Foreign Office had Lyman Carmichael's confirmation of his meeting with Roelas y Valiente, and a memo summarizing the essentially meaningless verbal exchange which had accompanied it. But that was all they had. So far, the Solarian League's government had simply ignored the communication entirely. That could be construed—no doubt with total accuracy, in this case—as a deliberate insult.

"Obviously they're trying to tell us something by their silence," he said, his tone almost as acid as Elizabeth's had been. "Let me see now, what could it possibly be . . . ? That we're too insignificant for them to take seriously? That they'll get around to us in their own good time? That we shouldn't get our hopes up about any willingness on their part to acknowledge Byng's culpability? That it'll be a cold day in hell before they admit to any wrongdoing?"

"Try 'all of the above,' " Langtry suggested sourly.

"Well, it's stupid of them, but we can't exactly pretend it's unexpected, can we?" Elizabeth asked.

"No," Grantville sighed.

"Then I think it's probably time we thought about turning up the wick," Elizabeth told him just a bit grimly. He looked at her, and she shrugged. "Don't get me wrong, Willie. This isn't just the famous Winton temper talking, and I'm not eager to be sending them any fresh notes until we've heard back from Mike again. The last thing we need to do is sound like anxious little kids pestering an adult for a response! Besides, I've got a pretty strong suspicion that when we do hear from Mike, we're going to have all the justification in the world for sending them an even stiffer follow-up note. But it might just be time to consider going public with this."

"I think Her Majesty has a point, Willie," Langtry said quietly. Grantville switched his gaze to the Foreign Secretary, and Langtry snorted. "I'm no more eager to 'inflame public opinion' than the next man, Willie, but let's face it. As you just said yourself, four days is too long for a simple 'delayed in the mail'

explanation. What it is is a calculated insult, for whatever reason they decided to deliver it, and you know how big a part perceptions play in any effective diplomacy." He shook his head. "We can't allow something like this to pass unanswered without convincing them they were right in their obvious belief that they can ignore us until they get around to bullying us into accepting their resolution of the problem."

"Agreed," Grantville said after a moment or two of silence. "At the same time, I'm still more than a little anxious over how the Solly media is going to react when they find out about this. Especially if they find out about it as 'unconfirmed allegations' from a bunch of neobarbs they already despise."

"That's going to happen in the end, anyway, Willie," Elizabeth pointed out.

"I know."

Grantville sipped coffee, then put his cup back on the saucer and rubbed an eyebrow in thought. Elizabeth was certainly right about that, he reflected. The first Manticoran reporters had been briefed by the Foreign Office and the Admiralty after they and their editors had agreed to abide by the government's confidentiality request. Legally, Grantville could have invoked the Defense of the Kingdom Act and slapped them with a formal order to keep silent until he told them differently, but that particular clause of the DKA hadn't been invoked by any prime minister in the last sixty T-years. It hadn't had to be, because the Star Kingdom's press knew it had been official policy over almost all of those T-years to be as open as possible in return for reasonable self-restraint on the 'faxes' part. He had no intention of squandering that tradition of goodwill without a damned good reason.

And, so far, the members of the media here in the Star Kingdom who knew anything about it were clearly living up to their end of the bargain. In the meantime, the first of their correspondents would have reached Spindle yesterday aboard an Admiralty dispatch boat. In another couple of weeks, those correspondents' reports would be coming back through the Junction to their editors, and it would be both pointless and wrong to expect their 'faxes not to publish at that point. So . . .

"You're both right," he acknowledged. "I'd like to hold off for a little longer, though. For two reasons. One is that they may actually have sent us a response that just hasn't gotten here yet. But the other, to be frank, has more to do with whacking them harder when we do turn it loose."

"Really?" Elizabeth cocked an eyebrow, and Ariel raised his head on his perch behind her chair. "I think I'm in favor of that," the Queen admitted after a moment, "but I'm not sure I see exactly how we're going to do it."

"I was thinking about that passage from St. Paul, but instead of doing good unto them in order to 'heap coals of fire upon their heads,' I'm in favor of using obvious restraint," Grantville said with a nasty smile.

"What I suggest is that we hold off for another four days. That will just happen to have given the Sollies exactly twice as long as they really needed to acknowledge the receipt of our note, and we make exactly that point in our official news release. We explain that we'd delayed making the news public both to give us time to notify the next of kin of Commodore Chatterjee's personnel and to be sure that the Solarian League government had been given ample time to respond to our concerns. Now that they've had twice as long as needed for that, however, we feel no further point can be served by failing to make the news public."

"And waiting that long makes the point that we had a specific delay interval in mind all along," Langtry mused. "We're not just going ahead and calling in the newsies because were getting nervous about the Sollies' failure to respond."

"Exactly." Grantville nodded with a nasty smile. "Not to mention the fact that, as the real adults of the piece, we gave the petulant, spoiled children of the piece extra time before we blew the whistle on them. But, equally as the real adults of the piece, we are not going to allow the spoiled brats to hunker down forever in the corner with their lips poked out while they sulk."

"I like it," Elizabeth said after considering for a moment or two, and her answering smile was even nastier than Grantville's had been.

She sat for a moment longer, then took another sip from her tankard and tipped her chair back.

"All right. Now that we've got that out of the way, what do we want to do about Cathy Montaigne's suggestion that we beef up Torch's security? To be honest, I think there's a lot of merit to the idea, and not just because Barregos and Rozsak got hammered so hard. There're some good PR possibilities here, not to mention the possibility of easing into a closer relationship with the Maya Sector's navy, and it can't hurt where Erewhon's concerned, either. So—"

"I can't say your report is very cheerful reading, Michelle," Augustus Khumalo said heavily. "On the other hand, I completely endorse all of your actions."

"I'm glad to hear that, Sir," Michelle Henke said sincerely. She and Khumalo sat facing one another in comfortable armchairs in his day cabin aboard Hercules, nursing large snifters of excellent brandy. At the moment, Michelle was far more grateful than usual for the way the brandy's comforting warmth slid down her throat like thick, honeyed fire.

And I damned well deserve it, too, she thought, allowing herself another sip. Maybe not for what happened at New Tuscany, but definitely for putting up with Baroness Medusa's tame newsies!

Actually, she knew, the newsies in question—Marguerite Attunga of the Manticoran News Service, Incorporated; Efron Imbar of Star Kingdom News; and Consuela Redondo of the Sphinx News Association—had been remarkably gentle with her. None of them had been gauche enough to say so, but it was obvious to her that they and their editors back home had been very carefully briefed before they were allowed in on what promised to be one of the biggest news stories in the Star Kingdom's history.

Especially now that things had just finished going so badly south in New Tuscany. Unfortunately, they were still newsies, they still had their job to do, however nonadversarial about it they'd been this time, and she still hated sitting in front of their cameras and knowing that the entire Star Kingdom would be seeing and hearing her responses to their questions. It wasn't nervousness —or she didn't think it was, at least. Or maybe it was, just not on a personal level. What really worried her, she admitted finally, was that she'd say or do something wrong, and the combination of her naval rank and her proximity to the throne would elevate whatever mistake she made to the level of catastrophe.

"I agree that there's nothing particularly cheerful about the situation, Sir," she continued out loud after a moment, shaking off—mostly—her reflections about potential media disasters with her name on them. "In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea to send Reprise off to Meyers before we knew exactly what was going to happen at New Tuscany. Especially since I didn't manage to keep the Sollies from getting a dispatch boat out."

"That decision was Baroness Medusa's . . . and mine," Khumalo told her. "As I recall, you were against it at the time, too."

"Yes, Sir, but not for exactly the same reasons I'm regretting it now. I didn't want to telegraph anything to Frontier Security and Frontier Fleet. I wasn't worried about one of our ships sailing into a broadside of missiles the instant she showed her face!"

"Commander Denton is a competent, conscientious officer, and no fool," Khumalo pointed out. "I think he demonstrated that pretty clearly in Pequod, and he'll follow the established protocols. Before Reprise ever gets into range of any Solarian ship, Mr. O'Shaughnessy will have delivered Baroness Medusa's note via com. And Commander Denton will also, by my specific instruction, carry out a Ghost Rider sweep of the system before Reprise even squawks her transponder. I authorized him to use his discretion if he happened to spot anything of concern, and he is specifically directed to remain outside weapons range of any Solarian unit until and unless Commissioner Verrochio has guaranteed our envoy's safety as per the relevant interstellar law."

"I know, Sir." Michelle's expression was grim. "What concerns me is that Verrochio might give that guarantee, then have Reprise blown out of space, anyway."

Despite everything that had already happened, Khumalo looked shocked, and Michelle smiled tightly at him.

"Mr. Van Dort and Commodore Terekhov and I have discussed this situation at some length, Sir. It's evident to us from what Vézien and his people had to say that we're looking at a very complex, very expensive, and extremely far-reaching operation. I'd call it a conspiracy, except that it looks very much to us—to me—as if some outside party is pulling all the strings and most of the people actually carrying out the dirty work don't have any clue what the ultimate objective is. They may be conspirators , but they're not part of the same conspiracy as the puppeteer behind them, if you see what I mean."

"And all three of you believe the 'puppeteer' is Manpower?"

"We do, Sir."

"Well, so do Baroness Medusa and I," Khumalo told her, and smiled faintly at her surprised expression.

"As I say, we've both read your report already, and we find ourselves in fundamental agreement with your conclusions. And, like you, we're deeply concerned about the apparent scope of Manpower's intentions and ambitions. It's completely outside anything we would have expected out of them, even after the business with Monica and Nordbrandt. And I find the degree of reach and influence required to position Byng as disturbing as you do. I think you're absolutely right; they are acting as if they thought they were a star nation in their own right."

"What's even more worrisome to me, especially where Reprise is concerned," Michelle said, "is that they'd managed to maneuver an officer like Byng—one who would pull the trigger without even blinking when they presented the right scenario—into a critical position in New Tuscany. If they've done the same thing in Meyers, and if there's another Anisimovna placed to provide the right stimulus at the right moment, some 'out-of-control' Solly officer may go ahead and blow Denton away whatever guarantees Verrochio may have given. After all, they've already got two incidents. Why shouldn't they go for three?"

"Now that is an unpleasant thought," Khumalo said slowly. "Do you think Verrochio would be in on it?"

"I genuinely don't have a clue what to think about that particular aspect, Sir." Michelle shook her head.

"We know he was more or less in their pocket last time around, so I don't see any reason to assume he's going to be pure as the driven snow this time. By the same token, though, they had Vézien at least as firmly in their pocket this time around, and they obviously cut him entirely out of the loop when they punched Byng's buttons. I'd say they've shown a remarkably good grasp of what they could reasonably—and I use the term loosely—convince one of their tools to do. If they need something they're pretty sure she won't be willing to do, then they manipulate the situation without warning her until they get it. That's what happened to Vézien. I don't doubt that he was entirely prepared for an incident between one or more of Byng's ships and our vessels, and I don't think he would have shed any tears about getting quite a few of our people killed. But there was no way he expected the incident to happen right there in the middle of New Tuscany, and he certainly never counted on having Giselle blown up to provide the necessary spark! Besides, he knows what the Star Kingdom's policy has always been when someone fires on one of our ships without provocation. Trust me, he didn't plan on doing the firing himself, and he sure as hell didn't plan on its happening right on his doorstep. So I don't see any reason to assume Verrochio would have to know what's supposed to happen if they really have arranged a Byng Mark Two in Meyers."

"Wonderful," Khumalo sighed.

"I'm afraid it gets even better, Sir. All they managed to give Byng was battlecruisers. This Admiral Crandall they were telling Vézien about apparently has a lot more than that under her command."

"Do you think 'Admiral Crandall' really even exists?"

"That's a good question," Michelle admitted. "Anisimovna told Vézien and the other New Tuscans about Crandall, but no one on the planet ever actually saw her or any of her ships. Given what happened to Giselle, it's pretty evident Anisimovna wouldn't have suffered any qualms of conscience over lying to them about a little thing like fifty or sixty superdreadnoughts. And I'd really like to think that it's one thing to get a Battle Fleet admiral with a pathological hatred for all things Manticoran assigned to a Frontier Fleet command but another thing entirely to get an entire fleet of Battle Fleet ships of the wall maneuvered this far out into the boonies. If Manpower has that kind of reach, if it can really move task groups and battle fleets around like chessmen or checkers, we've obviously been underestimating the hell out of them for a long, long time. And if that's true, who knows what else the bastards are up to?" The two of them looked at one another unhappily for several silent minutes, then Khumalo sighed again, heavily. He took a generous sip of brandy, shook his head, and gave her a crooked smile.

"You and Aivars do have a way of brightening up my days, don't you, Milady?"

"I wouldn't say we do it on purpose , Sir," Michelle replied with an answering smile.

"I realize that. In fact, that's part of what makes it so . . . ironic." Michelle cocked an eyebrow at him, and he chuckled and a bit sourly. "For quite some time, I was convinced I'd been sent out here—and left here—because the Cluster was absolutely the lowest possible priority for the Admiralty. In fact, to be honest, I still cherish rather strong suspicions in that direction."

He smiled more warmly at her, and she hoped she'd managed to conceal her surprise at hearing him say that. The fact that it accorded well with her own view of the situation made it even more remarkable that he'd brought it up. And especially that he'd done it with so little evident bitterness.

"In fairness," he continued, "I'm relatively sure the Janacek Admiralty sent me out here because of my connections with the Conservative Association and the fact that I'm related, although rather more distantly than you are, to the Queen. It put someone they considered 'safe' out here, and my connection to the Dynasty didn't hurt any in terms of local prestige. But they never showed any interest in providing Talbott Station with the ships required to provide any sort of real security in such a large volume of space. It was one of those 'file and forget' sorts of situations.

"Then the new Government came in, and I wondered how long I'd stay here until I got yanked back home. Politics being politics, I really didn't expect to be left out here for long, and it got more than a little unpleasant waiting for the ax to fall. But it became pretty evident that the Grantville Government had assigned a lower priority to Talbott than to Silesia, and, again, I couldn't really argue on any logical basis. So, here I sat in a humdrum, secondary—or even tertiary—assignment out in the back of beyond, with the firm expectation that the most exciting thing likely to happen was the chance to chase down an occasional pirate, while I waited to be relieved and banished to half-pay.

"Obviously," he said dryly, "that's changed."

"I think we might both safely agree that that's an accurate statement, Sir," Michelle said. "And, if you'll forgive me, and since you've been so frank and open with me, I'd like to apologize to you." He quirked an eyebrow, and she shrugged.

"I'm afraid my evaluation of why you were out here was pretty close to your own, Sir," she admitted.

"That's what I want to apologize for, because even if the logic that got you out here in the first place was exactly what you've just described, I believe you've amply demonstrated that it was a damned good thing you were here."

She held his eyes, letting him see the sincerity in her own, and, after a moment, he nodded.

"Thank you," he said. "And there was no need to apologize. Not when I'm pretty sure you were right all along."

There was another moment of silence, then he shook himself.

"Getting back to the matter of the hypothetical Admiral Crandall," he said in a determinedly lighter tone,

"I have to say I'm rather relieved by one of the dispatches I received day before yesterday."

"May I ask which dispatch that may have been, Sir?"

"Yes, you may. That, after all,"—this time the smile he gave her was suspiciously like a grin—"was the reason I casually worked mention of it into the conversation, Admiral Gold Peak."

"Indeed, Admiral Khumalo?" she responded, raising her brandy snifter in a small salute.

"Indeed," he replied. Then he sobered a bit. "The dispatch in question informed me that, despite whatever is or isn't going on closer to home, Admiral Oversteegen and his squadron will still be arriving here in Spindle. In fact, I expect him within the next twelve to fifteen T-days."

"Thank God!" Michelle said with quietly intense sincerity.

"I agree. It's taken some time for them to feel comfortable enough back home after the Battle of Manticore to go ahead and release him, and I still don't have an exact projected arrival date, but he's definitely in the pipeline. I understand he'll be bringing another squadron of Saganami-Cs with him, as well, and I'm sure we'll all be relieved to see them."

"Based on the Sollies' performance at New Tuscany, and what my people were able to see of their hardware on the prize ships, I'd say that with Michael and another squadron of the Charlies we ought to be able to handle just about anything below the wall they're likely to throw our way."

"I'm sure you would," Khumalo said even more soberly. "But I'm afraid that's sort of the point, isn't it?

I'm not too worried about anything below the wall, either."

"What do you think happened at New Tuscany?" Lieutenant Aphrodite Jackson, HMS Reprise 's electronic warfare officer, asked quietly.

Lieutenant Heather McGill, the destroyer's tactical officer, looked up from her book reader. She and Jackson were off duty, seated in Reprise's wardroom. At the moment, the EWO's hands were busy building a sandwich out of the ingredients she'd collected from the mid-rats laid out as a buffet, and Heather smiled slightly. Promotions came quick in the electronics warfare specialty these days. That tendency was probably going to become only more pronounced as the new construction began to commission in Manticore, and Jackson had actually been a JG when she arrived aboard Reprise . In fact, her current rank was still technically "acting" (although everyone was certain it would be confirmed in due time). Which meant that although McGill was still short of her own thirty-fifth birthday (standard reckoning), Jackson was a good nine T-years younger than she was.

Yet there were times when Heather felt a lot more than nine years older than Jackson. The younger woman often seemed to suffer from the perpetual, ravenous hunger which afflicted all midshipmen, and there was a new-puppy eagerness about her. Maybe that was part of the reason Heather had more or less taken the electronics warfare officer under her wing off duty, as well as on.

"I don't know, Aphrodite," she replied after a moment. "I know what probably happened if that idiot Byng didn't do exactly what he was told to do, though."

Jackson' blue eyes looked up from her plate and darkened. Unlike Heather, she'd never personally experienced combat, and what had happened to Commodore Chatterjee's destroyers had hit her hard. Well, Heather couldn't fault her for that. In a lot of ways, she supposed, she'd been lucky that she'd been far too busy during her own first taste of violence to think about it very much. Not that she'd felt particularly "lucky" at the time. Still, at least she'd been too . . . preoccupied during Esther McQueen's Operation Icarus to dwell on the horrors about her. She'd been on her snotty cruise at the time, almost ten T-years earlier, and there'd been very little time to think about anything besides doing her job—and hopefully surviving—as the sullen chain of Peep superdreadnoughts came over the hyper wall, missile batteries firing. The entire universe had seemed to go insane all about her as x-ray lasers chewed viciously into her ship and three of her fellow middies were torn apart less than fifteen meters from her own duty station.

But Aphrodite Jackson had never faced combat herself. And Commander Denton had quietly informed Heather that Lieutenant Thor Jackson had been Commander DesMoines' astrogator aboard HMS

Roland , Commodore Chatterjee's flagship at New Tuscany. She hadn't seen the sights and smelled the smells Heather had, yet she obviously had an excellent imagination, and like every other member of Reprise 's company, she'd seen the detailed tactical and visual imagery of the savage attack Tristram 's platforms had recorded with such merciless accuracy. Even at second hand, the blinding speed with which those three destroyers—and her big brother—had been wiped away was its own sort of brutality, and Heather saw the ghosts of it behind her eyes even now.

"I . . . still can't really believe they're all gone, sometimes," Jackson said, speaking even more softly, and Heather smiled sadly.

"I know. And don't think it's something you'll 'get over.' Idiots tell you that, sometimes, you know, but what happened stays with you. And it doesn't get any easier the next time it happens, either—not emotionally, anyway. You just have to figure out how to deal with the memories and keep going. And that's not very easy, either."

"How do you do it?"

"I don't really know," Heather admitted. "I suppose a big part of it is family tradition, actually, in my case." She smiled just a bit sadly. "There've been McGills in the Navy as long as there have been Saganamis, when you come right down to it. A lot of them have gotten themselves killed along the way, so we've had a lot of practice—as a family, I mean—dealing with that kind of loss. My mom and dad are both serving officers, too. Well, Mom's detached from Bassingford right now—she's a psychologist, and the Navy has her working with Dr. Arif and her commission on treecats—but Dad's a senior-grade captain, and according to his last letter, he's in line for one of the new Saganami-Cs . Between the two of them, they make a pretty good sounding board. And," her eyes darkened, "we all had to figure out how to cope when my brother Tom was killed at Grendelsbane."

"I didn't know that—about your brother, I mean," Jackson said softly, and Heather shrugged.

"No reason you should have."

"I guess not."

Jackson looked down long enough to finish constructing her sandwich, then picked it up as if to take a bite out of it, only to lay it back down again, unbitten. Heather looked at her a bit quizzically, cocking her head to one side, and the EWO snorted softly.

"I'm dithering," she said.

"I wouldn't go quite that far," Heather disagreed. "You do seem to have something on your mind, though. So why don't you just go ahead and tell me what it is?"

"It's just—" Jackson began, only to break off. She looked down again, staring at her own hands as her fingers methodically shredded the crust away from her sandwich's bread. Then she inhaled deeply and looked back up, meeting Heather's eyes squarely, and her own gaze was no longer hesitant. This time, it burned .

"It's just that I know I shouldn't, but what I really want is for Admiral Gold Peak to blow every one of those fucking bastards right out of space!" she said fiercely. "I know it's wrong to feel that way. I know most of the people aboard those ships didn't have any voice at all in what happened. I even know that the last thing we need is a war with the Solarian League. But still, I think about what happened to Thor—to all those people—for absolutely no good reason at all, and I don't want the 'right response.' I want one that kills the people who killed my brother and his friends!" She stopped speaking abruptly, and her lips thinned as she closed her mouth tightly. She looked away for a moment, then made herself smile. It was a tight, hard expression—more of a grimace than a smile, really—but at least she was trying, Heather thought.

"Sorry about that," Jackson said.

"About what?" Heather looked at her quizzically. "Sorry because you want them dead? Don't be ridiculous—of course you want them dead! They killed someone you love, and you're a naval officer. One who chose a combat specialty. So should it really surprise you when your instincts and your emotions want the people who killed your brother to pay for it?"

"But it's not professional," Jackson half-protested. Heather quirked an eyebrow, and the EWO made an impatient, frustrated gesture. "I mean, I ought to be able to stand back and recognize that the best thing all around would be for us to settle this without anyone else getting hurt."

"Oh, don't be so silly!" Heather shook her head. "You do recognize that, that's the reason you're upset with yourself for wanting something else! And if you want me to tell you you're right to be upset with yourself for that, I'm not going to. Now, if you were in a position to dictate the outcome, and you let your emotions push you into a massacre that could have been avoided, then you'd have a problem. But you're not, and I suspect that if you were, you'd still do that 'right thing' you really don't want to happen. In the meantime, I'm sure a young, attractive, female officer of your precocious bent can go out and find all sorts of better things to spend your time regretting!"

"Coming up on the hyper wall, Sir," Lieutenant Bruner announced.

"Very well," Lewis Denton told his astrogator, and glanced at the quartermaster of the watch. "Pass the word, PO."

"Aye, aye, Sir," the quartermaster said, and pressed a button. "All hands," he announced over the ship's com system, "stand by for translation into normal-space."

Thirty-two seconds later, HMS Reprise 's crew experienced the familiar but never really describable queasiness of an alpha translation as their ship crossed the hyper wall and the G0 star called Meyers blazed twenty-two light minutes ahead of her. She'd come out almost exactly on the hyper limit, in a piece of virtuoso hyper navigation, and Denton smiled at Bruner.

"Well done!" he said, and the lieutenant smiled back at him as Reprise altered heading slightly, aligning her prow on the spot in space the planet Meyers would occupy in two hours and fifty-three minutes, and went to five hundred gravities of acceleration. Then Denton's smile faded and he turned his attention to Heather McGill.

"Deploy the platforms, Guns," he said.

"Aye, aye, Sir. Deploying the alpha platforms now."

Heather nodded to Jackson, who gave her readouts one last check, then pressed the key. Heather watched red lights flash to green and watched her own panel carefully.

"Alpha patterns have cleared the wedge, Sir," she announced a few moments later. "Stealth is active and deployment appears nominal." She glanced at a time display. "Beta platforms prepped for launch in . . . ten minutes and thirty-one seconds."

"Very good," Denton said again, and as he leaned back in her chair, his earlier smile was not even a memory. His imagination pictured the Ghost Rider platforms speeding outwards, peering at the emptiness around them, and his eyes were hard with the memory of the last Solarian-occupied star system a Manticoran destroyer force had entered.

Not this time, you bastards , he thought coldly. Not this time .

Chapter Fifty

"Hyper footprint, Lieutenant," the sensor tech announced, and Lieutenant Oliver Bristow raised an eyebrow and bent over the tech's shoulder to eyeball the display himself.

Despite its status as the administrative center of the Madras Sector, the Meyers System was scarcely a bustling hive of interstellar commerce. In fact, it was a rare day that saw more than two or three hyper translations, and it was scarcely unheard of for days or even weeks to go by with no new arrivals at all. Traffic had been a bit more brisk since the fiasco in the Monica System, but most of the "special investigators" and representatives of the Inspector General's office had already come and gone. Most of them hadn't even bothered to unpack, as far as Bristow could tell. The fact that they'd come all the way out to Meyers was sufficient proof of their devotion to duty, and there was no point actually investigating anything, since most of them had been informed of their reports' conclusions before they were dispatched in the first place.

But business had been picking up again for Meyers Astro Control lately. The arrival of Admiral Crandall's task force three weeks earlier had been as much excitement as Bristow had ever seen here in Meyers. Admiral Byng's battlecruiser squadrons had represented more firepower than any system out in the Verge was ever likely to see, but they were dwarfed by Task Force 496. Bristow couldn't think of the last time he'd seen even one actual ship of the wall all the way out here, far less an entire task force of them with appropriate screening elements! He wasn't sure what Admiral Crandall was doing out here, but he was fairly confident she hadn't made the trip just for her health, and that made every unexpected arrival interesting. One never knew which of them might be whatever the hell it was Crandall was waiting for.

"What do you make of it, Coker?" he asked.

"Hard to say from this range, Sir."

Petty Officer 2/c Alan Coker, like Bristow, was Frontier Fleet, and the lieutenant suspected that a Battle Fleet officer like the ones on Byng's staff or aboard Crandall's superdreadnoughts would have found the petty officer's tone lamentably unprofessional. Bristow didn't. Which probably had a little to do with the fact that he assumed that, unlike most Battle Fleet officers he could name, Petty Officer Coker could actually find his own posterior if he got to use both hands.

"We've been telling them for months that we need to replace the arrays covering that sector," the petty officer continued more than a little sourly, "and resolution's not anything I'd care to screen home about. If I had to guess, though, I'd say it's probably a destroyer from the impeller signature. Might be a light cruiser—some of the piss pot 'navies' out here still have some awfully small 'cruisers' in inventory—but I don't think it's anything bigger than that, anyway."

"A light cruiser?" Bristow straightened slowly, scratching one eyebrow.

"Maybe, Sir. Like I say, though, it's more likely a destroyer," Coker replied, and Bristow nodded.

"Keep an eye on it. Let me know as soon as it squawks its transponder."

"Yes, Sir."

Bristow patted him absently on the shoulder, folded his hands behind himself, and began to pace slowly and thoughtfully back and forth across the limited width of the compartment. Coker was right about the condition of the arrays in question, but the petty officer was also a past master at getting balky equipment to do his bidding, and he had a good eye for ship IDs. So if he said that was a destroyer, it probably was a destroyer. Which was interesting, since so far as Bristow knew, the only Solarian destroyers in the sector were all either off with Admiral Byng or already right here in-system.

* * *

"Permission to enter the bridge, Captain?"

Gregor O'Shaughnessy might have had his odd moments of disagreement with the Star Kingdom's military, but it was clear he'd learned the rudiments of naval courtesy along the way, and he was always careful to observe protocol aboard ship. It wasn't what Denton had expected out of someone with his prickly reputation, and the commander had found himself wondering if perhaps O'Shaughnessy was so careful because of that history of his. Whether that was the case or not, though, he'd gone out of his way—successfully—to be a pleasant passenger on the almost six-week voyage from Spindle to Meyers.

"Permission granted, Mr. O'Shaughnessy," Denton said now, and pointed at the chair at Heather McGill's left elbow. It would have been occupied by Ensign Varislav, the junior assistant tactical officer, at battle stations, but it was empty at the moment.

"Have a seat," he invited.

"Thank you, Captain."

O'Shaughnessy crossed to the indicated bridge chair and settled into it, careful to keep his hands well away from the console in front of it or the chair arm keypads. Heather turned her head to smile at him, and he smiled back. The ATO's place was where Commander Denton normally parked him when he visited the bridge, and Heather had gotten to know the analyst rather better than she'd ever expected to. She'd also locked out the control pads he was so carefully avoiding, though she had no intention of telling him so. First, because she didn't want to risk rubbing in any perceived distrust in his ability to keep his hands out of trouble, and, second, because there was something rather touching—almost endearing—about how cautious he actually was.

She turned back to her own displays, watching the expanding hemisphere covered by her Ghost Rider platforms. As Reprise proceeded deeper into the system and the platforms closed in astern of her, watching her back, that hemisphere would become a complete sphere, but at the moment, CIC's attention—and Heather's—was focused on the leading edge of the surveillance zone. Reprise's hyper translation lay thirty-five minutes in the past. The destroyer's closing velocity relative to the system primary had risen to 20,296 KPS, and she'd traveled just under thirty-two million kilometers farther in-system. In that same interval, the Ghost Rider platforms, loping along at the low (for them) acceleration of only five thousand gravities in order to stay stealthy, had already moved three minutes past their turnover time. They were over sixty million kilometers ahead of the destroyer, with their velocity back down to a mere 85,413 KPS, which also meant they were only seventy-three million kilometers from Meyers, and four light-minutes was close enough for their passive instrumentation to begin picking up more detailed information.

She waited patiently, since Commander Denton had decided they would rely on directed lasers rather than the platforms' FTL capability. As a result, anything Heather saw would be just over four minutes old by the time it reached her. Not that she expected the delay to have any significant consequences, and it wasn't as if anyone—

An unanticipated icon blinked suddenly into existence on her display. Another one followed, and another, and the data sidebar began to flicker and change.

"Captain," she heard her own voice say calmly, "I'm picking up some unexpected readings. A lot of them."

"You're confident about this, Captain?"

"Yes, Mr. O'Shaughnessy, I am," Lewis Denton said, speaking rather more coolly to Baroness Medusa's personal representative than was his wont.

"I'm sorry," O'Shaughnessy said quickly. "I didn't mean to sound as if I were challenging the competency of any of your personnel, and particularly not Lieutenant McGill's. It's just that I'm having trouble wrapping my own mind around the implications. I guess it comes under the heading of asking redundant questions while I spar for time to get my brain working again."

"No apology necessary," Denton said in a more normal tone. "And I don't blame you. I never expected to see something like this out in the Verge, either. And just between you and me, I'm not very happy to be seeing it now."

"Amazing how we're thinking the same thing, isn't it?" O'Shaughnessy replied, and Denton snorted harshly, then turned back to the updated tactical plot.

Reprise had stopped accelerating and started coasting ballistically twenty-six minutes earlier. During that interval, her recon platforms had reached their destinations, spreading out to englobe the planet Meyers at a range of barely fifteen light-seconds. At that distance, there could be no mistake. There really were seventy-one Solarian superdreadnoughts, accompanied by sixteen battlecruisers, twelve heavy cruisers, twenty-three light cruisers, and eighteen destroyers orbiting the planet.

Not to mention three repair ships, what have to be a couple of dozen stores ships, and what looks like a pair of straight ammunition carriers. It would appear New Tuscany isn't the only star system out this way benefitting from Battle Fleet's attention of late, he thought ironically.

"May I ask a question, Mr. O'Shaughnessy?" he said.

"Captain, you can ask anything you like." The analyst turned to face him, his expression serious. "Believe me, you're cleared for anything you think you need to know in a situation like this one."

"Thank you, Sir. I appreciate that. What I was wondering was whether or not any one's come up with a better theory for how a Battle Fleet admiral ended up in command of a Frontier Fleet task group?"

"Given what we know about Byng, it didn't just happen by the luck of the draw," O'Shaughnessy said grimly. "Byng hates Frontier Fleet. Not as much as he hates us , maybe, but badly enough. He's got the connections to avoid an assignment like this one without even raising a sweat, too. And that completely ignores the fact that Frontier Fleet must've screamed bloody murder when it found out it was expected to hand a command like that over to anyone from Battle Fleet, far less Byng. Somebody with a lot of influence had to get him nominated for the command, and he had to want to accept it."

"That's pretty much the way I figured it already," Denton said. "The reason I asked is that I have to find myself doubting that these people"—he pointed at the display with his chin—"just happen to be here by the luck of the draw, either. I think there's a connection between them and Byng. In fact, the evidence seems to be screaming pretty loudly that we're looking at a setup."

"I'm very much afraid I agree with you," O'Shaughnessy said heavily. "I wish to God I didn't, and I suppose there might be some other explanation for it,. But if there is, I haven't been able to think of what it might be yet, either."

"I don't think Byng fired on Commodore Chatterjee by accident or in a panic." Denton's voice was hard, harsh-edged. "Not anymore. I don't know who's behind it, although I'd be willing to hazard a few guesses based on what's already happened here in the Quadrant, but someone wants us in a war with the League. And these people"—another quick, angry jut of his chin at the master plot—"are the hammer that's supposed to make sure it's a short, nasty war."

"We probably don't want to wed ourselves too immovably to that conclusion, Captain. I say that purely as a professional analyst who's gone a bit too far out on a limb upon occasion only to see it sawed off behind him. Having cast my professional sheet anchor to windward, however, I think you're absolutely right. But unlike you, I don't have any idea of just how bad the military odds really are, given these people's presence, and I'd like to get one."

"Against what we've got in the Quadrant right now?" Denton raised an eyebrow at him, and he nodded.

"Not good," the commander said. "In fact, that's understating the situation fairly significantly. In technical terms, I believe the phrase would be 'We're screwed.' "

"I was afraid that was what you were going to say."

"Don't get me wrong, Mr. O'Shaughnessy. We could hurt them, probably even pretty badly, but no way in the galaxy could we stop them if they're prepared to keep coming. The battlecruisers and the small fry— phfffft! " Denton snapped his fingers. "But those big bastards are something else entirely. We could probably rip hell out of them as long as the Mark 23 pods hold out, but it would take a lot of hits—even with the Mark 23—to kill one of them, and we don't have an unlimited supply of the pods. Worse than that, we don't have any podnoughts. That means we can only carry and deploy pods externally, which makes them a lot more vulnerable and tactically less flexible. They'd be at their most effective in a purely defensive deployment, with lots of shipboard control links to manage them, but to make that work, we'd have to figure out where we needed them far enough in advance to get them—and enough ships to control them in worthwhile salvos—there before the Sollies came calling, and that wouldn't exactly be a trivial challenge.

"It's more likely we'd find ourselves having to face up to them without a powerful pod reserve—especially if we decide we have to insure the security of Spindle and dump most of the pods there. If that happens, we'll have to use mobile units to cover the Quadrant's other systems, and that means nothing heavier than a Nike or a Saganami-C . And that means using primarily whatever we can fire from our internal tubes . . . which sure as hell doesn't mean Mark 23s.

"From what I've heard about the new Mark 16 warhead mods, we could probably get in some good licks even against wallers, once the pods are gone, but I don't think we could do enough to knock them out. Certainly not in large enough numbers to do us any good. And that's assuming they didn't just decide to split up into smaller task units and go after each of the Quadrant's star systems individually—which, by the way, would require us to parcel out everything we've got, not just the Mark 23 pods—on a penny-packet basis if we wanted to try to give some cover to the Quadrant as a whole. But our only real chance of inflicting significant damage on wallers would be to stay concentrated and hammer them with everything we've got from outside their effective powered envelope. Splitting up into smaller units to defend multiple targets would hurt us more than it would hurt them."

"What about the Lynx Terminus?"

"That's probably another story, Sir. For one thing, most of the forts are on-line now, and each of them is a hell of a lot tougher than any piece-of-crap Solly superdreadnought ever built. And for another thing, Home Fleet is right on the other side of the terminus. Trust me. If these people want to dance with Duchess Harrington after what she did to the Peeps at Manticore, they're toast."

"What do you think they'll do?"

"I'm only a destroyer skipper, Mr. O'Shaughnessy. One with a nasty suspicious streak, maybe, but only a destroyer skipper. That kind of strategic assessment is way above my pay grade."

"I realize that. And I'm not going to hold you to anything. But I'd really like to hear your thoughts."

"Well, if it was me, and if we really are looking at some kind of orchestrated plan, a setup designed to get us out of the Quadrant once and for all, I'd start by taking out the administrative center of the Quadrant."

"You'd go for Spindle?"

"In a skinny minute, Sir," Denton said flatly. "I'd head straight there on the assumption that if the Manties tried to fight me, they'd have to come to me, well away from the terminus, on my terms. I'd figure I was going to take some nasty lumps, but that the Admiralty would never allow any really heavy force to get too far away from the Lynx Terminus, given the situation back home. So all I'd really have to take on would be whatever Admiral Gold Peak had under her command. And if she didn't try to fight me, the Star Empire would effectively concede possession of the entire Talbott Cluster, which would let me gather up all the other systems at my leisure. I might not get to kill as many Manty starships, but I'd have taken what would probably be my primary objectives for minimal losses. Not to mention the morale damage I would have inflicted on all those people who'd just voted to join the Star Empire if the Navy cuts and runs instead of trying to defend them."

He spoke coldly, confidently, but then he visibly paused and took a step back.

"I said that's what I'd do if it was my call, and I think it's what anyone on the other side would do . . . if he were capable of finding his ass with both hands and if he had a realistic appreciation for the actual balance of military capabilities. From what we've seen of the Sollies, though, it's entirely possible they don't have that realistic appreciation. In which case, they might just decide to head direct for the Terminus, after all. The logic would be pretty compelling, given that kind of misestimate of the relative balance of combat effectiveness. Seize and hold the Terminus, cut us off from any relief from the home system, then steamroller the forces isolated out here in the Quadrant. So I guess the bottom line is that without any clearer idea of how accurately they've assessed our capabilities, it's really impossible to say which way they're going to jump. Except, of course, that I think we can be fairly confident it will be a way we won't like."

"As I said earlier, it's amazing how we seem to be thinking the same thing," O'Shaughnessy said.

"Well, with all due respect, Sir, I think it's time we aborted your diplomatic mission. Somehow, I don't think protesting Byng's actions or presenting a note explaining our response is going to do much good. And given what happened the last time some of our destroyers got too close to Solarian battlecruisers , I'd just as soon not get any closer than this to Solarian ships of the wall!"

"Captain, for what it's worth, I concur entirely."

* * *

"There it is again, Lieutenant," PO Coker said.

"Where?"

Bristow looked over the petty officer's shoulder again, frowning. The impeller signature of the elusive destroyer, assuming that was what it was, had disappeared a half-hour earlier. Now it was back again, but where it had been accelerating in-system at five hundred gravities, it was now decelerating at well over six hundred. Clearly, it had changed its mind about its destination.

"Never did squawk their transponder, Sir," Coker observed.

"No, I noticed that myself, PO," Bristow replied with a touch of irony, and Coker chuckled.

"Suppose they saw something they didn't much care for, Sir?"

"That's exactly what I think," Bristow said slowly, "and that's what bothers me."

"Sir?"

"Just how the hell did they see anything to make them nervous from way the hell and gone out there?" Bristow asked, and the petty officer frowned. It wasn't a particularly happy frown, and Bristow nodded slowly. "That's what I thought, myself. Of course, whether or not we can convince Admiral Crandall of it is something else entirely, isn't it?"

Fleet Admiral Sandra Crandall was a solidly built woman with mahogany-colored hair and hard brown eyes. She was always immaculately groomed and uniformed, perfectly tailored, and yet it seemed to Hongbo Junyan that some subliminal whiff of decay followed her around like rancid incense. On the plus side, she seemed to be smarter than Josef Byng. On the negative side, she was even stubborner and at least as thoroughly imbued with Battle Fleet arrogance as he was. Or as he'd been , rather, Hongbo corrected himself. The Navy dispatch boat from New Tuscany which had arrived just over two hours ago had announced the change in its late commanding admiral's corporeal status. Personally, Hongbo would have considered that change a positive step even if it hadn't pushed events exactly where his Manpower . . . patrons wanted them to go. Not everyone shared that view of the universe, however, and it had upset Admiral Crandall just a tad. Which was rather the point of this afternoon's meeting.

"I don't care what their frigging 'warning messages' to Josef said!" Crandall snarled, glaring across the conference table at Lorcan Verrochio as if he were a Manty. "And I don't give a good goddamn what happened to their damned destroyers! The bastards fired on and destroyed a Solarian League Navy battlecruiser with all hands!"

"But only after Admiral Byng had—" Verrochio began.

"I don't give a flying fuck what Byng may or may not have done!" Crandall interrupted furiously, her expression livid. "First, because the only evidence we have is what they've seen fit to provide us, and I don't trust it as far as I can damned well spit. But second, and even more importantly, because it damned well doesn't matter ! The Solarian League can't accept something like this—not out of some frigging little pissant navy out beyond the Verge—no matter what kind of provocation they may think they have! If we let them get away with this, God only knows who's going to try something stupid next!"

"But the Manticorans aren't a typical—"

" Don't tell me about their super weapons again, Mr. Commissioner," Crandall snapped. "I'll grant you that they obviously have much longer ranged missiles than we'd appreciated. That may actually make some sense of the preposterous stories we've been hearing about their damned war with the Havenites. But what they could do against a dozen Frontier Fleet battlecruisers won't help them very much against modern, integrated missile defense from nine squadrons of the wall, plus screen. Trust me, they'll need something more than a few fancy tricks with missiles to stop my task force! And I don't intend to stand here with my thumb up my ass while they get themselves organized."

"What do you mean, 'organized,' Admiral?" Hongbo asked in a carefully unprovocative tone.

"I mean they obviously didn't have any idea my task force was anywhere in the vicinity, or they wouldn't have tried this shit in the first place. But they damned well know now. Or they know more than they did, at any rate. Just who the hell do you think that mysterious hyper footprint yesterday morning was, Mr. Hongbo? I don't know what it was doing here, but I know damned well it was a Manty, and whoever it was, she's on her way straight back to tell her superiors about my wall of battle. Well now that they know, I don't intend to give them time to send wallers of their own through from Manticore!"

"Admiral," Verrochio said as forcefully as he could (speaking for the recorders, of course), "I cannot authorize any sort of action or reprisal against the Manticorans without approval from higher authority within the Ministry!" He raised one hand like a stop sign and continued quickly as Crandall seemed to swell visibly. "I'm not saying you aren't totally justified in your feelings. And assuming the information available to us at this time is accurate, I think it's extremely likely Ministry approval would be forthcoming. As you say, allowing something like this to go unchallenged, to set some sort of precedent for other neobarb navies, could be disastrous. But making a decision which would amount to going to war with a multi-system stellar power, especially one so deeply involved in the League's carrying trade, is well beyond the scope of my authority as a Frontier Security governor." Hongbo felt an unusual glow of admiration for his nominal superior's footwork. If Verrochio had shown the ability to play Byng like a violin, he was playing Crandall like an entire string quartet! This was working out even better than either of them had hoped, at least from the perspective of evading responsibility. From the perspective of what was about to happen to other people, it was something else entirely, he supposed. But there wasn't much he could do about that, and from a purely selfish viewpoint, it could hardly have been better. He and Verrochio had performed to specification, which ought to get Ottweiler and his employers off their necks, and managed to cover their tracks quite neatly along the way. It had been Byng's decision to depart for New Tuscany, and while Hongbo was genuinely shocked at what the Manties had done—and how easily they'd done it—no one could possibly fault him or Verrochio for it. And now Verrochio had gotten himself, and by extension Hongbo, on record as the civilian voice of reason in the face of spinal-reflex military pugnacity.

Which is probably going to be a very good thing if it turns out that our good admiral has underestimated the Manties even half as badly as I think she has , the vice-commissioner thought. She's thinking in terms of standard reprisals against uppity neobarbs, something the Navy's done hundreds of times, whether it admits it or not. But these aren't your typical neobarbs, even based solely on what's happened already. Unfortunately, she doesn't even have a clue how different they are, and she's not prepared to listen to someone like Thurgood. After all, he's only Frontier Fleet. What could he know about fights between ships of the wall?

"Well," Crandall didn't quite sneer, in response to Verrochio's protest, "you undoubtedly know the limits of your authority better than I do, Sir. However, I know the limits of my authority, and I also recognize my responsibilities. So, with all due respect for your need for Ministry approval, I have no intention of waiting for it."

"What do you mean?" Verrochio asked, his voice taut.

"I mean I'll be underway within forty-eight hours, Mr. Commissioner," Crandall said flatly, "and the Manties won't be happy to see me at all."

Chapter Fifty-One

"Well, Theresa?" Admiral Frederick Topolev said, looking at his chief of staff.

"Captain Walsh says we're ready to go, Sir," Commander Theresa Coleman replied. "And Felicidad's boards are all green."

Coleman nodded her head in the direction of Commander Felicidad Kolstad, Topolev's operations officer. It was odd, a corner of Topolev's thoughts reflected for far from the first time, that three of the four most important officers on his staff were not only all female, but all quite attractive, in their own very distinct ways. Although, perhaps, that attractiveness shouldn't have been such a surprise, since all of his officers were the products of alpha, beta, or gamma lines.

At the moment, Kolstad was concentrating all of her own attention on the readouts which showed the exact position of every unit of Topolev's task force, literally down to the last centimeter. All twenty of his ships were tractored together into two big, ungainly formations, nine hundred kilometers apart, as they floated with the closest thing possible to a zero velocity relative to one another and to the normal-space universe they'd left three months earlier.

"All right, people," Topolev said as calmly as he could, "let's do this."

"Yes, Sir," Coleman acknowledged, and passed the order to Captain Joshua Walsh, MANS Mako's captain.

Absolutely nothing seemed to happen for the next two or three minutes, but appearances were deceiving, and Topolev waited patiently, watching his own displays, as Task Force One of the Mesan Alignment Navy translated ever so slowly and gradually back into normal-space. This maneuver had been tested against the Mesa System's sensor arrays by crews using the early Ghost

-class ships even before the first of the Shark-class prototypes had ever been laid down, and Task Force One had practiced it over a hundred times once the mission had been okayed. Despite all that, Topolev still cherished a few reservations about the entire operation. Not about the abilities of his people, or the technical capabilities of his vessels, but about the timing.

And about the fact that we were never supposed to carry this out with the Sharks in the first place, Freddy, he reminded himself. Don't forget that minor point! This was what the Leonard Detweiler class was supposed to be for after the Sharks proved the basic concept. They weren't supposed to carry out the actual mission themselves; they were supposed to serve as training ships for the crews of the ships that would execute the mission .

He felt himself scowling down at his console as the familiar, worn-out thread of worry trickled through the back of his mind. He banished the expression quickly—it was hardly the confident, calm look his officers needed to see at this particular moment—and wished he could banish the worry with equal speed.

No one seemed to have noticed his momentary lapse, and his own concern smoothed into concentration as readouts began to slowly flicker and change. Both groups of his ships slid gradually, carefully towards the hyper wall, making the slowest possible translation back into normal-space. It was physically impossible for any ship to cross the hyper wall without radiating a hyper footprint, but the strength of that footprint was—to a large extent, at least—a factor of the base velocity the ship in question wanted to carry across the wall. The alpha translation's bleed factor was roughly ninety-two percent, and all of that energy had to go somewhere. There was also an unavoidable gravitic spike or echo along the interface between the alpha bands of hyper-space and normal-space that was effectively independent of a ship's speed. Reducing velocity couldn't do anything about that, but a slow, "gentle" translation along a shallow gradient produced a much weaker spike, as well. No translation, however slow and gentle, could render a hyper footprint too weak to be detected by the sort of arrays covering the Manticore Binary System. Yet arrays like that, because of their very sensitivity, were notorious for throwing up occasional "false positives," ghost translations that the filters were supposed to strain out before they ever reached a human operator's attention. And the most common ghosts of all normally appeared as a hyper footprint and an echo, which was precisely what Topolev's maneuver was supposed to counterfeit.

Under normal circumstances, there would have been very little point to deceiving the arrays where a simple hyper footprint was concerned, given the fact that those same arrays would almost certainly have picked up the impeller wedge of any ship headed towards the system. Even the best stealth systems were unreliable, at best, against a sensor array which could measure eight or nine thousand kilometers on a side, and Manticore's long-range sensors were even larger—and more sensitive—than that. Closer in, where the gradient of the stellar gravity well provided background interference and there were dozens of other gravity sources to clutter the landscape and turn the master arrays' very sensitivity against them, yes. The really big arrays were all but useless once you got within a light-hour or so of a system primary or a wormhole junction. That was where the shorter-ranged sensors aboard warships and recon platforms took over, and with good reason. But this far out was another matter entirely. Really good first-line stealth systems might manage to defeat the big arrays at this range, but no betting man would care to risk his money on the probability.

Fortunately, Frederick Topolev had no need to do anything of the sort.

It seemed to take much longer to complete the maneuver than it had in any of the training exercises, although the time displays insisted it really hadn't. Personally, Topolev suspected the damned clocks were broken.

"Translation completed, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Vivienne Henning, his staff astrogator, announced.

"Preliminary checks indicate we're right on the money: one light-month out on almost exactly the right bearing."

"Good work," Topolev complemented her, and she smiled with pleasure at the sincerity in his voice. He smiled back, then cleared his throat. "And now that we're here, let's go someplace else."

"Yes, Sir."

The twenty Shark -class ships, each about midway between an old-fashioned battleship and a dreadnought for size, deactivated the tractors which had held them together. Reaction thrusters flared, pushing them apart, although they didn't seek the same amount of separation most starships their size would have. Then again, they didn't need that much separation.

A few moments later, they were underway at a steady seventy-five gravities. At that absurdly low acceleration rate it would take them a full ninety hours—almost four T-days—to reach the eighty percent of light-speed that represented the maximum safe normal-space velocity permitted by available particle shielding, and it would take them another three T-weeks, by the clocks of the rest of the universe, to reach their destination, although the subjective time would be only seventeen days for them. Another ship of their size could have attained the same velocity in a little more than thirteen hours, but that was all right with Admiral Topolev. The total difference in transit time would still be under six days—less than four, subjective—and unlike the units of his own command, that hypothetical other ship would have been radiating an impeller signature . . . which his ships weren't.

"What've you got for me, Clint?"

Lieutenant Clinton McCormick looked up from his display as his supervisor, Lieutenant Commander Jessica Epstein, appeared at his shoulder. McCormick liked Epstein, but he sometimes wondered why in the world she'd ever decided to pursue a naval career. Born and bred on Gryphon, the dark-haired lieutenant commander was an avid backpacker, camper, and birdwatcher. She also liked cross-country running and marathons, for God's sake! None of those hobbies were particularly well-suited to the constrained dimensions found on the insides of spacecraft.

At least her assignment to Hephaestus meant she spent her time someplace big enough that there were actually personnel tubes, not just treadmills, set aside for the use of people who wanted to jog or run, but she clearly still had a lot of excess energy to burn off. Most other supervisors would simply have requested that McCormick shunt his data to their console, but not Epstein. She wanted any excuse to get out of her command chair and move around, which explained why he found her peering over his shoulder at his display in the big, cool, dimly lit compartment.

"Probably nothing, Ma'am," he told her now. "Looks like a ghost to me, but it popped through the filters. Right here."

He used a cursor to indicate the faint, almost invisible light splotch, then zoomed in. At maximum zoom, it was evident that there were actually two light splotches, each tagged with the time it had appeared, and Epstein grimaced at the telltale sign of a ghost footprint.

"I take it that this thing was strong enough the computers classified it as a genuine possible?" she said.

"That's what happened, all right, Ma'am," McCormick agreed.

"Well, better safe than sorry." Epstein sighed, then flicked her head in a sort of shorthand shrug. "I'll kick it upstairs, and they'll roust out some poor cruiser or destroyer division to go take a look."

"Hey, they ought to be grateful for us for finding them something to do instead of just sitting around in orbit," McCormick replied, and Epstein chuckled.

"If you think that's the way they're going to react, should I go ahead and tell them who spotted this in the first place?"

"Actually, now that I've thought about it, Ma'am, I think I'd prefer to remain anonymous," he said very seriously, and her chuckle turned into a laugh.

"That's what I thought," she said, then patted him on the shoulder and turned to walk back to her own command station.

Given the range on the possible footprint, the datum was over twelve hours old. Footprints, like gravitic pulses, were detectable by the fluctuations they imposed on the alpha wall interface with normal-space, which meant they propagated at roughly sixty-four times the speed of light. For most practical purposes, that equated to real-time, or very near to real-time, but when you started talking about the detection ranges possible to Perimeter Security Command's huge arrays, even that speed left room for considerable delays.

It seemed like an awfully long way to go for very little return. There'd been no sign of an impeller wedge, which meant no one was out there accelerating towards the star system. If there'd been an actual hyper footprint in the first place—which Epstein frankly doubted was the case—it had to have been some merchantship coming in with appallingly bad astrogation. Whoever it was had popped out of hyper a full light-month short of his intended destination, and then promptly (and sensibly) popped right back into hyper rather than spending the endless weeks which would have been required to reach anyplace worthwhile under impeller drive. And when she did arrive in the star system, or at the Junction, she wasn't going to tell a single solitary soul about her little misadventure. That kind of astrogation error went beyond simply embarrassing to downright humiliating. In fact, if Astro Control had hard evidence of a Manticoran astrogator who'd been that far off, they would undoubtedly call her back in for testing and recertification!

But, as she'd said to McCormick, better safe than sorry. That could have been the motto of Perimeter Security Command instead of the official "Always Vigilant," and Epstein, like virtually all of the officers assigned to PSC, took her responsibilities very seriously indeed. They were there, maintaining their endless watch, precisely to make sure everyone knew they were, which meant no one would even make the attempt to evade their all-seeing eyes. Checking out the occasional ghost was a trivial price to pay for that.

Commander Michael Carus, the commanding officer of HMS Javelin, and the senior officer of the second division of Destroyer Squadron 265, known as the "Silver Cepheids," sighed philosophically as he contemplated his orders.

At least it was something to do, he supposed. And he wasn't surprised they'd gotten the call. The squadron had earned its name from its demonstrated expertise in reconnaissance and scouting, although he'd always wondered if it was really all that appropriate. Cepheids were scarcely among the galaxy's less noticeable stars, after all, and recon missions were supposed to be unobtrusive.

"Here, Linda," he said, handing the message chip to Lieutenant Linda Petersen, Javelin's astrogator.

"We're going ghost hunting. Work out a course, please."

"To hear is to obey," Petersen replied. She plugged the chip into her own console, then looked over her shoulder at Carus.

"How big a hurry are we in, Skipper?" she asked.

"The datum is already almost thirteen hours old," Carus pointed out. "I feel sure our lords and masters would like us to go check it out before it gets a bunch older. So I'd say a certain degree of haste is probably in order."

"Got it, Skip," Petersen said and began punching numbers. A couple of minutes later, she grunted in satisfaction.

"All right," she said, turning his chair around to face Carus. "This is going to be a really short jump, Skipper. Not quite a micro-jump, but close, so if we build up too much velocity—"

"Once upon a time, in the dim mists of my youth, all of, oh, three years ago, I was an astrogator myself, my daughter," Carus interrupted. "I seem to have a vague recollection of the undesirability of overrunning your translation point in a short hop rattling around somewhere in my aging memory."

"Yes, Sir," Petersen acknowledged with a grin. "Anyway, what I meant to say is that I'd just as soon not get much above forty-two thousand KPS as our base velocity. That gives us a total flight time of about three hours—a tad less than that, actually—if we hit the theta bands." Carus nodded. As he'd just said, he'd been an astrogator himself, once, and his own mind ran through Petersen' decision tree. Translating steeply enough to hit the theta bands in a relatively short hop like this would probably take a couple of hours off the ships' hyper generators and alpha nodes, but it wouldn't be too bad.

"Figure about five hundred gravities?" he said.

"That was what I was thinking. Take us about two hours to hit our transit velocity at that rate. I don't see any point pushing it harder than that and risking overrunning the translation point at the other end."

"Sounds good to me," Carus said, and turned to his communications officer.

Three hours later, the destroyers Javelin, Dagger, Raven , and Lodestone arrived at the ghost footprint's locus and began to spread out.

"You and Bridget take the outer perimeter, John," Carus said, looking at the trio of faces on his divided com display. "Julie and I will take the inner sweep."

"Understood," Lieutenant Commander John Pershing of the Raven acknowledged, and Lieutenant Commander Bridget Landry, Dagger's CO nodded.

"Which of us plays anchor?" Lieutenant Commander Julie Chase asked from Lodestone's bridge, and Carus chuckled.

"Rank hath its privileges," he said just a bit smugly.

"That's what I thought," she huffed, then smiled. " Try to stay awake while the rest of us do all the work, all right?"

"I'll do my best," Carus assured her.

"Almost exactly on schedule, Sir," Commander Kolstad observed. "Nice to have punctual enemies, I suppose."

"Let's not get too overconfident, Felicidad," Admiral Topolev responded, giving her a mildly reproving look.

"No, Sir," Kolstad said quickly, and he allowed his slight frown to turn into an encouraging smile, instead.

If he were going to be honest, Topolev supposed, he wasn't immune to the ops officer's sense of euphoria. In the roughly seventeen hours since their arrival, their velocity had increased to better than forty-five thousand kilometers per second, and they were almost a hundred and thirty-eight million kilometers closer to their destination. Under most circumstances, 7.6 light-minutes wouldn't have seemed like very much of a cushion against military-grade sensors. Especially not against Manticoran military-grade sensors. The Mesan Alignment had plowed quite a few decades—and several trillion credits—into the development of its own stealth technology, however, and the MAN was at least two generations ahead of the Solarian League in that capability. Their analysts' best estimate was that their stealth systems were equal to those of Manticore at a minimum, and probably at least marginally superior, although no one was prepared to assume anything of the sort. But as the Manties' own Harrington had demonstrated at a place called Cerberus, the key element in any passive detection of a moving starship was its impeller signature . . . and Task Force One didn't have an impeller signature. The Royal Manticoran Navy was the enemy, and Frederick Topolev was prepared to do whatever it took to defeat that enemy, but neither he nor Collin Detweiler's intelligence services were prepared to underestimate that enemy or permit themselves to hold mere "normals" in contempt. Especially not given the RMN's combat record over the last twenty years. The MAN was almost certainly the galaxy's youngest real navy, and its founders—including one Frederick Topolev—had studied the Manties, and their officer corps, and their battle record with painstaking attention. They'd learned quite a few valuable lessons of their own in the process, and the admiral knew the crews of those destroyers were firmly convinced they'd been sent out here to investigate a genuine ghost. If anyone had thought anything else, they wouldn't have sent just four destroyers to check it out. But he also knew that, routine or not, the crews of those ships were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. He recognized the standard search pattern they were running, knew their sensor crews were monitoring their instruments and their displays intently. If there was anything out there to find, those destroyers would find it. Except that no one in the entire galaxy knew how to find it. Knew even how to recognize that there was something out there to find. And so, despite the absurdly low range, and despite his own ships'

ridiculously low top acceleration rate, Topolev felt just as confident as he looked.

Chapter Fifty-Two

"I wish I could say I was surprised," Elizabeth III said in tones of profound disgust as she flipped her hard copy of her cousin's report of the Second Battle of New Tuscany onto the same conference table in the same conference room. The initial report had arrived three days ago, with the news of Josef Byng's stupidity and the destruction of his flagship. That had been bad enough, but the rest of what Michelle had turned up after the battle was even worse, and the queen shook her head, her expression tight with anger.

"The Sollies have resented us for years," she continued harshly, "and we've walked on tiptoe around them for as long as anyone can remember. I guess something like this had to happen sooner or later, even if the timing could have been a lot better. In fact, I suppose the only thing I'm really surprised about is who seems to have arranged this entire—what's that charming military phrase? Oh, yes. This entire cluster fuck ."

The treecat on the back of her chair shifted, his ears half-flattened, his needle-tipped claws extending far enough to sink into the chair's upholstery, and everyone in the room could hear his soft hiss as his rage mirrored his person's. Obviously, whether Elizabeth was surprised or not, the events at New Tuscany—and the fact that there truly had been no survivors from Commodore Chatterjee's murdered destroyers—had been enough to whip her fury to a white-hot heat even before the confirmation of outside manipulation had reached her.

The other two treecats present were less overtly infuriated than Ariel was, but neither of them was immune to the human anger—and anxiety—swirling about them. They were, however, somewhat farther away, and Prime Minister Grantville, sitting beside the Queen, kept a wary eye on Ariel as he shook his own head.

"I don't think there's any such thing as 'good timing' for a confrontation with the Solarian League, Your Majesty," he said, speaking rather more formally than was his wont. "On the other hand, as you've just said, it's not exactly as if there were any tremendous surprises here, is it?"

"I can always be surprised by Solly stupidity, Willie," Elizabeth said bitingly. "I shouldn't be, I suppose, but every time I think I've seen the stupidest thing they could possibly do, they find a way to surpass themselves! At least this particular idiot's taken himself out of the gene pool. It's a pity he had to take so many others with him!"

"I agree, Your Majesty," anger of his own rumbled around in Sir Anthony Langtry's voice, "and the fact that those flaming idiots in Chicago still haven't officially responded to our initial note only proves your point."

He shook his head in disgust. The note in question had reached Old Terra three weeks before this meeting, yet there'd still been no response at all from the League's Foreign Ministry.

"Of course it does, Tony," Grantville acknowledged. "Still, I stand by my original point. This is something we've all seen coming—or at least as a serious probability—ever since we found out Byng had fired on Chatterjee in the first place."

"Oh, I don't know, Willie," his brother said, reaching out to stroke Samantha's soft ears as the 'cat pressed against the back of his neck, "I think this minor matter of the sixty or so Battle Fleet superdreadnoughts Vézien and Cardot were so eager to tell Mike about could probably come under that heading. Surprises, I mean."

"Assuming they're really there, Hamish," Grantville pointed out.

"Personally," Elizabeth said, "I'm less worried about sixty obsolete Solarian superdreadnoughts than I am about the several hundred modern, pod-laying superdreadnoughts the Peeps still have. You're right, Willie. We've discussed the Sollies almost to death. I'm not saying we've figured out what to do with them yet, even if I do feel a little bit better in that regard than I did a month or so ago, but I think we may have let ourselves get overly focused on them. I mean, whatever kind of threat the Solarian League may pose in the long term, it's the Peeps we have to worry about now. So while I'm perfectly willing to admit that the League may be the greater danger in absolute terms, I think we need to focus on removing the threat we can remove as quickly as possible."

She looked at White Haven, her eyes sharp.

"When we received our first report about Commodore Chatterjee, Willie asked you and Sir Thomas about our ability to hit Haven now, hard and fast, hurt them enough to make them realize they had no choice but to surrender outright. You seemed to think it would be feasible within a couple of months'

time. I realize that was less than one month ago, but could we do it now? And could we hold off the Sollies in Talbott while we do it?"

For the first time in his naval career, Hamish Alexander-Harrington felt an almost overwhelming temptation to temporize and dodge a fundamental question. But however great the temptation, he was still Elizabeth Winton's First Lord of Admiralty, and he met her eyes squarely.

"I've deliberately kept my hands off of a lot of the operational details," he said. "The last thing Tom Caparelli needs is to think he's got a backseat driver—and one who's a civilian, now—trying to grab the controls away from him, so he and I have both tried very hard to respect one another's spheres of authority. Having said that, though, I think the answer is probably that, yes, we could punch out the Haven System with what we have available right now. If we want to do it before we find ourselves up against the Sollies, though, and considering transit times and everything else, we'd have to use Eighth Fleet, which would mean uncovering the Home System at least temporarily. I don't much care for that thought, but I think enough of the new construction would be available at or almost at combat readiness to cover the gap, and we've made better progress than I really anticipated in getting the system-defense variant of Apollo into service.

"In addition, however, there's another timing issue involved. If there really are Solly SDs in Talbott, we can't afford to have our main striking force weeks away from the home system when they finally make their presence felt. That means that if we decide firmly in favor of taking the military option against Haven first, we'd have to launch the op now —immediately, without any effort to talk to the Peeps first—and that it would have to be militarily decisive , in the shortest possible period of time. If we present any ultimatums, they'd have to be delivered from the flag bridge of a fleet actually in position to attack, with no time for the other side to think about them or digest the implications ahead of time. Which, frankly, makes it much less likely, in my opinion, that they'd be willing to stand down without a fight. Faced with the same situation, we'd certainly be more likely to fight than just roll over, so I suspect we'd have to pretty much wipe out Capital Fleet before they were ready to give in. And we might well have to actually go ahead and really take out most or all of their infrastructure, as well." The fourth and final human being present for the conference stirred slightly in her chair beside him, but he kept his eyes resolutely focused on the Queen. He already knew exactly how his wife felt about the notion of turning the Haven System into a scrapyard.

"As I say," he continued, "we could punch out Haven. But you asked me a two-part question, and my answer to the second half of it—whether or not we can hold off the Sollies in Talbott while we do it—is that I simply don't know. That's why I say we can't afford to take the time to send diplomatic notes back and forth first, if we're going to set up to attack the Haven System at all.

"Having said that, however, I also have to say that, judging from my preliminary read of the technical appendices of this report, I think all our estimates about how outclassed the Sollies' deployed equipment is may actually have been overly pessimistic. But they've got a lot of ships, Elizabeth. And whatever our long-term prospects might be, if they've actually got that many superdreadnoughts deployed in proximity to the Talbott Quadrant, then Mike's and Khumalo's ability to fend them off with nothing heavier than battlecruisers is . . . doubtful, to say the least. If the Sollies have that many wallers available, and if they decide to respond the way it sounds very much like this Admiral Crandall would be likely to, we could find the new systems in the Quadrant burning to the ground at the same time we're off hammering Nouveau Paris."

"But as Willie just pointed out, we don't even know those superdreadnoughts exist ," Elizabeth retorted.

"All we have right now is what amounts to hearsay evidence from a bunch of New Tuscans who admit they were part of a strategy to smash the Quadrant before it truly has its feet under it. Forgive me if I find information they're offering as some sort of quid pro quo to keep us from leveling their system around their ears less than totally convincing. It certainly hasn't been confirmed yet!" She glared down at the hard copy of the report again for a heartbeat or two, then raised her eyes to White Haven once more.

"And where the question of timing is concerned, frankly, I won't exactly cry myself to sleep if we do have to send our ultimatum to Pritchard along with Honor. If they're too pigheaded to see reason and surrender, it'll be on their heads, not ours. And let's not forget that not only are they the people who started this war, but they're also the ones who sabotaged their own proposed summit and then launched an all-out attack on our home system." The Queen's brown eyes glittered fiercely. "I think we all know who the real enemy is, and it's a hell of a lot closer than the Sol System. Can we afford to allow a hypothetical fleet of superdreadnoughts, which might not really be there at all, to paralyze our strategic thinking and push us into taking our eye off the real enemy when we finally have the chance to finish the Peeps off once and for all?"

"I think we have to assume they are there," a soprano voice said. It was quiet, that voice, but there was something about its timbre, a hint of steely determination, and Elizabeth's eyes swiveled to the speaker.

"First, we have to assume that because it's our responsibility to make the most pessimistic assumptions," Honor Alexander-Harrington continued. "But, second, I think they really are. I think we've fundamentally underestimated Manpower's capabilities, and believe me, that's a much bigger surprise, as far as I'm concerned, than the fact that a stubborn, arrogant Solarian admiral wouldn't see reason and got his flagship's entire crew killed as an exercise in sheer stupidity. All of which makes me wonder—again—just how sure we really are about who the real enemy is."

"Honor, I know that you've thought—" Grantville began, but Honor cut him off with atypical brusqueness.

"Willie, I'm tired of people making allowances for what I think and why I think it. Yes, I've been in closer contact with the Ballroom—and with Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat"—Elizabeth's face tightened visibly at the second name, but Honor's voice didn't even pause—"than anyone else in this room. And, yes, my family history predisposes me to hate Manpower with every fiber of my being. All of that's true. But I am sick and tired of people who persist in using those facts to justify their refusal to look at the evidence because it doesn't suit their preconceptions."

"Meaning exactly what, Honor?"

Elizabeth's voice was sharp, and the look in her brown eyes was hard, as close to a glare as she had ever turned upon Honor Alexander-Harrington. But Honor looked back without flinching.

"Meaning, Elizabeth, that I've been telling you literally for months that it made absolutely no sense for the Havenites to assassinate Admiral Webster or try to kill Ruth and Berry. I'm not going to dispute with you over who did what to our prewar diplomatic correspondence, although I realize you know I don't think that's quite as open-and-shut as a lot of people seem to believe, either. But I'm telling you, Eloise Pritchart doesn't go around having people killed just for the fun of it, and she is not an idiot! If she'd actually wanted to derail her own summit meeting and killing Admiral Webster looked like the only way to do it, she would have found somebody one hell of a lot more deniable than her own ambassador's driver to pull the trigger."

White Haven managed not to cringe, but he didn't need Honor's empathic talent, or even Samantha's and Nimitz's soft hisses, to realize just how angry his wife truly was. She hadn't raised her voice, hadn't given the least indication of disrespect by tone or mannerism, but in a service not exactly noted for the pristine purity of its language, "the Salamander" was renowned for the fact that she never swore.

"That opinion isn't shared by the majority of the intelligence community," Elizabeth replied in a tone which made it obvious she was trying to throttle her own emotions.

"That isn't quite correct," Honor said flatly. Elizabeth's nostrils flared with anger, but Honor was no longer a mere cruiser captain meeting her monarch for the first time, and she continued without hesitation.

"That opinion wasn't shared by the majority of the intelligence community at the time and given what they knew then. And the reason it wasn't was simply that the majority of the intelligence community had concluded that they couldn't think of anyone else with a motive. Well, I submit to you that it's just been amply demonstrated— again— in New Tuscany that there is someone else with a perfectly good motive, and that someone is Manpower, Incorporated. Admiral Webster was hammering them on Old Terra; Berry is a symbol of everything they hate; the very existence of Torch is an affront to them; the weapon of choice for that attack was a bioweapon ; and they're busy trying to get us—successfully, I might add, from all appearances—into a shooting war with the Solarian League. For that matter, according to Mike's report, one of their operatives just casually killed more than forty thousand people in New Tuscany to help their efforts along! And let's not forget that fleet of StateSec rejects that Manpower subsidized for an attack on Torch . Do you think for one moment, Elizabeth, that Manpower isn't aware of how you feel about Haven? Or that they wouldn't be willing to play any card they could to get what they want?

"Yes, we're at war with the Republic of Haven. And, yes, they fired the first shot. And yes, they even launched the attack on our home system, and a lot of people have been killed. A lot of people I knew, people who weren't just professional colleagues but who'd been friends of mine for decades . Friends who'd literally risked their lives against impossible odds to save mine when they didn't have to, if you'll remember that little jaunt to Cerberus. So, believe me, I know all about anger, and I know all the reasons for distrust and hostility. But look at the evidence, for God's sake. Mike hit it exactly in her report—Manpower is operating like a hostile star nation , and we're the object of its hostility! Worse, it's got a hell of a lot more resources than we ever thought it did, even if it's hijacking some of them from the Sollies. And—" her almond-shaped, dark brown eyes pinned Elizabeth into her chair "—if there's anyone else in the galaxy who's even more inclined than the Legislaturalists or Oscar Saint-Just's State Security ever were to use assassination as a tool, it's Manpower.

"I admire you, and I respect you, both as my monarch and as a person and a friend, Elizabeth, but you're wrong. Whatever you may think, the real threat to the Star Empire at this moment isn't in Nouveau Paris or Old Chicago at all. It's in the Mesa System . . . and it's in the process of destroying the Star Kingdom you're responsible for ruling."

The tension hovering in the conference room was hard enough to chip with a knife as the two women locked eyes. And as those two sets of brown eyes met, Elizabeth Winton realized something emotionally that she'd long since recognized intellectually. Something Honor's analysis of any possible confrontation with the Solarian League had driven home in this very room only three T-weeks earlier. Honor Alexander-Harrington had become the closest thing Elizabeth III had to a true peer. Admiral, Countess, Duchess, and Steadholder, the third ranking member of the Star Empire's peerage, a ruling head of state in her own right, and someone who had been born to none of those titles and identities. Someone who had won them. Who'd paid for them in the cold, hard cash of combat, in the loss of people for whom she cared deeply, in all the thousands of deaths—enemy and friend alike—she had taken onto her own conscience in the service of Elizabeth's kingdom, and in her own blood. Someone who had received many of those titles and honors from Elizabeth's own hands because she damned well deserved them.

And that peer—the person, Elizabeth realized now, whose absolute integrity and whose judgment on every other question she most trusted—disagreed with her on this one. For several seconds, it felt as if the people around the table had forgotten to breathe, but then Elizabeth inhaled sharply, deeply, and shook her head like a boxer shaking off a hard left jab.

"I know you and I haven't seen eye-to-eye where the Peeps are concerned for a long time now, Honor," she said quietly. "I've tried to pretend we did. I've tried to ignore the fact that we didn't. And when I couldn't do that anymore, I've concluded that your personal acquaintance with people like Theisman and Tourville has affected your judgment. I still think that's possible, as a matter of fact. But—" She paused, and silence hovered once more for several heartbeats before she spoke again.

" But," she continued, "maybe I'm the one whose judgment has been affected. You know why that might be true—better than anyone else, I suspect. Yet even if my judgment's been less than perfect, that doesn't mean we don't have to deal with the Peeps before we can respond to the Sollies. And in addition to that, I have to think about how Pritchart is likely to respond when she finds out about what's happening in the Quadrant. When she realizes we're facing war with the Solarian League all over again, she's certainly going to realize we can't fight both of them at once, as well. After what happened in the Battle of Manticore, after that many dead, who knows what she's likely to demand—or do—under those circumstances? We don't even know what she was prepared to offer or demand at her proposed summit, far less what kilo of flesh she'll demand as her price for peace at this point. You say it's our duty to assume those superdreadnoughts really exist. Well, it's my duty to assume the Peeps would rather have victory than accept defeat, as well."

"Yes, it is," Honor agreed quietly. "But let's suppose you manage to impose peace on your terms. What are those terms going to be? Remember what we talked about here less than a month ago. Sir Thomas gave you the Admiralty's plan for defeating and occupying the Solarian League. Do you really think we could do the same thing to Haven, as well? Especially if we found ourselves trying to do both of them at once?

"We don't even know where Bolthole is, Elizabeth, so even if we demanded that they scrap their entire existing fleet, we can't take out their biggest and best yard with some sort of long-range strike. And it also means we can't picket it to make sure their fleet stays scrapped. So the Republic of Haven is still going to have a navy—and that navy's still going to be the only other major fleet with podnoughts—when we turn around to face the Sollies. We all know how well that worked out last time around. But let's suppose we do know where Bolthole is—that we demand its location as part of the surrender terms and then go blow the crap out of it. What happens then? If you impose punitive peace terms at knife-point because of the temporary advantage Apollo gives us, you've still got to come up with the hulls and ships to enforce those terms afterward . . . at the same moment when you're fighting for your life against the League.

"Do you really want to trust that we'll somehow be able to build a fleet big enough to handle both of those chores at once ? And do you really think Pritchart—or, more likely, some other Havenite administration—wouldn't go right ahead and stab you in the back at the first opportunity? Or even simply offer 'technical assistance' to the Sollies to help them close the gap between their capabilities and ours even faster? And if you impose those terms by blowing the Haven System's infrastructure apart, and by killing thousands more of their naval personnel when they can't even shoot back effectively, I can absolutely guarantee you that any Havenite administration is only going to be licking its chops while it waits for the best possible moment to hit you from behind."

"So what do you suggest instead?" Elizabeth asked. Honor's eyes widened slightly at the queen's reasonable tone, and Elizabeth chuckled harshly. "Step up to the plate, as I believe they say on Grayson, Duchess Harrington. You've just done the equivalent of spanking me in public—well, in semi-public, at least—and I may have deserved it. But if you're prepared to tell me I've been wrong, then I'm prepared to tell you to suggest something better!"

"All right," Honor said after a moment. "I agree that we've got to be able to face one opponent at a time. I don't think anyone in this room, or anyone in the entire Navy, wants to fight the Sollies. Not if they have even the faintest conception of just how big, how powerful, the League is, anyway. I don't care what any of us said about potential Solarian weaknesses, or possible political strategies or opportunities. The truth is that none of us can know if any of that analysis was truly accurate, and only a lunatic would willingly risk the very survival of her star nation on possibilities if she had any other option at all!

"But, having said that, I think we have to position ourselves to fight the SLN, whether we want to or not. And that means reaching some sort of settlement, whether its dip0lomatic or military, with the Havenites first. I've never disagreed with you there. But I think that rather than blowing still more of their ships out of space, and rather than destroying still more of their infrastructure, we ought to tell them we think it's time to talk. Hamish is right about the timing if we decide to launch what amounts to a preemptive strike, but remember what Pritchard did when she had the advantage because of what was happening in Talbott. She didn't shoot first, she offered to talk , and I genuinely believe she's telling the truth when she says she didn't set out to derail the summit.

"So I think it's time we show Haven we can forego an advantage in the interests of peace, as well. We defeated them decisively here in Manticore, despite our own losses, and they know it. By now, they know we could destroy the Haven System any time we chose to, as well. So I suggest that we hold Eighth Fleet right here, close to home, in case we do end up needing it in Talbott. Instead of sending me to Nouveau Paris to hold a pistol to their heads and make them sign on the dotted line, send an accredited diplomat, instead. Someone who can tell them that we know we can destroy them, too, and that we're prepared to do it if we have to, but that we don't want to unless we have to. Give them the option and let them have a little time to think, a little time to approach the decision with dignity, Elizabeth, not just because they're lying face down in the dirt with the muzzle of a gun screwed into the backs of their necks. Give them the chance to surrender on some sort of reasonable terms before I have to go out and kill thousands of more people who might not have to die at all."

"It's time, Admiral," Felicidad Kolstad said.

"I know," Admiral Topolev replied.

He sat once more upon Mako 's flag bridge. Beyond the flagship's hull, fourteen more ships of Task Force One kept perfect formation upon her, and the brilliant beacon of Manticore-A blazed before them. They were only one light-week from that star, now, and they had decelerated to only twenty percent of light-speed. This was the point for which they had been headed ever since leaving Mesa four T-month before. Now it was time to do what they'd come here to do.

"Begin deployment," he said, and the enormous hatches opened and the pods began to spill free. The other units of Task Force One were elsewhere, closing on Manticore- B. They wouldn't be deploying their pods just yet, not until they'd reached their own preselected launch point. Topolev wished that he'd had more ships to commit to that prong of the attack, but the decision to move up Oyster Bay had dictated the available resources, and this prong had to be decisive. Besides, there were fewer targets in the Manticore-B subsystem, anyway.

It'll be enough, he told himself, watching as the pods disappeared steadily behind his decelerating starships, vanishing into the endless dark between the stars. It'll be enough. And in about five weeks, the Manties are going to get a late Christmas present they'll never forget . Ship Schematics

Characters

Aberu, Captain Ingeborg, SLN—operations officer, Frontier Fleet Task Group 3021. Abruzzi, Malachai—Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Education and Information, Solarian League.

Adenauer, Commander Dominica, RMN—operations officer, Battlecruiser Squadron 106; later operations officer, 10th Fleet.

Agnelli, Chief Steward Joanna, RMN—Aivars Terekhov's personal steward. al-Fanudahi, Captain Daud ibn Mamoun, SLN—a Battle Fleet analyst assigned to the Office of Operational Analysis.

Alcoforado, Captain Filipa, RMN—CO, HMS Theseus . Shulamit Onasis' flag captain. Alonso y Yáñez, Fleet Admiral Engracia, SLN—CO, Frontier Fleet, Solarian League Navy. Alquezar, Joachim—Prime Minister of the Talbott Quadrant, leader of the Constitutional Union Party. Anisimovna, Aldona—Manpower Inc. board member; a senior operative of the Mesan Alignment. Appleton, Lieutenant Martin, RMN—XO, HMS Roland.

Archer, Sir Roger Mackley—"Gwen" Archer's father.

Archer, Lieutenant Gervais Winton Erwin Neville ("Gwen" ), RMN—Michelle Henke's flag lieutenant.

Armstrong, Captain Victoria ("Vicki"), RMN—commanding officer HMS Artemis ; vice Admiral Gold Peak's flight captain.

Askew, Lieutenant Maitland ("Matt" ), SLN—assistant tactical officer, SLNS Jean Bart. Attunga, Marguerite—a reporter for Manticoran News Service, Inc.

Bardasano, Isabel—Jessyk Combine cadet board member; senior intelligence specialist, Mesan Alignment.

Billingsley, Master Steward Chris, RMN—Michelle Henke's personal steward. Blaine, Vice Admiral Jessup, RMN—CO, Task Force 302, Lynx Terminus Station. Boltitz, Helga—Henri Krietzmann's senior personal aide.

Bouchard, Lieutenant Commander Jerod, RMN—astrogator, HMS Artemis . Bourget, Commander Hildegard ("Hildy"), SLN—XO, SLNS Jean Bart. Boutin, President Alain—System President, New Tuscany.

Bouvier, Captain Adelbert, RHN—Republic of Haven Navy POW camp liaison responsible for Camp C7.

Braga, Lieutenant Commander Antonio, RMN—staff astrogator, Battlecruiser Squadron 81. Brangeard, Lieutenant Toussaint, RHN—CO dispatch boat RHNS Comet.

Brescatore, Captain George, RMN—CO, HMS Sabertooth .

Breshnikov, Captain Adolf, SLN—CO, SLNS Restitution. Evelyn Sigbee's flag captain. Brinkman, Chief Steward Clorinda, RMN—Naomi Kaplan's personal steward. Bristow, Lieutenant Oliver, SLN—sensor officer, Meyers Astro Control. Brulé, Anne-Louise—an employee of the New Tuscany Ministry of Information. Brunner, Lieutenant Simon, RMN—astrogator, HMS Reprise .

Byng, Admiral Josef, SLN—CO, Frontier Fleet Task Group 3021.

Cardot, Alesta—Minister of Foreign Affairs, New Tuscany.

Carlson, Captain Frederick, RMN—CO, HMS Quentin Saint-James. Sir Aivars Terekhov's flag captain.

Carmouche, Captain Tanguy—a fictitious New Tuscan merchant captain portrayed by Oliver Ratté. Carus, Commander Joseph, RMN—CO, HMS Javelin; SO, Destroyer Division 265.2. Casterlin, Commander Sterling, RMN—astrogator, Battlecruiser Squadron 106; later astrogator, 10th Fleet.

Challon, Armand—Deputy Minister of War, New Tuscany.

Challon, Victor—a powerful oligarch and politician in the New Tuscany System Parliament. Chandler, Commander Ambrose, RMN—Augustus Khumalo's staff intelligence officer. Chang, Rear Admiral Liam, SLN—CO, Battlecruiser Squadron 302.

Chase, Lieutenant Commander Julie, RMN—CO, HMS Lodestone.

Chatterjee, Commodore Ray ("Bear")—CO, Destroyer Squadron 301; SO, Destroyer Division 301.1.

Cheng, Admiral Hai-shwun, SLN—CO, Office of Operational Analysis, Solarian League Navy. Chernevsky, Anastasia—head of naval research and development, Mesan Alignment. Clifford, Petty Officer First-Class Cheryl, RMN—acting quartermaster, HMS Hexapuma . Coker, Petty Officer2/c Alan, SLN—sensor technician, Meyers Astro Control. Coleman, Commander Theresa, MAN—Frederick chief of staff, Task Force One. Colenso, Admiral Jennifer, MAN—CO, Task Force Two.

Conner, Captain Jerome, RMN—CO, HMS Penelope . Senior officer, Battlecruiser Division 106.1. Cortez, Admiral Sir Lucian, RMN—Fifth Space Lord, Royal Manticoran Navy. Cramer, Commander Wesley, RMN—CO, HMS Devastation .

Crandall, Fleet Admiral Sandra, SLN—CO, Task Force 496.

d'Arezzo, Midshipman Paulo, RMN—assigned HMS Hexapuma for midshipman's cruise. Da Orta e Diadoro, Jacinta—Interior Minister, Solarian League.

Dallas, Commander Albert ("Al"), RMN—XO, HMS Artemis . Danville, Surgeon Lieutenant Pryce, RMN—ship's surgeon, HMS Tristram. Denton, Lieutenant Commander Lewis, RMN—CO, HMS Reprise.

DesMoines, Commander John, RMN—CO, HMS Roland. "Bear" Chatterjee's flag captain. Detweiler, Albrecht—CEO, Mesan Alignment.

Detweiler, Benjamin—Albrecht Detweiler's son; Mesan Alignment director of military affairs. Detweiler, Collin—Albrecht Detweiler's son; Mesan Alignment director of intelligence operations. Detweiler, Daniel—Albrecht Detweiler's son; Mesan Alignment director of nongenetic R&D. Detweiler, Evelina—Albrecht Detweiler's wife; a senior genetic researcher for the Mesan Alignment. Detweiler, Everett—Albrecht Detweiler's son; Mesan Alignment director of genetic R&D. Detweiler, Franklin—Albrecht Detweiler's son; Mesan Alignment director of political strategy. Detweiler, Gervais—Albrecht Detweiler's son; Mesan Alignment director of foreign affairs. Diego, Commander Wilton, RMN—tactical officer, HMS Artemis . Drewson, Captain Ellis, RMN—CO, HMS Kodiak .

Duchovny, Captain Agafia Denisevna, RMN—CO, HMS Horatius .

Dusserre, Damien—Minister of security, New Tuscany.

Edwards, Lieutenant Commander William ("Bill"), RMN—communications officer, Battlecruiser Squadron 106; later communications officer, 10th Fleet.

Epstein, Lieutenant Commander Jessica—senior tracking officer, Perimeter Security Command, Manticore Binary System.

Fernandez, Lieutenant Commander Kyle, RMN—communications officer, HMS Artemis . Filareta, Fleet Admiral Massimo, SLN—CO, Task Force 891.

FitzGerald, Commander Ansten, RMN—XO, HMS Hexapuma .

Flynn, Commander Sheila, MAN—chief of staff, Task Group 1.1.

Fonzarelli, Lieutenant Vincenzo, RMN—chief engineer, HMS Tristram. Foreman, Commander Clement, MAN—operations officer, Task Group 1.1. Garcia, Rear Admiral Jane, RMSN—senior officer, Monica Traffic Control. Gold Peak, Countess—see Michelle Henke.

Gold Peak, Admiral—see Michelle Henke.

Goulard, Commander Rochelle ("Roxy"), RMN—CO, HMS Kay . Guédon, Admiral Josette, NTN—chief of naval operations, New Tuscan Navy. Gutierrez, Lieutenant Mateo, Owens Steadholders Guard—Abigail Hearns' personal armsman. Gyulay, Shona—Prime Minister, Solarian League.

Haftner, Abednego—Henri Krietzmann's chief of staff.

Halstead, Captain Raymond, RMN—one of Project Apollo's project officers. Harahap, Damien—a former officer of the Solarian League Gendarmerie now working for Valery Ottweiler.

Harrison, Commander Dwayne, RMN—tactical officer, battlecruiser HMS Ajax . Hearns, Lieutenant Abigail, GSN—Miss Owens. Assistant tactical officer, HMS Hexapuma . Later tactical officer, HMS Tristram .

Hemphill, Admiral Sonja, RMN—Fourth Space Lord, Royal Manticoran Navy. Henke, Vice Admiral Gloria Michelle Samantha Evelyn, Countess Gold Peak—Elizabeth Winton's first cousin; fifth in succession for the throne of Manticore; CO 10th Fleet. Henke, Rear Admiral Gloria Michelle Samantha Evelyn, Countess Gold Peak—CO, battlecruiser squadron 81. Later vice admiral.

Hennessy, Lieutenant Commander Coleman, RMN—Sonja Hemphill's chief of staff. Henning, Lieutenant Commander Vivienne, MAN—staff astrogator, Task Force One. Hongbo, Vice-Commissioner Junyan—Lorcan Verrochio's senior OFS subordinate, Madras Sector. Horn, Commander Alexandra ("Alex"), RMN—XO, HMS Ajax . Houseman, Commander Frazier, RMN—XO, HMS Penelope . Acting chief of staff, Battlecruiser Division 106.1.

Huppé, Honorine—Minister of Trade, New Tuscany.

Hurskainen, President Stanley—President of the Mannerheim System Republic. Imbar, Efron—a reporter for Star Kingdom News.

Inbari, Lieutenant Commander Mazal, RMN—staff astrogator, Cruiser Squadron 94. Jackson, Lieutenant Thor, RMN—astrogator, HMS Roland.

Jackson, Lieutenant Aphrodite, RMN—electronic warfare officer, HMS Reprise . Jacobi, Captain Rachel, MAN—CO, freighter Wallaby .

Jeffers, Lieutenant Sherilyn, RMN—electronics warfare officer, HMS Tristram. Jenkins, Captain Vladislava, SLN—logistics officer, Frontier Fleet Task Group 3021. Johansen, Lieutenant Commander Barnabé, RMN—astrogator, HMS Quentin Saint-James . Kaminski, Lieutenant Albert, RMN—communications officer, Battlecruiser Squadron 81. Kaneshiro, Missile Tech 1/c Naomi, RMN—missile tech, HMS Tristram. Kaplan, Commander Naomi, RMN—tactical officer, HMS Hexapuma . Later CO, HMS Tristram . Karlberg, Commodore Emil—senior officer, Nuncio Space Force.

Kenichi, Captain Otmar, RMN—CO, HMS Marconi Williams.

Khumalo, Vice Admiral Augustus, RMN—senior officer, Talbot Station. Kingsford, Fleet Admiral Winston Seth, SLN—CO, Battle Fleet, Solarian League Navy. Kittow, Captain Joshua, RMN—XO, HMS Quentin Saint-James .

Kolokoltsov, Innokentiy Arsenovich—Permanent Senior Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, Solarian League.

Kolosov, Lieutenant Peter, RMN—XO, HMS Reprise .

Kolstad, Commander Felicidad, MAN—operations officer, Task Force One. Krietzmann, Henri—Minister of War, Talbott Quadrant.

L'anglais, Captain Prosper—CO, New Tuscan merchant ship Hélène Blondeau. Lababibi, Samiha—former President of the Spindle System; Treasury Minister, Talbott Quadrant. Landry, Lieutenant Commander Bridget, RMN—CO, HMS Dagger.

Laszlo, Commodore András—senior officer, Spindle System Navy.

Laycock, Captain Mariane, RMN—CO, HMS Julian Lister .

Le Vern, Lieutenant Herschel, RMN—logistics officer, HMS Quentin Saint-James. Lecter, Captain (JG) Cynthia, RMN—chief of staff, Battlecruiser Squadron 106; later chief of staff, 10th Fleet.

Lewis, Commander Ginger, RMN—chief engineer, HMS Hexapuma . Lewis, Commander Stillwell ("Stilt"), RMN—operations officer, Cruiser Squadron 94. Low Delhi, Baroness—see Admiral Sonja Hemphill.

Lynch, Commander Horace, RMN—tactical officer, HMS Quentin Saint-James . MacArtney, Nathan—Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Interior, Solarian League. MacKechie, Major Esmé, RMMC—CO, Marine detachment, HMS Artemis . MacMinn, Captain Eachann, RMN—CO, HMS Duke of Cromarty.

MaCuill, Captain Willard, SLN—staff communications officer, Frontier Fleet Task Group 3021. MaGuire, Master Chief Alice, RMN—bosun, HMS Ajax .

Manfredi, Commander Oliver, RMN—chief of staff, Battlecruiser Squadron 81. Markussen, Leontina—Minister of Education and Information, Solarian League. Maslov, Lieutenant Isaiah, RMN—EWO, HMS Artemis .

Masters, Captain Eric, MAN—CO, MANS Chameleon ; Karol Østby's flag captain. Matsuko, Dame Estelle—Baroness Medusa, Imperial Governor, Talbott Quadrant. McClelland, Commander Martin, MAN—staff electronics warfare officer, Task Force One. McCormick, Lieutenant Clinton, RMN—tracking officer, Perimeter Security Command, Manticore Binary System.

McGill, Lieutenant Heather, RMN—tactical officer, HMS Reprise . McIver, Commander Dabney, RMN—chief of staff, Battlecruiser Division 106.2. Medusa, Baroness—see Dame Estelle Matsuko.

Metcalf, Jansen—Mesan ambassador to New Tuscany.

Mikhailov, Captain Diego, RMN—CO, HMS Ajax .

Miskin, Commander Edward, RMN—CO, HMS Galahad.

Mizawa, Captain Warden, SLN—CO, SLNS Jean Bart; Josef Byng's flag captain. Molyneux, Lieutenant (JG) Gladys, RMN—junior tactical officer, HMS Tristram. Monahan, Ensign Rachel, RMN—midshipwoman assigned to midshipman's cruise, HMS Reprise . Montella, Lieutenant Atalante, RMN—communications officer, Cruiser Squadron 94. Morgan, Captain (JG) Frank, GSN—CO, HMS Gawain. Jacob Zavala's flag captain. Musgrave, Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin, GSN—bosun, HMS Tristram. Myau, Surgeon Lieutenant Zhin, RMN—ship's surgeon, HMS Quentin Saint-James. Nagchaudhuri, Lieutenant Commander Amal, RMN—communications officer, HMS Hexapuma . Nelson, Rear Admiral Gordon, SLN—CO, Battlecruiser Squadron 201.

Ning, Captain Kwo-Lai, RMN—CO, HMS Romulus .

Noorlander, Harbrecht—Treasury Minister, Solarian League.

O'Malley, Vice Admiral Quentin, RMN—CO, Task Group 302.1.

O'Reilly, Lieutenant Wanda, RMN—communications officer, HMS Tristram. O'Shaughnessy, Gregor—Dame Estelle Matsuko's senior civilian intelligence analyst. Ødegaard, Lieutenant Commander Mateuz, RMN—staff intelligence officer, Cruiser Squadron 94. Olson, Lieutenant Commander Lori, RMN—operations officer, Destroyer Squadron 301. Onassis, Commodore Shulamit, RMN—senior officer, Battlecruiser Division 106.2. Orban, Surgeon Lieutenant Commander Lajos, RMN—ship's doctor, HMS Hexapuma . Østby, Commodore Karol, MAN—CO, Task Group 1.1.

Ottweiler, Valery—a senior diplomat for the Mesa System.

Oversteegen, Rear Admiral Michael, RMN—CO, Battlecruiser Squadron 108. Pélisard, Nicholas—Minister of War, New Tuscany.

Pershing, Lieutenant Commander John, RMN—CO, HMS Raven.

Petersen, Lieutenant Linda, RMN—astrogator, HMS Javelin .

Pettigrew, Sensor Tech 1/c Isaiah, GSN—sensor tech, HMS Tristram. Pickering, Captain Henry, RMN—CO, HMS Daedalus .

Pope, Commander Tom, RMN—chief of staff, Cruiser Squadron 94.

Quartermain, Omosupe—Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Commerce, Solarian League. Rajampet, Fleet Admiral Kaushal Rajani, SLN—chief of naval operations, Solarian League Navy. Ratté, Oliver—an employee of the New Tuscany Ministry of Information. Razumovsky, Captain Lex, RMN—CO, HMS Malachai.

Redmont, Admiral Pierre, RHN—CO, "Bogey Two," Battle of Solon. Redondo, Consuela—a reporter for the Sphinx News Association.

Richardson, Lieutenant Osama, RMN—chief engineer, HMS Reprise . Roach, Captain Hal, RMN—XO, Charleston Center for Admiralty Law.

Rochefort, Lieutenant Léopold, NTN—communications officer aboard space station Giselle. Roelas y Valiente, Marcelito Lorenzo—Foreign Minister, Solarian League. Ronayne, Brangwen—Attorney General, Solarian League.

Rützel, Lieutenant Commander Tobias ("Toby"), RMN—CO, HMS Gaheris . Sackett, Commodore Lemuel—senior officer, Montana system Navy.

Sarkozy, Surgeon Lieutenant Ruth, RMN—ship's doctor, HMS Vigilant , transferred to HMS

Hexapuma following Battle of Monica.

Sarnow, Admiral Mark, RMN—senior officer naval forces assigned to the Silesian Confederacy. Saunders, Captain Victoria, RMN—CO, HMS Hercules .

Schroeder, Captain Federico, SLN—staff astrogator, Frontier Fleet Task Group 3021. Seacrest, Captain (JG) Ellen, RMN—CO, HMS Lancelot.

Séguin, Captain Gabrielle, NTN—CO, NTNS Camille.

Shaw, Captain Terrence, RMN—Sir Lucian Cortez' chief of staff.

Shoupe, Captain Loretta, RMN—Augustus Khumalo's chief of staff.

Sigbee, Rear Admiral Evelyn, SLN—CO, Battlecruiser Squadron 112.

Simpkins, Lieutenant Hosea, GSN—astrogator, HMS Tristram.

Sloan, Chief Petty Officer Tamara, RMN—HMS Reprise .

Stackpole, Lieutenant Commander John, RMN—operations officer, Battlecruiser Squadron 81. Sung, Commodore Roderick, MAN—CO, Task Group 2.1.

Sybil Moorehead—Joachim Alquezar's chief of staff.

Sywan, Mang—Minister of Commerce, Solarian League.

Szegdi, Commander Lindsey, RMN—CO, HMS Ivanhoe.

Taketomo, Kunimichi—Minister of Defense, Solarian League.

Taliadoros, Kyrillos—Aldona Anisimovna's genetically enhanced bodyguard. Tallman, Lieutenant Commander Alvin, RMN—XO, HMS Tristram.

Teague, Captain Irene, SLN—a Frontier Fleet analyst assigned to the Office of Operational Analysis. Teke, Captain Rachel, RMN—CO, HMS Slipstream.

Terekhov, Captain Aivars, RMN—CO, HMS Hexapuma . Later commodore. (See Sir Aivars Terekhov, below)

Terekhov, Commodore Sir Aivars, RMN—CO, Cruiser Squadron 94. (See Aivars Terekhov, above)

Tersteeg, Lieutenant Commander Maxwell, RMN—electronics warfare officer, Battlecruiser Squadron 106; later, EWO, 10th Fleet.

Terwilliger, Captain Vincenzo, RMN—CO, HMS Black Rose; Quentin O'Malley's flag captain. Thimár, Admiral Karl-Heinz, SLN—CO, Office of Naval Intelligence, Solarian League Navy. Thimár, Rear Admiral Karlotte, SLN—chief of staff, Frontier Fleet Task Group 3021. Thurgood, Commodore Francis, SLN—senior officer, Madras Sector Detachment, Frontier Fleet. Tigh, Lieutenant Commander William, RMN—chief engineer, HMS Ajax . Topolev, Admiral Frederick, MAN—CO, Task Force One.

Török, Lieutenant Commander Iona, RMN—communications officer, HMS Quentin Saint-James. Treacher, Lieutenant Commander Jackson, RMN—logistics officer, Battlecruiser Squadron 106; later logistics officer, 10th Fleet.

Trudeau, Lieutenant Jayne, RMN—communications officer, HMS Reprise . Turner, Commodore Arlo, RMN—XO, POW Camp C7, Haven.

Turner, Captain Jedidiah, RMN—CO, HMS Jason .

Tyler, President Roberto—President Republic of Monica.

Van Dort, Bernardus—founder and ex-chairman of the Rembrandt Trade Union. Special Minister without Portfolio of the Alquezar Government.

Van Scheldt, Paul—Joachim Alquezar's appointments secretary.

Varislav, Ensign Bradley, RMN—junior tactical officer, HMS Reprise . Verrochio, Commissioner Lorcan—Office of Frontier Security administrator for the Madras Sector. Vézien, Prime Minister Maxime—Prime Minister, New Tuscany.

Walsh, Captain Joshua, MAN—CO, MANS Mako ; Frederick Topolev's flag captain. Wang, Astrid—Innokentiy Kolokoltsov's personal assistant and chief of staff. Winton-Travis, The Honorable Frederick Roger—CEO Of Apex Industrial Group; Elizabeth III's cousin; member of the Conservative Association.

Wodoslawski, Agatá—Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Treasury, Solarian League. Wright, Commander Jason, RMN—chief of staff, Destroyer Squadron 301. Wright, Lieutenant Commander Tobias, RMN—astrogator, HMS Hexapuma . Xamar, Lieutenant Nicasio, RMN—assistant tactical officer, HMS Tristram. Yang, Captain Sharon, SLN—CO, SLNS Resourceful.

Yao, President Kun Chol—President and head of state, Solarian League. Zagorski, Chief Warrant Officer Sylwester, RMN—logistics officer, HMS Tristram. Zavala, Captain Jacob—SO, Destroyer Division 301.2.

Zeiss, Commander Ursula, SLN—tactical officer, SLNS Jean Bart. Zilwicki, Ensign Helen, RMN—Sir Aivars Terekhov's flag lieutenant. (See Midshipwoman Helen Zilwicki.)

Zilwicki, Midshipwoman Helen, RMN—assigned HMS Hexapuma for midshipman's cruise. Later ensign. (See Ensign Helen Zilwicki.)

THE END

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