"So what do we do, Sir?" he asked finally.

"An excellent question," Theisman murmured. "Well, we know some of them are out of the way. And if they're going on to Casca, they can't be back here for ten or twelve days." He tapped on his teeth for a moment. "That gives us a window, assuming these turkeys know what to do with it. Wake up Engineering, Al."

"Yes, Sir. Will we be heading for Endicott or Blackbird, Sir?"

"Endicott. We need to tell Captain Yu—and Sword Simonds, of course—about this. A Masadan courier would take too long getting home, so I think we'll just take this news ourselves."

"Yes, Sir."

Theisman returned to his command chair and leaned back, watching the outgoing impeller traces crawl across the display under two hundred gravities of acceleration. Readiness reports flowed in, and he acknowledged them, but there was no rush, and he wanted to be certain one of those crimson dots wasn't going to turn around and head back to Grayson. He waited almost three more hours, until the light codes' velocity had reached 44,000 KPS, and they crossed the hyper limit and vanished from his gravitic sensors.

"All right, Al. Take us out of here," he said then, and the seventy-five-thousand-ton Masadan destroyer Principality, whose wardroom crest still proclaimed her to be the PNS Breslau, crept carefully away from the asteroid in whose lee she had lain hidden.

Passive sensors probed before her like sensitive cat's whiskers while Theisman made himself sit relaxed in his command chair, projecting an air of calm, and the truth was that Principality herself was safe enough. There wasn't a ship in the Grayson Navy capable of catching or engaging her, and despite the belt's bustling mining activity, the extraction ships tended to cluster in the areas where the asteroids themselves clustered. Principality avoided those spots like the plague and crept along under a fraction of her maximum power, for if the locals' sensor nets were crude and short-ranged, there was at least one modern warship in Grayson orbit, and Theisman had no intention of being spotted by her. Detection could be catastrophic to Haven's plans ... not to mention the more immediate problem that Captain Yu would no doubt string his testicles on a necklace if he let that happen.

It took long, wearing hours, but at last his ship was far enough from Grayson to increase power and curve away from the asteroid belt. Principality's gravitics would detect any civilian vessel far out of radar range and long before she was seen herself, with plenty of time to kill her drive, and her velocity climbed steeply as she headed out-system. She needed to be at least thirty light-minutes from the planet before she translated into hyper, far enough for her hyper footprint to be undetectable, and Theisman relaxed with a quiet sigh as he realized he'd gotten cleanly away once more.

Now it only remained to be seen what Captain Yu—and Sword Simonds, of course—would do with his data.

"Thank you for coming, Admiral Courvosier."

High Admiral Yanakov stood to greet his guest, and Courvosier's eyebrows twitched as he saw the two women at the table, for the richness of their clothing and jewelry proclaimed that they were two of Yanakov's wives. It was almost unheard of for a Grayson wife to appear at even a private dinner unless the guests were among her husband's closest friends, and Yanakov knew Courvosier knew that ... which made their presence a message.

"Thank you for inviting me," Courvosier replied, ignoring, as etiquette demanded, the women's presence, for no one had introduced them. But then—

"Allow me to present my wives," Yanakov continued. "Rachel, my first wife." The woman to his right smiled, meeting Courvosier's eyes with a frankness which surprised the Manticoran. "Rachel, Admiral Raoul Courvosier."

"Welcome to our home, Admiral." Rachel's voice was like her smile, soft but self-assured, and she extended a hand. Courvosier hadn't been briefed on how one greeted a high-ranking Grayson wife, but he hadn't spent a lifetime in the service of his Queen for nothing. He bowed over the offered hand and brushed it with his lips.

"Thank you, Madam Yanakov. I'm honored to be here."

Her eyes widened as he kissed her hand, but she neither pulled away nor showed any sign of discomfort. Indeed, she smiled again as he released her, and then laid her hand on the other woman's shoulder.

"May I present Anna, Bernard's third wife." Anna looked up with a smile of her own and held out her hand to be kissed in turn. "My sister Esther asked me to extend her regrets, Admiral," Rachel continued, and Courvosier almost blinked before he remembered that all wives of a Grayson household referred to one another as sisters. "She's come down with a bug, and Dr. Howard ordered her into bed." Rachel's gracious smile turned into something suspiciously like a grin this time. "I assure you, but for that, she would have been here. Like all of us, she's been most eager to meet you."

Courvosier wondered if it would be proper to express a desire to meet Esther some other time. It seemed harmless enough, but Grayson men were jealous of their wives. Better to settle for something with less faux pas potential.

"Please tell her I'm very sorry her illness kept her away."

"I will," Rachel replied, and waved gracefully at the fourth chair.

She rang a small bell as Courvosier sat, and silent, efficient serving women—girls, really, he thought, reminding himself that these people didn't have access to prolong—bustled in with trays of food.

"Please don't be afraid to eat freely, Admiral," Yanakov said as a plate was set before his guest. "All these foods are from the orbital farms. Their metal levels are as low as anything grown on Manticore or Sphinx."

Courvosier nodded, but he knew better than to dig straight in. He waited until the servants had withdrawn, then bowed his head respectfully as Yanakov recited a brief blessing over the food.

Grayson cuisine reminded Courvosier of a cross between Old Earth Oriental and something he might have encountered in New Toscana on Manticore, and this meal was excellent. Yanakov's chef would have rated a full five stars even at Cosmo's, and the table conversation was nothing like what he'd imagined it would be. Yanakov and his officers—all Graysons, in fact—had been so stiff and unnatural—or half-openly contemptuous—in the presence of his own female officers that he'd developed a mental picture of a dour, humorless home life in which women were rarely seen and never heard, but Rachel and Anna Yanakov were lively and eloquent. Their affection for their husband was unmistakable, and Yanakov himself was a totally different man, out from behind the barriers of formality at last, comfortable and confident in his own setting. Courvosier had no doubt the evening was intended, in part at least, to show him the more human side of Grayson, yet he felt himself relaxing in the genuine aura of welcome.

Soft music played while they ate. It wasn't the sort of music Courvosier was used to—Grayson's classical music was based on something called "Country and Western"—but it was curiously lively, despite an undertone of sadness. The dining room was large, even by Manticoran planetary standards, with a high, arched ceiling and rich, tapestry-like wall hangings and old-style oil paintings. Religious themes predominated, but not exclusively, and the landscapes among them had a haunting, bittersweet beauty. There was a sense of the lost about them, like windows into Elfland, as if the loveliness they showed could never be wholly home to the humans who lived upon this world and yet could never be anything but home, either.

And between two of those yearning landscapes was a huge bay window ... double-paned and sealed hermetically into its frame, with an air filtration intake under it.