"Ladies and Gentlemen," she raised her wine, her voice deeper and more melodious—and confident—than Honor had expected, "the Queen!"

"The Queen!" The response rumbled back to her, glasses rose, and Wolcott slipped back into her chair with obvious relief as the formality was completed. She glanced up the table at her captain, and her face relaxed as she saw Honor's approving expression.

"You know," Courvosier murmured in Honor's ear, "I still remember the first time it was my turn to do that. Odd how terrifying it can be, isn't it?"

"All things are relative, Sir," Honor replied with a smile, "and I suppose it does us good. Weren't you the one who was telling me a Queen's officer has to understand diplomacy as well as tactics?"

"Now that, Captain, is a very true statement," another voice said, and Honor suppressed a grimace. "In fact, I only wish more Navy officers could realize that diplomacy is even more important than tactics and strategy," the Honorable Reginald Houseman continued in his deep, cultured baritone.

"I don't believe I can quite agree with that, Sir," Honor said quietly, hoping her irritation at his intrusion into a private conversation didn't show. "At least, not from the Navy's viewpoint. Important, yes, but it's our job to step in after diplomacy breaks down."

"Indeed?" Houseman smiled the superior smile Honor loathed. "I realize military people often lack the time for the study of history, but an ancient Old Earth soldier got it exactly right when he said war was simply the continuation of diplomacy by non-diplomatic means."

"That's something of a paraphrase, and that `simply' understates the case a bit, but I'll grant that it sums up the sense of General Clausewitz's remark." Houseman's eyes narrowed as Honor supplied Clausewitz's name and rank, and other conversations flagged as eyes turned toward them. "Of course, Clausewitz came out of the Napoleonic Era on Old Earth, heading into the Final Age of Western Imperialism, and On War isn't really about politics or diplomacy, except inasmuch as they and warfare are all instruments of state policy. Actually, Sun Tzu made the same point over two thousand T-years earlier." A hint of red tinged Houseman's jowls, and Honor smiled pleasantly. "Still, neither of them had a monopoly on the concept, did they? Tanakov said much the same thing in his Tenets of War just after the Warshawski sail made interstellar warfare possible, and Gustav Anderman certainly demonstrated the way in which diplomatic and military means can be used to reinforce one another when he took over New Berlin and built it into the Anderman Empire in the sixteenth century. Have you read his Sternenkrieg, Mr. Houseman? It's an interesting distillation of most of the earlier theorists with a few genuine twists of his own, probably from his personal background as a mercenary. I think Admiral White Haven's translation is probably the best available."

"Ah, no, I'm afraid I haven't," Houseman said, and Courvosier blotted his lips with his napkin to hide a grin. "My point, however," the diplomat continued doggedly, "is that properly conducted diplomacy renders military strategy irrelevant by precluding the need for war." He sniffed and swirled his wine gently, and his superior smile reasserted itself.

"Reasonable people negotiating in good faith can always reach reasonable compromises, Captain. Take our situation here, for example. Neither Yeltsin's Star nor the Endicott System have any real resources to attract interstellar commerce, but they each have an inhabited world, with almost nine billion people between them, and they lie less than two days apart for a hyper freighter. That gives them ample opportunity to create local prosperity, yet both economies are at best borderline ... which is why it's so absurd that they've been at one another's throats for so long over some silly religious difference! They should be trading with one another, building a mutually supported, secure economic future, not wasting resources on an arms race." He shook his head sorrowfully. "Once they discover the advantages of peaceful trade—once they each realize their prosperity depends on the other's—the situation will defuse itself without all this saber rattling."

Honor managed not to stare at him in disbelief, but if she hadn't known the admiral so well, she would have assumed someone had failed to brief Houseman. It would certainly be nice to make peace between Masada and Grayson, but her own reading of the download accompanying her orders had confirmed everything the admiral had said about their long-term hostility. And nice as it would be to put that enmity to rest, Manticore's fundamental purpose was to secure an ally against Haven, not engage in a peacemaking effort that was almost certainly doomed to failure.

"I'm sure that would be a desirable outcome, Mr. Houseman," she said after a moment, "but I don't know how realistic it is."

"Indeed?" Houseman bristled.

"They've been enemies for more than six hundred T-years," she pointed out as gently as she could, "and religious hatreds are among the most virulent known to man."

"That's why they need a fresh viewpoint, a third party from outside the basic equation who can bring them together."

"Excuse me, Sir, but I was under the impression our primary goals are to secure an ally and Fleet base rights and to prevent Haven from penetrating the region instead of us."

"Well, of course they are, Captain." Houseman's tone was just short of impatient. "But the best way to do that is to settle the locals' differences. The potential for instability and Havenite interference will remain as long as their hostility does, whatever else we may accomplish. Once we bring them together, however, we'll have two friends in the region, and there won't be any temptation for either of them to invite Haven in for military advantage. The best diplomatic glue is common interest, not simply a common enemy. Indeed," Houseman sipped his wine, "our entire involvement in this region stems from our own failure to find a common interest with the People's Republic, and it is a failure. There's always some way to avoid confrontation if one only looks deep enough and remembers that, in the long run, violence never solves anything. That's why we have diplomats, Captain Harrington—and why a resort to brute force is an indication of failed diplomacy, nothing more and nothing less."

Major Tomas Ramirez, commander of Fearless's Marine detachment, stared at Houseman in disbelief from further down the table. The heavyset, almost squat Marine had been twelve years old when Haven conquered his native Trevor's Star. He, his mother, and his sister had escaped to Manticore in the last refugee convoy through the Manticore Wormhole Junction; his father had stayed behind, on one of the warships that died to cover the retreat. Now his jaw tightened ominously as Houseman smiled at Honor, but Lieutenant Commander Higgins, Fearless's chief engineer, touched his forearm and jerked a tiny headshake. The little scene wasn't lost on Honor, and she sipped her own wine deliberately, then lowered her glass.

"I see," she said, and wondered how the admiral tolerated such a nincompoop as his second in command. Houseman had a reputation as a brilliant economist and, given Grayson's backward economy, sending him made sense, but he was also an ivory-tower intellectual who'd been plucked from a tenured position in Mannheim University's College of Economics for government service. Mannheim wasn't called "Socialist U" for nothing, and Houseman's prominent family was a vocal supporter of the Liberal Party. Neither of those facts were calculated to endear him to Captain Honor Harrington, and his simplistic notion of how to approach the Grayson-Masada hostility was downright frightening.