Fourteen year-old Judith discovered the best times to extract a VR rig from the lockers. Unlike her stepsons, who gloried in battle scenarios, she concentrated on the boring programs: Piloting a ship. Preparing for a hyper translation and adjusting to post-translation nausea. Checking and understanding astrogation coordinates. Scanning for communications.

In careful secrecy, Judith forced herself to learn how to get the most out of each of the preprogrammed routines that ran the essential ship stations, knowing that when her time came she would likely have to do without much in the way of a crew.

Judith was working her way through a particularly complicated scenario dealing with the aftereffects of a power surge following a return to N-space, when the VR rig was jerked off her face.

"What do you think you are doing?" Ephraim's senior wife hissed.

Like every other member of his graduating class, Michael Winton was given an opportunity to visit his family before reporting to his new assignment. It was good to be home, though Michael's suite at Mount Royal Palace seemed unnecessarily large and rather empty without Todd's explosively effusive companionship.

Empty, that was, unless Beth's son, Roger, came exploding into the room. Roger was three T-years old, with all the energy and curiosity that could be wished for in that delightful age when a baby is becoming distinctly a little boy.

When Roger reached his sixth Manticoran birthday—which would make him just over ten, by standard reckoning—he would be subjected to a comprehensive battery of physical and mental tests meant to guarantee that he was suited to be the next king. Until then, Michael would continue to hold the title Crown Prince and be next in the succession. Remembering his own encounter with a similar battery of tests, Michael had no doubt that Roger would pass with well over the minimum requirements.

Seven more years to go, Michael thought without the least trace of wistfulness. Then I can be just plain Prince Michael again—and if Beth has another kid or two, I'll drop so far down the succession I'll be like Aunt Caitrin, just another superfluous noble. 

He grinned at the thought, swinging a delightedly shrieking Roger around and around in circles. He thought there was probably no one less superfluous than Duchess Winton-Henke, his late father's younger sister, but he knew she'd enjoy the joke as much as he did.

All in all, Michael didn't mind having someone else make his bed, having the luxury to sleep late, the opportunity to wear something other than his uniform. The business of the Star Kingdom did not precisely stop because the Crown Prince was home from school, but Beth found excuses to avoid several formal engagements in favor of quiet evenings with her brother.

Even when Beth couldn't get free, Queen Mother Angelique might be available, and Roger always wanted a chance to play. For a few days, Michael could almost forget that his was a family any different from any other.

One evening after Justin had gone to put Roger to bed, brother and sister sat playing chess. Their only audience was Beth's treecat, Ariel, who sprawled drowsily across his human's lap. To Michael's complete surprise, Beth extended one long finger and tipped over her king, conceding the game to him.

"I haven't checkmated you yet!" Michael protested.

"You would have in two moves," Beth said, "and I have something I need to discuss with you."

Michael heard an odd twang in his sister's voice, a barely suppressed tension that warned him that the Queen was going to confide in him information that at least some of her advisors would rather she didn't—and that she was worried that their judgement, rather than her own, might be right.

Michael kept his observation of Beth's mood to himself, reaching instead for the chess pieces and beginning to methodically fit them into their velvet-lined niches in the polished hardwood box.

After a few moments, Beth continued, "I know where Intransigent is being sent."

Michael cocked an eyebrow at her. He'd been told that his new posting, the light cruiser Intransigent, was being sent to Silesia. He didn't know which sector, but he expected they'd be taking over one of the standard anti-pirate patrols. If that was the case, though, why did Beth look so thoughtful?

"Don't be a pig," Michael prompted when her silence stretched on. "Give."

Beth smiled at the bantering note in his voice.

"Intransigent isn't going to Silesia," she said, "at least not right away. She's being diverted to deliver new orders and relief personnel to a diplomatic contingent we have negotiating with the government of the Endicott System."

"Endicott?" Michael asked, not certain he had heard right.

Beth nodded. Stealing a few chess pieces from their velvet niches, she worked up a makeshift map on the board that still rested between them.

"This queen," she said, setting the carved ebony figure at one extreme, "is the Star Kingdom. This," she said, setting the white king at the other extreme, "is the People's Republic of Haven."

"They wouldn't appreciate your using a king," Michael teased. "They're a republic, not a decadent, top-heavy monarchy like us."

Beth grinned, but she didn't exchange the piece. Instead she drew imaginary, curving lines marking the sphere of influence ruled by each piece. The area ruled by the black queen was markedly smaller than the one ruled by the white king.

"Between our two less than harmonious governments," Beth went on, "is a certain amount of stellar real estate not claimed by either us or the Peeps. Unlike the People's Republic, the Star Kingdom of Manticore does not advocate a policy of forced annexation."

The Queen spoke lightly, but there was steel beneath her words, steel that had been forged and tempered through numerous battles in the political arena against those of Beth's subjects who felt that Elizabeth the Third, like her father before her, was a bit too fond of acquiring new extra-system responsibilities for the Star Kingdom. The conflict had come to a head with the acquisition of the Basilisk System in the very year Elizabeth had been born. Despite the passage of twenty-some years and the increasingly obvious predation of the PRH, the arguments against keeping the Basilisk System had not quieted in the least.

For Michael, his term at the Academy had only made him more certain, not less, that the policy followed by the Crown was the only sensible one. The words "Star Kingdom" might sound sweepingly grand, but when it came down to facts, before the acquisition of the Basilisk System, the Star Kingdom had only been one tidy little binary solar system.

True, the Manticore System had been blessed with three habitable planets. True, it commanded a wormhole terminus that was the envy of its neighbors and the heart of a profitable trade empire. But the fact remained that one home system, now supplemented by a second much poorer system, was a very small empire in the face of all the habitable worlds within the vast region commanded by the People's Republic of Haven.

Beth now placed two bishops—one white, one black, Michael noticed in amusement—on the board so that they occupied a space between the two spheres of influence.

"Between us and the Peeps," she continued, "are a variety of neutral entities. Right now Manticoran diplomatic focus is on two of them—the only inhabited worlds in a volume twenty light years across and rather conveniently placed between us and the Peeps. One of these," she touched the black bishop, "occupies the Yeltsin's Star System. The other occupies the Endicott System."

"The Graysons," Michael said, showing off just a little, "and the Masadans."

Elizabeth cocked an eyebrow at him, clearly impressed.

"Pretty good. I guess you did learn something at the Academy."