"Yes, Ma’am," Giscard said. "And my objective?"

"We’ll get to the territorial objectives in a minute," she told him, neither voice nor expression showing a hint of her frustration with Saint-Just’s foot-dragging. "But what matters far more than any star system you may raid or capture is your moral objective. So far in this war, we’ve danced to the Manties’ piping. I know that’s not the official line, but here in this briefing room, we simply cannot afford to ignore objective realities."

This time she did glance at Fontein, but her people’s commissioner only looked back at her without a word, and she returned her own gaze to Giscard.

"That stops now, Javier," she told him softly, using his first name for the very first time. "We must assert at least some control over our own strategic fate by forcing them to dance to our tune for a change, and you’re the man we’ve picked to play the music. Are you up for it?"

Damn, but she’s good, a small voice mused in the back of Giscard’s brain. He felt the siren call of her personality, the enthusiasm and hope she’d fanned by the apparently simple yet ultimately profound fact of speaking the truth openly... and inviting him to follow her. And I want to, he marveled. Even with all I’ve ever heard about her, even knowing the dangers of even looking like I’ve committed to "her faction," I want to follow her.

"Yes, Ma’am," he heard his voice say. "I’m up for it."

"Good," she said, and her smile was fiercer... and welcoming. "In that case, Citizen Admiral Giscard, welcome to command of Operation Icarus."

Citizen Admiral Giscard, CO Twelfth Fleet, stepped through the briefing room hatch aboard his new flagship and looked around the compartment at the equally new staff charged with helping him plan and execute Operation Icarus. Personally, he would have preferred to call it Operation Daedalus, since at least Daedalus had survived mankind’s first flight, but no one had asked him.

Besides, I probably wouldn’t worry about the "portents" of naming operations myself if the Manties hadn’t kicked our asses so often.

He brushed that aside and crossed to the empty chair at the head of the briefing room table, trailed by Eloise Pritchart. She followed him like the silent, drifting eye of the Committee of Public Safety, her public, on-duty face as cold and emotionless as it always was, and slipped into her own seat at his right hand without a word.

By and large, he reflected, he was satisfied with both his flagship and his staff. PNS Salamis wasn’t the youngest superdreadnought in the People’s Navy’s inventory, and she’d taken severe damage at the Third Battle of Nightingale. But she’d just completed repairs and a total overhaul, and she was all shiny and new inside at the moment. Even better, Citizen Captain Short, her CO, reported that her upgraded systems’ reliability was at virtually a hundred percent. How long that would remain true remained to be seen, but Short seemed pleased with the quality of her Engineering Department, so perhaps they could anticipate better maintenance than usual.

He adjusted his chair comfortably and brought his terminal on-line while he let his mind run over the details about Salamis’ readiness already neatly filed in his memory. Then he set them aside and turned his hazel eyes on the staffers sitting around the table.

Despite McQueen’s promise of as free a hand "as possible" in their selection, he’d been unable to exercise anything approaching the degree of control an officer of his seniority would have wielded before the Harris Assassination. The only two he’d really insisted upon had been Citizen Commander Andrew MacIntosh, his new ops officer, and Citizen Commander Frances Tyler, his astrogator.

He’d never actually served with MacIntosh, but he expected good things from him. Most importantly, the black-haired, gray-eyed citizen commander had a reputation for energy and audacity. Both those qualities would be in high demand for Operation Icarus, and both had become unfortunately rare after the purges.

Tyler was another matter. "Franny" Tyler was only twenty-nine T-years old, young for her rank even in the post-Coup People’s Navy, and Giscard had done his best to guide and guard her career over the last five or six years. There was a certain danger in that—for both of them—though Tyler probably didn’t really realize the extent to which he’d acted as her patron. Given the vivacious young redhead’s attractiveness, some might have assumed he had more than simply professional reasons for sheepdogging her career, but they would have been wrong. He’d seen something in her as a junior lieutenant—not just ability, though she certainly had that, but the willingness to take risks in the performance of her duty. Like MacIntosh, she not only accepted but actually seemed to relish the prospect of assuming additional responsibilities, almost as if (unlike the wiser and more wary of her contemporaries) she saw those responsibilities as opportunities and not simply more chances to fail and attract the ire of her superiors and StateSec. That sort of officer was more valuable than Detweiler rubies to any navy, but especially so to one like the People’s Navy.

Physically, Citizen Captain Leander Joubert, Giscard’s new chief of staff, closely resembled MacIntosh. He was taller—a hundred and eighty-five centimeters to MacIntosh’s hundred and eighty-one—and had brown eyes instead of gray, but both had the same dark complexions and black hair, and they were within four T-years of one another. But physical resemblance aside, Joubert was nothing at all like MacIntosh or Tyler. At thirty-one, he was even younger for his rank than Tyler was for hers, and that would have been enough to pop warning flags in Giscard’s mind under any circumstances. Not that the man wasn’t good at his job. He was. It was just that when someone catapulted from lieutenant to captain in under four T-years, one had to wonder if there might not be reasons other than professional competence for his extraordinary rise. Add the fact that Joubert had been insisted upon—quite emphatically—by Citizen Commissioner Pritchart with the powerful support of unnamed individuals in State Security, and one no longer had to wonder. Giscard had protested as strongly as he dared, for no admiral could be expected to relish the thought of having a political informer as his chief of staff, but in truth, he was less unhappy with Joubert’s presence than his complaints suggested. There were, after all, ways to neutralize one’s superiors’ spies... especially if one knew exactly who those spies were.

The rest of the staff were less known qualities. Citizen Lieutenant Commander Julia Lapisch, his staff com officer, seemed a competent sort, but she was very quiet. Only a couple of years older than Tyler, she appeared to be one of those officers who had found survival by remaining completely apolitical, and she seemed to emerge from her shell only to deal with professional matters. Coupled with the slender, delicate physique her low-gravity home world of Midsummer had produced, she had an almost elfin air of disassociation, like someone not quite completely in synch with the universe about her.

Citizen Lieutenant Madison Thaddeus, his new intelligence officer, was another puzzle. At forty-two, he was the oldest member of Giscard’s staff, despite his relatively junior rank. His efficiency reports were uniformly excellent, and he had a reputation as a skilled analyst, with an ability to get inside the opposition’s head when it came to drafting enemy intentions analyses, yet he seemed stuck at lieutenant’s rank. That probably indicated that somewhere in his StateSec file (which not even Pritchart had yet had the opportunity to peruse) someone had recorded doubts about his political reliability. No other explanation for his stalled promotion seemed likely, yet the fact that he hadn’t been purged—or at least removed from so sensitive a slot as staff intelligence—would appear to indicate a rare triumph of ability over someone else’s paranoia.