"Good." Medusa's nostrils flared. "I only hope that sanity leaks out somewhere in the League before anyone manages to get additional forces out our way. Or directed at the home system."

"You screened, Pat?" Sir Thomas Caparelli asked as his face appeared on Patricia Givens' com display. "I'm sorry I was out of the office, but Liesel told me you'd said it was urgent when I got back. And also that I wasn't to use my personal com?"

"That's right," Givens replied. "And I did tell her I needed you to screen back on a secure com."

She looked better than she had immediately after the disastrous attack, Caparelli thought, but "better" was a purely relative term. The shadows of guilt had retreated in her eyes, yet he was beginning to think they would never completely disappear, and the near hysteria of a certain portion of the Star Empire's news media hadn't helped. He doubted there was anything they could have said that she hadn't already said to herself—he knew that was true in his own case—but the angry, panic-driven sense of betrayal coming from that particular group of newsies and editorials had inspired them to hammer the "blatant intelligence failure" far harder than they'd hammered the rest of the Navy.

Realistically, neither he nor Givens could have expected anything else, Caparelli supposed. Public opinion had been wound tight enough with the combined euphoria of the Battle of Spindle and the looming threat of war against the Solarian League, and it was perfectly understandable why the psychological impact of the devastating onslaught had hit the Star Empire's subjects like a sledgehammer. And it was perfectly reasonable for those same subjects to want the heads of whoever had allowed it to happen. As a matter of fact, Caparelli agreed with them in many ways; that was why he'd submitted his resignation—twice. Unfortunately, in his opinion, it had been rejected twice, as well.

The first rejection had come from Hamish Alexander-Harrington, who'd pointed out—again—that no one could have seen something like this coming and that holding any individual or group of individuals responsible would be a blatant case of scapegoating.

Caparelli hadn't been able to logically dispute the first lord's analysis, but that didn't mean he'd agreed with it. Nor did it mean he was able to accept it, whatever logic might say. So he'd submitted his resignation a second time, this time directly to Queen Elizabeth . . . who'd returned it to him unread with an admonition "not to be silly." She'd accompanied that pithy bit of advice with a firm injunction to take his resignation back, to tear it up, and never to submit it to her again. First, because she agreed with Earl White Haven, and secondly (and, he suspected, even more pragmatically), because his abrupt departure from the Admiralty would look like a case of scapegoating. In the queen's opinion, the hysterical segment of public opinion represented a distinct minority, and she had no intention of allowing herself or the Grantville Government to fan the hysteria by looking as if they were racing about in a panic of their own, looking for someone—anyone —to blame.

And so, out of a sense of duty more than anything else, he'd stayed. And he'd supported White Haven when the first lord rejected Givens' resignation, as well. Which was why the two of them were still sitting in their offices having this discussion three and a half T-weeks after the attack.

He realized he'd allowed a silence to settle while his thoughts rattled back around the newly worn ruts in his brain, and he gave himself a shake.

"Sorry, Pat. Woolgathering, I guess."

"There's a lot of that going around," she said with biting irony, then inhaled sharply. "Sorry," she said in turn.

"Don't worry about it." He smiled. "But now that we're both here, what was it you needed to tell me?"

"Actually, this may be something we need to take to the PM and Her Majesty," Givens said, her expression and her tone both suddenly much more serious. "One of my people just brought me something from one of our 'black'—in this case, very black—Beowulf conduits."

Caparelli stiffened very slightly. Beowulf was, by any measure, Manticore's staunchest ally within the Solarian League. It was also the home system's biggest single trading partner, and a lot of Manticorans had married Beowulfers—and vice versa—over the centuries since the Junction had been discovered. The Harrington family was a case in point. Or, he corrected himself grimly, it had been, at least. When there'd been a Harrington family.

Beowulf was also the only League member system which had been kept routinely up to date on Manticoran military developments. The Beowulf System-Defense Force and the Royal Navy had been quietly in agreement that it would be in both services' best interests if Beowulf didn't suddenly began introducing Manticore's new tech goodies into its own ships, where they might find their way into the SLN's less than pristine hands, and the BSDF had somehow mysteriously failed to provide any of those "observers" the SLN had been so busily ignoring for so long. But that didn't mean Beowulf didn't have a very good basic grasp of what Manticore had been up to. Not only that, but Beowulf was the only non-Manticoran star system which had been included from the beginning in planning for Case Lacoцn, and there were all sorts of open channels of communication between the Beowulf Planetary Board of Directors and Her Majesty's Government.

Which was all well and good, but one of those little secrets polite people never mentioned was that even allies spied on one another. There were lots of reasons for that, particularly if the allies in question were less than totally confident about their "ally's" long-term intentions. That wasn't the case here, but another reason—and one which had operated in the case of Beowulf more than once—was because "spies" could exchange information that couldn't be exchanged openly. The sort of information that, for one reason or another, one government couldn't risk openly handing to another, no matter how friendly they were. And any "black" Beowulf conduits which reported to Pat Givens and ONI almost certainly came under that heading.

"All right," he told her. "I'm braced."

* * *

"This," Hamish Alexander-Harrington said, "is not good."

It was probably the most unnecessary observation he'd ever made, and he knew it. Still, someone had to break the ice of shocked dismay and get the conversation moving.

His wife glanced at him, her lips moving in a shadow of a smile as she sensed his thoughts, but his brother—seated across the conference table from them—snorted harshly.

"I suppose you could say it comes under that heading," he said. "Of course, it's had a lot of company there lately, hasn't it?"

"How much confidence do you have in this source, Admiral Givens?" Elizabeth Winton asked from her place at the head of the table.

"A high level, Your Majesty," Givens replied, and White Haven noticed that she looked more alive, more engaged, than he'd seen her since what everyone had come to think of as The Attack. "We haven't used this particular conduit very often. In fact, this is only the third message—aside from a handful of 'is this channel still open?' sort of exchanges—that's been passed through it, and it's been in existence for the better part of seventy T-years. Both of the other messages that came to us this way proved to be completely accurate, which is significant in its own right. More to the point, in my own mind, at least, that's a long time to maintain a back channel 'just in case.' Someone's invested a lot of effort in making sure it stayed open despite any changes in personnel—at either end. Which, to be honest, is the main reason I'm inclined to put so much trust in it now."