She felt Javier Giscard's death between them, just as she felt Alistair McKeon's and Raoul Courvoissier's and Jamie Candless' and so many others, and she finished very, very softly.

"Don't make me kill any more, Madam President. Please."

"Well?"

Eloise Pritchart looked around the table at her assembled cabinet. They sat in their normal meeting room, surrounded by a seamless, panoramic three hundred and sixty-degree view—from a combination of true windows and smart wall projections—of the city of Nouveau Paris. The sun was barely above the horizon, with a lingering tinge of early dawn redness, and none of her secretaries or their aides looked especially well rested.

"I think it's certainly dramatic," Henrietta Barloi replied after a moment.

The Secretary of Technology, like Tony Nesbitt at Commerce, had been one of the late, distinctly unlamented Arnold Giancola's supporters. Like Giancola's other allies within the cabinet, her horror appeared to have been completely genuine when Pritchart revealed the near certainty that Giancola, as the previous Secretary of State, was the one who'd actually manipulated the diplomatic correspondence which had led the Republic to resume military operations. The president had no doubt their reactions had been genuine, but that didn't change the fact that Barloi and Nesbitt remained the two cabinet secretaries who continued to nourish the greatest suspicion—not to mention resentment and hatred—where the Star Empire of Manticore was concerned.

Despite which, as far as Pritchart could tell, Barloi's response was more a throwaway remark, sparring for time, than anything resembling the notion that Haven should reject the opportunity.

"'Dramatic' is one way to put it, all right," Stan Gregory, the Secretary of Urban Affairs agreed wryly.

He was one of the secretaries who'd been out of the city last night. In fact, he'd been on the opposite side of the planet, and he'd been up and traveling for the better part of three hours to make this early morning meeting. Which didn't keep him from looking brighter-eyed and much more chipper than Pritchart herself felt at the moment.

"Dropping in on you literally in the middle of the night was a pretty flamboyant statement in its own right, Madam President," he continued. "The only question in my mind is whether it was all lights and mirrors, or whether Admiral Alexander-Harrington simply wanted to make sure she had your attention."

"Personally, I think it was a case of . . . gratuitous flamboyance, let's say." Rachel Hanriot's tone could have dehumidified an ocean, despite the fact that the Treasury Secretary was one of Pritchart's staunchest allies. "I'm not saying she's not here in a legitimate effort to negotiate, understand. But the entire way she's made her appearance—unannounced, no preliminary diplomacy at all, backed up by her entire fleet, arriving on the literal stroke of midnight in an un-armed civilian yacht and requesting planetary clearance . . . ."

Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head, and Denis LePic snorted in amusement.

"'Gratuitous flamboyance' or not, Rachel," the Attorney General said, "it certainly did get our attention, didn't it? And, frankly, given the way things've gone ever since Arnold got himself killed, I'm in favor of anything that moves us closer to ending the shooting before everything we've managed to accomplish gets blasted back to the stone age. So if Alexander-Harrington wanted to come in here naked, riding on the back of an Old Earth elephant, and twirling flaming batons in each hand, I'd still be delighted to see her!"

"I have to go along with Denis—assuming the offer's sincere and not just window dressing designed to put Manticore into a favorable diplomatic light before they yank the rug out from under us anyway," Sandra Staunton said. The Secretary of Biosciences looked troubled, her eyes worried. She'd been another Giancola supporter, and, like Nesbitt and Barloi, she continued to cherish more than a little suspicion where the Star Empire e was concerned. "Given how Elizabeth reacted to the Webster assassination and the attempt on Torch, and with the Battle of Manticore added to her list of 'Reasons I Hate Haven' on top of that, this entire out-of-the-blue offer of some sort of last-minute reprieve just rings a little false to me. Or maybe what I'm trying to say is that it seems way too good to be true."

"I know what you mean, Sandy." Tony Nesbitt's expression was almost equally troubled, and his tone was subdued. But he also shook his head. "I know what you mean, but I just can't see any reason they'd bother. Not after what they did to us at Manticore."

He looked rather pointedly at Thomas Theisman, and the Secretary of War returned his gaze levelly.

"I fully realize Operation Beatrice failed to achieve what we'd hoped to achieve, Tony," Pritchart said. "And I also fully realize the decision to authorize it was mine." Nesbitt looked at her, instead of Theisman, and her topaz gaze met his without flinching. "Under the circumstances, and given the intelligence appreciations available to both the Navy and the FIS at the time, I'd make the same call today, too. We weren't the ones who'd canceled a summit meeting and resumed military operations, and I fully agreed with Thomas that the only real option they'd left us—since they'd broken off negotiations and wouldn't even talk to us about any other possible solution—was to try and achieve outright military victory before they got their new weapon system fully deployed. As nearly as we can tell, we were almost right, too. None of which changes the fact that we were wrong, and that I authorized what turned out to be the worst military defeat our star nation has ever suffered."

There was silence in the Cabinet Room. Describing the Battle of Manticore as the "worst military defeat" the Republic of Haven or the People's Republic of Haven had ever suffered—in a single engagement, at least—while accurate, was definitely a case of understatement. Nor had Pritchart tried to conceal the scope of the disaster. Some details remained classified, but she'd refused to change her policy of telling the Republic's citizens the truth or abandon the transparency she'd adopted in place of the old Office of Public Information's propaganda, deception, and outright lies. Some of her political allies had argued with her about that—hard—because they'd anticipated a furious reaction born of frustration, fear, and a betrayed sense of desperation. And, to some extent, they'd been right. Indeed, there'd been calls, some of them infuriated, for Pritchart's resignation once the public realized the magnitude of the Navy's losses.

She'd rejected them, for several reasons. All of her cabinet secretaries knew at least one of those reasons was a fear that Giancola's unprovable treason would come out in the aftermath of any resignation on her part, with potentially disastrous consequences not just for the war effort but for the very future of the constitution all of them had fought so hard to restore.

Yet they also knew that particular reason had been distinctly secondary in her thinking. The most important factor had been that the President of the Republic was not simply its first minister. Under the constitution, Pritchart was no mere prime minister, able to resign her office and allow some other party or political leader to form a new government whenever a policy or decision proved unfortunate. For better or worse, for the remainder of her term, she was the Republic's head of state. Despite allthe criticism she'd taken, all the vicious attacks opposition political leaders (many of them longtime Giancola allies) had launched, she'd refused to abandon that constitutional principle, and all the muttered threats of impeachment over one trumped up charge or another had foundered upon the fact that a clear majority of the Republic's voters and their representatives still trusted her more than they trusted anyone else.