"And you think they wouldn't still be able to kill a lot of our ships and a lot of our spacers?" Wodoslawski demanded skeptically.

"Oh, they could hurt us," Rajampet conceded. "There's no way in the universe they could stop us, but I don't doubt we'd get hurt worse than the Navy's ever been hurt before. But that's beside the point, Agatб."

Her eyebrows arched skeptically, and he barked a short, sharp—and ugly—laugh.

"Of course it's beside the point!" he said. "The point of this is that a jumped up neobarb Navy's opened fire on the SLN, destroyed one of our warships, and captured an entire Solarian task group. We can't let that stand. No matter what it costs, we have to establish that no one—no one —fucks with the Solarian Navy. If we don't make that point right here, right now, who else is likely to suddenly decide he can issue ultimatums to the fleet?" He turned his glower on MacArtney. "You should understand that if anyone can Nathan!"

"All right," MacArtney replied, manifestly unhappily. "I take your point." He looked around the conference table at his civilian colleagues. "The truth is," he told them, "that big as it is, Frontier Fleet can't possibly be everywhere it needs to be—not in any sort of strength. It manages to maintain nodes of concentrated strength at the various sector HQs and support bases, but even they get stretched pretty thin from time to time. And most of the time, we send a single ship—at most a division or two—to deal with troublespots as they turn hot because we can't afford to weaken those concentrated nodes by diverting more units from them. And what Rajani's saying is that because we're spread so thinly, there are a lot of times when we don't actually have the firepower on the spot to enforce our policies. But what we do have on the spot is a representative of the entire Navy. Under the wrong circumstances, an unfriendly power may well have enough combat power to destroy whatever detachment we've sent out to show it the error of its ways. But they don't, because they know that if they do, the rest of the Navy—however much of it it takes—is going to turn up and destroy them ."

"Exactly," Rajampet agreed, nodding vigorously. "That's exactly the point. I don't care how damned justified the Manties may have thought they were. For that matter, I don't care how 'justified' they may actually have been , and I don't give a damn whether or not they were operating within the letter of interstellar war. What I care about is the fact that we have to make an example out of them if we don't want to suddenly find ourselves eyeball-to-eyeball with other neobarbs, all over the galaxy, who suddenly think they can screw around with the Solarian League, too."

"Wait." Malachai Abruzzi shook himself, then looked at Kolokoltsov. "Before we go any further, what did you mean about their 'discretion' where the newsies were concerned, Innokentiy?"

"I mean they officially released the news of Byng's attack on their destroyers—and their response to it—the same day they sent us this note," Kolokoltsov said flatly. Abruzzi stared at him in obvious disbelief, and Kolokoltsov smiled thinly. "I imagine we should be hearing about it shortly," he continued, "since, according to their note, they intended to release the news to their own media six hours after their dispatch boat cleared the Junction headed for Old Terra."

"They've already released the news?" Abruzzi seemed stunned in a way even the news of Jean Bart 's destruction had failed to achieve.

"That's what they tell us." Kolokoltsov shrugged."When you get right down to it, they may not have a lot of choice. It's been two months since the first incident, and the communications loop from New Tuscany to Manticore's only about three weeks. Word of something this big was bound to leak to their newsies pretty damned quickly after Byng managed to get himself blown away." Rajampet's eyes glittered at his choice of words, but Kolokoltsov didn't especially care. "Under the circumstances, they probably figured they couldn't keep it under wraps much longer even if they tried, so they'd damned well better get their version of it out first—especially to their own people."

"Then the bastards really have painted us all into a corner," Rajampet snarled. "If they've gone ahead and broadcast this thing to the entire galaxy, we've got even less choice about how hard we respond."

"Just hold on, Rajani!" Abruzzi said sharply. The admiral glared at him, and he glared right back. "We don't have any idea at this point how they've positioned themselves on this. Until we've at least had a chance to see the spin they put on it, we aren't in any position to decide how we want to spin our own response to it! And trust me on this one—we're going to have to handle it very, very carefully."

"Why?" Rajampet snapped.

"Because the truth is that your idiot admiral was in the wrong , at least the first time around," Abruzzi replied coldly, meeting the admiral's eyes glare-for-glare. "We can't debate this on their terms without conceding that point. And if public opinion decides he was wrong and they were right, and if we handle this even slightly wrong, the hullabaloo you're still dealing with over Technodyne and Monica's going to look like a pillow fight."

"If it does, it does," Rajampet said flatly.

"You do remember the Constitution gives every single member system veto power, don't you?" Abruzzi inquired. Rajampet glared at him, and he shrugged. "If you wind up needing a formal declaration of war, don't you think it would be a good thing if nobody out there—like, oh, Beowulf , for example—decided to exercise that power?"

"We don't need any frigging declarations of war! This is a clear-cut case of self-defense, of responding to an actual attack on our ships and personnel, and the judiciary's interpretation of Article Seven has always supported the Navy's authority to respond to that kind of attack in whatever strength is necessary."

Kolokoltsov started to respond to that statement, then made himself pause. Rajampet had a point about the judiciary's interpretation of Article Seven of the League Constitution . . . historically, at least. The third section of that particular article had been specifically drafted to permit the SLN to respond to emergency situations without waiting weeks or months for reports to trickle back to the capital and for the ponderous political mechanism to issue formal declarations of war. It had not, however, been intended by the Constitution's drafters as a blank check, and if Rajampet wanted to move the Navy to an actual war footing—to begin mobilizing additional superdreadnoughts from the Reserve, for example—someone was going to point out that he needed the authorization of that same formal declaration. At which point someone else was going to support Rajampet's position.

At which point we'll wind up with a constitutional crisis, as well as a military one , Kolokoltsov thought grimly. Wonderful .

He wondered how many of his colleagues grasped the true gravity of the threat they faced. If Rajampet was able to crush Manticore quickly after all, this would almost certainly blow over, as many another tempest had over the course of the League's long history. But if the Navy couldn't crush Manticore quickly, if this turned into a succession of bloody fiascoes, not even the most resounding ultimate victory would be enough to prevent seismic shockwaves throughout the entire tissue of bureaucratic fiefdoms which held the League together.

He suspected from Abruzzi's attitude that Malachai, if no one else, had at least an inkling of just how dangerous this could turn out to be. Wodoslawski probably did, too, although it was harder to tell in her case. Rajampet obviously wasn't thinking that far ahead, and Kolokoltsov honestly didn't have a clue whether or not MacArtney and Quartermain were able to see beyond the immediate potential consequences for their own departments.