There was silence around the table—a silence that was just a bit sullen on Rajampet's part, Kolokoltsov thought. But it was also thoughtful, and he saw a high degree of agreement as he surveyed his fellow civilians' faces.

"At this moment, I'm strongly inclined to agree with Rajampet's reasoning," Nathan MacArtney said after several seconds. "But I also agree with you and Agatб about looking before we leap, Innokentiy. And with Malachai about doing the spadework ahead of time, as well. For that matter, if the Manties have taken out Byng's task force, there can't be much left in-sector for us to be launching any offensives with. I know for damn sure that Lorcan Verrochio isn't going to be authorizing any additional action by the handful of Frontier Fleet battlecruisers and cruisers he's got left in the Madras Sector, at any rate! And I don't think the Manties are going to go looking for yet another incident while this one's hanging over their heads."

"I doubt they are either," Kolokoltsov agreed. "On the other hand, I think we need to put together a new note pretty quickly. One that makes the fact that we're distinctly unhappy with them abundantly clear but adopts a 'coolheaded reason' attitude. We'll tell them we'll get back to them as soon as we've had an opportunity to study the available information, but I think we need to get that done more quickly than we did last time around. Unless there are any objections, I'll 'recommend' to the Foreign Minister that we get a stern but reasonable note off no later than tomorrow morning."

"Suit yourself," Rajampet said, and there might have been just a flicker of something in his eyes that Kolokoltsov didn't really care for. "I think it's going to come down to shooting in the end, but I'm more than willing to go along with the attempt to avoid it first."

"And there won't be any unilateral decisions on your part to send reinforcements to Meyers?" Kolokoltsov pressed, trying hard not to sound overtly suspicious.

"I'm not planning on sending any reinforcements to Meyers," Rajampet replied. "Mind you, I'm not going to just sit here on my arse, either! I'm going to be looking very hard at everything we can scrape up to throw at Manticore if it comes to that, and I'm probably going to start activating and manning at least a little of the Reserve Fleet, as well. But until we all agree a different policy's in order, I'll leave the balance of forces in the Talbott area just where it is." He shrugged. "There's damn-all we can do about it right now, anyway, given the communications lag."

Kolokoltsov still wasn't fully satisfied, and he still didn't care for that eye-flicker of whatever it had been, but there was nothing concrete he could find fault with, and so he only nodded.

"All right," he said then, and glanced at his chrono. "I'll have full copies of the Manties' note, Sigbee's report, and the accompanying technical data distributed to all of you by fourteen-hundred."

"I can't believe this," Fleet Admiral Winston Kingsford, CO, Battle Fleet, half-muttered. "I mean, I always knew Josef hated the Manties, but, still . . . ."

His voice trailed off as he realized what he'd just said. It wasn't the most diplomatic comment he could possibly have made, since it was Fleet Admiral Rajampet who had personally suggested Josef Byng as the CO of Task Group 3021. Kingsford had thought it was a peculiar decision at the time, since the task group was a Frontier Fleet formation and Byng, like Kingsford, was a Battle Fleet officer. He'd also expected Fleet Admiral Engracia Alonso y Yбсez, Frontier Fleet's commanding officer, to resist Byng's appointment. For that matter, he'd expected Byng to turn it down. From a Battle Fleet perspective, a Frontier Fleet command had to be viewed as a de facto demotion, and Josef Byng had certainly had the family connections to avoid it if he'd chosen to.

All of which suggested it might not be a good idea to even hint at "I told you so" now that things had gone so disastrously awry.

"Believe it," Rajampet said heavily.

The two of them sat in Rajampet's luxurious office at the very apex of the Navy Building's four hundred stories. The view through the genuine windows was spectacular, and in another thirty or forty years it would almost certainly belong to one Winston Kingsford.

Assuming he didn't screw up irretrievably between now and then.

"Have you looked at the technical material yet, Sir?" he asked.

"Not yet." Rajampet shook his head. "I doubt very much that you'll find any clues as to secret Manticoran super weapons in it. Even if they've got them, I'm sure they'll have vacuumed the sensor data before they sent it on to us. And since Sigbee surrendered all of her ships, I'd imagine they did a pretty fair job of vacuuming her computers, too. So I don't think we're going to get a lot of insight into their hardware out of this even if they do oh-so-graciously return our property to us."

"With your permission, Sir, I'll hand this over to Karl-Heinz and Hai-shwun, anyway."

Admiral Karl-Heinz Thimбr commanded the Solarian League Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, and Admiral Cheng Hai-shwun commanded the Office of Operational Analysis. OpAn was the biggest of ONI's divisions, which made Cheng Thimбr's senior deputy . . . and also the person who should have seen this coming.

"Of course," Rajampet agreed, waving one hand brusquely. Then his mouth tightened. "Don't hand it over until I've had a chance to talk to Karl-Heinz first, though. Someone's got to tell him about Karlotte, and I guess it's up to me."

"Yes, Sir," Kingsford said quietly, and gave himself a mental kick for forgetting Rear Admiral Karlotte Thimбr, Byng's chief of staff, was—had been—Karl-Heinz's first cousin.

"Actually, getting them started on this is probably a damned good idea, even if we're not going to get much in the way of hard data out of it. I want the best evaluation OpAn can give me on these new missiles of theirs. I don't expect miracles, but see what you can get out of them."

"Yes, Sir."

"And while they're working on that, you and I are going to sit down and look at our deployment posture. I know the entire Manty navy's a fart in a wind storm compared to Battle Fleet, but I don't want us suffering any avoidable casualties because of overconfidence. Kolokoltsov has a point, damn him, about the difference in missile ranges. We're going to need a hammer they won't be able to stop when we go after their home system."

"When we go after their home system?" Kingsford stressed the adverb, and Rajampet barked a grating laugh.

"Those civilian idiots can talk about 'if' all they want to, Winston, but let's not you and I fool ourselves, all right? It's not 'if,' it's 'when,' and you know it as well as I do. Those Manticoran pricks are too arrogant to recognize what their real options are. They're not going to go for this ultimatum of Quartermain's, and in the end, that means we'll be going in. Besides—"

He broke off rather abruptly, and Kingsford raised one eyebrow at him. But the CNO only shook his head, waving his hand in another brushing away gesture.

"The point is," he continued, "that it's going to come to shooting in the end, no matter what sort of 'negotiations' anyone may try to set up. And when it does, the strategy's actually going to be pretty damned simple, since they've only got one really important star system. They don't have any choice, strategically. If we go after Manticore itself, they have to stand and fight. No matter how long-ranged their missiles may be, they can't just cut and run, so I want to be sure we've got enough counter-missiles and point defense to stand up to their missile fire while we drive straight for their planets. It may not be pretty, but it'll work."