Which was what this meeting was all about.

"All right, Eleanora. Go," Roger said, and sat back to listen. He'd been so busy for the last month handling post-battle cleanup chores and the maskirova at the spaceport that he'd been unable to devote any time to planning what came next. That had been the job of his staff, and it was time to see what they'd come up with.

"Okay, we're dealing with a number of problems here," Eleanora said, keying her pad and preparing to tick off points on it.

"The first one is intelligence, or lack thereof. All we have in the way of information from Imperial City is the news bulletins and directives that came in on the last Imperial resupply ship. Those are nearly two months old, so we're dealing with an information vacuum on anything that's happened in the interim. We also have no data on conditions in the Navy, except for the announced command changes in Home Fleet and the fact that Sixth Fleet, which is normally pretty efficient, was last seen apparently unable to get itself organized for a simple change of station move and hanging out in deep space. We have no hard reads on who we might be able to trust. Effectively, we're unable to trust anyone in the Navy, especially the various commanders who've been put in place post-coup.

"The second problem is the security situation. We're all wanted in the Empire for helping you with this supposed coup. If any one of the DeGlopper's survivors goes through Imperial customs, or even a casual scan at a spaceport, alarm bells are going to ring from there to Imperial City. Adoula's faction has to believe you're long dead, which makes you the perfect bogeyman. Who better to be wanted for something he didn't do, covering up the fact that they were the real perps, than someone who's dead? But the point remains that without significant disguise mod, none of us can step foot on any Imperial planet, and we're going to have real problems going anywhere else that's friendly with the Empire. Which means everywhere. Even the Saints would grab us, for any number of reasons we wouldn't like.

"The third problem is, of course, the actual mission. We're going to have to overthrow the current sitting government and capture your mother and the uterine replicator, without the bad guys making off with either. We're also going to have to prevent the Navy from interfering."

"'Who holds the orbitals, holds the planet,'" Roger said.

"Chiang O'Brien." Eleanora nodded. "You remembered that one."

"Great Gran's former Dagger Lord daddy had a way with words," Roger said, then frowned. "He also said 'One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.'"

"He cribbed that one from a much older source," Eleanora said. "But the point is valid. If Home Fleet comes in on Adoula's side—and with its current commander, that's a given—we're not going to win, no matter who or what we hold. And that completely ignores the insane difficulty of actually capturing the Empress. The Palace isn't just a collection of buildings; it's the most heavily fortified collection of buildings outside Moonbase or Terran Defense Headquarters itself. It might look easy to penetrate, but it's not. And you can be sure Adoula's beefed up the Empress' Own with his own bully boys."

"They won't be as good," Julian said.

"Don't bet on it," Eleanora replied grimly. "The Empress may hate and detest Adoula, but her father didn't, and this isn't the first time Adoula's been Navy Minister. He knows good soldiers from bad—or damned well ought to—and either he or someone else on his team managed to take out the rest of the Empress' Own when they seized the Palace in the first place. He'll rely on that same expertise when he brings in his replacements, and just because they work for a bad man, doesn't mean they'll be bad soldiers."

"Cross that bridge when we come to it," Roger said. "I take it you're not just going to give me a litany of bad news I already know?"

"No. But I want the bad to be absolutely clear. This isn't going to be easy, and it's not going to be guaranteed. But we do have some assets. And, more than that, our enemies do have problems. Nearly as many problems as we have, in fact, and nearly as large.

"The news we have here is that there are already questions in Parliament about the Empress' continuing seclusion. The Prime Minister is still David Yang, and while Prince Jackson's Conservatives are part of his coalition, he and Adoula are anything but friends. I'd guess that a lot of the reason they seem to be hunting so frantically for you, Roger, is that Adoula is using the 'military threat' you represent as the leverage he needs as Navy Minister to balance Yang's power as Prime Minister within the Cabinet."

"Maybe so," Roger said, with more than a trace of anger in his voice, "but Yang's also a lot closer to the Palace than we are, and we can tell what's going on. Yang may actually believe I'm dead, but he knows damned well who actually pulled off the coup. And who's controlling my mother. And he hasn't done one pocking thing about it."

"Not that we know of, at any rate," Eleanora observed in a neutral tone. Roger's eyes flashed at her, but he grimaced and made a little gesture. It was clear his anger hadn't abated—Prince Roger was angry a lot, these days—but it was equally clear he was willing to accept his chief of staff's qualification.

For the moment, at least.

"On the purely military side," O'Casey continued after a moment, "it seems clear Adoula, despite his current position at the head of the Empire's military establishment, hasn't been able to replace all of the Navy's officers with safe cronies, either. Captain Kjerulf, for example, is in a very interesting position as Chief of Staff for Home Fleet. I'd bet he's not exactly a yes-man for what's going on, but he's still there. And then there's Sixth Fleet, Admiral Helmut."

"He's not going to take what's happening lying down," Julian predicted confidently. "We used to joke that Helmut got up every morning and prayed to the picture of the Empress over his bed. And he's, like, prescient or something. If there's any smell of a fish, he'll be digging his nose in; you can be sure of that. Sixth Fleet's going to be behind him, too. He's headed it for years. Way longer than he should have. It's like his personal fiefdom. Even if they send someone out to replace him, five gets you ten that the replacement has an 'accident' somewhere along the line."

"Admiral Helmut was noted for some of those tendencies in reports I've seen," Temu Jin interjected. "Negatively, I might add. Also for, shall we say, zealous actions in ensuring that only officers who met his personal standards—and not just in terms of military capability—were appointed to his staff, the command of his carrier and cruiser squadrons, and even to senior ship commands. Personal fiefdoms are a constant concern for the IBI and the Inspectorate. It was only his clear loyalty to the Empress, and the Empire, that prevented his removal. But I concur in Sergeant Julian's estimate of him, based on IBI investigations."

"And there's one last possibility," Eleanora continued. Her voice was thoughtful, and her eyes were half-slitted in a calculating expression. "It's the most... interesting of all, in a lot of ways. But it also depends on things we know the least about at this point."

She paused, and Roger snorted.

"You don't need the 'cryptic seer' look to impress me with your competence, Eleanora," he said dryly. "So suppose you go ahead and spill this possibility for us?"

"Um?" Eleanora blinked, then flashed him a grin. "Sorry. It's just that a fair percentage of the Empress' Own tends to retire to Old Earth. Of course, a lot take colonization credits to distant systems, but a large core of them stays on-planet. After tours in the Empress' Own, I suppose backwaters look a bit less thrilling than they might to a regular Marine retiree. And the Empress' Own, active-duty or retired, are loyal beyond reason to the Empress. And they're also, well..." She gestured at Julian and Despreaux. "They're smart, and they have a worm's eye view of the politics in Imperial City. They're going to be making their own estimations. Even absent what we know, that Roger was on Marduk when he was supposedly carrying out this attempted coup, they're going to be suspicious."