"Yes, Sir." Caparelli gestured at Second Space Lord Patricia Givens, head of the Bureau of Planning, under whose control the Office of Naval Intelligence fell. "With your permission, Your Grace, Admiral Givens will brief us on the high points."

"Certainly." Cromarty nodded and turned his attention to Admiral Givens as she stood and activated the holo wall behind her, bringing up an enormous star map of the frontier between the Manticoran Alliance and the Peoples Republic of Haven. She stood with her back to the display, facing the people around the table, and drew a light wand from her pocket.

"Your Grace, Lady Morncreek, Lord Alexander." She nodded courteously to each of the civilians and smiled briefly at White Haven, but she didn't greet him by name. They were old colleagues and friends, but Patricia Givens had a strong sense of loyalty. She was on Caparelli's team now, and, despite the Prime Minister's explanation, the earl was an interloper today.

"As you know, reports are coming in of incidents all up and down our frontier." She pressed the remote built into her light wand, and a sparkle of blood-red lights—a dangerous, irregular line of rubies that arced around Manticore in a complete half-circle—glittered in the display behind her.

"The first incident reported," Givens went on, turning and using her light wand to pick out a single red spark, "was the destruction of Convoy Mike-Golf-Nineteen, here at Yeltsin. It was not, however, the first incident to occur. We simply heard about it first because the transit time from Yeltsin to Manticore was shorter than for the others. The first known incursion into Alliance territory actually occurred here—" the light wand moved southeast from Yeltsin "—at Candor. Nineteen days ago, a light cruiser squadron, positively IDed by our sensors as Havenite despite its refusal to respond to our challenges in any way, violated the Candor System's territorial limit. Our local mobile forces were unable to generate an intercept vector, and the Peeps passed through the outer system, well within missile range of one of our perimeter com centers, without firing a shot, then departed, still without a word."

She cleared her throat and moved the wand again, first to the north, and then back to the southwest of Yeltsin.

"The same basic pattern was followed here, at Klein Station, and again here, in the Zuckerman System." The wand touched each star as it was named. The only substantive differences between any of these incursions was that the force employed at Zuckerman was much heavier than either of the others, and that it destroyed approximately ninety million dollars worth of remote sensor platforms as it came in—after which it, like the others, turned around and withdrew without saying a word.

"There have also been more serious incidents, on the same pattern as the attack on Mike-Golf-Nineteen," she continued into the intense quiet, "but in these cases we cannot definitely assert that the Peeps were responsible.

"In Yeltsin's case, for example, the Grayson cruiser Alvarez got readings on the raiders. They were surprisingly good, considering Alvarez's limited tracking time, and our analysts have studied them carefully."

She paused and gave a small, almost apologetic shrug.

"Unfortunately, we don't have anything we could take to a court of law. The impeller wedge signatures were definitely those of a light cruiser and two destroyers, and their drive's gravitic patterns match those of Haven-built units, but their other emissions do not match those of the Peoples Navy. My own belief, and that of a majority of ONIs analysts, is that they were, in fact, Peeps who had deliberately disguised their signatures, but there's no way to prove that, and the Peeps have 'sold' enough ships to various 'allies' to give us a whole crop of other potential suspects."

Givens paused again, hazel eyes hard, then tilted her head.

"The same is true of the incidents at Ramon, Clearaway, and Quentin. In each case, we or our allies lost shipping and lives to the 'raiders' without getting a close enough look to positively ID the responsible party. The timing of the raids, coupled with the intelligence work it must have taken to plan and execute them so smoothly while denying us any interceptions, certainly suggests Havenite involvement, but again, we can't prove it. Just as we can't prove the recent heavy losses among the Caliphate of Zanzibar's picket and patrol ships are not the work of the ZLF. For that matter, we can't prove there's any connection at all between these episodes—except, of course, for our confirmation of Havenite involvement at Candor, Klein Station, and Zuckerman.

"Nonetheless, Your Grace," she said, looking straight at Cromarty, "it is ONI's considered opinion that we're looking at a pattern of deliberately engineered and orchestrated provocations. The timing is too tight, and they're too widespread, to be anything else, and the differences between them are far surpassed by the single thread common to them all: each of them has inflicted damage upon or underscored a threat to a star system which has been at the center of at least one confrontation between the Kingdom and the People's Republic over the past four to five years. Assuming that the same people planned and executed all of them—and I think we must—then the only possible suspect is the PRH. Only the Peeps have both the resources to manage something like this and any conceivable motive for provoking us in this fashion."

The brown-haired admiral switched off her wand and resumed her seat while the holo wall glowed behind her. Cromarty studied it with hooded eyes, and silence stretched out for a few seconds before the Prime Minister tugged at an earlobe and sighed.

"Thank you, Admiral Givens." He cocked his head at Caparelli. "Just how serious a threat do these incidents pose, Admiral?"

"Not much of one, in themselves, Your Grace. The loss of life involved is more than just painful, but our casualties might have been for heavier, and our strategic position remains unchanged. In addition, none of the forces we've seen has been powerful enough to pose more than a purely local threat. Admittedly, they could have taken Zuckerman out had they chosen to, but that was far and away the heaviest force they've committed anywhere."

"Then what are they up to?" Baroness Morncreek asked. "What's the point of it all?"

"They're crowding us, Milady," Caparelli said bluntly. "They're deliberately turning up the pressure."

"Then they're playing with fire," William Alexander observed.

"Exactly, Lord Alexander," Givens said. "Both sides have settled down in what we know have to be our final pre-war positions. We've developed 'bunker' mentalities on both sides of the line, and given the tension and suspicion that's provoked, 'playing with fire' is exactly what they're doing."

"But why?" Cromarty asked. "What does it gain for them?"

"Admiral Givens?" Caparelli invited heavily, and Givens sighed.

"I'm afraid, Your Grace, that their current activities indicate ONI's assessment of the Peep political leadership's intentions was fundamentally in error. The consensus of my analysts—and my own personal opinion—was that they had too many domestic problems to consider any sort of foreign adventures. We were wrong, and Commander Hale, our attache on Haven, was right. They're actively seeking a confrontation, possibly as a means to divert Dolist attention from internal concerns to an external enemy."

"Then why the covert nature of the majority of the incidents?" Alexander asked.

"It could be a sort of double-blind, my lord. We know it's them, but if they demand we prove it, we can't. They may want us to accuse them of responsibility while they maintain their innocence for the benefit of their propaganda. That way they can have their cake and eat it, too; they get their incident, but we look like the crisis-mongers."