“You’re probably right.” White Haven sighed, tucking his arm around her and drawing her in more tightly against his side. “But we are at war with them, love. Sooner or later, that’s going to trump the ‘public opinion’ issue in my thinking, I’m afraid.”

  “I know. Mine too, really. But everything we’re seeing says the Solly woman-in-the-street—especially outside the Sol System itself—is still a long way from being onboard with any of this. Or would be, if she had full information on what’s going on. And as long as the League’s shedding systems like Beowulf and Hypatia, we really don’t want to give Abruzzi a bigger lever while he tries to push opinion the other way.”

  “Granted.” He nodded. “But the flip side is that if we don’t do something about it, our potential friends in the Verge and the Fringe are likely to wonder if that’s because we can’t or because we simply choose not to. And that could…adversely affect the trajectory of public opinion, as Tony’s analysts so delicately put it.”

  “Of course other systems will wonder,” she agreed in a disgusted tone. “Hard to blame them, too. Some of them will do the math and realize why we can’t protect every inhabited star system in the galaxy, but how many people truly realize how many inhabited star systems there are? They know about theirs and maybe a half dozen others they’ve personally visited or where they have friends or family. Beyond that, it’s all abstract…and the threat to their own star system is anything but abstract. It’s another version of this false-flag operation Mike’s turned up in Talbott. It doesn’t matter whether or not what happens to one of the Fringe systems is our fault, because it’s our job to keep it from happening whoever’s ‘fault’ it is! It’s illogical, it’s unreasonable, and in some ways it’s just plain silly, but it’s also human nature, and somebody in Old Chicago knows it.”

  “Cogently reasoned,” he told her, brushing the tip of her nose with his index finger. “Would it happen that the brain behind that analysis has any suggestions to make? Besides the delightful one we’ve already ruled out about burning a few Solly star systems to the ground in retaliation, I mean?”

  “Actually, I have had one thought,” she said, and his eyes narrowed at her serious tone. “Chien-lu was aboard Imperator for dinner the night John Crouch’s first dispatch came in, so I shared it with him.”

  White Haven nodded. Chien-lu Anderman, Herzog von Rabenstrange, was Emperor Gustav’s first cousin and third in the succession for the Andermani throne. He was also Gustav’s representative to the Grand Alliance…and a personal friend of one Honor Alexander-Harrington. Theoretically, White Haven supposed, the information in Crouch’s dispatch had been classified, but it wouldn’t stay classified for long, and Honor and von Rabenstrange had a long history—one which had served both the Andermani and the Star Empire well, over the years—of working around formal restrictions.

  “He was as furious about it as I was,” she continued, “and we discussed the implications as well as we could, in light of what we knew at the time. And in the course of our discussion, we came up with a thought that may have some merit.”

  “What kind of thought?”

  “Well, I don’t think Gustav is overjoyed by the way Mike’s been pushing the pace in Talbott, and I expect him to be even less overjoyed when he finds out we’ve sent Lester out to reinforce her and authorized operations against Madras. I think he figures our favorite loose-laserhead Winton’s likely to have Mesa in her sights, as well, and you know how badly he wants to take the ‘Alignment’ down himself.”

  White Haven nodded. When Gustav Anderman learned of the Alignment’s existence—and that the murder of his nephew in the attempted assassination of his younger brother and immediate heir had almost certainly been carried out using the Alignment’s “killer nanotech”—there’d been no question about his idea of a proper response. At the same time, he had no desire to step into the Solarian League’s sights, if only because he was a coldly pragmatic practitioner of interstellar Realpolitik who recognized the potential consequences for his own star nation after the shooting stopped and the League settled down to deciding how to even the score. That consideration wouldn’t have stopped him from invading the Mesa System anyway, if not for the way in which Manticoran and Havenite allegations about Mesa had been incorporated into the narrative of their confrontation with the League. It was impossible to extricate the Alignment from the Mandarins’ claims that Manticoran imperialism—compounded and driven, possibly, by paranoia about imaginary enemies—was the primary cause of the escalating conflict. Which meant any action Gustav might take against Mesa would be seen by both the Mandarins and by Solarian public opinion as a decision on his part to take Manticore’s side against the League.

  “Chien-lu didn’t say so, but I think another factor in Gustav’s thinking is the way the Talbott Quadrant sort of boxes the Empire in,” Honor continued, and White Haven nodded again.

  He’d spent quite a bit of time helping his brother, the Prime Minister, and Foreign Secretary Langtry worry about Gustav’s possible reaction to the Star Empire’s expansion. He doubted anyone in the Empire truly believed Manticore wanted to lock the Andermani up in their own little corner of the galaxy. For that matter, anyone who understood the realities of hyper travel knew they couldn’t lock anyone up even if they had wanted to. But it was undeniable that the newly annexed Talbott Quadrant lay squarely athwart the hyper-space route between the Andermani Empire and the Solarian League. Given that the Manticoran Wormhole Junction already controlled the hyper bridges between the Andermani and the rest of the galaxy, a dynast like Gustav Anderman had to be experiencing at least a mild spasm of paranoia.

  “Anyway,” she said, “while we were bewailing the fact that Gustav can’t join our formal declaration of war—and that we don’t really want him to, in a lot of ways—we started looking for things the IAN might be able to do short of declaring war on the League. And that’s when Chien-lu suggested that he could propose to Gustav that the IAN consider establishing ‘neutrality patrols’ down on our Talbott flank.”

  “‘Neutrality patrols’?” White Haven repeated, and she nodded against his shoulder.

  “What he’s thinking is that not even the Mandarins are going to want to add the Empire to the Alliance. We’ve assumed from the beginning that they’ll want the Andermani to stay neutral. And we’ve encouraged Gustav to do just that because it gives him so much more leverage with them. We’ve been looking to that as a card in the end game, a chance for him to step in and play the ‘honest broker’ when the idiots finally realize shooting at us is a losing game and start looking for some sort of peace settlement. But he could use that leverage for other things, as well. For example, he could announce a list of star systems with whom the Andermani trade regularly and warn everyone, including the Alliance, that he intends to station a few cruisers in most of them—just to keep an eye on pirate activity, of course. And if he happened to call that a ‘neutrality patrol,’ the Mandarins would probably recognize it as a tripwire they’d better not stumble over. If we want to deter attack on a system, we’ll have to physically defend it, because we’re already at war with the League and nothing’s going to change that. But Chien-lu’s thinking is that Gustav wouldn’t have to come up with the strength to actually defend the systems, the way we would, because any attack on his ships would bring the Empire into the war as a full ally, and the Mandarins know it.”

  “Probably something to that,” White Haven said thoughtfully. “Did von Rabenstrange suggest how many systems he thought Gustav might be able to get away with protecting that way?”

  “No, and that’s going to be a more delicate calculation. The Mandarins will go a long way to avoid provoking Gustav into declaring war, but if he’s too obviously working with us, they may decide he’s already effectively declared war. In which case he gets added to their hit list and the ‘moral persuasion’ aspect of his neutrality patrol goes out the airlock.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “I thought so. And there’s another potential downside for us in the suggestion.”

  “Ah?” White Haven turned his head, looking at her, then smiled, remembering a very youthful, intensely focused Commander Honor Alexander-Harrington who’d been something of a blunt object…and not especially interested in the finer implications of interstellar diplomacy.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You’re thinking that if Gustav is so helpful and accommodating, he’ll generate all kinds of goodwill in the systems he’s protecting. The kind of goodwill that leads to things like, oh, most favored star nation trading status, military alliances, that sort of thing.”

  “Exactly.” Honor shrugged. “It’s a game the Andies have been playing for a long time, Hamish. It’s how they’ve expanded their frontiers over the years without having to actually conquer anyone. They make themselves useful enough that they get invited in, and let’s face it, as imperialist strategies go, that’s about as benign as it gets. They’ve had a lot of practice and they’ve gotten very good at it, though. And the very things which would limit the systems Gustav could legitimately cover this way means they’d all fall naturally into the Andermani sphere of influence to begin with.”

  “Very true, unfortunately. On the other hand,” White Haven pointed out, “they seem to be having rather more trouble absorbing their share of Silesia than we are. They probably need a while to digest that python lump before they look around for their next meal.”

  “Probably. But I can’t help thinking Chien-lu—and you know how much I genuinely like him—sees this as a potential way to set the table. And maybe bribe the maître d’ to make sure Gustav gets the best seat in the house.”

  “And that bothers you enough to turn the notion down?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Honor shook her head again. “First, because you and I both know the Andies are going to go fishing in those waters sooner or later anyway. Like the old nursery rhyme says, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly…and Andies gotta expand. We couldn’t change that if we wanted to. But the real reason it doesn’t bother me enough to say no?” Her lips tightened. “I’m in favor of anything that stops the sort of thing that happened to Cachalot anywhere, Hamish. We’ve lived through that right here, and I can’t convince myself the Sollies will all be as careful about minimizing the loss of life as Capriotti apparently was. I’ve lost too many people I loved. Nobody else is living through another Yawata Strike on my watch. Not if there’s one damned thing I can do about it!”

  He gazed at her, hearing the iron in that promise. And, better than most, he understood that iron, knew how utterly she meant every word of it…and that she would follow those responsible for the Yawata Strike to the ends of the universe. Someday, Honor Alexander-Harrington would catch up with them, and what would happen then would be as sure as entropy…and just as cold. But the Solarian League had never met the Salamander. Not the way he had. And he doubted the Mandarins had any concept of the Juggernaut they would unleash if another Admiral Capriotti wasn’t as careful about the careless butchery of someone else’s civilians.

  “I believe you,” he said simply, and he did.

  She’d told him once that a monster lived deep inside her, and he believed that, too. He’d seen it as she wept for Andrew LaFollet and her family after the Yawata Strike. He’d recognized it, known that for all his own outstanding military record, he wasn’t even in her league when it came to sheer, focused deadliness. But that monster was chained by compassion, by the moral code of someone who’d devoted her entire life to protecting others. Who’d found a use for her monster and embraced it in a way which, conversely, made her one of the two gentlest, most loving human beings he’d ever met.

  And I’m married to both of them, he thought wonderingly. How does a man get that lucky?

  “What?” Honor asked in a rather different tone, her eyebrows furrowing.

  “What ‘what’ would that be?” he said.

  “The ‘what’ that’s making you look at me the way Nimitz looks at celery,” she replied tartly, and he laughed at her expression. She had a pretty darned good idea what was making him look at her that way, he reminded himself. His wife literally could read him—or his emotions, at least—like the proverbial book.

  “I promise you, I don’t think of you remotely the way Nimitz thinks about celery, Honor!” he told her in his most serious possible tone. “Or, let me rephrase. There is a certain…I don’t know, resonance, perhaps, between the way I think of you and the way he lusts after celery. The end objective is rather different in my case, however.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she told him, shaking her head with a smile. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Maybe I am, but I’m your idiot.” He leaned closer, his kiss slow and lingering. “And you’re stuck with me,” he added in a whisper, nibbling the lobe of one ear.

  “Oh, darn,” she replied, putting her arms around him.

  “It’s a wonderful warm night,” he pointed out. “It’s even clear, with no rain in the forecast until midmorning, and this is a very large chaise lounge. Sturdy, too.”

  “I’d noticed that.”

  “Well, let me just go lock the door so we don’t inadvertently scandalize Spencer and Lucie.”

  “I think that would be an excellent idea.”

  He gave her another kiss, climbed off the chaise lounge, and crossed to lock the old-fashioned door. It wouldn’t stop Spencer Hawke or Tobias Stimson for a moment if a genuine emergency arose, but he smiled as he imagined their reaction if they happened to discover it was locked in a non-emergency situation. They’d snatch their hands away from the doorknob as if it were radioactive, he thought with a chuckle.

  “You know,” he said, sharing the thought with Honor as he pressed the locking stud and turned back towards her, “if Tobias or Spencer come along and—”

  His eyes widened. Honor stood before him, gilded in starlight and moonglow, her kimono puddled about her feet.

  “About that chaise lounge…” she said, and her eyes glowed as she opened her arms to him.

  Solarian Gendarmerie Headquarters

  City of Vivliothḗkē

  Hypatia System

  Major Ingrid Latimer, Solarian Gendarmerie, hid a quick frown as she stepped through the office door. Major Latimer was a little on the stocky side—a result of her homeworld’s 1.25 g gravity—but she had dark red hair, gray eyes, and a quick-moving grace that the planet Hypatia’s 0.93 g gravity only emphasized. In her impeccable uniform, she could have been used as a Gendarmerie recruiting poster any day. More than that, she was intelligent, dedicated, and just as good at her job as her appearance suggested.

  She was also an unhappy woman, and the news accounts murmuring from the HD in one corner of Major Lawrence Kourniakis’s office had quite a lot to do with the source of that unhappiness.

  “Oh, hi, Ingrid!” Kourniakis greeted her, looking up from the paperwork on his desk display. “What brings you to the troglodyte side?”

  “Hi, Larry.”

  Latimer smiled dutifully. She was the Gendarmerie’s in-system third-in-command, head of the Criminal Investigation Division in Hypatia, and she thought of herself as an old-fashioned cop, because she vastly preferred catching crooks to wading around in the cesspool of politics and surveillance. Kourniakis, on the other hand, commanded the Security Division, charged with both cyber security and counterintelligence in the star system. He was senior to her—in fact, in addition to his security responsibilities, he served Colonel Ganesh Naran, the senior Gendarme in Hypatia, as his second-in-command—and she’d always thought his cheerful, extroverted nature was a less-than-perfect fit for someone with his responsibilities. He certainly didn’t strike anyone as the sort of fellow who would hover in corners listening to private conversations. Which, she acknowledged, might be one reason he’d been so effective in what he liked to call his “troglodyte duties.”

  Now Kourniakis touched his display, turning the HD volume completely down, and cocked his head at her.

  “To what do I owe the honor?” he asked.

  “One of my people turned up something you need to take a look at,” she replied.

  “Shoot,” Kourniakis said, opening a notepad on his display, and pointing at the chair by his desk.

  “We’ve been investigating some smuggling activities down at the port.” Latimer dropped into the indicated chair. “I wouldn’t’ve been too worried about it, with all the other crap going on right now, except that these particular smugglers were bringing in 7H.”

  Kourniakis looked up from the note he’d been jotting with a quick, dark frown. “7H” was cop and street shorthand for “Seventh Heaven,” a particularly nasty psychedelic nanotech which had developed a hefty pool of addicts despite the psychoses it produced in long-term users. Just last week, a lorry driver down at the port had experienced a psychotic event while driving and rammed his vehicle through two warehouse bays and a crowded pedestrian walk. Six people had died on the scene, and another fourteen had been med-evaced. There was a reason nobody wanted 7H on his world.

  “You have proof of that?” he asked, and she nodded.

  “Plenty of proof, already bagged up and in Evidence Impound. Eleven perps in lockup to go with it…and three in the morgue because they didn’t want to come along when we knocked on their door.”

  “Pity about that.” Kourniakis’s smile was thin, and she smiled back. But then her expression sobered.

  “While we were surveilling them just before the bust, though, something else turned up,” she said. “We came across somebody else’s hack. Not on our perps, but piggybacked through their system to hit the planetary AG’s files.”

  “Attorney General Boyagis’s office?” Kourniakis asked sharply, and she nodded.