“Since you’ve decided to include Ms. Brosnan in our conversations, should I take that as a sign you and Admiral Rozsak have finalized your requirements for naval support?” Ellingsen continued. “Captain Abernathy’s been authorized to conditionally approve your needs, assuming they fall within the parameters we’d already discussed. If you’ve realized you need more firepower, it’s probable we can cut a little additional tonnage loose. Unfortunately, the Captain can’t guarantee that without running any fresh numbers past the Admiralty.”

  “Oh, I don’t think there’s going to be a problem about force levels,” Admiral Rozsak said. “There has been a slight change in plans, however.”

  “Indeed?” Ellingsen raised his eyebrows, and Rozsak smiled.

  “Yes,” he said pleasantly. “I’m afraid the two of you are under arrest.”

  Ellingsen stiffened.

  “I don’t understand,” he said in the tone of someone who hadn’t quite gotten the punchline of a joke.

  “Oh, I think you do,” Barregos said, and the governor’s normally affable voice had turned hard and cold. “Unfortunately for you, we had a visit from a real Manticoran admiral shortly after your last visit. Her name was Givens—Patricia Givens. I found it quite remarkable that the woman who runs the Royal Manticoran Navy Office of Naval Intelligence had never heard of either of you. Perhaps you’d care to explain that?”

  His eyes bored into the two men sitting on the far side of his desk, and Abernathy’s right hand twitched.

  “I wouldn’t,” another voice said, and the “captain” turned his head to find himself looking into the muzzle of the weapon in Spangen’s hand. It wasn’t a pulser. Instead, it was a stun gun, the modern descendant of the ancient Ante Diaspora Taser.

  “Vegar’s a very good shot, ‘Captain Abernathy,’” Barregos said. “But if you think you can reach that pulser under your left arm—the one my security people picked up when you walked through the shuttle pad scanners—go right ahead. I understand being stunned is a very unpleasant experience, and just this moment, I’d really like to see you have one of those.”

  The office door slid silently open once more. Abernathy’s head turned again, and his eyes narrowed as a brown-haired, brown-skinned man in the uniform of a Gendarmerie brigadier walked through it. He looked at the newcomer for a moment, and then his hand relaxed. In fact, he sat back in his chair with a curiously serene look and folded both hands in his lap.

  “I assume you recognize Brigadier Allfrey,” Barregos said.

  “I do,” Ellingsen said after a moment. “And should I assume from his presence that you have some suitable plan for our disposal?”

  “Always nice to deal with a professional,” Barregos replied. “We do have a few questions. I’m sure it’ll be a fascinating conversation. After that, we’ll be sending you to talk to some other friends of ours. I imagine you can guess where they live.”

  “I understand Landing’s very nice this time of year,” Ellingsen said almost whimsically, and Barregos’s eyes narrowed. There was something about the other man’s voice. Something odd that resonated somehow with Abernathy’s relaxed body language.

  “So I hear,” the governor replied, and Ellingsen smiled.

  “Pity I won’t see it,” he said…and slumped in his chair.

  “We don’t have a clue,” Philip Allfrey said several hours later. He looked more frustrated than surprised. “As far as the autopsy can tell, ‘Ellingsen’ had a massive heart attack and ‘Abernathy’ suffered an aneurysm. ‘Natural causes,’ both of them.”

  “Bullshit, Philip,” Luiz Rozsak said pleasantly. The admiral was parked at one end of Barregos’s conference room table with a large cup of coffee.

  “Of course it is.” Allfrey shrugged. “I’m just telling you what the ME said. And, by the way, he figured it was bullshit, too, given the fact that both those ‘natural causes’ deaths occurred in the same twenty-five-second span. He said something about lottery numbers when I asked him what the odds against that were.”

  “I have to say I find this disturbing,” Gail Brosnan said. The others looked at her, and she shrugged, her expression worried. “Not the fact that they’re dead. Given what they said to you the last time they were here, Oravil, I can’t think of anyone who deserves to be dead more than they did. And I’ve always been a great believer in that old proverb about dead men and tales. But I don’t like how…calm they were about it. Seeing somebody that relaxed just before she kills herself makes me wonder about exactly what we’re up against here.”

  “I don’t think they did kill themselves,” Rozsak said. The others looked at him, and he waved his coffee cup. “I think they knew they were going to die, but I don’t think they killed themselves,” he amplified. “If there’s anything to what Givens told us about this ‘killer nanotech’ the ‘Alignment’s’ supposed to have, it’d make perfect sense to install a version of it in their agents. There’s always the chance even the most dedicated operative will decide against suiciding when the time comes. If you’ve got something like the Manties are describing, you can take that off the table.”

  “So you think all their agents are walking around with this stuff inside?” Allfrey asked.

  “Yep. And so do you, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess I do.” Allfrey didn’t look overjoyed by his own admission.

  “As Gail just suggested, this may make any interrogations…difficult,” Barregos said in a light tone that fooled no one. “And it makes me wonder just how motivated these people really are. I mean, if you and Philip are right, Luiz—and I think you are—they knew what was going to happen. That means they knew whatever it is had been implanted before they ever came to call on us the first time. I’m sure they expected to get in and out again, just like they’d done before, but these were obviously top-notch, smart people. I’ve been inclined towards assuming they were as mercenary as your average transstellar’s covert operative, but it’s hard to imagine a typical operative agreeing to carry an involuntary suicide switch around with him.”

  “I could see that,” Rozsak demurred. “Offer somebody a big enough payoff, especially if the somebody in question’s convinced he’s smarter and quicker than anyone he’s likely to come up against, and he might well agree. After all, his ego would tell him nobody was going to trip him up. Even if he admitted the possibility to himself intellectually, he’d still figure the odds were in his favor.” He shook his head. “It’s not the fact that they’d been rigged to die if they were caught that bothers me. It’s not even the fact that they knew they were. What bothers me is that they were so calm about it.” He shook his head, dark eyes shadowed. “That’s the signature of a zealot. Whatever else they might have been, these two were true believers. And—” his voice turned harsher “—so was the crew of their damned transport.”

  Barregos grimaced. With “Ellingsen” and “Abernathy” dead, Rozsak had been forced to use his fallback plan. Instead of convincing one of them to order the transport to stand down, he’d tried for a covert boarding action, sending in Marine special forces operators in skinsuits on a ballistic intercept.

  Individual powered-down skinsuits were extraordinarily difficult to detect, but the transport’s crew obviously had. They’d allowed the twelve-Marine squad to make soft landings on their vessel’s hull. Then they’d dumped their fusion bottle and blown themselves—and the Marines—into plasma. The sensor records made it abundantly clear that that was what had happened, and reactor bottles didn’t dump spontaneously.

  “So basically what we have to pass on to the Manties is a whole bunch of nothing,” the governor said disgustedly.

  “I think we got a little more than that, Oravil,” Rozsak said. “If nothing else, we’ve got a pair of bodies, and if the Manties and Havenites have more experience with this nanotech, they may spot something our forensics people don’t know to look for. At the very least, it would be confirmation our bad guys and their bad guys really are the same people. I don’t think we need that confirmation, though. It’s hard for me to imagine there’s more than one galaxy-spanning conspiracy out to get Manticore at any given moment. Well, okay. Maybe more than one, but not more than two!”

  Barregos lips twitched and he shook his head. But then he nodded, too.

  “Point taken,” he said. “And I think we’ve got confirmation we’ve been put on the same hit list.”

  “I’m still not completely sold on that part of it.” Rozsak drank more coffee, then shrugged. “That’s one of the reasons I really wanted to have a little heart-to-heart with those two. Are we on their hit list, or did they simply see us as one more club to use on the Manties and Haven?”

  “Does it really matter?” Brosnan asked, and Rozsak nodded.

  “I think it does, Gail. If they put us on their little list as a target, not as a potential weapon, it suggests they know more about our ultimate intentions than we thought anybody outside the Sector did. And if they know more about our plans, who knows who else does? For that matter, if they know, have they arranged to make that information available to our lords and masters in Old Chicago if something prevents their original plan from working?”

  “That’s…an interesting question,” Barregos said slowly.

  “And likely to affect our own timing?” Rozsak asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “I’d say there’s a distinct possibility.” No one could have described Oravil Barregos’s expression as eager, but there was very little indecision in it. “We have Givens’s promise of naval support if we really need it, and this time we know the offer’s legitimate,” the governor continued. “The real problem’s Erewhon. No one in Suds expected us to move before we had the first of our own podnoughts. Even with the Manties—the real Manties—promising to support us and provide their ‘Mycroft’ for system-defense, that could be a problem. We had enough trouble getting them to agree to accelerate the timetable last time. I’m afraid Havlicek, at least, may be less than delighted if we suggest moving it up even farther. She wasn’t that enthusiastic last time, and I doubt she’ll care for the notion of increasing the window of vulnerability between declaring our intentions and when the Manties can get Mycroft installed.”

  “No, she won’t,” Rozsak agreed. “We may not have a choice, though. Especially not if what Philip’s telling us about the other systems out our way is accurate, and I think it is. These two were here to press us to act in the next couple of months, Oravil. I’m willing to bet they’ve had other people pushing the same schedule in Kornati and some of the other systems in our vicinity. If those other systems start going up in flames, that’s likely to draw a response from Frontier Fleet. And when that happens—”

  “When that happens, somebody will get a lot better look at what we’ve been building out here,” Barregos finished. “At which point, the hammer comes down.”

  “Unless we get in before they do, with the Manties standing ominously behind us.”

  “That might make it just a bit harder for Manticore to sell the rest of the galaxy on the notion that they didn’t have anything to do with it,” Brosnan pointed out. “If we move and announce the Star Empire’s supporting us, Abruzzi and his people will fall all over themselves arguing that that couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t coordinated it well ahead of time. And that’ll lend an awful lot of credence to the notion that Manticore was the instigator all along.”

  “You may be right,” Barregos said after a moment. “In fact, you probably are. But Landing and Nouveau Paris have to have thought about that before they sent Givens out here in the first place. And the bottom line is that we’re not doing what we’re doing to help their Grand Alliance.” He looked around the table, his face hard. “We’re doing it to protect the Maya Sector and the people who live here. If that’s inconvenient for the Manties, I’m afraid they’ll just have to live with it.”

  Bassingford Medical Center

  and

  Mount Royal Palace

  City of Landing

  Manticore Binary System

  Star Empire of Manticore

  Megan Petersen turned from the window as the waiting room door opened behind her. She expected a nurse or a doctor; what she got was a hard-eyed man in a green-on-green uniform with sergeant’s stripes and a nameplate that read “McGraw.” Those hard eyes swept the room with the precision of a laser tracker. Then he nodded courteously to her and keyed his uni-link.

  “Clear,” he said, and came to a parade rest to one side of the door.

  It opened again, a moment later, and it was Megan’s turn to come to attention as a very tall woman with a treecat on her shoulder came through the door. Two more green-uniformed men followed her.

  “Your Grace!”

  “Commander.” Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington crossed the room in three long strides and held out her hand. “I didn’t expect to find you here. I’m glad I did, though. It gives me the chance to personally commend you for what you and all of Admiral Kotouč’s people did in Hypatia. That was well done, Commander. Very well done.”

  “Your Grace, I appreciate the sentiment, but, really, Arngrim didn’t do nearly as much as the others.” Megan’s face tightened with the memory of her helplessness as the rest of the squadron died. “We mostly just sat there and watched it happen.”

  Duchess Harrington cocked her head, her expression thoughtful, and her treecat mirrored the movement.

  “I wondered if you’d feel that way,” the duchess said after a moment. “I suppose it’s natural you should feel you somehow let down the rest of your squadron. Allow me to point out, however, that Arngrim couldn’t have improved on what her consorts accomplished. I mean that seriously, Commander.” Those steady brown eyes held hers. “You literally couldn’t have increased the damage the rest of your squadron inflicted in that exchange, and your ship is alive today because Admiral Kotouč gave you an order—exactly the correct order, as it happens—and you obeyed it. And afterward, when yours was the only ship left, you and your people performed brilliantly, Commander.”

  “Your Grace,” Megan felt her face heat and shook her head hard, “we were bluffing. We couldn’t have stopped them if Yountz had been willing to pull the trigger!”

  “I was never much of a poker player, myself, but my husband and my wife are fanatics.” Megan blinked at the non sequitur, but the duchess only smiled. “According to them, a ‘bluff’ is when you raise on a busted flush, Commander Petersen. You had at least a pair of aces, and if Yountz had called, you would have hurt them badly.”

  “If they’d realized how little ammunition we had—”

  “You’re not listening to me,” the duchess said more sternly. “No, you couldn’t have destroyed his entire remaining task force. You couldn’t even have destroyed all his remaining battlecruisers. But you didn’t have to. After what Admiral Kotouč had already done to them, they didn’t have the stomach to find out if you could. No.” She shook her head. “What you did—what you and your people did—saved at least six million lives. You didn’t do it in a vacuum, and you couldn’t have done it if Admiral Kotouč hadn’t made the hard call and decided to fight, but you did do it when it counted. And the prisoner interrogation we’ve already done makes it clear that if you hadn’t intervened, Admiral Gogunov most certainly would have killed all of those civilians.”

  Harrington’s brown eyes had gone bleak and cold, and the cat on her shoulder bared his fangs. Then she shook herself and gave another of those crooked smiles.

  “I’d say we owe a vote of thanks to Commodore Haskell, too, although we probably wouldn’t do her any favors if we were to publicly thank her for it just yet.”

  “No, Your Grace, we wouldn’t,” Megan agreed, recalling her own interview with Haskell…and the incredible hatred burning in Martin Gogunov’s eyes when he spoke about his chief of staff.

  “Actually,” she went on after a moment, “I think what Arngrim may really have done was to give Yountz a pretext to avoid carrying out Buccaneer. I can’t prove that, but we do know he specifically ordered the screen not to launch when Lepanto sent out the fire distribution orders. I’m pretty sure he’ll downplay that in his after-action report, but that wasn’t the decision of a man who wanted to murder people in job lots.”

  “Let me remind you of something I know they taught you at the Academy, Commander,” Harrington said. “Battles aren’t always—or even usually—won by killing everybody on the other side. They’re won inside the other side’s brains and wills. Given the right weapons, the right tactical situation, anyone can kill an enemy. Convincing her to yield, to do what you set out to compel her to do without killing her—that’s harder. That’s a lot harder, and it’s also exactly what you and Arngrim did.”

  Megan looked at her, absorbing what she’d said. If there was an officer in Manticoran uniform who knew what she was talking about—knew exactly what the squadron had faced—that officer was standing in front of her. And if she said…

  “I know people are going to compare Hypatia to Grayson,” the duchess said, and Megan managed not to blink at the way the older woman’s thought had followed her own. “I suppose that’s inevitable, given the similarities. Of course, the differences are a lot more significant than any of those idiot newsies are going to realize!”

  She grimaced, and Megan surprised herself with a chuckle. Arngrim had returned to Manticore with dispatches, accompanying the Hypatian transport carrying the squadron’s survivors, barely two T-days earlier, and she’d already decided she’d rather face a salvo of Cataphracts than the Manticoran news corps any day!

  “Better,” the duchess said approvingly, then laid a hand on Megan’s shoulder.

  “I had a heavy cruiser to face a single battlecruiser,” she said more soberly. “The tech imbalance was a lot narrower than the one you had, but in a way, that only made the situation simpler. I mean, there weren’t a lot of fancy tactical options. You found a much more…elegant solution, and at least Hypatia doesn’t have steadings.”