The door opened and Colonel Ellen Shemais, who’d headed the empress’ personal security detachment since she’d been a little girl, appeared as if the mention of her name had summoned her. Elizabeth looked at her, eyebrows raised, but the colonel only bowed to her.

“Your Majesty, Your Grace,” she angled her bow subtly in Honor’s direction, “the…special embassy from Beowulf.”

Elizabeth darted a surprised glance at Honor. All joking about their security personnel aside, the last thing the empress had expected was for the mysterious envoy to be shown straight into her presence. But Honor was just as perplexed as she was. All she could do was shrug at the empress, and the two of them stood, facing the small presence chamber’s door.

Perhaps a dozen people filed through it, and Honor felt her eyes go wide as she recognized most of them.

“Your Majesty,” Chyang Benton-Ramirez, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Beowulf Planetary Board of Directors, said with a small bow, the sort heads of state bestowed upon one another, “I apologize for the unorthodoxy of this visit, but there are a few things we need to discuss privately. Very privately.”

* * *

“I guess,” Elizabeth Winton said several hours later, in tones of profound understatement, “that I should be getting accustomed to having foreign heads of state drop in with no warning, but I keep thinking we ought to get a little…I don’t know, regularity, I suppose, into this sort of thing.”

“Regularity?” William Alexander, Baron Grantville and Prime Minister of the Star Empire of Manticore, shook his head. “At this point, I’d settle for rationality! Does it occur to you, Your Majesty, that we’ve somehow stumbled through the looking glass?”

“It does seem that way,” she acknowledged. “I guess the real question is whether or not the good surprises outnumber the bad ones. I remember my father saying true leadership isn’t the ability to accomplish the things you plan on; it’s the ability to cope with the things you never in a thousand years saw coming.” She smiled a bit raggedly. “I seem to’ve been getting a lot of practice at that lately.”

“All of us have, Your Majesty,” Sir Anthony Langtry, the Star Empire’s Foreign Secretary, agreed wryly. “My people are supposed to have at least some vague notion of how other star nations are thinking—especially the ones we’re on good terms with!—but this blindsided us completely.”

“There’s been a lot of that happening lately, Tony.” Baroness Morncreek’s, tone was desert dry. She and portly, fair-haired Bruce Wijenberg were the only other two members of Grantville’s Cabinet at the table. Hamish Alexander-Harrington had been present, but he and Sir Thomas Caparelli were currently closeted in a separate meeting with Gabriel Caddell-Markham and Justyná Miternowski-Zhyang.