White Haven was gazing very thoughtfully at Yu, and Samantha cocked her head to one side, considering Yu even more intently than her person.

“It is,” Yu said after a moment. “My point, I mean. Look, when you set something like that up, you know it’s only going to be used when the tactical situation’s gone totally straight to hell, right?”

Honor nodded, almond eyes intent, and he shrugged.

“So you set it up so you can get the shot off with zero lost time,” he continued. “I don’t know for sure about the Solly Navy, but I do know that when we set up something like that in the GSN or the Protector’s Own, we usually tie it to a single macro, or at the most a very short, easily remembered keycode on the ops officer’s panel. That’s the way the People’s Navy did it, too.”

“And the Republican Navy still does it the same way,” Theisman said.

“Of course it does.” Yu nodded. “You don’t want something that’s going to go off by accident—not unless you’re criminally insane, anyway!—but you do want something that can get that shot off no matter what else is happening with the shortest possible delay between the order to fire and the actual launch. And what does that suggest?”

“Are you saying,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou asked in a very careful tone, “that you think we’re looking at another example of McBryde’s damned nanotech, Admiral?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Pritchart said, yet her voice was far more thoughtful than denying, and Yu looked at her.

“Why, Madam President? If you assume they could get to Filareta’s ops officer at all, why not set up something like this? Especially if there was some way for the people who programmed him to know or to guess how he’d go about setting up a gone-to-hell fire plan? Maybe they had access to recordings of simulations where he’d set up plans like that. For that matter, maybe they had someone else inside Filareta’s staff passing them that kind of information, probably with no idea at all what the Alignment meant to do with it. I can think of at least three ways, right off hand, a Peep flag officer back in the bad old days could’ve gotten that information about any operations or tactical officer in the People’s Navy anytime he’d wanted to, and the SLN’s at least as badly riddled by patronage and ‘favor buying’ as the Legislaturalists ever were. And if Filareta’s tac officer did have a pattern, did have a standard way of setting up for that kind of plan…”

His voice trailed off, and silence enveloped the conference room as the people in it looked at one another.

“Tester, you may be right,” Yanakov said softly into that silence at last. “It could be, anyway.”