“But look what those two bitches had to say!” Quartermain snapped. “You’ve seen what Beowulf’s dumped to the media, Innokentiy, and Holmon-Sanders is bad enough all by herself! The newsies are going to eat up that business about violating the Constitution, and ‘unelected bureaucrats’, and federal overreach, and you know it. God help us once O’Hanrahan gets hold of it! But that Manty admiral, that Truman—” She shook her head. “The contempt that bitch showed! She was daring Tsang to cross the line, and she didn’t show a trace of doubt that she could hammer our ships into wreckage any time she wanted. Worse, she didn’t pull any punches about dumping full responsibility on us—on us, personally—any more than Holmon-Sanders did, Innokentiy! That’s going to resonate with the woman-in-the-street in a way no ‘principled response’ of ours is ever going to match, and you know that, too.”

“Admittedly, it never occurred to me Beowulf might be so far gone as to actually invite Manty wallers through into Beowulf space to threaten the League Navy,” Kolokoltsov conceded. “On the other hand, I never expected Admiral Tsang to be so frigging stupid as to actually try to fight her way through when Beowulf told her no, either!” It was his turn to shake his head, his expression disgusted. “She was supposed to back off ‘in deference to Beowulf’s expressed wishes’—to let the Beowulfers stand on their ‘constitutional rights’ so we got the credit for showing restraint in the face of their irrationality!”

“Well, she didn’t get that part of it right, did she?”

“No, she didn’t. And I find it interesting that Rajani’s still so busy debriefing her.”

“What do you mean?” Quartermain’s eyes narrowed, and Kolokoltsov shrugged.

“I mean I want to talk to the good admiral personally,” he said in a flat, hard voice. “I want to find out exactly what her instructions from Rajani actually were. God knows, after Crandall’s performance I’m willing to accept that every serving flag officer in the Navy is a frigging idiot, but were her actions all her own idea? Or did somebody over at the Admiralty cut her a set of orders we didn’t know anything about?”

“Why the hell would Rajani have done something like that?” Quartermain frowned, her expression intent. “He knew what we were after as well as we did!”