Quartermain looked at him for a moment, eyes thoughtful, and then nodded slowly. Tyrone Reid was a senior Assemblyman from the Sol System itself. A member of the Judiciary Committee, he’d carefully crafted the public image of a senior and thoughtful jurist, and the camera liked him. His photogenic patrician face and the polished perfection of his Old Terran accent made him one of the newsies’ favorite talking heads, and that in turn made him one of the most widely known political figures in the entire League. He’d be perfect for the part, whether he adopted the persona of an infuriated firebrand or the “more in sorrow than in anger” attitude of a regretful constitutional scholar debunking Beowulf’s flawed position.

“And if it turns out Filareta’s screwed up as badly as Tsang did?” she inquired after a moment, and Kolokoltsov grimaced.

Assuming Operation Raging Justice had proceeded as planned—and the dispatch boat which had transited to Beowulf seemed to prove Filareta had reached Manticore at least a week ago, just about on schedule—they should already have heard from him. The fact that they hadn’t didn’t necessarily prove things hadn’t gone as planned, however. Battles between fleets the size of Eleventh Fleet and whatever the Manties had scraped up might last days or even weeks as the opponents maneuvered against one another. For that matter, even if Filareta had captured all three of the Manticore Binary System’s inhabited planets, he still would have had to get past the forts at the Manticore end of the Junction—and past the combined BSDF and RMN detachments in Beowulf space at the other end—before he could have gotten a message back to Old Chicago.

None of which kept Kolokoltsov’s nerves from tying themselves tighter and tighter while the silence stretched out.

“That’s one reason Malachai isn’t giving the newsies any ‘official’ position statements,” he admitted out loud. “And the reason I’ve primed Reid and the others without turning them loose yet. We’re not going to jump either way until we know what Filareta did, but Malachai and I have discussed our options. Obviously, if he’s pushed ahead and the Manties have collapsed, figuring out how to spin it is no problem. If he’s backed off, on the other hand, we point out that both he and Tsang have demonstrated yet again the Solarian League Navy’s abhorrence for the kind of blood fests the Manties seem perfectly willing to embrace.”

“And if he’s gotten his ass blown off like Crandall?” Quartermain asked grimly.

“My feeling is that he’s smarter than Crandall. I think he’ll have backed off if it looked to him like he was going to get hammered. And I think the Manties will have let him, to be honest.”

“Why?” Quartermain could have sounded incredulous, but her tone was genuinely curious.