“The sequence is clear from what the Manties have released. Filareta sailed into an ambush; Harrington sprang the trap and gave him the option of surrendering or being destroyed; he opened fire; she handed him his head. Right?”

Heads nodded, and he shrugged again.

“Well, we can’t possibly win if we try to defend his actions. So instead, we change the storyline. Harrington deliberately drew him into the trap; she offered him the option of surrendering as a ploy to get him to scuttle his missile pods; he did scuttle his missile pods…and the instant he’d given up the one weapon she was afraid of, she opened fire and cold bloodedly destroyed his fleet. It was never about giving him a chance to surrender; it was always about her intention to destroy him whatever he did.”

“How the hell do you expect to make that stand up?” Wodoslawski demanded. “Especially with the recordings the Manties have already made public!”

“We point out that they’re the recordings the Manties have made public,” Abruzzi replied. “They’ve told us they’re clean copies of the actual conversation, but we have no proof of that. We point out that Filareta’s orders gave him the option of standing down or even surrendering if it turned out Admiral Rajampet’s estimate of the tech imbalance turned out to be in error. I don’t know if they did—in fact, I doubt like hell they did—but by the time an official transcript of them gets released, they damned well will have! On the basis of those instructions and what appears to have been the tactical situation when Harrington demanded his surrender, we believe that’s what he actually did. At which point Harrington opened fire, and everything after that point in the ‘official record’ they’ve sent us is almost certainly a skillfully edited montage of the actual battle.”

“It’ll never fly,” Wodoslawski said flatly.

“It might,” Kolokoltsov said more slowly, eyes narrowed as he considered the scenario. “It has the advantage of being consistent with what we’ve been saying about Spindle and the other confrontations. Sure, some people are going to see it as the same old line, but for a lot of others that continuity’s going to give it a certain legitimacy. It’ll fit with what those people have already accepted as the truth, and the Manties can’t disprove it. They can provide all the sensor recordings and recorded messages they want, but all of them will be coming from official government organs, and any good, cynical Solarian citizen knows government organs routinely lie their asses off when it suits their purposes.”

“Oh, yeah?” Wodoslawski leaned back in her chair. “And what about Haven throwing in with them? Validating the same story?”