She glowered at them ferociously, and Rivka laughed as Roger cowered in mock terror. Elizabeth chuckled, shook her head, scooped up Ariel, and headed for her study.

She sat down at her workstation and pressed the acceptance key.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Eloise. I’ve discovered that arranging my son’s wedding is just a little more complicated than arranging interstellar treaties with lifelong enemies.”

“Funny you should mention treaties with lifelong enemies,” Pritchart replied with a somewhat peculiar smile. “It just happens I’ve received dispatches from Nouveau Paris. The reception of our treaty proposals wasn’t quite what I anticipated.”

“Oh?” After forty T-years on the throne, Elizabeth Winton’s face said exactly what she told it to say. It was a bit harder than usual to keep it that way at the moment. “In what way?”

“Remember how I told you I’d expected all along that Leslie was going to have trouble pounding them through the Senate, especially without me to back her up?”

Elizabeth nodded. There’d been strong arguments in favor of Pritchart’s taking the proposed treaty home and personally presenting it to the Havenite Congress, but there’d been countervailing arguments as well. The necessity for her, as Haven’s head of state, to personally oversee the delicate and difficult business of effectively coordinating the Republican Navy with the Royal Manticoran Navy after so many years of hostility had loomed large among them. But another, although Pritchart and Elizabeth had never explicitly discussed it, was that by remaining in Manticore, Pritchart could force a de facto acceptance of the treaty, in the short term at least, whatever the Senate ultimately decided.

“Well, it turns out I was wrong about the treaty’s prospects,” Pritchart went on now. “According to Leslie’s dispatch, she never got a chance to pound it anywhere. The Senate jumped all over it. It was approved with a fifty-six-vote margin over and above the two thirds majority requirement. There were only eleven dissenting votes!”

The president’s face blossomed in a huge smile, and Elizabeth felt herself smiling back.

“That’s wonderful news, Eloise!”

“I think the Senate’s as tired of locking horns with you people as Thomas Theisman is,” Pritchart said, shaking her head. “And according to Leslie, the fact that we not only get out of this without paying reparations, despite Giancola’s games with the diplomatic notes, but that it looks like we’re going to become the Star Empire’s biggest trading partner in the not so distant future didn’t hurt one bit. The probability that Giancola was working for Mesa the entire time and that we’re on the same hit list you people are didn’t hurt any, either, Leslie says. And neither did the fact that nobody in the Republic is especially fond of the League, for that matter.”