“Completely off the record—and I’ll deny it if you ever quote me—but I’d just as soon go pick on someone who isn’t as tough as you guys for a change, myself,” Elizabeth told her, marveling even now at how close she’d become to the president of the star nation she’d hated with every fiber of her being for four standard decades.

“There are still some questions at the Nouveau Paris end, of course,” Pritchart went on in a more sober tone. “As they say, the devil is always in the details. With your permission, now that the original treaty’s been approved at both ends, I’d like to go ahead and get Admiral Hemphill’s mission off to Bolthole as soon as possible. I think that would help put a lot of those questions to bed with a shovel.”

“Tom and Hamish are still having to knock a few heads together over at the Admiralty,” Elizabeth said with an off-center smile. “I don’t think there’ll be any major snafus, though.”

I hope to hell there won’t be, anyway, she added mentally. She truly didn’t expect any, but she’d been surprised upon occasion before. And she supposed it was inevitable that the more conservative members of the Royal Navy would be…uncomfortable about sending the entire surviving R&D staff of HMSS Weyland off deep into Havenite territory to share all of the RMN’s technical secrets with its traditional enemies. In fact, there were times Elizabeth expected to wake up with a terminal drug hangover any moment now.

But crazy as it sounds, it actually makes sense—a lot of sense, she thought. We’re pretty sure that if we couldn’t figure out where Bolthole was, the Sollies—and probably the Alignment—don’t know either. God knows we had a lot more incentive to find it than either of them did! So tucking our R&D projects away where no one with any invisible starships is likely to drop by to clean up what she missed the first time around strikes me as a very good idea. And from what Theisman and Eloise have shown us, Bolthole’s going to be a damned good place to start putting all that new hardware into production on a really large scale quickly, once we’ve made a few upgrades.