He paused and cocked an eyebrow at Honor. She gazed back at him, her expression a mask while she considered what he’d just said. The implications were frightening. She’d suspected that the briefings Jurgensen and his staffers had laid on for her had been overly optimistic, but she hadn’t suspected that they might actually be ignoring or even actively suppressing the sort of evidence Benjamin was implying existed. She wished she could feel confident that the Graysons were wrong, but she’d worked too closely with them to underestimate their abilities.

Which, she reminded herself, was definitely not the case where Sir Edward Janacek and Francis Jurgensen were concerned.

“Now I know I don’t like what I’m hearing,” she told him after a moment. “I hope you and Greg will share your own information and analyses with me.”

“Of course we will!” Benjamin sounded testy, and she tasted his sudden flash of anger, almost as if he felt insulted that she should even wonder about such a thing for a moment. She waved her right hand in a small gesture of apology, and he continued to eye her sternly for a handful of heartbeats, then made a face and snorted.

“Sorry. I know you didn’t mean it like that, but the fact that I even considered taking it that way is probably a sign of how hard High Ridge and Janacek and their cronies are making it for us to work with them. Trust me, the last thing I want is to let my frustration with them spill over onto you, Honor!”

“I know. And I know it’s hard, too. Especially when I’m sort of caught between two stools the way I am. You’d have to be superhuman to forget that I was a Manticoran first, Benjamin, and right now you’ve got every reason in the universe to be irritated with all Manticorans.”

“But not with one of them who happens to be not only a Grayson but the person who’s catching the most grief from both sides,” he pointed out.

“Trust me, compared to what I’ve been putting up with on the other side of the line, any ‘grief’ any Graysons have been giving me is a pillow fight!”

“Maybe,” he conceded, then brushed that aside and returned to his original topic.

“I said there were two areas we were concerned about, and Silesia is only one of them. And, if we’re going to be honest about it, Silesia is the lesser of the two.”

“The lesser?” Honor tilted her head to one side and frowned. “It sounds more than bad enough to be going on with to me!”

“I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t, but compared to what we’re hearing out of the Republic of Haven, it’s definitely secondary.”

“Out of Haven?” Honor sat bolt upright in her chair, and Nimitz stiffened in her lap as her sudden stab of anxiety went through him.

“Out of Haven,” Benjamin confirmed grimly. “Again, we don’t have a great deal of hard evidence and Jurgensen’s refusal to share sources with us contributes to a major uncertainty factor, but there are three things we think his reports have significantly understated or overlooked completely.”