“I suppose,” Elaine Descroix conceded across the remnants of her own breakfast. She drank a little coffee, patted her lips with an old-fashioned linen napkin, and then grimaced ever so slightly.

“Clarence certainly did his best to see to it that credit went where credit was due,” she told High Ridge. “And I particularly liked the way he kept managing to slip our ‘building the peace’ slogan into his replies. But that Kare, and especially Reynaud—!” She shook her head. “What a deadly dull pair!”

“One can hardly expect acute political awareness out of career bureaucrats and scientists, Elaine,” High Ridge chided gently.

“No,” she agreed. “But I was watching Reynaud, in particular. He didn’t care one bit for the way Clarence kept ‘stealing his thunder,’ and it showed. Are we going to have problems with him down the road?”

“What sort of problems?” High Ridge frowned.

“Oh, come now, Michael! He’s the RMAIA’s director, and however much I may dislike him, he obviously has a brain. I’m quite certain he can do simple math, and not even Melina can change the fact that he has access to his own books.”

High Ridge set down his cup, and glanced over his shoulder at the butler. Descroix had a disturbing tendency to ignore the ears of servants. The Prime Minister was particularly aware of it because it was something he had to constantly watch in himself, but he’d seen too many examples of what ungrateful and resentful servants could do to their employers when those employers were careless about what they said in front of them. It wasn’t a lesson he intended to forget, and although his butler had been in his employ for almost thirty T-years, there was no point in taking chances.

“That will be all, Howard,” he told the man. “Just leave us the coffeepot. I’ll buzz when we’re done.”

“Of course, My Lord,” Howard murmured, and disappeared with discreet promptness.

“Now then, Elaine,” High Ridge said, gazing at her intently, “what, specifically, are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting that he has access to his own books. I admit that Melina has done a better job than I’d expected in managing the fiscal details, but in the end, she can’t simply refuse to let the man who’s technically her superior look at his own agency’s accounts. And Reynaud may be an admiral, but he came up through Astro Control, Michael. He’s had plenty of bureaucratic experience of his own. He may not be an accountant, but I’m not at all sure that he wouldn’t be able to see through Melina’s little… subterfuges. And given that he so obviously disapproves of Clarence, and so, by extension, of us, he also has the potential to see himself as a knight on a white horse. It’s just possible that his delicate conscience could turn him into a whistleblower.”

“I think that’s unlikely,” High Ridge said after a moment. “If he were likely to do something like that, why hasn’t he already done it? So far as I’m aware, he hasn’t even asked any difficult questions, much less shown any inclination to take his suspicions—if any—public. And even if it turned out that he were so inclined after all, it would effectively be his word against the full weight of Her Majesty’s Government.” He shook his head. “No. I don’t see any way he could hurt us under the circumstances.”