“All right.” New Kiev nodded. “I can see that. But if Giancola’s been advocating a more confrontational foreign policy, wouldn’t she appear to be giving in to his demands if she adopted one?”

“That would certainly be one way to look at it,” Descroix conceded. “On the other hand, she may see it as her best opportunity to undercut his power base by co-opting his position and effectively taking it away from him. Which is why I said that announcing the existence of these new ships could reflect domestic tensions even more than interstellar ones. It’s entirely possible that Pritchart does intend to become more aggressive—on the surface, at least—in her negotiating stance, and that she sees Theisman’s announcement as a stick she can use against us. But if that’s the case, I would be extremely surprised if she were really willing to push us hard.”

“Why?” High Ridge asked. “I don’t necessarily disagree,” he said when she glanced at him. “I’m just curious as to your reasoning.”

“As Edward’s just pointed out,” the Foreign Secretary said after a moment, “the mere fact that they have more ships than we thought they did doesn’t necessarily indicate that they’ve actually managed to equalize the military balance. In fact, now that I’ve had time to think about it, the fact that Pritchart hasn’t already become more assertive in the treaty negotiations is probably an indication that it doesn’t. After all, whatever we may or may not have known about their naval building policies, she obviously had full information on them all along. So if she believed these new ships of the wall Theisman’s just told the galaxy about really would significantly change the military equation, I doubt that she would have waited this long to stiffen her negotiating stance. Especially not if delaying such a change has permitted Giancola to do any successful empire-building inside her administration.

“Given all of that, I’m very much inclined to think that we’re probably going to see a few strongly worded notes and probably some fairly emphatic news releases and press briefings from their State Department over the next few months. But all of that will probably be posturing, intended at least as much for domestic consumption as for us. Certainly, if Pritchart really intended to take a hard line in our negotiations, we’d have seen some sign of it before this.”

“I have to say that that makes sense to me,” Janacek put in. “And if she were truly insane enough to contemplate some resumption of active operations against us, they would have been much less likely to tell us these ships existed. The mere fact that we know about them enormously reduces the military impact they could have asserted if they’d taken us completely by surprise with them.”

High Ridge nodded exactly as if he hadn’t expected the First Lord to agree with anything which might make the Admiralty’s Intelligence failure look even a little less ominous.

“So what you’re basically saying, Elaine,” he said instead, “is that you believe we can expect a certain degree of surface agitation but that the fundamental diplomatic equation remains effectively unchanged?”