“Dr. Kare will now offer a brief summary of his team’s progress and immediate plans,” High Ridge announced as the applause finally faded. “After that, we will entertain questions from the ladies and gentlemen of the press. Dr. Kare?”

He beamed at the astrophysicist, and Kare smiled back dutifully. Then it was his turn to turn to face the audience.

“Thank you, Prime Minister,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I’d like to welcome you here aboard Hephaestus on behalf of the Royal Manticoran Astrophysics Investigation Agency, its scientific team, and its Director, Admiral Reynaud.” He turned his head to smile at Reynaud, then returned his attention to the spectators.

“As you know,” he began, “over the past two and a half T-years, we’ve been engaged in the systematic search for additional termini of the Manticore Wormhole Junction. It’s been a painstaking process, and a time-consuming one. But thanks in no small part to the observations and diligent work of my colleague, Dr. Wix, and to a quite disproportionate amount of pure good fortune, we are considerably ahead of any schedule we could have realistically projected as little as six, or even four, months ago. In fact, we are now in a position to dispatch a properly manned survey ship through the Junction’s seventh terminus.

“That ship will depart from the Manticore System next Thursday.” The entire audience seemed to inhale simultaneously, and he produced his most genuine smile of the entire news conference. “Precisely where it will depart to, and precisely when it will return, are questions I will not be able to answer today. No one will… until the ship and its crew have done both of those things. If you have any other questions, however, I’ll do my best to answer them.”

· · • · ·

“Excuse me, Ma’am. I apologize for interrupting, but you wanted to know when the Secretary of War’s pinnace was fifteen minutes out.”

“Thank you, Paulette.” Shannon Foraker looked up from her earnest conversation with Lester Tourville and smiled briefly at her flag lieutenant. “Please inform Captain Reumann that we’ll be joining him in the boat bay momentarily.”

“Of course, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Baker murmured and withdrew from the day cabin almost as unobtrusively as she’d entered it.

Foraker turned back to her guests. Tourville half-reclined in the cabin’s largest chair with all of his usual loose-limbed, casual ease. No one had seemed inclined to dispute his possession of it… particularly since it was positioned directly under an air return. Javier Giscard sat rather more neatly in his own chair, his mouth quirked in a fond half-smile as he watched the tendrils of smoke wreathing up from Tourville’s cigar towards the ventilator grille. Their chiefs of staff formed the perimeter of the conversational group along with Captain Anders, but Commander Clapp, the most junior officer present, sat directly to Foraker’s right. It probably wasn’t evident to anyone who didn’t know him as well as she did, but the commander was clearly more than a little uncomfortable at finding himself in such high-ranked company. Not that he’d allowed any trace of that to color the informal briefing he’d just given Tourville and Giscard.