She waved her hand in midair again, uncomfortable with the sincerity of his tone.

“At any rate,” she went on again, after a moment, both her expression and her voice determinedly light, “you managed to arrange things very neatly so that you don’t have to deal with the damned Manties. Or, for that matter, the rest of the Cabinet when they hear about the Manties’ latest antics.”

“And just what do those antics consist of this time?” Theisman asked, accepting her change of mood. “Besides, of course, their failure to accept our most recent proposal?”

“Nothing,” she admitted. “But they don’t have to do anything else to create enormous problems for us, Tom, and you know it.”

“Yes, I suppose I do.” He shrugged. “But like I said earlier, the fact that they can’t find their ass with both hands has been useful as hell from my perspective. At least I didn’t have to worry about them while Javier, Lester, and I ran around pissing on forest fires!”

“There is that,” Pritchart agreed with a sober nod.

Not everyone had been prepared to accept Theisman’s overthrow of the Committee of Public Safety gracefully. In fact, initially, he’d controlled only the capital system and its fleet. Capital Fleet was the Navy’s largest, of course, and two-thirds of the other core systems of the People’s Republic had declared for him—or, rather, for Pritchart’s interim government—within the first three T-months. The majority of the rest of the People’s Navy had also supported him, as well. But a large minority of the Navy had been under the control of other citizen admirals or, even worse, StateSec system commanders, who’d refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the new government.

It was, as Theisman had just suggested, extremely fortunate that the Manticorans had chosen to continue the negotiations Saint-Just had finessed them into beginning. If they’d decided to resume active military operations, instead, especially with the enormous technological superiority of their new hardware, the entire Republic would have disintegrated—within weeks, probably, but certainly within mere months. As it was, Theisman, with Giscard and Tourville as his primary field commanders, had found himself fighting a vicious, multi-cornered war against a shifting kaleidoscope of enemies. Pritchart had had more than one reason for being unhappy about that. As President, she’d hated the way it had distracted her from concentrating fully on the stalled negotiations with the Star Kingdom. On a more personal level, Giscard’s responsibilities as Theisman’s senior fleet commander had kept him away from Nouveau Paris—and one Eloise Pritchart’s bed—for all but a few weeks out of the last three-plus years. Which, she admitted, she resented even more than the official headaches it created.

Fortunately, she’d never really been concerned (unlike some people) that Theisman might not succeed in his pacification efforts in the end… as long as the Manties stayed out of it. The fact that most of his adversaries distrusted one another even more than they distrusted him had given him a powerful advantage, but not even their merry-go-round of mutual betrayal would have been enough to permit the interim government to survive in the face of an active Manticoran resumption of the offensive.