“Our people have done just about as well as Dr. Wix and his people, Ma’am. So far we’ve already identified no less than six ‘beacon’ stars, which has let us place our current position with a high degree of confidence.”

“And that position is—?” Zachary prompted when Thatcher paused.

“At this particular moment, Ma’am, we’re approximately six hundred and twelve light-years from Manticore. And we’ve been able to identify that G2 star at four light-years as Lynx.”

“Lynx?” Zachary’s brow wrinkled, then she shrugged. “I can’t say the name rings any bells, Rochelle. Should it?”

“Not really, Ma’am. After all, it’s a long way from home. But the Lynx System was settled about two hundred T-years ago. It’s part of the Talbott Cluster.”

“Talbott?” This time Zachary recognized the name, and her eyes narrowed as she considered the implications of that recognition.

The Talbott Cluster was the thoroughly inaccurate name assigned to one of several regions, most of them rather sparsely settled, just beyond the frontiers of the Solarian League. Whatever else the “cluster’s” stars were, they were nothing which remotely resembled anything an astrophysicist would have considered a cluster, but that didn’t matter to the people who’d needed to come up with a convenient handle for them.

Most such regions were relatively hardscrabble propositions. Many of them contained colonies which had backslid technologically, severely in some cases, since their settlement, and only a few of them contained star systems which anyone from the Star Kingdom would have considered economically well established. And eventually, all of them would inevitably be incorporated into the glacially expanding frontiers of the League. Whether they wanted to be or not.

No one would resort to anything as crude as outright conquest. Sollies didn’t do things that way… nor did they have to. The Solarian League was the largest, most powerful, wealthiest political entity in human history. On a per capita basis, the Star Kingdom’s economy was actually somewhat stronger, but in absolute terms Manticore’s entire gross domestic product would disappear with scarcely a ripple into the League’s economy. When that sort of economic powerhouse expanded into the vicinity of star systems which could scarcely keep their heads above water, the train of events leading to eventual incorporation extended itself with the inevitability of entropy.

And if it didn’t, the League could be counted upon to give the process a swift kick, Zachary reflected sourly.

Josepha Zachary was scarcely alone among the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s naval officers in her dislike for the Solarian League. Actually, a lot of people who had been denied the honor and privilege of Solly citizenship disliked the League. It wasn’t because the League went around conquering people. Not officially, anyway. It was just that the towering sense of moral superiority which the League seemed to bring to all of its interstellar endeavors could be absolutely relied upon to irritate every non-Solly who ever experienced it. The antipathy was exacerbated for the Royal Manticoran Navy, however, and Zachary was honest enough to admit it. The embargo which the Cromarty Government had managed to secure on weapons sales and technology transfers to the belligerents in the Star Kingdom’s war against the Peeps had irritated the hell out of an awful lot of Sollies. Some of them had been none too shy about making their ire known, and some of those who hadn’t been were officers in the Solarian League Navy or Customs Service who had expressed their personal irritation by harassing Manticoran merchant ships in Solarian space.