“On the surface,” Giancola repeated, “I’d have to agree with you. Certainly it’s in accordance with their established policy where control of termini of their wormhole junction is concerned. And the economic possibilities this new terminus offers certainly aren’t anything to be sneered at.” He chuckled suddenly, the sound completely—and surprisingly, for some of his audience—genuine. “Speaking from my own experience with the Committee of Public Safety’s treasury, I only wish our economy had access to something like the Junction! So, yes, Thomas. I’d have to agree that the reasons they and their spokesmen have offered are completely sufficient in their own right to justify their actions. I just don’t think they’ve made their full reasoning public.”

“In what way?” Pritchart asked.

“I think a part of their private reasoning is that playing this up as a major achievement is one way for them to distract their public from the shift in our own negotiating posture and the change in the balance of naval power.”

“I’m sure I’d be thinking very much the same way in their place,” Attorney General LePic said just a bit testily. Of all of the Cabinet secretaries, LePic was probably the poorest at concealing his emotions, and all of them were aware of his fundamental antipathy towards Giancola. And of his equally fundamental distrust of the Secretary of State. “If they are aware of those possibilities, I hardly think it represents any sort of Machiavellian secretiveness on their parts.”

“If all they were doing was trying to distract public attention from the negotiations with us, then I probably wouldn’t be particularly concerned myself,” Giancola said calmly. “Unfortunately, I think there’s probably another strand to their reasoning.”

“Which is?” Pritchart asked.

“I think they’re laying the groundwork for a complete revision of the traditional Manty foreign policy,” Giancola said flatly.

“A complete revision?” Theisman regarded him narrowly. “Excuse me, but I was under the impression that we’d just agreed it was part of their long-standing policy—that very ‘traditional’ policy you’re talking about—to exploit the Junction thoroughly and to secure control of its termini.”

“Yes, we had. But I would point out to you that they decided to annex Basilisk only after an extremely acrimonious and protracted domestic debate. A debate, I might add, in which the parties which comprise the current Manty government were, almost without exception, on the side arguing against annexation. Compare that to how long it took them to decide to annex Trevor’s Star. That was the Cromarty Government, of course, but there was amazingly little opposition to the decision, even on the part of their Conservatives and Liberals. In other words, they made the decision for Trevor’s Star much more quickly than they did in Basilisk’s case… and did so on something much closer to a consensual basis.

“Now we’re talking about Lynx and the rest of an entire cluster, and the very parties which were most strongly opposed to the annexation of Basilisk are the ones which have started coming out in favor of this new, larger annexation. And, I might add, they’d begun to do so within less than two weeks of discovering where this new terminus lies.”