“I see.” Descroix smiled. “Well, I assure you, Mr. Ambassador, that we will indeed reply at our earliest… convenience.”

“We could ask no more,” Grosclaude replied affably, with a smile as obviously false as her own. “And now,” he continued, “since I’ve discharged my mission here, I will take up no more of your valuable time.”

He rose with a slight, formal bow, and Descroix stood behind her desk to return it. She made no move, however, to escort him from her office, and he smiled again, this time as if in some obscure form of satisfaction at the deliberate slight.

She watched the door close behind him, then sat back down and turned her attention back to the text on her display. It was no more palatable on closer examination than it had been when she first glanced at it, and she allowed her anger to show now that she was once again alone in her office.

She read through the entire note, slowly, one phrase at a time, and her lips grew thinner and her eyes colder with each sentence.

· · • · ·

“I don’t believe I care for Pritchart’s tone,” Baron High Ridge observed coldly.

“And you think I do care for it?” Descroix demanded. Then she snorted. “At least you didn’t have that jumped up Dolist Grosclaude in your office handing his frigging note to you.”

“No,” the Prime Minister agreed. “I’ve had to endure three interviews with him, and that’s quite enough, thank you.”

“I wish three interviews were all I’d had to put up with,” Descroix replied. “But that’s neither here nor there. What’s important is the note itself. She’s getting more and more hardline, Michael.”

“So I see.” High Ridge glanced back at his own copy of the note and grimaced. “I see that she’s taken her offer of a plebiscite for Trevor’s Star back off the table.”

“That part doesn’t really surprise me,” Descroix admitted. “Especially with all of the talk here in the Star Kingdom about the annexation of the new terminus and the possibility of extending that to Lynx and the other Talbott systems. We’re considering mass annexations, and she sees that as a bad precedent for her own occupied systems. And we’ve also been concentrating on Talbott to downplay the tension between us and the Republic, and she knows that, too. So she went looking for a way to slap us on the wrist hard enough to get our attention, and this is what she came up with. She figures that Trevor’s Star is the most valuable counter on the board and that taking it back out of play—from her side, at least—at this particular moment will make the point that she’s pissed off.

“I can understand that, I suppose. On the other hand, surely she’s not so stupid as to think that whether she’s willing to talk about Trevor’s Star or not is going to make any difference to what happens there? We’ve formally annexed the system, for God’s sake! Whatever she or those other idiots in Nouveau Paris may think, Trevor’s Star and San Martin are definitely remaining under our control.”