Despite himself, his voice rose to a shout with the final sentence, and he clenched his fists behind him, glaring at Sternhafen. The other admiral seemed to wilt inside his spotless white uniform tunic, and Rabenstrange made himself close his eyes and draw another deep, cleansing breath.

“Now, after you’ve chosen to reject Harrington’s proposal and rushed to proclaim the official verdict of the Empire without any investigation whatsoever, I have no choice but to maintain the farce to which you’ve committed His Imperial Majesty. An opportunity which would have allowed us to turn this entire wretched incident decisively to our advantage has been totally foreclosed by your narrowminded, knee-jerk need to announce to the galaxy at large that the Manticorans were at fault. And because I can’t repudiate your official announcement without revealing to the entire universe just how stupid our policy has been, I’m probably going to find myself faced with fighting the war against the Star Kingdom which His Imperial Majesty so earnestly wished to avoid.”

The herzog smiled very coldly at Sternhafen.

“I suspect, Herr Graf, that the Emperor may have just a little to say to you upon this subject himself.”

· · • · ·

“I did warn you they were becoming increasingly hardline,” Arnold Giancola said in an artfully regretful tone.

Eloise Pritchart glared at him, too angry, for once, to maintain the sort of carefully crafted mask which had preserved her from detection by StateSec’s minions. Giancola settled back in his chair, presenting a properly submissive mien while deep inside he savored her obvious fury.

“Yes, Arnold, you did warn me,” she told him with savage, icy precision. “Which isn’t particularly useful, just at the moment.”

“Sorry,” he replied as sincerely as possible. “I didn’t mean to sound as if I were saying ‘I told you so.’ It’s just that I’ve been seeing them moving in this direction for so long without being able to do anything about it that—”

He shrugged helplessly, and the President turned her back to stare out the window of her office at downtown Nouveau Paris while she fought to control her own temper.

The traditional, archaic hardcopy of Elaine Descroix’s response to the Republic’s most recent note lay on her desk, and a corner of her mind was a bit surprised that the sheer, white-hot fury which had filled her as she read it hadn’t ignited the paper on which it was printed. Descroix had finally abandoned the platitudes and vague, generalized nothings with which the Star Kingdom’s negotiators had strung out negotiations for so long. Her new note was a combination of an arrogant lecture on the People’s Republic’s long history of interstellar misbehavior coupled with curt observations that “confrontational, antagonistic expressions of anger and impatience do not contribute to the mature resolution of differences between interstellar powers.” It also included a flat refusal to acknowledge that the Republic, as the direct successor of the “brutally oppressive prior regimes of the People’s Republic,” had any right “at this late date to wrap itself in a supposed mantle of moral authority” and demand the return of its territory to its sovereignty. Apparently, Pritchart noted furiously, that was true even if the citizens living in the territory in question requested in a freely voted upon plebiscite to do exactly that! In essence, Descroix’s note represented a thinly veiled ultimatum demanding that the Republic of Haven submit completely to the total package of the Star Kingdom’s diplomatic demands as the price for a formal treaty.