Still, the fact was that Eloise Pritchart and he had discussed this particular note at length and agonized over its phrasing. The President obviously expected him to send it in the exact form to which they’d both finally agreed. Unfortunately, she hadn’t given him any formal instruction to that effect, and—upon more mature consideration, based solely on his extensive experience with the Department of State and the Manticoran government and acting on his own authority as Secretary of State—he had identified a few small modifications which would make it far more effective.

Although, he admitted with a thin smile as he studied the revised text, the effect towards which it was directed might not be exactly the one the President had had in mind…

Chapter Forty-Four

SIR Edward Janacek had discovered that he no longer enjoyed going to work in the morning. He would never have believed that might come to pass when Michael Janvier first invited him to return to Admiralty House, but things had changed since that heady day of triumph.

He nodded to his yeoman and strode on into his inner office. His desk was waiting, and there in the middle of the blotter sat the locked dispatch case containing chips of the overnight communications. Like the trip to his office itself, that box had become something he dreaded, especially in light of the arrival of Eloise Pritchart’s most recent missive the day before. He didn’t really want to admit its existence, but he glanced at it as he started to walk past the desk towards the coffee carafe sitting in its accustomed place on the credenza. Then he stopped dead. A crimson light blinked on top of the dispatch case, and his stomach muscles tightened as it flashed at him.

Given the inevitable lags in communication time for units deployed over interstellar distances, there wasn’t a great deal of sense in awakening senior members of the Admiralty when dispatches arrived in the middle of the night. Even if their contents were desperately important, getting them into the hands of their recipients an hour or two sooner wasn’t going to have any significant effect on the turnaround time for a decision loop a dozen light-years or so across. There were, of course, exceptions to that rule, especially for star nations which possessed wormhole junctions, and senior communications staffers were expected to recognize when those exceptions occurred. Except in those very special circumstances, however, the Admiralty’s most senior echelons could anticipate a night’s sleep unflawed by the precipitate delivery of bad news.

But that flashing light indicated that Simon Chakrabarti, as First Space Lord, had already read the overnight dispatches… and that in his opinion one of them was of special importance.

The First Space Lord had been becoming steadily more unhappy for months now. Janacek was prepared to accept his in-house expression of a certain degree of concern, of course. It was the First Space Lord’s job to warn his civilian superiors of any worries he might entertain, after all. But Chakrabarti had gone beyond private discussions of concern or even verbal expressions of those same concerns in face-to-face meetings. He’d actually begun drafting formal memos whose arguments were becoming steadily more pointed, and he’d been following the message traffic—especially from Silesia—with what Janacek privately considered obsessive attentiveness.