She smiled back fiercely and nodded.

After all, it wasn’t as if she wouldn’t have another career to fall back on if it didn’t work.

· · • · ·

“So I’m afraid,” Arnold Giancola said regretfully, “that Foreign Secretary Descroix’s response is scarcely what I could call forthcoming.”

The Cabinet room’s oppressive silence underscored the massive understatement in which he’d just indulged himself. The actual text of Descroix’s note had been made available to all of them in electronic format before this meeting, which had given all of them plenty of time to reach the same conclusion.

Of course, the text they’d received wasn’t exactly the same as the one Descroix had transmitted.

Giancola hid a smile of satisfaction behind his studiously concerned expression. Placing Yves Grosclaude in the ambassador’s slot on Manticore had paid off even more handsomely than he’d anticipated. He and Grosclaude had served together in Rob Pierre’s State Department before Giancola was recalled to Treasury for the Turner Reforms. They’d become friends along the way, and they understood one another, just as they shared a genuine, implacable distrust of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. Despite their history, Giancola had been very cautious about feeling Grosclaude out, but their old friendship and mutual trust had still been there. Which meant no one in Nouveau Paris was going to be aware of any tiny discrepancies between the note Grosclaude had been handed on Manticore and the one Giancola had delivered in Nouveau Paris.

And the discrepancies truly were tiny, he reflected. High Ridge and Descroix had reacted almost precisely as he’d anticipated. All he’d had to do was to remove a half dozen minor connective words to make their response sound even more uncompromising. Best of all was the way they’d reacted to the one critically ambiguous sentence he’d managed to get included in the Pritchart-approved draft of the Republic’s own communique.

“I don’t understand,” Rachel Hanriot said finally. “I know they’ve been deliberately stringing these talks out. But if that’s what they want to continue to do, then why should they be so flatly confrontational?”

“I agree that they’re being confrontational,” Eloise Pritchart said. “On the other hand, I suppose it’s only fair to point out that our last note to them was pretty stiff, too. Frankly, I lost my temper with them.” She smiled thinly, topaz eyes bleak. “I’m not saying I wasn’t justified when I did, but the language Arnold and I addressed them in certainly could have put their noses sufficiently out of joint to explain some of this.”

“In all fairness, Madame President,” Giancola said, “I doubt very much that our last note was really needed to ‘put their noses out of joint.’ Their assumption from the beginning has been that they held the whip hand. Their belief that we would ultimately have no choice but to accept whatever terms they were graciously prepared to grant us has been fundamental to their attitude throughout. I may have had my doubts about the immediate tactical consequences of sending such a stiff note to them, but in a strategic sense, I doubt it’s had any significant effect on their posture. All its really done, I suspect, is bring their fundamental arrogance and intransigence out into the open.”