“Welcome aboard Campenhausen, Your Grace,” Chien-lu Rabenstrange said.

“Thank you, Your Grace,” Honor replied, and Rabenstrange smiled ever so slightly. She could taste the caution of his emotions, but she also tasted curiosity. And, even more important, she did taste something very like trust. She’d hoped she would, but she hadn’t allowed herself to count on it. Still, she and Rabenstrange had established a certain personal empathy which extended beyond their purely professional relationship during her last assignment to Silesia. Apparently, it was still there. He was obviously aware of the tension inherent in their meeting, under the circumstances, but he trusted her personal integrity. At least far enough for him to have agreed to meet with her in the first place, at least.

“I must confess,” he told her, “to being somewhat… surprised by your presence here, Your Grace. Under the circumstances, given the tension and recent unfortunate events between our two commands, I would not have anticipated a direct contact at this level.”

“I’ll confess that I was rather counting on that, actually, Your Grace,” she responded. He cocked his head questioningly, and she smiled. “I have something a bit unusual to discuss with you,” she told him, “and I felt that this might be the most effective way to get your attention.”

“Did you?” he murmured, and it was his turn to smile. “Well, Your Grace, I certainly can’t guarantee that I’ll find myself in agreement with whatever brings you here. But I will confess, that you have piqued my curiosity! So, why don’t you begin?”

He waved gracefully at the chair at the foot of the conference table, and Honor seated herself in it and collected Nimitz in her lap.

“Certainly, Your Grace,” she told him. “Now, I realize that tensions between the Empire and the Star Kingdom are running high at the moment. And I don’t propose attempting to magically sort things out between the two of us. That, obviously, is something which ultimately will have to be accomplished at a higher level. In the meantime, however, I’ve recently become aware of certain information which I believe ought properly to be shared with a representative of the Empire. Information which might have a certain bearing on the deployment of both of our forces.”

“Information?”

“Yes, Your Grace. You see…”

Chapter Fifty-Two

“SO, Zhenting, what did you think?”

Herzog von Rabenstrange and his chief of staff stood on Campenhausen’s flag bridge, watching the glittering icon of HMS Troubadour as the Manticoran superdreadnought accelerated steadily towards the hyper limit.

“I thought—” Kapitän der Sternen Isenhoffer paused, then shrugged ever so slightly. “I thought that in many ways it all sounded very… convenient for Duchess Harrington, Sir.”

“ ‘Convenient’?” Rabenstrange rolled the word across his tongue and cocked his head at the taller Isenhoffer. “An interesting choice of words, Zhenting. Not entirely without applicability, I suppose, but still…” He shook his head. “However ‘convenient’ it might be for her under some circumstances, it remains most inconvenient under most of them. I believe the old cliché about rocks and hard places comes to mind.”