The Prime Minister drew an unobtrusive breath, squared mental shoulders, and moved the two meters closer which brought him within the sentry’s designated official field of view.

The captain reacted then. Her head snapped to the side, her eyes focused on High Ridge, and her right hand flicked to the butt of the holstered pulser at her side with mechanical precision. It was all meticulously choreographed. Only an idiot would have thought the captain was anything less than a deadly serious professional, yet her response was also a display of formal military theater. One which required an equally formal response from him.

“The Prime Minister,” he informed her, as if she didn’t already know perfectly well who he was. “I crave a few minutes of Her Majesty’s time to attend to affairs of government.”

“Yes, Sir,” the captain said, never removing her right hand from her pulser, and her left hand moved in a precisely metered arc to activate her com.

“The Prime Minister is here to see Her Majesty,” she announced, and High Ridge’s jaw muscles clenched. Usually, he rather enjoyed the formalities, the time-polished procedures and protocols which underscored the dignity and gravity of the office he held and the Star Kingdom he served. Today, each of them was a fresh grain of salt rubbed into the wound which brought him here, and he wished they could just get on with it. It wasn’t as if his secretary hadn’t scheduled the appointment before he ever came, or as if sophisticated security systems hadn’t identified him and kept him under direct observation from the instant he entered Mount Royal Palace’s grounds.

The sentry’s eyes held him with unwavering, impersonal concentration—still flawed by that cold little core of contempt—as she listened to her earbug. Then she took her hand from her pulser and pressed the door activation button.

“Her Majesty will receive you, Sir,” she said crisply, and snapped back into her original guard position, gazing once more down the hall as if he no longer existed.

He inhaled again and stepped through the door.

Queen Elizabeth waited for him, and his jaw tightened further. She’d received him in this same formal office many times over the past four T-years. Not happily, but with at least a pretense of respect for his office, however poorly she’d concealed the fact that she despised the man who held it. In those same four years, she’d never seen him a single time except for the unavoidable requirements of government and her constitutional duties, yet both of them, by mutual unspoken assent, had used the mask of formal courtesy when she had.

Today was different. She sat behind her desk, but unlike any other time he’d entered this office, she did not invite him to be seated. In fact, there was no chair in which he might have sat. The coffee table, the small couch which had faced it, and the conversational nook of comfortable armchairs, had all vanished. He had no doubt at all that she’d ordered their removal the instant his secretary screened the Palace for an appointment, and he knew his fury—and dismay—showed through his own masklike expression as the unspoken, coldly intentional insult went home.