One confrontation had been over the long overdue security restrictions he’d found it necessary to institute at ONI after getting rid of Givens. The previous Second Space Lord’s “open door” policy with second-rate navies like Grayson’s had been a standing invitation to disastrous security breaches. In fact, the risk had been even greater with Grayson than any of the Alliance’s other minor navies, given Benjamin Mayhew’s willingness to trust ex-Peep officers like Admiral Alfredo Yu, the de facto commander of his grandiosely titled “Protector’s Own.” A man who would turn his coat once was always capable of turning it again if it seemed advantageous, and the restoration of the old Havenite constitution would actually provide a moral pretext for doing so. Yet the Graysons had steadfastly refused to cut such officers out of the information loop. They’d actually had the effrontery to dismiss the Admiralty’s entirely legitimate security concerns on the basis that the officers in question had “proven” their loyalty. Of course they had! And the ones most likely to go running home to Haven were the ones who would have taken the greatest care to be sure they’d proved they wouldn’t. No doubt they could even justify their deceit on the basis of patriotism, now that the StateSec regime they’d fled had been demolished!

Well, Janacek had put a stop to that nonsense, and if the “High Admiral” had a problem with the closing of the open door he’d so willfully abused, that was his lookout.

The second confrontation had been over the First Lord’s decision to shut down the joint Manticore-Grayson R&D programs. There’d been no need to continue funding them—not when what they’d already produced would provide at least twenty T-years worth of development work under peacetime budgetary constraints. Besides, it was obvious to Janacek that what the “joint programs” really amounted to was little more than a way for Grayson to siphon off technology from Manticore without footing the bill for developing it on its own. It was hardly surprising Matthews had been miffed when he cut off access to the trough… especially after the way the Cromarty Government and Mourncreek Admiralty had coddled and cosseted their Grayson pets.

And as for the third one… There was no way Matthews could have been unaware of the insult to the First Lord involved in granting that asshole White Haven the rank of a full admiral in their precious Navy. And it would be a cold day in Hell before Janacek forgot it, either.

“Whatever it is they think they’re doing, though,” he went on after a moment, “not even Graysons are stupid enough to think they could hope to accomplish anything significant on an interstellar scale without our support. Whether they want to be or not, they’re as much in our pocket as the Erewhonese, and they know it. So their navy—even assuming both that they could find some way to sustain it at its present size for more than a year or two without bankrupting themselves and that they knew what the hell they were doing with it without us to hold their hands—is really a non-factor in our security considerations. Except inasmuch as it actually increases ‘our’ modern warship strength, that is.”