“As to why they might have decided that this was the right time to do something about it, Skipper,” Zahn went on, “I can think of a couple of factors. The biggest one, though, is probably the way the Alliance has kicked the Peeps’ butts. They don’t think they have to worry about Haven coming through Manticore at them, anymore, and if they don’t need a buffer zone any longer, they might not see any reason to go on being ‘neutral’ in our favor. And—”

She stopped speaking abruptly, and Ackenheil looked sharply down at the crown of her head. He started to prompt her to continue, then paused as he suddenly realized what she’d probably been about to say.

And now that we’re downsizing the Fleet—like idiots-and we’ve gotten ourselves a Prime Minister who wouldn’t recognize a principle if it bit him on the ass and a Foreign Secretary with a spine about as stiff as warm butter, they probably can’t believe the opportunity we’ve handed them, he told himself sourly. True enough, but not the sort of thing a Sidemorian exactly wants to say to her Manticoran skipper.

“I see what you’re getting at,” he said aloud, after a few seconds. “I wish I could find some reason to disagree with you. Unfortunately, I can’t.”

Zahn looked back up at him, her expression anxious, and he shrugged.

“ONI hasn’t gotten around to putting the pieces together as well as you have, Anna. Not yet. But I think they’re going to.”

“And what do we do about it, Sir?” the lieutenant commander asked softly.

“I don’t know,” Ackenheil admitted. He started to say something more, then shook his head with a small smile and turned away.

Zahn watched him go, and just as he had recognized what she’d left unsaid, she knew what he hadn’t said. Any Sidemorian would have known, although no one she knew would have been tactless enough to say so to any of their Manticoran allies. All of them knew precisely what the Cromarty Government’s policy would have been in the face of any Andermani effort to expand its territory into Silesia.

No one had a clue how the High Ridge Government might react… but they didn’t expect it to be good.

Chapter Eight

LADY Catherine Montaigne, Countess of the Tor, stalked around her sitting room with all of her characteristic energy… and very little of her characteristic cheerfulness.

“Damn the lot of them!” she snarled over her shoulder to the slab-sided, broad shouldered man seated motionlessly in his favorite armchair. In every way, they might have been expressly designed as physical opposites. She was at least fifteen centimeters taller than he was, and so slender she looked even taller than she actually was, while he was so broad that he appeared almost squat. She was golden-haired and blue-eyed; his hair was black, his eyes dark. She literally could not sit still, while his ability to sit motionless in thought frequently reminded an observer of a boulder of his own Gryphon granite. Her staccato speech patterns and blindingly fast changes of subject often bewildered those unprepared to keep pace with the speed of her thoughts; he was deliberate and disciplined to a fault in his own. And where she held one of the Star Kingdom’s thirty oldest peerages, he was a Gryphon highlander, with all of the bred-in-the-bone hostility towards all things aristocratic which that implied.