But there was nothing she could do about that from here. She'd made every defensive adjustment within her own command area that she could think of in the absence of any fresh instructions from home. All she could do now was to report the scraps of information they'd managed to recover from Hecate to the Admiralty and hope someone back home drew the appropriate conclusions.
And not just that Sidemore Station was urgently in need of additional reinforcements, either.
She contemplated Truman's report one more time, mental teeth gnawing at the rocky shell of her dilemma while she felt the impending collision sliding towards her like ground cars on glaze ice. If only Alice had found Second Fleet! At least then she'd have proof for Janacek and Jurgenson. As it was, all she had was circumstantial evidence, and she knew the mere fact that that evidence came from her would make it suspect in Janacek's eyes. Had Patricia Givens or Thomas Caparelli still been at the Admiralty, she wouldn't have worried about that, but Janacek was backed by Chakrabarti and Jurgenson, neither of whom was likely to stand up to his prejudices, and that meant—Her dreary mental recitation of all the disasters looming on the horizon paused, and her eyes narrowed as a new thought thrust itself suddenly into her mind.
Wait, she thought. Wait just a minute, Honor. Janacek and his cronies don't operate in a pure vacuum . . . and the Royal Navy isn't the only one caught in the middle of all this. For that matter, the Manticoran Alliance treaty partners aren't the only people who have a stake in it! Of course, if you do it, and if you're wrong . . .
Nimitz's head snapped up, and she tasted his sudden spike of emotions as he sensed her inner turbulence. Then his ears flattened as he felt her reach a decision, and she looked up to meet his gaze. He looked back at her, the very tip of his tail twitching ever so slowly while he sampled the resolution flowering suddenly at her core. Then his ears came up and his whiskers quivered as he radiated the unmistakable image of a huge smile.
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."
"Maybe it has." Thomas Theisman's tone was sharp, and the look he bestowed upon the Secretary of State was not one of unalloyed friendliness. "At the same time, however, there's one point in this note of theirs which strikes me as particularly significant."
"The question about Trevor's Star?" Pritchart asked.
"Exactly." Theisman nodded. "They're specifically asking whether or not we intended to include Trevor's Star in our demand that they acknowledge in principle our sovereignty over the occupied star systems. It seems obvious to me that we didn't, but I suppose, looking back at our own note, that I can see how its wording might have been misconstrued. If they believe we're upping the ante by demanding the return of a star system which they've formally annexed, then I'd have to call that a fairly ominous development."
"In the greater scheme of things, it's only one of several strands that worry me," Pritchart told him. "And if they'd ever actually sit down to talk with us in good faith, we could tie up all of the confusion in a day or two. On the other hand, I see your point."
"But there's another side to it, too," Denis LePic said. The Attorney General tapped the hardcopy of Descroix's note where it lay on the conference table in front of him. "They're asking for clarification," he pointed out. "I think that's significant. Especially when you couple it with this part at the end where they're talking about the need to 'break the logjam of mutually antagonistic positions.' "
"That last part is nothing more than self-serving eyewash!" Tony Nesbitt retorted. The Secretary of Commerce snorted disdainfully. "It sounds good, and they probably expect it to play well to the 'faxes and their own public opinion, but it doesn't really mean anything. If it did, then they would have offered to give at least a little ground in response to our last note."
"You may be right," LePic replied, although it was fairly obvious from his tone that he didn't think anything of the sort. "On the other hand, their request for clarification could be a sort of backhanded way of suggesting both that they have a genuine concern over the issue and that there's some room for movement. If all they wanted to do was to prepare their own public opinion for some sort of resumption of hostilities, then they wouldn't have asked the question. They'd simply have deliberately assumed that we intended to demand the return of Trevor's Star and rejected our 'presumption' indignantly."
"That's certainly possible," Pritchart said thoughtfully.
"Well, anything's possible," Nesbitt conceded. "I just think some things are more likely than others."