by David Weber
"Please, everyone, be seated," Honor invited, acknowledging the silent command to continue in her role as official hostess.
Her "guests" obeyed, settling down around their two principals with a sort of instinctive social ranking, and she glanced at MacGuiness.
"May I assume your pantry is its normally efficient self despite the lateness of the hour, Mac?"
"Of course, Your Grace." MacGuiness bowed with perfect aplomb. "Would anyone care for refreshment?" he continued, turning to the others.
Although Elizabeth had just discovered a rather sudden craving for a strong whiskey, she suppressed it. No one seemed inclined to venture where she hadn't led the way, and after a moment, Honor shrugged slightly.
"It would appear not," she told the steward. "If anyone changes her mind, I'll buzz."
"Of course, Your Grace," MacGuiness murmured again, and withdrew.
Honor waited until the pantry door had closed behind him, then turned back to the others.
"In case any of you had managed to remain unaware of it," she said with another of those off-center smiles, "the tension level in this room is rather high, according to Nimitz." All eyes flitted to the treecat sitting on the back of her chair. "I can't imagine why that might be," she added.
Elizabeth surprised herself with a snort of laughter. It was harsh, but it was also genuine, and she shook her head reprovingly.
"I think I might be able to think of a reason or two," she said, then turned her own attention to Pritchart. "I must say, Madam President, that of all the possible scenarios under which you and I might have come face to face at last, this one would never have occurred to me." She let her eyes sweep over the cabinet secretaries flanking Pritchart. "If anything were to happen to this delegation, it would make a serious hole in your government, I believe."
"I thought that since you'd trusted us enough to send Admiral Alexander-Harrington to us, I should return the compliment, Your Majesty," Pritchart replied.
"Perhaps so," Elizabeth said. "But there was that one minor difference, I believe. I sent Duchess Harrington accompanied by an entire battle fleet."
"Indeed you did." Pritchart nodded, those striking topaz eyes meeting Elizabeth's levelly. "And I assure you, we missed neither element of the message behind that . . . arrangement. Neither the pointed suggestion, shall we say, that it would be wise of us to pay attention to her message and see to it that nothing untoward happened to her, nor the fact that you could have sent just the fleet . . . and its laser heads. Believe me, after all that's happened between our star nations, after the collapse of our own summit, after the Battle of Manticore, against the backdrop of the tensions mounting between the Star Empire and the League, I was as pleased as I was astonished that you were willing to talk instead of simply attacking when your advantage was so overwhelming."
"I suppose I could say the same thing, given your unexpected arrival after what happened to our system infrastructure," Elizabeth replied.
"Your Majesty, what happened to your star system has a lot to do with my presence here, but not, perhaps, in the way you believe."
"No?" Elizabeth regarded her intently, wishing with all her heart that she possessed even a hint of the empathic ability Honor had developed.
Honor had already briefed her fully on what she herself had sensed from Pritchart and the others—both during her time in Nouveau Paris, and since the president's totally unexpected arrival at Trevor's Star—but that wasn't the same thing as sensing it for herself. In fact, it wasn't even remotely the same thing.
Elizabeth Winton tried to be ruthlessly honest with herself. History was unfortunately replete with examples of kings and queens—and presidents—whose advisers had told them what they thought their rulers wanted to hear. And there'd been just as many—at least—of those kings and queens (and presidents) who'd told themselves what they wanted to hear. That was one of the lessons her father had always emphasized to her, and since taking the throne herself, she'd discovered just how wise he'd been to do that. And how difficult it was, at times, to remember it.
Yet because of that self honesty, she was well aware of her own temper, of how hard it was for her to forgive anyone who injured those she was responsible for protecting or those she loved. At this moment, in this day cabin, as she sat on Honor's couch, she looked into the eyes of the President of the Republic of Haven—the very personification of the star nation which had murdered her own father, her uncle, her cousin, and her prime minister. Of the conquering empire which had engulfed dozens of star systems, cost the lives of untold thousands of her military personnel, and forced the expenditure of literally incalculable floods of her people's treasure, as well as their blood. Every bulldog fiber of her being quivered with the tension of all that remembered bloodshed and violence, of the need to keep her guard up, to recall all those decades of treachery. It was her job to remember that, her duty to protect her people, and she would have given her own right arm to be able to know—not to be told, by someone else, however much she trusted that someone, but to know, beyond question or doubt—what the person behind those topaz eyes was truly thinking.
A soft, silken warmth pressed against the side of her neck, and Ariel's bone-deep, buzzing purr vibrated into her. She reached up to him, and he stroked his head against the palm of her hand, but his own fingers were still. They never moved, never signed a single word, and that, she realized suddenly, was the most eloquent thing he could possibly have told her.
"All right, Madam President," she said, and wondered if the others in that cabin were as surprised as she was by the gentleness of her own voice, "why don't you tell me why you're here?"
"Thank you," Pritchart said very quietly, as if she understood exactly what had been going through Elizabeth's mind. Then the president drew a deep breath and sat back in her chair.
"Before I say anything else, Your Majesty, there's one point I want to clear up. One which has bedeviled the relations between the Republic of Haven and the Star Empire for far too long."
She paused a moment, as if even now it was difficult to steel herself, then continued levelly.
"Your Majesty, we know who tampered with our prewar diplomatic correspondence. We did not know at the time the Republic resumed hostilities." She looked squarely at Elizabeth, facing the sudden resurgence of the queen's tension. "You have my word—my personal word, as well as that of the Republic of Haven—that it was only well after Operation Thunderbolt that we discovered, essentially by a fluke, that in fact the Star Empire was telling the truth about the High Ridge Government's correspondence. That the version which I saw in Nouveau Paris, and which my cabinet colleagues saw with me, had been altered before it ever reached us . . . and, despite the fact that it carried your own Foreign Office's valid authentication codes, not by any Manticoran. The two men responsible for it were Yves Grosclaude, our special envoy to you, and Secretary of State Arnold Giancola."
With the sole exception of Honor Alexander-Harrington and Anton Zilwicki, every Manticoran in the cabin stiffened in shock, and Elizabeth Winton's eyes blazed. She opened her mouth quickly, angrily . . . then forced herself to close it and sat back.
"We weren't aware of what Giancola had done until Mr. Grosclaude was killed in a highly suspicious 'air car accident.' One which looked remarkably like a suicide . . . or"—Pritchart's eyes bored into Elizabeth's, then flicked sideways to Honor—"like someone who'd been compelled to kill himself by flying into a cliff wall. Almost, you might say, like someone who'd been adjusted."
Elizabeth's eyes narrowed. She didn't have any idea where Pritchart was headed, but Ariel was still purring against her neck, and Honor's expression was still composed and calm, and so she made herself wait.
"Kevin, here," Pritchart nodded sideways at Usher, "has a nasty, suspicious mind which was already chewing the correspondence question over. When Grosclaude died so spectacularly, those suspicions of his started working overtime. It didn't take long for him to discover proof that the correspondence had bee
n altered at our end. Unfortunately, the 'proof' had clearly been manufactured, apparently to implicate Giancola."
She smiled very thinly at Elizabeth's evident confusion.
"We came to the conclusion that Giancola had arranged it himself on the theory that if obviously forged evidence indicated he was the guilty party, it would be blindingly apparent to everyone that he'd been framed, and who would bother to frame a guilty man? In other words, he wanted us to bring that evidence forward publicly—or that was our theory, at least. And then," her expression hardened with remembered fury and frustration, "Giancola was killed in another air car accident, this time—as far as we've been able to determine—a real accident.
"So there we were. We had no real evidence, only documentation which had obviously been forged. The only two men we could be relatively certain knew what had happened were both dead. And, just to make matters worse, they'd both died in air car accidents . . . which just happened to have been State Security's favorite means for removing 'inconvenient' individuals. Given the strength of the war party in Congress, the fact that we couldn't prove any of it, and the enormous suspicion which was going to be produced throughout the entire Republic by the way in which Grosclaude and Giancola had died, we couldn't simply present our theory and expect Congress to go along with an admission that it was someone in the Republic—not the Republic itself, but a rogue element in the very highest levels of our administration—who'd manipulated our correspondence. Who'd manipulated us—manipulated me—into calling for a resumption of hostilities because we honestly believed the government of our adversaries was not simply using diplomacy for its own cynical ends but then lying about our diplomatic notes."
There was an edge of raw appeal in her quiet voice, and Elizabeth paused long enough to be sure she had control of her own voice.
"How long have you known—or suspected, at least?" she asked then.
"Giancola was killed in September 1920," Pritchart replied unflinchingly. "We already suspected what had happened, but as long as he was alive, it was an ongoing investigation. There was always the chance we might find the real evidence we needed."
"But you've known—known for almost two T-years—that we were telling the truth. That it was your man who'd falsified the correspondence! And you said nothing!"
Elizabeth glared at Pritchart, and some of the other Havenites stirred angrily as her accusatory anger flooded over them, but their president only nodded.
"In his much as we 'knew' anything, yes," she said. "And that, Your Majesty, was the reason I proposed the summit meeting between us. Because it was time, once it became evident we'd never be able to find proof of what had happened, to end the fighting however we had to do it, even if that meant admitting the truth to you—to you, personally, where you and your treecat could evaluate my truthfulness. We still couldn't have gone public with the information back home, any more than you could remove High Ridge before the war," her eyes hardened ever so slightly as she reminded Elizabeth of her own experience with the limitations political considerations could impose, "but I was willing to tell you—and to surrender considerable military advantages on our part—to achieve peace. And so, when your Captain Terekhov sailed off to Monica, I sent your cousin home to you to do just that. And we both remember what happened then."
She held Elizabeth's angry eyes steadily, and a cold shock went through the Manticoran queen as she remembered. Remembered her fury, her rejection of the summit—her decision to resume military operations instead of talking.
Silence fell, fragile and singing with its own tension, and Pritchart let it linger for several seconds before she spoke again.
"When you attacked Lovat," she said quietly, and Elizabeth's eyes flickered as she remembered who'd been killed there, "we knew your new targeting system gave you a decisive military advantage. Or that it would, assuming you could get it into general deployment. So we—Thomas and I—" she nodded in Theisman's direction, "mounted Operation Beatrice. Thomas planned it, but I asked for it. Neither of us expected it to be as bloody—on both sides—as it finally was, but I won't pretend we thought the cost in lives would be cheap. Yet since the summit had been killed, since you were pushing the offensive against us, and since your new combat advantage was going to be so overwhelming, we felt our only hope was to strike for outright military victory before you could get your new systems deployed throughout your navy. And from our own analysis of the Battle of Manticore, we almost succeeded."
She paused for just a moment, then shrugged.
"When we lost the Battle of Manticore, we lost the war, Your Majesty. We knew that. But then, to our surprise, you sent us Admiral Alexander-Harrington. You'll never know how tempted I was to tell her the truth then. Not at first, but after I'd come to know her. Yet I couldn't. Partly, that was because of more of those domestic political constraints. When an administration's been as badly damaged as mine was by the Battle of Manticore, managing the internal dynamics gets just as hard as fighting an external enemy, but that was only part of it. Maybe the rest of it was simply because we'd kept it secret for so long. Maybe I would have told her, if she hadn't been recalled so precipitously. I don't know. But when your home system was attacked, there were those on our side who saw it almost as an act of divine intervention. An opportunity to win after all—or, at least, to avoid losing."
She made the admission without flinching, and Elizabeth nodded slowly. Of course there had. If what had happened to the Star Empire had happened to the Republic, exactly the same thought would have occurred to any number of Manticorans.
Including me, she admitted to herself.
"Obviously," she heard her own voice say, "that wasn't the option you chose to pursue."
"No, it wasn't. In fact, it was the last thing I wanted to do, for a lot of reasons. Including the fact that, as Admiral Alexander-Harrington had pointed out to us, if there's ever going to be an end to the cycle of violence between Haven and Manticore, it has to be achieved on some sort of equitable basis, not because one of us simply pounds the other into such bloody ruin that she has to yield.
"But, what I never anticipated for a moment was what happened when Officer Cachat and Mr. Zilwicki turned up in Nouveau Paris last month."
"Excuse me?" Elizabeth blinked at the apparent non sequitur, and Pritchart smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. In fact, it reminded Elizabeth forcefully of one she'd seen in her own mirror upon occasion.
"We have reason to believe we now know why events in Talbott were orchestrated the way they were," the president said. "Moreover, we know—or we think we do—at least approximately how the attack on your home system was carried out, and by whom. And we believe we know who's been supplying the advanced bio-nanotech which has been turning people into programmed assassins . . . or suicides. And"—she looked deep into Elizabeth's eyes once more—"we think we know who Arnold Giancola was working for, who manipulated me into going back to war against you, and who manipulated you into going back to war against me."
Elizabeth stared at her, brain whirling, unable to believe what she was hearing.
"Your Majesty, the Republic of Haven—not just the current Republic, but the Old Republic—and the Star Empire of Manticore have been on the same list for centuries. We have a common enemy—one which has manipulated us into killing millions of our own for its own purposes. One which has reached a critical point in its own plans, set events in motion which require the destruction—not the defeat, the destruction—of both the Star Empire and the Republic. And for the better part of a T-century, the two of us have been doing exactly what that enemy wanted."
Pritchart paused once more, then shook her head slowly.
"I think it's time we stopped," she said very quietly.
* * *
"More coffee, Your Majesty?"
Elizabeth looked up at the murmured question, then smiled and extended her cup. James MacGuiness poured, then moved on around the table, refilling other cups, and she watched him go before she sipped. I
t was, as always, delicious, and she thought yet again what a pity it was that MacGuiness made such splendid coffee when Honor couldn't stand the beverage.
The familiar reflection trickled through her brain, and she set the cup back down and gave herself a mental shake. No doubt her staff back at Mount Royal Palace had its hands full covering for her absence, but they were just going to have to go on coping for a while longer. Despite the grinding fatigue of far too many hours, too much adrenaline, and far too many shocks to the universe she'd thought she understood, she knew she and Eloise Pritchart were still far from finished.
She looked across the table at the Havenite president, who'd just finished a serving of MacGuiness' trademark eggs Benedict and picked up her own coffee cup. Despite a sleepless night, following a day even longer than Elizabeth's had been, the other woman still looked improbably beautiful. And still radiated that formidable presence, as well. Elizabeth doubted anyone could have intentionally planned a greater physical contrast than the one between her own mahagony skin and dark eyes and Pritchart's platinum and topaz, and they'd been producd by political and social systems which were at least as different as their appearances. Yet she'd come—unwillingly, almost kicking and screaming—to the conclusion that the two of them were very much alike under the surface.
"So," she said, sitting back from the table she shared with only Honor, Pritchart, and Theisman, "is Simões telling the truth or not, Honor?"
The two Havenites looked at Honor with slightly surprised expressions, and Honor smiled. Nimitz was sound asleep on his perch, and after the night which had just passed, she saw no point in waking him up.
"There's a reason Her Majesty's asking me, instead of Nimitz or Ariel," she told her guests. "As it happens, I've been hanging around with treecats long enough to have caught to at least some of their abilities. I can't read minds, but I can read emotions, and I know when someone's lying."