“All right,” she said. “How about a compromise? You’re right that the Navy deserves to be represented, Roger, so suppose what we do is alternate personnel from the various branches of the service? What about Navy-Queen’s Own-Marines-Palace Security-Navy, and repeat? If we run out of the Queens Own, we could fill in with regular Army. Otherwise, the Queens Own will represent the Army contingent. Could you live with that?”
“I think so,” Roger agreed, then looked at Rivka as she laughed suddenly. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“I was just thinking that the Navy’s going to be pretty well represented, anyway,” she explained. “Your uncle’s going to be present in uniform, and so is Admiral Truman, Earl White Haven, Admiral Caparelli, Admiral Givens, and Admiral Hemphill. Then there’s Admiral Theisman, Admiral Tourville, Admiral Yu, and High Admiral Yanakov for the foreign contingent.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Elizabeth agreed with a smile, not mentioning the one flag officer Rivka hadn’t named and who was not going to be in uniform. Honor Alexander-Harrington had agreed to serve as one of Rivka Rosenfeld’s matrons of honor, but she would be present in her persona as Steadholder Harrington, not Admiral Harrington.
Well, technically she’ll also be present as Duchess Harrington, I suppose, Elizabeth thought. On the other hand—
“Excuse me, Your Majesty, but President Pritchart is on the com.
Elizabeth turned to the footman who’d spoken, and he bowed with a slightly apologetic air. None of the Mount Royal staff liked to interrupt the royal family when they actually had time to spend as a family.
“She’s on the secure terminal in your study, Your Majesty,” he murmured.
“Thank you, Isaac,” she acknowledged with a smile, then turned back to Roger and Rivka. “All right, you two win this one on points. But I warn you, I’m going to be more adamant about the cake topper!”
She glowered at them ferociously, and Rivka laughed as Roger cowered in mock terror. Elizabeth chuckled, shook her head, scooped up Ariel, and headed for her study.
She sat down at her workstation and pressed the acceptance key.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Eloise. I’ve discovered that arranging my son’s wedding is just a little more complicated than arranging interstellar treaties with lifelong enemies.”
“Funny you should mention treaties with lifelong enemies,” Pritchart replied with a somewhat peculiar smile. “It just happens I’ve received dispatches from Nouveau Paris. The reception of our treaty proposals wasn’t quite what I anticipated.”
“Oh?” After forty T-years on the throne, Elizabeth Winton’s face said exactly what she told it to say. It was a bit harder than usual to keep it that way at the moment. “In what way?”
“Remember how I told you I’d expected all along that Leslie was going to have trouble pounding them through the Senate, especially without me to back her up?”
Elizabeth nodded. There’d been strong arguments in favor of Pritchart’s taking the proposed treaty home and personally presenting it to the Havenite Congress, but there’d been countervailing arguments as well. The necessity for her, as Haven’s head of state, to personally oversee the delicate and difficult business of effectively coordinating the Republican Navy with the Royal Manticoran Navy after so many years of hostility had loomed large among them. But another, although Pritchart and Elizabeth had never explicitly discussed it, was that by remaining in Manticore, Pritchart could force a de facto acceptance of the treaty, in the short term at least, whatever the Senate ultimately decided.
“Well, it turns out I was wrong about the treaty’s prospects,” Pritchart went on now. “According to Leslie’s dispatch, she never got a chance to pound it anywhere. The Senate jumped all over it. It was approved with a fifty-six-vote margin over and above the two thirds majority requirement. There were only eleven dissenting votes!”
The president’s face blossomed in a huge smile, and Elizabeth felt herself smiling back.
“That’s wonderful news, Eloise!”
“I think the Senate’s as tired of locking horns with you people as Thomas Theisman is,” Pritchart said, shaking her head. “And according to Leslie, the fact that we not only get out of this without paying reparations, despite Giancola’s games with the diplomatic notes, but that it looks like we’re going to become the Star Empire’s biggest trading partner in the not so distant future didn’t hurt one bit. The probability that Giancola was working for Mesa the entire time and that we’re on the same hit list you people are didn’t hurt any, either, Leslie says. And neither did the fact that nobody in the Republic is especially fond of the League, for that matter.”
“Completely off the record — and I’ll deny it if you ever quote me — but I’d just as soon go pick on someone who isn’t as tough as you guys for a change, myself,” Elizabeth told her, marveling even now at how close she’d become to the president of the star nation she’d hated with every fiber of her being for four standard decades.
“There are still some questions at the Nouveau Paris end, of course,” Pritchart went on in a more sober tone. “As they say, the devil is always in the details. With your permission, now that the original treaty’s been approved at both ends, I’d like to go ahead and get Admiral Hemphill’s mission off to Bolthole as soon as possible. I think that would help put a lot of those questions to bed with a shovel.”
“Tom and Hamish are still having to knock a few heads together over at the Admiralty,” Elizabeth said with an off-center smile. “I don’t think there’ll be any major snafus, though.”
I hope to hell there won’t be, anyway, she added mentally. She truly didn’t expect any, but she’d been surprised upon occasion before. And she supposed it was inevitable that the more conservative members of the Royal Navy would be…uncomfortable about sending the entire surviving R&D staff of HMSS Weyland off deep into Havenite territory to share all of the RMN’s technical secrets with its traditional enemies. In fact, there were times Elizabeth expected to wake up with a terminal drug hangover any moment now.
But crazy as it sounds, it actually makes sense — a lot of sense, she thought. We’re pretty sure that if we couldn’t figure out where Bolthole was, the Sollies — and probably the Alignment — don’t know either. God knows we had a lot more incentive to find it than either of them did! So tucking our R&D projects away where no one with any invisible starships is likely to drop by to clean up what she missed the first time around strikes me as a very good idea. And from what Theisman and Eloise have shown us, Bolthole’s going to be a damned good place to start putting all that new hardware into production on a really large scale quickly, once we’ve made a few upgrades.
There’d been arguments in favor of using Beowulf, instead. For one thing, Beowulf’s basic technology was considerably in advance of the Republic’s as a whole — or even of Bolthole’s, for that matter. In theory, Beowulf would be better placed to hit the ground running and improve upon the existing research more rapidly than the Haven could. But there was a difference between basic technology and war-fighting technology, and an even bigger difference between the mindsets required to successfully push military and civilian R&D. There was no doubt in Elizabeth’s mind — or that of any serving Manticoran officer, for that matter — that Shannon Foraker fully deserved her reputation. The staff she’d put together had done miracles to close the gap between Manticore and the Republic. With the destruction of Weyland and its Grayson equivalent at Blackbird, there was no one in the galaxy better qualified to push the bleeding edge of hardware development.