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."
"As we're all well aware," LePic shot back. Nesbitt glared at him, but that was as far as he was prepared to go under Pritchart's cold eye.
"All right," the President said. "We can sit here and argue over exactly what they meant all day, but I don't really think that's going to get us anywhere. I think we're all generally in agreement that this isn't precisely a forthcoming response to our last note to them?"
She looked around the conference table and saw nothing but agreement. Indeed, the secretaries who'd most strongly backed her against Giancola from the beginning seemed even angrier than the Secretary of State's supporters. She wondered how much of that was genuine exasperation with the Manties, and how much of it was frustration at seeing Giancola's predictions of the Star Kingdom's intransigence being borne out.
She made herself pause for a few seconds to acknowledge the danger of so much anger. Angry people didn't think clearly. They were vulnerable to the making of overly hasty decisions.
"On the other hand," she made herself say, "Tom and Denis are right to point out that there's at least a potential opening in their question about Trevor's Star. So I propose that we send them a reply specifically and definitively ceding sovereignty over that single system to them."
Several of Giancola's longest term supporters looked rebellious, but the Secretary of State himself nodded with every appearance of approval.
"What about their closing section?" LePic asked. "Should we take some notice of it and express our own desire to break this 'logjam' of theirs?"