"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 Fleetlike 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.
And they were also lovers. Among other things.
"Don't tell me that you're surprised by their tactics, Cathy," he rumbled in a voice so deep it appeared to come from somewhere just south of his toenails. It was a remarkably mild voice, given the speaker's obvious distaste for what it was saying. "Against someone like Harrington?" He laughed with absolutely no humor at all. "She's probably the one person they hate more than they hate you right now!"
"But this is so despicable, even for them, Anton," Lady Cathy shot back. "No, I'm not surprisedI'm just pissed off. No, not pissed off. I'm ready to go out and start removing body parts from the assholes. Preferably ones they're particularly fond of. Painfully. With a very dull knife."
"And if you can figure out a way to do it, I'll be delighted to help," he replied. "In the meantime, Harrington and White Haven are just going to have to fight their own battles. And it's not exactly as if they don't have anyone they can call on for support while they do."
"You're right," she admitted unhappily. "Besides, our track record isn't all that good, is it?" She grimaced. "I know damned well that Jeremy expected us to do better than we did, given what you managed to hack out of those idiots' files. I hate disappointing himdisappointing all of them. And I don't much like failing at anything, myself."
"You want me to believe that you expected them to just roll over?" he asked, and there was a hint of a twinkle in the dark eyes.
"No," she half-snarled at him. "But I did hope that we'd get more of the bastards nailed!"
"I understand what you're saying. But we did get convictions for over seventy percent of the names on my list. Given the timing, that's actually better than we had any right to expect."
"And if I'd come straight home by way of the Junction the way you'd wanted to, the timing wouldn't have mattered," she grated.
"Woman, we've been over this," Anton Zilwicki said in a voice as patient as his beloved mountains. "Neither one of us could have foreseen the Cromarty Assassination. If it hadn't been for that, we'd have been fine, and you were perfectly right about the need to get Jeremy off Old Earth." He shrugged. "I admit that I haven't spent as many years as deeply committed to the Anti-Slavery League as you have, but it's grossly unfair of you to blame yourself for spending three extra weeks getting home."
"I know." She stopped her pacing and stood gazing out the window for several taut moments, then drew a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and turned to face him.
"I know," she repeated more briskly. "And you're right. Given the fact that that asshole High Ridge was in charge of the Government by the time we got home, we did do very well to get as many convictions as we did. Even Isaac admits that."
She grimaced again, and Zilwicki nodded. Isaac Douglas, somewhat to Zilwicki's surprise, appeared to have attached himself permanently to the countess. Zilwicki had more than half-expected Isaac to accompany Jeremy X, but he remained in Lady Cathy's service as combination butler and bodyguard. And, Zilwicki knew, as the countess' clandestine pipeline to the thoroughly proscribed organization known as "the Ballroom" and its escaped slave "terrorists."
He was also the favorite uncle, preceptor, and assistant protector of Berry and Lars, the two children Zilwicki had formally adopted after Helen rescued them on Old Earth. And a very reassuring presence for them Isaac was, too. And for Zilwicki, come to that.
"Of course," the countess continued, "he hasn't exactly told me so in so many words, but he would have told me if he'd thought otherwise. So I suppose he's probably about as satisfied as we could reasonably expect. Not that I think for a minute that he and the Ballroomor Jeremyare prepared to call it quits. Especially not since they know who was on the list and wasn't convicted."
She looked acutely unhappy as she finished her last sentence, and Zilwicki shrugged.
"You don't like killing." His rumbling bass was gentle yet implacable. "Neither do I. But I'm not going to lose any sleep over the sick bastards involved in the genetic slave tradeand neither should you."
"And neither do I," she said with a wan smile. "Not in the intellectual sense. Not in the philosophical sense, either. But much as I hate slavery and anyone who participates in it, there's still something deep down inside me that hates the administration of 'justice' without benefit of due process." Her smile turned even more wry. "You'd think that after all these years hanging around with bloodthirsty terrorists I'd've gotten over my squeamishness."