War of Honor

“If we send them a very brief note, possibly one which responds only to a single point from this one,” he tapped his own hardcopy of the Descroix note, “and does so in a way which makes it obvious that we’re attempting to address their legitimate concerns—their legitimate concerns, Denis—but ignoring what Tony just called ‘eyewash,’ then we make it clear we’re willing to be reasonable but not to retreat from our insistence that they negotiate seriously.”

Then it was his turn to turn to face the audience.

The single word came out with an utter lack of emphasis which, in its own way, was as emphatic as a snort of disbelief.

Which, Janacek knew, was because he wanted to find his First Lord’s reassurances reassuring.

High Ridge nodded exactly as if he hadn’t expected the First Lord to agree with anything which might make the Admiralty’s Intelligence failure look even a little less ominous.

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.

Lester Tourville leaned back comfortably in his chair, listening with both ears, and half of his attention, to Marston’s brisk, competent exposition.

“They may think that if they blame it on Sternhafen, or even on Hellbarde’s captain and simply officially fault Sternhafen for not having reined in Hellbarde’s previous aggressiveness—which certainly wouldn’t have been the result of any official Andermani policy, under this interpretation—and possibly offer some form of reparations, we’d choose to absorb the attack without retaliating.”

Glockauer knew that was true, just as he understood that until the last fifty years—seventy-five, at the most—the Andermani merchant fleet had been too insignificant to justify the expense required to build up the Navy’s light forces to a point which would have permitted it to make any real inroad into the bloody forays of the Confederacy’s pirates and privateers.

Since the dispensation which allowed for the presence of the Harrington Steading armsmen on the island in the first place had been granted by the Queen’s Bench at the direct request of the Foreign Secretary in light of the fact that Steadholder Harrington and Duchess Harrington were two totally separate legal entities who simply happened to live in the same body as Admiral Harrington, the decision to revoke it had not been the purely internal Navy affair Janacek had attempted to make it.

High Ridge had not only managed to postpone confirmation of the San Martino peers and an almost certain embarrassing electoral defeat for both the Liberals and Progressives (his own Conservative Association’s representation in the lower house was already so tiny that no conceivable popular vote could have had much impact upon it), but also to maintain the “wartime only” tax measures which had been instigated by the Cromarty Government.

The plate before her bore the sticky remains of her eggs Benedict’s hollandaise sauce and a few bacon crumbs, while the rind of a musk melon stood up like the keel of a stripped ark on a smaller plate, accompanied by two purple grapes which had somehow escaped the massacre of their fellows.

It was made of native stone, with the immensely thick walls the first Wave colonists had used as insulation against the harsh winter climate of these northern latitudes, and it possessed a certain imposing presence, despite the fact that its oldest, central block had obviously been designed and built before its owners realized they were about to become nobles.