“Then who did you work with?” the messenger asked.

“Let’s just say there are a few people, some of them from rather prominent Andie families, who were able to stomach having their investment stolen by Wegener and his family, but only until Wegener decided to bring in another set of foreigners to take it over and run it. That was a bit too much for them, and one or two of them spoke to their prominent relatives after Henryk and I spoke to them, just before he and I came home to Prism. Which brings me to the point I need you to stress to the Council when you get home.”

“Yes, Sir.” The messenger straightened in his chair, his expression intent, and Dunecki looked straight into his eyes.

“The Andermani money people who made our ships available in the first place have just gotten word to me that the Imperial government is finally ready to act. If we can inflict sufficient losses on the local naval forces to provide the Emperor with a pretext, the Empire will declare that the instability in this region of the Confederacy has become great enough in its opinion to threaten a general destabilization of the area. And to prevent that destabilization, the Imperial Navy will move into Saginaw and impose a cease-fire, under the terms of which the Empire will recognize the Council as the de facto legitimate government of Prism.”

“Are you serious?” the messenger stared at Dunecki in disbelief. “Everyone knows the Andies have wanted to move into the Confederacy for years, but the Manties have always said no.”

“True, but the Manties are focused on Haven right now. They won’t have the resources or the will to take on the Empire over something as unimportant to them as Saginaw.”

“But what do the Andies get out of it?”

“The Empire gets the precedent of having successfully intervened to restore order to a sector of the Confederacy, which it can use as an opening wedge for additional interventions. It won’t demand any outright territorial concessions—this time. But the next time may be a slightly different story, and the time after that, and the time after that, and the time after that…” Dunecki let his voice trail off and smiled evilly. “As for our sponsors, the one thing the Emperor’s negotiators will insist upon is that Wegener, or whoever Stolar replaces him with, revoke the trade concessions Wegener made to the Manties in Melchor and regrant them to the original Andy investors. So everybody gets what they want… except for the Confeds and the Manties, that is.”

“My God.” The messenger shook his head. “My God, it might just work.”

“It damned well will work,” Dunecki said flatly, “and it’s what the Council has been working towards for the last three years. But we didn’t expect such sudden confirmation that the groundwork had finally been completed in the Empire, so no one back home is ready to move. But coupling the word from my Imperial contacts with what happened to Lydia, I think we’ve just run out of time. If Wegener and Nielsen are ready to begin moving against us rather than working with us, we need to act quickly. So what I need you to do is to go back to the Council and tell them that they have to get couriers to Henryk and to Captain Traynor in the Margit with instructions to begin all-out operations against the Confed Navy.”

“I understand, Sir, but I’m not sure they’ll listen to me.” The messenger smiled wryly. “I realize you’re using me because you don’t have anyone else available, but I’m hardly part of the inner circle, and this will be coming at them cold. So what if they refuse?”

“Oh, they won’t do that,” Dunecki said with cold assurance. “If it looks like they might, just tell them this.” He looked levelly at the messenger across his desk, and his expression was grim. “Whatever they may want to decide, Annika will commence active operations against the SN one standard week from today.”

“I still say there has to be a better way to do this.” Midshipman Makira sounded unusually grumpy, and Honor glanced across the table and shook her head at him.

“You have got to be one of the most contrary people that I’ve ever met, Nassios,” she told him severely.

“And just what do you mean by that?” Makira demanded.

“I mean that I don’t think there’s anything the Captain could do that you couldn’t decide was the wrong way to go about it. Not to say that you’re a nit-picker—although, now that I think about it, someone whose disposition was less naturally sunny and equable than my own probably would—but you do have an absolute gift for picking up on the potential weaknesses of an idea without paying any attention to its advantages.”

“Actually,” Makira said in an unusually serious tone, “I think you might have a point there. I really do have a tendency to look for problems first. Maybe that’s because I’ve discovered that that way any of my surprises are pleasant ones. Remember, Captain Courvoisier always said that no plan survives contact with the enemy anyway. The way I see it, that makes a pessimist the ideal commander in a lot of ways.”

“Maybe—as long as your pessimism doesn’t prevent you from having enough confidence to take the initiative away from the bad guys and hang on to it for yourself,” Honor countered. Nimitz looked up from his perch on the end of the Snotty Row table and cocked his head in truly magisterial style as he listened to his person’s discussion, and Makira chuckled.

“Not fair,” he protested, reaching out to stroke the ’cat’s ears. “You and Nimitz are ganging up on me again!”

“Only because you’re wrong,” Honor informed him with a certain smugness.

“Oh, no, I’m not! Look, all I’m saying is that the way we’re going about it now, this is the only star system in our entire patrol area that we’re giving any cover at all to. Now,” he leaned back and folded his arms, “explain to me where that statement is in error.”

“It’s not in error at all,” she conceded. “The problem is that there isn’t an ideal solution to the problem of too many star systems and not enough cruisers. We can only be in one place at a time whatever we do, and if we try to spread ourselves between too many systems, we’ll just spend all of our time running around between them in hyper and never accomplish anything at all in n-space.” She shrugged. “Under the circumstances, and given the fact that the Star Kingdom’s presence here in Melchor is pretty much nailed down, I think it makes a lot of sense to troll for pirates right here.”

“And while we’re doing that,” Makira pointed out, “we can be pretty sure that somewhere else in our patrol area a merchantship we ought to be protecting is about to get its ass into a world of hurt with no one there to look out for her.”

“You’re probably right. But without detailed advance knowledge of the schedules and orders of every merchie in the entire Saginaw Sector, it’s simply impossible for anyone to predict where our shipping is going to be at any given moment, anyway. For that matter, even if we’d had detailed schedules on every civilian ship planning on moving in our area at the time we left Manticore, they’d be hopelessly out of date by now, and you know it. And there aren’t any such detailed schedules in the first place, which means every single Manticoran ship in Silesia is basically its own needle inside one huge haystack. So even if we were cruising around from system to system, the odds are that we’d almost certainly be out of position to help out the merchantship you’re talking about. If we were in position to help, it could only be a case of sheer dumb luck, and you know that as well as I do.”

“But at least we’d have a chance for dumb luck to put us there!” he shot back stubbornly. “As it is, we don’t even have that!”

“No, we don’t—we’ve got something much better than that: bait. We know that every pirate in the sector knows about the Dillingham Cartel’s installations here in Melchor. They can be pretty much certain that there are going to be Manticoran ships in and out of this system on a semi-regular basis, not to mention the possibility that they might get lucky and actually manage to pull off a successful raid on the installations themselves, despite their defenses. That’s the whole point of the Captain’s strategy! Instead of chasing off from star system to star system with no assurance that he’ll catch up with any pirates, much less pirates in the act of raiding our shipping, he’s opted to sit here and set an ambush for anybody who’s tempted to hit Dillingham’s people. I’d say the odds are much better that we’ll actually manage to pick off a few pirates by lying in wait for them than there’d be any other way.”