War Of Honor

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?'

'I'd advise against that, actually,' Giancola said thoughtfully. LePic looked at him suspiciously, and the Secretary of State shrugged. 'I don't know that it would be a bad idea, Denis; I'm just not sure it would be a good one. We've been to some lengths to establish our impatience with the way they've been fobbing us off for so long. 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. In fact, the briefer the note, the more likely it is to make those points for us, particularly after how lengthy our previous notes have grown.'

Pritchart regarded him with carefully concealed surprise. Much as she might distrust his ultimate ambitions, she couldn't fault his logic at the moment.

'I think it might be wiser to make at least some acknowledgment of their comments,' LePic argued. 'I don't see any harm in making an explicit connection between our assurances about Trevor's Star and their expressed desire to find some way to move forward.'

'I understand your position, Denis,' Giancola assured him. 'You may well even be right. I just think we've used up so many millions of words talking to these people that it might be time to resort to a certain brutal brevity to make our point. Especially when the one we're making is our willingness to concede one of their demands. At the very least, the change of pace should be like letting a breath of fresh air into the negotiations.'

'I think Arnold may have a point, Denis,' Pritchart said. LePic looked at her for a moment, then shrugged.

'Maybe he does,' the Attorney General conceded. 'I suppose a part of it is how much time I spend wrestling with legal briefs and law codes. You don't want to risk any possibility of ambiguity in those, so you nail everything down in duplicate or triplicate.'

'Very well, then,' Pritchart said. 'Let's see just how brief and concise—in a pleasant way, of course—we can be.'

* * *

Arnold Giancola leaned back in the comfortable chair and gazed at the short, to the point message on his display. It was, indeed, brief and concise, and he felt a cold, unaccustomed tingle of something very like dread as he looked at it.

He'd made only one, very small change in it—deleted a single three-letter word—and for the first time, he felt a definite flicker of uncertainty. He'd known from the moment he'd set out to engineer Pritchart's foreign policy