"Summarily rejecting it?" Justin offered.

Corwin gave up. "She never had a chance," he said bluntly, forcing himself to look his brother straight in the eye. "You should have realized that right from the start and not let her file it."

Justin didn't flinch. "You mean there's no reason to try and change an unfair policy simply because it is policy?"

"Come on, Justin-you teach out there, for heaven's sake. You know how traditions hang on. Especially military traditions."

"I also know that those traditions started back in the Old Dominion of Man,"

Justin countered. "We haven't exactly been noted for blindly adopting their methods in anything else. Why should the military be immune?"

Corwin sighed. Various combinations of Moreau family members had hashed through all this in one form or another dozens of times over the past few years, ever since Justin's youngest daughter had first decided she wanted to follow in her father's Cobra footsteps. Like Justin's father before him... and Corwin was well aware that, for the Moreaus at least, family tradition wasn't something to be treated lightly.

Unfortunately, most of the others on the Council didn't see it that way.

"Military tradition is always particularly hidebound," he told Justin. "You know it, I know it, the worlds know it. It comes of having conservative old people like you at the top running things."

Justin ignored the attempt at levity. "But Jin would be a good Cobra, possibly even a great Cobra-and that's not just my opinion. I've given her the standard screening tests-"

"You've what?" Corwin cut him off, aghast. "Justin-damn it all, you know better than that. Those tests are exclusively for the use of the Academy."

"Spare me the lecture, please. The point is that she scored in the top five percent of the acceptance range. She's better equipped, mentally and emotionally, than ninety-five percent of the people we've accepted."