And even if he'd asked, the answers—assuming Rajampet answered him honestly—would only have raised additional questions. Besides, however far into this particular pie Rajampet's finger might be, the CNO was covered. Byng's assignment, while not precisely routine, wasn't completely unprecedented. It was certainly justifiable in the wake of the Battle Monica and all the charges and counter charges that had spawned, as well. And, equally certainly, Crandall had the seniority to choose, within reason, where to carry out her training exercises. So if it just happened she'd picked the McIntosh System for Exercise Winter Forage (or whatever she'd decided to call it in the end), and if that just happened to mean Task Force 496 was barely fifty light-years away from the Meyers System, that didn't necessarily indicate any collusion on Rajampet's part.

Sure it didn't , he thought. And I'll bet that answers my first question, too. Hell no he didn't tell them. And he's covered no matter what happens, because she's undoubtedly made up her own mind by now what she's going to do, and he can't possibly get orders to her in time to stop her. So, really, there was no point in telling them, was there?

Winston Kingsford hadn't commanded a fleet in space in decades, but he had plenty of experience in the tortuous, byzantine maneuvers of the Solarian League's bureaucracy. And he was well aware of how much Rajampet resented his own exclusion from the cozy little civilian fivesome which actually ran the League. Minister of Defense Taketomo's real power was no greater than that of any of the other cabinet ministers who theoretically governed the League, but Defense was—or damned well ought to be, anyway—at least as important as Commerce or Education and Information. It had a big enough budget to be, at any rate, and it was critical enough to the League's prosperous stability. Yet Rajampet had been denied his place at the head table, and it irritated the hell out of him.