“And?” Rajampet’s eyes turned warier than ever and he seemed to settle back into his chair.

“And they weren’t joking about sending their Admiral Gold Peak to inquire into matters on the ground in New Tuscany.”

“They weren’t?” The question came from Wodoslawski, not Rajampet, and Kolokoltsov glanced at her.

She was twenty-five T-years younger than he was—a third-gerneration prolong recipient with dark red hair, gray eyes, and quite an attractive figure. She was also fairly new to her position as the real head of the Treasury Department, and she’d received it, following her predecesor’s demise, only as a compromise between the other permanent senior undersecretaries. She knew perfectly well that she’d been everyone else’s second choice—that all her current colleagues had allies they would really have preferred to see in that slot. But she’d been there for over a decade, now, and she’d solidified her powerbase quite nicely.

She was no longer the junior probationary member of the quintet of permanent undersecretaries who truly ran the League from their personal fiefdoms in the Foreign Ministry, Commerce Department, Interior Department, Department of Education and Information, and Treasury Department. She was, however, the only one of them who’d been out-system and unavailable when the first Manticoran diplomatic note arrived. As such, she could make an excellent claim to bearing no responsibility for how that note had been handled, and from her expression, Kolokoltsov thought sourly, she was thoroughly aware of that minor fact.

“No, Agatб,” he said, moving his gaze to her. “No, they weren’t. And just over a T-month ago—on November the seventeenth, to be precise—Admiral Gold Peak arrived at New Tuscany… to find Admiral Byng still there.”

“Oh, shit,” Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Interior Nathan MacArtney muttered. “Don’t tell us Byng opened fire on her, too!”