“If he did, I’m sure it was only because she provoked it!” Rajampet said sharply.

“With all due respect, Rajani,” Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Education and Information Malachai Abruzzi said tartly, “I wouldn’t bet my life on that.” Rajampet glared at him angrily, and Abruzzi shrugged. “As far as I can tell from the Manties’ first note, none of their ships did a damned thing to provoke him the first time he killed several hundred of their spacers. That being so, is there any reason we ought to assume he wouldn’t just as cheerfully kill a few thousand more for no particular reason?”

“I’ll remind you,” Rajampet said even more sharply, “that none of us were there, and the only ‘evidence’ we have of what truly happened was delivered to us, oh so generously, by the Manties. I see no reason to believe they’d be above tampering with the sensor data they provided to us. In fact, one of my people over at Operational Analysis commented at the time that the data seemed suspiciously good and detailed.”

Abruzzi only snorted, although Kolokoltsov suspected he was tempted to do something considerably more forceful. The vast majority of the Solarian League’s member star systems looked after their own educational systems, which meant, despite its name, that Education and Information was primarily concerned with the information half of its theoretical responsibilities. Abruzzi’s position thus made him, in effect, the Solarian League’s chief propagandist. In that role, it had been his job to find a positive spin to put on Josef Byng’s actions, and he’d been working on it ever since the Manties’ first diplomatic note reached Old Chicago.

So far, he hadn’t had a lot of success. Which wasn’t too surprising, Kolokoltsov thought sourly. When a Solarian admiral commanding seventeen battlecruisers opened fire without warning on three destroyers who didn’t even have their wedges and sidewalls up, it was going to be just a trifle difficult to convince even the Solarian public he’d been justified.