"Hello, Frank," she said, and Ariel twitched his whiskers in greeting.

A very small twinkle showed at the backs of the major's eyes as the 'cat bleeked a welcome to him, but the twinkle never touched his expression. Elizabeth didn't mind. She'd known Frank Ney since she was a child, and she was not among those who called him antisocial. He was certainly... prickly, with opinions that had been cast in battle steel. That much she was willing to concede. But he was also from Gryphon's Olympus Mountains, whose yeomen had a long history of friction with their local aristocracy, which explained a lot of his taciturn personality and general distrust of those in authority. Which might seem odd in a man who'd volunteered fifty years before to protect the monarch and senior members of her government, but made perfectly good sense to anyone who knew him. And truth to tell, the Crown had a long history of supporting Gryphon's commoners against Gryphon's nobility, which produced a fierce loyalty to the current monarch. It also explained why half of Gryphon's aristocrats were card-carrying members in good standing of the Conservative Association. (The percentage probably would have been higher, but the Association was far too liberal and namby-pamby for the truly conservative members of the Gryphon peerage.)

At any rate, Elizabeth knew better than most that Ney certainly wasn't antisocial. Cantankerous, stubborn, overly focused, and often infuriating to those who collided with his inflexible principles, yes. But not antisocial. Besides, he was very good at his job, and she'd been delighted when the Prime Minister tapped him to head his own security force.

"Hello, Your Majesty," the major replied to her greeting, and a smile — a small one perhaps, and fleeting, but incontrovertibly a smile — flickered on his lips.

"Is he keeping you busy?" She twitched her head at the closed door, and Ney chuckled.

"Not as busy as I try to make him think, Your Majesty. I'm managing to make him slow up at least a little by making him feel guilty over how hard he drives the rest of us. Pity I can't convince him to do the same thing to go a little easier on himself sometimes."

"I know." Elizabeth sighed, then reached across and patted the major on the shoulder. "Keep trying though, Frank. And I hope he realizes how lucky he is to have someone like you around to nag him."

"Please, Your Majesty!" Ney's discouraging expression was back in full force. "Not `nag'! I prefer to think of it as offering... ah, directed encouragement."

"That's what I said: nag," Elizabeth replied. Ariel bleeked laughter from her shoulder, and the major chuckled and reached back to press the door button for her.

Allen Summervale, Duke of Cromarty and Prime Minister of Manticore, rose, courteously but without haste, as Elizabeth entered Queen Caitrin's Suite with her 'cat.

"Hello, Allen." The Queen smiled warmly and walked across to give him a hug. That wasn't exactly protocol, but she and her Prime Minister had known one another a long time. Indeed, he'd been a member of her regency council when she ascended the throne as a grief-stricken teenager following her father's untimely death, and in many ways, he had become a surrogate father to her. He was also the man who'd run the Star Kingdom in her name, working in partnership with her to overcome, circumvent, buy-off, or bully all opposition to the naval buildup her father had begun... and which had, so far at least, prevented the Star Kingdom's destruction.

"And what brings you calling on a Sunday afternoon?" she asked as she released him and waved him back into his chair. "I assume it's not all that urgent, or you would have commed to save time. On the other hand, you obviously regard whatever it is as being at least a bit out of the ordinary, or you would have let it wait till Monday."

"Actually, it is a bit urgent, although not in the sense of requiring an immediate response," he told her. "But it does have a certain potential to complicate our lives in a major way. Especially when the Opposition gets wind of it... assuming their spies haven't already alerted them."

"Oh, my." Elizabeth flopped into her own chair and hugged Ariel to her chest. "Why do you persist in bringing me news like this, Allen Summervale?" she demanded. "Just once I'd like you to come to the Palace, poke your head in, and say `Just dropping by for a visit, Your Majesty! Nothing at all new to worry about. Have a nice day!' "

"That would be nice, wouldn't it?" Cromarty agreed wistfully. But then he shook himself. "Nice, but not likely to happen any time soon, I'm afraid."

"I know." Elizabeth regarded him with a fond smile, then sighed. "Go ahead and let me have the bad news."

"I'm not certain it is `bad' news," he said judiciously. "In fact, it could be very good news, in the long run."

"But if you don't get to the point, not even Major Ney will be able to keep it from being very bad news for you in the short run," Elizabeth said pointedly, and he chuckled.

"All right, Your Majesty. In a nutshell, we've just received a formal request from the President of San Martin."

"Formal request?" Elizabeth frowned, and Ariel cocked his ears at the Prime Minister. "What sort of formal request?"

"It's a bit complicated, Your Majesty."

"It always is on San Martin," Elizabeth pointed out dryly, and the Duke smiled in rueful agreement.

San Martin was one of the heaviest-gravity worlds ever settled by humanity. In fact, at 2.7 standard gravities, it might well be the heaviest. The planet was so massive its colonists had been restricted solely to its mountainous peaks and plateaus despite the fact that virtually all of them had been descended from people genetically engineered for high-grav environments centuries before San Martin was settled. Fortunately, San Martin was a very large planet which had a lot of mountain ranges, several of which put Old Earth's Himalayas and New Corsica's Palermo Range to shame.

There had to be something about mountains that put its own impression on the human genotype, Elizabeth reflected wryly. Even here in the Star Kingdom, people from places like the Copperwalls or the Olympus Range seemed to be stubborner and stiffer-necked than their lowland friends and relations. And since San Martin had the most spectacular mountains known to man, it was no doubt inevitable that its inhabitants would be among the most fractious people in the history of mankind.

Which they were. In point of fact, they made Major Ney seem downright malleable and easily led, which was no doubt the reason they'd fought so stubbornly — and hopelessly — when the PRH moved in on Trevor's Star thirty-three T-years before.

Some had reached accommodations with their conquerors in the intervening decades, of course. Some had been outright collaborators, and some, as on any conquered planet, had actually found their spiritual home in the ranks of their conquerors. But the vast majority of the population had regarded anyone who had anything to do with the Peep occupiers with contempt, and they hadn't been shy about making their... displeasure with such souls known.

As a result, both the old Office of Internal Security and its StateSec successors had been forced to maintain a large presence on the planet. Worse, from the Peeps' viewpoint, thirty-odd years was nowhere near as long a time for a planet to be occupied as it had been in pre-prolong days, and far too many San Martinos for the Peeps' peace of mind had very clear, adult memories of what life had been like before the Peeps arrived to rescue them from the twin curses of prosperity and independence.

Since Admiral White Haven had taken the system away from the Peeps, it had been the Alliance's turn to deal with the stubborn mountaineers, and the process had been... interesting. It wasn't that the San Martinos were fond of the Peeps or wanted StateSec back, because they certainly weren't, and they certainly didn't. But the provisional government which had been set up under the aegis of the Allied occupation had encountered its own difficulties, because, having endured occupation by the PRH for so many years, the people of San Martin had no desire to be dictated to, even gently, by anyone, including the people who'd liberated them. They wanted control of their home world back, which was only reasonable, in Elizabeth's opinion.

The Alliance had no problem with that, but the San Martinos themselves and their constant internal bickering had created endless difficulties. Observers from Zanzibar and Alizon had been particularly dismayed by the liveliness of the exchanges, and even the Grayson delegates to the commission overseeing San Martin's return to self-government had experienced reservations about turning the planet back over to its owners. It might be their world by birth, but most of the commissioners seemed to feel the Allies had a responsibility to protect them (and their helpless planet) from their own excesses.

The Manticoran and Erewhonese commissioners had been less worried, mostly because they had rather more experience at dealing with energetic electorates of their own. The fine old art of political hyperbole, viewing with alarm, and vilifying one's political opponents had been a part of Manticoran political life almost since the Star Kingdom's inception. Erewhon wasn't far behind, and for all their enthusiasm, the San Martinos were scarcely in the same league as Manticoran or Erewhonian machine politicians out to demonize their foes. As long as no one was actively shooting at anyone else, the Manticorans and Erewhonese were reasonably content to adopt a wait-and-see attitude, and they'd concentrated their prophylactic efforts on providing transport off planet for any of the old regime's sympathizers who preferred to be somewhere else when their somewhat irritated friends and neighbors resumed self-government. No one had used any threats to compel Peep sympathizers to refugee out, but the Allies' San Martin Reconstruction Commission had found a great many people who'd been downright eager to accept their transportation offer.

In the event, that waiting attitude had proven the wiser course, if not precisely for the reasons the commissioners had thought it might. The provisional government had just started wrangling about the details for arranging the first planetwide election when Honor Harrington was captured by the Peeps, and they'd still been wrangling when she returned from the dead. That much hadn't surprised anyone in the Alliance. Indeed, what had almost stunned those who'd become accustomed to the debates, arguments, shouting matches, and occasional fistfights which formed the bone and sinew of the San Martin political process had been the screeching speed at which those debates had come to an end with the return of Commodore Jesus Ramirez from Cerberus.

No one, including Ramirez, could possibly have predicted the effect of his return. In some ways, the San Martinos had been even more infuriated than the Allies by the Peep claim to have executed Harrington. Perhaps it was because it resonated so painfully with their own memories of what it was like to live under StateSec's heel, Elizabeth reflected. But whatever the cause for it, San Martin had been the scene of spontaneous, planetwide celebrations when the Elysian Space Navy sailed into the Trevor's Star System. Not even the fact that their world had been forced, temporarily at least, to somehow absorb, house, and feed the better part of half a million strangers with literally no warning at all had damped the San Martinos' jubilation.

Then they'd discovered exactly who the "Commodore Ramirez" who'd served as Harrington's second-in-command was. He was Jesus Ramirez, nephew of the last preconquest planetary president and the last uniformed commander of the San Martin Space Navy. The man who'd forced the People's Navy to pay at a rate of three to one for every San Martin ship destroyed, and who had successfully covered the final evacuations to Manticore (and, everyone thought, died in the process) as the Peeps closed in at last.

The Ramirez family had not fared well during the occupation. President Hector Ramirez had been "shot trying to escape" within a month of being forced to sign the planet's capitulation. His brother Manuel, Jesus' father, had been convicted of "terrorist activities" and shipped off to Haven. InSec apparently had intended to use his immense popularity to encourage his countrymen to behave themselves and stop blowing up InSec Intervention HQs, but the plan had backfired when he died within two years. Given the fact that a dead hostage wasn't particularly useful, it was probable that in this instance the Peeps had told the truth about a prisoner's death being due to natural causes. Unfortunately, no one on San Martin, least of all Manuel's surviving uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, in-laws, and acquaintances, had believed a word of it. Manuel and his brother had become martyrs, and their surviving family members had been at the heart of the local resistance movement.

And the Ramirezes had paid for it. The Legislaturalists had stripped them of their bank accounts and property as part and parcel of the process of looting the San Martin economy to shore up PRH's finances. InSec had hunted and harried them. One by one, most of the family's men and many of its women had perished. Some had been picked up by InSec, or later by StateSec, and simply disappeared. Others had been killed leading guerilla attacks, or in Peep raids on Resistance camps. By the time the Alliance took the planet, the family had been all but wiped out, and in the process, it had acquired an almost mythic stature in the eyes of all San Martin opponents of the Peep regime.

And then the Ramirezes had returned. First in the person of Brigadier General Tomas Ramirez, Royal Manticoran Marine Corps, who, in a rare instance of slipping a round peg neatly into a round hole, had been selected to serve as the executive officer of the Allied occupation force. That had been a sufficiently emotional experience, especially for San Martinos who remembered Tomas' family, even the boy Tomas himself, from before the occupation. But then Tomas' father had returned, as well, literally from beyond the veil of death, and the effect upon the rest of San Martin's population had been... profound. Hysterical hero worship was not a San Martino vice, but the staunchly individualistic mountaineers had come perilously close to it when they realized one of the Ramirezes, one of the icons of the Resistance, was still alive.

The squabbles over electoral processes ended overnight, and Jesus was drafted, almost without being consulted, to run for the presidency of the new government. All but one of his opponents withdrew when they realized who they faced, and the one woman who stayed the course was trounced at the ballot box, receiving barely fourteen percent of the vote and conceding defeat even before the polling closed. The last president of the old Republic of San Martin had been a Ramirez; so was the first president of the new Republic of San Martin, and the Allies — and especially Manticore, for whom the stability of San Martin was of particular concern — had all heaved a vast, collective sigh of relief.

Which might have been just a mite premature after all, Elizabeth thought, studying her Prime Minister's expression.

"All right, Allen. Just what, exactly, are they up to now?"

"Well..." Cromarty tugged on one of his earlobes, then shrugged. "In simplest terms, Your Majesty, President Ramirez has instructed his ambassador to explore the possibility of San Martin's requesting annexation as our fourth planetary member."

"He what?" Elizabeth stared at the Prime Minister, and Cromarty nodded.

"That's essentially what I said when Ambassador Ascencio broached the possibility, Your Majesty. It came out of absolutely nowhere."

"Is he serious?" Elizabeth demanded. "And even if he is, what in the world makes him think he could pull off something like that? I know he's popular, but if he's going to run around making offers like that one, the man must have delusions of godhood!"

"In answer to your first question, I think the answer is that he's extremely serious," Cromarty said. "The letter he sent along via Ascencio certainly reads that way, and his analysis of the benefits and advantages such an arrangement might bring to San Martin is both persuasive and well reasoned. As, I might add, is his analysis of the advantages the arrangement would offer the Star Kingdom and our desire to insure the security of the Trevor's Star terminus. And he's apparently done a surprising amount of research into the legal precedents created by your father's annexation of Basilisk. Your uncle is on Gryphon this weekend, but I had some of the Foreign Office's senior legal specialists look over his conclusions, and their preliminary consensus is that he's quite right about the Crown's authority, with advice and consent of Parliament, to add worlds to the Star Kingdom."

"But what about the rest of the San Martinos? Does he honestly think they'll stand for being sold down the river to Manticore?"

"I doubt he thinks anything of the sort, Your Majesty," Cromarty said sternly. "But I also doubt that he expects them to feel they've been `sold down the river,' either. Apparently, the initial idea wasn't his alone. According to his letter, it had occurred independently to several of the more prominent members of their new Senate more or less simultaneously. They'd still been talking around the point with one another without anyone's quite having the nerve to propose it seriously, when a casual remark of his led them to believe he shared their interest. That was enough to get them moving, and the authorization to formally explore the possibility with us seems to have been proposed, debated before the Senate in closed session, and voted upon in less than two weeks."

"You mean he has official Senate sanction for this?"

"That's what his letter says, Your Majesty. And if their own Senate is backing at least an exploration of the matter, clearly a real possibility of pulling it off exists."

"My God." Elizabeth sat back in her chair, cradling Ariel in her arms, while she pondered the possibilities suddenly opening before her.

The question of what to do, ultimately, with the one-time Peep planets presently occupied by Allied troops had been a vexatious one from the beginning. She knew some members of Parliament, especially among Cromarty's own Centrists and the Crown Loyalists, secretly yearned for annexation as a simple resolution... and one that would increase the Star Kingdom's size and population base substantially, which was nothing to sneeze at when engaged in a war against the largest star nation in the vicinity. But none of them had dared to suggest it when they knew every Opposition party's leaders would trample one another trying to be the first to leap upon the idea and strangle it at birth.

The Liberals would be horrified by the very notion that the Star Kingdom might become an old-fashioned, brutal, imperialist power. They'd raised enough hell over the annexation of Basilisk, whose sole habitable planet was peopled only by a batch of aliens about as primitive as any star-traveling race might ever hope to encounter. The idea of annexing other human —inhabited worlds would offend every ideological bone in their bodies.

The Conservative Association would have been even more horrified. They were isolationist to the core, and the thought of adding huge numbers of new subjects who had no experience of an aristocratic society (and hence could scarcely be expected to bow and scrape properly before their betters) would be intolerable to them.

The Progressives probably wouldn't care a great deal... as long as they were allowed to set up their own party organizations and electioneering machinery. The fact that the inhabitants of those planets would already have their own political factions and parties, however, would stick in even the Progressives' craws, since it would inevitably lessen their ability to seize upon new sources of strength at the polls.

And even many Manticorans not blinkered by ideology or the calculus of electoral advantage would be dismayed by the thought of adding huge chunks of foreigners to the Star Kingdom. They would worry that adding so many foreign elements would dilute or even destroy the unique amalgam which had allowed the Star Kingdom to come so far and achieve so much with such a relatively small population.

Elizabeth could understand all of that, and even sympathize with the last bit. But she also knew that the Star Kingdom's unique balance and accomplishments rested in no small part upon the steady stream of immigrants it had always attracted. There'd never been an overwhelming flood of such newcomers, but there'd always been some, and far from weakening the Star Kingdom, they'd added their own strengths to it. Elizabeth had always believed, firmly, that the continuation of that inflow was crucial to her kingdom's ongoing prosperity, and the thought of adding whole new planets held no dismay for her.

Not that she expected selling the idea to Parliament to be easy.

"Do you think we should support Ramirez, Allen?" she asked quietly, and the Prime Minister nodded.

"I do, Your Majesty. First, we need the manpower. Second, Trevor's Star is absolutely essential to us in a strategic sense. And third, I think that ultimately the San Martinos', um, liveliness, let us say, would be of great benefit to our own society. Moreover, it would establish a precedent for annexing other worlds that request it... and give us an excuse not to annex those who don't request it. And, frankly, Your Majesty, it would bolster public morale. The incredible lift Duchess Harrington's return gave it is starting to wear off, and the new emergency Navy appropriations — and the taxes they entail — are starting to sink in. And, of course," his lips twisted sourly, "our `friends' in the Opposition see absolutely no reason not to take advantage of either of the above."

He gave himself a little shake.

"Under the circumstances, the knowledge that another entire planet chooses voluntarily to join the Star Kingdom and share our risks and the burden of supporting the war would do wonders. After all, who would choose to formally join what he expected to be the losing side of a war like this one? If that thought doesn't occur naturally to the electorate and our public policy think tanks, I assure you we'll bring it to their notice!" He chuckled. "The Opposition isn't the only bunch who can play the public opinion game, Your Majesty!"

"I like your argument, Allen," Elizabeth mused, cuddling Ariel and pursing her lips while she considered all he'd just said. "Of course, it's all very preliminary, possibly even a little premature to speculate about, right now. But if it works out..."

Her voice trailed off, and Cromarty watched her face as she stared into the empty air at something only she could see. He'd seen that expression on her face before, and as he saw it now, he felt a vast certainty that, preliminary and premature or not, yet to be ratified or rejected by public opnion, Parliament, and the voters though it might be, the actual decision had already been made by the slim, mahogany-skinned woman sitting across from him.

And once that young woman makes a decision, the rest of the universe had better resign itself to the inevitable and get out of the way, he thought cheerfully. Because if it doesn't, it's going to get hurt.