David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

She grinned at him, and to his own obvious surprise, he smiled back.

"I guess maybe we are sort of alike," he said finally. "In a way."

"And who'd've thunk it?" she replied with that same toothy grin.

"It probably wouldn't have hurt to've had this discussion earlier," he added.

"Nope, not a bit," she agreed.

"Still, I suppose it's not too late to start over," he observed.

"Not as long as you don't expect me to stop being my usual stubborn, insufferable, basically shallow self," she said.

"I don't know if all of that self-putdown is entirely fair," he said thoughtfully. "I never really thought of you as stubborn."

"As soon as I get over my unaccustomed feeling of contrition for having misjudged the motivation for that nose-in-the-air, superior attitude of yours, you'll pay for that," she assured him.

"I look forward to it with fear and trembling."

"Smartest thing you've said all day," she told him ominously, and then they both laughed.

"And I suppose Aleksandra's going to say this isn't significant, either," Henri Krietzmann said sourly.

"Of course she is," Joachim Alquezar snorted.

The two of them sat on the seaside villa's terrace, gazing out across the ocean into the ashes of sunset. Stars had just begun to prick the cobalt vault above them, the remnants of a light supper lay on the table between them, a driftwood fire burned in a stone and brick outdoor fireplace with a copper hood, and Alquezar leaned back in a chaise lounge. An old-fashioned wooden match flared in the twilight, and smoke wreathed upward as he lit a cigar. Krietzmann sniffed appreciatively at the aromatic tendrils, then reached for his beer.

"I'm beginning to really, really dislike that woman," he said almost whimsically, and Alquezar chuckled.

"Even Bernardus dislikes her, whether he's willing to admit it or not," the San Miguelian said. "After all, what's not to dislike?"

It was Krietzmann's turn to snort in bitter amusement, but there was an unpalatable amount of truth in Alquezar's quip.

"I just don't understand the way her mind works," the Dresdener admitted after a moment. "Bad enough Nordbrandt and those 'Freedom Alliance' maniacs are blowing people up and shooting them almost at random on Kornati, but at least everyone realizes they're lunatics. Westman, though." He shook his head, scowling at the memory of the reports from Montana which had arrived only that morning. "Westman is Old Establishment. He's not a marginalized hyper-nationalist politician-he's a wealthy, propertied aristocrat , or what passes for one on Montana. And he's smarter than Nordbrandt. She started off with a massacre; he started with a joke. She followed up with assassinations and scattered bombings; he followed up by blowing up the headquarters of one of the most hated off-world organizations on his homeworld… and still did it without killing a single soul. He's like, like-"

"Like that ante-diaspora fictional character Bernardus was talking about?"

"Yes, exactly!" Krietzmann nodded vigorously. "What was his name… the Crimson-No! The Scarlet Pimpernel, that was it!"

"Maybe so," Alquezar said. "But I hope you won't think me shallow for pointing out that I, and the other RTU shareholders and directors, aren't exactly amused by his choice of targets. However much debonair style and elegance he may display as he goes about his nefarious business."

"Of course not. But," Krietzmann gazed at him levelly in the light of the oil lamps burning on the table as darkness settled fully in, "I hope you don't expect me to shed a lot of tears over your losses, either."

Alquezar looked at him sharply, eyebrows lowered for just a moment, then snorted and shook his head.

"No," he said softly, and paused to draw upon his cigar. The tip glowed like a small, red planet, and he launched an almost perfect smoke ring onto the evening breeze. "No, Henri. I don't. And I shouldn't. But the fact that I feel that way, and that other people on San Miguel and Rembrandt-like Ineka Vaandrager-are going to have even stronger feelings about it, is only another proof of Westman's shrewdness. He found a target guaranteed to polarize feelings on both sides of his particular political divide, and that takes brains. You say you have trouble understanding Aleksandra's take on this? Well, I just wish I understood how someone who's obviously as bright as Westman is could have bought into something like this in the first place. He ought to be getting behind us and pushing, not blowing us up!"

"Bright isn't the same thing as well-informed or open-minded," Krietzmann pointed out. "And everything I've been able to piece together suggests that Westman takes the Montanan fetish for stubborn individuality to previously uncharted heights-especially where Rembrandt and the RTU is concerned. Not to put too fine a point on it, he hates your guts. He doesn't really care why you people were so busy sewing up the Cluster's shipping. All he knows-or wants to know-is that you were doing it, that you were about as ruthless about it as you could possibly have been, and that his world's one of several which feels it was royally screwed by your so-called 'negotiating technique.'"

The Convention President shrugged.

"I don't really blame him for that. If you people had enmeshed Dresden in your cozy little empire against our will, I'd probably resent you just as much as he does. The only real difference between Westman and me is that, first, I believe Bernardus when he tells me how he first conceived of the Trade Union, and why. And, second, whatever his real motives-and yours-might have been, annexation by Manticore represents the greatest single opportunity, and not just in economic terms, which has ever fallen the entire Cluster's way. I'm willing to forgive an awful lot to capitalize on that opportunity. But Westman's too focused on the old equation to realize how completely it's been changed."

"That's basically what Bernardus said," Alquezar said. "I suppose I follow the analysis intellectually. It's just that the mindset which can ignore all of that is so far away from the universe I live in that I can't get my understanding wrapped around the possibility it can even exist. Not on any emotional level."

"You'd better," Krietzmann said bleakly. "In the end, I think he's more likely to succeed in killing the Constitution than Nordbrandt is."

"Really?" Alquezar cocked his head. "I don't think I disagree with you, but I'd like to hear your reasoning."

"How much reasoning's involved?" Krietzmann grunted. "Oh, all right."

He leaned back in his own chaise lounge, cradling his beer mug.

"At the moment, O my esteemed fellow conspirator, you have about sixty-two percent of the delegates in your vest pocket. And Nordbrandt's extremism's actually pushed about ten percent of that total into your corner, I'd estimate. But Tonkovic and Andre Yvernau-and Lababibi-have an iron lock on the other thirty-eight percent. They've got most of the Cluster's oligarchs, aside from the delegates you and Bernardus can deliver from the RTU planets, and Nordbrandt pushed about ten percent of them away from your side and into Tonkovic's pocket when she punched the economic warfare button. Most of them could care less what happens on Kornati… as long as it doesn't splash onto their own comfortable little preserves. But with her blowing up banks and shooting bankers, not to mention the local oligarchs, her particular version of destabilization threatens to spill over into other systems, and they're not about to sign on to anything that would, as they see it, hamper their existing political and law-enforcement machinery for dealing with neo-bolsheviks and anarchists on their own worlds. And, since it takes a two-thirds majority to vote out a draft Constitution, as long as she can hold on to the five or six percent of the delegates you still need, she can stonewall the entire process and try to extort concessions out of you. Out of us ."