"We should have hit them four years ago," Duncan Jessup grunted. The secretary of public information was a stocky, perpetually disheveled man who cultivated the public image of a grumpy but golden-hearted uncle. Public Information was the official government spokesman, its main propaganda pipeline, but it had also wrested the Bureau of Mental Hygiene away from the Ministry of Public Health twenty years before. Jessup employed the Mental Hygiene Police with a cold and ruthless dispatch which sometimes frightened even Harris, and his personal control of the MHP made him the most powerful member of the cabinet, after the President himself.

"We weren't ready," Dumarest protested. "We were overextended digesting our new acquisitions, and—"

"And you got too fucking fancy," Jessup interrupted with a rude snort. "First that screw-up in Basilisk and then the disaster in Yeltsin and Endicott. All we've done is let them build their 'alliance' while our military potential held steady. Are you seriously suggesting we're in a stronger relative position now than we were then?"

"That's enough, Duncan," Harris said quietly. Jessup glowered at him for a moment, then lowered his eyes, and the President went on more calmly than he felt, "The entire cabinet endorsed both operations, and I'll remind all of you that however spectacular those failures were, most of our other operations have succeeded. We may not have prevented the Manticorans from building up their alliance, but we have secured countervailing positions. At the same time, I think we all know the showdown with Manticore is coming." Heads nodded unhappily, and Harris turned his eyes to Fleet Admiral Amos Parnell, CNO of the Peoples' Navy, who sat at Dumarest's elbow. "How do the odds really stack up, Amos?"

"Not as well as I'd like, Sir," Parnell admitted. "The evidence suggests Manticore has a considerably greater technical advantage than anyone thought four years ago.