John—

	I wish you could have been here to hear Duchess Harrington’s address at Last View last month! There are so many things I’ve tried— we’ve all tried— so hard to teach them, impress upon them, but they’re so damned young. They’re so damned full of their own immortality, they still find it so hard to believe the universe could exist just fine without them in it. I know— I know! We were all like that once, and maybe it’s just as well we were. If we’d known then what we know now, how many of us would have stuck it out? Worn the uniform? Seen so many of our friends die?
	Sorry. I don’t mean to be all doom-and-gloom or rain all over your parade. You know the score as well as I do, after all. One of the things I hate most about being Commandant— or even a Queen’s officer, sometimes— is the way I have to keep my mouth shut, especially in front of the middies, about the sort of things that “undermine respect for civilian authority.” When I think about the systematic way High Ridge and those other bastards threw away everything— everything, John!— that you and I and everyone else fought and died for. About the way we were right on the brink of outright military victory. We had them— we had them, and there wasn’t a single damned thing they could do about it, and High Ridge and those other bastards decided to play politics instead. Damn it, you know as well as I do who was really behind the Cromarty Assassination. Hell, without Duchess Harrington, they’d have killed Her Majesty as well! Don’t tell me for one stinking second High Ridge didn’t know that just as well as you and I do. The son-of-a-bitch knew Saint-Just ordered it, and he still insisted on “negotiating” with the Peeps. He let them wiggle off the hook, when we could’ve dictated terms to Saint-Just in Nouveau Paris itself, because it was more important to him to break Her Majesty’s kneecaps in the House of Lords to protect his own precious ass and political power, and God knows how many men and women in uniform have been killed because that was more important to him than winning the damned war. I don’t know, anyway, and when the nightmares are especially bad, I try not to know how many of my midshipmen and midshipwomen are going to die for the same frigging reason. Kids, John— good kids, my kids— and they’re going to be killed because a clutch of self-serving, conniving politicians didn’t care what their actions were going to cost anybody else.
	And I can’t say a word about it in public without violating the Articles of War and my own oath as an officer of the Queen.
	Sorry. There I go again. I’ll try to behave better.
	Look, they’re supposed to be pulling me out of the Academy, sending me back to the Fleet sometime in the next few months. I don’t know where yet, although there’s some talk about a task force in Home Fleet that needs looking after. Can’t say I really like the thought of going up against the Peeps now that they’ve duplicated the MDM and built pod-layers of their own, but we’re still better than they are, and we’ll still kick their asses in the end. In fact, I think Duchess Harrington’s on her way to do a little preliminary ass-kicking of her own right now, and the truth is, I wish I was with her. But remember what Mom always said, “If wishes were fishes, we never want food.”
	Anyway, I’ll be seeing you and her and the kids next month, once I get the semester shut down and I can grab a little time for myself. I’ll bring along a chip of Duchess Harrington’s address. If you’re still as much like me as you’ve always been before, it’ll send a shiver down your spine, I promise. But they’ll do good, my kids. It won’t matter to them whose fault it is, or why so many of them are going to die. They believe, John. They believe in duty, and honor, and responsibility. They believe there are things in this universe worth dying for. And they believe in those things strongly enough to go out and do the dying for the people they love and the things they care about. That’s what Last View is all about, really, and it’s what Duchess Harrington put into words for them so well. She touched that belief of theirs because she believes, too.
	And when you come down to it, John, so do I.
	Gotta go. Kiss Martha for me, hug those kids, and tell Mom to get the grill fired up. I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks, little brother.
		Love,
		Betty
—excerpt from a letter from Vice Admiral Lady Beatrice McDermott, Baroness Alb, Commandant, Naval Academy, Saganami Island, to her younger brother, Commodore John McDermott, one year before her death in the Battle of Manticore.