Storm from the Shadows-OOPSIE

by David Weber

  "I might quibble with some of your terminology, Ma'am," Terekhov said thoughtfully. "I never really thought of them as stupid, but I guess I'd have to admit that the quality I associated with them was more . . . cunning, let's say, then intelligence."

  "And their operations in the past—or the ones we've known about, at least—have all been related to the bottom-line somehow," Michelle pointed out. "Sometimes the connection's seemed a little strained, but it's always been there if we looked close enough. And they've never used major military forces—their own, or anyone else's. Even when they tried for Montaigne, they used mercenaries. And that business of yours in Nuncio, Aivars—that was using orphaned StateSec units, which was effectively just another batch of mercenaries. But this time, neither of those things is true."

  She shook her head, her eyes unwontedly worried.

  "Arguably, I suppose, you could say both the Monicans and the New Tuscans were more 'mercenaries,' whether they realized it or not, but what about Byng? What about the connections it took to get him assigned to a Frontier Fleet command and then sent out here? And what about this Battle Fleet task force Anisimovna claimed was stationed at MacIntosh? That's a huge escalation in force levels from anything we've ever seen out of them in the past. I suppose Battle Fleet's corrupt enough that they could conceivably have managed it with only a few people in key spots in their pockets, but even so, it shows a degree of hubris that strikes me as almost insane. And look at the timing on it. They had to have the MacIntosh deployment and Byng's appointment already in the pipeline before you hit Monica, Aivars. They literally couldn't have gotten the ships out here so quickly, if they hadn't already arranged for it. So either they really were already looking at New Tuscany—or something like it—or else they'd decided to arrange it all as a second string to their bow if Monica failed. Either way, that's a sort of multi-layered strategy I don't think any of us would have expected out of them. And if we're going to talk about escalations, think of everything else they've risked here. They're headquartered on an independent planet which isn't even part of the League, but they're deeply involved in the League's economy. They depend on that involvement, and they've always relied on their connections in the League's bureaucracy and Assembly to deter any Solarian action against them. But now they start throwing Battle Fleet admirals and task forces around? Even the League is going to react—and react hard—if it figures out a single outlaw corporation—a foreign outlaw corporation—is sending entire fleets of its wallers around the galaxy!

  "And even leaving that risk aside, look at the financial side of it. They have to have lost a fortune on that fiasco in Monica, but they didn't even slow down. Instead, they switched right over to this New Tuscany operation, and I'll guarantee you it didn't come cheap, either. I'll concede that they've got every reason in the world to keep us as far away from the Mesa System as they can, but after taking the hit to the bank account Monica must've represented, shouldn't simple financial pain have made them at least a little slower out of the gate for New Tuscany? And after such an obvious failure, and all the bad PR it's gotten them from the League newsies, I'd have expected them to keep a low profile, at least for a little while. Which, obviously, they didn't do, if they're actually manipulating major SLN command appointments and fleet movements. And to top it all off, the person they sent out to coordinate it is also the person who coordinated the Monica operation, and before Monica, we'd never even heard of her. Which wouldn't worry me as much as it does if she didn't seem to be so damned capable. If they've had her tucked away in their forward magazine all this time, why haven't we seen her—or her handiwork, at least—before? Where did this rogue corporation suddenly come up with an operative of her caliber? And why is it acting like it thinks it's a star nation, not just a criminal business enterprise?"

  The other two looked back at her, and no one said another word for quite a long time.

  * * *

  The silence in the conference room deep inside Mount Royal Palace was profound as the report from Augustus Khumalo and Estelle Matsuko ended and the holo display blanked. No one said anything for several seconds, and then, predictably, Queen Elizabeth III cleared her throat.

  "You know," she said almost whimsically, "when you and the Admiralty sent Mike off to Talbott, Hamish, I thought we might be sending her to a relatively quiet little corner of the galaxy while she recuperated."

  Hamish Alexander-Harrington, the Earl of White Haven and First Lord of Admiralty, produced a rather sour chuckle.

  "We never said it was going to be a 'quiet little corner,'" he told his Queen. "On the other hand, I never thought it was going to get this . . . interesting, either."

  "No?" White Haven's younger brother, William Alexander, Baron Grantville and Prime Minister of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, clearly wasn't going to be producing any chuckles, sour or otherwise. His expression was profoundly unhappy, and he shook his head. "'Interesting' isn't the word I'd choose, Ham. It doesn't even come close to what this little vest pocket nuke is going to do to us!"

  "No, it doesn't, Willie," Honor Alexander-Harrington told her brother-in-law, and her expression was almost as unhappy as his. She reached up to stroke the ears of the cream and gray treecat stretched across the back of her chair. "In fact, I've got a really bad feeling about all this."

  "Other than the fact that we've just lost three destroyers and their entire crews, you mean, I take it, Honor?" Elizabeth asked.

  "That's exactly what I mean." Honor's mouth tightened, and she made a small throwing-away gesture with her right hand. "Don't take this wrongly, but after what happened to us—and to the Havenites—in the Battle of Manticore, the loss of life is of less concern to me than the future implications. I don't like saying that, and when I do, I'm not speaking as someone named Honor Alexander-Harrington; I'm speaking as Admiral Alexander-Harrington, the officer in command of Home Fleet."

  "I understand," the queen said, reaching out to lay one hand on Honor's left wrist. "And, to be honest, I agree with you one hundred percent. I think that may be one reason I'm making weak witticisms as a way to keep from looking at it squarely. But I suppose that's exactly what we need to do, isn't it?"

  "To put it mildly," Grantville agreed.

  He gazed at the backs of the hands folded on the tabletop in front of him for a second or two, then looked up at the other three people seated at the table. Sir Thomas Caparelli, the First Space Lord, sat to White Haven's right. Honor sat to her husband's left, between him and the Queen, and Second Space Lord Patricia Givens sat just to Grantville's immediate left, between him and Caparelli. Sir Anthony Langtry, the Star Kingdom's Foreign Minister, completed the gathering, sitting between Grantville and the Queen.

  "Anything new on that business in Torch, Pat?" the Prime Minister asked Givens, whose duties included command of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

  "No, not really," she admitted. "All we know for certain at this point is that what looks like it must have been most of the StateSec 'refugee fleet' that had taken service with Manpower was committed to the attack. Commodore Rozsak intercepted it, but he got hammered hard. Frankly, quite a few of my analysts—and I was one of them, for that matter—were surprised when he waded into them that way. I think it's the clearest evidence we've had to date that he and Governor Barregos take their treaty obligations seriously."

  "But there's not much question Manpower was behind it?"

  "No question at all, really," Givens agreed. "We've been aware ever since Terekhov took out Anhur in Nuncio that Manpower's been picking up every StateSec refugee it could. We never expected it to use them for something like this, but everything we already knew and interrogation of survivors all says Manpower was the mastermind behind the attack."

  "I see where you're going with this, Willie," Honor said. "You're wondering if the timing is a coincidence or not, aren't you?"

  "Yes, I am." Grantville snorted and shook his head at his sister-in-law. "Mind you, I'm not sure I'm not succumbing to terminal par
anoia, but after what happened in the Quadrant and at Monica, having obvious Manpower proxies suddenly busy in our own backyard just at the same time things seem to be going to hell in New Tuscany strikes me as a particularly ominous coincidence."

  "Are you seriously suggesting that Manpower's deliberately set out to embroil us in an all-out war with the Solarian League, Willie? That that's what they were really after in Monica?" Langtry asked, and Grantville shrugged.

  "I don't know, Tony. For that matter, Manpower might simply have stumbled into all this. They may not have had any concerted plan from the get-go. For all I know, they've been improvising as they go along, and everything that's happening could be pure serendipity from their perspective. But whether they're behind what happened in New Tuscany or not—and the similarity to what happened at Monica does appear to be rather striking, doesn't it?—we're still faced with the consequences. I don't think anyone sitting at this table is likely to criticize Mike, Baroness Medusa, or Admiral Khumalo for their response to the destruction of Commodore Chatterjee's ships. I certainly don't, and I know Her Majesty doesn't. Everything they've proposed is in strict accordance with our own existing, clearly enunciated policies and positions. And, obviously, all of us hope the Solarian units in New Tuscany—assuming they were still there when our ships arrived—have complied with Mike's demands without any further loss of life. Unfortunately, we can't count on that."

  He paused, and let the silence hiding in the corners of the conference room whisper to all of them, then turned his eyes to his brother.

  "A few months ago, Hamish," the Prime Minister of Manticore said, "you gave us your evaluation of what would happen if we found ourselves in a shooting war with the Solarian League. Has that evaluation changed?"

  "In the longer term, no." White Haven's prompt response—and grim expression—made it evident he'd been thinking about exactly the same question. "I'll want to look at the technical appendices of Khumalo's dispatches—just as I'm sure Tom and Pat will want to do—in case they tell us anything interesting, but everything BuWeaps has turned up from its examination of the Monica prizes has only strengthened my conviction that the SLN is several generations behind us in terms of applied military hardware. Obviously, there's no way of knowing exactly where they are in terms of research and development, and God only knows what they might have in the procurement pipeline, but even for the League, putting such fundamentally new weapons technologies into mass production and fitting them into an existing fleet structure is going to take time. Lots of time. God knows it took us long enough, and we had a life-or-death incentive to make the move. The League doesn't, and its political and military bureaucracies suffer from a lot more inherent inertia than ours ever did. In fact, I'll be very surprised if the bureaucratic bottlenecks and simple ingrained resistance to change and 'not invented here' prejudices don't double or triple the time requirement the purely physical constraints would impose.

  "Assuming we do have the sort of technological edge BuWeaps is currently projecting, we'll rip the ass off of any Solarian force we run into, if you'll pardon my language, at least in the immediate future. Eventually, though, assuming they have the stomach for the kinds of casualty totals we can inflict on them, they'll suck up whatever we can do to them, develop the same weapons, and run right over us. Either that, or we'll hit some sort of 'negotiated peace,' and they'll go home and pull a Theisman on us. We'll wake up one fine morning and discover that the Solarian League Navy has a wall of battle just like ours only lots, lots bigger . . . at which point, we're toast."

  "For that matter, they've got another option, Hamish," Honor pointed out. "One that actually worries me more, in some ways."

  "What option?" Elizabeth asked.

  "They could just refuse to declare war at all," Honor said bleakly. Elizabeth looked confused, and Honor shrugged.

  "If we get into a shooting war with the League and we're going to have any chance of achieving a military victory—or, for that matter, of inflicting the kind of casualty totals Hamish was just talking about, so that they settle for a negotiated peace—we're going to have to take the war to them. We're going to have to demonstrate everything we've learned about deep-area raids instead of system-by-system advances. We're going to have to go after their military infrastructure. Take out their more modern and larger system defense force components. Rip up their rear areas, wipe out their existing, obsolete fleet and its trained personnel, take out the shipyards they'd use to build new ships. In other words, we're going to have to go after them with everything we have, using every trick we've learned fighting Haven, and demonstrate that we can hurt them so badly that they have no choice but to sue for peace."

  Elizabeth's face had hardened with understanding, and her brown eyes were grim as they met Honor's.

  "But even that won't be enough," Honor continued. "We can blow up Solarian fleets every Tuesday for the next twenty years without delivering a genuine knockout blow to something the size of the League. The only way to actually defeat it—and to make sure that we've put a stake through its heart and it doesn't just go away, build a new fleet, and then come back for vengeance a few years down the road—is to destroy it."

  Elizabeth's hard eyes widened in surprise, and Sir Anthony Langtry stiffened in his chair. Even White Haven looked shocked, and Honor shrugged again.

  "Let's not fool ourselves here," she said flatly. "Destroying the League would be the only way for the Star Empire to survive in the long haul. And frankly, I, for one, think that might actually be a practical objective, under the right circumstances."

  "Honor, with all due respect," Langtry said, "we're talking about the Solarian League."

  "A point of which I'm well aware, Tony." Her smile was as bleak as her tone. "And I realize we're all accustomed to thinking of the League as the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful, most advanced, most anything-you-want-to-mention in the history of humanity. Which means that right along with that, we think of it as some sort of indestructible juggernaut. But nothing is truly indestructible. Crack any history book, if you don't believe me. And I'm seeing quite a few signs that the League is at or very near—if, in fact, it isn't already past—the tipping point. It's too decadent, too corrupt, too totally assured of its invincibility and supremacy. Its internal decision-making is too unaccountable, too divorced from what the League's citizens really want—or, for that matter, think they're actually getting! We were just talking about Governor Barregos and Admiral Roszak. Hasn't it occurred to any of you that what's really happening in the Maya Sector is only the first leaf of autumn? That there are other sectors—not only in the Verge, but in the Shell, and even in the Old League itself—that are likely to entertain thoughts of breaking away if the League's veneer of inevitability ever cracks?"

  They were all looking at her now, most of them with less shock and more speculation, and she shook her head.

  "So if we get into an all-out war with the League, our strategy is going to have to have a very definite political element. We'll have to make it clear that the war wasn't our idea. We'll have to drive home the notion that we're not after any sort of punitive peace, that we're not trying to annex any additional territory, that we have no desire to conduct reprisals against people who don't want to fight us. We need to tell them, every step of the way, that what we really want is a negotiated settlement . . . and at the same time, we have to hit the League as a whole so hard that the fracture lines already there under the surface open right up. We have to split the League into separate sectors, into successor states, none of which have the sheer size and concentrated industrial power and manpower of the present league. Successor states that are our own size, or smaller. And we have to negotiate bilateral peace treaties with each of those successor states as they declare their willingness to opt out of the general conflict to get us to stop beating on their heads. And once we have those peace treaties, we have to not only honor them, but step beyond them. We need to use trade incentives, mutual defense pacts, educational assi
stance, every single thing we can think of to show them that we are—and to really be, not just pretend to be—the sort of neighbor and ally they'll want around. In other words, once we break the League militarily, once we splinter it into multiple, mutually independent star nations, we have to see to it that none of those star nations have any motive to fuse themselves back together and gang up on us all over again."

  She paused, and there was silence in the conference room. All of them, with the probable exception of Hamish Alexander-Harrington, were gazing at her in astonishment. Elizabeth looked less surprised than most of the others, but there was an edge almost of wonder in her expression.

  Not a man or woman at that table would have questioned Duchess Harrington's military insight, or tactical or strategic ability . . . in the purely military arena. Yet most of them still tended to think of her as a fleet commander. Manticore's best fleet commander, perhaps, but still a fleet commander. As they'd listened to her, they'd come to realize how silly that was—and how foolish they'd been not to recognize their own silliness much earlier. In their defense, most of the insight she'd previously shown in the field of political strategy and analysis had focused on domestic concerns, or on the internal workings of the Manticoran Alliance. It hadn't occurred to them that she might have already focused that formidable ability on the Solarian League as the Star Empire's next great challenge, and that had been remarkably blind of them.

  "I think you're right," Elizabeth said finally, and managed a half-humorous grimace. "I suppose I've been so fixated on how much I don't want to fight the League, how terrifying an opponent it would be, that I've been much more aware of our own weaknesses and disadvantages than I have of any weaknesses it might suffer from."