by David Weber
Her uniformed fellows nodded, and Baroness Medusa tilted back her chair.
"Should I assume that—for the moment, at least—you feel relatively secure here in the Quadrant, then?"
"I think we probably are," Khumalo answered, instead of Michelle. He was, after all, the station commander. "There's a great deal to be said for Admiral Oversteegen's analysis where these mysterious newcomers are concerned. And, frankly, at the moment, the League doesn't have anything to send our way even if it had the nerve to do it. That could change in a few months, but for now, at least, they can't pose any kind of credible threat even against ships armed 'only' with Mark 16s."
"Good." Medusa's nostrils flared. "I only hope that sanity leaks out somewhere in the League before anyone manages to get additional forces out our way. Or directed at the home system."
Chapter Thirty-Seven
"You screened, Pat?" Sir Thomas Caparelli asked as his face appeared on Patricia Givens' com display. "I'm sorry I was out of the office, but Liesel told me you'd said it was urgent when I got back. And also that I wasn't to use my personal com?"
"That's right," Givens replied. "And I did tell her I needed you to screen back on a secure com."
She looked better than she had immediately after the disastrous attack, Caparelli thought, but "better" was a purely relative term. The shadows of guilt had retreated in her eyes, yet he was beginning to think they would never completely disappear, and the near hysteria of a certain portion of the Star Empire's news media hadn't helped. He doubted there was anything they could have said that she hadn't already said to herself—he knew that was true in his own case—but the angry, panic-driven sense of betrayal coming from that particular group of newsies and editorials had inspired them to hammer the "blatant intelligence failure" far harder than they'd hammered the rest of the Navy.
Realistically, neither he nor Givens could have expected anything else, Caparelli supposed. Public opinion had been wound tight enough with the combined euphoria of the Battle of Spindle and the looming threat of war against the Solarian League, and it was perfectly understandable why the psychological impact of the devastating onslaught had hit the Star Empire's subjects like a sledgehammer. And it was perfectly reasonable for those same subjects to want the heads of whoever had allowed it to happen. As a matter of fact, Caparelli agreed with them in many ways; that was why he'd submitted his resignation—twice. Unfortunately, in his opinion, it had been rejected twice, as well.
The first rejection had come from Hamish Alexander-Harrington, who'd pointed out—again—that no one could have seen something like this coming and that holding any individual or group of individuals responsible would be a blatant case of scapegoating.
Caparelli hadn't been able to logically dispute the first lord's analysis, but that didn't mean he'd agreed with it. Nor did it mean he was able to accept it, whatever logic might say. So he'd submitted his resignation a second time, this time directly to Queen Elizabeth . . . who'd returned it to him unread with an admonition "not to be silly." She'd accompanied that pithy bit of advice with a firm injunction to take his resignation back, to tear it up, and never to submit it to her again. First, because she agreed with Earl White Haven, and secondly (and, he suspected, even more pragmatically), because his abrupt departure from the Admiralty would look like a case of scapegoating. In the queen's opinion, the hysterical segment of public opinion represented a distinct minority, and she had no intention of allowing herself or the Grantville Government to fan the hysteria by looking as if they were racing about in a panic of their own, looking for someone—anyone—to blame.
And so, out of a sense of duty more than anything else, he'd stayed. And he'd supported White Haven when the first lord rejected Givens' resignation, as well. Which was why the two of them were still sitting in their offices having this discussion three and a half T-weeks after the attack.
He realized he'd allowed a silence to settle while his thoughts rattled back around the newly worn ruts in his brain, and he gave himself a shake.
"Sorry, Pat. Woolgathering, I guess."
"There's a lot of that going around," she said with biting irony, then inhaled sharply. "Sorry," she said in turn.
"Don't worry about it." He smiled. "But now that we're both here, what was it you needed to tell me?"
"Actually, this may be something we need to take to the PM and Her Majesty," Givens said, her expression and her tone both suddenly much more serious. "One of my people just brought me something from one of our 'black'—in this case, very black—Beowulf conduits."
Caparelli stiffened very slightly. Beowulf was, by any measure, Manticore's staunchest ally within the Solarian League. It was also the home system's biggest single trading partner, and a lot of Manticorans had married Beowulfers—and vice versa—over the centuries since the Junction had been discovered. The Harrington family was a case in point. Or, he corrected himself grimly, it had been, at least. When there'd been a Harrington family.
Beowulf was also the only League member system which had been kept routinely up to date on Manticoran military developments. The Beowulf System-Defense Force and the Royal Navy had been quietly in agreement that it would be in both services' best interests if Beowulf didn't suddenly began introducing Manticore's new tech goodies into its own ships, where they might find their way into the SLN's less than pristine hands, and the BSDF had somehow mysteriously failed to provide any of those "observers" the SLN had been so busily ignoring for so long. But that didn't mean Beowulf didn't have a very good basic grasp of what Manticore had been up to. Not only that, but Beowulf was the only non-Manticoran star system which had been included from the beginning in planning for Case Lacoön, and there were all sorts of open channels of communication between the Beowulf Planetary Board of Directors and Her Majesty's Government.
Which was all well and good, but one of those little secrets polite people never mentioned was that even allies spied on one another. There were lots of reasons for that, particularly if the allies in question were less than totally confident about their "ally's" long-term intentions. That wasn't the case here, but another reason—and one which had operated in the case of Beowulf more than once—was because "spies" could exchange information that couldn't be exchanged openly. The sort of information that, for one reason or another, one government couldn't risk openly handing to another, no matter how friendly they were. And any "black" Beowulf conduits which reported to Pat Givens and ONI almost certainly came under that heading.
"All right," he told her. "I'm braced."
* * *
"This," Hamish Alexander-Harrington said, "is not good."
It was probably the most unnecessary observation he'd ever made, and he knew it. Still, someone had to break the ice of shocked dismay and get the conversation moving.
His wife glanced at him, her lips moving in a shadow of a smile as she sensed his thoughts, but his brother—seated across the conference table from them—snorted harshly.
"I suppose you could say it comes under that heading," he said. "Of course, it's had a lot of company there lately, hasn't it?"
"How much confidence do you have in this source, Admiral Givens?" Elizabeth Winton asked from her place at the head of the table.
"A high level, Your Majesty," Givens replied, and White Haven noticed that she looked more alive, more engaged, than he'd seen her since what everyone had come to think of as The Attack. "We haven't used this particular conduit very often. In fact, this is only the third message—aside from a handful of 'is this channel still open?' sort of exchanges—that's been passed through it, and it's been in existence for the better part of seventy T-years. Both of the other messages that came to us this way proved to be completely accurate, which is significant in its own right. More to the point, in my own mind, at least, that's a long time to maintain a back channel 'just in case.' Someone's invested a lot of effort in making sure it stayed open despite any changes in personnel—at either end. Which, to be honest, is the main re
ason I'm inclined to put so much trust in it now."
"If the information's as reliable as you believe it is, then I can see why they didn't want to pass it to us openly," William Alexander said.
"I suppose that technically it does come under the definition of treason against the Solarian League," Elizabeth agreed.
"That's arguable, Your Majesty," Sir Anthony Langtry said. The queen looked at him, and he shrugged. "First, 'treason' is a particularly elusive term as defined—more or less—in the Solarian Constitution. Secondly, if the warning's accurate, someone could make a good case for Rajampet's plans being the real act of treason. He's bending Article Seven into a pretzel if that's what he's using to justify this."
"Not that anyone's going to call him on it, Tony," Honor Alexander-Harrington observed, and her soprano voice was almost as shadowed as Patricia Givens' eyes. "Or, not in time to do us any good, at any rate."
"I'm afraid that's entirely too likely," Elizabeth said, smiling at Honor in unhappy agreement.
"So, if we assume the information is accurate, what do we do with it?" Grantville asked.
"That depends in part on how serious the actual military threat is, Willie," the queen replied, and looked at the first space lord. "Sir Thomas?"
"In some ways, that's harder to say than I'd like, Your Majesty," Caparelli told her. "If the numbers are correct—if they're really talking about throwing four hundred or so of the wall at us—then the initial attack is going to be toast, to use Hamish's favorite term. We've got almost that many wallers of our own, all of which are longer-ranged and far better protected in any missile duel than the wallers Admiral Gold Peak took out at Spindle, and that doesn't even include our system-defense pods. So I'm totally confident of our ability to defeat this force decisively. The only question, to be brutally honest, would be whether or not any of them survived long enough to strike their wedges."
He paused, looking around the conference table, and his steely confidence was plain to see.
"Unfortunately, a lot depends on what the thinking behind this is, and, frankly, we don't know that. One thing I do know is that if we defeat another Solarian task force—although this one, frankly, is going to be big enough no one's going to be able to get away with calling it anything except a 'fleet,' which is going to present its own problems when it comes around to psychological impact time—it's going to have an enormous influence on Solarian public opinion where we're concerned. As I see it, there are two possible extremes to their potential reactions. First, they could be so horrified by the devastating nature of the SLN's defeats that they could turn completely against any future operations. Possibly even completely enough to present Kolokoltsov and the rest of them with a genuine challenge to their control of the League. Second, though, they could be so horrified and infuriated by the devastating nature of their defeats that they basically give Rajampet a blank check. There's room for all sorts of variations between those two extremes, of course, but I think that's what it really comes down to. And in some ways, unfortunately, I think it's a crapshoot which way they'll jump."
"Hamish? Honor?" Elizabeth looked at them, eyebrow arched.
Honor glanced at her husband for a moment, then squared her shoulders and faced Elizabeth with Nimitz pressing his cheek into the side of her neck from the back of her chair.
"I think Sir Thomas has it pretty much right, Elizabeth," she said. "To be honest, even if the League threw its entire active wall of battle at us in a single wave, we could be fairly confident of defeating it. Throwing in their wallers in dribs and drabs is simply going to make the job even easier from our perspective. The only real worry, in the short term, is the question of our ammunition supply, and judging from what happened at Spindle, I'm pretty sure we've got enough to deal with their entire active superdreadnought strength.
"Unfortunately, if we end up having to do that, it'll make a huge hole in our supply of missiles, which will present all kinds of potential problems if we can't work something out with Haven after all. Which, of course, doesn't even consider what we might need against Manpower."
Her voice turned harder and flatter on the last word, and the light glittering in her brown eyes for just a moment sent a shiver down Elizabeth Winton's spine. Most of the Star Empire's senior officers and political leaders were careful to emphasize—in public, at least—that they still didn't know exactly who'd attacked the home system. There was no doubt whatsoever in Honor Alexander-Harrington's mind, however.
And there was no doubt in Elizabeth's mind exactly what Honor intended to do about it. It wasn't that Elizabeth disagreed with her; it was only that even after all these years, the queen still hadn't realized that when it came down to it, Honor Alexander-Harrington's granite determination was even more merciless than her own famed temper. Colder and less outwardly expressive, perhaps, and definitely slower to awaken, yet that made it only more deadly in the end.
"If we could count on facing only the League, I think we'd probably be pretty much okay for the first couple of years," Honor continued after a moment. "It's going to take them longer to get substantial numbers of the Reserve refitted, activated, and manned—and trained—than it's going to take us to get our missile production started up again. They've got enough battlecruisers and cruisers in Frontier Fleet to pose a significant threat to our commerce if they resort to a full bore guerre de course and use them as raiders, but thanks to the wormhole network, we actually have the 'interior lines,' so they'd be even more vulnerable to commerce raiding than we are.
"But the one thing we wouldn't be able to do is take the war to them until we got the missile supply back under control, and that means they'd have a lot more time to react to their technological inferiority. Without an adequate, reliable supply of missiles, we can't go after them. If they choose not to go after us while they look for answers to our hardware advantages, then by the time we've got our missile lines back in full production, they'll probably be well on their way to producing new designs that are a lot more survivable and a lot more dangerous. And, even worse, we've lost so much industry that there's no way in the galaxy we could hope to stay in shouting range of their production capability. If they turn out six times as many ships, we lose, even if their ships are individually only half as good as ours."
"And the fact that, as you say, we can't take the war to them means we can't exploit those fracture lines of the League's you pointed out to us," Elizabeth said, nodding her head in grim understanding and agreement.
"Exactly." Honor reached up to stroke Nimitz and met her queen's eyes levelly. "If this information is accurate, if Rajampet really is planning on feeding another four hundred wallers into the furnace, it's going to get really, really ugly, no matter what happens. Worst-case scenario, frankly, is that in defeating them we inflict enough losses to provide the rallying point Sir Thomas was talking about. Assume each of those ships has a complement of sixty-five hundred, which is actually on the low side. That would still give us over two and a half million people aboard the wallers alone. Potentially, that's two and a half million fatal casualties, on top of the losses Crandall took at Spindle. More likely, we'd kill a lot less than that outright and take the rest prisoner, but I'm not sure that would be a lot better from a psychological perspective. To be honest, I'm inclined to think that's exactly what Rajampet has in mind."
White Haven stirred beside her, and she looked at him.
"I'm not one of the Sollies' greater admirers myself," he said, "but deliberately courting that kind of death toll purely as a political maneuver seems a bit too cynically calculating to me, even for a Solly."
"That's because deep down inside you're a straightforward, decent sort of person, Ham," his brother said grimly. White Haven's gaze moved to him, and Grantville shrugged. "You might want to remember Cordelia Ransom and Rob Pierre. The number of casualties Honor's talking about here are actually a lot lower than the casualties Pierre was willing to inflict just by launching his pogroms against the Legislaturalists, much less
fighting us. Ransom wouldn't have turned a hair at sacrificing three or four times that many people if it suited her purposes, and let's not even get started on that sociopath Saint-Just!"
"But—" White Haven began, then stopped, and Grantville nodded.
"That's right, Ham." His voice was almost gentle now. "We're used to thinking of Peeps as political sociopaths. From what I've seen so far out of Kolokoltsov and his crew—and especially out of Rajampet, so far—they're at least as bad. Maybe even worse, because I don't think any of them have the personal involvement or the legitimate basis for outrage that Pierre, at least, definitely did have. To them, it's just a matter of gaming the system the way they've always gamed it."
"Which leaves us in one hell of a mess, doesn't it?" Queen Elizabeth summed up, and no one in that conference room disagreed with her.
* * *
"Are you serious, Admiral Trenis?"
Eloise Pritchart tried to keep the disbelief out of her voice as she gazed at the director of the Republican Navy's Bureau of Planning. That position made Linda Trenis the Republic of Haven's equivalent of Patricia Givens, and, over the years, especially since the fall of the People's Republic, she'd become accustomed to presenting reports some of her superiors initially found . . . somewhat difficult to credit. Now she simply looked back at the president and nodded.
"Yes, Madam President, I'm quite serious."
"But, let me get this straight—you don't have any idea who sent you this particular information?"
