by David Weber
There were times when it was easier than at others to remember that Sir Anthony Langtry had been an officer in the Royal Marines before he ever became a diplomat, Grantville reflected. The Foreign Secretary's sheer anger was bad enough, but the savage irony of his tone could have withered a Sphinxian picketwood forest. Which didn't change the fact that it was a masterful summation of exactly what the Solarian League's attitude was likely to be.
"You're right, of course," he conceded aloud. "And that means we're going to have to be careful exactly how we handle our protest to the League."
"At least we can get our diplomatic note in the first," his brother pointed out. "The message turnaround time from New Tuscany to Old Terra is only about twenty-five days by way of Manticore and the Junction. It's a lot longer for anyone trying to work around the outside of our communication loop. New Tuscany to Meyers is over five T-weeks for a dispatch boat, and it's over six T-weeks even for a message direct from New Tuscany to Mesa." White Haven grimaced, as if the system name physically tasted bad. "From there, it's another thirteen T-days or so to Old Terra by way of the Visigoth Junction and Beowulf. If they waste time following protocol and report to Meyers first, it'll take them right on eighty-six days—damned close to three T-months—just to get their first report back to Sol. Of course, assuming that we're right about Manpower's involvement, they probably will send dispatches directly by way of Mesa and Visigoth and get them there in only sixty-seven days or so, but even on that basis, our note will be there in less than half the time."
"I know," Grantville agreed. "But that leaves us with an interesting quandary."
"How public we want to go," Langtry said, and the Prime Minister nodded.
"Exactly. At this point, nobody else has a clue what's going on out there. Well, that something is going on out there, at any rate. I don't think any of us are really prepared to say exactly what's going on." He smiled thinly. "So do we make this a very quiet note to the Solly Foreign Ministry, or do we hand Tristram's sensor data directly over to the newsies?"
"What a wonderful set of options," Elizabeth said sourly, and her Prime Minister shrugged.
"I'm not incredibly happy about them myself, Your Majesty. Unfortunately, they're really the only two we've got. So do we try to handle this as quietly as we can in the faint hope that refraining from splashing egg all over the League's face will inspire the Solly powers-that-be to actually work with us, or do we go for maximum publicity? Launch our own offensive in the League's newsfaxes in hopes of pressuring them into being reasonable?"
No one said anything for several thoughtful seconds. Then Honor inhaled deeply and shook her head.
"Given how divorced the real decision-makers in the League are from anything remotely resembling the electoral process, I doubt that any sort of propaganda offensive is going to have much effect in the short term. At the same time, though, if we go public with it, we start backing those same decision-makers into a corner. Or that's how they're likely to see it, at any rate.
"As Hamish just pointed out, it's going to take a lot longer for any of their dispatches to get to Old Terra, unless Byng is smart enough to stand down and sends his own message traffic through the Junction. So I don't think there'd be any point in expecting the League to reach any final decisions on how it's going to respond very quickly even if it wanted to. And, frankly, I don't think it is going to want to. Sheer arrogance would take care of that, but as Tony's already suggested, they're also going to be thinking in terms of precedents. Of what's going to happen if they 'let us get away with this' sort of response. If we go ahead and start inflaming public opinion, that's only going to make them even stubborner about admitting for an instant that their man screwed up."
"All true," Elizabeth said. "On the other hand, I don't think anyone in this room really expects them to be anything but stubborn about admitting that they're at fault."
"No," Langtry said. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't appear as reasonable as possible, Your Majesty."
He grimaced, obviously unhappy at the thought of playing the part of a moderating influence. Unfortunately, that responsibility came with his present job, and he buckled down to it.
"The fact that we're demanding the at least temporary surrender of their warships—and that our commander on the spot is authorized to use deadly force if they refuse—is going to infuriate them," he continued. "There's no way around that. The fact that we're willing to infuriate them, though—that we're willing to go eyeball-to-eyeball with them over this, which no one else has been gutsy or crazy enough to do literally for centuries—is going to make a pretty firm statement about how seriously we take this. I think we could probably afford to handle it in a way that suggests we don't want to publicly humiliate the League without looking irresolute."
"I think Tony and Honor have both made valid points, Your Majesty," Grantville said after a moment. "I'm inclined to recommend that we not go public at this point. In fact, I think we should specifically point out to them that we haven't handed the story over to the media when we draft our note to Foreign Minister Roelas y Valiente."
Elizabeth thought for a moment, then nodded.
"I think that makes sense," she said. "At the same time, though, I don't think we can afford to sit on it for too long, for several reasons."
"Which reasons are you thinking about?" Grantville asked just a little bit warily.
"The most important one to me personally is that we have a responsibility to inform our own citizens," the queen replied. "And that's not just coming from any moral sense of responsibility, either, Willie," she added a bit pointedly. "Sooner or later we're going to have to go public with this, and if we delay too long, people are going to wonder why we didn't tell them about it sooner, since it happens to involve the minor matter of the possibility of our ending up at war with the most powerful navy in the galaxy while we're already at war with the Republic of Haven. I think it's important that they understand why we're running this sort of risk, and exactly how important the principles involved really are."
Grantville winced slightly. Although he'd been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the the Duke of Cromarty's cabinet, he'd never fully agreed with Cromarty's news policies during the First Havenite War. Cromarty's position had been that things could be kept secret only so long, however hard people in positions of authority tried. Since unfortunate news items were going to leak anyway, he'd reasoned, a policy of openness and honesty would be the best way to increase the public's confidence in official statements when they did. Grantville—although he'd been only the Honorable William Alexander at the time—hadn't disagreed with either of those points. His problem had been his intense dislike (actually, he was prepared to admit without any particular apology, hatred would have been a better choice of noun) for the official news establishment of the Solarian League. Anything reported in Manticore would be reported on Old Terra within the week, and the Solly newsies had not, in his opinion, wasted very much effort trying to report it factually and without bias.
There'd been a time, before the initial Peep attacks at places like Hancock Station and Yeltsin's Star, when the Solarian press had covered the looming confrontation between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the People's Republic with something approaching evenhandedness. In fact, a segment of the Solly news establishment had covered it from a pro-Manticore position, and the Star Kingdom's government and its well-established public relations organs in places like Beowulf, the Sol System, and Far Corners had deliberately played to the "plucky little Manticore" view of that portion of the press.
But the Solarian resentment of the Star Kingdom's dominant position in interstellar commerce had always been there in the background, and once the actual shooting began, it had started coming to the fore. "Plucky little Manticore" had been seen in quite a different light when the Royal Manticoran Navy was winning battle after battle after battle. The fact that it was winning those battles against heavy numerical odds only seemed to make many Solarians more inclined
to see the Star Kingdom as the militarily superior side, and it was only a short hop (for many of them) to somehow transforming Manticore ("I never liked those pushy Manties, anyway. Always too greedy and sure of themselves for a bunch of neobarbs, if you ask me! IfI were Haven, I wouldn't much care for 'em either!") into the aggressor. And the Cromarty Government's success in getting the League to embargo tech transfers to the People's Republic had only irritated that traditional Solarian resentment.
Under those circumstances, it hadn't taken the Solarian media very long to switch to what Grantville, at least, had always regarded as a revoltingly pro-Peep stance. Even the least anti-Solly Manticoran had to concede that there'd been a definite bias against the Star Kingdom, and quite a few of them would have agreed with Grantville that there was an orchestrated anti-Manticore lobby within the Solarian press corps. Yet Cromarty had stuck to his policy of openness and agreed to modify it only on a case-by-case basis and only in the face of pressing operational requirements.
That didn't mean Cromarty had been blind to the realities of news coverage in the Solarian League. Indeed, in many ways he'd been just as bitter about slanted Solarian newsfaxes as Grantville himself. But Cromarty's policy had reflected his concern with the Alliance's media. He'd accepted that the Star Kingdom was going to get hammered in the League's reportage, whatever it did, and under his premiership, the Star Kingdom's PR had concentrated primarily on making sure that a contrarian view was also presented and the accurate information from both sides was at least available to Solarians in general. Manticore hadn't exactly tried to understate StateSec's brutality in the information it fed the League through its own conduits. Nor, for that matter, had Manticoran journalists and commentators been at all shy about pointing out the fact that whereas the Star Kingdom did not censor reporters, the People's Republic did . . . and that Solarian correspondents assigned to Haven never mentioned it because doing so would get them expelled from the People's Republic.
Which, in many ways, had only made the self-appointed masters and mistresses of the Solarian Establishment even more bitterly anti-Manticore. They'd resented the Star Kingdom's and its surrogates' efforts to debunk their more outrageous misrepresentations, and the constant reminders that they uncritically repeated the Committee of Public Safety's propaganda rather than condemn PubIn's censorship had infuriated them . . . especially since they knew it was true. The fact that the Havenite propaganda had suited their own dislike of Manticore so much better than the truth, combined with their vindictive fury that anyone would dare to challenge their version of reality, had produced inevitable consequences, of course. Given the way their version of events played to stereotypical Solarian biases, the Star Kingdom's efforts had all been uphill, especially in light of the powerful vested interests in both the League's bureaucracy and its economic establishment with their own strong motives for blackening Manticore's image.
And then, of course, along had come the High Ridge Government, which couldn't have been more effective at reinforcing the most negative possible Solarian view of the Star Kingdom if it had been purposely designed for it. The demise of the People's Republic; the resurrection of the old Havenite Constitution; the resucitation of a functioning Havenite democracy; the High Ridge refusal to negotiate seriously (or to reduce the "wartime emergency" increases in transit fees on Solarian shipping); and the fact that neither High Ridge nor his Foreign Secretary, Elaine Descroix, had seen any need to "pander" to Solarian public opinion had produced predictably catastrophic results where the Solarian media's coverage of the Star Kingdom was concerned. Which was why one of Grantville's first priorities as Prime Minister had been to authorize heavy investments in rebuilding the PR organization High Ridge and Descroix had allowed to atrophy.
Unfortunately, the sudden fresh outbreak of fighting between the Republic and the Star Kingdom had made his rebuilding task much more difficult. And, he was forced to admit, the way in which the Star Kingdom had divided the Silesian Confederacy with the Andermani Empire, had given its Solarian press critics altogether too much fresh grist for its "Manticore As the Evil Empire" mill. Which had undoubtedly been a factor in the thinking of whoever had set out to destabilize the annexation of the Talbott Quadrant in the first place.
"Your Majesty," he said carefully, "I understand what you're saying, and I don't disagree with you. But Honor's point about not making the League's leadership feel we're trying to back it into a corner has a lot of merit. And, frankly, you know about the beating we've been taking in the Solarian media ever since Operation Thunderbolt." He paused, then snorted. "Excuse me, ever since that idiot High Ridge formed a government, I mean."
"I realize that, Willie." Elizabeth's tone was, in its way, as careful as Grantville's. Unlike her current Prime Minister, she'd always been firmly in agreement with the Duke of Cromarty's media policies. "And I don't disagree with Honor or with the point you and I both know you're making. But be that as it may, I'm still convinced that we need to avoid any appearance that we're trying to keep bad news hidden from our own people. In fact, I'm even more inclined to feel that way in the wake of the Battle of Manticore than I was before it. And I'm also firmly of the opinion that if we sit on this too long, we're likely to suggest to a bunch as arrogant as the Sollies that we're afraid to 'out them' for their actions. Not only that, but we give those bastards at Education and Information more time to decide how they're going to spin the news when it finally breaks."
Grantville had started to open his mouth. Now he closed it again, and nodded, almost against his will. The Solarian League's Department of Education and Information had very little to do with education and a very great deal to do with "information" these days. The bureaucratic structure which actually ran Education and Information (along with the rest of the League) had turned it into an extremely effective propaganda ministry.
"Those are both very valid points, your Majesty," he admitted. "I'd still really prefer to sit on this at least until the Sollies have had time to receive our note and respond to it. And at the same time, I think, we need to do some preliminary spadework of our own. I think we need to spend some time deciding exactly how we'll respond if the news leaks before we're ready to officially release it—the last thing we need is to get caught off balance, without having done our homework, when or if that happens—and also of deciding how we want to break it on our own terms, if that seems like the best policy. So could I suggest a compromise? We hold the news for the moment, but we quietly contact some of our own newspeople. We brief them in on what's happening in Talbott on a confidential basis in return for their agreement to sit on the story until we release it. And to sweeten the pot, as it were, we offer them official access in Spindle. We send their reporters out to talk to Khumalo, Medusa—even Mike, after she gets back—on the record, and we promise them as much freedom of access to all our information as operational security allows."
Elizabeth thought about it for several seconds, and then it was her turn to nod.
"All right," she said. "I think that makes sense. And it's not as if our own newsies aren't already accustomed to putting holds on specific stories because of those operational security concerns of yours. I don't want to hold this one any longer than we have to, though, Willie. The reason our newspeople respect the holds we do request is because they know we haven't abused the practice."
"I understand, Your Majesty," Grantville said, and glanced at Langtry. "How soon do you think you can have a draft of our note, Tony?"
"I can have a first draft by this afternoon. I imagine we'll want to kick it around between your office and mine—and Her Majesty, of course—through several iterations before we finally turn it loose."
"I'm sure you're right about that," Grantville agreed. "But while I'm willing to admit that you and Honor are probably on the right track, or as close to the 'right track' as anyone could be in a mess like this, let's not fool ourselves here. This is a situation which can slide totally out of control in the blink of an eye. In fact, depending on
how stupid this Admiral Byng really is, it could very well be sliding totally out of control at New Tuscany before we finish this meeting."
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.