by David Weber
Elizabeth started to speak, but White Haven raised an index finger, requesting attention. She looked at him for a moment, then nodded.
"I'd just like to add something to what Tom's said, Your Majesty," he said. "First, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the people who did this did it in hopes that either the League or the Republic will finish us off before we can recover. Frankly, I don't know how likely they are to succeed, if that was their intention; there are too many political and diplomatic elements tied up in that kind of decision tree for me to offer any kind of meaningful opinion. But, secondly, the one thing that's struck me about this—in addition to what Tom and Sonja have said about new drive technologies—is that the people behind it can't have a very large navy."
"What?" Grantville blinked at his brother, and most of the other people around the table looked either surprised or downright skeptical. Caparelli, on the other hand, nodded firmly.
"Think about it, Willie," White Haven said. "If someone had anything like the number of capital ships we have, and if all of them had this kind of technology, they wouldn't have had to raid our infrastructure. They could have simply arrived, demonstrated their invisibility, and demanded our surrender, and we wouldn't have had any choice but to give it to them. If they'd gotten a couple of dozen capital ships with this new drive of theirs as far in-system as they got their pods before launch, what other option would we have had? Even if we'd wanted to bring in Home Fleet—every single ship at Trevor's Star, for that matter—they'd already have control the planetary orbitals long before we could get into position. For that matter, they'd've been into missile range of the planets before we could even bring the system-defense missiles online to nail them! And even under the Eridani Edict, they'd be fully justified in bombarding the planets if we refused to surrender under those circumstances. But instead of going for the jugular, they attacked our arms and legs.
"Not only that, but the nature and pattern of the attack strongly suggest that whoever planned and launched it was operating with strictly limited resources. Yes, it was extraordinarily well planned and executed. From a professional perspective, I have to admire the ability, imagination, and skill behind it. But successful as it was, it was essentially a hit-and-run raid, albeit on a massive scale, and its success—as Tom has just pointed out—derived entirely from the fact that it achieved total strategic and tactical surprise. If any significant percentage of the weapons committed to it—either those graser platforms or the missile pods—had failed, or been detected on their way in, or even if we'd only suspected something was coming in time to alert the stations and activate their sidewalls and get the tugs deployed to interpose their wedges against potential attacks, the damage would have been much less severe. Give us fifteen or twenty minutes' warning, and we'd've had a good ninety-five percent of our personnel off Hephasteus and Vulcan, for that matter, not to mention getting a lot of our ships out of the station docking slips! The people who put this together had to be as well aware of those possibilities as I am, and they have to know the axiom that anything which can go wrong, will go wrong. True, they seem to have pretty much avoided that this time around, but they damned well knew better than to count on that. So if they'd had more resources to commit to the attack, we'd have seen overkill, not just 'exactly enough to do the job if everything works perfectly.'"
He shook his head.
"All of it points to the same conclusion. They've got this revolutionary new drive technology, but they don't have it in large numbers. If they had the numbers, they'd either have been able to follow through with an outright knockout blow or have at least been able to deploy enough additional weapons to give them the sort of redundancy factor any competent planner would be looking for."
Grantville's expression turned thoughtful, and several of the faces which had looked dubious began to look if not more hopeful, at least less desperate.
The Queen looked around the conference table again, and her nostrils flared.
"I think you've all made very good points," she said. "I know information's going to change over the next several days—that we're going to find some things aren't quite as bad as we thought they were, and that others are even worse. But the bottom line is this. Hamish is probably right about how the people who did this—and I think we all know who that almost certainly was—were thinking when they planned the operation. And now, they undoubtedly think they've won. It may take a while, but between Haven and the Solarian League, with our industrial base smashed, it's obviously over, and they know it. We've lost."
The silence in the conference room could have been carved with a chisel. And then, despite everything, the woman the treecats called "Soul of Steel" smiled.
There was nothing humorous or whimsical about that smile. No amusement. It was a thing of chilled steel—the smile of a wolf in the door to her den, between her young and the world as the hunting hounds closed in upon it. It was grim, hard, and yet, in spite of everything she'd just said, there wasn't a gram of surrender in it. For better or for worse, it was the wolf-smile of a woman who would die on her feet in the defense of her people and her home before she surrendered or yielded.
"No doubt they do know that," Elizabeth Adrienne Samantha Annette Winton said very softly. "But there's one tiny flaw in their analysis, ladies and gentlemen. Because even if they do know it . . . we don't."
March, 1922 Post Diaspora
"History is filled with roadkills who thought they knew exactly where 'the inevitable' was headed."
—Hamish Aleaxander-Harrington,
Earl of White Haven
Chapter Thirty-One
Innokentiy Kolokoltsov looked up with what he hoped was carefully hidden trepidation as Astrid Wang knocked once, lightly, on the frame of his office door, then stepped through it. She had what he'd come to think of as "The Look." If anyone had asked him to define the constituent parts of "The Look," he wouldn't have been able to. He knew it included worried eyes, tight lips, and a slightly furrowed brow, but there was a certain subtle something more, as well. Something which tied all the other components together and warned him she was the bearer of yet more bad news.
It was odd, really, how their definition of "bad news" had shifted. Once upon a time, it had meant "This is irritating, and it's going to be bothersome to deal with." Now it meant "Oh my God, what now?"
"Yes, Astrid?" His voice came out calmly enough, but a flicker in her green eyes told them she'd heard his wariness anyway. "What is it?"
"A courier from Admiral Rajampet just delivered this, Sir.
She held out the red-bordered folio of a high-security message chip, and Kolokoltsov gazed at it for a moment, his lips puckering slightly, like a man sucking on an underripe persimmon. What was it about Rajampet, he wondered, that had produced this mania for hand-delivered, officer-couriered memos rather than old-fashioned e-mail or a simple com conference over one of the innumerable secure channels available to the people who ran the Solarian League? Whatever it was, it was getting worse pretty much in tandem with the situation.
Which probably means that by next week sometime he'll be sending them written in invisible ink on even more old-fashioned paper—probably with an entire battalion of Marines providing security between his office and mine!
Somewhat to his surprise, the thought woke a flicker of genuine—and much needed—humor. Not much of one, but given what had been going on here on the League's capital planet for the past couple of days, he'd settle for any humor he could get.
"I suppose you'd better give it to me," he sighed after a moment.
"Yes, Sir." Wang handed it over, then withdrew with just a little more haste than usual. It was almost as if she were afraid simple proximity to whatever fresh tidings of disaster had just arrived would somehow infect her with an incurable disease.
Kolokoltsov snorted at the thought, and the folio, dropped the chip into a reader, and sat back in his chair.
* * *
"What do you make of Rajani's latest brainstorm
?" Kolokoltsov asked considerably later that evening.
He, Nathan MacArtney, Malachai Abruzzi, and Agatá Wodoslawski were sharing a quiet and very private supper at the moment. It was the third night in a row they'd done so, and Omosupe Quartermain had been present the first two times, as well. At the moment, though, she was off chairing a very hush-hush meeting with a dozen or so of the Sol System's most powerful industrialists. Kolokoltsov didn't expect much in the way of practical solutions out of her meeting, but at least it would be evidence that she and her colleagues were Doing Something. Precisely what—in the way of meaningful improvements, at least—eluded him, but he supposed her idea of producing an "industrial mobilization plan" couldn't hurt. At least it would be something they could show the newsies.
"Which brainstorm would that be?" The sourness in Wodoslawski's smile had nothing to do with the excellent wine which had accompanied supper.
"The one about redeploying every single Frontier Fleet battlecruiser to raid Manticoran infrastructure," Kolokoltsov said dryly.
"Actually, compared to some of the other ideas he's come up, that one sounds almost reasonable." MacArtney's tone was considerably more sour than Wodoslawski's smile had been.
"Fair's fair, Nathan," Abruzzi said. "None of us have come up with any better ones."
"Yes?" MacArtney growled. "Well, it wasn't our precious Navy that screwed the pooch either, now was it? And it wasn't one of us who 'forgot' to tell the rest of us that that idiot Crandall was already in the Talbott Cluster! Not to mention that he was the one who assured us no 'magical Manticoran missiles' were going to get through his defenses!"
MacArtney, Kolokoltsov reflected, was the angriest and arguably the most frightened of their quintet. That undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the fact that Frontier Security reported to him . . . and that of all of them, he was the most aware of just how catastrophic the blow to the Solarian League Navy's prestige was really likely to be out in the star systems of the Verge.
"And then there's the whole Green Pines thing," MacArtney continued in tones of profound disgust. Abruzzi seemed to stiffen, but the interior underscretary waved a dismissive hand. "I'm not blaming you for that one, Malachai," he did not, Kolokoltsov noticed, say what he did blame Abruzzi for, "but even that's going to turn around and bite us on the ass if we're not careful thanks to Rajani! You've got the reliable newsies behind us when it comes to demanding a Frontier Fleet investigation, all right. Fine. Great! Exactly what we wanted . . . when Rajani was telling us how unstoppable his damned fleet was. The problem is that we've whipped up too much fervor in some quarters. They want us to go ahead and make the Manties admit their involvement and pay Mesa a huge indemnity, and the Manties've just proved we can't make them do anything! Not if Rajani's superdreadnoughts keep getting popped like zits, anyway!"
"I think we can all agree that neither Rajani nor the rest of Battle Fleet have precisely covered themselves with glory," the foreign affairs undersecretary observed out loud. "On the other hand, much as I hate to admit it, the same thing could be said of all of us, whether as individuals or as a group." He looked around the table, and his level brown eyes were serious. "We all took the Manties much too lightly. We didn't really press Rajani, because—let's be honest here, now—none of us really thought it mattered. No matter what the Manties might have tucked away in the way of military surprises, it didn't matter, did it? Not compared to our basic tech capabilities and the size of Battle Fleet."
"I don't think that's entirely fair, Innokentiy," MacArtney protested. "We discussed the possibilities, and he—"
"Sure, we 'discussed' a whole range of possible responses," Kolokoltsov said bitingly. "But what we didn't for even one minute consider was simply going ahead and admitting Byng was a frigging idiot who'd fucked up, murdered the crews of three Manticoran warships with absolutely no justification, and then gotten himself and everyone else aboard his flagship killed doing something even stupider. And unless my memory fails me, Nathan, a great deal of the reason we didn't consider doing that was the fact that we agreed with Rajani that we couldn't afford to let a batch of neobarbs 'get away' with something like New Tuscany because of the way Jean Bart's destruction would undermine the Navy's prestige."
MacArtney glared at him, but this time he kept his mouth shut, and Kolokoltsov smiled thinly.
"Well, unless I'm sadly mistaken, the destruction or capture of over seventy ships-of-the-wall, plus every single member of their screen, plus their entire supply group, by a force of Manticoran cruisers, has probably had at least some slight 'undermining' effect of its own, wouldn't you say?"
MacArtney's glared grew even more ferocious for a moment. Then it seemed to fold in on itself, and he sat back in his chair, shoulders slumping.
"Yes," he admitted heavily. "It has."
"Well," Abruzzi said a bit tartly, "I'm sure all that levelheaded admission of reality is very cathartic, and I suppose it's something we really do have to do. On the other hand, deciding who's to blame isn't going to have much impact on getting out of this damned hole. Unless, Innokentiy, you want to suggest we go ahead and acknowledge that this is all the League's fault and ask the Manties if they'd be so kind as to allow us to lick their boots while we make amends."
Kolokoltsov started a quick, hot retort. He managed to stop it before any of the syllables leaked out, but it wasn't easy. Especially when he recalled how airily Abruzzi had assured everyone the Manties were only posturing for their own purely domestic political ends. It wasn't as if they'd really been prepared to risk a direct confrontation with the might of the Solarian League! Oh, goodness, no!
"No, Malachai, that isn't exactly what I had in mind," he said after a moment, and the shutters which seemed to close behind Abruzzi's eyes told him the education and information undersecretary had recognized the careful—and hard held—restraint in his own coldly precise tone. "Mind you, in a lot of ways, I really would prefer to settle this diplomatically, even if we did end up having to eat crow. When I think of what this is going to cost, I'd be even be willing to substitute dead buzzard for the crow, if that offered us a way to avoid paying it. Unfortunately, I don't think we can avoid it."
"Not after pumping so much hydrogen into the Green Pines fire, anyway," Wodoslawski agreed glumly. "I'd say that's pretty much finished poisoning the well where diplomacy's concerned. And now that the newsies have hold of what happened to Crandall, as well, any suggestion on our part that we ought to be negotiating's only going to be seen as a sign of weakness. One that turns loose every damned thing we've been worrying about from the beginning."
"Exactly." Kolokoltsov looked around the supper table. "It's no use recognizing how much less expensive it would've been to treat the Manties' claims and accusations seriously."
In fact, Kolokoltsov couldn't think of another single event—or any combination of events, for that matter—in his entire lifetime which had come even close to having the impact this one had. The citizens of the Solarian League had been told so often, and so firmly, that their navy was the largest and most powerful not simply currently but in the entire history of mankind that they'd believed it. Which was fair enough—Kolokoltsov had believed it, too, hadn't he? But now that navy had been defeated. It wasn't a case of a single light unit somewhere, one whose loss might never even have been noted by the League's news establishment. It wasn't even a case of a Frontier Fleet squadron surrendering to avoid additional loss of life. Not anymore, anyway.
No. It was a case of an entire fleet of ships-of-the-wall—of Battle Fleet's most powerful and modern units—being not simply defeated but crushed. Humiliated. Dispatched with such offhand ease that its survivors were forced to surrender to mere cruisers of a "neobarb" navy from the backside of nowhere.
The newsies who'd charged off to the Talbott Cluster to cover the New Tuscany incidents had gotten far more than they'd bargained for, he thought grimly. They'd come flooding home in their dispatch boats, racing to beat the Royal Manticoran Navy dispatches bearing
word of the battle—and of Admiral O'Cleary's surrender—back to Manticore. The first rumors of the catastrophe had actually reached the Old Earth media even before the latest Manticoran diplomatic note—this one accompanied by Admiral Keeley O'Cleary in person—reached Old Chicago.
The public hadn't taken it well.
The initial response had been to brush off the reports as yet more unfounded rumors. After all, the news was impossible on the face of things. Cruisers—even battlecruisers—simply didn't defeat ships-of-the-wall any more than antelopes hunted down tigers. The very suggestion was ludicrous.
But then it began to sink in. Ludicrous or not, it had happened. The greatest political, economic, and military power in the explored galaxy had been backhanded into submission by a handful of cruisers. Estimates of fatalities were still thankfully vague, but even the Solarian public was capable of figuring out that when a superdreadnought blew up in action, there weren't going to be a lot of survivors from its crew.
There was an edge of fear, almost of hysteria, in some of the commentary. And not just on the public bulletin boards, either. Theoretically well-informed and levelheaded military and political analysts were climbing up on the "the universe is ending" wagon, as well. After all, if the Manties could do that, then who knew what they couldn't do? Indeed, some of the most panic-stricken seemed to expect Manticore to dispatch an unstoppable armada directly through the Beowulf terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction to attack Old Earth.
To be honest, there'd been moments, especially immediately after the news broke, when Kolokoltsov had worried about the same thing. But that was nonsense, of course. For a lot of reasons—not least because he figured the Manties had to be at least a little brighter than he and his colleagues had proven themselves. Which meant he very much doubted anyone in the Star Empire of Manticore was stupid enough to attack the home world of humanity and provide the League with such a wonderfully evocative emotional rallying point.