by David Weber
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Honor sat back from the display in her own suite's sitting room, and her expression was much less amused than it had been. She tipped back her chair and crossed her legs, and Nimitz flowed up into her lap and sat upright, facing her.
"Not so good, is it, Stinker?" she asked, reaching out to stroke his ears. Actually, she realized, "not so good" might be putting it entirely too optimistically. The news was over three weeks old, after all. By this time, it was only too probable that Michelle Henke had already had the opportunity to prove—or disprove—the more optimistic estimates of the superiority of Manticoran military hardware. She felt Nimitz's concern mirroring her own, but then he twitched his upper pelvis in imitation of a human shrug.
For just a moment, Honor was tempted to ask what made him an expert on the subject of battle fleets. Fortunately, the temptation disappeared as quickly as it had come. Treecat understanding of advanced technology and weaponry was still for all intents and purposes nonexistent, but those who'd adopted humans had been sufficiently exposed to it to understand what it did, even if they didn't grasp how it did it. And Nimitz had seen more naval combat than the majority of professional naval personnel ever saw in an entire lifetime. Some of that combat had come uncomfortably close to killing both him and Honor. In fact, ever since Paul Tankersley had designed his first treecat skinsuit, he'd seen exactly the same combat she had from exactly the same command bridges.
And he knows Mike better than almost anyone else does, too, she reflected. So, yes, he definitely is entitled to an opinion.
"I hope you're right, Stinker," she said quietly, instead of what she'd started to say, and he bleeked in amusement as he felt her shift gears. She shook her head at him with a smile and gave his left ear a gentle yank. He smacked her hand with carefully retracted claws, and she chuckled, but then her smile faded and she folded her arms about him, hugging him while she thought.
"The question," she said aloud, using the 'cat as her sounding board once again, "is whether or not we tell Pritchart about this."
"Yes, actually. I do," she admitted. He flicked his ears in silent question, and she sighed.
"Beth hasn't made Mike's dispatches public yet—or she hadn't when she sent her message, at least. Sooner or later, though, that's going to change, which means Pritchart's going to find out eventually, whatever happens. I don't want her deciding I was so nervous about her possible reaction to the news that I tried to keep it from her. I don't think she's likely to get infected with whatever Younger has and start playing stalling games, but I could be wrong about that. And I've been as candid with her as I could from the very beginning, including leveling with her about Green Pines. I don't want to jeopardize whatever balance of trust I've built up with her."
Nimitz considered that for several moments, grass-green eyes thoughtful. Unlike any other member of Honor's delegation, he'd been able to sample Eloise Pritchart's mind glow even more thoroughly than Honor had, and it was obvious to her he was considering what she'd said in the light of that insight. She wasn't about to rush him, either. Unlike the steadily decreasing number of Manticorans who continued to reject the evidence of treecat intelligence, Honor Alexander-Harrington had enormous respect both for the ability of 'cats in general to follow complex explanations and for Nimitz's judgment, in particular, where human nature was concerned.
Finally, his fingers began to move again, and her eyes widened.
"I—" she began, then stopped as she realized that, as usual, Nimitz had come unerringly to the point.
"You're right," she admitted out loud. "Which may not be a good thing." She smiled ruefully. "I don't think hard-nosed, professional diplomats are supposed to like the people they're trying to beat a treaty out of."
"'Truth Seeker'?" Honor repeated, leaning back and looking deep into his eyes. "Is that what you've decided her treecat name should be?"
Nimitz nodded, and Honor's eyes narrowed. As a general rule, the names treecats assigned to humans usually turned out to be extraordinarily accurate. Some of them were more evocative than truly descriptive—her own, for example, "Dances on Clouds"—but even those were insightful encapsulations of the humans involved. And now that she thought about it, "Truth Seeker" summed up her own feel for Pritchart's personality.
Slow down, Honor, she told herself firmly. That's certainly the personality you want her to have, and so does Nimitz. So maybe you're both reading more into what you're picking up from her than is really justified.
And maybe you're not, too.
"And have you come up with a name for Thomas Theisman, too?" she asked.
His right true-hand closed into the letter "S" and "nodded" up and down in the sign for "Yes," but it seemed to Honor to be moving a little slower than usual. He looked up at her for a second or two, and her eyebrows rose. She could literally feel him hesitating. It wasn't because he was concerned about how she might react to it, but more as if . . . as if he didn't quite expect her to believe it.
Then he raised his right hand, palm-in, touched his forehead with his index finger, then moved it up and to the right. As his hand rose, his forefinger alternated back and forth between the straight extended position indicating the number "1" and the crooked position indicating the letter "X" before the hand turned palm-out and closed into the letter "S" once more. Then both hands came together in front of him, thumbs and index fingers linked, before they rose to his chin, left in front of right, thumb and first two fingers of each hand signing the letter "P." They paused for a moment, then separated downward, and Honor felt her eyebrows rising even higher.
"'Dreams of Peace'?" she said, speaking very carefully, as if she couldn't quite believe what she heard herself saying. "That's his treecat name?"
Nimitz nodded his head very firmly, and Honor tasted his confidence—his assurance—about the name he'd assigned. No wonder he'd been hesitant to share it with her! If anyone in the galaxy had demonstrated his unflinching, tough-as-nails readiness to do whatever duty required of him, however grim that duty might be, it was Thomas Theisman! He was the one who'd rebuilt the Republican Navy into a war machine that could actually face the RMN in combat. The man who'd planned and executed Operation Thunderbolt. The man who'd planned Operation Beatrice! The man—
Her thoughts paused, and Nimitz stared up into her eyes with an intensity which was rare, even for the two of them. They sat that way for several, endless seconds, and then Honor inhaled deeply.
Yes, Theisman had always done his duty. Would always do his duty, without flinching or hesitating, whatever its demands. But she supposed the same thing could be said of her, and what was she doing here on this planet, of all planets in the universe, if she didn't "dream of peace?" And the more she thought about it, about what it must have been like to spend all those years trying to defend his star nation against an external enemy even while he saw State Security making "examples" out of men and women he'd known for years—out of friends—the more clearly she realized just how longingly a man like Thomas Theisman might dream of peace.
I wish Elizabeth were here, she thought. Maybe she can't taste Ariel's emotions the way I can taste Nimitz's, but she trusts Ariel. And if he told her he agreed with what Nimitz has named Pritchart and Theisman . . . .
"You do realize that what you just told me doesn't make my decision any easier, don't you, Stinker?" she asked him with a crooked smile.
He blinked once, slowly, then bleeked in agreement, radiating his love for her . . . and his simultaneous deep amusement. Nimitz understood perfectly well that they'd come to Haven on serious business. He even understood exactl
y what stakes they were playing for. Yet when it came down to it, this whole business of "negotiating" was a two-leg concept which had very little meaning for a race of telempaths who couldn't have engaged in diplomatic subterfuge even if they'd ever had any desire to do so in the first place. He knew Honor had to play by two-leg rules, but he found the entire process incredibly roundabout, cumbersome, and just plain silly.
"Yeah, sure," she said, hugging him once more. "Easy for you, Bub!"
* * *
"Yes, Admiral?"
Eloise Pritchart's expression was politely curious as she gazed out of Honor's com display. Even without the physical proximity which would have permitted Honor to physically sample the president's emotions, it was obvious Pritchart wondered why she'd screened when their delegations were due to sit down together again in less than half an hour.
Well, she's about to find out, Honor thought. And it'll be interesting to see if she and Theisman react the way someone with Stinker's notion of their treecat names ought to.
"I'm sorry to disturb you, Madam President," she said out loud, "but I've just received a dispatch from home. It doesn't require any immediate action on our part," she assured Pritchart as the other woman's eyebrows rose, "but I thought I'd share it with you. As part of the deep background for the Star Empire's negotiating stance, as it were."
"By all means, Admiral, if you think that's appropriate." Pritchart sat back in her chair, shoulders squared, and looking into those topza eyes, Honor could see the other woman's memories of the last time she'd provided her with "deep background."
"'Appropriate' can be such an interesting word," Honor observed wryly. "I hope it applies in this case, but I suppose we'll just have to see, won't we?
"At any rate, Madam President, it would appear that just over three T-weeks ago, one of our destroyers, HMS Reprise, returned to the Spindle System from Meyers with what I suppose could be called interesting news. It would appear that notwithstanding all of the historical evidence to the contrary, it really is genuinely possible for a Solarian ship of the wall to make it all the way out into the Verge under its own power. In fact—"
Chapter Twenty-Six
"Well," Elizabeth Winton said dryly, "I suppose the question presently before us is 'Now what the hell do we do?'"
"I suppose so, Your Majesty," William Alexander replied. "On the other hand, our decision trees have just been rather brutally simplified. Once you're on the hexapuma's back, your only real options are to hang on or get eaten!"
"Not necessarily, Willie," his brother said. Baron Grantville looked at him, eyebrows rising, and Hamish Alexander-Harrington barked a laugh. There was no humor in the cold sound, and his blue eyes were even colder.
"You really think there's another option, Hamish?" the prime minister asked skeptically.
"Of course there is! If you can reach your pulser, you put a dart through the six-legged bastard's brain, instead," the Earl of White Haven replied harshly.
Grantville's face tightened as he heard the combined anger, vengefulness, and confidence in his brother's voice. The Alexander temper was famous throughout the Royal Manticoran Navy, and Grantville had enjoyed even more experience with it than most of White Haven's fellow officers. For that matter, he had it himself, in full measure. And he knew his brother well enough to understand exactly how a man who'd commanded the men and women of the Royal Navy in battle would feel about someone who'd cold-bloodedly set out to annihilate a handful of battlecruisers and heavy cruisers with an entire fleet of superdreadnoughts. The fact that things hadn't worked out the way Sandra Crandall had expected wasn't likely to do a thing to make White Haven any less angry, either. Nor, for that matter, should it.
After all, "it's the thought that counts," isn't it? Grantville reflected. On the other hand . . . .
"You know, Ham, I've been doing a little historical research of my own since Mike's first reports about New Tuscany got back to us," he said. "You were right when you suggested Lincoln to me, but there are some other interesting tidbits in Old Earth history, too. For example, I assume you're familiar with the term 'victory disease,' aren't you?"
"As a matter of fact, I am." White Haven's teeth flashed in something which bore a certain vague resemblance to a smile, and Samantha flattened her ears as she lay stretched tense and angry along the back of his chair. "On the other hand, we're the ones who were supposed to be the recipient of a Pearl Harbor attack this time around, not the ones stupid enough to launch it. And I'm not proposing any of us underestimate the scale of the threat, either. What I am pointing out is that there's no point pretending none of this has happened, or that the League's going to accept the outright destruction of twenty-three superdreadnoughts and the capture of forty-eight more—not to mention all Crandall's escorts, screening elements, and supply ships—without doing its damnedest to turn the entire Star Empire into rubble. In my opinion, Mike did exactly what she should've done under the circumstances, given an opposition force commander who obviously couldn't have poured piss out of a boot even if it did have instructions on the heel. But the fact that she chose the right option doesn't mean she chose a good one, since there weren't any good ones available to her."
He paused, inviting anyone to disagree with anything he'd just said. Queen Elizabeth clearly didn't, and as much as Grantville would have liked to, he couldn't. Sir Anthony Langtry seemed torn between a diplomat's responsibility to find an option short of war and an ex-Marine's bloodthirsty belligerence. Sir Thomas Caparelli and Admiral Patricia Givens, on the other hand, were in obvious agreement with White Haven.
"All right," the earl continued when no one accepted his invitation. "Since the Sollies're going to decide, as the Queen put it before Crandall actually showed up, that the Star Empire's a nail and the thing for them to do is reach for the biggest damned hammer they've got, there's not much point kowtowing to that jackass Kolokoltsov and his pain-in-the-ass, equally arrogant buddies. The way they've been viewing that Green Pines crap with alarm and calling for 'an impartial interstellar investigation'—by Frontier Security, of all people!—into 'the Star Empire's apparent involvement in terroristic actions' is a pretty fair indicator of where their brains—such as they have, and what there is of them—were headed even before Mike kicked Crandall's arse! So I think our best option is to tell them flat out that the entire mess is the result of the way their people have fu—ah, screwed up by the numbers, and that we're all done putting up with it. Send them the tac recordings from Spindle and ask them how many more superdreadnoughts they want our cruisers to kill before we even bring up our battlecruisers—much less our own wallers—and get down to the main event. And while we're doing that, we go ahead and activate Case Lacoön, too."
Faces tightened around the table with his last sentence. Case Lacoön was the Royal Manticoran Navy's plan to close all wormhole nexii under its control to Solarian traffic. Or, rather, that was the first phase of Lacoön. The second phase included active commerce raiding and the extension of de facto Manticoran control to every wormhole nexus within its reach, regardless of who that nexus nominally belonged to.
"I realize what we're talking about here," White Haven said grimly, "and I know the Sollies're going to scream bloody murder about our 'interference with free trade' even before we decide to move to Lacoön Two. But the realization of just how much we can hurt them economically, coupled with what happened at Spindle, may actually be a big enough clue stick to get through even to Sollies. It's the biggest one we've got short of launching a general offensive, at any rate, so I think we have to see whether or not it's big enough to do the trick. It's not like we've got all that much to lose, anyway. Worst case, the League goes ahead and does what it was going to do anyway and we get to find out whether or not Honor's right about how fragile it is. Best case—though I'm not going to suggest anyone hold his breath waiting for it—somebody in Old Chicago suddenly sprouts an IQ higher than his body temperature and they decide it just might not be a good idea after all to get a coup
le or three million of their spacers killed."
He shrugged.
"I'm not saying it's a good idea. But I am saying that, just like Mike, we're fresh out of good alternatives. So it's time we stop trying to avoid the inevitable and position ourselves to fight the League as effectively as humanly possible if—when—it comes to that."
The silence in the Mount Royal Palace conference room was intense, and White Haven leaned back in his chair, his face hard.
"I don't really like saying it," Langtry said finally, "but I think Hamish has a point. Nobody's ever captured a Solarian ship-of-the-wall before, far less blown twenty-three of them out of space. And unless I'm mistaken, no one's ever killed anyone's superdreadnought using nothing but heavy cruisers. Talk about rubbing salt into the wound!"
He shook his head, contemplating the way Solarian arrogance was likely to react to the insult of being that casually—and totally—trounced by someone who hadn't even used a capital ship in the process.
"We're in uncharted territory," he continued, "and, unfortunately, the one thing I think we can all agree on is that the League isn't going to . . . take the news well, shall we say? That being so, the only modest change to Hamish's proposal I'd suggest would be to include a diplomatic note which basically tells Kolokoltsov we consider Crandall's actions at Spindle yet another act of war and that if they're not repudiated—publicly, and in the strongest possible terms—within two standard T-days of the receipt of our note, Her Majesty's Government will assume it represents the Solarian League' chosen policy vis-à-vis the Star Empire. In that case, given the existence of a state of war of the League's choosing between it and us, we will immediately close all nexii under our control to all Solarian traffic and inform all our station commanders that we're at war with the League and that they're to act accordingly."
"I don't have a problem with that," White Haven said. "I don't expect it to do any good, but at least there won't be any questions about our prewar diplomacy this time around."