by David Weber
"I think it's got a good chance," Kolokoltsov replied. "I don't say it's foolproof, by any stretch of the imagination. We're going to be juggling hand grenades whatever we do, though, and the fact remains that Manticore has to realize the League is simply too damned big for them to ultimately defeat, no matter how good their weapons are. So as long as we're willing to talk, they'll be willing to talk, because if they push military operations instead, especially while they have such an overwhelming tactical advantage, they'll be clearly perceived as the aggressors, not the 'plucky little neobarbs' defending themselves against the big, nasty Solarian League. They're already half-way in the doghouse over the Green Pines allegations, and they can't afford to lend those any credence by acting the part of swaggering military bullies. There's no way they could survive rallying a unified Solarian public opinion against them, so they're not going to come to us and inflict millions of additional casualties in what's clearly a war of aggression.
"In the meanwhile, it's going to be obvious to the entire League that we're Doing Something. However we got into this mess, we're taking a measured, mature position, doing our best to reverse Manticore's expansionism without anyone else's getting hurt. Ultimately, that's going to have a soothing effect on public opinion. It'll probably even get a bunch of the people who cry most loudly over how evil Manpower is—like those idiots in the Renaissance Association—on our side because of how hard we're working to avoid additional bloodshed. And the more we emphasize how we're seeking a diplomatic solution, the less likely anyone is to notice that we can't pursue a military solution. But at the same time, we keep the pot bubbling so that everyone's used to the notion that we have this ongoing conflict-short-of-outright-shooting with Manticore."
"So that when the time's right, we can turn the heat under the pot back up in a way that either pushes Manticore into shooting again or gives us a clear pretext for going after them," Abruzzi said. He was actually smiling now, and Kolokoltsov nodded.
"I'm not saying this is a perfect policy," he said. "I'm just saying that given what happened to Crandall, and the way the the public's reacting to it, I think it may be the best one we've got. And another—"
"Excuse me, Mr. Undersecretary."
Kolokoltsov turned in his chair, eyebrows rising in astonishment. His butler, Albert Howard—who'd been with him for over thirty years and knew better than to ever walk into the middle of one of Kolokoltsov's private strategy sessions—had just opened the dining room door. His expression was as apologetic as his tone, but he raised the small com unit in his hand slightly when Kolokoltsov started to open his mouth.
"I'm very sorry to intrude, Sir," Howard said quickly, "but Admiral Rajampet is on the com. He says it's urgent. I told him you were in conference, but he insisted I get you immediately."
Kolokoltsov shut his mouth again, and his eyes narrowed. After a moment, he nodded.
"All right, Albert. Under the circumstances, I'm sure you made the proper decision." He held out his hand, and Howard handed over the com, bowed slightly, and disappeared once more.
Kolokoltsov looked at the others for a few seconds, holding the com, then sighed slightly, shook his head, and activated it.
"Yes, Rajani?" he said as the small holo display materialized above his hand. "What can I do for you?"
Rajampet's image on the undersized display was tiny, but it was large enough for his odd expression to register. There was something wild and feral about it, and then the admiral grinned like a wolf.
"I'm glad to see the others are there with you, Innokentiy," he said in a harsh, exultant voice. "We just got an emergency dispatch over here in my office, and you'll never guess what's been happening with those bastards in Manticore!"
Chapter Thirty-Two
"I never knew idiocy came in so many flavors!"
Irene Teague looked up from her display, eyebrows raised, as Daud ibn Mamoun al-Fanudahi stalked into her office. Powered doors weren't very suitable for slamming behind oneself, but al-Fanudahi did his best.
"I beg your pardon?" Teague said as he hammered the manual close button savagely with the heel of his hand. Her tone was only politely interested, but that fooled neither of them, and he glared at her.
His obvious disgust and ire weren't directed at her—that much was readily apparent, but it was also remarkably cold comfort at the moment. It had become obvious, over the past few days, that even his earlier concerns over possible Manticoran military hardware had fallen short of the reality, yet even that hadn't been enough to fray his habitual control this way. So if something finally had . . . .
"I cannot believe that even those . . . those cretins could—!"
She'd been wrong, she realized. It wasn't disgust and ire; it was blind, naked fury.
"What is it, Daud?" she asked considerably more urgently.
"It's just—"
He broke off again, shaking his head, and then, abruptly, the power of his anger seemed to desert him. He sank into the chair facing her deck, legs stretched out before him, shaking his head again, this time with an air of weariness, and Teague felt a tingle of something entirely too much like outright fear as she saw the darkness in his eyes.
She started to say something else, then stopped, got up, and poured a cup of coffee. She glanced at him speculatively for a moment, then added a healthy slug from the bottle of single-malt she kept in her credenza before she poured another cup, this one without the whiskey, for herself. She passed the first Navy-issue mug across to him, then perched on the edge of her deck, holding her own in both hands, and cocked her head at him.
"Drink first," she commanded. "Then talk to me."
"Yes, Ma'am," he replied and managed a wan smile. He sipped, and his smile turned more natural. "I think it's probably a bit early in the morning for this particular cup of coffee," he observed.
"It's never too early for coffee," she replied. "And somewhere on this planet, it's well past quitting time, so that means it's late enough for any little additions."
"Creative timekeeping has its uses, I see."
He drank more whiskey-laced coffee, then settled back into the chair, and she saw his shoulders finally beginning to relax.
The sight relieved her. The last thing he needed was for fury to betray him into saying something unfortunate to one of his superiors, and she didn't want that. In fact, she was a bit surprised by how genuinely fond of him she'd become over the last few months. The fact that he was Battle Fleet and she was Frontier Fleet had become completely irrelevant as she began to realize just how justified his anxiety over possible Manticoran weapons really was. His persistent refusal to allow her to endorse his more "alarmist" analyses left her feeling more than a little guilty, even though she followed his logic. Unfortunately, she'd also followed his tracks through the reports everyone else had systematically ignored, as well, and her own sense of anxiety had grown steadily sharper in the process. The number of other reports which had apparently been creatively misfiled—and they'd discovered and managed to hunt down—had only made things even worse.
Then had come news of the Battle of Spindle. Despite all her own concerns, despite al-Fanudahi's most pessimistic projections, the two of them had been shocked by the totality of the Manticoran victory. Not even they had anticipated that an entire fleet of superdreadnoughts could be casually defeated by a force whose heaviest unit was only a battlecruiser. That was like . . . like having a professional prizefighter dropped by a single punch from her own eight-year-old daughter, for God's sake!
But if the two of them had been shocked, the rest of the Navy had been stunned. The sheer impossibility of what had happened was literally too much for the Navy's officer corps to process.
The first reaction had been simple denial. It couldn't have happened, therefore, it hadn't happened. There had to be some mistake. Whatever the initial news reports might have seemed to indicate, the Manties had to have had a task force of their own ships-of-the-wall present!
Unfortunately for that line
of logic (if it could be dignified by that description), the Manties appeared to have anticipated such a response. They'd sent Admiral O'Cleary herself home along with their diplomatic note, and they'd allowed her to bring along tactical recordings of the engagement.
At the moment, O'Cleary was a pariah, tainted with the same contamination as Evelyn Sigbee. Unlike Sigbee, of course, O'Cleary was home on Old Earth, where she could have her disgrace rubbed firmly in her face, and even though she was Battle Fleet, not Frontier Fleet, Teague found herself feeling a powerful sense of sympathy for the older woman. It was hardly O'Cleary's fault she'd found herself under the orders of a certifiable moron and then been left to do the surrendering after Crandall sailed her entire task force straight into the jaws of catastrophe.
Despite the convenience of the scapegoat O'Cleary offered, however, there was no getting around the preposterous acceleration numbers of the Manty missiles which had ravaged TF 496. The reports which had confidently been dismissed as ridiculous turned out to have been firmly based in fact, exactly as al-Fanudahi had been warning his superiors. Indeed, they'd actually understated the threat by a significant margin, and as fresh proof of the fundamental unfairness of the universe, Admiral Cheng had seized upon Al-Fanudahi's original estimates, based on the lower acceleration and accuracy numbers in the original reports, and sharply reprimanded him for not having "fully appreciated the scope of the threat" in the analyses Cheng had then proceeded to ignore.
Nonetheless, the fact that al-Fanudahi had been right all along couldn't be completely ignored. Not any longer. And so the despised prophet of doom and gloom had suddenly found himself presenting briefings flag officers actually listened to. Not only that, but the Office of Operational Analysis was finally being asked to do what it should have been doing all along. Of course, its efforts were a little handicapped by the fact that it had been systematically starved of funds for so long and that ninety percent of its efforts had gone into feel-good analyses of Battle Fleet's simulations and fleet problems instead of learning to actually think about possible external threats to the League. Of which, after all, there had been none. Which meant, preposterous and pathetic though it undoubtedly was, that the only two people it had who were actually familiar with those threats happened to be in Teague's office at that very moment.
To be fair, at least some of their colleagues were immersed in crash efforts to familiarize themselves with the same data, but most of them were still running about like beheaded chickens. They simply didn't know where to look—not yet—and Teague felt grimly confident that they wouldn't figure it out in time to avoid an entire succession of disasters.
Not, at least, if the idiots in charge of the Navy didn't start actually paying attention—really paying attention, as in processing the information, not simply ackowleding it—to al-Fanudhi. Which, even now, they seemed remarkably disinclined to do.
If there'd truly been such a thing as justice, Cheng Hai-shwun and Admiral Karl-Heinz Thimár would have been out of uniform and begging for handouts on a corner somewhere, Teague thought bitterly. In fact, if there'd been any such thing as real justice, they'd have been in prison! Unfortunately, both of them were far too well connected. In fact, it seemed unlikely either of them would even be relieved of his present assignment, despite the catastrophic intelligence failure represented by the Battle of Spindle. And, given the fact that al-Fanudahi had been the bearer of uniformly bad tidings in the briefings people were finally listening to, Teague had an unpleasant feeling that she knew exactly who would end up scapegoated to save Cheng and Thimár's well protected posteriors.
For the moment, though, people had finally been at least listening to what al-Fanudahi had been trying to tell them all along, which was why his present mixture of anger and despair was so frightening to her.
"Ready to talk about it now?" she asked gently after a moment.
"I suppose so," he replied. He took one more sip, then lowered the cup into his lap and looked at her.
"What have they done this time?" she prompted.
"It isn't so much what they've done as what they're getting ready to talk themselves into doing," he said, and shook his head. "They've decided that what's happened to the Manties offers them the perfect opening, and I think they're getting ready to take advantage of it."
"What?" Teague's tone was that of a woman who felt pretty sure she'd misheard something, and he snorted in harsh amusement.
"I've just come from a meeting with Kingsford, Jennings, and Bernard," he told her. "They're working on a brainstorm of Rajampet's."
Teague's stomach muscles tightened. Admiral Willis Jennings was Seth Kingsford's chief of staff, and Fleet Admiral Evangeline Bernard was the commanding officer of the Office of Strategy and Planning. Under most circumstances, the notion of the commanding officer of Battle Fleet meeting with his chief of staff and the Navy's chief strategic planner to consider the implications of combat reports might have been considered a good thing. Under the present circumstances, and given al-Fanudahi's near despair, she suspected that hadn't been the case this time around. Maybe it was his use of the word "brainstorm," she thought mordantly.
"What sort of brainstorm?" she asked out loud.
"As Rajampet sees it, what just happened to the Manties' home system offers what he calls a 'strategic window of opportunity'. He wants to mount an immediate operation to take advantage of the opening, and he proposes to use Admiral Filareta for the purpose."
"Filareta?" Teague repeated a bit blankly, and al-Fanudahi shrugged.
"He's Battle Fleet, so you probably don't know him. Trust me, you're not missing much. He's smarter than Crandall was. In fact, I'm willing to bet his IQ is at least equal to his shoe size. Aside from that, his only recommendation for command is that he has a pulse."
It was a mark of just how much he'd come to trust her—and vice-versa—she reflected, that he dared to show open contempt for such a monumentally senior officer in front of her.
"What makes Admiral Rajampet think this Filareta's in a position to do anything?"
"For some reason known only to God and, possibly, Admiral Kingsford, Filareta is swanning around in the Shell, half way to Manticore, with a force even bigger than Crandall's was."
She looked at him sharply, and he looked back with a carefully expressionless face.
"And just what is this Admiral Filareta doing out in the Shell?" she asked.
"By the oddest coincidence, he, too, is conducting a training exercise." Al-Fanudahi smiled without any humor at all. "You might be interested to know—I checked myself, out of idle curiosity, you understand—that in the last thirty T-years Battle Fleet has conducted only three exercises which deployed more than fifty of the wall as far out as the Shell. But this year, for some reason, Crandall was authorized to conduct her training exercise in the Madras Sector and Fleet Admiral Massimo Filareta was simultaneously authorized to conduct 'wargames' in the Tasmania Sector. And, unlike Crandall, Filareta's exercise constitutes—and I quote—'a major fleet exercise'. Which is how he comes to be parked out in Tasmania with three hundred wallers, plus screen. Rajampet wants to reinforce him with another seventy or eighty of the wall which 'just happen' to have been deployed to various sector bases within a couple of weeks' hyper time from Tasmania, then send him off to attack Manticore directly."
"What?"
She stared at him in disbelief, and he grinned sourly, then extended his whiskey-laced coffee mug towards her.
"Care for a little belt?" he invited.
"I don't think an entire bottle would help a lot," she replied after a moment, and shook her head. "You're serious, aren't you?"
"Believe me, I wish I wasn't."
"What can he be thinking?"
"I'm not sure I'd apply that particular verb to whatever's going on inside his skull at the moment," al-Fanudahi said tartly. Then he sighed.
"As nearly as I could figure out from what Jennings and Bernard were saying to Kingsford, and the kinds of questions all three
of them were asking me, Rajampet thinks that even if reports of what happened to them are grossly exaggerated, the Manties have to be reeling. As Jennings put it, the moment is 'psychologically ripe'. After a pounding like that, they aren't going to have the stomach for a standup fight against the SLN."
"Just like a handful of their cruisers didn't have the stomach for a standup fight against Crandall, you mean?" Teague said bitterly.
"I think they expect things to work out a little better this time."
"They think the Manty Home Fleet won't fight to defend their home system when a batch of cruisers were willing to go toe-to-toe with Crandall over the administrative center of a province they haven't even firmly integrated into their empire yet?"
Teague hadn't even tried to keep the incredulity out of her savage tone, and al-Fanudahi grinned with at least a trace of genuine humor.
"There you go using that verb again," he said. Then he sobered.
"It does tie in with existing strategic planning," he pointed out. "And, apparently, the theory is that getting hammered that way, completely out of the blue, is bound to have had a devastating effect on the Manties' morale and confidence, completely disregarding whatever effect it's had on their actual, physical capabilities. In fact, Jennings suggested that the psychological impact was probably even greater because it came so close on the heels of what happened at Spindle. And, of course, they can't be certain we weren't the ones who did it. So when a fresh Solarian fleet turns up on their doorstep in about half the time they can have expected anyone to take getting there, and when they realize we're willing to go at them again, this time on their home ground, despite Spindle, they'll realize they're screwed and throw in the towel. Especially if they do think we're the ones who just hit them and they're looking over their shoulder, waiting for us to do it t again at the moment they're engaged against our conventional wallers."
Teague looked at him again, then sighed, walked back around her desk, and flopped into her own chair.