by David Weber
“I’ve had a few ‘ambivalent’ feelings about it myself, over the years,” Honor acknowledged. She raised her left hand—her artificial left hand—to her equally artificial left eye. “On the other hand, I’ve been sitting here watching the work boats around Hephaestus Alpha. It’s pretty impressive.” She shook her head. “I’m astonished that they’ve accomplished so much so soon, really.”
White Haven nodded in agreement. Without her cybernetic eye’s telephoto feature, he couldn’t make out details from here, but he spent more than enough time actually in space touring the projects to know she was right. Current estimates were that the first shipyard modules would be ready to begin construction again in no more than another eight to ten T-months, far sooner than anyone had dared project immediately after the strike, and the new stations—two of them in orbit around each of the Manticore Binary System’s inhabited planets this time, not one—would boast ample active and passive defenses of their own.
Nothing like a burned hand to teach you what you should have seen coming all along, he thought grimly. And more than a little unfairly, he acknowledged. Without the “invisible” weapons someone—almost certainly the “Mesan Alignment” Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki had discovered—had used in the attack, Hephaestus, Vulcan, and Weyland would have been just fine.
“I wonder if Cachalot’s going to be as lucky as we have,” he said, then grimaced apologetically as he felt Honor stiffen beside him. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to bring any business up tonight. Just slipped out.”
“Nothing I wasn’t already thinking about.” She shook her head with a sigh. “I can’t say I’m looking forward to hearing all the gory details from Pat tomorrow. What we’ve already heard is bad enough.” She shook her head again. “You know, I realize we’re talking about the Mandarins, and God knows nobody in the galaxy’s better aware of how far the Solarian League’s fallen from what it was supposed to be, but the idea that the League officially sanctioned something like this ‘Buccaneer’ abortion is just…just more than I can process, I guess. Or more than I want to be able to process, maybe. I know it’s stupid of me, but I’d really rather this had been some rogue flag officer—another Byng or Crandall—acting entirely on her own.”
“I know. But the truth is, we probably should’ve seen it—or something like it—coming. After what happened to Filareta, even the real idiots in Battle Fleet have to realize they can’t face an Allied wall of battle. That takes any sort of fleet engagement out of their table of options, and you’re a naval historian. You know ‘guerre de course’ has always been the strategy of the weaker side. Hell, Honor! It’s the strategy you were using with Eighth Fleet after the Havenites hit us with Thunderbolt.”
“I know, and I hated it then, too,” she said, both eyes bleak as she gazed up at the distant lights. “There’s something obscene about destroying anything that’s taken that long to build. Especially when so many people who never did a single thing to you or yours depend on it for a living.”
“But we didn’t have a choice, because at that point we were the ones who couldn’t risk a decisive battle,” White Haven pointed out. “And be fair to yourself, sweetheart. You never did the sort of job this Admiral Capriotti apparently did on Cachalot. I don’t think the damage evaluation’s going to get any better after we listen to Pat tomorrow, and it’s pretty damned bad right now! I got a revised update just before Tom Caparelli and I decided to call it a night and head for home.” He shook his head. “It sounds like after he’d taken out every scrap of industrial infrastructure—and one major orbital habitat went with it; we’re not sure that was intentional, but the damage they inflicted on three others damned well was—he rounded up every ship and small craft in the system bigger than a runabout and either took them with him or destroyed them.”
“What?” Honor’s head snapped around, eyes narrowed, and he nodded.
“We got a follow-on report from Captain Crouch this afternoon.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her, and she nodded in recognition. She’d known John Crouch for years, ever since her time at the ATC, when he’d been a promising lieutenant commander on her staff. In fact, she’d recommended him for his current command, and his cruiser division had arrived in Cachalot on a routine port visit less than twenty-four hours after the Solarians had completed their work and departed once more. From the Cachalotians’ description of the Solly task force, it was just as well that Crouch’s four Saganami-Bs had missed it, but he’d immediately dug in to do what he could in the wake of such widespread devastation. He’d also sent HMS Mortar, one of his escorting destroyers, from Cachalot to Beowulf and straight on to Manticore. He clearly grasped how seriously the attack was likely to impact other neutral star nations’ public opinion, which hadn’t surprised her a bit. Nor did the fact that he’d sent another dispatch after the first one. Someone like Crouch was only too well aware of how the slow speed of interstellar communications could affect everything from tactical decisions by local commanders to the grand strategy of star nations.
“I haven’t seen the actual dispatch, but Pat dropped us a preliminary synopsis,” White Haven went on. “According to Crouch, they went after everything, Honor. When you were carrying out Cutworm, you were careful to avoid civilian collateral damage. Oh, it’s not always possible to make a clean separation between military infrastructure and civilian infrastructure. We both know that. But you at least tried to, and you never took out civilian power sats or orbiting agro habitats. And you damned well never collected up every tugboat, repair boat, ore collector, and rowboat in the system and trashed them. There’s no conceivable military justification for that kind of destruction. It’s so…so petty. It’s like a full grown adult punching out a twelve-year-old in a temper tantrum and then deciding to go through his pockets and steal his allowance, too!”
Honor nodded slowly, her expression tight. She had tried to minimize collateral destruction, and it hadn’t always been possible. But this—!
“Capriotti made it clear the Mandarins were sending a message,” she said after a moment, memory replaying the record of the com exchange between the Solarian and System President Jahnke, which Crouch had included with his initial dispatch. “From what you’re saying, it’s pretty obvious what the message is, too. Piss us off, and we’ll turn your entire star system into a junkyard.” Something dangerous crackled in the backs of her eyes. “And in answer to your earlier question, I don’t see how Cachalot can be as lucky as we’ve been. Oh, they were a lot luckier about the body count.” The fire behind her eyes turned cold and lethal with the memory of her own dead and how many millions of other Manticorans had joined them. “But they don’t begin to have the depth of resources we have, even without Beowulf and Haven, and at least nobody systematically destroyed anything we might’ve used to start rebuilding!” She shook her head. “I know we’ll do whatever we can to help, but I have to wonder how much we can do, given how much rebuilding we’ve got on our hands.”
“President Jahnke’s already recognized as much,” White Haven said grimly. “She’s asked for all the assistance we can provide—and she damned well should have, since we’re the ones the Sollies are really trying to get at with this shit—but she obviously understands how constrained our resources are right now.”
“And from Capriotti’s statement, Cachalot’s not the only system the bastards are going to do this to.” Honor’s voice was harsh, and White Haven could have counted the number of times he’d ever heard her call someone “bastard” on his fingers and toes without taking off both shoes.
“No, I’m sure it’s not,” he acknowledged. “That’s one of things we’ll be looking at with Pat tomorrow before you, Tom, and I have the ineffable joy of coming up with some kind of recommendation for Elizabeth. At the moment, I don’t have a clue what that recommendation’s going to be, either.”
“I don’t either.” Honor’s nostrils flared. “What I’d like to do is to announce a policy of reprisal. You come in and devastate one of our s
tar systems, or somebody you accuse of tilting our way, and we devastate one of yours. Problem is, I’m pretty sure the Mandarins wouldn’t object if we did that.”
“That might depend on which system we chose for our reprisal,” White Haven countered.
“Would it?” Honor settled back, resting her head on his shoulder and shaking it as she looked up at those star-strewn heavens. “I don’t think it actually would, Hamish. This isn’t really a military strategy; it’s a psychological strategy. They want to terrify people who might support us into backing away; that’s obvious. And it does have military implications, because they want us to do what we forced Tom Theisman to do with Cutworm and dissipate our forces. Spread them over as many potential targets as we can to prevent them from doing this over and over again. If they’re willing to target Cachalot on the basis that it’s simply been trading with us, though, their criteria for target selection’s so broad there’s no way we could separate probable targets from the merely possible ones. And if we can’t identify or prioritize them, we couldn’t really cover them, either, even if we didn’t realize that was one of the things they wanted.
“But I have to say that, in some ways, I’m almost as worried about what they may be trying to tempt us into doing in response as I am about the actual attacks. If we start demolishing League star systems, we won’t be punishing the people who actually ordered this thing, and we will be alienating League public opinion. Not only that, we’ll be handing Abruzzi and the others a pretext they can use to go on whipping up a Solly war frenzy. Do you really think any of their pet newsies will suggest even for a moment that our attacks are a reprisal in response for their attacks? Especially when Capriotti’s already equated ‘Buccaneer’ with Lacoön? Under their version of reality, we ‘forced’ them to adopt ‘Buccaneer’ when we began waging such brutal warfare against their citizens’ ‘economic lifeblood.’ Nobody in the League’s going to parse Abruzzi’s news releases well enough to realize how absurd that comparison is.”
“You’re probably right,” White Haven sighed, tucking his arm around her and drawing her in more tightly against his side. “But we are at war with them, love. That tends to trump the ‘public opinion’ issue in my thinking.”
“I know. Mine too, really. But everything we’re seeing says the Solly woman-in-the-street—especially outside the Sol System itself—is still a long way from being onboard with any of this. Or would be, if she had full information on what’s going on. And as long as the League’s shedding systems like Beowulf and Hypatia, we really don’t want to give Abruzzi a bigger lever while he tries to push opinion the other way.”
“Granted.” He nodded. “But the flipside is that if we don’t do something about it, our potential friends in the Verge and the Fringe are likely to wonder if that’s because we can’t or because we simply choose not to. And that could…adversely affect the trajectory of public opinion, as Tony’s analysts so delicately put it.”
“Of course other systems will wonder,” she agreed in a disgusted tone. “Hard to blame them, too. Some of them will do the math and realize why we can’t protect every inhabited star system in the galaxy, but how many people truly realize how many inhabited star systems there are? They know about theirs and maybe a half dozen others they’ve personally visited or where they have friends or family. Beyond that, it’s all abstract…and the threat to their own star system is anything but abstract. It’s another version of this false-flag operation Mike’s turned up in Talbott. It doesn’t matter whether or not what happens to one of the Fringe systems is our fault, because it’s our job to keep it from happening whoever’s ‘fault’ it is! It’s illogical, it’s unreasonable, and in some ways it’s just plain silly, but it’s also human nature, and somebody in Old Chicago knows it.”
“Cogently reasoned,” he told her, brushing the tip of her nose with his index finger. “Would it happen that the brain behind that analysis has any suggestions to make? Besides the delightful one we’ve already ruled out about burning a few Solly star systems to the ground in retaliation, I mean?”
“Actually, I have had one thought,” she said, and his eyes narrowed at her serious tone. “Chien-lu was aboard Imperator for dinner the night John Crouch’s first dispatch came in, so I shared it with him.”
White Haven nodded. Chien-lu Anderman, Herzog von Rabenstrange, was Emperor Gustav’s first cousin and third in the succession for the Andermani throne. He was also Gustav’s representative to the Grand Alliance…and a personal friend of one Honor Alexander-Harrington. Theoretically, White Haven supposed, the information in Crouch’s dispatch had been classified, but it wouldn’t stay classified for long, and Honor and von Rabenstrange had a long history—one which had served both the Andermani and the Star Empire well, over the years—of working around formal restrictions.
“He was as furious about it as I was,” she continued, “and we discussed the implications as well as we could, in light of what we knew at the time. And in the course of our discussion, we came up with a thought that may have some merit.”
“What kind of thought?”
“Well, I don’t think Gustav is overjoyed by the way Mike’s been pushing the pace in Talbott, and I expect him to be even less overjoyed when he finds out we’ve sent Lester out to reinforce her and authorized operations against Madras. I think he figures our favorite loose-laserhead Winton’s likely to have Mesa in her sights, as well, and you know how badly he wants to take the ‘Alignment’ down himself.”
White Haven nodded. When Gustav Anderman learned of the Alignment’s existence—and that the murder of his nephew in the attempted assassination of his younger brother and immediate heir had almost certainly been carried out using the Alignment’s “killer nanotech”—there’d been no question about his idea of a proper response. At the same time, he had no desire to step into the Solarian League’s sights, if only because he was a coldly pragmatic practitioner of interstellar real politik who recognized the potential consequences for his own star nation after the shooting stopped and the League settled down to deciding how to even the score. That consideration wouldn’t have stopped him from invading the Mesa System anyway, if not for the way in which Manticoran and Havenite allegations about Mesa had been incorporated into the narrative of their confrontation with the League. It was impossible to extricate the Alignment from the Mandarins’ claims that Manticoran imperialism—compounded and driven, possibly, by paranoia about imaginary enemies—was the primary cause of the escalating conflict. Which meant any action Gustav might take against Mesa would be seen by both the Mandarins and by Solarian public opinion as a decision on his part to take Manticore’s side against the League.
“Chien-lu didn’t say so, but I think another factor in Gustav’s thinking is the way the Talbott Quadrant sort of boxes the Empire in,” Honor continued, and White Haven nodded again.
He’d spent quite a bit of time helping his brother, the Prime Minister, and Foreign Secretary Langtry worry about Gustav’s possible reaction to the Star Empire’s expansion. He doubted anyone in the Empire truly believed Manticore wanted to lock the Andermani up in their own little corner of the galaxy. For that matter, anyone who understood the realities of hyper travel knew they couldn’t lock anyone up even if they had wanted to. But it was undeniable that the newly annexed Talbott Quadrant lay squarely athwart the hyper-space route between the Andermani Empire and the Solarian League. Given that the Manticoran Wormhole Junction already controlled the hyper bridges between the Andermani and the rest of the galaxy, a dynast like Gustav Anderman had to be experiencing at least a mild spasm of paranoia.
“Anyway,” she said, “while we were bewailing the fact that Gustav can’t join our formal declaration of war—and that we don’t really want him to, in a lot of ways—we started looking for things the IAN might be able to do short of declaring war on the League. And that’s when Chien-lu suggested that he could propose to Gustav that the IAN consider establishing ‘neutrality patrols’ down on our Talbott fla
nk.”
“‘Neutrality patrols’?” White Haven repeated, and she nodded against his shoulder.
“What he’s thinking is that not even the Mandarins are going to want to add the Empire to the Alliance. We’ve assumed from the beginning that they’ll want the Andermani to stay neutral. And we’ve encouraged Gustav to do just that because it gives him so much more leverage with them. We’ve been looking to that as a card in the end game, a chance for him to step in and play the ‘honest broker’ when the idiots finally realize shooting at us is a losing game and start looking for some sort of peace settlement. But he could use that leverage for other things, as well. For example, he could announce a list of star systems with whom the Andermani trade regularly and warn everyone, including the Alliance, that he intends to station a few cruisers in most of them—just to keep an eye on pirate activity, of course. And if he happened to call that a ‘neutrality patrol,’ the Mandarins would probably recognize it as a tripwire they’d better not stumble over. If we want to deter attack on a system, we’ll have to physically defend it, because we’re already at war with the League and nothing’s going to change that. But Chien-lu’s thinking is that Gustav wouldn’t have to come up with the strength to actually defend the systems, the way we would, because any attack on his ships would bring the Empire into the war as a full ally, and the Mandarins know it.”
“Probably something to that,” White Haven said thoughtfully. “Did von Rabenstrange suggest how many systems he thought Gustav might be able to get away with protecting that way?”
“No, and that’s going to be a more delicate calculation. The Mandarins will go a long way to avoid provoking Gustav into declaring war, but if he’s too obviously working with us, they may decide he’s already effectively declared war. In which case he gets added to their hit list and the ‘moral persuasion’ aspect of his neutrality patrol goes out the airlock.”