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# Chapter Fifty-Seven

"May I ask what you think of Prime Minister High Ridge's message, My Lord?" Niall MacDonnell asked politely.

"I think that making himself sound civil probably increased his blood pressure enough to take two or three decades off his life expectancy," Hamish Alexander replied cheerfully. "One could certainly hope so, at least."

MacDonnell smiled. A native born Grayson, himself, he was sometimes bemused in many ways by the Manticoran officers who had taken service with the GSN. The Earl of White Haven was scarcely in that category, of course, although he'd fought enough battles side-by-side with Grayson units to make him one of their own by adoption, at least. But what bemused MacDonnell the most was that the Manticorans seemed so outspoken in their criticism of the High Ridge Government. Of course, they were talking about their prime minister, not their monarch, but it was difficult for MacDonnell to conceive of a serving Grayson officer expressing himself so frankly—and contemptuously—about the Protector's Chancellor.

Not that any of his fellow Grayson citizens disagreed where High Ridge was concerned. It was just that Graysons as a group were more . . . deferential than most Manticorans. It confused MacDonnell sometimes. The crux of the Star Kingdom's entire current political dilemma lay in the aristocracy's control of who formed the executive branch of their government. That same condition, in an even more virulent form, had afflicted Grayson before the Mayhew Restoration had returned the authority which had eroded away from several generations of protectors. But the profound deference which the steaders of Grayson had always extended to their steadholders seemed oddly lacking in Manticorans where their own nobility was concerned.

Of course, White Haven himself was a member of that very aristocracy, which probably accounted for his own lack of automatic respect for it.

"I won't pretend that I don't share your hopes, My Lord," the admiral said after a moment. "But it looks as if he's decided to put the best face he can on the situation."

"He doesn't have a lot of choice," White Haven pointed out. "To be honest, I'm quite certain that was a part of Protector Benjamin's calculus when he hatched this entire notion. And while it would never do for me to accuse the Protector of meddling in the internal political affairs of an ally, I think he put High Ridge into his current position with malice aforethought."

MacDonnell looked a question at him, and the earl shrugged.

"High Ridge's only option is to pretend he's in favor of Benjamin's actions. Anything else would make him look at best weak and ineffectual, since he couldn't keep Benjamin from doing it anyway. At worst, if it turns out we're right and he's wrong about the Peeps' intentions, he'd look like a complete and total idiot if he'd sat around protesting the fact that we're saving him from his own stupidity. Not," White Haven added with a particularly nasty smile, "that we're not going to make him look stupid anyway, if the ball does go up."

MacDonnell cocked his head. White Haven sounded almost as if he wanted the Peeps to attack because of the damage it would do the High Ridge Government. The Grayson knew he was being unfair. That the earl most certainly didn't want the Republic of Haven to go back to war with the Star Kingdom. But White Haven had clearly passed beyond the point of hoping that that wouldn't happen. Unlike MacDonnell, who continued to cherish his doubts, despite the fact that the original warning had come from Lady Harrington, the earl had completely accepted the proposition that a Havenite attack was imminent. And since he'd done all he could to prepare for that looming catastrophe, he was ready to look for whatever silver lining he might be able to find.

And, MacDonnell conceded, anything that offered to remove Baron High Ridge from power had to be considered a silver lining.

The Grayson returned his attention to Benjamin the Great's flag plot. It was appropriate that he and White Haven should be standing on that ship's bridge at this particular moment, he thought. The "Benjie," as the Navy affectionately referred to Benjamin the Great, had been White Haven's flagship from the day she commissioned until the conclusion of Operation Buttercup. But although the ship was still less than eight T-years old, Benjie belonged to a class of only three ships. Her design had been superseded by the Harrington-class SD(P)s, and MacDonnell knew that some of those in the Office of Shipbuilding wanted to designate his flagship for disposal. He hated the very thought of sending her to the breakers for reclamation, although he had to admit that there was a certain cold-blooded logic to it. Grayson was straining every sinew to build and maintain the fleet it had. It couldn't afford to retain ships, however new, or however beloved, whose design had been rendered obsolescent.

Personally, MacDonnell hoped Shipbuilding would adopt one of the alternate proposals, instead, and refit the Benjie's shipboard launchers to handle the latest generation of multi-drive missiles. But that was someone else's decision. For right now, Benjamin the Great was exactly where she needed to be. Designed from the keel out as a fleet command ship, she had arguably the finest flag deck and fleet information center of any ship in commission anywhere.

"Whatever High Ridge might think of all this," White Haven said, stepping closer to MacDonnell and gazing into the plot with him, "Admiral Kuzak doesn't seem to have any reservations, does she?"

"No, she doesn't," MacDonnell agreed. His eyes moved from the plot which showed his own command to the secondary display set for astrographic mode. The Trevor's Star terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction lay much closer to the system primary than the Junction itself lay to Manticore-A. Still, there was the better part of three light-hours between it and Trevor's Star itself. Even with the powerful forts which had been built to cover it, the sheer distance between the system's inhabited planet and the terminus had created an almost insuperable difficulty for Admiral Theodosia Kuzak.

Her Third Fleet could be in only one place at a time, unless she wanted to accept an extremely dangerous dispersion of its strength. In theory, the forts could deal with most attacks on the terminus itself. Actually, calling them "forts" was something of a misnomer. To most people, the term "fort" implied a fixed fortification, something ponderous and immobile. But while the terminus forts were certainly ponderous, they were not—quite—immobile. Instead, they might be better thought of as enormous sublight superdreadnoughts. Ships so huge that their low acceleration made them totally unsuited to mobile operations, but which remained capable of at least minimal combat maneuvers . . . and which could generate the impeller wedges which were the first line of defense for any warship.

But for all their massive size, thick armor, and potent weaponry, they—like Benjamin the Great—were an obsolescent design. Their rate of fire in a missile engagement was only a fraction of that which a Harrington-class ship could produce. If they had time to deploy missile pods before a battle, they could throw stupendous salvos as long as the pods lasted, of course. But that was another way of saying they could fire for as long as no one could get warheads close enough to take out their pods with proximity kills.

When only the Manticoran Alliance had possessed SD(P)s, no one had worried particularly about pod vulnerability. First, because no other navy in space could produce the weight of fire an SD(P) was capable of, and, second, because no other navy in space could match the range of the Alliance's multi-drive missiles. Which meant that the forts' pods would be able to wreak havoc on any attacker before that attacker could possibly get close enough to kill their remaining pods. But the navy Thomas Theisman had built did have SD(P)s. And it was just possible that those SD(P)s had multi-drive missiles of their own.

And under those circumstances, pod vulnerability became a very serious concern, indeed.

All of which helped to explain why a conscientious system commander like Theodosia Kuzak had been so unhappy about her mutually contradictory defense obligations. The official Admiralty view, that there was no evidence that the forts could no longer look after themselves against anything the Peeps might bring to bear against them, was cold comfort for the officer on the spot. Completely ignoring the potential consequences for her career if the Peeps managed to get in and destroy the forts, the sheer loss of life such attack would entail had undoubtedly been enough to give her nightmares. So it was with enormous relief that she had turned responsibility for supporting the forts over to MacDonnell's task force while she concentrated her own SD(P)s and supporting CLACs to cover San Martin and the inner system.

"If you were the Peeps, and you were planning to attack this system, My Lord," he asked White Haven now, "which would you concentrate on? The terminus, or San Martin? Or would you go for both simultaneously?"

"I asked myself those same questions a lot when I was trying to take the system away from the Peeps," White Haven replied. "The biggest problem is that the terminus and the inner system are close enough to offer each other a degree of mutual support that just isn't possible at the Manticore end. It's not the easiest thing in the galaxy for the defense to arrange, you understand, but an attacker going after one objective can never afford to forget about what can come up his backside from the other while he's doing it. That was bad enough for us when the Peeps held the system. For the Peeps, who can never be absolutely certain that a sizable chunk of Home Fleet isn't in range for an emergency transit direct from Manticore, it's even worse."

"Granted," MacDonnell agreed. "But if you're going to attack this system at all, you have to pick one objective."

"Oh, certainly!" White Haven grinned wryly. "In my case, I chose to concentrate on their fleet, squeezing it to defend the inner system. After all, San Martin was a lot more important to them than the terminus of a wormhole junction they couldn't use anyway! And they didn't have anywhere near the terminus fortifications we've put into place since we took the system away from them. Even so, I had to be pretty cautious."

"That's not exactly the way I heard it, My Lord," MacDonnell told him with a smile. "I heard that in the end you threw an assault straight through the Junction."

"Well, yes," the earl said with a slightly uncomfortable expression. "It was something close to a council of despair, you understand. Esther McQueen was commanding here at the time, and she was a holy terror. Just between you and me, I've often thought that she may well have been a better tactician than I was, and she was a devilishly good strategist, as well. She'd forted up here with battleships and superdreadnoughts in a defense in depth, and however I maneuvered, she managed to stay close enough to keep me from having a free hand for either objective. So I settled in to convince her that I was prepared for what amounted to a siege of the inner system, and when I'd convinced her—or, rather, her replacement, after Pierre and Saint-Just pulled her out for Octagon duty—to redeploy to face it, well—"

"So basically, you forced the Peeps to commit to protecting one objective, then hit the other one with a surprise attack," MacDonnell observed.

"Yes. But I had certain advantages Theisman and his people wouldn't have in attacking the system. Despite the disadvantages a fleet faces in using a junction as an avenue of attack, the element of surprise tends to offset them to a considerable degree. But Theisman won't have a friendly fleet sitting at the other end of the terminus. So he can't really threaten it from two directions at once, the way I did. That would have given Theodosia the opportunity to repeat McQueen's defensive deployments against him.

"In the end, I suspect he could probably have taken her anyway. If our more pessimistic assumptions about what he may have added to his fleet mix without mentioning it to anyone are accurate, the odds swing even further in his favor. But in answer to your question, if I were him, I'd concentrate on the inner system."

"But as long as the Star Kingdom continues to hold the terminus, it can always reinforce or counterattack," MacDonnell pointed out.

"That assumes it has something to counterattack with," White Haven said in a much grimmer tone, and waved a hand at the gleaming icons of the inner system. At this range and on such a scale, all of Third Fleet's ships of the wall formed a single green bead. "Third Fleet has almost a hundred ships of the wall in its order of battle, including forty-eight of our SD(P)s, Niall, and two SD(P)s are down for local refit. We have exactly two—count them; two—more squadrons of them with Home Fleet. We have another squadron of them assigned to Sidemore Station. We have a fourth squadron assigned to Grendelsbane. And we have, at the moment, four more of them in various stages of overhaul and working up back home but not assigned to Home Fleet. That's it, even with the dribs and drabs Janacek has managed to add to his order of battle. If Theisman could take out Third Fleet, he'd destroy around a third of our pre-pod wall and two-thirds of our total modern wall. That makes Theodosia's ships his true objective, and if he can pin them against the star, force her to defend San Martin, he has an opportunity to destroy them.

"If he pulled that off, he could deal with anything we had left with relative ease. To be perfectly honest, the only remaining counterweight the Alliance would have would be your own fleet, and Grayson would find itself facing much the same quandary the Manticore System faces. How much of your home fleet can you afford to commit to offensive operations?"

"To be honest?" MacDonnell shook his head. "We've probably actually exceeded that limit by what we've deployed here. Not that I think it was a mistake to send us," he added hastily. "I think Lady Harrington and Mr. Paxton are correct in arguing that the Peeps are unlikely to make Grayson one of their priority objectives. That could change, of course, especially once word gets back to them that a sizable portion of our Navy is reinforcing here at Trevor's Star. But at the moment, they almost have to be assuming the GSN is still concentrated at Yeltsin, and they aren't going to want to provoke us until after they've dealt with your SD(P)s."

"Exactly," White Haven agreed, hiding any trace of the instinctive irritation he felt. It wasn't anything MacDonnell had actually said. Nor was it anything White Haven could have disagreed with, even if the Grayson had put it into so many words. But it was unutterably galling for any senior Manticoran admiral to hear a Grayson calmly assessing the RMN as only the second ranking navy of the Alliance.

Especially given the fact that, at the moment, that assessment was entirely accurate.

"Actually," he went on, "the best-case scenario would be for Theisman to realize that you've reinforced us here before he kicks off any attack. The realization that the GSN is prepared to reinforce us this promptly, despite any . . . difficulties you may be experiencing working with our present deplorable Prime Minister, would almost have to give him pause. He'd also have to rethink any ops plan he'd already drawn up on the assumption that you wouldn't be. And if we can win that jackass Janacek just another four or five months, the ships he's finally resumed construction on will begin to come into commission in something like genuinely useful numbers. Especially the ones in the Grendelsbane shadow yards. They were further along in construction when they were suspended, and the first of them will be ready for acceptance trials in just a couple of weeks."

"From your lips to the Tester's ears," MacDonnell said fervently.

* * *

"It's confirmed, Sir. All of them."

Admiral of the Red Allen Higgins was a man of only middling height, with a round, almost chubby face that was usually a faithful mirror of his affable nature. At the moment, that face was the color of old oatmeal and the eyes were haunted.

He stared down at the pitiless display and felt like a fly in the path of Juggernaut as the Peep attack force rumbled down upon him. Thirty-two superdreadnoughts, an unknown number of them SD(P)s. There were also at least some CLACs in that oncoming freight train of destruction. There had to be, because the four hundred-strong LAC strike he'd sent out to meet them had been ripped apart by an even stronger LAC counterattack.

And to oppose it, once his LACs had been effectively destroyed, he'd had seven SD(P)s, sixteen pre-pod SDs, four CLACs with less than thirty LACs between them, and nineteen battlecruisers and cruisers. He'd thought he might still be able to accomplish something, given his outnumbered SD(P)s' range advantage. But he'd been wrong. As the Peeps had just demonstrated by destroying all seven of them from a range in excess of forty million kilometers.

His remaining twenty capital ships were hopelessly outclassed. The incredible missile storm which had wiped away his SD(P)s was proof enough of that. Thank God that at least he'd held them back when he sent in the SD(P)s! Thousands of RMN personnel were still alive because of that simple decision on his part. A decision he'd tossed off almost casually at the time.

But that was the only mercy which had been vouchsafed to him.

"We can't stop them," he said softly and looked up to meet his chief of staff's equally shocked eyes at last. "Anything we send out to meet them will only end up giving them extra target practice," he grated. "And the same thing is true of the shipyards. Hell, we always depended on the mobile force for the system's real security. Why bother to upgrade the forts to fire MDMs? That's what the frigging Fleet was for! Goddamn that bastard Janacek."

"Sir, how—I mean, what do we do now?" the chief of staff asked almost desperately.

"There's only one thing we can do," Higgins ground out. "I am not going to be another Elvis Santino, or even another Silas Markham. No more of my people are going to be killed in a battle we can't win anyway."

"But, Sir, if you just abandon the yards, the Admiralty will—"

"Fuck the Admiralty!" Higgins snarled. "If they want to court-martial me, so much the better. I'd love to have an opportunity to discuss their excuse for a naval policy in front of a formal court! But right now what matters is saving everyone and everything we can . . . and we can't save the yards."

The chief of staff swallowed hard, but he couldn't disagree.

"We don't have time to set scuttling charges," Higgins went on in a harsh, flat voice. "Get every work crew back to the main facility. I want all secure data wiped now. Once you've done that, set the charges and blow the entire computer core, as well. I don't want the bastards getting squat from our records. We've got about a ninety-minute window to evacuate anyone we're going to get out, and we wouldn't have the personnel lift to take more than twenty percent of the total base personnel even if we had time to embark them all. Grab the priority list and find everyone on it that you can. We're not going to be able to get all of them to a pickup point in time, but I want to pull out every tech with critical knowledge that we can."

"Yes, Sir!" The chief of staff turned away and started barking orders, obviously grateful for something—anything—to do, and Higgins rounded on his ops officer.

"While Chet handles that, I've got another job for you, Juliet." His corpse-like smile held no humor at all. "We may not have enough missiles with the legs to take those bastards on," he said, waving a hand at the tactical display. "But there's one target we can reach."

"Sir?" The ops officer looked as confused as her voice sounded, and Higgins barked a travesty of a laugh.

"We don't have time to set demolition charges, Juliet. So I want you to lay in a fire plan. As we pull out, I want an old-fashioned nuke on top of every building slip, every immobile ship, every fabrication center. Everything. The only thing you don't hit are the personnel platforms. You understand me?"

"Aye, aye, Sir," she got out, her expression aghast at the thought of the trillions upon trillions of dollars of irreplaceable hardware and half-completed hulls she was about to destroy.

"Then do it," he grated, and turned back to the pitiless display once more.

* * *

Javier Giscard checked the time again. It was odd. Nothing could be calmer or more orderly than Sovereign of Space's flag bridge. There were no raised voices, no excitement. No one rushed from console to console or conferred in urgent, anxious tones.

And yet for all of the order and serenity, the tension was palpable. Task Force Ten had yet to fire a shot, but the war had already begun. Or resumed. Or whatever future historians would agree it had done.

The exact verb didn't matter all that much to the men and women who would do the killing and the dying, and as he sat in his command chair and listened to the quiet, efficient murmur of his staff, he felt the cold wind of all that mortality blowing through the chinks in his soul. He was about to do something he'd already done once before, in a star system named Basilisk. He'd had no choice then, and he had even less of one now, but that didn't mean he looked forward to it.

He checked the time again.

Fifteen minutes.

* * *

"Perimeter Security has bogeys, Admiral!"

Niall MacDonnell turned quickly from his conversation with Earl White Haven at his ops officer's announcement.

"They just made their alpha translations," Commander William Tatnall continued. "We're still getting a preliminary count on their transit signatures, but there are a lot of them."

MacDonnell felt White Haven standing behind him and sensed how difficult it was for the earl to keep his mouth shut. But White Haven had assured him before they ever departed from Yeltsin's Star that despite any questions of relative seniority, he had no intention of backseat driving. This was MacDonnell's command, not his, he'd said, and he was as good as his word now.

"Locus and vector?" MacDonnell asked.

"They made translation right on the hyper limit for a least-time course to San Martin," Commander David Clairdon, his chief of staff, amplified quickly.

"Any sign of anything headed for the terminus?" the admiral pressed.

"Not at this time, Sir," Clairdon replied carefully, and MacDonnell smiled thinly at the unspoken "yet" everyone on the flag bridge heard in Clairdon's tone.

The admiral turned back to the main plot as the glittering light codes of the bogeys' hyper footprints appeared upon it. Clairdon was certainly right about their position and course. And Tatnall was right, too—there were "a lot of them."

"CIC makes it over eighty of the wall, Sir," Tatnall announced a moment later, as if he couldn't quite believe the numbers himself. "Uh, they say that's a minimal estimate," he added.

"Sweet Tester," MacDonnell heard someone mutter. Which, he decided, reflected his own reaction quite well.

There was no way to tell how many of those ships were SD(P)s and how many were pre-pod designs. If he were Thomas Theisman, there'd be as many of the former and as few of the latter as he could possibly arrange. Either way, it sounded as if the Peeps had sent a force twice as powerful as the one they had expected to face. And it sounded very much as if they were doing what White Haven had said he would do in their place.

But MacDonnell couldn't be certain of that, and his brain raced as he considered possibilities and options. It seemed to him as if he stood there, staring at the plot, for at least a decade, but when he looked at the date/time display again, less than ninety seconds had passed.

"Alpha One, David," he told his chief of staff calmly. Clairdon looked at him for just a moment, then nodded briskly.

"Alpha One. Aye, aye, Sir," he said, and MacDonnell looked back at White Haven as Clairdon headed for the com section to pass the necessary movement orders.

"I think they're doing exactly what you said you'd do, My Lord," MacDonnell told the Manticoran. Then he smiled mirthlessly. "Of course, I suppose half of those ships could be EW drones and it could all be a huge ruse designed to draw the terminus picket force they didn't know was here out of position."

"It does seem unlikely," White Haven agreed with a slightly warmer smile of his own. "And I doubt they'd be foolish enough to repeat their Basilisk pattern. They know this terminus' forts are completely online. They could still have it—the force they seem to be sending towards San Martin could take all of the forts without too much trouble. But I find it difficult to believe that even Thomas Theisman and Shannon Foraker between them could have given them enough ships to let them hit Trevor's Star with two task forces that size. Especially not if Duchess Harrington was right and they have sent an attack force all the way to Silesia. Or, at least, if they can attack Silesia and still hit Trevor's Star with a hundred and sixty ships of the wall, we'd better start working on our surrender terms now!"

* * *

Admiral Higgins stood like a statue of acid-etched iron on HMS Indomitable's flag bridge, waiting, as his task force's remaining units accelerated towards the Grendelsbane hyper limit. No one spoke to him. No one approached him. There was an invisible perimeter around him, a circle of pain and self-loathing none dared enter.

Intellectually, he knew as well as anyone else on that bridge that what had happened here wasn't his fault. No one with his assigned order of battle could possibly have stopped the force the Peeps had thrown at him. That didn't guarantee that he wouldn't be scapegoated for it, of course—especially not by the Janacek Admiralty—but at least he'd had the sanity and moral courage to refuse to throw away any more of the lives and ships under his command.

None of which was any comfort to him at all at this moment.

His eyes were on the visual display, not the tactical display or the maneuvering plot. He was staring at the huge naval yard, its individual structures long invisible as they fell away astern, and his eyes were cold and empty as space itself.

And then his mouth tightened and pain flickered in those empty eyes as the first small, intolerably bright sun flashed behind his ships. Then another. Another, and another, and yet another as a tidal wave of flame marched through the huge, sprawling naval base Manticore had spent almost two decades building up from literally nothing.

Those silent pinpricks looked tiny and harmless from this range, but Higgins' mind's eyes saw them perfectly, knew their reality. It watched the forest fire of old-fashioned nukes—his own missiles' warheads, not even the enemy's—consuming fabrication centers, orbital smelters, reclamation yards, stores stations, orbital magazines, the huge hydrogen farm, sensor platforms and relays, and System Control's ultra-modern command station. And the ships. The handful of ships in the repair yards. The ones who'd had the misfortune to choose this particular moment to be immobilized in yard hands because they required some minor repair, or to be undergoing refit. And worse—far worse—the magnificent new ships. Twenty-seven more Medusa-class SD(P)s, nineteen CLACs, and no less than forty-six of the new Invictus-class superdreadnoughts. Ninety-two capital ships—almost six hundred and seventy million tons of new construction. Not just a fleet, but an entire navy's worth of the most modern designs in space, helpless as they lay beside fitting-out stations or half-finished, cocooned in their building slips and dispersed yards. The fifty-three additional lighter types being built alongside them hardly mattered, but Higgins could no more spare them from the fiery sword of fusion than he could the superdreadnoughts.

The fireballs marched, hobnailed with fire, ripping the heart out of Grendelsbane Station. A tidal wave of flame and fury carrying disaster on its crest. And behind that wave were the personnel platforms and the yard personnel he hadn't been able to withdraw. Over forty thousand of them—the entire workforce for a complex the size Grendelsbane once had been, just as lost to the Star Kingdom as the ships they had come here to work upon.

In one catastrophic act of self-inflicted devastation, Allen Higgins had just destroyed more tonnage and far more fighting power than the Royal Manticoran Navy had ever lost in the entire four T-centuries of its previous existence, and the fact that he'd had no choice was no consolation at all.

* * *

"Sir," Marius Gozzi said urgently, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but we've just picked up a second task force."

Giscard turned quickly to his chief of staff, raising one hand to stop his ops officer in mid-conversation.

"Where?" he asked.

"It looks like its coming in from the terminus," Gozzi said. "And we're very lucky that we saw it at all."

"Coming from the terminus?" Giscard shook his head. "It's not 'luck' we saw it, Marius. You were the one who insisted that we needed to scout it to cover our backs while we dealt with the inner system."

The chief of staff shrugged. Giscard's statement was accurate enough, but Gozzi still suspected that the admiral had subtly prompted him to make the suggestion. Giscard had a tendency to build a staff's internal confidence by drawing contributions out of each of them . . . and then seeing to it that whoever finally offered the contribution he'd wanted all along got full credit for it.

"Even with the drones and the LACs, we were still dead lucky to pick them up, Sir. They're coming in heavily stealthed. But they're also pushing hard. One or two impeller signatures burned through the stealth, and once the drones got a sniff, the recon LACs knew where to look. The numbers are still tentative, but CIC is estimating it as between twenty and fifty ships of the wall. Possibly with carrier support."

"That many?"

"CIC stresses that the numbers are extremely tentative," Gozzi replied. "And we're not getting the take directly from the drones."

Giscard nodded in understanding. The recon LACs were heavily modified Cimeterres, with greatly reduced magazine space in order to free up the volume for the most capable LAC-sized sensor suite Shannon Foraker and her techies had been able to build. Their main function, however, if the truth be known, was to serve as drone tenders. Foraker and her wizards still hadn't figured out how to fit a grav pulse transmitter with any sort of bandwidth into something as small as a drone. But they could put a LAC in range for the drone to hit it with a whisker laser, and a LAC could carry an FTL com. They still couldn't real-time the raw drone data to Sovereign of Space, but they could get enough summarized information through to give Giscard a far better picture of what was happening than any previous Havenite fleet commander could have hoped for.

The question, he reflected wryly, was whether that was a good thing, or a bad one. There was such a thing as knowing too much and allowing yourself to double-think your way into ineffectualness.

He walked across to a smaller repeater plot and punched in a command. Moments later, CIC had displayed its best guess of the new force's composition and numbers. He frowned slightly. Apparently, CIC had managed to firm up its estimate at least a little while Marius was reporting to him. They were showing a minimum of thirty of the wall now, although some of the impeller signatures were still a bit tentative.

He folded his hands behind him and squared his shoulders while he considered the display.

It was always possible, perhaps even probable, that what looked like Third Fleet in the inner system was something else entirely. Or, for that matter, that it was actually only a portion of Third Fleet. In fact, that was the more likely probability. If Kuzak had been as completely surprised as Thunderbolt's planners had hoped, then she might very well have been caught with her fleet divided between the inner system and the wormhole terminus. In that case, she might be employing ECM to convince his sensors that she was actually fully concentrated near San Martin in an effort to keep them from noticing the second half of her force sneaking in to join her.

The only real problem with that neat little theory was that there seemed to be too many ships in that second force. Giscard had studied Kuzak's record, and he had a lively respect for her strategic judgment. If she'd split her forces to cover two objectives in the first place, she would have placed the larger force to cover the more important one. And in this instance, there was no comparison between the value—politically and morally, as well as economically—of defending San Martin's citizens as opposed to a wormhole terminus. So if one force was going to be more powerful than the other, then the one in front of him ought to be substantially more numerous than the one behind him, yet CIC's estimate suggested that the trailer was damned nearly the size of Kuzak's entire fleet.

But if it wasn't the second half of Third Fleet, then what was it, and what was it doing here? Could it be a detachment from their Home Fleet that had simply happened to be in range for a crash Junction transit? That was certainly possible, although a part of him rejected the possibility. It would have been too much like history repeating itself. That was exactly how White Haven had reached Basilisk in time to keep Giscard from taking out the terminus there when he'd raided that system. But the possibility of a coincidence like that happening a second time was remote, to say the least.

No. If there really was a second force out there, then it had been deliberately placed there ahead of time. Only that didn't make a lot of sense, either . . . unless he assumed that they'd somehow guessed what was coming. Which should have been impossible. On the other hand, he couldn't even begin to count the number of "top secret" plans which had somehow been compromised in the long history of military operations.

But even if it were a force from their Home Fleet, how bad could that be? They didn't have enough SD(P)s in Home Fleet to significantly affect the odds here, and rushing in pre-pod SDs would be suicidal. But they'd know that, too. So where—?

"I wonder," he murmured, and turned back to Gozzi. "We need to nail this down, Marius. Send the LACs in closer."

"Sir, if they get any closer and this is what it looks like, they're going to be awfully vulnerable," the chief of staff reminded him quietly.

"I realize that," Giscard acknowledged. "And I don't like it a whole lot more than you do. But we have to know. This is the largest single task force of Operation Thunderbolt. If the Manties have somehow figured out what we're up to, this would be the one place they'd try hardest to set a trap for us. Don't forget what they did to Admiral Parnell at Yeltsin's Star at the beginning of the war. And whether they deliberately set it up as a trap or not, we can't afford to get ourselves enveloped by a superior force. If we take heavy losses here, we could be in serious trouble until Admiral Tourville gets back from Silesia. Or, at least, until Admiral Foraker and Bolthole can make up our losses. If we have to risk some LACs, or even deliberately sacrifice them, to ensure that doesn't happen, then I'm afraid we'll simply have to do it."

"Yes, Sir."

* * *

"They know we're here," Commander Tatnall said positively, and MacDonnell nodded.

He'd hoped that the Peeps wouldn't spot them until it was too late. Although it had become evident that there were actually at least a hundred capital ships in the Havenite task force, he remained confident that his task force and Third Fleet, with almost a hundred SD(P)s and fifty pre-pod SDs between them, could take them. The small, fast impeller signatures which proved that the Peeps did have CLACs, after all, had caused him to raise his estimate of the losses he and Kuzak would probably suffer, but that hadn't affected his fundamental confidence. Not with the hundreds of planet-based LACs the Janacek Admiralty had deployed to back up Third Fleet as relations with the Republic worsened steadily. He knew they could take them . . . and that White Haven shared his confidence.

But in order to defeat them, he and Kuzak had to be able to get at them in the first place, and if they cut and ran for it, the chances of catching up to them would be poor at best.

He glowered at the display, where the steadily, if cautiously, advancing impeller signatures of scouting LACs crept ever closer to his own stealthed units. The question wasn't whether or not they knew he was here—it was whether or not they knew what he had. If they did realize that he was coming in behind them with another forty SD(P)s, plus carriers, anyone but idiots would disengage in a moment, and those probing LACs were going to provide their commander with that information before very much longer. However good his own EW and however poor Peep sensor suites might be, he couldn't hide from them if the range fell much further. Of course, it was always possible that they already had him. There was no way for anyone to be certain how much Shannon Foraker might have managed to improve their sensors in the last three or four years. But if they hadn't managed to lock up his units yet they might not know just how powerful his force was.

"Contact Ararat," he told Clairdon. "Tell Captain Davis that I want him to . . . discourage those LACs."

The chief of staff looked at him for a moment, then nodded, and MacDonnell turned back to his plot. Ararat was one of the Covington-class CLACs. Somewhat larger than the RMN's carriers, the Covingtons carried twenty-five percent more LACs, and unlike the RMN, the GSN had developed the Katana-class LAC, specifically designed for the "dogfighting" role. The Graysons had begun from the assumption that eventually someone else was going to produce their own LACs and carriers for them. When that time came, the GSN intended to be ready . . . especially since the RMN's "space superiority LAC" project had been one of the casualties of the Janacek cuts.

He heard Clairdon passing on his instructions, and then he nodded in satisfaction as the green diamond chips of Ararat's LACs suddenly blinked into existence less than eight minutes after he'd given the initial order.

* * *

Javier Giscard's scouting LACs realized they were doomed the instant Ararat launched. There were only fifteen of the recon platforms, each of them only lightly armed, and there were over a hundred and twenty LACs coming at them. Worse, their own vectors were almost directly towards the enemy vessels.

There was no way they could possibly escape, and so they pressed on, accelerating directly towards the Graysons in an effort to at least get close enough to see the enemy clearly before they died.

* * *

Giscard knew exactly what they were doing, and a knife seemed to turn in his heart as he watched them do it. Nothing he could do at this point would affect what was about to happen to them. But he was the man who'd deliberately sent them out to die, and even though he knew he'd been right—that he would do the same thing again under the same circumstances, even knowing the outcome—that didn't make it hurt any less.

He watched his people accelerate, rushing to meet their deaths rather than fight for every instant of life they could cling to. He watched the red icons of their killers sweep towards them even as their sensors reached out and confirmed one capital impeller signature after another. He saw the missile storm that blotted them from the heavens. And then, finally, he turned away and made himself meet Captain Gozzi's eyes.

"What does CIC say now?" he asked quietly.

"We've confirmed thirty-seven positive superdreadnought impeller signatures, with another three probables and one possible," Gozzi said, equally quietly. "There are also at least eight other ships out there. They're a shade too small for SDs but too big for anything else on the Manty ship lists."

"Judging by what we just saw," Giscard said dryly, "I suspect that they must be CLACs."

"Yes, Sir. But our recon crews were quite definite. They're bigger than Manty carriers."

"Graysons, then," Giscard murmured.

"That would certainly be my guess, Sir," Gozzi agreed, and Giscard snorted softly.

The confirmation of the presence of the GSN in strength put an entirely different complexion on the tactical situation. The sheer numbers coming up behind him would have been bad enough under any circumstances. The fact that they were Graysons made it even worse. Not just because of the profound respect with which the Republican Navy had learned to regard the GSN, but because of what their presence implied.

"Do you think they knew we were coming, Sir?" Gozzi asked, speaking softly enough to avoid other ears, and Giscard snorted again as his chief of staff followed his own thoughts.

"I think they must have figured out that something was coming, at any rate," he replied. "I doubt they managed to penetrate Thunderbolt, if that's what you're asking. But they wouldn't have needed to do that to set up an ambush here. All they would really have needed was one analyst with enough IQ to seal his own shoes and they could have guessed what would happen if the negotiations collapsed. And if they did that, even Janacek could figure out this would be the best spot to use for a counterstroke. After all, when you combine the concentration of most of their modern ships with the political significance of San Martin, this is undoubtedly the most valuable target we could have hit. That's precisely why this is our strongest task force. Which means that if they wanted a place to arrange for us to suffer a mischief, this would certainly have been a logical choice for it.

"If that's what they had in mind, though, it looks like they've come up a little short on the execution end. We know they're out there now, and they haven't gotten us quite deeply enough in-system to pin us between their two forces."

He fell silent once more, studying the displays and pondering options and alternatives. He could try turning on either one of the enemy task forces with his entire force. He'd have an excellent chance of defeating either one of them in isolation, if he could intercept it before its allies could come to its assistance. But if they chose to avoid action with one force while pursuing with the other, they might manage to prevent the interception he wanted. Or, even worse, let him have it but with too tight a time window to defeat the force he'd "caught" before the other one caught him from behind, in turn.

If the Committee of Public Safety had still been in power, the decision ultimately wouldn't have been his. It would have belonged to his people's commissioner, and if he'd dared to argue about it he would have found himself shot for his temerity. But the Republic had no commissioners, and he drew a deep breath and committed himself to the decision no admiral of the People's Navy would ever have dared to make.

"Go to evasion Tango-Baker-Three-One," he told Gozzi.

"Are you sure about this, Sir?" Gozzi asked in a painstakingly neutral tone.

"I am, Marius," Giscard replied with a small smile. "Trevor's Star was a primary objective, I know. And I know why Admiral Theisman wanted Third Fleet destroyed. But if they've managed to assemble this much firepower here, then they have to be buck naked on all of Thunderbolt's other objectives. That means we've kicked their ass everywhere else. I realize that we've got a chance here to carry through and cripple or destroy three-quarters of the combined Manty–Grayson SD(P) force. But we've got too many pre-pod ships of our own, and we'd be risking over half of our own SD(P)s. Not to mention the fact that there's too good chance of their catching us between them instead of us catching them separated." He shook his head. "No. There's always tomorrow, and if we've gotten out as lightly as I think we have elsewhere, the comparative loss figures are going to hit Manticoran public morale right in the belly. I don't want to give them a victory here to offset that effect. Nor do I want them to think that they hurt us badly enough we can't continue to take the war to them."

"Yes, Sir," Gozzi acknowledged and headed for the com section yet again.

Giscard watched him go, and then returned his attention to the master plot. He knew that Gozzi's question had reflected the chief of staff's concern over the possible repercussions the decision might have on Giscard's career. His own concern, hidden behind a confidently serene expression, had nothing to do with his career prospects. He knew Tom Theisman would expect him to exercise both judgment and discretion in the case like this, nor was he afraid that Theisman would see his decision to withdraw as an act of cowardice. For that matter, he snorted in genuine amusement, he could probably count on the President to intervene if things got too grim.

No, his concern was that he might be wrong. He didn't think he was. But he could be. And if he was, if he was throwing away a genuine opportunity to gut the Manticoran Alliance's wall of battle, the implications of that would dwarf anything that might ever have happened to anyone's career.

* * *

Michael Janvier, Baron High Ridge, was also thinking about careers as he paused, some hours later, in the hallway outside the polished wooden door. An armed sentry—a captain in the uniform of the Queen's Own—stood stiffly at attention before that door, and the immaculately uniformed woman didn't even glance at the Prime Minister.

High Ridge knew that the traditions and training of the Queen's Own required that ramrod stiffness, that apparent obliviousness to anything even as the sentry saw and noted everything that happened about her. But there was more to it than mere tradition or training. Something no one could ever have put a finger upon or isolated, but nonetheless there.

An edge of contempt, High Ridge thought as he made certain the mask of his own expression was firmly in place. The hostility that all of Elizabeth III's partisans reflected, each in his or her own way.

The Prime Minister drew an unobtrusive breath, squared mental shoulders, and moved the two meters closer which brought him within the sentry's designated official field of view.

The captain reacted then. Her head snapped to the side, her eyes focused on High Ridge, and her right hand flicked to the butt of the holstered pulser at her side with mechanical precision. It was all meticulously choreographed. Only an idiot would have thought the captain was anything less than a deadly serious professional, yet her response was also a display of formal military theater. One which required an equally formal response from him.

"The Prime Minister," he informed her, as if she didn't already know perfectly well who he was. "I crave a few minutes of Her Majesty's time to attend to affairs of government."

"Yes, Sir," the captain said, never removing her right hand from her pulser, and her left hand moved in a precisely metered arc to activate her com.

"The Prime Minister is here to see Her Majesty," she announced, and High Ridge's jaw muscles clenched. Usually, he rather enjoyed the formalities, the time-polished procedures and protocols which underscored the dignity and gravity of the office he held and the Star Kingdom he served. Today, each of them was a fresh grain of salt rubbed into the wound which brought him here, and he wished they could just get on with it. It wasn't as if his secretary hadn't scheduled the appointment before he ever came, or as if sophisticated security systems hadn't identified him and kept him under direct observation from the instant he entered Mount Royal Palace's grounds.

The sentry's eyes held him with unwavering, impersonal concentration—still flawed by that cold little core of contempt—as she listened to her earbug. Then she took her hand from her pulser and pressed the door activation button.

"Her Majesty will receive you, Sir," she said crisply, and snapped back into her original guard position, gazing once more down the hall as if he no longer existed.

He inhaled again and stepped through the door.

Queen Elizabeth waited for him, and his jaw tightened further. She'd received him in this same formal office many times over the past four T-years. Not happily, but with at least a pretense of respect for his office, however poorly she'd concealed the fact that she despised the man who held it. In those same four years, she'd never seen him a single time except for the unavoidable requirements of government and her constitutional duties, yet both of them, by mutual unspoken assent, had used the mask of formal courtesy when she had.

Today was different. She sat behind her desk, but unlike any other time he'd entered this office, she did not invite him to be seated. In fact, there was no chair in which he might have sat. The coffee table, the small couch which had faced it, and the conversational nook of comfortable armchairs, had all vanished. He had no doubt at all that she'd ordered their removal the instant his secretary screened the Palace for an appointment, and he knew his fury—and dismay—showed through his own masklike expression as the unspoken, coldly intentional insult went home.

Even if his own emotions hadn't shown, and even if the Queen had greeted him with smiling affability rather than the cold-eyed silence in which she watched him cross the office, the treecat on the back of her chair would have been a sure and certain barometer of the hostility coiled in that office. Ariel's tufted ears were more than half flattened and his bone-white claws sank deep into the upholstery of the Queen's chair as his green eyes watched High Ridge.

The baron came to a halt before her desk, standing there—like, he thought from a lava field of resentment, an errant schoolboy and not the Prime Minister of Manticore—and she regarded him as coldly as her treecat did.

"Your Majesty," he managed to get out in very nearly normal tones. "Thank you for agreeing to see me so promptly."

"I could hardly refuse to see my own Prime Minister," she replied. The words could have been courteous, even pleasant. Delivered with the tonelessness of a computer they were something else entirely.

"Your secretary indicated that the matter had some urgency," she continued in that same chill voice which pretended that she didn't know precisely what had brought him here.

"I'm afraid it does, Your Majesty," he agreed, wishing passionately that the unwritten portion of the Star Kingdom's Constitution didn't require the formality of a face-to-face meeting between a prime minister and the monarch at a time like this. Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid it, although he'd toyed—briefly, at least—with the thought that since this was technically only a violation of a truce and not a formal declaration of war he might have evaded it.

"I regret," he told her, "that it is my unhappy duty to inform you that your realm is at war, Your Majesty."

"It is?" she asked, and he heard his own teeth grinding together at the proof that she intended to spare him no smallest fraction of his humiliation. She knew precisely what had happened at Trevor's Star, but . . .

"Yes, unfortunately," he replied, forced by her question to formally explain the circumstances. "Although we've received no notification that the Republic of Haven intended to resume active military operations, their Navy violated Manticoran space this morning at Trevor's Star. Their task force was engaged by our own forces and driven off after suffering relatively light casualties. Our own forces suffered no damage, but the Republic's action in violating the Trevor's Star territorial limit can only be construed as an act of war."

"I see." She folded her hands on her desk and looked at him steadily. "Did I understand you to say, My Lord, that our own forces drove the intruders off?"

The emphasis on the possessive pronoun was subtle but unmistakable, and High Ridge's eyes flickered with rage. But, again, still trapped by the prison of formality and constitutional precedent, he had no choice but to reply.

"Yes, Your Majesty. Although, to be more precise, they were driven off as a result of the joint action of our forces and those of the Protectorate of Grayson."

"Those Grayson forces being the ones which made unauthorized transit through the Junction yesterday?" she pressed in those same, chill tones.

"Yes, Your Majesty," he made himself say yet again. "Although, it would be more accurate to call their transit unscheduled rather than unauthorized."

"Ah. I see." She sat there for several seconds, regarding him levelly. Then smiled with absolutely no trace of warmth or humor. "And how do my ministers recommend that we proceed in this moment of crisis, My Lord?"

"Under the circumstances, Your Majesty, I see no option but to formally denounce our own truce with the Republic of Haven and resume unrestricted military operations against it."

"And are my military forces in a fit state to pursue that policy in the wake of this attack, My Lord?"

"They are, Your Majesty," he replied a bit more sharply, despite everything he could do to control his tone, as her question flicked him unerringly on the raw. He saw her satisfaction—not in any flicker of an expression on her own face, but in the treecat's ears and body language—and fought to reimpose the armor of his formality. "Despite the Republic's incursion into our space, we suffered no losses," he amplified. "Effectively, the military position remains unchanged by this incident."

"And is it the opinion of my Admiralty that this incident was an isolated one?"

"Probably not, Your Majesty," High Ridge admitted. "The Office of Naval Intelligence's estimate of the enemy's current order of battle strongly suggests, however, that the forces which violated the Trevor's Star limit constituted virtually the entirety of their modern naval units. That clearly implies that any other operations they may have carried out, or attempted to carry out, must have been on a much smaller scale."

"I see," the Queen repeated. "Very well, My Lord. I will be guided by the views of my Prime Minister and my First Lord of Admiralty in this matter. Are there other measures which you wish to propose?"

"Yes, there are, Your Majesty," he replied formally. "In particular, it's necessary that we inform our treaty partners of the state of affairs and notify them that we intend to formally reinvoke the mutual defense clauses of our alliance." He managed to get that out without even gagging, despite the gall and bile of suggesting any such thing. Then he drew a deep breath.

"In addition, Your Majesty," he continued, "given the significance and extreme gravity of the Republic's actions, and the fact that the entire Star Kingdom is now forced, however unwillingly, to take up arms once again, it is my considered opinion as your Prime Minister that your Government must represent the broadest possible spectrum of your subjects. An expression of unity at this critical moment must give our allies encouragement and our enemies pause. With your sovereign consent, I believe that it would be in the Star Kingdom's best interests to form a government of all parties, working together to guide your subjects in this moment of crisis."

"I see," the Queen said yet again.

"In time of war, such a suggestion often has merit," she continued after a brief pause, her eyes deadly as her sentence reminded him of another meeting in this same office four years before. "Yet in this instance, I think it may be . . . premature." High Ridge's eyes widened, and the merest hint of a smile touched her lips. "While I am, of course, deeply gratified by your willingness to reach out to your political opponents in what you've so correctly described as a moment of crisis, I feel that it would be most unfair to burden you with possible partisan disputes within your Cabinet at a moment when you must be free to concentrate on critical decisions. In addition, it would be unjust to create a situation in which you did not feel completely free to continue to make those decisions for which you, as Prime Minister, must bear ultimate responsibility."

He stared at her, unable to believe what she'd just said. The Constitution required him to inform her and obtain her formal consent to any proposal to form a new government, but no monarch in the entire history of the Star Kingdom had ever refused that consent once it was sought. It was unheard of—preposterous! But as he gazed into Elizabeth Winton's unflinching, flint-hard eyes, he knew it was happening anyway.

She gazed back at him, her face carved from mahogany steel, and he recognized her refusal to countersign his bid for political survival. There would be no "coalition government," no inclusion of the Centrists and Crown Loyalists to broaden his basis of support . . . or share in the guilt by association if additional reports of disaster rolled in. Nor would she even permit him to extend in her name the invitation William Alexander would almost certainly have refused, thus giving High Ridge at least the threadbare cover of being able to accuse the Centrists of refusing to support the Crown at this moment of need.

She had limited him to just two options: to continue without the cover of a joint government with the Opposition, or to resign. And if he resigned, it would be no more and no less than a formal admission of full responsibility on his part.

The moment stretched out between them, shivering with unspoken tension, and he hovered on the brink of threatening to resign if she did not endorse a coalition. But that was what she wanted. That was precisely the politically suicidal misstep into which she strove to drive him, and he felt a flowering of indignant outrage that the Crown should resort to such blatant political maneuvering at such a moment.

"Were there any further measures you wish to propose or discuss?" she asked into the ringing silence, and he recognized the question's message. Whatever he might propose, whatever he might recommend, she would saddle him unmistakably, personally, and permanently with responsibility for it.

"No, Your Majesty," he heard himself say. "Not at this time."

"Very well, My Lord." She inclined her head in a slight bow. "I thank you for your solicitous discharge of your responsibilities in bringing this news to me. I'm sure it must have been a most unpleasant task. And since there are undoubtedly many matters which require your urgent attention in the wake of this unprovoked aggression, I won't keep you longer."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," he got out in a strangled voice. "With your permission?"

He bowed considerably more deeply to her, and she watched with pitiless, unflinching eyes as he withdrew.

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