Mission of Honor

Chapter Thirty

The men and women in the conference room rose in a spontaneous gesture of respect as Queen Elizabeth III came through the door.

The queen normally had little use for such formalities. In fact, they usually irritated her, since it was her opinion that all of them—including her—had better things to be doing with their time. But today she simply nodded back to them and crossed without speaking to her own chair. She carried Ariel in her arms, and Prince Consort Justin walked at her side. Justin's own treecat, Monroe, rode on his shoulder, and the 'cats' flattened ears, the way Monroe's tail wrapped around his person's throat, reflected the dark emotional aura of the room entirely too well.

Justin pulled back the queen's chair and seated her before he sat at his own place. Their treecats arranged themselves along the backs of their chairs, settling with tightly-coiled tension, and then the standing officers and civilians followed the prince consort's example.

For a small eternity the silence was total, and Elizabeth surveyed the faces of her most senior advisers and ministers. She didn't need Honor's empathic sense to know what all those people were feeling. None were the sort to panic, yet in many ways, the horrifying impact of what happened had hit them even harder than the general public. For the public as a whole, the shocked disbelief, the stunned incomprehension, was its own anesthesia . . . for now, at least. That was going to change, and, given human nature, all too many of the Old Star Kingdom's subjects were going to blame her and, even more, the men and women sitting around this conference table with her. Rational or not, it was going to happen. Elizabeth knew that . . . just as she knew that entirely too many of those advisers and ministers already blamed themselves .

And just as she knew the shock of the totally unanticipated cataclysm which had descended upon them had been made incomparably worse by coming so closely on the heels of the news from Spindle. In her worst nightmares, she would never have believed Manticore's prospects could be so catastrophically shifted in barely three T-days. She knew how mentally and emotionally paralyzing that body blow had been for her; she suspected that even she couldn't imagine how stunning and traumatizing it had been for the men and women directly responsible for the Star Empire's defense.

"All right," she said finally, her voice level. "I already know it's bad. Tell me how bad." She looked around the circle of faces, and her brown eyes settled inevitably upon one of them. "Hamish," she said quietly.

"Your Majesty," Hamish Alexander-Harrington said in a flat, unflinching, yet curiously deadened voice, "I think the short answer is very bad. I'm not qualified to speak to the civilian aspects. I'm sure Tyler"—he nodded across the table to Sir Tyler Abercrombie, the Home Secretary "—has better information on the civilian casualty toll than I do. But from the purely military perspective, it would be extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, to exaggerate the damage this has done to us."

The Earl of White Haven looked away from Abercrombie, sitting very upright in his chair and turning it slightly to face the queen directly.

"Hephaestus, Vulcan , and Weyland are gone, Your Majesty. There's been some talk about recovering some of the modules and repairing them, but my staff's current estimate, based on input from both BuShips and BuWeaps, as well as from Construction and Repair, is that it would be faster and more efficient to start over from scratch.

"That means we've just lost every 'hard yard' we had. I don't as yet have a complete count of the numbers and classes of ships lost with them, but I already know it represents a significant loss of combat power. In addition, we've lost better than ninety-nine percent of the labor force of all three stations. For all intents and purposes, the only real survivors we have are people who, for one reason or another, were off-station when the attack hit. Most of them ," he added heavily, "also lived aboard the stations, which means virtually all of them have lost their entire immediate families. That means it's going to be quite some time—and rightly so—before their morale recovers to a point at which they can really be considered part of the labor force again."

His face showed his distaste at having to make that observation. Grief and bereavement, especially on such a horrific scale, weren't supposed to be reduced to mere production factors, but whether they were supposed to be or not, they were something which had to be taken into consideration this time, and he continued unflinchingly.

"The damage to the dispersed orbital yards is almost as bad. At this moment, my best figures are that fifteen of them—none of which had units under construction—are undamaged, and another eight are probably repairable, although the ships under construction have been so badly damaged we're probably going to have to break them up and start over rather than trying to repair and complete them.

"In effect, we've lost every ship under construction, the labor force which was building them, and the physical plant in which they were being built—and which was fabricating almost all the components the dispersed yards were assembling. That means that what we have in commission and working up at Trevor's Star now is all we're going to have for at least two T-years. For any capital ships, the delay will be more like four T-years. Minimum."

Despite all the disastrous reports the other people in that conference room had already received, people winced all around the table and one or two faces turned perceptibly paler at the First Space Lord's flat, unvarnished admission.

"What about the repair facilities in Trevor's Star, Ham?" Prime Minister Grantville asked quietly, and White Haven looked at his brother.

"That's still intact," he admitted, "and it's going to play a huge part in regenerating yard capacity within the timeframe I just mentioned, Willie. But it's primarily repair capacity. It was never intended for sustained, high-volume component production , so it's going to require a lot of modification before it can really make its presence felt. And, more inportantly, we're going to have to divert a hell of a lot of its potential capacity to something we're going to need even worse."

William Alexander's face tightened at his brother's last sentence. He started to open his mouth, then shook his head and waved his right hand in a small arc, inviting White Haven to continue with his report. No doubt there'd be time for even more bad news soon enough.

"Before we can begin any new construction projects, we're going to have to replace our yard capacity, Your Majesty," the first lord went on, turning back to the queen. "We're fortunate in that our extraction and refining platforms are untouched—probably because they're so dispersed and they were too far from the building platforms for convenient targeting—but raw materials have never been a significant bottleneck for us. Fabrication has been, however, and any of our previous problems pale beside what we're looking at now. Before we can replace our yard capacity, we have to replace the core industrial capacity the space stations represented. BuShips is working on a complete listing of our repair and fabrication ships. Obviously, we'll be recalling them from most of our foreign stations—we're going to need them here, at home, too badly to leave them anywhere else.

"Given our situation where the League is concerned, the fact that we're going to be unable to increase the size of our wall of battle is obviously a huge problem. However, we actually have one that's worse."

He inhaled deeply, like a man steeling himself for the first touch of a surgeon's scalpel.

"Whoever planned this operation, obviously knew exactly how to hurt us. Not only did they take out our building capacity, but when they destroyed Hephaestus and Vulcan , they also destroyed our missile production lines. I remain confident that the missiles we have deployed are superior to those of any probable enemy, but the ones we already have aboard ship, or aboard ammunition ships assigned to our fleet formations, are all the missiles we have. All we're going to have until we can rebuild our production facilities . . . which is why I said we'd need the Trevor's Star facilities for something else even more than for rebuilding our Manticoran yards. At this time, I have no firm estimate for how long it's going to take to get Trevor's Star up for missile production—we're still inventorying our mobile repair and construction capabilities, and I'm sure some of them will help—but I'll be extraordinarily surprised if we can get new missile lines into production in less than ten T-months. And even then, it's going to take us a long time to ramp back up to anywhere near the production levels we had yesterday. Given the fact that our tactical advantages are so hugely bound up with our missile superiority, and given the numbers of missiles required to destroy or mission-kill even a Solarian ship-of-the-wall, that means our ability to take the war to the League has just evaporated. In fact, while it's likely we have enough Apollos already in inventory to finish off the Republic if it comes to that, doing so would leave us with essentially none for use against the League for almost an entire T-year."

The silence in the conference room was even deeper and darker, and White Haven seemed to give himself a little shake.

"The solitary bright spot I've so far been able to find—aside from the fact that Trevor's Star is still intact—is that Weyland was virtually empty when the attack went in." Several people blinked in surprise, and White Haven's lips twitched in something which might one day become a smile once more. "Vice Admiral Faraday had scheduled a surprise emergency evacuation exercise. Given the interruption in the station's operations—not to mention the expense and the disruption of government services on Gryphon when all those life pods dropped in so unexpectedly—I imagine Faraday probably anticipated taking more than a little flak over his exercise." The ghost of a smile disappeared. "As it happens, he doesn't have to worry about that anymore. He and his staff were aboard when the station was destroyed. All of them were lost, as was almost all of the station's senior command crew and a quarter of its engineering staff. But because of his exercise, the entire R&D staff and over ninety-five percent of the station's manufacturing workforce—and, thank God, their families—were on the planet and survived. That workforce will be literally invaluable when we start trying to rebuild."

"And how much research did we lose with the station, Hamish?" Prince Consort Justin asked quietly.

"None, Your Highness," White Haven replied, and gave Justin a hint of a nod. The prince consort, the earl knew, had already known the answer to his question. He'd asked it to make certain everyone else in the conference room knew.

"All research notes and reports were automatically backed up at a secure location on Gryphon every twelve hours," White Haven continued, still addressing the prince consort even though he was actually talking to the entire conference room. "They were downloaded by the ground station and backed up after the evacuation, so they're literally up-to-the-minute. We've lost some experimental hardware and prototypes, but we have all the data and all the minds which created the hardware in the first place."

"Which is, unfortunately, of limited utility for the immediate future," Minister Grantville observed. He smiled sadly. "Until we've got someplace to build things again, it doesn't really matter how many more wonder weapons they might be able to come up with, does it, Ham?"

"No, I don't suppose it does," White Haven agreed.

"All right," Elizabeth said again. "I'm sure none of us enjoyed hearing any of that—except the bit about Weyland , of course. But I imagine we're going to hear still more things we don't really want to know about. So let's start with you, Tyler." The queen visibly steeled herself. "What are the latest casualty figures?"

Sir Tyler Abercrombie was tall, broad shouldered, and distinguished looking. He was only a T-year younger than White Haven, and his dark hair had silvered at the temples, adding to his air of distinction. The aura he usually projected was one of calm, competent, confidence; today, his brown eyes were haunted, and his hands trembled visibly as he adjusted his memo pad's display.

"First, Your Majesty," he said, in a voice that was steadier than his hands, as he looked up from the pad at her, "I'm sure everyone present will understand that any numbers I offer at this point have to be considered purely preliminary. And I'm sure everyone else hopes as much as I do that we're going to find our initial projections are wrong—that a lot of the people who are currently missing are simply that—missing in the confusion, not dead—and that they'll turn up later. Unfortunately, I don't expect that to happen. In fact, I believe the current figures are probably going to climb at least somewhat."

Several sets of shoulders seemed to tighten, and expressions which had already been grim became set in stone.

"The loss of life aboard the space stations themselves is currently estimated at five-point-four million," the home secretary said levelly, looking back down at the pad. "That number includes only those we know were onboard at the time. It does not include arriving transients who hadn't yet passed through immigration or those who were still in the concourses waiting to transship without ever entering customs in the first place because they weren't entering Manticoran sovereignty. We don't think that latter number's going to be very high, since most interstellar through passengers make—made— their connections at the Junction, not Hephaestus or Vulcan . It also doesn't include military personnel aboard the vessels docked at the stations at the time of the attack.

"Additional loss of life from the attacks on the orbital shipyards amounts so far to three hundred and ninety-six thousand. We estimate that another thousand or so were probably killed aboard small craft and private vessels that found themselves caught in the crossfire."

He paused again, then cleared his throat.

"In the case of Gryphon, we were extraordinarily lucky. Weyland was less than half the size of Vulcan , so there was less debris to begin with. In addition, Gryphon's population is still much sparser than that of our other planets, and it's concentrated closer to the equatorial zone. There were several major debris strikes on the planetary surface, but they were concentrated in the high northern latitudes. The most serious consequences would appear to be the damage to the local ecosystems and the consequences of one major ocean strike. Human casualties, however, were nil, so far as we now know, and the estimates from my biosciences people are that the ecological damage is all well within recoverable ranges.

"In the case of Manticore itself, we were once again fortunate—in this case, in that there were a larger than usual number of tugs moving vessels and freight in and around the volume of Hephaestus . Two of them were destroyed along with the station, but the others survived, and we were also fortunate that Lieutenant Commander Strickland, the captain of one of those surviving tugs—Stevedore , I believe—reacted quickly enough to organize her fellow skippers. Between them, they managed to intercept all but a half dozen significant pieces of wreckage. The Mount Royal Palace defenses destroyed the two of those pieces which might have threatened Landing, and the other four struck either uninhabited or only sparsely inhabited areas of the planet. None struck water, either. We don't have anything like definitive numbers yet, but I doubt the total casualty count from debris strikes on the planet will exceed two hundred.

"We were less fortunate on Sphinx."

He shook his head slowly, and his eyes, darker than ever, flicked briefly to an iron-faced Hamish Alexander-Harrington before they returned to his memo pad.

"There was only a single tug in position to intervene. My impression is that its crew performed far better than anyone could possibly have expected. Nonetheless, the city of Yawata Crossing was effectively destroyed by a major debris strike. The city of Tanners Port wasn't directly impacted, but there was a major ocean strike. It would almost certainly have destroyed Yawata Crossing even without the direct hit on that city, and it did destroy at least three-quarters of Tanners Port, and three other, smaller cities, were very severely damaged. There was too little time for significant evacuation before the first impact waves came ashore, and loss of life was heavy, especially in Tanners Port. Local authorities had more warning, further away from the actual strikes, and emergency evacuation efforts thankfully reduced human losses, although property damage is certainly going to run into the high billions of dollars. The town of Evans Mountain was also badly damaged—by a cascade of smaller pieces of debris in its case—although the casualty count there seems to have been much lighter. And according to the Sphinx Forestry Service"—Abercrombie's eyes flitted to the treecats on the backs of Elizabeth and Justin's chairs—"it would appear at least one treecat clan was completely destroyed."

A soft sound came from all three of the treecats in the room. White Haven opened his arms as Samantha flowed down from his chair back and buried her muzzle against him, and Ariel and Monroe joined their voices to her own soft lament.

"Counting the known casualties on the planetary surfaces," Abercrombie concluded softly, "the civilian human death toll so far is approximately seven million, four hundred and forty-eight thousand. I've asked the Forestry Service to give us a definitive figure for treecat fatalities as soon as possible." The home secretary met Ariel's eyes, not the queen's. "They're working on that. At the moment, the best estimate from their search and rescue teams is approximately eighty-five hundred."

White Haven winced. Seven and a half million human dead was even worse than he'd anticipated. True, it was less than a third of the population of the city of Nouveau Paris. For that matter, it was about a million and a half less than the population of the city of Landing. And the permanent population of the Manticore Binary System had grown to just over 3.6 billion, an increase of almost twenty percent in just the past thirty T-years or so, so the percentage of deaths was still barely more than two-tenths of a percent of the total. But the people who'd been killed represented a horrendous percentage of the labor force which had been the backbone and the sinews of the Star Empire's industrial might. And from his own service's perspective, the naval personnel lost, combined with the casualties already suffered during the Battle of Manticore, came close to equaling the total manpower of the entire Royal Manticoran Navy at the beginning of the First Havenite War. The consequences for fleet experience, training, and morale were going to be bad enough—especially given the whipsaw effect on the heels of the surge in confidence which had followed the Battle of Spindle—but working around the casualty total might very well be enough to bring Lucian Cortez's BuPers to the breaking point this time, after all.

Against all that, less than nine thousand treecats might not seem so terrible. But there were many planets occupied by human beings, while by the Sphinx Forestry Service's best estimate, the total treecat population was probably less than twelve million, which meant those nine thousand lives represented almost a full percent of them. Not one percent of the treecats living on the planet Sphinx; one percent—one out of every hundred—of every treecat in the entire universe.

And the 'cats were telempaths.

Elizabeth had reached up to gather Ariel back into her arms, and Munro had leaned forward, pressing his wedge-shaped chin into the top of Justin's shoulder while the prince consort caressed his ears. They sat that way for several seconds, then Elizabeth bent and kissed the top of Ariel's head gently, straightened once more, and cleared her throat.

"Thank you, Tyler," she said quietly, then looked around the table again.

"I'm sure it's going to take a while for Tyler's numbers to soak in, for all of us. In the meantime, however, and however painful we may find it, it's our responsibility to look beyond the immediacy of the human—and treecat—cost and consider the future. Specifically, the extent—and speed—with which we can recover from the damage to our military, industrial, and economic power. We've already heard from the Navy. So I suppose it's your turn, Charlotte."

"Of course, Your Majesty," Dame Charlotte FitzCummings, Countess Maiden Hill, replied. Maiden Hill was the Star Empire's Minister of Industry, and her expression was every bit as grim as White Haven's or Abercrombie's.

"Basically, all I can do is confirm Hamish's summation." The dark-haired countess' normally pleasant voice was harsh, hard-edged. "We've already begun an emergency mobilization of all civilian repair and service ships assigned to both the Junction's central nexus and Basilisk. We're also making plans to tow the Junction industrial platforms back into the inner system, but, to be honest, like the Trevor's Star platforms, they're really designed for repair and routine service work, not heavy fabrication. We can increase their construction capacity, but what they have now is too small to have any immediate effect. My people are working on their own inventories of capabilities, and we've already arranged to coordinate as closely as possible with the Navy. Personally, I suspect we're going to find we have more capacity than we believe we do right this minute. The natural reaction to something like this has to be pessimism. But even if that's true, I very much doubt we're going to be able to significantly reduce the time constraints Hamish described.

"To be honest, what's going to hurt at least as badly as the hit our physical plant's taken is the workforce we've lost." She nodded her head slightly in Abercrombie's direction. "No one ever contemplated the catastrophic destruction of an entire space station without any opportunity to evacuate personnel. Even if Haven's attack had succeeded, there would've been time to evacuate, but this . . . bolt from the blue didn't give us any warning at all. For all intents and purposes, we've just lost our orbital infrastructure's entire skilled labor force—aside from the Weyland survivors—which completely disrupts our existing emergency plans. Not that any of those plans ever contemplated an emergency on this scale, anyway. Somehow we're going to have to prioritize the workers we have left between essential construction tasks and training an entirely new workforce."

She shook her head heavily.

"Our three biggest advantages, the ones that have kept us intact for the last twenty or thirty T-years, have been our R&D, the quality of our educational system and workforce, and the strength of our economy. As Hamish just pointed out, we still have the research capability, and we still have the educational system. But we no longer have the workforce, and with our industrial capacity this brutally cut back, the strength of our economy has to be doubtful, at best."

"Bruce?" Elizabeth said quietly, looking at the elegantly groomed, slightly portly man sitting between Maiden Hill and Frances Maurier, Baroness Morncreek, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Bruce Wijenberg was one of the minority of the Cabinet's members without even a simple "Sir" in front of his name. Which wasn't because titles hadn't been offered, however. Like Klaus Hauptman, Wijenberg was aggressively proud of his yeoman ancestry. Besides, he was from Gryphon. Despite his sophistication and polish, he retained at least a trace of the traditional Gryphon antipathy towards the aristocracy. He much preferred the House of Commons, and he'd been the Centrist Party's leader there before he'd accepted his Cabinet appointment. He'd really been happier in that role and he hoped to return to it sometime in the next few years, which would become impossible if he accepted a patent of nobility.

He was also the Star Empire's Minister of Trade.

"There's no point pretending we haven't just taken an enormous hit, Your Majesty," he said now, meeting her eyes squarely, his Gryphon burr more pronounced than usual. "Our carrying trade isn't going to be directly affected, and our Junction fees probably aren't going to fall too significantly—not immediately, at least. The indirect effect on our carrying trade is going to make itself felt pretty quickly, though. As Charlotte's just pointed out, for all intents and purposes we've lost our industrial sector completely. That means an awful lot of manufactured goods we used to be exporting aren't going to be available now. That accounts for a significant percentage of our total carrying trade—not to mention an enormous chunk of the Old Star Kingdom's Gross System Product. And as our industrial exports drop, the resultant drop in shipping's also going to have at least some effect on our Junction fees.

"Most of the rest of our GSP comes out of the financial sector, and I can't even begin to predict how the markets are going to react. There hasn't been an example of something like this happening to a major economic power since Old Earth's Final War, and even that's not really comparable, given how interstellar trade's increased since then. On the one hand, a huge percentage of our financial transactions have always consisted of servicing and brokering interstellar transactions between other parties, and the wormholes and shipping routes which made that possible are still there. What isn't there, and won't be for quite some time, is the dynamo of our own economy. People who were invested in the Star Kingdom—foreigners, as well as our own people—have just taken a devastating hit. How well anyone's going to recover from it, how quickly that's going to happen, and what's going to happen to investor confidence in the meanwhile is more than anyone except Nostradamus would even try to predict."

"Bruce has an excellent point, Your Majesty," Morncreek put in. The small, dark baroness looked almost like a child sitting beside the taller, bulkier, fair-haired Wijenberg, but her voice was crisp.

"At the moment, we've suspended the markets," she continued. "We can probably get away with that for a few more days, but we can't just freeze them forever, so we're going to have to respond with some sort of coherent policy quickly. And as the first stage in doing that, I think the most important thing is for us to stop and take a deep breath. As Charlotte says, we still have our educational system, and as Bruce just pointed out, shipping routes aren't going to magically change. We have the ability to recover from this . . . assuming we can survive long enough. How bad things are going to get economically before they start getting better is more than I'm prepared to predict, and the price tag's going to be enormous, but I'm confident of our ultimate capacity to rebuild everything we've lost . . . if whoever did this to us gives us the time."

She looked directly at Hamish Alexander-Harrington, Sir Thomas Caparelli, and Admiral Patricia Givens, and her dark eyes were sharp. Francine Maurier had been First Lord of Admiralty herself, and that lent her unspoken question an even sharper edge.

"I don't know whether or not they will, My Lady," Givens admitted. She seemed to have aged at least a couple of decades in the last twenty hours, and her eyes were filled with bitter anguish. "At this point, we don't have the least idea who did it to us, much less how ."

Samantha made a soft, distressed sound in White Haven's arms as the bleeding wound of the second space lord's sense of personal failure reached out to her. The earl didn't need Honor's empathy to understand his companion's distress, and his right hand twitched in an automatic reflex to reach out to Givens.

"Your Majesty," the admiral continued, facing Elizabeth squarely, "what's just happened represents the worst intelligence failure in the history of the Star Empire. A total failure. And as the head of the Office of Naval Intelligence, that failure is mine."

Givens never physically moved, yet her shoulders seemed to hunch under the weight of her admission, and silence hovered. Then Elizabeth looked past her to White Haven. She started to speak, then stopped and shifted her eyes to Caparelli, instead.

"Sir Thomas?" the queen said very softly.

"Your Majesty," the First Space Lord looked more granite-like than ever, yet he replied almost instantly, and his eyes were level and his voice—as granite-like as his face—was unflinching, "Admiral Givens is entirely correct in at least one sense. We never saw this coming. None of us saw it coming. And that does represent an enormous failure on the part of your armed forces and your intelligence services. We were supposed to keep something like this from happening, and we didn't."

The silence was deeper and darker than ever. He let it linger for a heartbeat, then inhaled deeply.

"You'll have my letter of resignation by the end of the day, Your Majesty. And the reason you'll have that letter is because the responsibility ultimately is mine. But in defense of my subordinates—including Admiral Givens—I don't think this was something any of them could have seen coming. I've already spoken with Admiral Hemphill. Her people have been systematically examining every recorded sensor reading from every surveillance platform and ship in the entire binary system. She began with the moment of the attack, and she proposes to go back for at least six T-months. While that's going to take a long time, she tells me her preliminary assessment is that we're looking at the result of a previously unsuspected technological capability that's probably at least as revolutionary in its own way as anything we've managed.

"But that kind of capability doesn't just happen overnight. Whoever did this to us didn't just wake up the day before yesterday, pick the Star Empire at random, and decide to hit us with something he just happened to have lying around. Whoever did this—and I have a few suspicions about who that 'whoever' might be—developed the capability he just used for the specific purpose, the exact sort of operation, he just used it to accomplish. And given what's been happening lately in Talbott and the League, I also very strongly suspect we were the primary target all along, from the moment he first set out to develop his new tech.

"So if there was an intelligence failure involved, it wasn't a failure to correctly interpret information. It didn't happen because someone overlooked something. I suppose it's remotely possible we're eventually going to discover there was some tiny clue somewhere , but if this attack was the work of who I think it was, then we've been trying to put their capabilities under a microscope ever since the Battle of Monica. If we didn't realize they'd managed to put together the technology and the resources to pull this off, it wasn't because we weren't looking. It was because we didn't know—because nobody knew—what to be looking for ."

No one spoke for a moment, then Grantville cleared his throat.

"I'm very much inclined to endorse what you've just said, at least to the extent that it bears upon Admiral Givens' performance." The prime minister looked directly across the table at Givens. "I've known you too long, worked with you too closely, to believe for a single moment that what's just happened represents any 'failure' on your part, Pat. From what Sir Thomas just said, it's obvious no one over at BuWeaps had a hint the weapons used in this attack were even possible , much less that anyone was actually developing them. That wouldn't be the case if whoever did the research and developing hadn't exercised extraordinary care to keep anyone from realizing what he was up to. So in my view, barring some totally unexpected revelation, this doesn't represent an intelligence failure on any one person's part. I doubt very much that it represents a failure on the part of our intelligence community as a whole , for that matter. Yes, we were supposed to see something like this coming. But to use one of Hamish's charming phrases, when you're ass-deep in alligators, sometimes it's hard to remember your original purpose was to drain the swamp. With everything that's been coming at us over the last few years, how in the world were you supposed to realize someone was cooking up a totally new—and presumably unorthodox as hell—technology that could defeat the best sensor platforms and technology in existence?"

Givens looked back at him with those wounded eyes. She didn't speak, but at least she didn't disagree with him—not openly, at any rate. He held her gaze for a moment, then looked back at Caparelli.

"I said I think I agree with what you've said at least inasmuch as it bears on Patricia's performance at ONI," he said. "But it's clear you're suggesting Manpower might somehow be behind this." The prime minister shook his head. "I know we're in the process of radically reevaluating everything we thought we knew about Manpower and Mesa. But are you seriously suggesting they have this kind of capability? Look at our confrontation with the League. What makes you think Manpower is more likely to be behind this than that the SLN's just demonstrated it has previously unsuspected capabilities of its own?"

Caparelli started to reply, but White Haven laid a hand on his forearm, stopping him.

"If I may, Tom?" he said quietly. Caparelli glanced sideways at him, then nodded, and White Haven turned to his brother.

"On the face of it, Willie, it does seem more likely someone like the League should be able to develop and deploy something like this—whatever 'this ' is—than that an outlaw outfit like Manpower or even an entire single-system star nation like Mesa could. But I'm as certain as Tom that it wasn't the League, and not just because we've convinced outselves of our technological superiority to the SLN. If they'd had this sort of capability—and some way to get it to us this quickly—they wouldn't even have bothered to talk to us after what happened at New Tuscany. Think about the scale and the scope of what whoever it really was did here." He shook his head. "I suppose it's remotely possible Crandall could have been stupid enough to sail directly into a confrontation with us even knowing the League Navy had something like this in its locker. For that matter, if the development was kept 'black' enough, she might not even have known it existed. It could even have been developed by one of the system defense forces, not the SLN itself, although that seems unlikely. But none of those possibilities change the fact that someone like Kolokoltsov would for damned sure have told us to pound sand from the outset rather than playing diplomatic games if the League had had this capability and been busy moving it into position to hit us all along.

"I agree with Tom's assessment. Whoever developed this, developed it for exactly the sort of operation he just carried out, and, frankly, there was no reason for the League to develop it. When you're the biggest, baddest conventional navy in the history of humanity—which is exactly how the SLN's always thought of itself—you don't need something like this. For that matter, you don't want something like this, because it's going to fundamentally destabilize the equation that's made you the biggest, baddest navy in existence."

Grantville looked skeptical, and White Haven waved one hand in an impatient gesture, as if he were looking for the exact way to express what he was trying to say.

"This is like . . . like our development of the grav-pulse com and the multidrive missile, Willie, only more so. You may remember just how much trouble Sonja had convincing certain members of our naval establishment—myself included—to support her changes, despite the fact that even those of us who disagreed with her had an enormous incentive to figure out how somebody our size survived against someone the size of the People's Republic. It's human nature to stick with what you know works, and there's always something scary about cutting loose from known, quantifiable, predictable technologies and capabilities, especially when you know you're the best around, have a significant qualitative or quantitative advantage over your adversaries, under the existing rules. That's why we kicked and screamed at each other so much—and so loudly.

"But we did head out in those new directions. And we did it because we had to. Because of that enormous incentive. Someone back on Old Earth once said that when a man knows he's going to be hanged, it concentrates his thoughts, and that's exactly what happened to us. But the League's never worried about that. It's never had any reason to, and that's precisely why the SLN's always been the most conservative fleet in existence. I can't conceive of any reason for the Sollies to have changed that permanently ingrained a mindset so completely. Under the existing rules, they've always been the eight-hundred-kilo gorilla, and any fundamental change could only jeopardize their position, or at least require them to duplicate the new technology themselves, quite possibly at the expense of throwing away the huge numerical superiority they've spent literally centuries building up.

"But Manpower, on the other hand—" The earl shook his head again. "However uncomfortable the conclusion may be, I think just about all of us have decided Mike and Honor are right about Manpower's responsibility for everything that's happened in Talbott. Which means that whatever we may have thought Manpower was for the last few centuries, it isn't just 'an outlaw outfit.' I still don't have a clue in Hell what it is , but I know it's more than that. And, like Tom, I know it's managed to keep anyone from guessing it was. What I can't even begin to speculate meaningfully on is how long it's been more than that, but I'm sure as hell not prepared to assume the leopard just decided to change its spots the day before yesterday. So given that someone's already demonstrated that he's developed both the intent and the capability to maneuver us into open warfare with the Solarian League, I think that someone is a much more likely candidate to have orchestrated this attack. And I also think someone who's apparently spent a long time planning and building up capabilities he didn't want the rest of the galaxy to know about is a much more likely candidate to have very quietly embraced a brand-new, completely destabilizing military technology.

"If you know anyone that description fits better than Manpower, please tell me who it is."

Grantville gazed at his brother for several seconds, then sat back in his chair.

"I can't," he said quietly.

"Neither can I." Elizabeth's grim voice drew all eyes back to her. Her own attention was fixed on White Haven and Caparelli, however.

"Am I correct in assuming you and Sir Thomas believe Manpower—or whatever the hell we should start calling these people—wouldn't have hit us and left our allies alone?"

"I doubt very much that they would have," White Haven said heavily. "I suppose it's possible they left the Andermani out. They have to be aware the Emperor's more than a little unhappy about this confrontation of ours with the League, and the Andermani have always had that reputation for . . . pragmatism, let's say. And there's got to be a limit on their current capabilities—how far they could stretch their attack when they started planning it—as well. So they may well have figured Gustav would recognize a sinking ship when he saw one. For that matter, they may have figured he's smart enough and cautious enough to figure there's no reason they couldn't do the same thing to him later if he didn't decide to step aside.

"But anyone smart enough to put all of this together is going to understand Benjamin Mayhew better than that, Your Majesty. They're going to've had a page or two in their plans for him. I'm very much afraid our dispatch boat telling him about what's happened here is going to cross one from him telling us the same thing already happened at Yeltsin's Star."

"I agree entirely with Hamish, Your Majesty," Caparelli said. "And I'd add one other point. The Andermani still don't have their military hardware fully up to our standards. The Graysons do. I don't believe anyone would launch an attack like this on us without trying to make certain he took out the people most likely to help us rebuild, as well."

Elizabeth looked at him for several more seconds, then nodded.

"That was about the conclusion I'd reached myself, unfortunately, Sir Thomas."

"I would like to make one additional point if I may, however, Your Majesty," the first space lord said quietly.

"Of course."

"I realize that at this moment what we're all most aware of is the damage we've taken and the fact that we don't have a clue how the attack was pulled off. Frankly, from a military perspective, the most frightening thing is that none of our sensor systems saw a single thing coming.

"My own feeling, and Admiral Hemphill's tentative analysis supports the same conclusion, is that what we have to be looking at is some radically new propulsive system. The missiles used in this attack were essentially conventional weapons—variants on our own MDMs. Analysis of their maneuvers from the moment they brought their drives up further suggests they were delivered in pods, probably coasted ballistically in to their launch points at a velocity of about point-two cee. The weapons that were used on the space stations were another case entirely. At this point, it looks like they were probably some sort of throwaway, disposable version of our own Shrikes , although nobody in Admiral Hemphill's shop has the least clue how Manpower—excuse me, how whoever launched this attack—managed to cram a weapon that powerful into a remote platform. Or how they gave its graser that sort of pulse endurance. For all intents and purposes, though, it's basically only a longer-ranged version of our own Mistletoe, probably using whatever new drive technology their ships use instead of relying completely on stealth the way Mistletoe does.

"So, so far, the only fundamentally destabilizing thing we've seen—or, rather, not seen—is the drive technology itself. That's scary enough, but I suspect it's an advantage that's going to be considerably less valuable the second time it's used against someone who knows it's out there, even if he doesn't know how it's done. And whatever it may let them do in sublight maneuvering, unless the laws of physics have been repealed, they still have to radiate a hyper footprint when they leave hyper-space. Admiral Hemphill tells me she feels quite confident she'll eventually be able to identify whatever trace footprint or hyper ghost we failed to spot or identify properly at the time the ships which deployed this attack's weapons dropped in on us.

"My point is, Your Majesty, that it's going to be much more difficult for this adversary to launch a second attack on this star system—or, for that matter, on Grayson or New Potsdam—without our at least spotting their arrival from hyper. If we spot any unidentified hyper footprint or ghost, we'll immediately saturate the space around it with grav-pulse com-coordinated scout ships and deploy remote sensor platforms in a shell dense enough for someone to walk across. Even without our knowing exactly what we're looking for, it's extremely unlikely any significant force of starships could penetrate that kind of surveillance wall without our detecting something . And unless these people have been able to build an awfully large fleet of SD(P)s with Apollo capability of its own, 'something' is all Home Fleet or the system-defense Apollo pods are going to need."

"So a second, similar attack is unlikely to succeed?" Grantville asked.

"Obviously no one can absolutely guarantee it won't, Mr. Prime Minister," Caparelli said with unaccustomed formality. "I think 'unlikely to succeed' would be putting it mildly, however."

The first space lord shrugged, and looked back at Elizabeth.

"Your Majesty, I fully realize that what I'm talking about here is, at best, an argument that we can defend ourselves against similar attacks. I'm not even remotely trying to suggest that until we know how it was done, and until we're completely confident we know exactly who did it, we'll be in any position to take offensive action. And one thing we've learned against the Havenites is that the side which can't take effective offensive action ultimately loses. But barring the need to expend a large percentage of our limited missile supply against either the Republic or the League before we can get new production lines set up, I believe we ought to be able to protect ourselves against whoever this was until we do know what we need to know to go after them."

Elizabeth started to speak, but White Haven raised an index finger, requesting attention. She looked at him for a moment, then nodded.

"I'd just like to add something to what Tom's said, Your Majesty," he said. "First, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the people who did this did it in hopes that either the League or the Republic will finish us off before we can recover. Frankly, I don't know how likely they are to succeed, if that was their intention; there are too many political and diplomatic elements tied up in that kind of decision tree for me to offer any kind of meaningful opinion. But, secondly, the one thing that's struck me about this—in addition to what Tom and Sonja have said about new drive technologies—is that the people behind it can't have a very large navy."

"What?" Grantville blinked at his brother, and most of the other people around the table looked either surprised or downright skeptical. Caparelli, on the other hand, nodded firmly.

"Think about it, Willie," White Haven said. "If someone had anything like the number of capital ships we have, and if all of them had this kind of technology, they wouldn't have had to raid our infrastructure . They could have simply arrived, demonstrated their invisibility, and demanded our surrender, and we wouldn't have had any choice but to give it to them. If they'd gotten a couple of dozen capital ships with this new drive of theirs as far in-system as they got their pods before launch, what other option would we have had? Even if we'd wanted to bring in Home Fleet—every single ship at Trevor's Star, for that matter—they'd already have control the planetary orbitals long before we could get into position. For that matter, they'd've been into missile range of the planets before we could even bring the system-defense missiles online to nail them! And even under the Eridani Edict, they'd be fully justified in bombarding the planets if we refused to surrender under those circumstances. But instead of going for the jugular, they attacked our arms and legs.

"Not only that, but the nature and pattern of the attack strongly suggest that whoever planned and launched it was operating with strictly limited resources. Yes, it was extraordinarily well planned and executed. From a professional perspective, I have to admire the ability, imagination, and skill behind it. But successful as it was, it was essentially a hit-and-run raid, albeit on a massive scale, and its success—as Tom has just pointed out—derived entirely from the fact that it achieved total strategic and tactical surprise. If any significant percentage of the weapons committed to it—either those graser platforms or the missile pods—had failed, or been detected on their way in, or even if we'd only suspected something was coming in time to alert the stations and activate their sidewalls and get the tugs deployed to interpose their wedges against potential attacks, the damage would have been much less severe. Give us fifteen or twenty minutes' warning, and we'd've had a good ninety-five percent of our personnel off Hephasteus and Vulcan , for that matter, not to mention getting a lot of our ships out of the station docking slips! The people who put this together had to be as well aware of those possibilities as I am, and they have to know the axiom that anything which can go wrong, will go wrong. True, they seem to have pretty much avoided that this time around, but they damned well knew better than to count on that. So if they'd had more resources to commit to the attack, we'd have seen overkill , not just 'exactly enough to do the job if everything works perfectly.'"

He shook his head.

"All of it points to the same conclusion. They've got this revolutionary new drive technology, but they don't have it in large numbers. If they had the numbers, they'd either have been able to follow through with an outright knockout blow or have at least been able to deploy enough additional weapons to give them the sort of redundancy factor any competent planner would be looking for."

Grantville's expression turned thoughtful, and several of the faces which had looked dubious began to look if not more hopeful, at least less desperate.

The Queen looked around the conference table again, and her nostrils flared.

"I think you've all made very good points," she said. "I know information's going to change over the next several days—that we're going to find some things aren't quite as bad as we thought they were, and that others are even worse. But the bottom line is this. Hamish is probably right about how the people who did this—and I think we all know who that almost certainly was—were thinking when they planned the operation. And now, they undoubtedly think they've won. It may take a while, but between Haven and the Solarian League, with our industrial base smashed, it's obviously over, and they know it. We've lost."

The silence in the conference room could have been carved with a chisel. And then, despite everything, the woman the treecats called "Soul of Steel" smiled.

There was nothing humorous or whimsical about that smile. No amusement. It was a thing of chilled steel—the smile of a wolf in the door to her den, between her young and the world as the hunting hounds closed in upon it. It was grim, hard, and yet, in spite of everything she'd just said, there wasn't a gram of surrender in it. For better or for worse, it was the wolf-smile of a woman who would die on her feet in the defense of her people and her home before she surrendered or yielded.

"No doubt they do know that," Elizabeth Adrienne Samantha Annette Winton said very softly. "But there's one tiny flaw in their analysis, ladies and gentlemen. Because even if they do know it . . . we don't."