"I'd like to think so," Honor said when he paused, inviting comment. "In fact, I'm inclined to think it has. I'd feel more comfortable about that if I didn't know how tough-minded Thomas Theisman is, though." She shook her head. "He was bad enough as a destroyer skipper at Blackbird; nothing I've seen indicates that he's turned into any more of a pushover since."
"Agreed." Caparelli nodded vigorously. "On the other hand, Pat and I have discussed this at some length with her analysts. Pat?"
"No one in my shop, with the possible exception of one or two very junior officers who haven't yet learned the limits of their own mortality, is prepared to make any unqualified predictions at this point, Your Grace," Givens said. "The consensus, however, is that Apollo's effectiveness, in particular, has to have come as a significant shock to their systems. In fact, it was more effective in action than we expected, even after your exercises, and it came at them completely cold. Given the way Sanskrit has to resonate with what happened to them in Buttercup," she nodded at Hamish, "they've got to be wondering if we're prepared to do the same thing to them all over again."
"I don't doubt that," Honor replied. "And don't misunderstand me, I'm not trying to say the analysts are wrong. I'd just like everyone to remember that Thomas Theisman wasn't prepared to roll over and play dead when we introduced the missile pod, and they didn't have it. And when we introduced the SD(P) and MDM, he and Shannon Foraker simply sat down and came up with effective responses to both of them."
"We're remembering that," Caparelli assured her. "I assure you, no one in this building is ever likely to take Admiral Theisman lightly again."
"I'm glad to hear it," she said. "I wish, though, that we could at least find this 'Bolthole' of theirs. I know it's not likely to be as critical to their building capacity as it was, and it's got to be becoming steadily less so as the units under the construction in their other yards progress. But that seems to be where Admiral Foraker and her little brain trust are working on their various new weapons and doctrines, and that makes it a target well worth hitting any time."
"We all agree, Your Grace," Givens told her feelingly. "Unfortunately, we still haven't found it. Which leads me to suspect that our fundamental assumptions were in error."
"How?" Honor asked curiously.
"We assumed it was located in a Peep star system," Givens said simply, and Honor blinked.
"We assumed that for two reasons," Givens continued. "First, because it has to have a certain level of industrial capacity, which suggests a certain level of population to support it, which, in turn, suggests that it has to be an established star system. Second, we assumed that because we were too intellectually lazy to consider anything else."
"You're still being too hard on yourself, Pat," Caparelli put in, and Givens shrugged.
"I'm not staying up nights kicking myself, but it's ONI's job to think outside the box, as well as in it."
"I think I probably agree with Sir Thomas," Honor said. "What they've accomplished there obviously requires the capacity you were talking about."
"Yes, it does. But I've been going over some of our older intelligence summaries looking for clues. Some of those summaries date clear back to before the Pierre Coup, and a couple of very interesting ones came out of debriefs of some of the people you brought back from Cerberus, as well. On the basis of that, I'm beginning to suspect they didn't move into any star system's existing infrastructure, at all. I think they built it from the ground up in one where no one already lived."
"What?"
"I also think I'd like to sit down and discuss it with Admiral Parnell," Givens told her with a crooked smile. "Unless I miss my guess, he's the one who actually started the project even before President Harris was assassinated. Some of the people you brought back from Cerberus have mentioned large labor drafts from the political prisoners there. There was always some of that going on, of course, but assuming their memory of the timing is accurate, we can't account for where quite a few of them might have gone. That's not conclusive; the People's Republic was a big place, and they always had 'black projects' of one sort or another going on somewhere. We couldn't possibly have identified or tracked all of them. But I'm beginning to think 'Bolthole' is actually a complete secret colony of theirs somewhere. One the Legislaturalists started. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out that Pierre and the Committee took it and ran with it-probably on a scale Harris had never initially contemplated. But if I'm right, the reason we haven't found it despite all of our scouting efforts is because we don't have any idea where to look for it in the first place. It may even be outside the Republic's official borders!"
"That's not a very reassuring thought," Honor remarked after a moment.
"Even if it's true, it doesn't actually make things that much worse, Your Grace," Caparelli said. "As you said, Bolthole as a physical production facility is becoming progressively less important to them. Mostly, it's just frustrating to think that the Peeps were thinking far enough ahead to do something like this that long ago."
"And," Givens added sourly, "from a professional viewpoint, it's a lot more than 'frustrating' to think about an intelligence failure on this scale. We ought to at least have known they were doing it, even if we didn't have a clue where!"
"Stop beating yourself up over it," Caparelli said, his tone just a bit sharper, and Givens nodded.
"Whether or not Pat's new theory about Bolthole is accurate, Your Grace," the First Space Lord continued, turning back to Honor, "your point about the Peeps' tough-mindedness in general, and Theisman's in particular, is well taken. In fact, we believe it's time to give Admiral Theisman another whack as quickly as possible. We need to drive home the fact of his tactical inferiority and, hopefully, confirm the Peeps' belief that we've deployed the new systems broadly across the fleet."
Honor regarded him thoughtfully. Emily's "no business talk when Honor's home" decree-and Hamish efforts to avoid intruding into Caparelli's authority in the operational sphere-had foreclosed the sort of discussion she and Hamish might otherwise have had. But from the little he'd said, and the wisps of anxiety she'd tasted from him, she had a shrewd notion of where Caparelli was headed.
"Lovat," the First Space Lord continued, "was an important target, but secondary. It hurt them, no question of that, and it was a major escalation from the sorts of targets we'd been hitting. But as far as their economy and central war effort is concerned, it was still a peripheral target, in a lot of ways. The Strategy Board thinks it's time we went for a first-rank target, instead, and we think we've found one which may not be Bolthole but still ought to get their attention. Jouett."
He paused again, and despite her earlier suspicions, Honor's nostrils flared. The planet of Shadrach, in the Jouett System, was one of Haven's oldest daughter colonies. The system had been colonized from Haven less than fifty T-years after the colony ship Jason reached an uninhabited planet called Manticore, and the system's population was well up into the billions. It was also the site of the oldest of the Republican Navy's satellite shipyards, and its defenses were almost as heavy as those of the Haven System itself.
"Sir Thomas," she said, very carefully, into the waiting silence, "that's... a very audacious proposal. And I imagine it would certainly come under the category of 'whacking' them smartly. But Jouett's going to be a very, very tough target. We succeeded at Lovat in large part because they didn't have a clue what was coming. That won't be the case the next time we go in. Two things I think we're all agreed the new management in Nouveau Paris is demonstrating are resiliency and flexibility. My staff and I haven't looked at Jouett closely, since it never occurred to us to include it in our targeting list, given the parameters laid down for Cutworm and Sanskrit. Nonetheless, I'd be very surprised if its defenses haven't been upgraded much more comprehensively even than Solon's and Lovat's."