"But you were willing to take the chance with me?" Grantville asked, with a flicker of returning humor.
"I had no choice where you were concerned," she said with another crooked smile. "It was talk to you, or go direct to Elizabeth. And, frankly, I'm not at all sure how she would have reacted."
"Poorly." Grantville's voice was bleak. "I don't believe I've ever seen her this furious. Whether it was the Peeps or someone who simply wanted us to believe it was, she's out for blood. And the hell of it, Honor, is that even if every single thing Cachat told you was the truth-so far as he knows, as you yourself said-I agree with her."
"Even if Haven had nothing to do with any of the assassinations and assassination attempts?" she asked quietly.
"If I could be certain they hadn't, I might feel differently. But I can't be. All I can know for certain is that one man who ought to know is convinced they didn't. But he's got to have a huge vested interest, whether he realizes it or not, in believing the best about his own government. I'll accept that he has no evidence this was a Peep operation. But if I recall my briefings on what happened in Erewhon and Congo accurately, his superiors might have had a very good reason to keep him out of the loop on something like this, considering who would probably have been among the victims. Am I wrong?"
"No," she admitted.
"So what am I supposed to do, Honor? We're in the middle of a war, we've already announced we're resuming operations, the Peeps have probably already resumed operations on the basis of our note, and the fact that Cachat didn't have anything to do with the attempt to kill Berry and Ruth doesn't prove someone else from Haven didn't."
He shook his head slowly, his expression sad.
"I'd like to believe you're right. I want to believe you are. But I can't make my decisions, formulate the Star Kingdom's policy, based on what I'd like to believe. I believe you military people are familiar with the need to formulate plans based on the worst-case scenario. I'm in the same position. I can't dislocate our entire strategy on the basis of what Zilwicki and Cachat believe to be true. If they had one single scrap of hard evidence, that might not be so. But they don't, and it is."
Honor tasted his honesty... and also the impossibility of changing his mind.
"I'm sorry to hear that," she said. "I think they're right, at least about whether or not what's happened represents the official policy of the Pritchart Administration."
"I realize that," Grantville said, and looked into her eyes. "And because I know you genuinely feel that way, I have to ask you. Are you still prepared to carry out your orders, Admiral Alexander-Harrington?"
She looked back, hovering on the brink of the unthinkable. If she said no, if she refused to carry out the operation and resigned her commission in protest, it would almost certainly blow the entire question wide open. The consequences for her personally, and for her husband and wife, would be... severe, at least in the short term. Her relationship with Elizabeth might well be permanently and irreparably damaged. Her career, in Manticoran service, at least, would probably be over. Yet all of that would be acceptable-a small price, actually-if it ended the war.
But it wouldn't. Grantville had put his finger squarely on the one insurmountable weakness: the lack of proof. All she had was the testimony of two men, in private conversation. At best, anything she said about what they'd told her would be hearsay, and there was simply no way she could expect anyone outside her immediate circle to understand-or believe-why she knew they'd told her the truth.
So the war would continue, whatever she did, and her own actions would have removed her from any opportunity of influencing its conduct or its outcome. That would be a violation of her responsibility to the men and women of Eighth Fleet, to her Star Kingdom. Wars weren't always fought for the right reasons, but they were fought anyway, and the consequences to the people fighting them and to their star nations were the same, whatever the reasons. And she was a Queen's officer. She'd taken an oath to stand between the Star Kingdom and its enemies, why ever they were enemies. If the Star Kingdom she loved was going back into a battle in which so many others who'd taken that oath would die, she couldn't simply abandon them and stand aside. No, she had no choice but to stand beside them and face the same tempest.
"Yes," she said quietly, her voice sad but without hesitation or reservation. "I'm prepared to execute my orders, Willie."
Chapter Fifty-Seven
"What's the latest on our visitors?" Admiral Alessandra Giovanni asked.
"Pretty much unchanged, Ma'am," Commander Ewan MacNaughton replied. "Their starships are still stooging around outside the hyper limit, but their platforms are dancing all over the damned place... and making sure we know it."
He grimaced and waved one hand at the huge display showing the Lovat System's inner planets and the space about them.
The system's G-6 primary floated at the display's center, orbited by the innermost cinder-which had never attained the dignity of an actual name, aside from Lovat I-and then the planets Furnace, Forge, and Anvil. At seven light-minutes from the primary, Forge, the system's only habitable world, would have enjoyed a pleasant climate, if not for its pronounced axial tilt. Although, to be fair, if you liked severe seasonal weather changes (which MacNaughton didn't), Forge was still a lovely world.
It was also heavily industrialized.
The Lovat System had originally been settled by the Aamodt Corporation, one of the huge industrial concerns which had helped build the original Republic of Haven's enormous wealth and power only to go the way of the dinosaur under the People's Republic. The current system governor, however, Havard Ellefsen, was a direct descendent of the Aamodt Coporation's founder, and Lovat had somehow avoided the worst consequences of the PRH's efforts to kill every golden goose it could lay hands on. Despite the fact that it was less than fifty light-years from the Haven System, Lovat had remained one of the unquestioned bright spots of the People's Republic's generally blighted economy, and the system's industrial concerns had played a major role in the Republic's industrial renaissance since the economic reforms Rob Pierre had forced through and the restoration of the Constitution.
Among other things, Forge's current population of almost three billion was deeply involved in the enormous naval construction programs Thomas Theisman had initiated after going public about the existence of the Republican Navy's new ship types. To be sure, the Lovat System wasn't one of the primary yard sites. Its local industry was much more heavily committed to the construction of light units-light attack craft and the new light cruiser classes-and fleet support vessels-ammunition ships, personnel transports, general cargo haulers, and repair ships. Despite that, it was among the Republic's twenty or so most important star systems, and its system defenses reflected that importance.
Just over eight thousand LACs were based on Forge and the system's orbital platforms. A permanent covering force of three battle squadrons-admittedly, of pre-pod types, but still a total of twenty-four superdreadnoughts-was assigned, and the system was liberally blanketed with system defense missile pods. In the last six months, Lovat had also received not just one Moriarty platform, but three, the second pair to serve solely as backups for the first.
And, MacNaughton thought, there's also the defenses I can't see.
All of which explained why Commander MacNaughton was as confident as his admiral that no Manty raiding force was going to stick its nose into Lovat.
"We've got their arrays in several quadrants of the inner system," he continued, indicating the wavering icons representing the ghost-like sensor traces which were the best his platforms could do against current-generation Manticoran stealth technology. "They've been buzzing around for over sixty hours now, and we've still got hyper footprints jumping in and out all around the periphery. It's starting to get on my nerves, Ma'am."