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?"