"Hamish? Honor?" Elizabeth looked at them, eyebrow arched.
Honor glanced at her husband for a moment, then squared her shoulders and faced Elizabeth with Nimitz pressing his cheek into the side of her neck from the back of her chair.
"I think Sir Thomas has it pretty much right, Elizabeth," she said. "To be honest, even if the League threw its entire active wall of battle at us in a single wave, we could be fairly confident of defeating it. Throwing in their wallers in dribs and drabs is simply going to make the job even easier from our perspective. The only real worry, in the short term, is the question of our ammunition supply, and judging from what happened at Spindle, I'm pretty sure we've got enough to deal with their entire active superdreadnought strength.
"Unfortunately, if we end up having to do that, it'll make a huge hole in our supply of missiles, which will present all kinds of potential problems if we can't work something out with Haven after all. Which, of course, doesn't even consider what we might need against Manpower."
Her voice turned harder and flatter on the last word, and the light glittering in her brown eyes for just a moment sent a shiver down Elizabeth Winton's spine. Most of the Star Empire's senior officers and political leaders were careful to emphasize—in public, at least—that they still didn't know exactly who'd attacked the home system. There was no doubt whatsoever in Honor Alexander-Harrington's mind, however.
And there was no doubt in Elizabeth's mind exactly what Honor intended to do about it. It wasn't that Elizabeth disagreed with her; it was only that even after all these years, the queen still hadn't realized that when it came down to it, Honor Alexander-Harrington's granite determination was even more merciless than her own famed temper. Colder and less outwardly expressive, perhaps, and definitely slower to awaken, yet that made it only more deadly in the end.
"If we could count on facing only the League, I think we'd probably be pretty much okay for the first couple of years," Honor continued after a moment. "It's going to take them longer to get substantial numbers of the Reserve refitted, activated, and manned—and trained—than it's going to take us to get our missile production started up again. They've got enough battlecruisers and cruisers in Frontier Fleet to pose a significant threat to our commerce if they resort to a full bore guerre de course and use them as raiders, but thanks to the wormhole network, we actually have the 'interior lines,' so they'd be even more vulnerable to commerce raiding than we are.
"But the one thing we wouldn't be able to do is take the war to them until we got the missile supply back under control, and that means they'd have a lot more time to react to their technological inferiority. Without an adequate, reliable supply of missiles, we can't go after them. If they choose not to go after us while they look for answers to our hardware advantages, then by the time we've got our missile lines back in full production, they'll probably be well on their way to producing new designs that are a lot more survivable and a lot more dangerous. And, even worse, we've lost so much industry that there's no way in the galaxy we could hope to stay in shouting range of their production capability. If they turn out six times as many ships, we lose, even if their ships are individually only half as good as ours."
"And the fact that, as you say, we can't take the war to them means we can't exploit those fracture lines of the League's you pointed out to us," Elizabeth said, nodding her head in grim understanding and agreement.
"Exactly." Honor reached up to stroke Nimitz and met her queen's eyes levelly. "If this information is accurate, if Rajampet really is planning on feeding another four hundred wallers into the furnace, it's going to get really, really ugly, no matter what happens. Worst-case scenario, frankly, is that in defeating them we inflict enough losses to provide the rallying point Sir Thomas was talking about. Assume each of those ships has a complement of sixty-five hundred, which is actually on the low side. That would still give us over two and a half million people aboard the wallers alone. Potentially, that's two and a half million fatal casualties, on top of the losses Crandall took at Spindle. More likely, we'd kill a lot less than that outright and take the rest prisoner, but I'm not sure that would be a lot better from a psychological perspective. To be honest, I'm inclined to think that's exactly what Rajampet has in mind."
White Haven stirred beside her, and she looked at him.
"I'm not one of the Sollies' greater admirers myself," he said, "but deliberately courting that kind of death toll purely as a political maneuver seems a bit too cynically calculating to me, even for a Solly."
"That's because deep down inside you're a straightforward, decent sort of person, Ham," his brother said grimly. White Haven's gaze moved to him, and Grantville shrugged. "You might want to remember Cordelia Ransom and Rob Pierre. The number of casualties Honor's talking about here are actually a lot lower than the casualties Pierre was willing to inflict just by launching his pogroms against the Legislaturalists, much less fighting us . Ransom wouldn't have turned a hair at sacrificing three or four times that many people if it suited her purposes, and let's not even get started on that sociopath Saint-Just!"
"But—" White Haven began, then stopped, and Grantville nodded.
"That's right, Ham." His voice was almost gentle now. "We're used to thinking of Peeps as political sociopaths. From what I've seen so far out of Kolokoltsov and his crew—and especially out of Rajampet, so far—they're at least as bad. Maybe even worse, because I don't think any of them have the personal involvement or the legitimate basis for outrage that Pierre, at least, definitely did have. To them, it's just a matter of gaming the system the way they've always gamed it."
"Which leaves us in one hell of a mess, doesn't it?" Queen Elizabeth summed up, and no one in that conference room disagreed with her.
* * *
"Are you serious, Admiral Trenis?"
Eloise Pritchart tried to keep the disbelief out of her voice as she gazed at the director of the Republican Navy's Bureau of Planning. That position made Linda Trenis the Republic of Haven's equivalent of Patricia Givens, and, over the years, especially since the fall of the People's Republic, she'd become accustomed to presenting reports some of her superiors initially found . . . somewhat difficult to credit. Now she simply looked back at the president and nodded.
"Yes, Madam President, I'm quite serious."
"But, let me get this straight—you don't have any idea who sent you this particular information?"
"That's not precisely what I said, Madam President. I know exactly who handed it over to us. No, I don't know the identity of the person who actually provided it at the source, but I do know where it came from—in general terms, at least."
"But, excuse me, Linda," Thomas Theisman said, turning to face her and the president, with his back towards the panoramic window of Pritchart's Pйricard Tower office, "why in the world would somebody in Beowulf suddenly drop this kind of information on us of all people?"
"That's something I'm less prepared to theorize about," Trenis said. "I have some thoughts on the subject, but that's all they are at this point."
"Well, if you have any thoughts on this subject, you're well ahead of me," Pritchart said candidly, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs. "So let's hear them, Admiral."
"Of course, Madam President."
Linda Trenis was a highly organized woman. One of her greatest strengths when it came to building tightly reasoned analyses was the way she carefully considered every snippet of information before fitting it in place. It was painfully evident that the thought of presenting what could be no more than her preliminary, off-the-cuff impressions to the Republic's head of state wasn't very high on her list of favorite things to do. But she'd known it would be coming, so she drew a deep breath and began.