"This, as I'm sure you must be aware, constitutes not merely a cowardly act of murder, but also an act of war."
That cold, precise voice paused, and Byng felt his facial muscles congeal. If they truly did have sensor records showing what Gold Peak claimed, then they'd be able to make a damnably good argument—at least to anyone who hadn't been here, who didn't have the experience to set events into a proper context—that his response had been . . . unjustified. But for any so-called flag officer of a pissant little neobarb navy to accuse the Solarian League Navy of committing an act of war—!
"Neither Prime Minister Alquezar nor Governor General Medusa desire additional bloodshed," Gold Peak continued. "However, they would be derelict in their duties and in their responsibilities to my Queen if they did not take the strongest measures to clearly establish responsibility for these actions, and if they did not demand accountability of those who are, in fact, responsible for them. Accordingly, I am instructed to require you to stand down your vessels. I am not demanding their permanent surrender to the Royal Manticoran Navy. I am, however, informing you that you will stand them down; you will make arrangements with the New Tuscan government to transfer all but a skeleton anchor watch of your personnel to the surface of the planet; you will stand by to be boarded by parties of Royal Marines and Royal Navy personnel, who will take temporary possession of your vessels and custody of your tactical data; and you will not delete any tactical information relevant to this incident from your computers. Your vessels will remain in this star system, under Manticoran control, until a Manticoran board of inquiry has determined precisely what happened here and who bears the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Manticoran personnel."
Despite himself, Byng felt his eyes flaring impossibly wide in disbelief as Gold Peak rolled out that litany of arrogant, intolerable demands.
"Special Minister Bernardus Van Dort is here aboard my flagship as the direct representative of the the Talbott Quadrant's Prime Minister, Governor, and Cabinet. He will present a formal note to you, recapitulating the points I've just made. He will also present a similar note to the New Tuscan government, informing them that the Star Empire of Manticore requires its cooperation in this investigation, that none of our requirements are negotiable, and that, should New Tuscany prove wholly or partially responsible for what happened here, it, too, will be held to account by the Star Empire."
She paused once more, her eyes as unyielding as her face, and her voice was harder still when she continued.
"I will reach New Tuscany orbit approximately one hour and thirty-five minutes after your receipt of this message. I require a response from you, accepting my requirements, within the half-hour. Should you choose to reject my government's requirements, I am authorized to use deadly force to compel you to change your mind. I have no more desire to kill Solarian personnel than anyone else, Admiral Byng, but Manticoran personnel have already been killed in this star system. I will not hesitate, should you choose to resist, to employ whatever force is necessary and inflict whatever casualties are required to compel your compliance. I will expect to hear from you within thirty standard minutes of now.
"Gold Peak, clear."
"Oh, fuck!"
"My own thoughts exactly," Alesta Cardot told Maxime Vézien tartly, despite the fact that the foreign minister, who was something of a bluenose, would normally have found his language offensive. At the moment, however, she had other things on her mind, and she'd just finished playing Bernardus Van Dort's transmission—which had been remarkably like Michelle Henke's message to Admiral Byng, aside from one small variation—for the Prime Minister.
"They know we're fronting for Manpower," Vézien said bitterly.
"That isn't exactly what they said, Max," Cardot disagreed. "What they said is that they know Manpower was behind what happened last year, and that it was using Monica as a front. The implication is certainly that they believe we're doing the same thing, but they didn't say they know we are."
Vézien's expression must have betrayed his opinion of such semantic hairsplitting, but Cardot shook her head.
"Think about it, Max. They were very specific about what they know about what happened here three weeks ago. They told us they have sensor data, they told us they know the Sollies fired on them, and they told us the exact status of their own ships at the moment they were destroyed. Those are facts, and they presented them as facts. If they had solid evidence that we were in Manpower's back pocket, they would have said so."
"All right, so they don't know—yet," Vézien said. "But they obviously suspect very strongly. And if we give in to these demands of theirs, any investigation is probably going to come up with the proof you've just said they don't have. In which case, we're fucked."
It was a sign of her own tension that Cardot didn't even turn a hair at his choice of verbs. What she did do was to shake her head again.
"Look, you told me to be thinking about ways to convince the Manties we didn't have anything to do with Byng's decision to kill their destroyers, right? Well, I think this is probably the best shot at that we're going to have."
"AndI think it's the best way to hand them the proof that we damned well helped set it up, whether we meant to or not!" Vézien shot back.
"You're probably right about their finding the proof," Cardot acknowledged. "But I think you may be missing the most critical point of their linking us with Monica."
"Which is?" Vézien asked skeptically.
"Which is that given everything that happened in the Cluster and at Monica, they were actually very restrained in the terms they imposed on Monica. Had the Monicans surrendered those Solly battlecruisers to Terekhov when he initially demanded that, I doubt a shot would have been fired. I doubt Tyler would've been allowed to keep his battlecruisers, but nobody would have been killed on either side, and his navy wouldn't have been totally demolished. I think one of the points of this message from Van Dort is to signal us that they aren't interested in kicking us any harder than they have to. I don't think they like us very much, and I don't think we'll be getting out of this without some serious repercussions, and probably some painful reparations, but I doubt very much that they want to impose destructive sanctions against us if they can avoid it. If nothing else, I don't think they want to be responsible for what's likely to happen on this planet if they punch us so hard the government collapses. And I know they don't want to be seen as the imperialistic conquerors of New Tuscany—not after how hard they've worked on demonstrating to the galaxy that the annexation was the result of a voluntary, spontaneous request from within the Cluster. And you just put your finger on the most critical point of all a moment ago."
"I did?" He looked at her blankly, and she shrugged.
"You said that we've helped to set up what happened here 'whether we meant to or not.' I submit that the best we can possibly hope for at this point is to prove that we didn't mean for that to happen. Whether we admit it, or they find proof of it, or not, they already know we were fronting for Manpower. That's a given, Max, and they're eventually going to take action against us on that basis, whether we cooperate right now or not. If we want to have any control over what they do to us, we'd better start distancing ourselves from any intentional shedding of Manticoran blood just as fast as we possibly can. However restrained they may want to be, for whatever reasons, if we can't distance ourselves from that, they won't have any choice but to up the ante all around."