"As Hamish just pointed out, it's going to take a lot longer for any of their dispatches to get to Old Terra, unless Byng is smart enough to stand down and sends his own message traffic through the Junction. So I don't think there'd be any point in expecting the League to reach any final decisions on how it's going to respond very quickly even if it wanted to. And, frankly, I don't think it is going to want to. Sheer arrogance would take care of that, but as Tony's already suggested, they're also going to be thinking in terms of precedents. Of what's going to happen if they 'let us get away with this' sort of response. If we go ahead and start inflaming public opinion, that's only going to make them even stubborner about admitting for an instant that their man screwed up."
"All true," Elizabeth said. "On the other hand, I don't think anyone in this room really expects them to be anything but stubborn about admitting that they're at fault."
"No," Langtry said. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't appear as reasonable as possible, Your Majesty."
He grimaced, obviously unhappy at the thought of playing the part of a moderating influence. Unfortunately, that responsibility came with his present job, and he buckled down to it.
"The fact that we're demanding the at least temporary surrender of their warships—and that our commander on the spot is authorized to use deadly force if they refuse—is going to infuriate them," he continued. "There's no way around that. The fact that we're willing to infuriate them, though—that we're willing to go eyeball-to-eyeball with them over this, which no one else has been gutsy or crazy enough to do literally for centuries—is going to make a pretty firm statement about how seriously we take this. I think we could probably afford to handle it in a way that suggests we don't want to publicly humiliate the League without looking irresolute."
"I think Tony and Honor have both made valid points, Your Majesty," Grantville said after a moment. "I'm inclined to recommend that we not go public at this point. In fact, I think we should specifically point out to them that we haven't handed the story over to the media when we draft our note to Foreign Minister Roelas y Valiente."
Elizabeth thought for a moment, then nodded.
"I think that makes sense," she said. "At the same time, though, I don't think we can afford to sit on it for too long, for several reasons."
"Which reasons are you thinking about?" Grantville asked just a little bit warily.
"The most important one to me personally is that we have a responsibility to inform our own citizens," the queen replied. "And that's not just coming from any moral sense of responsibility, either, Willie," she added a bit pointedly. "Sooner or later we're going to have to go public with this, and if we delay too long, people are going to wonder why we didn't tell them about it sooner, since it happens to involve the minor matter of the possibility of our ending up at war with the most powerful navy in the galaxy while we're already at war with the Republic of Haven. I think it's important that they understand why we're running this sort of risk, and exactly how important the principles involved really are."
Grantville winced slightly. Although he'd been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the the Duke of Cromarty's cabinet, he'd never fully agreed with Cromarty's news policies during the First Havenite War. Cromarty's position had been that things could be kept secret only so long, however hard people in positions of authority tried. Since unfortunate news items were going to leak anyway, he'd reasoned, a policy of openness and honesty would be the best way to increase the public's confidence in official statements when they did. Grantville—although he'd been only the Honorable William Alexander at the time—hadn't disagreed with either of those points. His problem had been his intense dislike (actually, he was prepared to admit without any particular apology, hatred would have been a better choice of noun) for the official news establishment of the Solarian League. Anything reported in Manticore would be reported on Old Terra within the week, and the Solly newsies had not, in his opinion, wasted very much effort trying to report it factually and without bias.
There'd been a time, before the initial Peep attacks at places like Hancock Station and Yeltsin's Star, when the Solarian press had covered the looming confrontation between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the People's Republic with something approaching evenhandedness. In fact, a segment of the Solly news establishment had covered it from a pro-Manticore position, and the Star Kingdom's government and its well-established public relations organs in places like Beowulf, the Sol System, and Far Corners had deliberately played to the "plucky little Manticore" view of that portion of the press.
But the Solarian resentment of the Star Kingdom's dominant position in interstellar commerce had always been there in the background, and once the actual shooting began, it had started coming to the fore. "Plucky little Manticore" had been seen in quite a different light when the Royal Manticoran Navy was winning battle after battle after battle. The fact that it was winning those battles against heavy numerical odds only seemed to make many Solarians more inclined to see the Star Kingdom as the militarily superior side, and it was only a short hop (for many of them) to somehow transforming Manticore ("I never liked those pushy Manties, anyway. Always too greedy and sure of themselves for a bunch of neobarbs, if you ask me! IfI were Haven, I wouldn't much care for 'em either!") into the aggressor. And the Cromarty Government's success in getting the League to embargo tech transfers to the People's Republic had only irritated that traditional Solarian resentment.
Under those circumstances, it hadn't taken the Solarian media very long to switch to what Grantville, at least, had always regarded as a revoltingly pro-Peep stance. Even the least anti-Solly Manticoran had to concede that there'd been a definite bias against the Star Kingdom, and quite a few of them would have agreed with Grantville that there was an orchestrated anti-Manticore lobby within the Solarian press corps. Yet Cromarty had stuck to his policy of openness and agreed to modify it only on a case-by-case basis and only in the face of pressing operational requirements.
That didn't mean Cromarty had been blind to the realities of news coverage in the Solarian League. Indeed, in many ways he'd been just as bitter about slanted Solarian newsfaxes as Grantville himself. But Cromarty's policy had reflected his concern with the Alliance's media. He'd accepted that the Star Kingdom was going to get hammered in the League's reportage, whatever it did, and under his premiership, the Star Kingdom's PR had concentrated primarily on making sure that a contrarian view was also presented and the accurate information from both sides was at least available to Solarians in general. Manticore hadn't exactly tried to understate StateSec's brutality in the information it fed the League through its own conduits. Nor, for that matter, had Manticoran journalists and commentators been at all shy about pointing out the fact that whereas the Star Kingdom did not censor reporters, the People's Republic did . . . and that Solarian correspondents assigned to Haven never mentioned it because doing so would get them expelled from the People's Republic.
Which, in many ways, had only made the self-appointed masters and mistresses of the Solarian Establishment even more bitterly anti-Manticore. They'd resented the Star Kingdom's and its surrogates' efforts to debunk their more outrageous misrepresentations, and the constant reminders that they uncritically repeated the Committee of Public Safety's propaganda rather than condemn PubIn's censorship had infuriated them . . . especially since they knew it was true. The fact that the Havenite propaganda had suited their own dislike of Manticore so much better than the truth, combined with their vindictive fury that anyone would dare to challenge their version of reality, had produced inevitable consequences, of course. Given the way their version of events played to stereotypical Solarian biases, the Star Kingdom's efforts had all been uphill, especially in light of the powerful vested interests in both the League's bureaucracy and its economic establishment with their own strong motives for blackening Manticore's image.