"For that matter, they've got another option, Hamish," Honor pointed out. "One that actually worries me more, in some ways."
"What option?" Elizabeth asked.
"They could just refuse to declare war at all," Honor said bleakly. Elizabeth looked confused, and Honor shrugged.
"If we get into a shooting war with the League and we're going to have any chance of achieving a military victory—or, for that matter, of inflicting the kind of casualty totals Hamish was just talking about, so that they settle for a negotiated peace—we're going to have to take the war to them. We're going to have to demonstrate everything we've learned about deep-area raids instead of system-by-system advances. We're going to have to go after their military infrastructure. Take out their more modern and larger system defense force components. Rip up their rear areas, wipe out their existing, obsolete fleet and its trained personnel, take out the shipyards they'd use to build new ships. In other words, we're going to have to go after them with everything we have, using every trick we've learned fighting Haven, and demonstrate that we can hurt them so badly that they have no choice but to sue for peace."
Elizabeth's face had hardened with understanding, and her brown eyes were grim as they met Honor's.
"But even that won't be enough," Honor continued. "We can blow up Solarian fleets every Tuesday for the next twenty years without delivering a genuine knockout blow to something the size of the League. The only way to actually defeat it—and to make sure that we've put a stake through its heart and it doesn't just go away, build a new fleet, and then come back for vengeance a few years down the road—is to destroy it."
Elizabeth's hard eyes widened in surprise, and Sir Anthony Langtry stiffened in his chair. Even White Haven looked shocked, and Honor shrugged again.
"Let's not fool ourselves here," she said flatly. "Destroying the League would be the only way for the Star Empire to survive in the long haul. And frankly, I, for one, think that might actually be a practical objective, under the right circumstances."
"Honor, with all due respect," Langtry said, "we're talking about the Solarian League."
"A point of which I'm well aware, Tony." Her smile was as bleak as her tone. "And I realize we're all accustomed to thinking of the League as the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful, most advanced, most anything-you-want-to-mention political unit in the history of humanity. Which means that right along with that, we think of it as some sort of indestructible juggernaut. But nothing is truly indestructible. Crack any history book, if you don't believe me. And I'm seeing quite a few signs that the League is at or very near—if, in fact, it isn't already past—the tipping point. It's too decadent, too corrupt, too totally assured of its invincibility and supremacy. Its internal decision-making is too unaccountable, too divorced from what the League's citizens really want—or, for that matter, think they're actually getting! We were just talking about Governor Barregos and Admiral Roszak. Hasn't it occurred to any of you that what's really happening in the Maya Sector is only the first leaf of autumn? That there are other sectors—not only in the Verge, but in the Shell, and even in the Old League itself—that are likely to entertain thoughts of breaking away if the League's veneer of inevitability ever cracks?"
They were all looking at her now, most of them with less shock and more speculation, and she shook her head.
"So if we get into an all-out war with the League, our strategy is going to have to have a very definite political element. We'll have to make it clear that the war wasn't our idea. We'll have to drive home the notion that we're not after any sort of punitive peace, that we're not trying to annex any additional territory, that we have no desire to conduct reprisals against people who don't want to fight us. We need to tell them, every step of the way, that what we really want is a negotiated settlement . . . and at the same time, we have to hit the League as a whole so hard that the fracture lines already there under the surface open right up. We have to split the League into separate sectors, into successor states, none of which have the sheer size and concentrated industrial power and manpower of the present league. Successor states that are our own size, or smaller. And we have to negotiate bilateral peace treaties with each of those successor states as they declare their willingness to opt out of the general conflict to get us to stop beating on their heads. And once we have those peace treaties, we have to not only honor them, but step beyond them. We need to use trade incentives, mutual defense pacts, educational assistance, every single thing we can think of to show them that we are—and to really be, not just pretend to be—the sort of neighbor and ally they'll want around. In other words, once we break the League militarily, once we splinter it into multiple, mutually independent star nations, we have to see to it that none of those star nations have any motive to fuse themselves back together and gang up on us all over again."
She paused, and there was a new and different silence in the conference room. All of them, with the probable exception of Hamish Alexander-Harrington, were gazing at her in astonishment. Elizabeth looked less surprised than most of the others, but there was an edge almost of wonder in her expression.
Not a man or woman at that table would have questioned Duchess Harrington's military insight, or tactical or strategic ability . . . in the purely military arena. Yet most of them still tended to think of her as a fleet commander. Manticore's best fleet commander, perhaps, but still a fleet commander. As they'd listened to her, they'd come to realize how silly that was—and how foolish they'd been not to recognize their own silliness much earlier. In their defense, most of the insight she'd previously shown in the field of political strategy and analysis had focused on domestic concerns, or on the internal workings of the Manticoran Alliance. It hadn't occurred to them that she might have already focused that formidable ability on the Solarian League as the Star Empire's next great challenge, and that had been remarkably blind of them.
"I think you're right," Elizabeth said finally, and managed a half-humorous grimace. "I suppose I've been so fixated on how much I don't want to fight the League, how terrifying an opponent it would be, that I've been much more aware of our own weaknesses and disadvantages than I have of any weaknesses it might suffer from."
"You're not the only one who's been guilty of that, Your Majesty," Sir Thomas Caparelli said. "Over at Admiralty House, the Strategy Board has been aware for quite some time of the need to launch all-out operations against the League in the event of open hostilities. But we'd never been able to take our planning beyond the point of somehow beating the League to its knees, taking out its military infrastructure, and then committing the Star Empire to a multigeneration occupation policy. There's no way we could possibly hope to garrison or physically occupy every system of the League, or even just the more important industrial nodes. But what we could do is to picket the major systems. To require the League to renounce a large, modern navy after defeating its existing navy militarily, and then to post observers in all of the systems where a navy like that could be rebuilt in order to keep an eye on the shipyards and call in our own heavy units at the first sign of treaty violations in the form of new warship construction.
"But the problem with that kind of strategy is that it virtually assures that at some point someone in the League is going to emerge with a revanchist policy and the muscle to back it up. They're going to figure out a way to do a Thomas Theisman on us, and they're going to be able to build a fleet big enough to at least force us to pull our pickets out of the occupied systems to deal with it. At which point other systems that won't like us very much will join the fray and then, as Hamish so succinctly put it, we're toast.