"Assuming they haven't sent out orders for the next phase even as we sit here."
"Assuming that," Givens agreed. "But if they haven't reached that point yet, it could be useful to consider inserting information we'd like them to have into that command loop."
"Such as?"
"I don't know," Givens admitted. "I just hate the thought of losing any opportunity to throw them off stride. The worst thing we could do is let them steamroller us on their timetable. I'd like to shake them up, draw them off balance."
Caparelli nodded and joined her in pondering the holo afresh.
His eyes flitted automatically back to the three most worrisome points: Yeltsin, Hancock Station, and the Talbot-Poicters area. Although the pace and violence of Haven's war of nerves had increased steadily, Manticore had held its own in actual encounters to date. The loss of Star Knight with all hands was more than offset, albeit fortuitously, by Bellerophon's destruction of two entire Peep battlecruiser divisions in Talbot. By the same token, the tragic loss of Captain Zilwicki's entire squadron had not only earned her the Parliamentary Medal of Valor, the Kingdom's highest award for heroism, but saved every ship in the convoy under her protection... and cost the People's Navy almost twice her own ships' combined tonnage. Other Peep attacks had been more successful, of course, for they had the advantage of the initiative. And, he conceded unhappily, they also seemed to have fiendishly good intelligence on supposedly secure star systems. But by and large, their successes were outweighed, in the cold, brutal logic of war, by their less numerous but more spectacular failures.
Unfortunately, that didn't mean their operation as a whole was failing. Although his redeployments to face the threat had been much less drastic than he'd originally envisioned, there was still a general shift and flow of task forces and squadrons all throughout the volume of the Alliance. That left him feeling off balance and defensive-minded, driven into passive reaction, not initiation, and some of his local commanders seemed similarly afflicted. They were making decisions which looked more than a little questionable from his own vantage point, at any rate.
He tapped his fingertips on his console, and his frown deepened. Talbot-Poicters worried him because there'd been so much Peep activity in the area. Both star systems were exposed, and the incidents within them could simply be classic probing missions. Reconnaissances in force which happened to run into local pickets—or over them, he thought grimly—in the course of pre-attack scouting missions. Except that their timing argued that the Peeps already had detailed intelligence.
Yeltsin and Hancock, on the other hand, worried him because there'd been no action in their areas, other than the original convoy raid in Yeltsin and the Caliph's mystery losses in Zanzibar. Perhaps it was because he viewed them as his most vulnerable points, but the lack of activity around either star made him wonder why the Peeps didn't want him worrying about them.
Added to which, Admiral Parks' decision to uncover Hancock was enough to give any First Space Lord ulcers. He understood Parks' reasoning, but he wasn't at all certain he shared it. In fact, he'd gone so far as to draft a dispatch ordering Parks back to Hancock only to file it unsent and settle for ordering Admiral Danislav to expedite his own movements. The RMN tradition was that the Admiralty didn't override the man on the spot unless it had very specific intelligence that he didn't have... and the one thing Sir Thomas Caparelli currently had in abundance was a lack of specific intelligence.
"They're going to do it, Pat," he murmured, eyes still fixed on the-display. "They're really going to do it."
It was the first time either of them had said so in so many words, but Givens only nodded.
"Yes, Sir, they are," she agreed, her voice equally soft.
"There has got to be some way to pull them off balance," the First Space Lord muttered, drumming his fingers harder on the console. "Some way to turn this thing around so it bites them on the ass."
Givens gnawed her lower lip a moment longer, then drew a deep breath and reached back into the display. She cupped her palm around Yeltsin's Star, and Caparelli's eyes narrowed as he raised his head to look at her.
"I believe there may be, Sir," she said quietly.
"Let me be certain I understand this correctly, Sir Thomas." The Duke of Cromarty's voice was very quiet. "You're suggesting that we deliberately entice the PRH into attacking Yeltsin's Star?"
"Yes, Sir." Caparelli met the Prime Minister's gaze levelly.
"And your reasoning for this is?" Cromarty prompted.
"In essence, Sir, we hope to set a trap for the Peeps." Caparelli cleared his throat and activated a small-scale holo display of the Yeltsin System in the high-security conference room just off Cromarty's office.
"At present, Yeltsin's Star represents our most powerful concentration short of Home Fleet itself, Your Grace," he explained. "We've taken pains to keep our exact strength in the system a secret. Given the intelligence the Peeps seem to have on our routine movements elsewhere, it's quite possible they know much more about Yeltsin than we'd like, but Admiral Givens' plan offers us at least the possibility of turning that around on them."
He manipulated controls, and the tiny star system above the table was suddenly lit by tinier flecks of bright green light.
The Graysons have spent the last year fortifying their system with our assistance, Your Grace. We're still a long, long way from completing our plans, but as you can see, we've made considerable progress and Grayson itself is well covered by orbital forts. They're small, by our standards, because they're left over from the Grayson-Masada cold war, but there are a lot of them, and they've been heavily refitted and rearmed. In addition, the Grayson Navy itself must now be considered equivalent to at least a heavy task group of our own Navy—a truly enormous accomplishment for a seventeen-month effort from their beginning tech base—and Admiral D'Orville's Second Fleet is an extremely powerful formation. All in all, Sir, this system has turned into an excellent place for an attacker to break his teeth."
"But it also happens to belong to a sovereign ally of the Star Kingdom, Admiral." Concern and more than a hint of disapproval tinged Cromarty's voice. "You're suggesting that we deliberately draw the enemy into attacking one of our friends—without consulting them."
"I fully realize the implications of my suggestion, Your Grace, but I'm afraid we've reached a point at which we don't have time for consultations. If Admiral Givens is correct—and I think she is—the Peeps are counting down against a timetable they may have spent years perfecting. We have our own defensive plans, but allowing them to begin a war on their terms, at a time of their choice, against a target of their choice, is extremely dangerous. If at all possible, we need to draw them into a false start or, at least, into attacking a target of our choice. But to do that, Your Grace, we have to get the information we want them to have into their hands in time for them to rethink their operations and send out new orders from their central command node before their scheduled 'X' hour.
"The key to the plan is one of Admiral Givens' communication officers at BuPlan. The Havenite ambassador's gone to great pains to suborn him. He's been working for them for almost two T-years now, but what they don't know—we hope—is that he's actually working for Admiral Givens. To date, his reports have been one hundred percent accurate, but he's reported only information which couldn't hurt us or which we were reasonably certain the Peeps could obtain by other means.