"If we survive in power, we may be able to find a way to make our displeasure felt at a later date," High Ridge told him. "But to be completely honest, Edward, even that's unlikely. I think this is just one of those insults we're going to have to swallow in the name of political expediency. Not," the Prime Minister assured the First Lord grimly, "that I intend to forget it, I assure you."
Secretary of State Arnold Giancola sat in his office and stared at his chrono. Another nine hours. That was all.
He closed his eyes and leaned back in his comfortable chair while a complex storm of emotions whirled and battered against the back of his bland expression.
He'd never planned on this. He admitted that to himself, although it wasn't easy for him to concede the collapse of his plans. He remained convinced that he'd read the Manties correctly; it was Eloise Pritchart he had catastrophically underestimated. Her, and her control over Thomas Theisman. Or perhaps he'd been wrong there, too. He'd never expected her to be able to drag Theisman into supporting any open act of war even if she'd had the nerve to contemplate one—not after how hard the Secretary of War had fought against even admitting Bolthole existed. But perhaps all along, Theisman had possessed the intestinal fortitude to unflinchingly contemplate a resumption of military operations and Giancola, deceived by his insistence on concealing his new fleet until it was ready, simply hadn't recognized it.
But wherever Giancola's error had lain, it was too late to undo it now. Even if he commed the President this instant, confessed all he'd done, and showed her the originals of the Manties' diplomatic notes, it was still too late. The Navy was in motion, and no one in the Haven System could possibly recall it in time to stop the Thunderbolt from striking.
He could have stopped it, he admitted to himself. He could have stopped it before it ever began. Could have stopped it before Pritchart ever appeared before Congress in the blazing majesty of her righteous indignation, laid the Manties' "duplicity" before it, and carried her request for what amounted to a declaration of war by a majority of over ninety-five percent. Could have stopped it even after that, if he'd been prepared to confess his actions and accept the consequences before the final activation order had been sent to Javier Giscard.
But he hadn't been, and he still wasn't. A huge part of that, he knew with bleak honesty, was simple self-preservation and ambition. Disgrace and a total, irrevocable fall from power would be the very least he could expect. Trial and imprisonment were far from unlikely, however strongly he might argue that he'd actually violated no laws. Neither of those was a fate he was prepared to embrace.
Yet there was more to it than that. He hadn't planned on this, no; but that didn't necessarily make what was happening a disaster. Certainly he'd manipulated the Manties' diplomatic correspondence, but the fact that he might have changed their words didn't mean he'd misrepresented their ultimate goals. Weak and unprincipled High Ridge and his associates might be, but the expansionist trend of Manticoran policy remained, and another Manty regime—one with a spine and the will to make its policies effective—would inevitably have embraced those same goals in time. And so, perhaps, this was in fact the best of all possible outcomes. To strike now, when the Navy's advantage over the Manties was at its strongest . . . and when the current Manticoran government was at its weakest.
And, he acknowledged, when Thomas Theisman had displayed a degree of strategic imagination and willingness to take the war to the enemy which Giancola had never imagined for a moment he might possess.
The Secretary of State opened his eyes, looked at the chrono once again, and felt the decision make itself, once and forever.
It was too late to stop what was going to happen. Confessing his true part in the events which had set Operation Thunderbolt in motion could only destroy him without stopping anything. And so he would not admit it.
He turned to his private computer station and brought it online. Half a dozen keystrokes were all it took to erase the record of the original Manticoran notes he had stored "just in case." Another three keystrokes and that portion of the Department of State's molycirc memory core where those notes had been stored was reformatted with a "document shredding" program guaranteed to make the data permanently non-recoverable.
Grosclaude, he knew, had already destroyed all of his records on Manticore, as well as every other sensitive file which might fall into enemy hands, in anticipation of Thunderbolt. The thought held a certain ironic satisfaction, even now, because no one—not even the Manties, when the discrepancy in the diplomatic record became public knowledge—could accuse Grosclaude of destroying incriminating records in the name of self-preservation. Not when he'd had specific orders to do so from the President of the Republic herself.
And that's that, he thought. No tracks, no fingerprints. No proof.
Now, if only the Navy gets it done.
Javier Giscard looked at the bulkhead date-time display, and his bony face was expressionless.
It was very quiet in his day cabin, but that was going to change in little more than three hours. That was when Sovereign of Space's general quarters alarm would sound and First Fleet would clear for battle.
But the war, Giscard thought, would start even sooner than that. In approximately ninety-eight minutes, assuming Admiral Evans met his ops schedule at Tequila the way Giscard expected him to.
The admiral laid out his own thoughts before his mind's eye and tried to decide—again—what he truly felt.
Wary, he thought. And yet, if he was honest, confident, as well. No one in the history of interstellar warfare had ever attempted to coordinate a campaign on such a scale. The operational plan Theisman and the Naval Staff had worked out included literally dozens of minutely coordinated operations. The timing was tight, yet they had avoided situations in which it was truly critical. There was plenty of room for slippage, for schedules to be readjusted on the fly. And the strategic audacity at its core was almost literally breathtaking for an officer who had survived the desperate, uncoordinated defensive efforts of the People's Navy following the Legislaturalist purges.
Dozens of operations, each with its own objectives, its own place in the overall strategy. And each—even Giscard's own attack on Trevor's Star—independent of one another. Any one, or two, or even three, of them could fail completely without spelling the defeat of Operation Thunderbolt as a whole. To be sure, the destruction of Third Fleet at Trevor's Star was the most important single objective, but even if Giscard failed there, the other operations would inflict a defeat upon the Star Kingdom which would utterly surpass even the one Esther McQueen had delivered in Operation Icarus.
The objective of Thunderbolt, Giscard knew, was to convince the Manties that they must negotiate in good faith and compel them to begin the process. Eloise had no ambitions beyond that point, as she had made crystal clear in her address to the Congress. But much as Giscard loved her, he wasn't blind to the blind spots in her own judgment. By and large, they were so minor, especially compared to her strengths, as to be completely negligible. But sometimes . . . sometimes her faith in the rationality of others betrayed her.
It seemed so obvious to her that all the Republic wanted was to be treated fairly, for the Star Kingdom to negotiate in good faith, that some essential part of her couldn't quite believe anyone else could fail to see that. She didn't want to conquer the Star Kingdom. She didn't want to reconquer Trevor's Star. All she wanted was for the Star Kingdom to talk to her. To once and for all negotiate an end to this ugly, festering, endless conflict. And so, because that was all she wanted and because it was so obvious to her that it was all she could want, she truly believed that the Manties would recognize both the justice of her demands and the realities of their hopelessly weakened position and allow her to achieve the equitable diplomatic solution she craved.