Not that any of his fellow Grayson citizens disagreed where High Ridge was concerned. It was just that Graysons as a group were more . . . deferential than most Manticorans. It confused MacDonnell sometimes. The crux of the Star Kingdom's entire current political dilemma lay in the aristocracy's control of who formed the executive branch of their government. That same condition, in an even more virulent form, had afflicted Grayson before the Mayhew Restoration had returned the authority which had eroded away from several generations of protectors. But the profound deference which the steaders of Grayson had always extended to their steadholders seemed oddly lacking in Manticorans where their own nobility was concerned.
Of course, White Haven himself was a member of that very aristocracy, which probably accounted for his own lack of automatic respect for it.
"I won't pretend that I don't share your hopes, My Lord," the admiral said after a moment. "But it looks as if he's decided to put the best face he can on the situation."
"He doesn't have a lot of choice," White Haven pointed out. "To be honest, I'm quite certain that was a part of Protector Benjamin's calculus when he hatched this entire notion. And while it would never do for me to accuse the Protector of meddling in the internal political affairs of an ally, I think he put High Ridge into his current position with malice aforethought."
MacDonnell looked a question at him, and the earl shrugged.
"High Ridge's only option is to pretend he's in favor of Benjamin's actions. Anything else would make him look at best weak and ineffectual, since he couldn't keep Benjamin from doing it anyway. At worst, if it turns out we're right and he's wrong about the Peeps' intentions, he'd look like a complete and total idiot if he'd sat around protesting the fact that we're saving him from his own stupidity. Not," White Haven added with a particularly nasty smile, "that we're not going to make him look stupid anyway, if the ball does go up."
MacDonnell cocked his head. White Haven sounded almost as if he wanted the Peeps to attack because of the damage it would do the High Ridge Government. The Grayson knew he was being unfair. That the earl most certainly didn't want the Republic of Haven to go back to war with the Star Kingdom. But White Haven had clearly passed beyond the point of hoping that that wouldn't happen. Unlike MacDonnell, who continued to cherish his doubts, despite the fact that the original warning had come from Lady Harrington, the earl had completely accepted the proposition that a Havenite attack was imminent. And since he'd done all he could to prepare for that looming catastrophe, he was ready to look for whatever silver lining he might be able to find.
And, MacDonnell conceded, anything that offered to remove Baron High Ridge from power had to be considered a silver lining.
The Grayson returned his attention to Benjamin the Great's flag plot. It was appropriate that he and White Haven should be standing on that ship's bridge at this particular moment, he thought. The "Benjie," as the Navy affectionately referred to Benjamin the Great, had been White Haven's flagship from the day she commissioned until the conclusion of Operation Buttercup. But although the ship was still less than eight T-years old, Benjie belonged to a class of only three ships. Her design had been superseded by the Harrington —class SD(P)s, and MacDonnell knew that some of those in the Office of Shipbuilding wanted to designate his flagship for disposal. He hated the very thought of sending her to the breakers for reclamation, although he had to admit that there was a certain cold-blooded logic to it. Grayson was straining every sinew to build and maintain the fleet it had. It couldn't afford to retain ships, however new, or however beloved, whose design had been rendered obsolescent.
Personally, MacDonnell hoped Shipbuilding would adopt one of the alternate proposals, instead, and refit the Benjie's shipboard launchers to handle the latest generation of multi-drive missiles. But that was someone else's decision. For right now, Benjamin the Great was exactly where she needed to be. Designed from the keel out as a fleet command ship, she had arguably the finest flag deck and fleet information center of any ship in commission anywhere.
"Whatever High Ridge might think of all this," White Haven said, stepping closer to MacDonnell and gazing into the plot with him, "Admiral Kuzak doesn't seem to have any reservations, does she?"
"No, she doesn't," MacDonnell agreed. His eyes moved from the plot which showed his own command to the secondary display set for astrographic mode. The Trevor's Star terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction lay much closer to the system primary than the Junction itself lay to Manticore-A. Still, there was the better part of three light-hours between it and Trevor's Star itself. Even with the powerful forts which had been built to cover it, the sheer distance between the system's inhabited planet and the terminus had created an almost insuperable difficulty for Admiral Theodosia Kuzak.
Her Third Fleet could be in only one place at a time, unless she wanted to accept an extremely dangerous dispersion of its strength. In theory, the forts could deal with most attacks on the terminus itself. Actually, calling them "forts" was something of a misnomer. To most people, the term "fort" implied a fixed fortification, something ponderous and immobile. But while the terminus forts were certainly ponderous, they were not—quite—immobile. Instead, they might be better thought of as enormous sublight superdreadnoughts. Ships so huge that their low acceleration made them totally unsuited to mobile operations, but which remained capable of at least minimal combat maneuvers . . . and which could generate the impeller wedges which were the first line of defense for any warship.
But for all their massive size, thick armor, and potent weaponry, they—like Benjamin the Great—were an obsolescent design. Their rate of fire in a missile engagement was only a fraction of that which a Harrington —class ship could produce. If they had time to deploy missile pods before a battle, they could throw stupendous salvos as long as the pods lasted, of course. But that was another way of saying they could fire for as long as no one could get warheads close enough to take out their pods with proximity kills.
When only the Manticoran Alliance had possessed SD(P)s, no one had worried particularly about pod vulnerability. First, because no other navy in space could produce the weight of fire an SD(P) was capable of, and, second, because no other navy in space could match the range of the Alliance's multi-drive missiles. Which meant that the forts' pods would be able to wreak havoc on any attacker before that attacker could possibly get close enough to kill their remaining pods. But the navy Thomas Theisman had built did have SD(P)s. And it was just possible that those SD(P)s had multi-drive missiles of their own.
And under those circumstances, pod vulnerability became a very serious concern, indeed.
All of which helped to explain why a conscientious system commander like Theodosia Kuzak had been so unhappy about her mutually contradictory defense obligations. The official Admiralty view, that there was no evidence that the forts could no longer look after themselves against anything the Peeps might bring to bear against them, was cold comfort for the officer on the spot. Completely ignoring the potential consequences for her career if the Peeps managed to get in and destroy the forts, the sheer loss of life such attack would entail had undoubtedly been enough to give her nightmares. So it was with enormous relief that she had turned responsibility for supporting the forts over to MacDonnell's task force while she concentrated her own SD(P)s and supporting CLACs to cover San Martin and the inner system.
"If you were the Peeps, and you were planning to attack this system, My Lord," he asked White Haven now, "which would you concentrate on? The terminus, or San Martin? Or would you go for both simultaneously?"