He shook his head, and Honor sighed and nodded in unhappy acknowledgment of his point. She still couldn't believe it, not of the Thomas Theisman she'd met. And yet, there it was. Whether she could believe it or not, it had happened. And God knew people often changed. It was just that she couldn't imagine what sort of process could have so completely warped the internal steel of the man she'd known in so short of time.
"Well, whatever is going on there," she said, "how bad is it, really, on the military front? And can we really afford to have you sitting in a dirtside office as First Lord instead of in a fleet command? I'm supposed to visit the Admiralty tomorrow afternoon for a formal briefing from Admiral Givens, but the bits and pieces I've already heard aren't very encouraging."
"I suppose that's one way to put it," White Haven said grimly. He reached for his wineglass and sipped deeply, then put it down and leaned back in his chair.
"As far as where we can 'afford' for me to be, I don't see any alternative to my taking on the Admiralty. I don't want to, but someone has to do it, and Elizabeth and Willy are right about how important is it for that someone to be a person the entire Alliance trusts. Which, for our sins, means either me or you. And, to be perfectly honest about it, it makes a lot more sense for it to be me. So I suppose—" he smiled crookedly at her "—that this war is going to be yours, Honor. Not mine.
"As for how bad the situation is, High Ridge and Janacek between them, with more than a little help from Reginald Houseman, managed to do even more damage than we'd guessed. Of course, what happened when the Peeps hit us made it far worse, but if they hadn't set us up for the blow, our backs wouldn't be so firmly against the wall.
"Basically, we've lost in excess of twenty-six hundred LACs, seventy cruisers and light cruisers, forty-one battlecruisers, and sixty-one superdreadnoughts." Honor inhaled sharply as he listed the figures. "None of which includes all of the ships which were currently under construction at Grendelsbane, or the construction personnel we lost there and in half a dozen minor repair facilities scattered around what were occupied Peep star systems. And we've lost," he finished in a granite voice, "every single system we'd taken away from them—with the sole exception of Trevor's Star—since the war started. We're back where we were strategically on Day One, aside from controlling all of the Junction termini, and proportionately, we're much weaker now compared to the Peep navy than we were before the Battle of Hancock."
Honor gazed at him in dismay, and he shrugged.
"It's not all doom and gloom, Honor," he told her. "First of all, thank God for Grayson! Not only did they save our asses at Trevor's Star and help bail you out at Sidemore, but they constitute the only true strategic reserve the Alliance has. Especially now that Erewhon has effectively gone over to the Peeps." He glowered again. "Erewhon didn't have the full Ghost Rider tech package, or the beta-squared nodes, or the LAC fission plants, but they had just about everything else . . . including the newest compensator version and the latest grav-pulse transmitters. When Foraker gets her hands on that and starts reverse-engineering it, we're going to be in an even worse mess than we are now.
"Maybe even worse than that, though, Pat has been engaged in a massive reevaluation of ONI's files, cross-indexed with information Greg Paxton has made available, and she's come up with some possible ballpark figures for what the Peeps may still have in reserve. I'm inclined to think that she's probably overestimating their capabilities, which would be a natural enough reaction to how badly we were surprised by what they hit us with. On the other hand, I've seen her basic analysis, and it certainly doesn't seem to me that she's being alarmist in the way she approaches it. So it may be that she's right. But if she is, then the Peeps have a minimum of another three hundred of the wall currently under construction. A minimum, Honor. That's at a time when Grayson has just under a hundred SD(P)s, and we're all the way up to seventy-three. Since we seem to have observed damned close to two hundred of them in action exclusive of the ones they sent to Sidemore, we're looking at what might conservatively be called an unfavorable balance of forces."
Honor had felt her face become stiff and drawn as the figures rolled over her. She'd already had first-hand experience of how effectively the Republic was using its new ships and hardware. Now she had a sense for the sheer size and mass of the juggernaut which had been assembled to smash the Alliance.
"We're not dead yet, Honor," Hamish told her almost gently, and she shook her head as if she could physically banish her sense of doom.
"What do you mean?" she asked after a moment.
"First of all, what you managed to accomplish at Sidemore seems to have had a profound impact on their thinking. Obviously, they don't know exactly what happened yet—it's going to take their commander on the spot a lot longer to get home, since he can't use the Junction. But they know they got reamed, if only from news reports of what we've already announced. Willie and I have discussed it with Elizabeth, and we're going to go ahead and announce their loss figures officially tomorrow morning, as well. I doubt that we're going to really astonish anyone, after the rumors have already been flying for so long. But when we confirm that you managed to destroy well over half of their attack force and damage most of the rest of it, I think it will give them even more pause. Not to mention what it's already done for our own civilian—hell, not just civilian!—for our civilian and military morale. What you pulled off out there is the only really bright spot in this entire disaster."
"What about what you and Niall managed at Trevor's Star?" she challenged.
"What we managed there was a negative event," he replied. She started to say something else, and he shook his head. "I'm not trying to be falsely modest, Honor. And I'm not trying to downplay what we accomplished, or to pretend that the public as a whole and the San Martinos in particular don't realize that what we staved off would have turned the Peep offensive into a total and complete disaster for the Alliance. But the fact remains that the fleet we had a shot at escaped intact, with nothing worse than the loss of a few LACs. The fleet that you had a shot at didn't just retreat—it was destroyed. I'm prepared to admit that in a strategic sense Sidemore is infinitely less vital to the Star Kingdom than Trevor's Star, and even that the ships they committed to the attack there seem to have included a higher percentage of obsolescent types which, in the final analysis, they could afford to lose much more readily than they could have afforded to lose the ships they committed to Trevor's Star. All of that may be true, but it's also beside the point.
"Given the increases in their technical capabilities, especially now that Erewhon is on their side of the line, the moral ascendancy we established before the cease-fire is even more vitally important. Frankly, they've just demonstrated that we don't have a right to that ascendancy any longer, but they may not realize it. For that matter, our people may not realize it . . . if we're lucky. The fact that you defeated them so decisively in the one place where effectively equal forces stood and fought is what we want them to remember. It's what we want our own people to remember, too, but it's even more important where the Peeps are concerned.
"The fact that they refused to engage at roughly equal odds at Trevor's Star is also going to loom in their thinking, I hope, of course. But that refusal takes on an entirely new light in the wake of what happened at Sidemore. Now it could be seen not simply as prudence—which, between you and me, is precisely what it actually was—so much as cowardice. Or, at least, an admission of their continued inability to meet us on equal terms."