Mission of Honor

Chapter Thirty-One

Innokentiy Kolokoltsov looked up with what he hoped was carefully hidden trepidation as Astrid Wang knocked once, lightly, on the frame of his office door, then stepped through it. She had what he'd come to think of as "The Look." If anyone had asked him to define the constituent parts of "The Look," he wouldn't have been able to. He knew it included worried eyes, tight lips, and a slightly furrowed brow, but there was a certain subtle something more, as well. Something which tied all the other components together and warned him she was the bearer of yet more bad news.

It was odd, really, how their definition of "bad news" had shifted. Once upon a time, it had meant "This is irritating, and it's going to be bothersome to deal with." Now it meant "Oh my God, what now? "

"Yes, Astrid?" His voice came out calmly enough, but a flicker in her green eyes told them she'd heard his wariness anyway. "What is it?"

"A courier from Admiral Rajampet just delivered this, Sir.

She held out the red-bordered folio of a high-security message chip, and Kolokoltsov gazed at it for a moment, his lips puckering slightly, like a man sucking on an underripe persimmon. What was it about Rajampet, he wondered, that had produced this mania for hand-delivered, officer-couriered memos rather than old-fashioned e-mail or a simple com conference over one of the innumerable secure channels available to the people who ran the Solarian League? Whatever it was, it was getting worse pretty much in tandem with the situation.

Which probably means that by next week sometime he'll be sending them written in invisible ink on even more old-fashioned paper—probably with an entire battalion of Marines providing security between his office and mine!

Somewhat to his surprise, the thought woke a flicker of genuine—and much needed—humor. Not much of one, but given what had been going on here on the League's capital planet for the past couple of days, he'd settle for any humor he could get.

"I suppose you'd better give it to me," he sighed after a moment.

"Yes, Sir." Wang handed it over, then withdrew with just a little more haste than usual. It was almost as if she were afraid simple proximity to whatever fresh tidings of disaster had just arrived would somehow infect her with an incurable disease.

Kolokoltsov snorted at the thought, and the folio, dropped the chip into a reader, and sat back in his chair.

* * *

"What do you make of Rajani's latest brainstorm?" Kolokoltsov asked considerably later that evening.

He, Nathan MacArtney, Malachai Abruzzi, and Agatб Wodoslawski were sharing a quiet and very private supper at the moment. It was the third night in a row they'd done so, and Omosupe Quartermain had been present the first two times, as well. At the moment, though, she was off chairing a very hush-hush meeting with a dozen or so of the Sol System's most powerful industrialists. Kolokoltsov didn't expect much in the way of practical solutions out of her meeting, but at least it would be evidence that she and her colleagues were Doing Something. Precisely what— in the way of meaningful improvements, at least—eluded him, but he supposed her idea of producing an "industrial mobilization plan" couldn't hurt. At least it would be something they could show the newsies.

"Which brainstorm would that be?" The sourness in Wodoslawski's smile had nothing to do with the excellent wine which had accompanied supper.

"The one about redeploying every single Frontier Fleet battlecruiser to raid Manticoran infrastructure," Kolokoltsov said dryly.

"Actually, compared to some of the other ideas he's come up, that one sounds almost reasonable." MacArtney's tone was considerably more sour than Wodoslawski's smile had been.

"Fair's fair, Nathan," Abruzzi said. "None of us have come up with any better ones."

"Yes?" MacArtney growled. "Well, it wasn't our precious Navy that screwed the pooch either, now was it? And it wasn't one of us who 'forgot' to tell the rest of us that that idiot Crandall was already in the Talbott Cluster! Not to mention that he was the one who assured us no 'magical Manticoran missiles' were going to get through his defenses!"

MacArtney, Kolokoltsov reflected, was the angriest and arguably the most frightened of their quintet. That undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the fact that Frontier Security reported to him . . . and that of all of them, he was the most aware of just how catastrophic the blow to the Solarian League Navy's prestige was really likely to be out in the star systems of the Verge.

"And then there's the whole Green Pines thing," MacArtney continued in tones of profound disgust. Abruzzi seemed to stiffen, but the interior underscretary waved a dismissive hand. "I'm not blaming you for that one, Malachai," he did not, Kolokoltsov noticed, say what he did blame Abruzzi for, "but even that's going to turn around and bite us on the ass if we're not careful thanks to Rajani! You've got the reliable newsies behind us when it comes to demanding a Frontier Fleet investigation, all right. Fine. Great! Exactly what we wanted . . . when Rajani was telling us how unstoppable his damned fleet was. The problem is that we've whipped up too much fervor in some quarters. They want us to go ahead and make the Manties admit their involvement and pay Mesa a huge indemnity, and the Manties've just proved we can't make them do anything! Not if Rajani's superdreadnoughts keep getting popped like zits, anyway!"

"I think we can all agree that neither Rajani nor the rest of Battle Fleet have precisely covered themselves with glory," the foreign affairs undersecretary observed out loud. "On the other hand, much as I hate to admit it, the same thing could be said of all of us, whether as individuals or as a group." He looked around the table, and his level brown eyes were serious. "We all took the Manties much too lightly. We didn't really press Rajani, because—let's be honest here, now—none of us really thought it mattered. No matter what the Manties might have tucked away in the way of military surprises, it didn't matter, did it? Not compared to our basic tech capabilities and the size of Battle Fleet."

"I don't think that's entirely fair, Innokentiy," MacArtney protested. "We discussed the possibilities, and he—"

"Sure, we 'discussed' a whole range of possible responses," Kolokoltsov said bitingly. "But what we didn't for even one minute consider was simply going ahead and admitting Byng was a frigging idiot who'd fucked up, murdered the crews of three Manticoran warships with absolutely no justification, and then gotten himself and everyone else aboard his flagship killed doing something even stupider. And unless my memory fails me, Nathan, a great deal of the reason we didn't consider doing that was the fact that we agreed with Rajani that we couldn't afford to let a batch of neobarbs 'get away' with something like New Tuscany because of the way Jean Bart 's destruction would undermine the Navy's prestige."

MacArtney glared at him, but this time he kept his mouth shut, and Kolokoltsov smiled thinly.

"Well, unless I'm sadly mistaken, the destruction or capture of over seventy ships-of-the-wall, plus every single member of their screen, plus their entire supply group, by a force of Manticoran cruisers , has probably had at least some slight 'undermining' effect of its own, wouldn't you say?"

MacArtney's glared grew even more ferocious for a moment. Then it seemed to fold in on itself, and he sat back in his chair, shoulders slumping.

"Yes," he admitted heavily. "It has."

"Well," Abruzzi said a bit tartly, "I'm sure all that levelheaded admission of reality is very cathartic, and I suppose it's something we really do have to do. On the other hand, deciding who's to blame isn't going to have much impact on getting out of this damned hole. Unless, Innokentiy, you want to suggest we go ahead and acknowledge that this is all the League's fault and ask the Manties if they'd be so kind as to allow us to lick their boots while we make amends."

Kolokoltsov started a quick, hot retort. He managed to stop it before any of the syllables leaked out, but it wasn't easy. Especially when he recalled how airily Abruzzi had assured everyone the Manties were only posturing for their own purely domestic political ends. It wasn't as if they'd really been prepared to risk a direct confrontation with the might of the Solarian League ! Oh, goodness, no!

"No, Malachai, that isn't exactly what I had in mind," he said after a moment, and the shutters which seemed to close behind Abruzzi's eyes told him the education and information undersecretary had recognized the careful—and hard held—restraint in his own coldly precise tone. "Mind you, in a lot of ways, I really would prefer to settle this diplomatically, even if we did end up having to eat crow. When I think of what this is going to cost, I'd be even be willing to substitute dead buzzard for the crow, if that offered us a way to avoid paying it. Unfortunately, I don't think we can avoid it."

"Not after pumping so much hydrogen into the Green Pines fire, anyway," Wodoslawski agreed glumly. "I'd say that's pretty much finished poisoning the well where diplomacy's concerned. And now that the newsies have hold of what happened to Crandall, as well, any suggestion on our part that we ought to be negotiating's only going to be seen as a sign of weakness. One that turns loose every damned thing we've been worrying about from the beginning."

"Exactly." Kolokoltsov looked around the supper table. "It's no use recognizing how much less expensive it would've been to treat the Manties' claims and accusations seriously."

In fact, Kolokoltsov couldn't think of another single event—or any combination of events, for that matter—in his entire lifetime which had come even close to having the impact this one had. The citizens of the Solarian League had been told so often, and so firmly, that their navy was the largest and most powerful not simply currently but in the entire history of mankind that they'd believed it. Which was fair enough—Kolokoltsov had believed it, too, hadn't he? But now that navy had been defeated. It wasn't a case of a single light unit somewhere, one whose loss might never even have been noted by the League's news establishment. It wasn't even a case of a Frontier Fleet squadron surrendering to avoid additional loss of life. Not anymore, anyway.

No. It was a case of an entire fleet of ships-of-the-wall—of Battle Fleet's most powerful and modern units—being not simply defeated but crushed . Humiliated. Dispatched with such offhand ease that its survivors were forced to surrender to mere cruisers of a "neobarb" navy from the backside of nowhere.

The newsies who'd charged off to the Talbott Cluster to cover the New Tuscany incidents had gotten far more than they'd bargained for, he thought grimly. They'd come flooding home in their dispatch boats, racing to beat the Royal Manticoran Navy dispatches bearing word of the battle—and of Admiral O'Cleary's surrender—back to Manticore. The first rumors of the catastrophe had actually reached the Old Earth media even before the latest Manticoran diplomatic note—this one accompanied by Admiral Keeley O'Cleary in person—reached Old Chicago.

The public hadn't taken it well.

The initial response had been to brush off the reports as yet more unfounded rumors. After all, the news was impossible on the face of things. Cruisers—even battlecruisers— simply didn't defeat ships-of-the-wall any more than antelopes hunted down tigers. The very suggestion was ludicrous.

But then it began to sink in. Ludicrous or not, it had happened. The greatest political, economic, and military power in the explored galaxy had been backhanded into submission by a handful of cruisers. Estimates of fatalities were still thankfully vague, but even the Solarian public was capable of figuring out that when a superdreadnought blew up in action, there weren't going to be a lot of survivors from its crew.

There was an edge of fear, almost of hysteria, in some of the commentary. And not just on the public bulletin boards, either. Theoretically well-informed and levelheaded military and political analysts were climbing up on the "the universe is ending" wagon, as well. After all, if the Manties could do that , then who knew what they couldn't do? Indeed, some of the most panic-stricken seemed to expect Manticore to dispatch an unstoppable armada directly through the Beowulf terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction to attack Old Earth.

To be honest, there'd been moments, especially immediately after the news broke, when Kolokoltsov had worried about the same thing. But that was nonsense, of course. For a lot of reasons—not least because he figured the Manties had to be at least a little brighter than he and his colleagues had proven themselves. Which meant he very much doubted anyone in the Star Empire of Manticore was stupid enough to attack the home world of humanity and provide the League with such a wonderfully evocative emotional rallying point.

But if there was an undeniable element of fear, there was an even more undeniable—and overwhelming—feeling of outrage. Things like this weren't supposed to happen to the Solarian League. The League's invincibility was a physical law, like the law of gravity, and just as inevitable. Which meant that if it had happened, someone was to blame.

At the moment, much of that outraged anger was directed at the Manties. The way Abruzzi's propagandists had milked Mesa's Green Pines allegations had helped there, since they'd managed to get public opinion aimed at the Ballroom "baby killers" and their "Manticoran paymasters." Personally, Kolokoltzov figured there might have been as much as one actual fact in the Mesan reports, There sure as hell hadn't been two of them, as far as he could tell, but the spectacular charges had been useful grist for Abruzzi's mill.

Except, as MacArtney had suggested, inasmuch as they'd whipped up too much heat. The public anger against Manticore—here on Old Earth, at least—was attained near hysterical levels, and the fear bound up in it in the wake of New Tuscany only fanned its heat still higher. Yet there were already at least a few voices whose owners were looking for someone to blame closer to home than the Manticore Binary System. The ones who wondered how the people in charge of the League's security could have been so soundly asleep at the switch that they hadn't even seen this coming. And other voices which wanted to know just what those same people in charge had been doing to let a loose warhead like Sandra Crandall plunge the SLN into such a disastrous fiasco.

Those were the dangerous ones, and not simply because of the threat they posed to Innokentiy Kolokoltsov's personal power and prestige. He wasn't going to pretendpersonal considerations didn't play a major part in his own attitude and decision-making processes, but they weren't the end-all and be-all of his concerns. Not by a long chalk. The far more dangerous problem was that any thorough and open investigation of the disastrous decisions leading up to the Battle of Spindle would open some very nasty cans of worms. Any inquiry like that would lead directly to Kolokoltsov and his colleagues, and while the personal consequences were likely to be highly unpleasant, the institutional consequences might well prove fatal to the entire system which had governed the Solarian League for centuries.

He'd actually considered calling for an inquiry himself, anyway. There'd been enough blue-ribbon panels and "impartial investigatory boards" which had obediently produced the necessary conclusions to hand-wave away other embarrassing little problems over the years. This time, though, in the wake of such anger and such stunning and public disclosure of disaster, he wasn't at all confident any inquiry could be properly controlled. And one that couldn't be controlled would be even more catastrophic than what had happened at Spindle.

Like it or not, there was no political structure to replace the bureaucratic one which had evolved over so many years. The very language of the League's Constitution foreclosed the possibility of such a structure, especially in light of the centuries of unwritten constitutional law and traditions which had settled into place. Kolokoltsov strongly doubted that any political structure could ever be created, under any circumstances, to truly govern something the size of the League. But even if he were wrong about that, even if it had been possible to create such a structure under ideal circumstances and conditions, it most definitely would not be possible under the ones which actually obtained.

Which meant he and his colleagues had to come up with a response. They were squarely on the back of the tiger, and the best they could hope for was that the beast came equipped with some sort of saddle and reins.

So far, he hadn't seen any sign of them, unfortunately.

"Let's face it," he told the other three. "It's too late for any sort of diplomatic settlement, and the two things we absolutely can't afford are to have the League's ability to deal with something the size of Manticore or our own ability to control the situation called into question."

"I don't disagree with you, Innokentiy," Wodoslawski said after a moment. "Unfortunately, I'd say the League's ability to deal with Manticore's already been pretty thoroughly 'called into question'."

"In the short term, you're right," Kolokoltsov agreed. "Rajani can dance around it all he wants to, but the truth is that until we figure out how the Manties did what they did—and how we can duplicate the same technology—we can't fight them."

"Then how—?" Abruzzi began.

"I said we can't fight them. That's why Rajani's idea of burying them under battlecruisers won't work."

"Actually, you know, it might," MacArtney said slowly. "Oh, we'd lose a hell of a lot of battlecruisers, but we could afford that more than the Manties could afford what would happen to their star systems."

"No," Kolokoltsov said firmly. "It won't work, Nathan. Even if it did 'work' in the sense of so thoroughly shooting up the Manties' industrial base and rear areas that they had to surrender, the cost would be catastrophic. What we'd be doing—and what there wouldn't be any way to keep people from figuring out we were doing—would be to use battlecruisers to run the Manties out of missiles. Do you really want to have someone like that bitch O'Hanrahan and her 'muckraking' friends baying at our heels over that once the smoke clears? Can't you just hear her now? Hear her explaining how we deliberately used warships—and their crews , Nathan—as missile sponges, as targets that couldn't even hope to shoot back effectively, until the Manties literally ran out of ammunition?"

MacArtney looked as if he wanted to argue, but the temptation faded quickly as he pictured exactly what Kolokoltsov was describing.

"And even if that weren't true," Kolokoltsov continued, "it would probably be even more disastrous in the long run than simply giving in to the Manties' demands right this minute. God only knows how many ships and how many people we'd lose, but despite everything Rajani's been saying, I strongly suspect casualties would only get worse, not better, and there comes a point when phrases like 'favorable rates of exchange' lose their meaning. If we managed to 'defeat' Manticore only at the expense of casualties ten times, or twenty times—or a hundred times—as great as theirs—and right now, the ratio is even worse than that, by a considerable margin—we'd've set exactly the precedent we wanted to avoid all along. Sure, Manticore would be history, but do you think the example of what they'd done to us first would just disappear in the minds of all those people out there in the Verge—or the Shell, for that matter—who don't like us very much? Not to mention the possibility that we'd take so much damage against Manticore that someone else—maybe someone who's not even on our radar horizon at the moment—saw an opportunity to come at us from behind. I don't know about you, but I can think of at least a couple of System Defense Forces whose loyalty might be just a tad less than totally reliable under those circumstances."

"So what can we do?" MacArtney demanded.

"At the moment, I think we don't have any choice but to play defense," Kolokoltsov said frankly. "The bottom line is that even if we can't afford to go after Manticore until we figure out how to match their weapons, they can't realistically come after us , either. They've got to worry about the Republic of Haven, and even if they manage to settle with Haven somehow, it's going to take time.

"What we have to do is use that time to accomplish two things. First, we have to make it clear to everyone here in the League that what's happening is the result of Manticoran decisions, not ours. The only way to stay ahead of the mob this time around is to run even faster and shout even louder, so I say we keep right on bearing down on Green Pines and endorse that recording someone sold O'Hanrahan as the real version of what happened at New Tuscany. As for what happened to Crandall at Spindle, we can't conceal our losses, but we don't have to confirm that the Manties did it to her with cruisers and battlecruisers."

"What about the newsies' reports?" Wodoslawski asked skeptically.

"We don't challenge them directly," Abruzzi said, his eyes narrowed in intense thought as he considered what Kolokoltsov had just said. "We point out that none of the newsies were aboard either side's ships during the actual battle. Oh, sure, some of them were allowed aboard a couple of the surrendered superdreadnoughts afterward, but none of them had access to the raw sensor data of the battle, and none of them have been allowed aboard any of the Manty ships to see firsthand whether they were really cruisers and not ships-of-the-wall. They're taking other people's word for what happened when you come right down to it, aren't they? So we take the position that our analysts 'strongly doubt' the Manticoran version—the only one that's been 'leaked' to the media—of what happened. We should be properly open to all possibilities, including the possibility the Manties are telling the truth, but insist the available evidence is far too sparse to confirm the truth either way at this point."

"Exactly." Kolokoltsov nodded, and Wodoslawski's skepticism eased visibly. After all, this was a game they'd played many times.

"In the meantime," Kolokoltsov went on, "we point out that everything that's happened in the Talbott Cluster is the result of Manticoran imperialism. We've had our concerns over their actions and intentions for some time, and what they did at New Tuscany, and their attack on Admiral Byng, have made us even more concerned. After all, the mere fact that they've changed their name officially to the Star Empire of Manticore is surely an indication of their expansionism and ambitions! And the reports of their backing for outright acts of terrorism and mass murder by the Audobon Ballroom—the fact that they're clearly using the Ballroom as a weapon against someone they've unilaterally decided is their enemy—only underscores the kind of lunatic excesses their territorial ambitions and arrogance produce.

"As for what happened at Spindle, there are a couple of ways we might come at it. We could always toss Crandall to the wolves, exactly the way she deserves, especially since she's not around to dispute anything we say. We could observe more in sorrow than in anger that while her intentions were good, and her suspicions about Manticoran imperialism were undoubtedly justified, she approached the situation far too impetuously. Or we could argue that the only records we have of her conversations with the Manties come from Manticoran sources . . . just like the falsified sensor recordings from New Tuscany. In reality, she was nowhere near as confrontational and bloody-minded as the Manties' version indicates. I'm sure someone over at Rajani's could create a much more reasonable version of her conversations with O'Shaughnessy and Medusa for domestic consumption. And the fact that she's so conveniently dead, under mysterious circumstances, would be only logical if the Manties were going to falsify the official record of what she'd said to them. After all, it would never do for them to have left her alive to tell the galaxy they were lying, would it?

"The first possibility—laying the blame off on Crandall—could blow up in our faces if it leads to a demand that we acknowledge her fault and more or less accept the Manties' demands in full. That would push us back into that unacceptable outcomes area. The second possibility has risks of its own, of course. The biggest one is that eventually, someone—like O'Hanrahan—is going to start screaming that we knew the truth all along and suppressed it. If that happens, we might be looking at exactly the sort of domestic witch hunts we most need to avoid. On the other hand, the majority of the public's so jaded where conspiracy theories are concerned that we could probably fob off any inquiry with a suitable cover story . . . unlike what would happen if the wrong people started nosing around our actual immediate post-New Tuscany decisions."

"And the reason we're doing all of this is—?" Wodoslawski asked.

"We're doing it because, in the end, we're going to have to go to war with Manticore, no matter what we want," Kolokoltsov said flatly. "And under the circumstances, given the fact that we can't go to war right now , the groundwork has to be set up carefully. We have to explain why the war is their fault and why we can't just go smack the hell out of them the way they deserve right this minute."

"Sounds like a tall order to me," she said dubiously, and he nodded.

"It is. But I think we've got at least a decent shot at it, if we handle things right. First, we go ahead and admit that, however many ships of whatever classes they deployed at Spindle, they've clearly demonstrated that at least some of their weaponry is, in fact, superior to anything we have currently deployed . Obviously, the Navy's been pursuing similar weapons developments for some time, but has declined to put them into service because the League was unwilling to take responsibility for such a dramatic escalation in the lethality of weapons of war. Which, by the way, also helps buy us a little time. Because of that unwillingness to pursue such an escalation, we didn't press the R&D on it, and there's going to be an inevitable delay before we can bring our own systems fully up to operational status and start getting them deployed.

"In the meantime, however, the Manties have become aware both of their current superiority and also of the fact that it's a fleeting one, and they've decided to push their imperialist agenda while they still have a decided edge in combat. Clearly, the way in which they've distorted what happened in both incidents at New Tuscany—and probably what happened at Monica, as well—is all part of an elaborate deception plan. It's intended to erect a faзade of Solarian aggression in order to create a peace lobby here in the League which will agitate in favor of allowing their new 'Empire' to retain its ill-gotten gains rather than risk a lengthy, expensive war to force them to surrender those gains. That's probably why they're insisting on this nonsense about Manpower being behind it all, too."

"So you don't think there's anything to that?" Abruzzi asked.

"To the idea that a single corporation, no matter how rich and well-connected, could arrange to throw entire battle fleets around the galaxy? Please! " Kolokoltsov rolled his eyes. "Oh, I don't doubt for a minute that Manpower is involved in this thing up to its eyebrows, and everybody knows how all the Mesan transtellars scratch each other's backs. For that matter, all that nonsense about the Manties being involved in what happened in Green Pines is an obvious crock . . . thar came out of the official Mesan 'system government.' So, sure, Manpower's involved, and we all know how much Manpower's hated Manticore—and vice-versa—for centuries. But there's no way a single corporation could be pulling the sorts of strings the Manties are insisting it is! On the other hand, Manpower is the poster child for corrupt transstellars, and thanks to people like O'Hanrahan, 'everybody knows' the transstellars are involved in corruption and sweetheart deals all over the Shell and the Verge. The Manties are tryint to take advantage of that."

"You really believe that?" MacArtney soundedskeptical again, and Kolokoltsov shrugged.

"You probably know more about that sort of thing that I do, given what goes on with Frontier Security. I'm not casting any stones when I say that, either. I'm just saying you're probably better informed about conditions in the Shell and Verge than I am. But I'm pretty sure that's what the Manties are doing. It's what I'd be doing, in their place, at any rate. Whether they really have ambitions beyond the Talbott Cluster or not, and whoever's really to blame for what happened at Spindle, they really do have all sorts of powerful motivations to create exactly the kind of 'peace lobby' I'm talking about. I think they've decided to wave Manpower's involvement under the collective noses of our do-gooders here in the League—can anyone say 'Beowulf'?—to undercut public support for further military operations against them."

"And just how will we go about defeating this nefarious Manticoran plan?" Wodoslawski asked, frowning intently.

"One thing we're going to have to do is make sure there are no more Crandalls," Kolokoltsov said. "And I know Rajani's already begun activating units from the Reserve. In fact, I suspect he's already begun redeploying his active units, as well, under Article Seven. Mind you, he hasn't told us that, but I'll be damned surprised if he hasn't. So as part of our 'No More Crandalls' policy, one thing we're going to have to do is get him back under control, whatever happens."

"I think between us we can do that," MacArtney said. "Go on."

"All right. The most important thing is that we don't even try to seek a formal declaration of war. Especially with this bogus Manpower issue running around, someone would be certain to veto the declaration even if we asked for one, and any debate in the Assembly would have too much chance of triggering the sort of witch hunt the League can't afford. Besides, we don't want to find ourselves pushed into conducting some sort of offensive operations, and that could happen if we somehow managed to get a formal declaration after all. So instead, we go right on activating the Reserve while we push—hard—on R&D to figure out what the hell they've done with their missiles and how to duplicate it. Rajani isn't going to like it, but we settle into a defensive military posture while we work on the tech problems and take the offensive diplomatically and in the media. We take the position that despite the horrible provocation Manticore has offered us, we aren't going to charge forward into a bloodbath—ours or anyone else's. Instead, we make it clear we're pursuing the diplomatic option, trying to find a negotiated solution that will get Manticore back out of the Talbott Cluster, where it belongs and, ultimately, hold it responsible for its provocative actions at New Tuscany and Monica and, probably, Green Pines, too."

"Sort of an offensive short of war, you mean?" Wodoslawski asked.

"Exactly. What we're really doing is playing for time while we find a way to compensate for these new missiles of theirs. We keep up a barrage of diplomatic missions, news releases, that sort of thing, to keep things simmering along below the level of outright combat, until we've managed to equalize the hardware equation. We don't need to have weapons as good as theirs; we just need to have weapons close enough to theirs to make our quantitative advantage decisive again. Once we reach that point, we regretfully conclude that diplomacy isn't going to work and we have no choice but to pursue the military option after all. Which we then do under Article Seven, without seeking a formal declaration."

"And you really think this is going to work?" Wodoslawski asked.

"I think it's got a good chance," Kolokoltsov replied. "I don't say it's foolproof, by any stretch of the imagination. We're going to be juggling hand grenades whatever we do, though, and the fact remains that Manticore has to realize the League is simply too damned big for them to ultimately defeat, no matter how good their weapons are. So as long as we're willing to talk, they'll be willing to talk, because if they push military operations instead, especially while they have such an overwhelming tactical advantage, they'll be clearly perceived as the aggressors, not the 'plucky little neobarbs' defending themselves against the big, nasty Solarian League. They're already half-way in the doghouse over the Green Pines allegations, and they can't afford to lend those any credence by acting the part of swaggering military bullies. There's no way they could survive rallying a unified Solarian public opinion against them, so they're not going to come to us and inflict millions of additional casualties in what's clearly a war of aggression.

"In the meanwhile, it's going to be obvious to the entire League that we're Doing Something. However we got into this mess, we're taking a measured, mature position, doing our best to reverse Manticore's expansionism without anyone else's getting hurt. Ultimately, that's going to have a soothing effect on public opinion. It'll probably even get a bunch of the people who cry most loudly over how evil Manpower is—like those idiots in the Renaissance Association—on our side because of how hard we're working to avoid additional bloodshed. And the more we emphasize how we're seeking a diplomatic solution, the less likely anyone is to notice that we can't pursue a military solution. But at the same time, we keep the pot bubbling so that everyone's used to the notion that we have this ongoing conflict-short-of-outright-shooting with Manticore."

"So that when the time's right, we can turn the heat under the pot back up in a way that either pushes Manticore into shooting again or gives us a clear pretext for going after them ," Abruzzi said. He was actually smiling now, and Kolokoltsov nodded.

"I'm not saying this is a perfect policy," he said. "I'm just saying that given what happened to Crandall, and the way the the public's reacting to it, I think it may be the best one we've got. And another—"

"Excuse me, Mr. Undersecretary."

Kolokoltsov turned in his chair, eyebrows rising in astonishment. His butler, Albert Howard—who'd been with him for over thirty years and knew better than to ever walk into the middle of one of Kolokoltsov's private strategy sessions—had just opened the dining room door. His expression was as apologetic as his tone, but he raised the small com unit in his hand slightly when Kolokoltsov started to open his mouth.

"I'm very sorry to intrude, Sir," Howard said quickly, "but Admiral Rajampet is on the com. He says it's urgent. I told him you were in conference, but he insisted I get you immediately."

Kolokoltsov shut his mouth again, and his eyes narrowed. After a moment, he nodded.

"All right, Albert. Under the circumstances, I'm sure you made the proper decision." He held out his hand, and Howard handed over the com, bowed slightly, and disappeared once more.

Kolokoltsov looked at the others for a few seconds, holding the com, then sighed slightly, shook his head, and activated it.

"Yes, Rajani?" he said as the small holo display materialized above his hand. "What can I do for you?"

Rajampet's image on the undersized display was tiny, but it was large enough for his odd expression to register. There was something wild and feral about it, and then the admiral grinned like a wolf.

"I'm glad to see the others are there with you, Innokentiy," he said in a harsh, exultant voice. "We just got an emergency dispatch over here in my office, and you'll never guess what's been happening with those bastards in Manticore!"