Mission of Honor

demanded our surrender, and we wouldn't have had any choice but to give it to them. If they'd gotten a couple of dozen capital ships with this new drive of theirs as far in-system as they got their pods before launch, what other option would we have had? Even if we'd wanted to bring in Home Fleet—every single ship at Trevor's Star, for that matter—they'd already have control the planetary orbitals long before we could get into position. For that matter, they'd've been into missile range of the planets before we could even bring the system-defense missiles online to nail them! And even under the Eridani Edict, they'd be fully justified in bombarding the planets if we refused to surrender under those circumstances. But instead of going for the jugular, they attacked our arms and legs.

'Not only that, but the nature and pattern of the attack strongly suggest that whoever planned and launched it was operating with strictly limited resources. Yes, it was extraordinarily well planned and executed. From a professional perspective, I have to admire the ability, imagination, and skill behind it. But successful as it was, it was essentially a hit-and-run raid, albeit on a massive scale, and its success—as Tom has just pointed out—derived entirely from the fact that it achieved total strategic and tactical surprise. If any significant percentage of the weapons committed to it—either those graser platforms or the missile pods—had failed, or been detected on their way in, or even if we'd only suspected something was coming in time to alert the stations and activate their sidewalls and get the tugs deployed to interpose their wedges against potential attacks, the damage would have been much less severe. Give us fifteen or twenty minutes' warning, and we'd've had a good ninety-five percent of our personnel off Hephasteus and Vulcan , for that matter, not to mention getting a lot of our ships out of the station docking slips! The people who put this together had to be as well aware of those possibilities as I am, and they have to know the axiom that anything which can go wrong, will go wrong. True, they seem to have pretty much avoided that this time around, but they damned well knew better than to count on that. So if they'd had more resources to commit to the attack, we'd have seen overkill , not just 'exactly enough to do the job if everything works perfectly.''

He shook his head.

'All of it points to the same conclusion. They've got this revolutionary new drive technology, but they don't have it in large numbers. If they had the numbers, they'd either have been able to follow through with an outright knockout blow or have at least been able to deploy enough additional weapons to give them the sort of redundancy factor any competent planner would be looking for.'

Grantville's expression turned thoughtful, and several of the faces which had looked dubious began to look if not more hopeful, at least less desperate.

The Queen looked around the conference table again, and her nostrils flared.

'I think you've all made very good points,' she said. 'I know information's going to change over the next several days—that we're going to find some things aren't quite as bad as we thought they were, and that others are even worse. But the bottom line is this. Hamish is probably right about how the people who did this—and I think we all know who that almost certainly was—were thinking when they planned the operation. And now, they undoubtedly think they've won. It may take a while, but between Haven and the Solarian League, with our industrial base smashed, it's obviously over, and they know it. We've lost.'

The silence in the conference room could have been carved with a chisel. And then, despite everything, the woman the treecats called 'Soul of Steel' smiled.

There was nothing humorous or whimsical about that smile. No amusement. It was a thing of chilled steel— the smile of a wolf in the door to her den, between her young and the world as the hunting hounds closed in upon it. It was grim, hard, and yet, in spite of everything she'd just said, there wasn't a gram of surrender in it. For better or for worse, it was the wolf-smile of a woman who would die on her feet in the defense of her people and her home before she surrendered or yielded.

'No doubt they do know that,' Elizabeth Adrienne Samantha Annette Winton said very softly. 'But there's one tiny flaw in their analysis, ladies and gentlemen. Because even if they do know it . . . we don't.'

March, 1922 Post Diaspora

'History is filled with roadkills who thought they knew exactly where 'the inevitable' was headed.'

—Hamish Aleaxander-Harrington,

Earl of White Haven

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