Mission of Honor

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