Ashes Of Victory

suggest that she might want to tone down the inside info in her next letter.

'I really don't know how the Earl puts up with it, even with us to run interference for him,' Mirdula went on more seriously. 'I suppose he must be used to projecting a pleasant mood even when he wants to shoot people. And he has to be used to people trying to buttonhole him for personal favors, too; he is the Queen's uncle, after all. But this place has been a madhouse, and he and Lord Alexander are taking the brunt of it.'

Trikoupis grunted, his humor souring as he contemplated the truth of yet another of his wife's observations. His Grayson commission had taken him out of the mainstream of the Star Kingdom's political life, but Mirdula's insights and a thoughtful study of the 'faxes (plus the analyses Grayson Naval Intelligence circulated to its senior officers) kept him abreast of what was happening, and he didn't like some of what he was hearing.

Trikoupis had met Countess New Kiev during his stint assigned to the FO, and he hadn't much enjoyed the experience. He was willing to accept that she held her beliefs sincerely, and honest enough to admit he'd met Centrists and Crown Loyalists who were just as officious and nearly as strident. But her towering faith in her own rectitude was so sublime as to elevate her to a status all her own. No doubt the fact that he shared so little of her view of the universe made it seem even worse, but she reminded him irresistibly of the witch-hunters of ancient Terra who had dragged their victims out, tortured them into confessing, then burned them alive... all strictly for the good of the sinners' immortal souls. The Countess had that same zealous streak, and she was just as determined to do what was 'best' for people whether they wanted it done for — or to —them or not.

Given the uproar over the Peeps' resumption of the offensive, it was probably inevitable for New Kiev and her allies to gain more credence with the electorate. Less because they'd done anything right where the war was concerned (because even the stupidest voter knew they hadn't), but because they led the opposition to the government on whose watch things had gone wrong. Human nature's desire to find someone upon whom to blame disasters had operated faithfully and efficiently... and in their favor.

Much of the furor had faded when the Peeps failed to follow up with more deep raids, and Duchess Harrington escaped from Cerberus. But the public wanted the Navy to do more than just stop the Peeps. It wanted the Navy to resume the offensive — without running any risks, of course, or exposing any more core systems to attack — and push the Peeps back where they belonged so the Allies could end the war once and for all. Worse, the military budgets were beginning to bite truly deep, and the taxpayers who felt that bite failed to understand that their increased tax burden was actually a good sign.

Trikoupis switched off the viewer, puffed his cheeks, and swung into a sitting position. This was his third time through Mirdula's letter, and he knew he'd view it several more times before he recorded his response. Just at the moment, though, the direction of his own thoughts had soured his enjoyment of it, and he rose to pace, still in his sock feet, on the carpet covering his day cabin's decksole.

Isaiah MacKenzie (known to her crew as Izzie when they figured no spies from the Office of Shipbuilding might overhear) was part of the taxpayers' pain, although the taxpayers in her case were Graysons and not Manticorans. Despite an exponential increase in effective firepower, Izzie actually had only about forty percent as much crew as her older consorts, thanks to the sophistication of her automation, and the same trend towards lower crew numbers obtained across the board in all the new classes being designed by BuShips and the Grayson Office of Shipbuilding. Trikoupis rather doubted that the average Manticoran civilian would have understood what that meant even if the Government had been in a position to share such sensitive information with anyone. But what they did know about the Navy's new ships was quite simple enough for the voters to grasp: they cost a lot.

But there was more to it than that. In fact, there was a great deal more to it, and Trikoupis wished it were possible to tell the people paying for the new designs just how much they were actually getting for their money.

The most obvious advantage of the new designs — and especially the SD(P)s, as the new Harrington/Medusa class was being designated — was a huge increase in offensive capability. Whether or not the new defensive systems could match that increase remained to be seen, but until the Peeps had equivalently armed classes, that hardly mattered. Trikoupis had commanded Battle Division Sixty-Two from the Izzie for over a T-year now and run innumerable exercises with her and her division mate, GNS Edward Esterhaus, so he knew exactly how devastating the Peeps were going to find her and her sisters once the new class was employed en masse.

Perhaps even more important than the increase in offensive power was the huge decrease in crew requirements. With one exception, the bottleneck for the RMN's expansion had always been more about manpower than the cost of hulls. That exception had been the Junction forts in the Manticore Binary System itself, where a large number of units had been a strategic necessity, whatever the cost. That commitment had put a squeeze on available peacetime funding, and manning the forts had only made the personnel problems worse. But the capture of Trevor's Star had alleviated that particular requirement, and two-thirds of the forts had been transferred from active to reserve status. Even with the need to fortify the Basilisk and Trevor's Star ends of the Junction, that had still released enough personnel to man a hundred and fifty old-style SDs. With the new automation, that gave the Navy the manpower for almost two hundred and fifty, which was a third again more than the RMN's entire prewar superdreadnought strength.

The junction fortress reduction was the most enormous windfall BuPers had ever experienced, and while the new LAC wings about which Trikoupis had heard endless rumors seemed to be skimming off a lot of junior officers and senior noncoms, the vast bulk of that manpower pool remained untouched. Which meant that for the first time since Roger III had begun his Navy's buildup against the Peep threat, the RMN literally had the crews to man as many vessels as it could physically build.

And it was building a lot of them.

No one had experienced a true revolution in naval design or weaponry in over half a millennium, and the sheer expense of carrying one through in the midst of a shooting war was enough to stagger the most avid militarist. According to Trikoupis' latest classified briefing on the subject, the Navy had close to two hundred new ships of the wall under construction simultaneously. At roughly thirty-five billion a pop, that came to the tidy sum of seven trillion Manticoran dollars, and that was an enormous bite out of anyone's budget. Nor did it include the price tag on all the escorts those ships would require, or the new carriers (and the LACs to go on them), or the new missiles, or the R&D to support all of the above.

The Cromarty Government had borrowed heavily, and the Star Kingdom's record of stable financial growth, coupled with how well the Allied navies had done up until the Basilisk Raid, had helped sell a lot of bonds in places like the Solarian League. Increased Junction use fees had also helped, but ultimately there'd been no choice but to raise taxes. More, for the first time in the Star Kingdom's history, Parliament had, with much trepidation, adopted a graduated income tax rather than the Constitutionally-mandated flat rate. The new tax would automatically expire at the next general election or within five years, whichever came first, but it had still come as a profound shock to the taxpayers and sent a massive ripple through the financial and investment markets, and there were sinister signs of a steadily rising inflation rate, all coupled with a far more intense, government-imposed rationalization of the entire industrial sector.

Trikoupis could scarcely blame the electorate for its dismay. The Star Kingdom had gotten by without such measures for almost five T-centuries, and experiencing them now seemed like a reversion to the Dark Ages of the last century or two Ante Diaspora. Or, even worse, to the ruinous policies which had transformed the once prosperous Republic of Haven into an interstellar appetite that could never be sated.

And New Kiev, North Hollow, High Ridge, and Lady Descroix had all voted for the new taxes out of 'patriotic duty.' Of course, they'd done so only with profound, eloquently expressed personal reservations, and only because the Cromarty Government had assured them it was essential to ultimate victory. They'd made certain the electorate knew how reluctant they'd been... and how Lord Alexander, Cromarty's Chancellor of the Exchequer, had twisted their arms to make them cooperate. Which had been shrewd of them, Trikoupis acknowledged. Not nice, but certainly effective. They'd not only garnered the benefits of having put aside their own agendas in the interest of the Star Kingdom's security in a time of emergency, but managed to stick the Cromarty Government with full responsibility for imposing such a painful burden. And they'd taken great care,