The Shadow of Saganami

White Haven's experience and stature to refrain from jostling his uniformed subordinate's elbow at a time like this.

'Very well, Sir Thomas,' Elizabeth said. 'I'll want to send someone senior from the Foreign Office to deal directly with Monica. Who would you suggest, Tony?'

'We could just add it to Terekhov's load,' Langtry said with a crooked grin, and the Queen snorted.

'I think his Foreign Office experience is a bit too far in the past for me to feel comfortable with that, Sir Thomas. Besides, having the fellow whose actions we're contemplating disavowing potentially in charge of doing the disavowing in our name might be just a little awkward. Next suggestion?'

'My first reaction would be to ask Estelle to take this over, now that the draft Constitution's been voted out,' Langtry said much more seriously. 'Unfortunately, she's still back in Spindle.' He frowned, thinking hard. 'I think we might hand it to Amandine Corvisart. What do you think, Willie?'

'I think it's an excellent idea,' Grantville replied. Dame Amandine Corvisart was a second-generation Manticoran whose family had fled the People's Republic of Haven sixty-five T-years earlier. 'She's tough-minded as a bulldog, but she understands the need to control situations instead of exacerbating them.'

'And she'd be ready to actively enlist Van Dort in any negotiations,' Langtry said with a nod.

'How soon could she be briefed and ready to go?' the Queen asked.

'Unfortunately, Your Majesty,' Langtry said wryly, 'there isn't a lot of briefing we can do in this instance. I'd say it'll take me forty-five minutes to give her her instructions, and probably another couple of hours for her to pack. Then however long it takes to get her out to join the relief force. She can read up on the situation from Terekhov and Khumalo's raw dispatches en route .'

'And how soon can we begin redeploying, Sir Thomas?' she asked.

'I can slice one battlecruiser squadron and a CLAC division off Home Fleet with orders for Monica within two hours, Your Majesty. I think I'll ask Admiral Yanakov if I can swap out a division of his BC(P)s for one of our Redoubtable divisions. It'll take a little longer to move the heavy squadrons, but I should be able to have them on their way within, say, six hours. I'll send the support elements through over the next day or two.'

'In that case,' the Queen told him, brown eyes hard, 'we'll leave that in your hands. Go ahead and get the lighter forces off as soon as possible. We'll send Dame Amandine after them in a dispatch boat. She'll catch up with them long before they get to Monica.'

'Yes, Your Majesty.'

'When you give your officers their orders, Admiral,' the Queen said, 'there's one point I want you to be perfectly clear about. You will inform them that they're to avoid incidents with Solarian units if at all possible. They're authorized to engage Monican units at their own discretion, based on the situation they encounter when they reach that star system, but I would very much prefer to avoid escalating this into a direct, open confrontation between us and the Solarian League. But at the same time, be certain they understand that avoiding incidents with Sollies 'if at all possible' doesn't-I repeat, Admiral, does not— include yielding a single centimeter on our claim of sovereignty over the Lynx Terminus or in the defense of the territorial integrity of any star system represented at the Constitutional Convention on Flax. Not a single centimeter.'

She glanced at Grantville, who simply nodded his understanding of the policy she'd just announced. Then she looked back at Sir Thomas Caparelli, and the 'cat on the back of her chair yawned at the admiral, showing needle-pointed, snow-white fangs.

'God knows we don't need a war with the League. But we aren't going to let some corrupt Frontier Security bureaucrat connive with leeches like Manpower or the Jessyk Combine to drive us out of the Cluster so they can suck it dry. Not now that the Constitutional Convention's finally voted out an acceptable draft. If that means engaging the SLN, so be it.'

'Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen,' Aivars Terekhov said.

He sat at the head of the briefing room table, flanked by Ansten FitzGerald to his left, and Ito Anders to his right. The junior-grade captain was his second in command, and FitzGerald was the closest thing the Squadron had to a flag captain. Naomi Kaplan sat beside FitzGerald, and the three of them faced the holographic com display at the far end of the table. That display had been set to its maximum size, stretching from the top of the table to the deckhead above, and it was intricately divided into nineteen quadrants, each occupied by one of the Squadron's commanding officers or XOs.

Despite the efficiency of the electronic conference, Terekhov would much have preferred for those holographic ghosts to be physically present. But the Squadron was plunging ahead along one of hyper-space's grav waves. Ito had been on board Hexapuma since they'd left Point Midway, conferring personally and directly with Terekhov in order to be sure he understood exactly what his superior had in mind. The other officers were stuck aboard their own ships-for now, at least-however, since it was physically impossible for any impeller-drive small craft to transfer personnel in the midst of a gravity wave. And they didn't have time to wait until the Squadron cleared the wave. It was only six days from Point Midway to Monica by the universe's clocks, and Hexapuma and her consorts were traveling at seventy percent of the speed of light. That velocity reduced the time available to their crews to only a little over four days.

'Commander Kaplan is about to brief you on our ops plan,' he continued levelly, facing the com. 'Let me emphasize one more time that while I'm prepared to use force, if necessary, I regard that as a last-resort option. I intend to demand that the Monican Navy stand down all its units. And, specifically, that they evacuate all personnel from Eroica Station, leaving all starships in place, pending the arrival of competent Manticoran authority to deal with the situation on a diplomatic basis. I'd like to believe President Tyler's too good a poker player to ride a busted flush down in flames. Failing that, I'd like him to be conniving enough to figure we'll probably be withdrawn from Monica quickly, possibly after a show of force to drive home the point that we're keeping an eye on him. In that case, presumably, he'd get to keep his new toys, and that prospect would have to be attractive to him. The bottom line is that I don't want to kill anyone we don't have to kill, and I'm not interested in destroying starships simply to be destroying them. If we can control the situation without firing a single shot, I'll be delighted.'

He let them digest what he'd said, then flicked his right hand.

'Having said that, however, we must be prepared for the possibility that Tyler will opt not to comply with my demand. Perhaps even more to the point, we need to be aware that a government like his, by its very nature, is likely to try to stall. If nothing else, to keep us talking while he brings up his entire navy to confront us. I think he would anticipate that confronting us in that way would cause us to blink and at least hesitate. If we're-I'm-right in my suspicions, there's also the very real threat that still other forces are already in motion, and that if he can stall long enough, still more Solarian, or at least OFS units, will turn up to support his own forces.

'So, eager as I am for a diplomatic solution, I have no intention of allowing this to turn into a long, drawn out standoff. I intend to crowd the senior officer at Eroica Station hard. If at all possible, I want to push him into accepting the stand-down order immediately, on his own authority, then push hard to secure physical control of Eroica as quickly as possible-hopefully before Tyler is able to order him to stall. If there is League involvement in this, I don't intend to give Tyler time to send off to his OFS friends and whistle up an SLN task force to invite us to leave. If he doesn't immediately show clear signs of agreeing to my demands, we will destroy his battlecruisers... and any other units they send in to oppose us. Which is a very good reason to deny them the time to send those other units in. If nothing else, it will be that many fewer people for us to have to kill.'

No one said a word, and he let his eyes move from quadrant to quadrant, meeting their gazes one by one, then nodded slowly.

'Commander Kaplan will now brief you on how I intend to do that, if it becomes necessary. Commander?'

He turned to Naomi Kaplan.

'Yes, Sir.' She turned to face the com more squarely and tapped a command into the console in front of her, bringing up a holographic schematic of the Monica System.

'As you can see, Ladies and Gentleman, Eroica Station, the main shipyard nexus of the Monican Navy, is located in the Eroica asteroid belt, which has an average orbital radius of roughly nineteen and a half light-minutes. The Station is an extensive complex, larger than a Navy this size would normally require, because they took advantage of the proximity of the Eroica Belt to set up a basic heavy industry node for the entire system. All this