House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (17 page)

It was very quiet in the conference room, and Roger let his eyes circle the table again, his gaze making contact with that of every other person around it.

“The Queen and I are scheduled for a state visit to San Martin in October,” he continued finally. “That was set up almost a year ago, and all indications are that the Peeps’ planners want to let us get that visit out of the way before they move. Our analysts think that letting us go ahead with ‘business as usual’ with San Martin is supposed to lull both us and President Ramirez’s administration into not noticing what’s about to happen. And I think we can safely assume the Peeps aren’t going to pull the trigger while Queen Angelique and I are actually in Trevor’s Star. That gives us at least a brief window, and I intend to take advantage of it by personally proposing to President Ramirez, during our visit, a mutual defense treaty between Trevor’s Star and the Star Kingdom of Manticore. Exactly the same sort of treaty we have with every other member of the Alliance—one that obligates us to protect
their
territory, as well as simply guarding our own assets on the terminus.”

There was something suspiciously like a muted gasp, and his smile turned feral.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think we’re fully prepared for war against the People’s Republic at this point. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure we’ll never feel like we’re
fully
prepared, even when the shooting actually starts. I don’t think
they’re
ready to take
us
on directly yet, either, though. I think that if they suddenly realize we’re serious about meeting them head on if they go after Trevor’s Star, they’ll blink. I don’t think we’ll stop them
permanently
, but I do think we’ll knock them off stride, at least slow them down, inspire them to run an entirely new set of risk assessments based on our obvious determination to stop trying to
avoid
a confrontation and actually court one on our own terms. And if we do have to fight them now, then so be it. There’s no point building a sword”—his eyes flitted sideways to Jonas for just a moment—“if you’re never willing to use it. I’d rather not yet, but I’d also rather take the chance on having to than simply sit here and watch Trevor’s Star and San Martin go down when we might have stopped it.”

“Your Majesty, I don’t know if that’s even possible,” Castle Rock said after a moment. “Coming at them cold, after so long—”

“It won’t be coming at them
completely
cold, Abner,” Roger said. “I actually met Ramirez on our last state visit to San Martin, eight years ago. Of course, he was only
Senator
Ramirez at the time, which is probably the main reason I got to talk to him in something like genuine privacy. And I liked him. I liked him a lot . . . and so did the Queen. Not only that, I think there’s a lot more fire in that man’s belly than anyone in Nouveau Paris—or most of the people in Ciudad San Marcos, for that matter—believe. That’s what gave me the idea to try something this insane in the first place.”

The King smiled briefly, then sobered.

“I apologize for not having brought you in on this sooner, but under the circumstances it had to be kept very, very quiet. Only Foreign Secretary Nageswar, Assistant Secretary Maxwell, and our ambassador to San Martin have been brought fully on board at this point. But Ambassador Mandelbaum has conveyed a personal message from me to Hector Ramirez, laying out the offer I’m prepared to make. And Ramirez has responded. I won’t pretend he’s positive he can pull it off, but he thinks there’s a very, very good chance of it, especially if it comes spontaneously ‘out of nowhere’ and directly from me to him when I’m standing on San Martin’s soil. The fact that I’m
personally
making it, putting the Crown of Manticore directly and explicitly behind it, without any of the customary diplomatic euphemisms, is critical to the calculus from San Martin’s end. I intend to invoke Quentin Saint-James while I’m about it, too.” The King’s eyes glinted. “It won’t hurt to remind the galaxy in general of the standards the Navy holds itself to, and the memory of how he handled things in 1752 should resonate with the San Martin electorate. And the sheer surprise of having it dropped on them with no previous leaks, no trial balloons, no diplomatic discussion at all, should give us at least the possibility of breaking through that ‘fatalism’ Ed just described.”

He sat back again, looking at his advisors, tasting their shock as they grappled with his proposal, and his bared teeth would have done any treecat proud.

“Nobody wants a war against the People’s Republic. But nobody in this conference room is foolish enough to think one isn’t coming, anyway. All right, if it has to come, then let’s fight it with a bridgehead right in the heart of the Peeps’ own territory. Let’s take away that complacent certainty that Trevor’s Star is theirs for the taking whenever they get around to it. Let’s make them think—
really
think—about facing a navy every bit as good or
better
than theirs and make them think about the Sword of Damocles that terminus represents where their own territorial integrity’s concerned. They’re the ones who’ve been marching in our direction for forty T-years now, and it’s time someone showed them the error of their ways.”

Those brown Winton eyes were ice, and his voice was colder still.

“If they want a war, we’ll give them a war like none they’ve ever fought, and we’ll by God give it to them
now
.”

September 1883 PD

“
SO ARE YOU REALLY
as full of fight as everyone in the Cabinet and at Admiralty House thinks you are?” Jonas Adcock asked, leaning back in the comfortable armchair and waving the brandy snifter appreciatively under his nose.

One of the few “upper crust” luxuries he’d come to enjoy was a good glass of brandy, and the Mount Royal Palace cellars’ collection of brandies was his secret vice. One his sister and brother-in-law always remembered at Christmas and birthdays. And one which he pandered to shamelessly on his visits to the palace.

“In a way, yes,” Roger replied, settling into his own chair with a sigh of comfort. Unlike Jonas, the King favored whiskey, and the glass in his hand contained Glenfiddich Grand Reserve. “I don’t
want
to, not yet, but we genuinely can’t afford to lose Trevor’s Star at this point. A logistically secure forward base well behind the enemy’s front lines? One we could reinforce faster than they could? One that would give us forward basing for raids on their shipping and infrastructure?” He shook his head, his expression grim. “I know we’re still outgunned, but Gram and our open R and D have already given us a substantial qualitative edge. And much as I’d love to wait until we had more of Gram’s programs into the developmental stage, or even ready to deploy, I just can’t sacrifice the strategic advantage of being able to deploy that far forward. My God, Jonas! It would put our advanced fleet base less than two weeks from the Haven System itself, instead of almost two damned
months
! Think of the force multiplier that kind of reduction in turn around time would give us! If we can get our fleet to Haven in a quarter of the time, it’d be the same as giving us four times the wallers . . . and
they’d
have to worry about us taking out
their
home system with a pounce through hyper rather than the other way around. For all intents and purposes, it gives us a hundred and fifty more light-years of strategic depth.”

“And, conversely,” Jonas said, nodding gravely, “
losing
the Trevor’s Star Terminus puts the Peeps a lot closer to us than that hundred and fifty light-years would suggest.”

“In a lot of ways,” Roger agreed. He sipped from his glass, then looked up with a grimace which had nothing at all to do with the rich, honeyed fire of the whiskey. “Mind you, I think they’d be lunatics to try an assault through the Junction, especially with only one terminus in their possession. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to guarantee they won’t
be
lunatics about it, and as I’ve said more than once before, even a failed Junction assault on their part would result in a state of war between us, anyway. We won’t have any choice but to upgrade and strengthen the Junction forts if we lose Trevor’s Star, either, which won’t help our naval budgets one bit. And that doesn’t even consider the consequences for trade patterns or the implications for morale. Losing Trevor’s Star would have to have a depressing effect on our people’s psychology. By the same token, it would have to pump up domestic support for the Peeps. Not only would San Martin be the wealthiest single planet they’ve managed to pick off yet, but it would give them a claim—potentially, at least—on San Martin’s share of the Junction transit fees under the Treaty of 1590. And if we don’t let them cash in on the treaty, they can always withdraw from it and charge whatever damned fees they want. That would be a shot in the arm for their economy . . . and one that would only make them even hungrier to grab off the mother lode for themselves. It would also give us the choice between accepting whatever fee schedule they set or trying to do something about it by force, which would simply get us into that war we’re all trying so hard to postpone. You know their propagandists would use the fact that they’d gotten away with punching out Trevor’s Star as another way to suggest to their domestic news market that we’re not willing to face them militarily, despite all our ‘posturing’ and ‘unilateral hostility towards the peaceloving citizens of the People’s Republic.’ And if they got away with jacking up the terminus fees, they’d just use our restraint as another example of how frightened of them we are.’”

“Of course they would.” Adcock’s grimace was as sour as Roger’s had been . . . and owed equally little to his beverage of choice. “And I’m sure they’d find all sorts of ways to use their possession of Trevor’s Star and our proximity to it, thanks to the Junction, to stage-manage tensions—and incidents—between us and them for their advantage whenever they felt like it.”

“Exactly.” Roger took another sip of whiskey and shook his head. “Like I say, I don’t
want
to fight them right now, but I’m a lot more willing to do that than to give up Trevor’s Star. Of course, if this visit with Ramirez works out next month, we may be able to have our cake and eat it too.”

“And if pigs had wings they’d be pigeons, Roger.” It was Jonas’ turn to shake his head. “You’re not going to convert the Legislaturalists into pacifists just by standing up beside San Martin.”

“No, but I genuinely believe from everything we’re hearing out of ONI and the SIS that we’d at least cause them to rethink, and probably rethink hard. Big Sky’s gotten better penetration than I think a lot of people realize. We don’t have anyone actually inside the Octagon, but we’ve managed to recruit or place agents a lot more broadly at lower levels, and we’ve gotten a better look inside their hardware than I ever expected.”

Roger sipped whiskey again, then shrugged.

“He’s going to shoot a copy of our latest tech analysis over to you—top-secret, burn-before-reading, of course—and I think you’ll find it interesting. Unless it’s a really clever example of disinformation, we’ve opened an even bigger edge in conventional weapons systems—especially ECM and our missile targeting systems—than we’d realized. It looks like our current-generation laser head grav lensing’s a lot better than theirs than we’d thought, too. They’re basically using the straight Astral design, without any upgrades, and I know Rodriguez has routed Section Thirteen’s latest throughput numbers to Gram. Our capital missile laser heads are almost twice as powerful as their current-generation hardware, assuming these numbers are good. And they’re nowhere near deploying a cruiser or destroyer grade version, whereas
we
—”

He shrugged, and Jonas nodded in understanding. Gram’s researchers had played a not insignificant role in pointing Section Thirteen at the component miniaturization which had permitted BuWeaps to engineer the newest laser heads down to something that would fit a missile body which could be launched from light units’ tubes. And carried in sufficient numbers to be useful, he reminded himself. One disadvantage of the RMN’s increasing emphasis on missiles was that magazine space had to be upsized to keep pace with the increase in launchers. That problem had already reared its head when the impeller drive counter-missile came into use, of course, and the increased standoff range of the laser head was only making that still worse. Last-generation sidewall burners had started the progression, but with laser heads, it became imperative to begin thinning the incoming salvos as early as possible, and only counter-missiles had that kind of reach.

And every counter-missile we carry uses up volume we
can’t
use on shipkillers,
he thought.
And if Mjølner works out the way we hope, thatAs going to get even worse. Or better…depending on who else has the same capability!

“I wish we had a better look inside their software,” Roger went on, “but we’ve managed to get our hands on actual tech manuals, and the decrypt codes, for their current generation shipkillers, radar, and gravitic sensors.”

Jonas’ eyebrows rose respectfully.

“Somebody’s damned well earned his pay, assuming they’re really current,” he observed. “Of course the fact that we got them also underscores one of my own worst nightmares!”

“And I’m not going to tell you our security hasn’t been breached,” Roger replied with a nod. “I don’t think it has, and what ONI’s been turning up suggests a lower level of tension among the Peeps than we’d be seeing if they had a clue about some of the things your people are working on at
Weyland
. If they knew about Gram, they’d either be running a lot more scared, or else they would’ve already launched a preemptive attack. The
last
thing they’d want to do would be to let us get the new systems through development and into deployment!” He shook his head again. “No, it looks to me like Shell Game’s working, Jonas.”

Jonas considered that for a moment, then nodded just a bit grudgingly. One thing which Roger had insisted upon fanatically from the very beginning was that Project Gram’s security
had
to be absolute. Gram was his ace in the hole, his desperately needed equalizer, and for it to be those things, it also had to be completely black, completely hidden from the People’s Republic of Haven’s spies and analysts. It helped that all indications were that the Peeps saw espionage more as an offensive than a defensive tool. They appeared to be far more focused on gathering political information, looking for dissidents who could be subsidized to destabilize opponents, using blackmail, extortion, and even assassination to weaken their targets at the critical moment. Their covert operations people were among the best in the galaxy when it came to that sort of mission, but it did tend to give their intelligence people a form of tunnel vision. They focused on short-range, intensive efforts to penetrate, undermine, and critically weaken the objective immediately on their targeting screens, and they appeared to assign their very best people to those sorts of ops, which left only limited personnel, resources, and funding for their chronically understrength
long
-range operations.

None of which meant they didn’t spend
any
effort on those sorts of operations, and they’d obviously realized long ago that Manticore was going to constitute their greatest challenge. Under the circumstances, they had to have assigned a substantial chunk of their intelligence efforts to “the Manticore Problem.”

That was why Shell Game, the operation designed to protect Gram’s secrecy, had been stood up over fifteen T-years ago. Gram’s first fruits had been decanted into BuWeaps’ openly maintained R&D programs, like Section Thirteen and Project Python, with carefully worked out and documented pedigrees designed to provide plausible origins for them which had nothing at all to do with top-secret R&D think tanks based on HMSS
Weyland
. In addition, BuWeaps had its own R&D staff, working independently of Gram, within the sorts of security safeguards anyone would have anticipated. That staff was doing good work, too, without ever realizing that much of its function was to serve as the Office of Naval intelligence’s counterespionage staff’s stalking horse—the “honeypot,” as Roger had called it—designed to attract Peep espionage efforts. Nor was that staff aware that there were
Manticoran
“spies” seeded throughout its ranks, charged with making certain that every scrap of useful data it might turn up would be channeled to the even larger, carefully concealed R&D staff assigned to Gram. And even if anyone eventually figured out there was a research effort going on aboard
Weyland
, Gram itself was hidden behind a secondary level of BuWeaps’ official research efforts which had been located on the station precisely to cover Gram and serve as a second level “honeypot” for anyone who got past the first one.

Which doesn’t even consider the fact that Gram is under the command of that well-connected but clearly-something-of-a-dim-bulb, Captain Jonas Adcock,
he thought wryly.

The House of Winton wasn’t above using planted stories to help mislead and misdirect the Star Kingdom’s enemies, and Roger’s staff, under Elisa Paderweski’s competent direction, had “leaked” several new stories subtly underscoring the point that King Roger and Queen Consort Angelique were “looking after” Captain Adcock until he was finally ready to be eased out into retirement. It was hard to conceal the kinds of information flow—in and out—a research effort like Gram required, but Shell Game had considered that aspect, as well, and Jonas’ personal relationship with Roger gave him a perfect excuse to “take time off” from the sinecure in the Office of Fleet Logistics which had been created for him aboard
Weyland
for visits to his sister and his brother-in-law. Visits which just happened to let him deliver personal and highly comprehensive briefings to Roger, the space lords, and the two or three senior officers at BuWeaps who knew about Gram.

“I don’t think our security’s been broken, either, really, Roger,” he said now. “That doesn’t keep me from spending the occasional sleepless night worrying about it, of course. But I think you’re right about how the Peeps would have reacted by now if they knew about it. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have picked up at least a whiff, though, and simply not realized how far along we actually are.”

“Probably not. But that brings up an interesting question, you know.” Roger gave his brother-in-law a very level look. “We can’t keep you hidden away in Gryphon orbit forever, Jonas. At some point, your research is going to be far enough along that we need to start major development, and there’s no one currently at BuWeaps with the knowledge and the expertise you have. I’m not going to be able to leave you as a mere captain much longer.”