August 1883 PD
“SO, IS MIKEY—I MEAN, MICHAEL—still pissed off with me?” Roger Winton asked as the armored air limo, accompanied by the sting ships in the blue and silver livery of the House of Winton, descended sedately towards Admiralty House’s rooftop pad.
“I wouldn’t say he was ‘pissed’ at you, Dad,” Elizabeth replied, wrinkling her nose in thought. “I’d say he was more . . . intensely irritated by circumstances beyond his control.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Allen and Elisa. Or with your Uncle Ed, at least.” Her father grinned at her, and the treecats sprawled across their laps bleeked in their species’ equivalent of laughter. “No, I detect Allen’s fell hand. He’s the diplomat spinmeister—comes with being Prime Minister, I suppose. Ed’s still a staff weenie; he hasn’t learned how to weasel-word his way around unpleasant issues yet. And Elisa can’t quite forget she used to be a Marine, so she just swings straight from the shoulder. Usually with a lead-loaded clue stick, now that I come to think of it.”
“I guess that’s at least a little fair.” Elizabeth held up her right hand, thumb and forefinger perhaps a half-centimeter apart. “I stand by my original diagnosis, though. It’s not so much you personally he’s mad at, Dad. He’s mad at the fact that he’s not in control, not in a position to make his own decisions.”
Roger crooked a thoughtful eyebrow, one hand stroking smoothly and reflexively down Monroe’s silky spine. She was probably right, he decided, although it was a bit hard for a harassed parent—especially a harassed male parent—to remember that when teenaged angst reared its ugly head in all its passionate glory.
“I have to say I wish the two of you wouldn’t keep . . . locking horns this way, though,” Elizabeth continued. “I know there’ve been times I was just as upset as he is about how little choice either of us have in our lives, but I really don’t remember having had this kind of . . . of—what is it Mom calls it? War in the camp?—with either of you when I was his age.”
“All of four whole T-years ago! Gosh!” Roger shook his head in astonishment. “You know, sometimes I forget what an ancient and decrepit sort you are, Beth.”
His daughter stuck out her tongue at him, and the treecat in her lap—over twenty T-years younger than Monroe, with four fewer age bands around his tail—bared needle fangs in a long, laughing yawn.
“That doesn’t make it untrue,” she pointed out after a moment, and he nodded.
“No, it doesn’t. But you and Mikey have always been different, honey. That’s not a slam at him, either, but there’s no point pretending you weren’t pretty darned . . . precocious, even for a Winton. Probably your mom’s genetic contribution, now that I think about it.” Her eyes twinkled at him, and he shrugged. “Even so, though, you were only a year or so younger than he is now when you decided you wanted to get involved in the ‘family business.’ He’s got time to make up his mind about what he wants to do—or, at least, how graciously he wants to do it.” Roger grimaced. “I won’t lie about it and say I don’t wish both of you had more options, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that. Except for your mom and me never to have had either of you, and, frankly, I’m too selfish a man to’ve put up with a world without the two of you in it.”
Elizabeth’s eyes softened, and he snorted.
“Don’t worry! I’m not going all gooey on you. But it’s true. And I think he’s having a harder time with adolescence than you did. In fact, I’m sure he is. Your mom and I discussed it with Doctor Sugiyama earlier this year, and Mikey’s having heavier sledding with the prolong therapies than you did. Frankly, I was a little surprised by some of what Sugiyama had to say about it, to be honest. Your mom and I are both first-generation prolong, and we didn’t have to go through the hormone adjustment and monitoring you and Mikey have—we were both pretty much through that phase before we got the initial treatments in the first place, and I don’t think either of us really understood just how different it was going to be for someone like you, with the third-gen therapies. They explained it to us, but there’s a big difference between having it explained and actually experiencing it, and, unfortunately, Mikey’s experiencing it right along with us. Sugiyama’s working on balancing dosages, but he doesn’t want to medicate Mikey’s mood swings if he doesn’t have to. And, so far, it’s nothing we can’t cope with . . . even if it does seem to Mikey sometimes that I’ve turned into a slave driver instead of a father!”
“Dad, he doesn’t—”
“Oh, yes he does, honey.” Roger’s chuckle carried only the thinnest trace of sourness, and he reached out to touch the tip of his daughter’s nose the way he had when she’d been far younger. “But he’ll get over it. And there are times when parents can’t be their children’s friends. It comes with the responsibility of raising them, and one of these days Mikey’s going to realize no one was really deliberately trying to make his life miserable. Best of all, your mom and I both have prolong, which means we may actually live long enough to see it!”
Elizabeth smiled, but she also shook her head. In a way, she was most frustrated with Michael because the very thing he was rebelling against was something she’d very much wanted. She’d wanted to go into the Navy, but she’d had to choose between that and learning her responsibilities and duties as Heir in the face of a situation radically different from the one her father had faced when he’d been her age. As Heir, she wasn’t going to be allowed a combat assignment if war came, and she’d known it, which had also factored into the choice she had to make. Did she commit to a naval career under those restrictions, knowing she could never really be more than a glorified staff officer, or did she accept that she’d have to leave physically defending her people to someone else and concentrate on preparing herself to help her father as effectively as possible outside the Navy? It had been her own decision in the end, but she’d chosen Landing University of Manticore over Saganami Island because LUM had the best—and toughest—political science curriculum in the Star Kingdom.
And I’m glad I did . . . for a lot of reasons, she admitted, her smile softening. I wouldn’t have met Justin if I hadn’t!
Justin Zyrr was four years older than she was. That wasn’t very much in a prolong society, but it meant he was old enough to have completed his graduate degree in chemistry before she enrolled at LUM. Given who she was and the security considerations involved, LUM had been more than willing to provide freshwoman Elizabeth Winton with a private orientation tour, rather than sending her along with the rest of the thundering herd. And—also given who she was, she thought with an inner chuckle—she’d strayed from the assigned path and somehow ended up in Trantham Hall, the main chemistry building, and wandered into one of the research labs associated with the school. Where she had interrupted a very intense young man fully focused on his current research project. She had, in fact, distracted him at a most inopportune moment, which had resulted in the loss of over three hours of painstaking work, and he’d responded by ripping her head off and handing it to her. He’d just been revving up for the second round when the bodyguard she’d eluded had caught up with her, hurried into the lab, and addressed her as “Your Highness.”
Elizabeth Winton had her father’s—and her mother’s—temper. She’d been trying very hard to put up with the incredibly rude young man’s tirade with good grace, acknowledging her trespass, but that temper had been about to slip its steadily fraying leash when Sergeant Bradley turned up. Fortunately, the expression on Justin’s face when he heard her title, realized who he’d just been ripping up on side and down the other was, had been priceless. He’d looked so stricken—not afraid of the consequences, but horrified by his own disrespect—that she’d burst out laughing. And then, after a moment, he’d started laughing, as well.
Probably as a result of how they’d met, Justin had become one of the few people remotely her own age who’d managed to conceal any awe he might feel in her royal presence. She’d liked that. Besides, he’d been so cute. Even better looking than her preadolescent memories of Sergeant Proctor! And there had been that constitutional requirement that she marry a commoner.
Not that Justin had entertained any such notion the first time they met. That was one thing Elizabeth had been able to be absolutely certain of, thanks to Ariel, she thought, stroking her treecat companion affectionately.
She’d been adopted by Ariel when she was only fifteen, which was on the young side, even for the House of Winton. No one pretended to understand even now how the treecats who bonded with humans made their selections, but the fact that all but two Manticoran monarchs since Queen Adrienne had been adopted before they ever took the throne certainly suggested the process wasn’t quite as random as it might otherwise appear. Indeed, that pattern had caused some alarm over the centuries, and at least some people believed it wasn’t really the treecats’ decision at all.
Wintons knew better than that, although they didn’t go out of their way to make the point. By this time, the situation was so well-established that no one was likely to raise any concerns, but more than one of the security personnel responsible for the dynasty’s safety had worried about it in earlier days. Anyone who’d ever been adopted knew that people who argued treecats were no more than clever animals were completely and totally wrong, and the notion that an intelligent, empathic, and at least potentially telepathic alien species was deliberately attaching itself to the human monarchs of the Star Kingdom in what could only be described as a bond of emotional dependency was enough to make any good conspiracy theorist paranoid. No one in the House of Winton was concerned about that—which the aforementioned conspiracy theorist would simply have pointed out meant the conspiracy was working, she guessed—and the ’cats had saved the lives of members of her family at least three times, starting with then-Crown Princess Adrienne. Under the circumstances, if anyone wanted to believe the ’cats were somehow being influenced by humans using the well-worn paths of wealth, patronage, and political power to push the Sphinx Forestry Service into “encouraging” the bonds with the royal house, the Wintons were entirely in favor. And so was Palace Security, given the anti-assassin early warning system the ’cats provided. Not that Security went out of its way to mention the instances when that had happened. Having potential assassins regard treecats as little more than cute, adorable, exotic pets no self-respecting killer had to worry his head over was all to the good, as far as the royal family’s bodyguards were concerned.
They also provided other, less readily apparent advantages, however. Like everyone who’d ever been adopted, Elizabeth was convinced Ariel helped her balance her own anxieties and worries, and she was virtually certain the ’cat had saved her on more than one occasion from what her cousin Michelle irreverently referred to as her “temper from hell.” And ’cats were infallible barometers of the emotions of people around their human companions. It took a while for those companions to learn to read the ’cats’ responses, but even if Ariel was physically incapable of human speech, he understood Elizabeth just fine. He was fully capable of responding to “yes/no” queries by nodding or shaking his head, too, and she’d become almost as adroit as a good customer service AI when it came to asking questions to refine whatever he was trying to tell her.
And what he’d told her about Justin Zyrr was that she’d have to be very cautious about how she approached him if she didn’t want him to immediately back off and run lest someone think he was attempting to “take advantage” of her. That would’ve been enough all by itself to convince her to look at him very, very closely, given how many theoretically eligible males she’d run into who’d done everything in their power to convince her they were the perfect answer to any nubile maiden’s prayers. So she’d specifically requested him as her chemistry mentor for the required basic course. It had been, she cheerfully admitted, at least a tiny case of abuse of power, since she’d known perfectly well that the university would never dream of not giving her the mentor she’d requested. She hadn’t much cared about that, either, because it had given her the opportunity for that closer look, and what she’d found when she took it had been even better than she’d expected . . . even if he had been skittish as an Old Earth rabbit downwind of a treecat when he realized she was taking it.
He’s coming along quite nicely at the moment, though, she reflected. And Mom and Dad both approve of him immensely. She quirked a smile. I always knew they had excellent judgment.
But the smile faded as the armored limo drifted towards touchdown and her thoughts returned to her younger brother.
I don’t want Mikey to be unhappy, and I know it bothers Dad more than he’s willing to admit. Mom, too, but this one’s between him and Dad a lot more than between him and her.
“I really do wish he didn’t get so wound up about it,” she said, watching the sting ships through the side window. “He hates it afterward, too, you know. I think he knows he’s being unfair when he gets so mad, and he doesn’t like being mad at you, Dad.”
“I know that, honey. And I don’t like being mad at him, either.” He touched her hair lightly and smiled when she looked back at him. “But, fortunately, Mikey’s a really good kid, whatever rough patch we’re going through right now. And part of it, you know, is the difference between the way boys’ and girls’ heads work.”
“Oh?”
Elizabeth looked at him just a bit suspiciously, and his smile broadened.
“Boys don’t do ‘subtle’ very well, Beth. Especially when those hormones kick in, but it starts earlier than that, really. They know what they know, they’re stubborn as the day is long, and they don’t handle limits very well. They’re geared to solve problems—like disputes with parental authority—by doing things their way, with all the finesse of an Old Earth rhino, and they come at you head on. That’s the reason Mikey and I lock horns so much more often than he and your mom do. As Doctor Sugiyama says, Mikey’s a lot more like me than he is like your mom, and that makes these little . . . lively moments between us inevitable, I’m afraid.”
And, he chose not to add out loud, the way I’m stressing over the situation in Trevor’s Star isn’t helping just at the moment. I try not to let it affect the way I react when he and I don’t see eye-to-eye, but I know it’s leaking over sometimes. In fact, I think it was probably a major contributory factor in our last blow up.
“So, if boys don’t do ‘subtle’ very well, is that another way of saying girls do?” Elizabeth demanded, pulling him away from that unhappy thought before his smile could fade.
“Well, of course!” He shook his head at her. “Girls tackle problems more consensually than boys do, they’d rather spend their energy doing things they don’t know from the outset is going to get them lectured by their elders, and they figure out early that the males in their lives are only there to get in the way and mess things up, so they start out by practicing on their parents. They smile, they promise to do exactly what their parents tell them to do, and then they go out to do precisely what they were going to do anyway, on the theory that if they’re lucky—and good—their parents will never find out about it. And, the way they see it, they’re actually doing their parents a favor, aren’t they? By keeping them from worrying about the consequences of all those things they promised they wouldn’t do, I mean.”
Elizabeth’s eyes widened, and Ariel bleeked with laughter as he tasted her chagrin.
“I didn’t—I mean,” she said, “I—”
“Didn’t realize I’d figured that out?” her father suggested helpfully, and chuckled at her expression. Then his smile faded slightly.
“Beth, I never worried about the venal sins your mom and I knew you were committing, because—like Mikey, but maybe even more so—you were always a good kid. You’re turning into a remarkable young woman, as well, and I knew the whole time you were manipulating and evading your way around me in those venal things you were up to, that you’d never lie to me about anything important.” He rested his hand on her shoulder as the limo settled onto its skids. “I wasn’t worried then, I’m not worried now, and I doubt there’s another father anywhere in the entire Star Kingdom who’s more satisfied—more delighted—than I am with the way his daughter’s turned out. I’m sure Mikey’ll turn out just as well—in his own stubborn, male, mule headed, obstinate, determined way—as you did. And as for the rest of it, I console myself with an ancient Old Earth proverb.”
“And which proverb would that be?” Elizabeth asked as a lieutenant of the King’s Own began to open her limo door for her.
“The one that says ‘This too shall pass,’” her father told her wryly. “‘This too shall pass.’ Even male adolescence, thank God!”
Jonas Adcock and the other people gathered in the briefing room rose respectfully as King Roger and Crown Princess Elizabeth walked through the door.
They were a striking pair, Adcock thought yet again, his brother-in-law and his niece. Elizabeth was above average height for a woman, but her father had his own father’s height. At a hundred and ninety-four centimeters, Roger was far taller than his daughter, whose slender, not quite delicate frame clearly favored her mother’s side of the family. Her complexion was just a shade lighter than her father’s, as well, but she had the Winton chin and her father’s steady brown eyes. And if her head didn’t top Roger’s shoulder, her spine was just as straight, her head regally raised, despite the weight of the treecat riding on her shoulder.
She’ll make a wonderful queen someday, he thought, even if I’ll be long gone before that ever happens. No system of government’s proof against throwing up idiots, incompetents, thieves, or charlatans as head of state, and monarchy’s got more potential for it than some others I could think of. But Manticore’s been lucky as hell in that regard over the centuries. I imagine an awful lot of that’s due to the requirement that the Heir marry a commoner—avoids inbreeding, anyway!—but I think a lot more has to do with that whole Winton concentration on “servant of the people” when they start raising their kids. Wouldn’t be surprised if the ’cats have more than a little to do with it, too, now that I think about it, but the childhood training . . . that’s the big factor. And Roger and Angel are smart—smart—to get Beth involved in Roger’s plans as deeply as possible, as early as possible.
He knew more than a few people, even among Roger’s closer advisers, wouldn’t have agreed with him. People who felt that a young woman—a girl—barely three T-months past her eighteenth birthday was not a suitable recipient for the sorts of heavily classified information which routinely came her way. And even many who’d learned not to worry that she was going to start posting classified documents on her personal blog continued to cherish reservations about an eighteen-year-old’s insight, judgment, and ability to truly understand the Star Kingdom’s steadily deteriorating relations with the People’s Republic of Haven.
Jonas thought those people were fools. He was willing to admit he might be just a little prejudiced, as well, but still—!
Hadn’t they been listening to her? She clearly remembered one of her mother’s favorite adages, learned from Jonas’ stepmother—“A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool speaks because he has to say something.” Elizabeth didn’t open her mouth all that often in the meetings she attended with her father, but whenever she did, what she had to say was worth listening to. There’d even been a time or two when she’d disagreed with Roger, at least in part, and it had been instructive to see how carefully Roger listened to her when she did.
Yep, a wonderful queen, he told himself as her father pulled back her chair and seated her before taking his own place. I hope she doesn’t get to demonstrate that for decades and decades after I’m gone, but when the time comes, she’ll be ready.
Roger noticed Jonas’ small smile, and he was glad to see it, although he hated how lined his brother-in-law’s face was getting, how thin his snowy hair had turned. It was even more striking at today’s meeting, since Roger’s other brother-in-law, Edward Henke, was also present, looking absurdly—painfully—young beside Jonas. The Earl of Gold Peak was an up-and-coming assistant undersecretary in the Foreign Office, although he was still more than a little junior for this sort of stratospheric session, despite his close relationship to the Crown. He was also, however, one of Foreign Secretary Nageswar’s specialists where San Martin was concerned, and that was rather the point of today’s meeting.
In fact, it would probably be a good idea to get that part of the meeting out of the way now so they could move on to the material Gold Peak and most of the other Foreign Office representatives had no need to know.
“All right,” he said, “at least part of this is going to be brutally short, simple, and to the point. According to all our information,” he nodded in Big Sky’s direction, “the Peeps are going to move on Trevor’s Star within the next six T-months. Possibly even sooner.”
Most of the civilians around the table stiffened as they abruptly realized why this meeting was taking place at Admiralty House instead of Mount Royal Palace, and Roger smiled thinly.
“Yes, you’re absolutely right,” he told those civilians, sparing a slight, additional nod in Gold Peak’s direction. “As soon as we can shove all of you civilians—except you and Abner, Allen—” he smiled a bit more naturally at Prime Minister Cromarty and First Lord Castle Rock “—out the door, the uniformed types and I are going to be looking very closely at all of our military hole cards. But before we get to that, we have to decide what we’re going to tell President Ramirez and his government.”
“At the moment, Your Majesty,” Baron Big Sky said, “I’m not sure there’s much we can tell the President.” His expression was unhappy. “I don’t doubt he and his intelligence people are picking up on the same straws in the wind we are—in fact, I know their navy’s intelligence officers are. President Ramirez’s assessment may be somewhat different from ours, but he has to realize what’s building. The problem is that they’re painted into a corner. Not only have they been looking down the barrel of the Peeps’ pulser for damned close to thirty T-years, but they’ve pursued that ‘nonaligned’ policy of theirs for so long that trying to reverse course would be bound to create all sorts of confusion within their own government. And that completely ignores the question of how the Peeps would react!”
“Admiral Big Sky’s correct, I’m afraid, Your Majesty,” Gold Peak put in. He was careful to speak formally, under the circumstances, even if Roger was his brother-in-law. “I hate to say it, but there’s a huge degree of . . . fatalism, I guess I’d have to call it, in the San Martin leadership. They’ve been trying to build up their military, but everyone knows they’ve got the chance of a snowball in hell if—when—the Peeps come after them. I think they’ll probably fight, even knowing they can’t win, but that’s the problem. They’ll hurt the Peeps a lot worse than the Peeps probably think they can, but the San Martinos know they can’t win in the end, and they’ve got their heads so far down, leaning so hard into the wind, that they just aren’t open to any other possibilities. In fact, it’s almost as if they’re afraid to consider any other possibilities because of how much worse it will hurt when they find out they were right to be pessimistic all along.”
“I’m aware of that, Ed,” Roger replied. “And I think your estimate’s a very good one. For that matter, more than one member of the Alliance is going to have serious reservations about what I have in mind. They agree with Ramirez’s advisers: Trevor’s Star is going down, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Not when the Peeps outgun the San Martinos as badly as they do, and not when Trevor’s Star is effectively completely surrounded by Peep territory. To be brutally realistic about it, they see no benefit to tying the Alliance to a walking corpse, especially if it’s likely to embroil the entire Alliance in a shooting war with the PRH. We’re a hell of a lot better off than we were a couple of decades ago, but so are the Peeps, and they’re still a hell of a lot bigger than we are. We have seventy-six of the wall; they have twice that many. And they’ve got somewhere north of three hundred and fifty battleships for rear area security . . . while we don’t have any anymore.”
He paused for a moment, long enough to let all of that sink in, then leaned forward, folding his hands on the table in front of him, looking around the faces of his most trusted advisers, feeling his daughter sitting at his elbow.
“I understand why they feel we can’t risk facing down the Peeps over a single star system that isn’t even a member of the Alliance, but they’re wrong,” he said flatly. “Completely ignoring any moral questions or how long San Martin’s been a Manticoran trading partner, we can’t afford to let the Trevor’s Star Terminus go down without at least trying to save it. And we can’t put defensive forces on it without the San Martinos’ permission. And San Martin isn’t about to give us permission to defend the terminus if they believe doing so will move up the Peeps’ schedule for seizing the star system. We have to convince them to . . . see the situation differently, and we also need to deliver a shock to Nouveau Paris. They’ve gotten too complacent, too sure of themselves, and that’s part of the problem. We need to make them back off and rethink, really consider how serious a threat our own Navy’s become and whether or not they really want to risk opening the ball with us. At the very least we need to change the game in a way which can buy us another five, even ten extra T-years before the missile actually does go up.”
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.”