"Jeff Tullingham is a very responsible jurist, and one who was present as a voting member of the Convention. He takes his duty to oversee both the Convention's final resolution and the Constitution very seriously. Which, of course, was the reason I so strongly sponsored him when he was nominated to the bench."
Something clicked visibly behind McGwire's eyes, and his gaze was much more overtly speculative as he considered Giancola's completely bland expression.
"This is all very interesting," he said slowly, "but it's also premature at this point. After all, there's been no open policy disagreement in the Cabinet, and so far as I know, the President hasn't asked for anyone's resignation."
"Of course not," Giancola agreed.
"If there were to be an open disagreement, however," McGwire went on, "what, precisely, would it be about? And why would it arise in the first place?"
"I would imagine that the most probable cause for disagreement would be a dispute over whether or not—and how hard—to press the Manties to restore our occupied star systems and sign a formal peace treaty whose terms would be acceptable to the Republic," Giancola replied. "Of course, we're speaking purely hypothetically at this point, you understand."
"Oh, of course. But, continuing in that hypothetical vein, why should any member of the Cabinet feel so strongly on this topic as to risk a potential public breach with the President?"
"Out of a sense of responsibility to the Republic's citizens and its territorial integrity," Giancola said. "Obviously, if the present Administration is unable or unwilling to move expeditiously towards an equitable and honorable peace settlement, then it's the duty of those who might advocate a more active policy to provide Congress and the electorate with . . . an alternative leadership choice."
"I see," McGwire said very softly. Silence hovered in the conference room, and then McGwire tipped his chair back, steepled his fingers across his chest, crossed his legs, and cocked his head sideways at Arnold Giancola.
"Is there some particular reason why the need to present the possibility of such an energetic policy should arise at this time?" he asked pleasantly.
"There may be." Giancola tipped his own chair forward, and his expression was no longer bland as the keen, ambitious brain behind his eyes dropped its mask. "The situation in Silesia is unraveling on the Manties. I don't think they even begin to realize just how true that is, either. Of course, they don't know that the Imperial Foreign Service has formally inquired as to exactly what the Republic's position would be should the Empire seek certain border adjustments in the Confederacy."
"Why haven't we heard anything about that on the Foreign Affairs Committee?" McGwire demanded.
"Because the inquiry was only made day before yesterday. It was also made confidentially, and it doesn't directly affect our own foreign policy, anyway. The Republic has no interests in Silesia," the Secretary of State said with a very slight smile, "and as a result, we feel no desire to become embroiled in someone else's dispute there. Which I explained to the Imperial ambassador when he and I spoke over a private dinner."
McGwire's eyes narrowed, and Jason Giancola was obviously hard put to suppress a chuckle.
"Are you planning on handing out any more green flags, Arnold?" McGwire asked after a moment. "As Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I'd really appreciate it if you could give us at least a little warning before you effectively commit the Republic to turning a blind eye to someone else's territorial expansion."
"Why? I mean, we don't have any interests in Silesia, do we?" Giancola shot back. "And even if we did, and even if we objected to whatever the Andermani have in mind, what, precisely, do you think we could do about it? The Confederacy is three hundred light-years from Nouveau Paris, Samson. Until we manage to finally resolve the mess in our own front yard—the one the Manties have stuck us with—we certainly don't have any business becoming involved in confrontations over Silesia!"
"And was that President Pritchart's view, as well?" McGwire inquired in a carefully neutral tone.
"On the basis of our many past discussions on similar topics, I feel certain it would be," Giancola told him in an even more neutral voice. "And because I felt confident I already knew her views, I saw no reason to waste any of her valuable time discussing it with her yet again."
"I see." The tension in the conference room ratcheted upward. Then McGwire gave a desert-dry chuckle. "I don't suppose that it really is any of our business to attempt to dissuade the Empire from pursuing its long term and arguably legitimate ambitions in Silesia. Particularly not when doing that would ease the Manties' problems."
"Not until they get the hell out of our star systems, at any rate," Younger agreed emphatically.
"That thought had crossed my own mind," Giancola admitted. "And I notice that the Manty navy has just announced that it's dispatching a substantial task force to reinforce their Sidemore Station. Jason?"
"According to the Naval Affairs Committee's last briefing, they're dispatching at least five squadrons of ships of the wall, plus at least one carrier squadron. Of course, that information is bound to be out of date, since the dispatch boat took the better part of two weeks to get here from Trevor's Star. Actually, if they stuck to their original schedule, they should have already sent them on their way, although NavInt says they seem to be running a bit behind on their timetable. But even if it's taking them a while to get organized, that's still a fairly substantial force. And they've put Harrington in command of it."
"Harrington, eh?" McGwire looked thoughtful.
"Exactly. Everyone knows she and High Ridge aren't exactly bosom buddies," the Secretary of State said. "But even he has to know she's one of the best naval officers they've got. The fact that they're prepared to send over thirty additional ships of the wall all the way to Silesia and put them under the command of someone like her suggests that they're prepared to take a rather firm line with the Andermani."
"And from the point Ambassador von Kaiserfest raised with you over dinner, it sounds as if the Andermani are prepared to be equally . . . firm with them, doesn't it?" McGwire mused.
"That thought had also crossed my own mind," Giancola replied. "As had the fact that if worse came to worst, the Manties would have to transfer even more of their available naval forces to Silesia to deal with it. Which, just coincidentally, would mean they had to transfer those forces directly away from us."
"I'm not sure I like the sound of that, Arnold." McGwire sounded suddenly more cautious, almost alarmed. "It's one thing to contemplate the possibility of a foreign distraction for High Ridge and Descroix, but it's quite another to deliberately court a fresh military confrontation with the Manties! I trust you haven't forgotten what their Eighth Fleet did to us. I certainly haven't, I assure you, and however much I might differ with the President's negotiating stance, I'm not about to support anything which might put us back in that position."
"Nor would I," Giancola assured him. "But that particular situation isn't really likely to arise again."
"You've been dropping smartass hints about that for months now, but all I've seen is a lot of smoke and no substance," McGwire told him in frosty tones, "And, frankly, it would take one hell of a lot of substance to convince me that we wouldn't be reaching right back into a meat grinder if we started screwing around with the Manties again. You may think we can avoid that situation, or at least survive if it hits us in the teeth. I don't happen to agree, and with all due respect, I'm not prepared to risk the survival of the Republic on the possibility that you know what you're talking about."
"It isn't a 'possibility,' " Giancola said calmly. "It's a virtual certainty. Whatever I may think of Theisman when it comes to foreign policy or his apparent inability to subordinate theory to reality when it comes to the 'rule of law,' I don't think there's much question about his ability as a naval officer. Would you agree with that?"
"Anyone but an idiot would," McGwire half-snapped.
"I'm glad to hear you say that," Giancola tol
d him. "Because it just happens that that's what my 'smartass hints' have been about. It would appear that without his having bothered to tell anyone about it, the Secretary of War has been quietly but rather effectively doing something about our military inferiority."
"Doing what?" McGwire asked intently.
"By a fortunate turn of circumstances, we're actually in a position to answer that question for you, Samson," Arnold Giancola said calmly, and looked at his brother. "Jason, why don't you tell Samson and Gerald about the good Admiral's little Bolthole."
Chapter Twenty-Two
It wasn't the usual route for deploying to Silesia.
Under normal circumstances, a Manticoran task force making transit to the Confederacy would have gone out by way of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction's Gregor terminus. But Gregor was an Andermani star system located in the very heart of the Empire. The Star Kingdom might hold title to the terminus itself, along with the legally recognized right to fortify the area around it and to maintain a fleet base orbiting the system's secondary component, but it was the Empire who held sovereignty over the rest of it.
Which was why Honor had opted to travel the Triangle Route in reverse. Rather than making transit to Gregor, and from there to Silesia and home again by way of Basilisk, as most merchant skippers would have, she and the reinforcing units of Task Force Thirty-Four had moved "north" to Basilisk, and then "west" to Silesia. It wasn't the fastest possible way to get there, since it required her to effectively cross the entire breadth of the Confederacy to reach Marsh, but it was one way to avoid any possible . . . unpleasantness with the Andies before she even reached her new command area. She didn't really like tacking on the additional thirty-four light-years, but even in the zeta hyper-space band, that amounted to less than five days of travel time, and the additional delay was acceptable under the circumstances which actually applied.
Not that every one of her officers agreed with her about that.
"I still say that all of this pussyfooting around is ridiculous," Alistair McKeon grumbled.
He, Alice Truman, and their chiefs of staff had come aboard Werewolf by pinnace in response to one of Honor's dinner invitations. Her dinners were something of a legend in the Fleet, and everyone knew her guests were expected to bring their opinions and any problems they might be wrestling with along with them when they came. McKeon knew that even better than most, and she'd more than half-expected to hear from him—again—on this topic once the wine had been poured.
"It's not 'pussyfooting,' Alistair," she replied mildly, sipping her own cocoa while her guests nursed a particularly good Sphinxian burgundy. She knew it was a good one, although she personally didn't care for it particularly, because her father had selected it for her.
"I calls it as I sees it," he told her with a lopsided grin. "And pussyfooting is exactly what it feels like to me. No offense, Nimitz," he added with a nod to the treecat in the highchair beside Honor, who showed him bone-white fangs in a yawn of amusement.
"In a lot of ways, I have to agree with Alistair," Truman put in. "Not that Wraith and I can't find a lot of useful things to do with the additional time, of course."
She cocked her head at Captain (senior-grade) Craig Goodrick, her chief of staff. Goodrick, who'd earned the nickname "Wraith" for his work with the electronic warfare capabilities of the first Shrike-class LACs, was an unremarkable-looking officer. The brain hiding behind his unassuming façade, however, was one of the better ones in the RMN, at least when it could be pried away from contemplating a hand of spades. Now he shrugged.
"Actually, Ma'am, I don't mind the longer transit time at all. I'm not especially crazy about anything that looks like tiptoeing around the Andies' sensibilities when they're being such pains in the posterior, but given the realities where our LAC groups are concerned, I'll take all the exercise time I can get and be glad of it."
"Heresy!" McKeon proclaimed, but there was a twinkle in his eye, and Commander Roslee Orndorff, his own chief of staff, chuckled out loud. It was a very substantial chuckle from a very substantial woman, and the 'cat in the chair beside her bleeked a laugh of his own. Honor didn't know Orndorff very well, but the ash-blond commander was another of the handful of naval officers who had been adopted. Her Banshee didn't seem to mind that his human-style name was derived from a mythological female harbinger of death. He was a good bit younger than Nimitz, around Samantha's age, in fact, but it was obvious to Honor that he shared Nimitz's low sense of humor.
"You're outnumbered, Sir," Orndorff told McKeon now. "And it's not just the LAC jocks who need time to work up to full efficiency, is it?"
"We could take any batch of Andies I ever saw exactly like we are this minute," McKeon proclaimed.
"In your dreams, Alistair," Truman said dryly. McKeon looked at her, and she shook her head at him. "I make all due allowance for patriotism and esprit de corps, even parochialism, but you know better than that."
"Well, maybe," he conceded. "But the Andies aren't exactly four meters tall and covered with long, curly hair, either. And while I'm prepared to admit we have more than our fair share of rough edges, we also have a bunch of combat-experienced veterans, which is more than the Andies can say."
"That's fair enough," Honor acknowledged. "But you might want to think about the fact that before we and the Peeps started shooting at one another, they were the ones with all of the in-depth backlog of combat experience. We'd done our share of chasing down pirates and dealing with the occasional squadron of 'privateers,' but we didn't have any real, recent war-fighting experience to go with it. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty decent description of where the Andermani probably are right now."
"Maybe it is," McKeon agreed with a more serious expression, "but we're not exactly the Peeps. They might have had a lot of experience at knocking off single-star system opponents, but most of their 'wars' hadn't really amounted to all that much more than polishing off privateer squadrons of their own."
"Somehow I rather doubt President Ramirez would agree with your analysis where the San Martin navy was concerned," Truman pointed out in an even drier tone.
"Your ganging up on me," he complained plaintively.
"That's what happens when someone rushes in where angels fear to tread," Honor told him. "Besides, it's dangerous to draw too close an analogy between the prewar Peep navy and the one we actually wound up fighting. The officers who'd amassed all the experience tended to be Legislaturalists, and they disappeared in Pierre's purges without our having to face most of them in combat. The ones we did go up against, like Parnell—or Alfredo Yu, when he was still in Havenite service—certainly gave us a run for our money, even with our hardware edge."
"You're undermining your own argument," McKeon objected. "If we're supposed to be the overconfident Peeps and the Andies are supposed to be the underestimated but plucky underdogs, then pointing out how competent people like Parnell and Yu were sort of defeats your purpose, doesn't it?"
"Not really. Even Parnell clearly underestimated what we could do to him, and the fact that he was so good in so many ways only underscores how easy it is for it even a competent officer to get overconfident on the basis of his people's superior levels of experience. Which is what the lot of us are ever so gently suggesting to you that you might be doing, Alistair."
She smiled seraphically, and Truman snorted at his expression.
"Gotcha!" she announced.
"All right. All right!" McKeon surrendered. "I admit we can use the additional training time. But all joking aside, I really am more than a little . . . irked to see a Manticoran task force sneaking around through the backdoor route this way."
"I know," Honor acknowledged. "And I know you're not alone in feeling that way, either. But remember that our most recent reports on what's going on in Marsh were three weeks old before we even left Manticore. I don't want to appear any more provocative than we can help. If Emperor Gustav really is planning an aggressive move in Silesia, we don't need to go around prov
iding any military pretexts he can capitalize on. And, by the same token, if there's a genuine probability of hostilities with the Empire, I don't want our task force to be caught deep in Imperial territory when the shuttle goes up."
"I understand entirely," McKeon said, and this time there was no humor at all in his expression or tone. "And I don't really disagree with you. That's the main reason I'm so irritated. We shouldn't have to be so worried about provocations that we go thirty-five light-years out of our way just to avoid the possibility. Much as I may complain about it, I understand exactly why no responsible station commander would be in a position to make any other routing decision. But understanding it doesn't mean I have to like the circumstances which make it the responsible thing to do."
"No," Honor agreed. "And on that level, I have to agree with you. But Alice and Wraith are right about how much we can use the additional time for training."
McKeon nodded, and she tasted the agreement behind the gesture. It was a bit grudging, but that wasn't because Alistair rejected her position. It was because he didn't like the reasons her ships' companies needed the additional drill time any more than he liked the reasons she felt no choice but to avoid actions which might be—or might be construed as—provocative.
And he's right, she reflected. It's absolutely ridiculous for the Queen's Navy to have gotten so . . . out of shape in barely four T-years. I suppose this is what Hamish meant when he started talking about "victory disease." But I know darned well that it never would have happened if Baroness Mourncreek were still First Lord and Sir Thomas were still First Space Lord.
But that was the real crux of the matter, when she came right down to it. Any military organization had a pronounced tendency to take its direction from the attitudes of its senior commanders, and the complacency and arrogance of the political admirals currently running the Admiralty were reflected among an unfortunately large and growing proportion of the Navy's officers. The manpower reductions mandated as part of the build down had been disproportionately concentrated among experienced personnel, particularly in the senior noncom and enlisted grades, which helped explain some of the problem, but it certainly didn't excuse it. Total numerical reductions in the regular officer corps had been lower than anywhere else, since the first priority had been to release reservist officers back to the merchant marine and civilian economy. That had actually increased the proportion of active-duty officers who were Academy graduates, but all too many of the better regulars had become so disgusted with the Janacek Admiralty that they had voluntarily gone on half-pay status and followed their reserve fellows into merchant service. The ones who remained were all too often the ones who found the current Admiralty attitude a comfortable fit. Which didn't say anything good about their own training and readiness attitudes.