At All Costs Read online

  "Alizon System Central, this is Captain Javits. I will be bringing your Tregarth Alpha facilities into my extreme missile range in twenty-seven minutes from... now. My vector will make it impossible for me to match velocity with the facilities or send across boarding parties, and I hereby inform you that I will open fire on them, and on any extraction vessels within my missile envelope, in twenty-nine minutes."

  He looked down at his plot once more with a hard, fierce grin. Then keyed his mike once more.

  "I advise you to begin evacuation procedures now," he said. "Javits, clear."

  * * *

  "So what's the best estimate of the results, Admiral?" President Eloise Pritchart asked.

  The beautiful, platinum-haired President had come across to the Octagon, the Republic of Haven's military nerve center, for this meeting, and aside from one bodyguard, she was the single civilian in the enormous conference room. All eyes were on the huge holo display above the conference table, where the reproduced imagery from Bertrand Javits' tactical plot hovered in midair.

  "Our best estimate from the recon platforms' data is that Captain Javits' raid destroyed about eight percent-probably a little less-of Alizon's total resource extraction capability, Madam President," Rear Admiral Victor Lewis, Director of Operational Research replied. Thanks to venerable traditions of uncertain origin, Naval Intelligence reported to Op Research, which, in turn, reported to Vice Admiral Linda Trenis' Bureau of Planning.

  "And was that an acceptable return in light of our own losses?" the President asked.

  "Yes," another voice said, and the President looked at the stocky, brown-haired admiral at the head of the table who'd spoken. Admiral Thomas Theisman, Secretary of War and Chief of Naval Operations, looked back at her steadily. "We lost about a third of the people we'd have lost aboard a single old-style cruiser, Madam President," he continued, speaking very formally in the presence of their subordinates. "In return, we confirmed NavInt's estimate of the system-defense doctrine the Manties appear to be adopting and acquired additional information on their fire control systems and current pod deployment patterns; destroyed eight million tons of hyper-capable merchant shipping, better than five times the combined tonnage of all the LACs Javits lost; and put a small but significant dent into the productivity of Alizon. More to the point, we hit one of the Manticoran Alliance's member's home system for what everyone will recognize as negligible losses, and this isn't the first time Alizon's been hit. That has to have an effect on the entire Alliance's morale, and it's almost certain to increase the pressure on the White Haven Admiralty to detach additional picket forces to cover the Star Kingdom's allies against similar attacks."

  "I see." The spectacularly beautiful, platinum-haired President's topaz-colored eyes didn't look especially happy, but they didn't flinch away from Theisman's logic, either. She looked at him for a moment longer, then returned her attention to Rear Admiral Lewis.

  "Please pardon the interruption, Admiral," she said. "Continue, if you would."

  "Of course, Madam President." The rear admiral cleared his throat and punched a new command sequence into his terminal. The holo display shifted, and Javits' plot disappeared, replaced by a series of bar graphs.

  "If you'll look at the first red column, Madam President," he began, "you'll see our losses to date in ships of the wall. The green column beside it represents SD(P)s currently undergoing trials or completing construction. The amber column-"

  * * *

  "Well, that was all extremely interesting, Tom," Eloise Pritchart said some hours later. "Unfortunately, I think we're into information overkill. In some ways, I think I know less about what's going on now than I did before I came over here!"

  She made a face, and Theisman chuckled. He sat behind his desk, tipped back comfortably in his chair, and the Republic's President sat on the comfortable couch facing the desk. Her personal security detail was camped outside the door, giving her at least the illusion of privacy, her shoes lay on the carpet in front of her, and she had both bare feet tucked up under her while she nursed a steaming cup of coffee in slender hands. Theisman's own cup sat on his desk's blotter.

  "You spent long enough as Javier's people's commissioner to have a better grasp of military realities than that, Eloise," he told her now.

  "In a general sense, certainly." She shrugged. "On the other hand, I was never actually trained for the realities of the Navy, and there've been so many changes in such a short time that what I did know feels hopelessly out of date. I suppose what matters is that you're current. And confident."

  Her tone was ever so slightly questioning on the last two words, and it was his turn to shrug.

  "'Confident' is a slippery word. You know I was never happy about going back to war against the Manties." He raised one hand in a placating gesture. "I understand your logic, and I can't disagree with it. Besides, you're the President. But I have to admit that I never liked the idea. And that Thunderbolt's success has exceeded my own expectations. So far, at least."

  "Even after what happened-or didn't happen-at Trevor's Star?"

  "Javier made the right decision on the basis of everything we knew," Theisman said firmly. "None of us fully appreciated just how tough Shannon's 'layered defense' was going to be against long-range Manticoran missile fire. If we'd been able to project probable losses during the approach phase as accurately then as we could now, then, yes, he should have gone ahead and pressed the attack. But he didn't know that at the time any more than the rest of us did."

  "I see." Pritchart sipped coffee, and Theisman watched her with a carefully hidden smile. That was about as close as the President was ever going to allow herself to come to "pulling strings" on Javier Giscard's behalf, lover or no lover.

  "And Lewis' projections?" she continued after a moment. "Do you feel confident about them, too?"

  "As far as the numbers from our own side go, absolutely," he said. "Manpower's going to be a problem for about the next seven months. After that, the training programs Linda and Shannon have in place should be producing most of the personnel we need. And a few months after that, we'll begin steadily mothballing the old-style wallers to crew the new construction as it comes out of the yards. We're still going to be stretched to come up with the officers we need-especially flag officers with experience-but we were able to build up a solid base between the Saint-Just cease-fire and Thunderbolt. I think we'll be all right on that side, too.

  "As far as the industrial side goes, I realize the economic strain of our present building plans is going to be heavy. Rachel Hanriot's made that clear enough on behalf of Treasury, but I didn't need her to tell me, and I deeply regret having to impose it. Especially given the high price we've all paid to start turning the economy around. But we don't have a lot of choice, unless we end up successfully negotiating a peace settlement."

  He raised his eyebrows questioningly, and she gave her head a quick, irritable shake.

  "I don't know where we are on that," she admitted, manifestly unhappily. "I'd have thought even Elizabeth Winton would be willing to sit down and talk after you, Javier, and the rest of the Navy finished kicking her navy's ass so thoroughly! So far, though, nothing. I'm becoming more and more convinced that Arnold's been right about the Manties' new taste for imperialism from the very beginning... damn him."

  Theisman started to say something, then stopped. This wasn't the time to suggest that the Queen of Manticore might have very good reasons to not see things exactly as Eloise Pritchart did. Or to reiterate his own deep distrust and suspicion of anything emerging from the mouth of Secretary of State Arnold Giancola.

  "Well," he said instead, "in the absence of a negotiated settlement, we don't really have any choice but to press for an outright military victory."

  "And you genuinely believe we can achieve that?"

  Theisman snorted in harsh amusement at her tone.

  "I wish you wouldn't sound quite so... dubious," he said. "You're the commander-in-chief, after all. Does terr
ible things for the uniformed personnel's morale when you sound like you can't quite believe we can win."

  "After what they did to us in the last war, and especially Buttercup, it's hard not to feel a little doubtful, Tom," she said a bit apologetically.

  "I suppose it is," he conceded. "But in this case, yes, I do believe we can defeat the Star Kingdom and its allies if we have to. I really need to take you out to Bolthole to actually see what we're doing there, and discuss everything Shannon Foraker is up to. The short version, though, is that we hurt the Manties badly in Thunderbolt. Not just in the ships we destroyed, but in the unfinished construction Admiral Griffith took out at Grendelsbane. We gutted their entire second-generation podnought building program, Eloise. They're basically having to lay down new vessels from scratch, and while their building rates are still faster than ours are, even at Bolthole, they aren't fast enough to offset the jump we've gotten in ships already under construction and nearing completion. Our technology still isn't as good as theirs is, but the tech information Erewhon handed over, and the sensor data we recorded during Thunderbolt-plus the captured hardware we've been able to take apart and examine-is helping a lot in that regard, as well."

  "Erewhon." Pritchart shook her head with a sigh, her expression unhappy. "I really regret the position we put Erewhon in with Thunderbolt."

  "Frankly, I don't think the Erewhonese are exactly ecstatic over it, themselves," Theisman said dryly. "And I know they didn't anticipate that they were going to hand over their tech manuals on Alliance hardware just in time for us to go back to war. On the other hand, they know why we did it," why you did it, actually, Eloise, he carefully did not say aloud, "and they wouldn't have broken with Manticore in the first place if they hadn't had some pretty serious reservations of their own about the Manties' new foreign policy. And since the shooting started, we've been scrupulous about respecting the limitations built into the terms of our treaty relationship."

  Pritchart nodded. The Republic's treaty with the Republic of Erewhon was one of mutual defense, and her administration had very carefully informed Erewhon-and the Manticorans-that since Haven had elected to resume open hostilities without being physically attacked by Manticore, she had no intention of attempting to invoke the military terms of the treaty.

  "In any case," Theisman continued, "they at least gave us a look inside the Manties' military hardware. What they had was dated, and I could wish it were more current, but it's been extraordinarily useful to Shannon, anyway.

  "The upshot is that Shannon's already working out new doctrine and some new pieces of hardware, especially in the LAC programs and out system-defense control systems, based on the combination of our information from Erewhon, examination of captured and wrecked Manticoran hardware, and analysis of operations to date. At the beginning of Thunderbolt, we'd estimated that one of our pod superdreadnoughts probably had about forty percent as much combat power as a Manticoran or Grayson SD(P). That estimate looks like it was fairly accurate at the time, but I believe we're steadily moving the ratio in our favor."

  "But the Manties have as much operational data as we do, don't they? Aren't they going to be improving their capabilities right along with ours?"

  "Yes and no. Actually, except for what happened to Lester at Marsh, they didn't retain possession of a single star system where we engaged them, and none of Lester's modern hyper-capable types were taken intact. We, on the other hand, effectively destroyed virtually every one of their pickets we hit, so those pickets didn't have much opportunity to pass on any observations they might have made.

  "In addition, we captured examples of a lot of their hardware. Their security protocols worked damned effectively on most of their classified mollycircs, and quite a bit of what we did get we can't really use yet. Shannon says it's a case of basic differences in the capabilities of our infrastructure. For all intents and purposes, we've got to build the tools, to build the tools, to build the tools we need to reproduce a lot of Manticore's cutting edge technology. But we've still picked up a lot, and, frankly, our starting point was so far behind theirs that our relative capabilities are climbing more rapidly than theirs are.

  "As I say, we'd estimated pre-Thunderbolt that each of their modern wallers was about two and a half times as combat-effective as one of ours. On the basis of changes we've already made in doctrine and tactics, and allowing for how much more capable our missile defenses turned out to be, we've upped that estimate to set one of their SD(P)s as equal to about two of our podnoughts. On the basis of the current rate of change in our basic capabilities, within another eight months or a year, the ratio should drop from its original two-point-five-to-one to about one-and-a-half-to-one, or even one-point-three-to-one. Given the difference in the numbers of ships of the wall we can anticipate commissioning over the next T-year and a half or so, and especially bearing in mind how much more strategic depth we have, that equates to a solid military superiority on our part."

  "But the Legislaturalists had a solid military superiority when they started this entire cycle of war," Pritchart pointed out. "And, like the one you're talking about, it depended on 'strategic depth' and offsetting the Manties' tech edge with numbers."

  "Granted." Theisman acknowledged. "And I'll also grant you that the Manties aren't going to be letting any grass grow under them. They know as well as we do that their big equalizer has always been their superior technology, so they're going to be doing whatever they can do increase their tech edge. And as someone who had far more experience than I ever wanted working with the bits and pieces of assistance we were able to get from the Solarian League back in the bad old days under Pierre and Saint-Just, I sometimes suspect that even the Manties don't realize just how good their hardware really is. It's certainly better than anything the Sollies actually have deployed. Or had deployed as of two or three T-years ago, at least. And if NavInt's right, they haven't done a thing to change that situation since.

  "But the bottom line, Eloise, is that they simply can't match or overcome our building edge over the next two T-years or so. Even then, the sheer numbers of hulls we can lay down and man-assuming the economy holds-should be great enough to allow us to more than maintain parity in newly commissioned units. But for those two years, at a bare minimum, they simply won't have the platforms to mount whatever new weapons or defenses they introduce. And one thing both we and the Manties learned the last time around is that strategic hesitation is deadly."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Eloise, no one else in the history of the galaxy has ever fought a war on the scale on which we and the Manties are operating. The Solarian League never had to; it was simply so big no one could fight it, and everyone knew it. But we and the Manties have hammered away at each other with naviess with literally hundreds of ships of the wall for most of the last twenty T-years now. And the one thing the Manties made perfectly clear in the last war is that wars like this can be fought to a successful military conclusion. They couldn't do it until they managed to assemble their Eighth Fleet for 'Operation Buttercup,' but once they did, they drove us to the brink of military collapse in just a few months. So, if they won't negotiate, and if we have a time window of, say, two T-years in which we enjoy a potentially decisive advantage, then this is no time to be dancing around the edges."

  He looked her straight in the eye, and his voice was deep and hard.

  "If we can't achieve our war objectives and an acceptable peace before our advantage in combat power erodes out from under us, then it's time for us to use that advantage while we still have it and force them to admit defeat. Even if that requires us to dictate peace terms in Mount Royal Palace on Manticore itself."

  Chapter One

  The nursery was extraordinarily full.

  Two of the three older girls-Rachel and Jeanette-were downstairs, hovering on the brink of adulthood, and Theresa was at boarding school on Manticore, but the remaining five Mayhew children, their nannies, and their personal armsmen made a respectable mob. Then there
was Faith Katherine Honor Stephanie Miranda Harrington, Miss Harrington, heir to Harrington Steading, and her younger twin brother, James Andrew Benjamin, and their personal armsmen. And lest that not be enough bodies to crowd even a nursery this large, there was her own modest person-Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Steadholder and Duchess Harrington, and her personal armsman. Not to mention one obviously amused treecat.

  Given the presence of seven children, the oldest barely twelve, four nannies, nine armsmen (Honor herself had gotten off with only Andrew LaFollet, but Faith was accompanied by two of her three personal armsmen), and one Steadholder, the decibel level was actually remarkably low, she reflected. Of course, all things were relative.

  "Now, that is enough!" Gena Smith, the senior member of Protector Palace's child-care staff, said firmly in the no-nonsense voice which had thwarted-more or less-the determination of the elder Mayhew daughters to grow up as cheerful barbarians. "What is Lady Harrington going to think of you?"

  "It's too late to try to fool her about that now, Gigi," Honor Mayhew, one of Honor's godchildren, said cheerfully. "She's known all of us since we were born!"