War Of Honor

"Um." High Ridge frowned, and Janacek waited, his expression calm, while he pondered. Then the Prime Minister nodded slowly.

"I'm not certain I entirely agree with you, Edward," he said pontifically, "but the Admiralty is your shop. And certainly your loyalty to your subordinates is commendable. I would advise you not to allow that loyalty to blind you to realities. Or to create a situation in which someone else's incompetence destroys your own career. But I'm not prepared to overrule you where Jurgensen is concerned at this time."

"Thank you, Michael. I appreciate that," Janacek said gravely, and it was true. He especially appreciated the fact that keeping Jurgensen around offered him a ready made scapegoat he could blame and—regretfully, of course—sack after all if any other disasters came home to roost.

"In the meantime," the First Lord continued, "and having admitted that, for whatever reason, we've suffered an Intelligence failure of the first magnitude, I would like to point out two things. First, the only source we have for the number and capabilities of the Peeps'—I mean, the Republic's—new ships is Theisman's own news conference. There is absolutely no independent confirmation of any of his claims at this time. Second, the mere fact that they may possess pod-superdreadnoughts doesn't necessarily equate to anything like equal capabilities in combat."

"Are you suggesting that the Republic doesn't, in fact, have the ships it claims it does?" New Kiev managed not to sound overtly incredulous, but her automatic distaste for and distrust of all things military still colored her voice.

"I'm not suggesting anything where numbers of hulls are concerned," he replied, his eyes hard. "I'm simply pointing out that the only numbers we have are the ones Theisman supplied. It's certainly possible he exaggerated those numbers. By the same token, it's equally possible that he under represented them, instead."

"Why would he do either of those?" Descroix asked.

"I haven't said he did do either of them." Janacek heard an edge of exasperation creeping into his voice and made himself stop and draw a deep breath. Then he continued. "What I said was that he might have done either of them, and that we wouldn't have any way of knowing which—if either—it was. As to why he might have a

He paused again, this time without grinding his teeth together, and glanced around the conference room. The expressions on the faces looking back at him had become at least a little more thoughtful as he spoke, and he allowed himself to feel a very slight flicker of satisfaction at the evidence that his own reasoned ma

"Whatever their intentions, though," he continued, "the second point I raised is probably the more important one. In the final analysis, ships of the wall are only platforms for weapons. What really matters is the weapons those platforms carry, and at the moment nothing we know suggests that the Republic has somehow managed to overcome the technological gap between our capabilities. While Theisman and Pritchart may have managed to build a shipyard complex somewhere that we didn't know about, the mere fact that a yard exists says nothing about the sophistication of its technical capabilities. It's going to take longer for us to develop that sort of information, but Admiral Jurgensen's technical people have been ru

He made certain that neither his tone nor his expression revealed his awareness that he was heading out onto thin ice.

"By their most pessimistic estimates, the Republic's R&D is still years from matching our capabilities. In that regard, it's significant that Theisman hasn't claimed that they've managed to put any CLACs into commission. Building the carriers themselves isn't any more difficult than building SD(P)s. In fact, it's a simpler problem in naval design. So the fact that they apparently don't have any of them may well be an indicator that their tech base still isn't up to the task of producing a LAC design good enough to justify building carriers to put it on.

"Obviously, that's nothing more than a hypothesis at this point. We certainly can't prove or dis prove it on the basis of the evidence available to us. But if it's true, then it's just one more indication of the wide gap between our basic military technology and theirs, and that's the significant point. Until they can deploy weapons systems which match the range and accuracy of ours—or, perhaps even more important, the defensive capabilities of our electronic warfare systems—the actual to

"Unimportant?" New Kiev repeated. The single word came out with an utter lack of emphasis which, in its own way, was as emphatic as a snort of disbelief.

"Relatively unimportant," he corrected in a voice just barely on the warm side of frosty. "Obviously that's not the same thing as 'insignificant,' Marisa. But as Eighth Fleet demonstrated in Operation Buttercup, capability trumps simple numbers. To put it in its simplest possible terms, if our ships can kill their ships at twice their effective range, then it really doesn't matter if they have more hulls than we do. All it does is give our fire control crews more targets."

"I see what you're saying," High Ridge said, and his voice was noticeably warmer than it had been at the begi

"So do I," Descroix seconded with a vigorous nod.

"I follow your logic," New Kiev agreed, although her voice and ma

"I follow your logic," she repeated, "but even granting all you've just said, I have to admit that the mere fact that they've a

Janacek exhaled internally, his attentive expression hiding his enormous relief that she hadn't pointed out that the ONI which was confident of the RMN's technological superiority was the same ONI which had been equally confident of its numerical superiority up until approximately thirty-six hours before this meeting.

"I have to admit to concerns of my own in that regard," he told her, and turned to the Foreign Secretary. "I'm not aware of any compelling military reason for Theisman to have made this information public," he said. "Which leads me to suspect that there must be some other consideration which justifies him and Pritchart, at least in their own minds, in making this a