War Of Honor

Dozens of operations, each with its own objectives, its own place in the overall strategy. And each—even Giscard's own attack on Trevor's Star—independent of one another. Any one, or two, or even three, of them could fail completely without spelling the defeat of Operation Thunderbolt as a whole. To be sure, the destruction of Third Fleet at Trevor's Star was the most important single objective, but even if Giscard failed there, the other operations would inflict a defeat upon the Star Kingdom which would utterly surpass even the one Esther McQueen had delivered in Operation Icarus.

The objective of Thunderbolt, Giscard knew, was to convince the Manties that they must negotiate in good faith and compel them to begin the process. Eloise had no ambitions beyond that point, as she had made crystal clear in her address to the Congress. But much as Giscard loved her, he wasn't blind to the blind spots in her own judgment. By and large, they were so minor, especially compared to her strengths, as to be completely negligible. But sometimes . . . sometimes her faith in the rationality of others betrayed her.

It seemed so obvious to her that all the Republic wanted was to be treated fairly, for the Star Kingdom to negotiate in good faith, that some essential part of her couldn't quite believe anyone else could fail to see that. She didn't want to conquer the Star Kingdom. She didn't want to reconquer Trevor's Star. All she wanted was for the Star Kingdom to talk to her. To once and for all negotiate an end to this ugly, festering, endless conflict. And so, because that was all she wanted and because it was so obvious to her that it was all she could want, she truly believed that the Manties would recognize both the justice of her demands and the realities of their hopelessly weakened position and allow her to achieve the equitable diplomatic solution she craved.

But Javier Giscard, as both the lover who knew her better than anyone else in the galaxy and as the senior field commander of her Navy, suspected she was wrong. Not in what she wanted, but in how likely she was to get it. Even if the High Ridge Government fell, no Manticoran successor government was going to simply roll over and quit—not without additional proof of how Thunderbolt had crippled them. Nor were the Manties likely to believe that peace was truly all she wanted. Especially not if Thunderbolt secured the level of advantage Giscard expected it to. The Star Kingdom would have no choice but to expect the opportunities Thunderbolt would offer to tempt the Republic into exploiting them. Into imposing a peace on its own terms, not negotiating for one equitable to both sides. And just as Eloise had been unwilling to accept such an imposition for the Republic, so any new Manty government would be unwilling to accept one for the Star Kingdom. Which meant the war that Eloise hoped would be both begun and ended with a single campaign wouldn't be.

Giscard knew that. Thomas Theisman knew that, and both of them had explained it to Eloise. More operations would be required, more people would be killed—on both sides. And, intellectually, Eloise had admitted the possibility that they were correct. It was a possibility she was prepared to face as unflinchingly as she had been prepared to defy the Committee of Public Safety as Giscard's people's commissioner. But it wasn't one she'd truly accepted on an emotional level, and he was frightened for her. Not because he expected Thunderbolt to fail, because he didn't. And not because he expected defeat after Thunderbolt, because he didn't expect that, either. Theisman's plan was too good, its objectives too shrewdly chosen, for that. If additional operations became necessary, the Republican Navy would be well-positioned, with the strategic momentum on its side and an ever increasing stream of powerful new warships coming forward from Bolthole to replace any losses.

But even now he doubted that Eloise was truly prepared for the casualties. Not for loss of money, or loss of hardware—of lives. The deaths of men and women, Manticoran as well as Havenite, which would stem directly from her decision to go back to war. The deaths Javier Giscard firmly expected to continue for months, possibly even years, beyond the end of Operation Thunderbolt.

And if they did, he told himself grimly, then it was his job—his and Thomas Theisman's and Lester Tourville's and Sha

He looked back at the date-time display, and as he did his com terminal beeped softly. He looked down at it and pressed the acceptance key, and Captain Gozzi's face appeared upon it. The chief of staff's expression combined tension and confidence, and he smiled at his admiral.

"Sir, you wanted me to remind you at X-minus three. The staff is assembling in your flag briefing room now."

"Thank you, Marius," Giscard said. "I'll be there in a moment. Go ahead and distribute the briefing packets so people can be looking over them. We don't have much time, so if anyone sees any last-minute detail we need to address, we'd better get on it quickly."

"Yes, Sir. I'll get right on it."

"Thank you," Giscard said again. "I'm on my way."

Chapter Fifty Five

Lieutenant Commander Sarah Flanagan finished the current report, affixed her electronic signature, and dumped it back into the station's communications system. No doubt, she thought sourly, she'd be seeing it again soon. After all, there had to be some section she'd forgotten to initial, some signature block she'd forgotten to check, or—all else failing—some arcane routing number she'd somehow managed to delete from the header. Something. Right off the top of her head, she couldn't think of a single report which Captain Louis al-Salil hadn't bounced back to her for one obscure reason or another.

Now if he'd only spent half as much effort on keeping his LAC group's training up to standard . . . .

Unfortunately, al-Salil had better things to do with his time than to waste it on boring, "routine" training ops. And if the group absolutely had to train, it made so much more sense to him to rely on the simulators. The fact that no more than a quarter of the group could fit into the available simulators at any one time (which made exercises in things like full-group coordination impossible) was not, in his opinion, a particularly significant drawback.

Sarah Flanagan disagreed. Her last posting had been to HMS Mephisto, a CLAC assigned to Home Fleet. Even there, the LAC training tempo had slackened noticeably from the pace Eighth Fleet had maintained under Admiral Truman during Operation Buttercup, but it remained far more demanding than anything al-Salil seemed to feel was necessary. Flanagan had been only a lieutenant during Buttercup, working her way up to command her own LAC, but she'd had her eye on a squadron command slot even then. She'd absorbed everything she could under Truman's tutelage and applied it with an aggressive efficiency which had carried her to that goal in something close to record time. Although, she admitted to herself, if she'd known they were going to assign her to a bare-bones space station in a podunk frontier system when they gave it to her, she might have had second thoughts about her ambition.

She supposed it made at least some sense to economize on starships, especially given the way the Admiralty and Government had built down the Navy's strength. And certainly a LAC group could cover far more space, and do it more efficiently, than a like to