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Roberto Tyler felt as if someone had just kicked him in the belly. His ears couldn't have heard what he thought they just had. But if she meant it...
"While the Indefatigables are being replaced in Solarian service by the Nevada -class ships, Mr. President," Levakonic said, speaking up for the first time, "they served primarily with the frontier fleet elements. As I'm sure you're aware, that means they were kept much more rigorously updated with refits than is traditionally the case for Solarian ships of the wall or battlecruisers attached to the Central Reserve. These vessels represent very nearly the latest word in SLN weaponry and EW capabilities. Ms. Anisimovna has pointed out that they would effectively quadruple your existing to
"Yes. Yes, they would," Tyler admitted after a moment, and he could hear the raw greed in his voice himself. "I fail to understand, however, just how private businesspeople like you and Ms. Anisimovna might happen to have access to such ships." He resolutely refrained from looking at Hongbo.
"As I just pointed out," Levakonic said calmly, "the Indefatigables are being replaced by the Nevadas . The process is going to take years. It's also going to be expensive, and Technodyne is one of the primary builders for the new class. To help defray construction costs, the Navy is disposing of some of the Indefatigables slated to be replaced by transferring them to us for scrapping and reclamation. Obviously, they have on-site inspectors to ensure that the hulls are stripped and broken up. As it happens, however," his expression, Tyler noticed, remained completely i
"I see." Tyler was getting his imagination back under control, and he smiled crookedly at the Technodyne representative. "I imagine, though, that it might be a bit difficult for your employers if those 'scrapped' ships turned up intact in someone else's navy."
"'A bit difficult' would be a fairly generous understatement, Mr. President," Levakonic agreed. The small, wiry man smiled with what Tyler suspected was the first genuine amusement any of his visitors had displayed. "That's why we'd have to insist that all of them be comprehensively refitted in your own yard here in Monica. We'd need more than just a simple change of transponder codes. We could reshape their emissions signatures significantly by changing out sidewall generators and the main active sensor arrays, but there are several other, smaller changes we'd want to make, as well. In combination, they should be more than enough to adequately disguise the ships' origins. It wouldn't stand up in the face of a physical boarding and examination, but that shouldn't really be a factor."
"I suppose not," Tyler said. But then he shook himself.
"This is all extremely fascinating... and very tempting," he said frankly. "But even with a reinforcement like that, the Monican Navy would disappear like water in a vacuum if the Manty Home Fleet came calling." He shook his head. "However much I might like the notion of controlling the Lynx Terminus, and of keeping the Manticorans as far away from Monica as possible, I'm not prepared to commit suicide by challenging them to open combat."
"It wouldn't work out that way," Anisimovna predicted with what Tyler privately thought was a ludicrous degree of assurance.
"Without wishing to seem discourteous, Ms. Anisimovna, I don't believe I feel quite as confident of that as you appear to."
"Honesty is always welcome, Mr. President, even at the risk of discourtesy. And I'm not surprised you don't share my confidence. The entire idea's come at you cold, without the opportunity to consider all the ramifications. But I assure you that we have considered them quite carefully. And although I recognize we're suggesting you assume a more immediate and larger degree of personal risk than we are, I might also point out that if this gambit fails, and your new battlecruisers are traced back to Mr. Levakonic or to myself, then the consequences for us and for our corporations will also be... extreme."
His eyes flared, and she smiled gently.
"I'm not trying to equate our degrees of risk, Mr. President. I'm simply trying to make the point that we wouldn't be recommending any such course of action to you if we didn't honestly and completely expect it to succeed."
And I can believe as much of that as I want to, he thought sardonically. But, then again, my relationship with Manpower and Mesa is worth too much to jeopardize by being blunt. And it can't do any harm to at least listen to whatever insanity she wants to propose.
"Very well," he said. "Explain just why you believe I could get away with anything like this, please."
"Let's consider this situation from the Manties' side," Anisimovna suggested reasonably. "Their intelligence on the Cluster can't have been very complete before they first located the Lynx Terminus. After all, Lynx is over six hundred light-years from Manticore; Monica is another two hundred and seventy light-years from Lynx; and the Star Kingdom had absolutely no strategic interests in the area.
"Things have changed, however, and I'm sure their intelligence services have been working overtime to secure as much information as possible about the Cluster and its immediate -neighbors-including Monica. And they've probably done an excellent job of analyzing the data they've been able to collect, especially now that Patricia Givens has returned to head their Office of Naval Intelligence.
"Because of that, they know exactly-or, at least, to within a fairly close margin-how powerful your navy is. We may as well all be honest here and admit that Monica's long-standing relationship with Frontier Security would make you of special interest to the Manties, so it's virtually certain they've devoted an additional effort to collecting, collating, and analyzing information about you."
She paused, and Tyler nodded.
"I'm sure you're right, at least about the bit about their having a special interest in us. That's why I'm confident their Admiralty must already have drawn up contingency plans for the unlikely event that we were foolish enough to get frisky and step on their toes."
"Of course. But ," Anisimovna's gray eyes flashed with what certainly seemed to be genuine enthusiasm, "those plans are based on the ship strength they know you possess. If you were to suddenly appear before the terminus with no less than fourteen big, powerful, modern battlecruisers, they would have to realize there'd been some sort of sudden, radical change in the balance of military power in the Cluster. They won't know where you got those ships, or who you got them from. Nor will they know how many other ships you may have acquired. The possibility that you got them directly from the League, or at least with the League's official knowledge and approval, will have to cross their minds. And the fact that they're already at war with the Republic of Haven, which has them stretched extremely tightly, will be another factor in their thinking.
"I'm not going to suggest that anyone could guarantee they wouldn't eventually move against you, assuming they concluded you were acting solely on your own. But they'll hesitate, Mr. President. They have to. Given how close to desperate their military situation is right now, they can't possibly unhesitatingly divert the strength to deal with your newly discovered battlecruisers— and whoever might be backing you -until they've had time to analyze the situation."
"And if they respond out of knee-jerk reaction by sending, say, twenty or thirty of their own battlecruisers, or a single squadron of superdreadnoughts, through before they have time to realize all the reasons why they have to analyze the situation?" Tyler inquired.
"Should they be stupid enough to do that, Mr. President," Bardasano said, "I believe you'll be able to present them with an argument against pressing any launch buttons after they get here."
"Indeed?" He looked at her skeptically. "Such as?"
"After you've accepted the surrender of the Manty terminus picket, or blown it out of space, as the case may be," she said calmly, "a dozen or so Monican freighters will begin emplacing mines. Actually, courtesy of Mr. Levakonic, they'll be something new, something Technodyne developed out of the reverse flow of information from the previous Havenite regime."
Tyler looked at Levakonic, and the Technodyne rep smiled.
"We call them 'missile pods,' Mr. President," he said. "They have a great deal more standoff range than any conventional mine, and enough of them will blow any ship ever built out of space."
"And where do these 'Monican freighters' come from?"
"Oh, I imagine I know someone who could loan them to you," Bardasano said, gazing up at the ceiling.
"And the cost of all of this generosity-battlecruisers, freighters, missile pods...? I may not be Admiral Bourmont, but I have a pretty shrewd notion that what you're talking about would cost considerably more than the next ten or fifteen years of our GSP."
"Certainly it would be expensive, Mr. President," Anisimovna agreed. "But not any more than could be readily repaid by someone who had possession of a junction terminus. You could undoubtedly work quite a bit of it out by simply granting transit fee exemptions to Jessyk Combine shipping passing through."
"So." Tyler let his gaze sweep over all of his visitors. "And how long are these missile pods good for? What's their endurance?"
"No more than two or three weeks," Levakonic admitted. "A month, at most. After that, they have to be taken off-line for service and maintenance."
"But they'd be your hole card against an immediate, ill-conceived response from Manticore," Anisimovna said quickly.
"And while your freighters were placing the mines," Bardasano said, "your navy would be sweeping up all of the merchantships which were present awaiting transit at the time of your arrival. And, of course, the additional ships coming in through hyper and unaware of the change in ownership. I'm sure you'd feel enormous remorse if you allowed any of those vessels to pass through the terminus before the situation with Manticore was fully resolved. After all, accidents happen, and it's entirely possible that a merchantship coming through from Lynx might be mistaken for a hostile warship and destroyed by the Manties before they realized their error. It would therefore be your responsibility to hold all of those ships under the close, protective escort of your own naval units."