Ashes Of Victory

"Then it's unfortunate most of you aren't eligible to vote yet," Mayhew said, "because that's exactly the sort of attitude which preserves freedom in the first place." His sincerity was obvious, and he smiled. "Which makes me look forward to the day all of you, and not just Admiral Yu, do have the franchise here on Grayson."

"Hey! I've got the vote here," Honor protested.

"True," Mayhew agreed. "But everyone knows that `that Foreign Woman' is so firmly in my pocket — or that I'm in hers, depending on their prejudices — that you have absolutely no interest in genuine debate on the merits of my reforms. So the people who agree with you already listen to what you say, and the ones who support Mueller simply tune you out. Or, worse, listen selectively and edit anything you say to suit their bigotry."

He said it lightly, but there was a bitter aftertaste to his emotions, and Honor quirked an eyebrow. The bitterness was sharpened and intensified by whatever he was determined not to discuss with her, but she was unaccustomed to feeling such tension from him.

"Are you really anticipating serious losses in the Steaders?" she asked quietly, and he shrugged.

"I don't know. Some losses, certainly. And possibly more than just `some' if the present trends continue."

"I don't believe they will, Sir," Yu said, and snorted a laugh when Benjamin looked at him inquiringly. "What you're seeing in the polls right now isn't a genuine, fundamental shift in public attitudes, Your Grace. It's the result of the Opposition's media blitz, and they can't go on spending money hand-over-fist that way forever."

Honor's eyes narrowed at the sudden, savage spike of rage which blazed through Mayhew at Yu's last sentence. The rage wasn't aimed at the vice admiral, and Benjamin suppressed it almost instantly, but she felt it resonating with whatever it was he wasn't going to mention. And the more she tasted it, the more she realized it was something he was specifically avoiding mentioning to her, not to the other members of his i

She felt Andrew LaFollet behind her, standing at the edge of the terrace with Major Rice, and made a mental note. If anyone could figure out the reason both her mother and the Protector of Grayson had decided not to tell her something, Andrew could, and it was time she sicced him on the problem. Particularly since she was picking up a strong flavor of "for her own good" from Benjamin. It was almost as if the Protector were afraid she might do something... hasty if he shared whatever it was with her.

"I hope you're right about that, Admiral. I suppose even the Opposition's pockets have to have bottoms somewhere," Mayhew said a trifle sourly to Yu.

"I think Admiral Yu is probably right, Sir," Brigadier Henri Benson-Dessouix put in. "And I know Harry is." As always, he sat beside his wife, and his arm went around her as he spoke. "The people who tend to be the most conservative are the ones with the most to lose if the system changes, and if they're well enough off to worry about what you may lose, they're also well enough off to contribute to political campaigns. But there are limits to how much they're willing to cough up. I don't believe Mueller can maintain this level of spending indefinitely, and even if he can, the surge he's generating in the poll numbers is probably deceptive. As the elections get closer, I expect a lot of the Opposition's present apparent strength to fade in the stretch."

Honor nodded, but she was hard put to hide a smile. The speech impediment from which Harriet and Henri had suffered on Hell had completely disappeared as the result of the medical treatment Fritz Montoya had started and the Harrington Neurological Clinic had completed. Both of them had been delighted to regain clarity of speech, but it had taken longer for Henri. He'd made up for it since by turning downright loquacious, which was a bit difficult for Honor's mental image of him to adjust to. He'd seldom spoken at all back on Hell, and she'd been away from Grayson while that was changing.

Which didn't invalidate a thing he'd just said.

"I think Henri is right, Benjamin," she said now, "and especially with the way the war is turning around. I don't think Mueller can be a very happy man right now. Just when the poll numbers show he's making ground in the Steaders, Operation Buttercup starts undercutting one of the Opposition's cental themes. He's going to find it awful hard to keep carrying on about `tying our incomparable Navy to the leading strings of incompetent foreign admiralties' now that Eighth Fleet's blown Barnett to dust bu

"What in the world makes you think that, Honor?" Benjamin demanded, only half humorously. "As you just more or less said yourself, the man's already been able to refer to `our incomparable Navy' with an absolutely straight face, as if we'd built the tech base or trained enough officers to support that `incomparable' fleet solely out of our own resources. Which," he added with a wry glance around the table, "present company would seem to indicate wasn't quite the case."

Since he was the only native-born Grayson, aside from LaFollet and Rice, on the terrace at that particular moment, Honor had to concede his point.

"But that kind of ignore-the-facts approach works best when you're talking to people who already agree with you and choose to wear the same sort of blinkers," Rear Admiral Mercedes Brigham pointed out.

"Absolutely," Caslet agreed. "The people he actually needs to convince are going to be a lot more skeptical than his true-believers, Your Grace."

"Please, Captain Caslet!" Benjamin said with another chuckle. "Here on Grayson, we reserve that particular term for those idiots on Masada! Our own intolerant, bigoted, unthinking, doctrinaire reactionaries are properly referred to as `conservative thinkers.' "

"Sorry, Your Grace." Caslet smiled. "I suppose that's one of those fine cultural distinctions we outsiders have trouble picking up on."

"Don't feel bad, Captain. It's one most of us who aren't intolerant reactionaries would love to get rid of."

"Seriously, Sir, you may just have a chance for that," Henri put in. "It's clear from what happened at Barnett that Buttercup took the Peeps completely by surprise. And the new systems were more effective than I think anyone could have predicted. I certainly didn't expect them to prove that decisive, but then, the information most of us had on the systems was pretty limited before the offensive kicked off."

"Speak for yourself, baudet," Harriet told him. "You Marine types had no need to know about Ghost Rider. For that matter, it's hard to think of a Marine having any real need to know about anything more complicated than a club, conservative dirt-pounders that you are. We naval officers, on the other hand, were thoroughly briefed on Ghost Rider, and we had a pretty fair background on the new LACs, as well."

" `More complicated than a club,' is it?" Henri murmured, cocking his head at his tall, blond wife. "Perhaps when we get home, my uncomplicated club and I will have something to say about your disrespectful attitude."

"You think so, do you?" Harriet smiled sweetly. "In that case, I think it would be wise of you to tell the Protector where you'd like to be buried before we leave, dear."

"Leaving aside threats of domestic violence," Yu said, "I think Henri is right, Your Grace. I don't want to sound too optimistic — the last thing any of us need is to fall prey to overconfidence — but I genuinely believe the new LACs and missiles are going to win this war outright. And probably a lot sooner than anyone on either side would have believed possible. And if that happens, Mueller's going to look pretty damned stupid if he goes on insisting that joining the Alliance was a serious mistake for Grayson."