At All Costs

"Except for the fact that by the end of that window, their numerical advantage in SD(P)s will be on the order of three-to-one or even higher," Hamish said.

"Nothing we can do will change that," Elizabeth said flatly. "We're building as quickly as we can; they're doing the same thing. The threat zone until the ships we've laid down can equalize the numbers is beyond our control... unless we can do something to whittle the Peeps down."

"You're thinking about Sanskrit," Hamish said, equally flatly.

Most of the people in the Cabinet Room had no idea what Sanskrit was. Grantville, Hamish, the Queen, and Sir Anthony Langtry did, and Elizabeth nodded.

"You just said Eighth Fleet has the new weapons. If we use them, if we can convince the Peeps we've got more of them-that we've reequipped with them across the board-that's got to affect their strategic thinking. It may force them to do what we wanted all along and fritter away their wall of battle defending rear area systems. Or it may even convince them they've gotten their sums wrong and they don't have sufficient numbers to offset our individual superiority. In which case, the bastards may actually have to sit down and talk to us after all."

"It's possible," Hamish agreed. "I can't predict how probable it might be. A lot would depend on how their analysts evaluate the situation after they run into Mistletoe and Apollo. They might not draw the same conclusions we would, since they won't have the same information we have about the systems' capabilities."

"That's a given," Elizabeth said, nodding. "But do you see any approach-any military approach-which would give us a better chance of attaining our objectives?"

"No." Hamish shook his head. "Whatever the actual chance of success may be, Sanskrit almost certainly offers us the best military odds we're going to be able to generate."

"Very well." Elizabeth surveyed her ministers one more time, then nodded sharply, decisively.

"Willie, I'm going to draft a note to Pritchart. It's not going to be pretty. I'm going to officially and publicly denounce her actions and notify her that I have no intention of meeting anywhere with someone who uses assassination as a routine tool. And I'm also going to notify her that we intend to resume active military operations immediately."

Grantville nodded.

Technically, he might have rejected Elizabeth's policy decisions. In fact, it was clear from her attitude that the only way he could have opposed them would have been by resigning rather than accepting them. And he had absolutely no doubt that if the Queen explained to her subjects what had happened, and why shed made the decisions she had, those decisions would enjoy overwhelming support and approval. She could readily have found another Prime Minister to put them into effect.

All that was true enough, but ultimately beside the point. Because the critical point was that he agreed with her.

"Tony," Elizabeth continued, turning to the Foreign Secretary, "I want our notice that we're going back to active operations very clearly stated. Unlike them, we're not going to be launching attacks without declaring hostilities first, and I want that point made to the galaxy at large by publishing our note in the 'faxes at the same time we send it. There's not going to be any room for anyone to accuse us of altering correspondence after the fact this time. Clear?"

"Clear, Your Majesty," Langtry said, and the Queen turned back to Hamish.

"Hamish, I want orders cut to Eighth Fleet immediately. Operation Sanskrit is reactivated, as of now. I want active pla

The smile she produced was one a hexapuma might have worn.

"We'll give them their formal notice," she said grimly, "and I hope the bastards choke on it!"

Chapter Fifty-Three

The senior members of Eloise Pritchart's cabinet sat around the conference table in stu

Except Pritchart. She'd experienced that sensation ninety minutes earlier, when Montreau delivered the note to her office. Now she inhaled deeply, tipped her chair slightly forward, and rested her forearms on the conference table in a posture which she hoped bespoke confidence.

"There you have it," she said simply.

"Is she insane?" Tony Nesbitt's question could have sounded furious; instead, it sounded plaintive. "Why in God's name does she think we did it? What possible motive could we have had?"

"They already blamed us for the attempt to kill Harrington," Pritchart replied. "And to be fair, if the situation were reversed, I'd be convinced of our guilt in that case, too. After all, Harrington would be such a logical target for us to remove, if we could.

"The fact that we know we didn't do it gives us a rather different perspective, of course. It's obvious to us that it had to have been someone else. That's not readily apparent to them in Harrington's case, though, and I can think of several logical reasons for us to have attempted to assassinate Webster, as well, if we were willing to use assassination in the first place. The evidence that we were directly involved in the Webster assassination is pretty damning, too, even if we do know it was all fabricated.

"So now they have this assassination attempt on Queen Berry and, apparently, Princess Ruth. Who else are they going to blame for it?"

"But we'd offered to discuss peace with them," Walter Sanderson said. "Why would we have done that and then deliberately sabotaged our own proposed peace conference? It just doesn't make sense!"

"Actually, Secretary Sanderson," Kevin Usher said, "I'm afraid that however angry Elizabeth may be being at this moment, her suspicions of us aren't as illogical-or unreasonable, at least-as I'd like them to be."

"Meaning what?" Sanderson demanded.

"Madam President?" Usher looked at Pritchart with a questioning expression, and she nodded.

"Go ahead, Kevin. Tell them."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Usher turned back to the rest of the Cabinet.

"Some months ago, I was going through some of the older State Security files. As you know, we seized so many secure files it's going to take literally years to sort our way through them all. These, though, carried maximum-security flags-from both InSec and StateSec. That was unusual enough to pique my curiosity, so I took a look. And it turns out we have an even longer history with the House of Winton than I thought we did."

Sanderson scowled, as if impatient for the Federal Investigative Agency's director to get on with it, and Usher smiled thinly.

"I'm sure we're all aware that Saint-Just organized the attempt to kill Elizabeth and Benjamin Mayhew in Yeltsin. I'm sure we're all also aware that while the Masadans missed Elizabeth and Benjamin, they did get the Manticoran prime minister and foreign secretary. And, of course, the foreign secretary in question, Anson Henke, was Elizabeth's uncle. Her first cousin was also killed, and she'd been very close, emotionally as well as politically, to the Duke of Cromarty literally from the day she first took the throne.

"That would be bad enough, but we might convince her to associate that only with StateSec. Except, of course, for the minor difficulty that we also had her father assassinated."

"What?" Thomas Theisman jerked upright in his chair, his expression thunderstruck, and Usher nodded grimly.

"King Roger was the primary moving force behind the original Manticoran buildup against the Legislaturalists' Duquesne Plan. They'd assumed all along that Manticore would be the toughest of their intended victims, but Roger's activities were making their projections look much worse, so they decided to decapitate the opposition. InSec already had its hooks into several Manty politicians, and it used them to kill the king. Elizabeth was still a minor at the time, and according to the InSec files, they hoped to influence the regency and 'redirect' Manticoran foreign-policy. At the very least, they figured putting someone as young and inexperienced as she was on the throne would hamstring opposition to them.