At All Costs

"I didn't put your name on the list, Honor," Elizabeth said quietly. "Your peers did that. And, while I might have been tempted to jump you to the top of the list if I'd had to, your name was already there."

"But-"

"No buts, Honor," Elizabeth said, shaking her head. "I have to admit this pleases me from an enormous number of perspectives. And, if I'm going to be honest, 'waving my talisman' is one of those perspectives. But much more important to me than that, it's an indication of the respect in which you are held by the officer corps of my Navy. If anyone in the galaxy is in a position to properly appreciate all you've done for me and for my Star Kingdom, it's that officer corps, and they saw fit to nominate you for this honor. You will not reject the judgment of my officer corps, Your Grace. Is that clear?"

Honor gazed at her, clutching the soft fabric of the beret, then, finally, nodded slowly.

"Good. And now, we've got about forty-five minutes before that audience, after which Willie will be turning up with Sir Thomas and Admiral Givens. We'll discuss all those depressing military details then. For now, I do intend to spend some time just visiting with you. Not with Admiral Harrington, not with Duchess Harrington, and not even with Steadholder Harrington. Just with you. All right?"

"Fine, Elizabeth," Honor said. "That's just fine."

"So the raid on Alizon didn't help a bit," Sir Thomas Caparelli said. He, Patricia Givens, Honor, Nimitz, Hamish, Samantha, Elizabeth, Ariel, and Lord William Alexander, the newly created Baron Grantville and Prime Minister of Manticore, sat around a conference table of brilliantly polished feran wood. Hamish, the Queen, and Baron Grantville still wore their formal court attire, but Caparelli and Givens, like Honor, were in mess dress uniform. Three sheathed swords lay across one end of the conference table, and a holographic star map was projected above it, spangled with the icons of friendly units and enemy units' reported positions. There seemed to be considerably more of the latter than of the former, Honor noticed.

"We're badly strapped for deployable assets everywhere," the First Space Lord continued, turning back from the map to face the Queen. "Obviously, we're going to have to reinforce Alizon, if only to make our commitment to their defense clear, and that's going to stretch us even thi

"Excuse me, Sir Thomas," Honor said, "but what about the Andermani?"

"Unfortunately, they don't have as many pod-layers as we'd estimated they might when it looked like they were going to be shooting at us," Caparelli said, and nodded to Givens. "Pat?"

"Essentially, Your Grace," Givens said, "the Andies were estimating the number they'd need if push came to shove between us on the basis that at least half our available strength would be required closer to home to keep an eye on Haven. They projected a total build of roughly a hundred and thirty SD(P)s, but they have only forty-two currently in commission. The other ninety are all under construction at various states of completion. Some of them won't be completed for at least another eighteen months."

"And even the ones they've completed are going to require fairly substantial refits before we can make best use of them," Hamish put in. Elizabeth cocked her head at him, and he shrugged. "Their multi-drive missiles are considerably cruder than ours. In fact, they're less sophisticated than the ones Haven is currently deploying. They're almost as big as Havenite three-drive missiles, but they incorporate only two drives. Tactically, they're a lot more like the Mark 16s we're deploying aboard the new Saganami-Cs. They've got heavier warheads than the Mark 16, but their range is very similar. And because they're capacitor-fed, without the Mark 16's fusion plant, their EW is less effective. They simply can't match our birds' power budgets. And while their pods are bigger than ours are, they actually carry fewer birds than the Republic's currently do, which means their salvo density is thi

"We've put BuWeaps and BuShips on to the problem, and Admiral Hemphill and Vice Admiral Toscarelli have come up with a minimum-modification solution. They can't operate the new fusion-powered MDMs from their pods, but we can load their launcher cells with our own older-style, capacitor-fed three-stage missiles. It won't give them any greater salvo density, and the EW will still be less capable, but it will significantly improve their range. It's going to require some modifications to their pods, which they're going to be making at their end, but that part of the process should be completed within the next sixty days. After that, it's just a case of their building the new pods.

"The longer-range fix is to modify their existing SD(P)s to accept the Keyhole platforms and fire our new 'flat-pack' pods with the all-up fusion-powered birds. That's going to take considerably longer, because each ship will have to spend at least ninety days in yard hands to carry out the modifications. Toscarelli's people have just about completed the blueprints for the necessary alterations, and they've been working with the Andies' architects to provide a fix which can be incorporated into the ships still under construction. At best, though, that's going to impose an additional delay on those units' completion."

"So," Caparelli said, "looking at every pod-laying waller we can scrape up between us, Grayson, and the Andies, and including all of the Andy SD(P)s currently in commission as fully effective units, we have a total of two hundred and thirty-two. Assuming our construction times hold up, and allowing for working up time, we can have a total of just over four hundred within the next eleven to eighteen months. We can add about a hundred and sixty pod-laying battlecruisers to that total, but they can't stand in the wall against proper superdreadnoughts. That's an impressive number, but the Havenites have some pretty impressive numbers of their own."

"Yes," Elizabeth said, looking intently at Admiral Givens. "I saw a precis of your revised strength estimates last week, Admiral, but it didn't include the basis for your revisions. Is the situation really that bad?"

"That's impossible to say with certainty, Your Majesty," Givens replied. "I'm not trying to cover myself, and I stand by the numbers in the most recent report, but until the shooting's over, we can't do an actual nose count to prove it. I'm sorry it's taken this long to produce the report in the first place, but we still have a certain amount of reorganizing to do over at ONI."

Elizabeth grimaced, her eyes hard, at the oblique reference to Admiral Francis Jurgensen's disastrous tenure as Second Space Lord.

"Our human-intelligence sources in the Republic are considerably weaker than they used to be," the admiral continued. "Partly, that's due to the political changes there. Quite a few of the people supplying information to us were doing so because of their opposition to the old r‚gime, and their motivation to continue to work with us largely disappeared along with Saint-Just. Others, who we'd managed to buy or suborn, lost their access when they were purged by the new management. And, unfortunately, under the Janacek Admiralty, ONI hadn't assigned a high priority to building new networks. In fairness, doing so under the new circumstances would have been difficult, time-consuming, and probably expensive."