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"But the problem with that kind of strategy is that it virtually assures that at some point someone in the League is going to emerge with a revanchist policy and the muscle to back it up. They're going to figure out a way to do a Thomas Theisman on us, and they're going to be able to build a fleet big enough to at least force us to pull our pickets out of the occupied systems to deal with it. At which point other systems that won't like us very much will join the fray and then, as Hamish so succinctly put it, we're toast.
"But if Honor is right—and, actually, I think there's a very good chance she is—about the probability of the League's being much more fragile than anyone is accustomed to believing, then there's another option. Her option. Instead of occupying the League for generations, we accept that it's already moribund, break it up, and make its successors our allies and trade partners, not our enemies."
" 'I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend,' " White Haven quoted softly.
"What?" His brother blinked at him, and the earl smiled.
"A quote from an Old Earth politician Honor's gotten me interested in, Willie. I think it has to do with her views on genetic slavery."
"What politician?" Grantville still looked puzzled.
"A president of the ancient United States of America named Abraham Lincoln said that," White Haven said. "And if I'm remembering correctly, he also said 'If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.' " He smiled again, this time at his wife, much more broadly. "I can see I haven't read him as carefully as Honor has, but you ought to take a look at him, too, now that I think about it. He was in a pretty sticky military situation himself."
"Well, maybe I've got a point, and maybe I don't," Honor said a bit more briskly, and her expression had turned bleak once again. "But assuming I do, then the most dangerous thing I can see the League doing is simply refusing to declare war on us and conducting whatever operations are going on in and around the Talbott Quadrant as a 'police action.' If they refuse to extend their operations beyond that area, no matter how intensive their operations are within that area, and if they consistently take the position that they're reacting defensively, then we can't expand the fighting into the other areas where we would need to take the war to them before they manage to duplicate our hardware advantages without becoming the aggressor in the eyes of all the rest of the League. And if we do that, our chances of breaking the League and 'destroying our enemy by making him our friend' probably go right out the airlock. Which means they get the time they need to build the steamroller they need to roll right over us."
"Wonderful," Elizabeth sighed.
"I'll admit it's worrisome." Despite his words, White Haven sounded quite a bit more cheerful than his wife had, "but I'm also inclined to think it's very unlikely the League's real leadership in the bureaucracies is truly going to recognize its danger soon enough to adopt a sensible policy like that. I realize that predicting what your enemy will do and then betting everything you have on the probability that your prediction is accurate is a really, really stupid thing to do. I'm not suggesting we do anything of the sort, either. But at the same time, I think there's a very real probability, not just a possibility, that as soon as OFS and the SLN realize just what sort of sausage machine they've shoved their fingers into, they're going to start screaming for all the help they can get. Whether they paint us as savage aggressors or themselves as liberators, they're going to take this a lot further than any mere 'police action.' "
"And they wouldn't be the only decision-makers involved in the process, either." Sir Anthony Langtry sounded much more thoughtful than he had a few moments before. "Whatever position they take, we'll always be able to edge at least a little further around their flank, push them a little more in the direction we want to go, without turning ourselves into Attila the Hun in starships in the eyes of the rest of the League. We'll have to be careful, but we've had plenty of experience dancing around the League in the past. As long as we coordinate our PR and diplomatic and military efforts carefully, I think we'll be able to shape the political and diplomatic side of the battleground much more effectively than you may have been allowing for, Honor. And it's not like we're not going to have allies inside the League, either—especially if Manpower's role in all of this becomes public knowledge. Beowulf carries a hell of a lot of prestige, and every one of her daughter colonies is going to follow her lead where anything having to do with genetic slavery is involved. I think we can count—no, I know we can count—on a powerful Solarian lobby on our side in any Mesa-engineered confrontation."
"And there's still another side to all of this, Your Majesty," Patricia Givens pointed out. "Thanks to the wormhole network, we have an enormous degree of penetration into the League. If they try to shut the network down to cut off our trade, they'll cripple themselves just as badly—possibly even worse—by effectively destroying the carrying trade they rely on. For that matter, until they do manage to overcome the advantages of our hardware—for the foreseeable future, in other words—we should be able to keep all of the critical termini open with fairly light forces. All of which means we'll continue to have a lot of contact with the League and that we're actually likely to have considerably more economic clout with quite a few of the League's sectors than the League bureaucracy itself does. Which would mean one hell of a lot more clout than anything as ephemeral as an elected League politician could hope for. If we use that clout while bearing in mind the need to make our enemies into friends, rather than letting ourselves turn predatory in the short-term interests of survival, I think we could probably pry quite a few of the League's citizens loose from it."
There was silence again, and then Elizabeth inhaled deeply.
"Honor, I have to say you've pointed my mind in a direction that makes me feel much less pessimistic about the future. Mind you, there's still a huge difference between 'less pessimistic' and anything I'd call remotely 'optimistic,' but I think you've got me headed in the right direction."
She smiled at the other woman, but then her smile faded.
"In the short term, though, we have to think in terms of our immediate survival. And wherever we wind up going in the end, I think we're all in agreement that first we've got to accomplish Hamish's predictions about beating the crap out of them. Which brings me to another point, Sir Thomas." She looked at Caparelli. "What's the status on our new construction?"
"We're well ahead of projections." Caparelli shook himself. Despite the strategic insight Honor had just laid before him, his eyes were still weary looking. But if there was any defeat in those eyes, Elizabeth couldn't see it. "We've got the next best thing to two hundred brand new wallers either out of the yards or leaving them in the next month to six weeks," he continued, "and all of them have been fitted with Keyhole-Two, which makes them Apollo-capable. Coupled with what Honor has in Home Fleet, the new construction that's come forward from the Andermani, and what the Graysons have made available, that's going to give us somewhere in excess of three hundred and eighty ships-of-the-wall—almost all of them Apollo-capable—by the third week of February."
The Star Kingdom of Manticore officially ran on the Manticoran calendar, but Caparelli—like many people throughout the galaxy (and most in the Manticore Binary System)—thought in terms of T-years and the ancient calendar of Old Terra, despite the fact that all three of the home system's planetary days varied considerably in length from the standard T-day. It made things simpler than translating back and forth between multiple calendars, and given the fact that each of the Star Kingdom's three original planets had different years of different lengths, as well as days, Manticorans were more accustomed even than most to using the standard calendar. And the habit was undoubtedly going to get still more pronounced for the citizens of the new Star Empire of Manticore, given the numbers of planets—and the plethora of local calendars—which would be involved. By Manticoran reckoning, Caparelli was talking about Ninth Month of the year 294 After Landing. By the standard reckoning of the galaxy at large, he was talking about the month of February of the year 1922 Post Diaspora. And if he had been speaking to someone from before mankind had departed for the stars, he would have been talking about the year 4024 CE.