Chapter Twenty

"She’s a gorgeous ship, Hamish," Lord William Alexander said as Lieutenant Robards, his older brother’s Grayson flag lieutenant, ushered them into the admiral’s day cabin aboard Benjamin the Great at the end of an extended tour. "And this isn’t half bad, either," the younger Alexander observed as his eyes took in the huge, palatial compartment.

"No, it isn’t," White Haven agreed. "Please, be seated, both of you," he invited, gesturing to the comfortable chairs facing his desk. Robards waited until they’d obeyed and White Haven had seated himself behind the desk, then pressed a com stud.

"Yes?" a soprano voice replied.

"We’re back, Chief," the lieutenant said simply.

"Of course, Sir," the intercom said in answer, and another hatch opened almost instantly. This one led to the admiral’s steward’s pantry, and Senior Chief Steward Tatiana Jamieson stepped through it with a polished silver tray, four crystal wineglasses, and a dusty bottle. She set the tray on the end of White Haven’s desk and carefully cracked the wax seal on the bottle, then deftly extracted the old-fashioned cork. She sniffed it, then smiled and poured the deep red wine into all four glasses, handed one to each of White Haven’s guests, then to him, and finally to Robards, and then bowed and disappeared as unobtrusively as she’d come.

"So Chief Jamieson is still with you, is she?" William observed, holding his glass up and watching the light glow in its ruby heart. "It’s been—what? Fourteen T-years now?"

"She is, and it has," White Haven agreed. "And you can stop hoping to lure her away. She’s Navy to the core, and she is not interested in a civilian career in charge of your wine cellar." William produced an artfully injured look, and his brother snorted. "And you can stop considering the wine so suspiciously, too. I didn’t pick it out; Jamieson selected it personally from a half dozen vintages the Protector sent up."

"Oh, in that case!" William said with a grin, and sipped. His eyes widened in surprised approval, and he took another, deeper sip. "That is good," he observed. "And it’s a good thing a total ignoramus like you has a keeper like the Chief to watch out for you!"

"Unlike idle civilians, serving officers sometimes find themselves just a little too busy to develop epicurean snobbery to a fine art," the Earl said dryly, and looked at Caparelli. "Would you agree, Sir Thomas?"

"Not on your life, My Lord," the First Space Lord replied instantly, although the corners of his mouth twitched in an almost-grin. Sir Thomas Caparelli had never felt really comfortable with White Haven, and the two of them had never particularly liked one another, but much of their personal friction had been worn away over the last eight or nine years by the far harsher grit of war. There were white streaks in Caparelli’s hair now, despite prolong, which had very little to do with age. The crushing responsibility for fighting the war with the PRH had carved new worry lines in his face, as well, and the Earl of White Haven had been his main sword arm against the People’s Navy.

"Not a bad strategic decision," White Haven complimented him now, and took a sip from his own glass. Then he set it down and looked up at Lieutenant Robards. "Is Captain Albertson ready for that briefing, Nathan?"

"Yes, My Lord. At your convenience."

"Um." White Haven looked down into his glass for several seconds, then nodded at something no one else could see. "Would you go and tell him that we’ll be—oh, another thirty or forty minutes or so?"

"Of course, My Lord." It was a moderately abrupt change in plans, but Robards’ brown eyes didn’t even flicker at his dismissal. He simply drained his own glass, bowed to his admiral’s guests, and vanished almost as unobtrusively as Chief Jamieson had.

"A well-trained young man," William Alexander observed as the hatch closed behind him, then looked at his brother. "May I assume there was a reason you sent him on his way?"

"There was," White Haven agreed. He looked up from his wine and gazed at both his guests. "Actually, there were two, but the more pressing is my feeling that there have to be more reasons for the two of you to come out here than the official communique listed. I also have an unhappy suspicion about what one of those reasons might be. Under the circumstances, I thought I’d clear the decks, as it were, so we could discuss my suspicion from a purely Manticoran viewpoint."

"Ah?" William sipped wine once more, regarded his brother with a half-quizzical, half-wary expression, then crooked an eyebrow, inviting him to continue.

"I’ve been trying to assemble Eighth Fleet for the better part of a T-year now," White Haven said flatly. "The process was supposed to be complete over nine standard months ago, and I still haven’t received the strength my original orders specified. More to the point, perhaps, I have received the units I was promised by Grayson, Erewhon, and the other Allied navies. What I haven’t seen have been the Manticoran units I was promised. I’m still better than two complete battle squadrons—seventeen ships of the wall—short on the RMN side, and nothing I’ve seen in my dispatches from the Star Kingdom suggests that those ships are going to turn up tomorrow. Should I assume that one reason Allen Summervale sent the second ranking member of his Government and the Admiralty’s senior serving officer out here was to explain to myself—and possibly the Protector—just why that is?"

He paused, and Caparelli and William looked at one another, then turned back to him.

"You should," Caparelli said quietly after a moment, "and they aren’t. Going to turn up tomorrow I mean, My Lord. We won’t have them to send you for at least another two T-months."

"That’s too long, My Lord," White Haven said in an equally quiet voice. "We’ve already waited too long. Have you seen last month’s estimates on the Peep strength at Barnett?"

"I have," Caparelli admitted.

"Then you know Theisman’s numbers are going up faster than mine are. We’re giving them time —time to get their feet under them and catch their breath—and we can’t afford that. Not with someone like Esther McQueen calling the shots on their side for a change."

"We don’t know how free McQueen is to make her own calls," Caparelli pointed out. "Pat Givens is still working on that. Her analysts don’t have a lot to go on, but they make it no more than a twenty-five percent chance that the Committee would give any naval officer the authority to build her own strategy. They’re still too afraid of a military coup."

"With all due respect, Sir Thomas, Pat is wrong on this one," White Haven replied flatly. "I’ve fought McQueen, and in my personal opinion, she’s the best CO they have left. I think they know that, too, but everything ONI has ever picked up on her has also emphasized her personal ambition. If we know about that, then Saint-Just and State Security know about it, as well. Given that, I can’t see the Peeps picking her to head their war office unless they intended all along to give her at the very least a major role in determining their strategy."

"I don’t quite see your logic, Ham," William said after a moment.

"Think it through, Willie. If you know someone is a threat to your regime, and you go ahead and put him—or, in this case, her—in a position of power anyway, then you have to have some overriding motive—something which you consider more important than the potential danger she represents. If the Committee of Public Safety called McQueen home and made her Secretary of War, it was because they figured their military situation was so screwed up they needed a professional... even if the professional in question might be tempted to try a coup. "

White Haven shrugged.

"If they followed that logic, then they’d be not simply fools but stupid fools not to make every possible effort to avail themselves of her expertise. And that—" he turned back to Caparelli "—is why giving them this much time is a major, major mistake, Sir."

"I can’t fault your reasoning," Caparelli admitted, rubbing a big, weary hand across his face and leaning back in his chair. "Pat’s analysts have followed the same trail, and it may be that they’re double-thinking themselves into mistakes. They share your opinion as to the reason the Committee recalled her to Haven; they just question whether or not a PRH run by the Committee of Public Safety and the Office of State Security is institutionally capable of making use of her expertise. It would require not simply a change but a major upheaval in the entire relationship between their people’s commissioners and the officer corps."

"Maybe officially, but it’s obvious some of their fleet commanders and commissioners have already made some informal changes," White Haven argued. "Theisman, for example. His tactics at Seabring—and, for that matter, his decision to release their version of the missile pod for use at Adler—all indicate that he, at least, figures he can count on his commissioner to back him up. That’s dangerous, Sir. A divided Peep command structure works in our favor; one in which the political and military commanders work together and trust one another is another matter entirely. But the point where McQueen is concerned, is that the Committee may choose to allow an exception—another ‘special relationship’—between her and her commissioner. Especially since she put down the Levelers for them." He made a face. "I’m not saying that wouldn’t come around and bite them on the ass in time, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try it—especially if the military situation looks bad enough."

"You may be right, Ham," William said, "but there’s only so much blood in the turnip. Whatever we’d like, we simply don’t have the ships to send you right now. We’re trying, but we’re tapped out."

"But—" White Haven began, only to stop as Caparelli raised a hand.

"I know what you’re going to say, My Lord, but Lord Alexander is right. We simply don’t have them. Or, rather, we have too many other commitments and we ran our maintenance cycles too far into the red in the push to get as deep into Peep territory as we are now."

"I see." White Haven sat back, drumming his fingers on the desk in narrow-eyed thought. As a fleet commander, he lacked access to the comprehensive, Navy-wide kind of data Caparelli saw regularly, but the availability numbers must be even worse than he’d thought.

"How bad is it?" he asked after a moment.

"Not good," Caparelli admitted. "As the officer who took Trevor’s Star, you must have been aware of how we were deferring regular overhauls on the ships under your command to let you maintain the numbers to capture the system."

He paused, and White Haven nodded. Almost twenty percent of the ships he’d taken into the final engagement had been long overdue for regular maintenance refits... and it had shown in their readiness states.

"It hasn’t gotten any better," the First Space Lord told him. "In fact, for your private information, we’ve had no choice but to pull in just over a quarter of our total ships of the wall."

"A quarter?" Despite himself, White Haven’s surprise showed, and Caparelli nodded grimly. That was seventy-five percent higher than the fifteen percent of Fleet strength which was supposed to be down for refit at any given time.

"A quarter," Caparelli confirmed. "And if we could, I’d have made it thirty percent. We worked the Fleet too hard to get to where we are now, My Lord. We’ve got to take the battle fleet in hand—and not just for routine repairs, either. We’ve been refitting the new systems and weapons and compensators on an ad hoc basis since the war started, but over half our wall of battle units are at least two years behind the technology curve. That’s seriously hurting our ability to make full use of the new hardware, especially the compensators, since our squadrons are no longer homogenous. It doesn’t do us a lot of good to have three ships in a squadron capable of accelerating at five hundred and eighty gravities if the other five can only pull five-ten! We’ve got to get all the current upgrades into a higher percentage of the total wall."

"Um." White Haven played with his empty wineglass while his mind raced. The numbers were worse than he’d feared, yet he understood Caparelli’s logic. And the First Space Lord was right. But he was also wrong. Or, rather, he was running dangerously low on "right" options.

"We’re building up our fleet strength as quickly as we can, Ham," William told him, then grimaced. "Of course, that’s not as quickly as I’d like. We’re beginning to stress the economy pretty hard. I’ve even got permanent secretaries and undersecretaries in my department talking about a progressive income tax."

"You what?" That brought White Haven upright in his chair once more, and his eyes widened when his brother nodded. "But that’s unconstitutional!"

"Not exactly," William said. "The Constitution specifies that any permanent income tax must be flat-rated, but it does make provision for temporary adjustments to the rate."

"‘Temporary’!" White Haven snorted.

"Temporary," William repeated firmly. "Any progressive taxes have to be enacted with a specific time limit, and they automatically terminate at the time of the first general election after enactment. And they can only be passed with a two-thirds super-majority of both houses in the first place."

"Hmpf!"

"You always were a fiscal conservative, Hamish. And I won’t say you’re wrong. Hell, I’m a fiscal conservative! But we’ve already quadrupled the transit fees on the Junction and levied special duties on our own merchant shipping, as well—not to mention increasing import duties to a two-hundred-and-fifty-year high. So far, we’ve managed not to have to rob Peter to pay Paul—or at least not to resort to armed robbery with violence in the process. But without something like a progressive tax, we won’t be able to keep that up much longer. We’ve already had to restrict cost of living increases in government pensions and assistance programs... and I’ll let you imagine for yourself how Marisa Turner and her bunch reacted to that."

"Not well, I’m sure," White Haven grunted. Then his eyebrows rose. "You’re not saying New Kiev went public about it, are you?"

"Not directly. She’s been more nibbling around the edges—sort of testing the water. The Opposition hasn’t come right out and criticized me and Allen over it yet; they’re only at the ‘we regret the harsh necessity’ stage. But I can’t guarantee they’ll stay there." It was William’s turn to snort. "They sure as hell aren’t holding their fire on the basis of principle, Ham! They’re afraid of what’ll happen to them at the polls if they seem to be seeking partisan advantage in the middle of a war."

"Is it really that bad?" White Haven asked anxiously, and this time Caparelli responded before his brother could.

"It is and it isn’t, My Lord," he said. "We’re doing everything we can at the Admiralty to hold budgets down, and from a purely military perspective, there’s lots of slack yet in our industrial capability. The problem Lord Alexander and Duke Cromarty are facing is how we can use that capability without crippling the civilian sector, and even there, we still have quite a lot of slack in fact. The problem is that politics is a game of perceptions, and the truth is that we are reaching the point of imposing some real sacrifices on our civilians."