White Haven blinked. The Thomas Caparelli he’d known for three-quarters of a century wouldn’t have made that remark, because he wouldn’t have understood the fine distinctions it implied. But it seemed his tenure as First Space Lord was stretching his mind in ways White Haven hadn’t anticipated.

"Sir Thomas is right," William said before the Earl could follow that thought completely down. "Oh, we’re not even close to talking about rationing yet, but we’ve got a real inflation problem for the first time in a hundred and sixty years, and that’s only going to get worse as more and more of our total capacity gets shifted into direct support of the war at the same time as wartime wages put more money into the hands of our consumers. Again, this is for your private information, but I’ve been in closed-door negotiations with the heads of the major cartels to discuss centralized planning for the economy."

"We already have that," White Haven protested.

"No, we don’t. I’m talking about true centralization, Hamish," his brother said very seriously. "Not just planning boards and purely military allocation boards. Complete control of all facets of the economy."

"My God, it’ll never fly. You’ll lose the Crown Loyalists for sure!"

"Maybe, and maybe not," William replied. "They’re more fiscally conservative than we are, but remember that the centralization would be under Crown control. That would appeal to their core constituency’s litmus test by actually strengthening the power of the Monarch. Where we’d get hurt would be with the independents we might lose, especially in the Lords... and the toe in the door it would offer the Liberals and Progressives." He shook his head with a worried frown. "It’s definitely not something we’re looking forward to, Ham. It’s something we’re afraid we may not have any choice but to embrace if we’re going to make use of the industrial and economic slack Sir Thomas just mentioned."

"I see," White Haven said slowly, and rubbed his lower lip in thought. The Liberals and Progressives had always wanted more government interference in the Star Kingdom’s economy, and Cromarty’s Centrists had always fought that idea tooth and nail, especially since the People’s Republic had begun its slide into fiscal ruin. The Centrists’ view had been that a free market encouraged to run itself was the most productive economy available. Too much government tampering with it would be the case of killing the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs, whereas the very productivity of an unregulated economy meant that even with lower tax rates, it would ultimately produce more total tax revenues in absolute terms. The Liberals and Progressives, on the other hand, had argued that unregulated capitalism was fundamentally unfair in its allocation of wealth and that it was government’s proper function to regulate it and to formulate tax policies to influence the distribution of affluence in ways which would produce a more equitable balance. Intellectually, White Haven supposed both sides had their legitimate arguments. He knew which viewpoint he supported, of course, but he had to admit that his own heritage of wealth and power might have a little something to do with that.

Yet whatever one Hamish Alexander might think, Cromarty and William must truly be feeling the pressure to even contemplate unbottling that particular genie. Once the government had established tight centralized control of the economy for any reason, dismantling those controls later would be a Herculean task. There were always bureaucratic empire-builders who would fight to the death to maintain their own petty patches of power, and any government could always find places to spend all the money it could get its hands on. But even more to the point, the Liberals and their allies would be able—quite legitimately, in many ways—to argue that if the Star Kingdom had been willing to accept such control to fight a war, then surely it should be willing to accept less draconian peacetime measures in the fight against poverty and deprivation. Unless, that was, the fiscal conservatives wished to argue that it was somehow less moral or worthy to provide its citizens with what they needed when they weren’t killing other people?

"We see some other alternatives—and some bright spots on the horizon," William said, breaking into his thoughts. "Don’t think it’s all doom and gloom from the home front. For one thing, people like the Graysons are taking up a lot more slack than we’d anticipated when the war began. And did you know that Zanzibar and Alizon are about to bring their own shipyards on-line?"

"Zanzibar is?" White Haven’s eyebrows rose, and his brother nodded.

"Yep. It’s sort of a junior version of the Graysons’ Blackbird Yard, another joint venture with the Hauptman Cartel. It’ll be limited to cruiser and maybe battlecruiser-range construction, at least for the first couple of years, but it’ll be top of the line, and the same thing for Alizon. And the Graysons themselves are just phenomenal. Maybe it’s because they’ve already had so many battles fought in their space, or maybe it’s simply because their standard of living was so much lower than ours was before the war started, but these people are digging deep, Hamish... and their civilian economy is still expanding like a house on fire at the same time. I suppose part of the difference is that their civilian sector is still so far short of market saturation, whereas ours—" He shrugged. "And it’s not helping a bit that we’re still unable to provide the kind of security for our merchant shipping in Silesia that we’d like. Our trade with the Confederation is down by almost twenty-eight percent."

"Are the Andermani picking up what we’ve lost?" White Haven asked.

"It looks more like it’s the Sollies," William said with another shrug. "We’re seeing more and more market penetration by them out this way... which may help explain why certain elements in the League are willing to export military technology to the Peeps."

"Wonderful." White Haven massaged his temples wearily, then looked back at Caparelli and dragged the conversation back to his original concern. "But the operative point for Eighth Fleet is that it looks like another couple of months before I’ll see my other battle squadrons, right?"

"Yes," Caparelli said. "We had to make a choice between you and keeping Trevor’s Star up to strength, and, frankly, what happened at Adler is still having repercussions. We’re managing to ride them out so far, but the sheer scope of our defeat there has everyone—and especially the smaller members of the Alliance—running more than a little scared. I’m doing my level best to gather back the ships we were forced to disperse in even more penny-packet pickets for political reasons, but Trevor’s Star is another matter. If I were the Peeps, that system—and the Junction terminus there—would be absolutely my number one targeting priority, and I have to assume they’re at least as smart as I am."

"Um." White Haven considered that, then nodded slowly. If he were Esther McQueen and he had the strength for it, he’d retake Trevor’s Star in a heartbeat. Of course, he wasn’t Esther McQueen, and so far as he knew, she didn’t have the strength to retake the system, but he understood why Caparelli was determined to make sure she didn’t get the chance. Not that understanding made the implications for his own command area any better.

"All right," he said finally. "I understand what’s happening, and I can see why we’re where we are on the priorities list. But I hope you and the rest of the Admiralty understand, Sir Thomas, when I say that I’m not trying to set up any sort of preexisting excuses for future failure by saying that I have very deep concerns over our ability to execute our original mission if those ships are delayed for as long as you’re suggesting is likely. At the rate they seem to be reinforcing Barnett, what should have given us a very comfortable margin of superiority is likely to provide little more than parity when we actually move. And everything I’ve seen out of Citizen Admiral Theisman suggests that giving him parity is not the way to go about winning a battle."

"I understand, My Lord." Caparelli sighed. "And all we can ask you to do is the best that you can do. I assure you that everyone at the Admiralty understands that, and no one regrets the delay in your buildup more than I do. I’ll see what I can do to expedite matters on my return."

"At least the construction rates are still climbing," William observed in the tone of someone looking hard for a silver lining. "And manning requirements should be dropping, if the reports the Exchequer’s been getting from BuShips and BuPers hold up."

"That’s true enough," Caparelli agreed, "and if Project Anzio—" He cut himself off, then grinned at White Haven. "Let’s just say that we’ve got the possibility for some real force multiplication, My Lord. If the bastards will only give me another four months or so, I think we’ll be ready to resume the offensive."

"Remember what Napoleon said about time," White Haven cautioned, and the First Space Lord nodded.

"Point taken, My Lord. But no one’s fought a war on this scale in at least three hundred T-years, and even then the distance scale was much lower. We’re sort of making up the rules for strategic deployments as we go, and so are the Peeps. For that matter, we know what our problems are, but let’s not make the mistake of assuming the bad guys don’t have problems of their own to offset ours."

"Fair enough," White Haven agreed. He tipped his chair back again and sipped wine, frowning as he digested what he’d just been told. His brother watched him for several seconds; then he cleared his throat, and White Haven looked up questioningly.

"You said you had two things you wanted to discuss with us," William reminded him. "Did we already cover the other one, as well?"

"Hm?" White Haven frowned, but then his expression cleared, and he shook his head. "No. No, we didn’t actually." He brought his chair back upright and set his wineglass back on the desk. "I wanted to get the official Government impression of the consequences of Ransom’s death."

"Ha! You and me both, brother mine," William replied sourly.

"I take it from your response that the whole thing smelled as fishy to you people back home as it did to me?"

"To put it mildly, yes." William glanced at Caparelli, then looked back at his brother. "ONI and Special Intelligence both agree that something about it wasn’t kosher, but of course they don’t agree on what that something was."

White Haven swallowed a snort of laughter at William’s expression. The Office of Naval Intelligence and its civilian counterpart had a history of disagreeing with one another, and the turf battles when their areas of expertise intersected could be spectacular.

"Would you care to elaborate on that?" he invited after a moment.

"Well," William leaned back and crossed his legs, "they both agree she must have been dead for some time before the announcement. That ‘killed by enemy action while touring the front on Committee business’ is pure crap. We know exactly when and where we’ve knocked out Peep battlecruisers, and none of the dates we have match the one they’ve given. It’s a little more sophisticated than those ‘air car accidents’ the Peeps’ have always favored to explain away disappearances, especially when they’ve got some reason to want to obscure the exact time they disappeared someone, but it’s still a crock, and we know it. As for when she really died, as far as any of our analysts can determine, she hasn’t been seen in public in months, and with that as a starting point, we’ve taken a very close look at the more recent HD imagery of her, as well. At least some of it was faked—and faked very well, I might add—but the earliest example we’ve been able to positively identify is only a couple of T-months old. She may have been dead longer than that, but we can’t be positive."

"At least we know she was alive recently enough to murder Lady Harrington," Caparelli put in, and the raw, grating anger in his tone snapped White Haven’s eyes to him. The earl gazed at his superior for a handful of silent seconds, then nodded without any expression whatever and looked back to his brother.

"Should I take it that the disagreement between ONI and SIS is over the reason the Peeps delayed admitting her death?" he asked.

"You should," William agreed. "SIS thinks she was zapped as part of a personal power struggle between her and Saint-Just or, perhaps, her and the combination of Saint-Just and Pierre. Some of their more... creative analysts have actually raised the possibility that she was the senior inside member of the Leveler conspiracy and Saint-Just found out about it and had her popped. I personally find that a little hard to swallow, but it’s certainly not impossible, especially when you consider the sort of rhetoric she routinely pumped out. But if that was the case, or if it was simply a case of settling a personal rivalry, the Committee may have wanted to keep it quiet until the winners were confident that they’d IDed—and purged—any of her adherents.

"ONI, on the other hand, is less certain about that. They agree that Ransom was a loose warhead and that deep down inside, at least, Pierre has to be mightily relieved that she’s gone. But they don’t think it was a personal power struggle or that Ransom had anything to do with the Leveler coup attempt. They think it was part of the same process which brought McQueen in as Secretary of War. Everyone knows how bitterly Ransom distrusted the Peep military, and McQueen’s reputation for personal ambition would practically make her a poster girl for Ransom’s paranoia. So the theory is that Pierre and Saint-Just had decided they absolutely needed a professional to run the military—as you suggested earlier, Hamish—and that McQueen’s suppression of the Levelers made her seem an attractive choice... to them. But not to Ransom. So either she tried something from the inside to stop the appointment, or else her ‘friends’ on the Committee figured she might decide to try something and chose to play safe by removing her."

William paused and shrugged.

"Either way, the Committee wouldn’t have wanted to let the word leak until what they considered the optimum time, hence the delay in announcing her death. As for its supposed circumstances, that’s clearly an attempt to paper over whatever intramural conflict led to her removal in the first place and simultaneously gain a little propaganda support for the war. ONI and SIS agree on that, as well, especially given Ransom’s continuing popularity with the Mob."

"I see." White Haven rubbed his chin for a moment, then sighed. "I can’t say I was sorry to hear about her death," he admitted. In fact, I was goddamned delighted after what she did to Honor! "But I rather regret the potential consequences." William cocked his head questioningly, and the earl shrugged. "Remember what I said earlier about divided command structures, Willie. Saint-Just and StateSec were only part of the grit in their military machinery, and, frankly, Ransom was a lot bigger problem for them. Whether they recognized that and killed her to remove an obstruction or whether it was purely fortuitous, the fact remains that it’s going to make it a hell of a lot easier for McQueen to do whatever she was brought in to do. And that isn’t good from our viewpoint."

He brooded pensively down at his blotter for another long moment, then shook himself and climbed out of his chair with a wry smile.

"Well, I suppose that answers my questions, one way or another. But now, gentlemen, my staff and flag captain are waiting to brief you on Eighth Fleet’s status. I don’t suppose we should keep them waiting any longer than we have to, so if you’ll just accompany me?"

He stepped around his desk and led the way from his day cabin.