David Weber - At All Costs

She tasted the way nerves tightened after her last sentence, and she smiled without any humor at all.

"The bottom line is that Eighth Fleet is something of a paper hexapuma at the moment. The Admiralty doesn't have the ships to make it anything but a shadow of what it was under Admiral White Haven. Your battle squadron, Alistair-all six ships worth of it-will constitute our entire 'wall of battle' for at least the immediate future."

"Excuse me?" McKeon blinked. "Our entire wall?"

"That's what I said," Honor replied grimly. "Not only that, but any additional wallers we receive for the next few months will almost certainly be old-style, pre-pod ships from the Reserve."

"Your Grace," Mercedes Brigham said quietly, "that's not a 'fleet;' it's a task force. Or maybe only a task group."

"It's a little better than that, Mercedes," Honor said. "For example, we'll have two full squadrons of CLACs under Alice Truman. That's over a quarter of the total we have in commission, including-" she smiled at Cardones "-Werewolf. And they're giving us all of the Manticoran pod-battlecruisers. We'll have first call on additional Agamemnons as they commission, as well. And we should be seeing the majority of the Saganami-Cs, as well."

"Excuse me, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said slowly, "but that sounds like a peculiar force mix, if you'll pardon my saying so. My impression from the media reports, at least, was that Eighth Fleet was being reactivated as our primary offensive command, just as it was during Operation Buttercup. But you're talking about primarily light units, aren't you?"

"That's exactly what I'm talking about," Honor confirmed. She drew a deep breath and leaned back in her chair.

"The other day, the Queen referred to me as her 'lucky talisman,'" she said, with a slight grimace. "I might quibble with the accuracy of that label, on several levels, but thanks to the media coverage of Sidemore, there's some truth to it. At least in terms of public perception. At the moment, Admiralty House is rather hoping the Havenites will read those reports at face value.

"The truth is that the deployment cupboard is bare, people. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel just to maintain the fleets we've got to have to cover our critical core systems. We simply can't reduce them any further, even with all of the system-defense pods and other fortifications we can put into position. But bad as the situation is, it's going to get worse before it gets better. We'll get to the exact figures ONI is projecting shortly, but what matters for our purposes right this minute is that the Havenites' wall of battle is already bigger than ours is, and it's going to grow faster than ours is for at least the next two T-years.

"Which means that, if they're prepared to take the losses, they probably have-or shortly will have-the combat power they need to hammer Manticore or Grayson."

Her office was deathly still and silent.

"Needless to say, all of that is highly classified information," she continued after a moment. "We don't know if the Republic is as well aware of those numbers as we are, but we have to assume they are. After all, our pre-war strength was pretty much a matter of public record; theirs wasn't, so they started with an intelligence advantage. However, we're hoping they won't want to take such massive losses if they can possibly avoid it. And the job of Eighth Fleet, at this moment, is to persuade them to disperse as much of their fleet strength as possible, so that it won't be available for offensive operations."

"So they're giving us units optimized for raiding operations," McKeon said.

"Exactly." Honor nodded. "The idea is for us to wreak a fair amount of havoc in the Republic's rear areas. They can't have built up and maintained a fleet the size of their present navy without having weakened themselves somewhere. For example, ONI's best estimate, from all the intelligence sources we still have in the Republic, is that one thing they did was to scrap all the old battleships the Old Regime was using for rear-area defense. Even if they hadn't needed the manpower anywhere else, those ships would have been sitting ducks for MDMs and LACs, so it would make a lot of sense to retire them. But it's unlikely they've been able to replace them out of new construction, either. It's more probable they're relying on light units and, possibly, LACs of their own for normal security. Undoubtedly, they also hope the damage they did to us in their opening operation knocked back our offensive capability badly enough we won't be in any position to take advantage of the weakness of their secondary systems' defenses. Our job is to convince them they're wrong."

"And they gave you Eighth Fleet, and played up its role as our 'primary offensive force,' to help convince them of that," McKeon said. Honor looked at him, and he shrugged. "It's not that hard to figure out, Honor. If the Admiralty gave you the assignment after Sidemore, then clearly it regards Eighth Fleet as a critical command which it will reinforce as rapidly as possible. Which means the Peeps are going to have to assume that whatever we do to them with raids will only grow steadily in intensity and weight. Right?"

"Something along those lines," she said. "And, as much as possible, they'll be right. It's just that the degree to which anyone can reinforce us is going to be limited."

She let her chair come fully upright once again, laying her folded forearms on her desk and leaning forward over them.

"So, that's the bottom line, people. We'll have essentially a free hand in selecting our objectives and timing our operations. We'll base out of Trevor's Star, so we can also serve as a ready reinforcement to Admiral Kuzak's Third Fleet. And we'll do everything we can to convince the media-and the Republic-we have a lot more tonnage and firepower than we actually do."

"Sounds... interesting," McKeon said.

"Oh, it'll be 'interesting,' all right," she said grimly. "And now, the floor is open for suggestions about ways to make it even more interesting for the Republic than it is for us."

"Have you got a minute, Tony?"

Sir Anthony Langtry, Foreign Secretary of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, looked up in faint surprise as the Earl of White Haven poked his head into Langtry's private office.

"I suppose I do," the Foreign Secretary said mildly. He watched quizzically as White Haven stepped fully into the office, treecat on his shoulder, then pointed at a chair and cocked his head. "May I ask just how you got through the dragon's den without tripping any alarms?"

White Haven chuckled as he took the indicated chair and lifted Samantha down into his lap. Early morning sunlight poured in through the office windows to his left, splashing over his chair, and Samantha buzzed in pleasure as its warmth soaked into her.

"It's not really all that hard," the earl said, stroking the 'cat's silken pelt. "I just walked into the outer office, told Istvan you were expecting me this morning, and that there was no need to announce me."

"Interesting." Langtry tilted his chair back. "Particularly since Istvan's been with me for over ten T-years, and he happens to be the person who keeps my schedule. Ah, I wasn't expecting you, was I?"

"No," White Haven said, much more seriously. "A point, judging from Istvan's expression, of which he was quite well aware."

"I thought I wasn't." Langtry regarded his unexpected visitor thoughtfully. "As it happens, there's nothing else on my calendar just at the moment-except, of course," he added a bit pointedly, "for this position paper I'm supposed to be studying before I meet with the Andermani ambassador for lunch. So I suppose Istvan may have decided to humor you. And now that he has, why are you here?"

"For a private conversation."

"It wouldn't be a bit more of an end run than just a get together of two old friends, now would it?" Langtry asked.