David Weber - Mission of Honor

She paused once more, then allowed herself to inhale deeply.

“The confrontation with the Solarian League was not of our seeking. We endeavored to make that point clear to the Solarian government, but our diplomatic efforts were rebuffed, and our warnings about the seriousness of our impending collision—and of the outside forces we had come to believe were deliberately bringing that collision about—were ignored. Which led, just under four T-months ago, to the Battle of Spindle, where a handful of our heavy cruisers completely defeated over seventy Solarian superdreadnoughts.”

An edge of iron pride showed in her voice, but her expression remained solemn, serious and focused.

“I’m sure all of you recall that moment of combined fear for the future and pride in our uniformed men and women when we realized not a single Manticoran, not one of our Grayson allies, had even been injured at Spindle. It seemed impossible that the vaunted Solarian Navy could have been so summarily and completely defeated.

“Which”—her voice dropped and hardened—”made the shock and horror of the attack on our home system immeasurably worse than it would have been anyway. It hit us at the very moment when our confidence and relief were highest, and it took us completely by surprise. The truth is that no one—not the Admiralty, not our intelligence services, not our diplomats, not our political leaders, not I, but no one —even saw that attack coming.”

She made the admission unflinchingly.

“We believe the attack was made possible through the development of a radically new starship drive technology. We believe we have, after a painstaking analysis of Perimeter Security’s records, identified the hyper footprint of the attackers’ arrival, although it wasn’t recognized as such at the time. We also believe it would be extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, for a similar operation to be repeated without the attackers being detected and engaged far short of their targets.

“Yet despite all that, the truth remains—we were attacked. The attack was totally successful. Millions of our citizens, thousands of visitors to our star system, and an unconscionable percentage of the intelligent species native to this, our home system, died in a deliberate, callous attack whose very nature precluded the notice to evacuate nonmilitary personnel required under the universally recognized rules of warfare. It was, by any standard anyone might choose to apply, the most successful, most devastating, and bloodiest surprise attack in the history of human warfare, and it left our industrial infrastructure crippled and in ruins.”

She paused once more, and throughout the Manticore Binary System literally billions of other human beings sat silent with her, staring at her face, wondering what she would say—what she could say—next.

“Even if we’d attempted to, there would have been no way we could have kept what happened here a secret,” she resumed finally. “Although no one could definitively say even who was responsible for it, the fact that the attack had occurred, and its consequences, spread rapidly throughout the League. We do believe we know who was behind the attack upon us.” Her eyes hardened, and surprise rippled through her enormous audience. “At this point, we can’t prove our suspicions, but looking at everything which has happened over the past T-year, there is a very clear and discernible pattern. We know, without doubt, that we’re still merely scratching the surface, that there are far more things we don’t know than things we do know. But I am totally confident that we’ll find the proof we require. We will discover who was behind that attack, where that attack originated, and who carried it out, and when we’ve proven those things to our complete satisfaction, we will act.”

Her voice was a sword, chilled steel with a razor edge, and her treecat companion’s ears flattened as he showed bared, needle-pointed canines.

“In the meantime, however,” she continued, “those in the League whose stupidity and arrogance made them so amenable to our enemies’ manipulation have not suddenly become wise. As some in the media have been reporting, the Solarian League Navy, having failed to learn its lesson at Spindle, has decided to move directly against the Manticore System. We anticipate the arrival of several hundred Solarian superdreadnoughts in our space within the next two to three T-weeks.”

If the silence of her audience had been profound before, it became absolute as she made that admission.

“When those ships arrive, they will not be here on a peaceful diplomatic mission. All of us have known for our entire lives how corrupt the Solarian League has truly become. We know who truly runs the Solarian bureaucracy. We know about the ‘sweetheart deals’ between Solarian transstellars and the venal, utterly dishonest Frontier Security commissioners who pimp for them. We know about the vast gulf between the League’s soaring professions of belief in human dignity and human worth and OFS’ support of debt peonage throughout the Verge. Between the League’s solemn condemnation of the interstellar genetic slave trade and the reality of high League officials and bureaucrats on the payrolls of criminal enterprises like Manpower, Incorporated.”

Her lip curled, and her brown eyes glittered like ice.

“Knowing what we know, none of us can be surprised by the fact that the Solarian League Navy intends to demand the Star Empire of Manticore’s unconditional surrender. The intention is to turn us into yet another OFS-administered satellite of the League. We’ve all seen, only too often, what happens to local government, local administration of justice, local economies, and the right of self-determination when the ‘enlightened’ supervision of the Office of Frontier Security engulfs an independent star nation. Make no mistake about it—that is precisely what the League intends to do to us.

“It intends to do so out of a desire for vengeance for the defeats it’s suffered at our Navy’s hands. It intends to do so because it cannot tolerate the example of a ‘neobarb’ out-system star nation which refuses to slavishly comply with the League’s whims. It intends to do so because it resents the size and power of our merchant marine. And it intends to do so out of the basest motives of greed as it contemplates the potential revenue source of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction.”

She paused yet again, briefly, and her shoulders squared and her head rose proudly.

“There is no hope of dissuading the Solarians from their chosen course,” she said slowly and distinctly. “The Solarian League, for all its past glories and high achievements, has become an appetite , a voracious hunger, and trillions of its citizens, living safe, satisfied, self-centered, and secure lives on its core worlds, have no concept of what routinely happens to the weak and the helpless along its frontiers.

“It’s time they found out.”

The eyes which had been cold as ice glittered with a sudden fire, and Ariel half-rose on the back of her chair, lips curling back from his fangs in challenge.

“The Star Empire of Manticore has been wounded as we’ve never been wounded before,” she said flatly. “But a hexapuma or a peak bear or a Kodiak max is most dangerous when it’s wounded. Perhaps the men and women secure at the heart of the Solarian League’s bureaucracy have forgotten that fact. If so, we’re about to remind them.

“I do not say this lightly. I know, even better than any of you, how badly we’ve been weakened, how seriously our industrial and economic power has been reduced, what that means ultimately for our military capacity. I know the stakes.”