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Admiralty House

City of Landing

Planet Manticore

Manticore Binary System

October 9, 1906 PD


“so what do you think about White Haven’s report?”

Thomas Caparelli tipped back in his chair, regarding Admiral Givens across his desk.

“What part of it?” Givens asked in return. “I’m not the best woman to ask for an analysis of his tactics, if that’s what you meant.”

“I think you can safely assume I wasn’t asking you to critique his attack plan.” Caparelli smiled crookedly. “I’m more interested in your reaction to what he brought back and to his conclusions about what’s going on inside the People’s Republic.”

“Well, taking your points in order, he got a lot closer to a complete data dump from Mathias than we’ve gotten anywhere else, including Samson. How much good all that data’s going to do us, I don’t know. Unfortunately, Mathias wasn’t exactly a strategic hotspot, so we didn’t capture any copies of ‘Our Secret Plan to Win the War and Destroy the Star Kingdom of Manticore in Ten Easy Steps.’ She grimaced. “For that matter, we didn’t capture anything significant about ship movement plans, either. Not outside the scheduled supply runs to Mathias, anyway.

“The hardware’s a wash, too, I think. I don’t think we picked up anything on that front that told us much more than we already had from Seaford, among other places. So from that side, there’s not a lot to interest the folks in my shop.”

She paused, and the First Space Lord smiled again.

“From that side?” he observed.

“Well, that brings me to your second point. And I have to say, he’s offered a lot of confirmation of things we already thought we were seeing. In fact, when I look at his conclusions—well, his and O’Hanlon’s, really—I have to keep reminding myself to avoid confirmation bias. The two of them are saying so many of the same things that either we’re all brilliant analysts or else we’re all chasing the same wild hares.”

“Ah?”

“I think it’s obvious the Peeps’ purges have hurt them even worse than we’d thought. Their performances at Samson and Welladay suggested that, but one of the things he did bring back from Mathias that we found really interesting were the service records on everyone assigned to the system.” She shook her head. “Commander O’Hanlon made sure we had them, and he did a deep dive before they even got back to Madras. He sent both his conclusions and the raw data on to us, and he was right; there are a lot of senior Peep officers who were lieutenants, junior-grade lieutenants—even enlisted spacers—a year ago. That’s already cost them, and his data dump suggests the problem’s even broader than we’d thought it was. If we could have jumped on them the same way earlier, we could’ve—”

She cut herself off, nostrils flared angrily, and Caparelli snorted in harsh agreement with her unfinished thought.

So far, the war had gone well, in many ways. Manticore had captured and occupied a total of nineteen Peep star systems, including two major fleet bases, counting Seaford, and destroyed lesser bases and support stations in seven more, including Mathias. In the course of Riposte Gamma’s operations, they’d destroyed twenty Peep ships-of-the-wall—seventeen superdreadnoughts and thirteen dreadnoughts—and sixty-seven battleships outright. In the same interval, they’d commissioned five new superdreadnoughts—all Gryphon-class ships—from their own construction programs and taken an additional twenty-six ex-Peep wallers into Manticoran service. Another eleven ex-Peep SDs, all captured by White Haven at Third Yeltsin, were being refitted to provide the Grayson Space Navy with a core of wallers of its own.

But aside from the four SDs White Haven had caught in Samson and two more Kuzak had picked off in Poicters, all of those wallers had been destroyed or captured before the eleven-month delay in the formal declaration stopped them short. If they’d been able to continue high-tempo operations while the Peeps were still in total disarray, they could have tripled that.

At least.

Of course, assuming that hadn’t led to outright victory—which it most probably would have, in Caparelli’s opinion—it would have created problems of its own. Welcome as the captured wallers might be, the prize ships imposed even more strain on their already buckling logistics. Thirteen of the RMN’s prewar ships-of-the-wall were in yard hands—or queued up, waiting for yard space—with battle damage that would keep them sidelined for months under even the best of conditions. The prize ships were one of the reasons those damaged warships were waiting for yard slips, and the need to repair and refit fifty ships-of-the-wall—which represented over sixteen percent of the Navy’s entire prewar wall-of-battle’s strength—was a staggering burden. It came on top of all of the Navy’s day-to-day maintenance and rebuilding needs, and, still worse in many ways, on the heels of how far down the Navy had run its maintenance cycles while it fought the non-war it couldn’t get Parliament to declare.

Adding nine percent to your battle fleet while taking the same ships away from the bad guys has to be a good thing, Tom, Caparelli told himself. So why do you feel like the guy clubbing pseudocrocs when all he wanted to do was drain the swamp?

Possibly, he reflected dryly, it was because despite its atrocious losses, the Havenite wall-of-battle was still fourteen percent stronger than Manticore’s augmented wall would be even after all fifty of those ships were restored to service. Haven’s current margin of superiority was on the order of twenty percent, and that was in terms of hulls alone. The Star Kingdom’s construction budgets had never been able to match the People’s Navy ship-for-ship or, for that matter, to build enough ships to cover even their prewar deployment needs adequately. That was what had compelled Manticore to build a larger percentage of dreadnoughts rather than the pure superdreadnought battle fleet the RMN would vastly have preferred. A weak waller was infinitely better than no waller, and their need for platform numbers had forced them to accept the smaller, lighter ships, which was why forty percent of Manticore’s prewar wall-of-battle had consisted of dreadnoughts, as opposed to less than eleven percent of the Peeps’ wall.

Under the circumstances, getting those capital ships into service—or back into service, in the case of the damaged units—had to take absolute priority. He knew that, even though he hated to think about the implications for construction and overhaul schedules on their lighter units. Cruisers and destroyers were crucially important, but right this minute, not as much as ships-of-the-wall. They’d just have to wait their turns, and that meant too many of them weren’t receiving critically needed overhauls.

Then there was the personnel problem. Havenite designs tended to be slightly more manpower intensive, class for class, and scaring up the trained bodies to crew the RMN’s explosively expanding ship strengths was a nontrivial challenge. In fact, in many ways, the additional time the yards needed to restore the prizes to service was actually beneficial, since it would give Lucien Cortez and BuPers time to increase the size of their training programs to provide the crews to man them.

And just to fill Thomas Caparelli’s cup to overflowing, entirely too much of the home system’s skilled labor force was tied down in a massive expansion of the Navy’s shipyards and repair facilities. Once those new yards were online—and the training programs had spun up—they’d solve virtually all of his current problems. Unfortunately, bringing them online could only make his current problems vastly worse in the short term. And, of course, he could count on the Peeps to do everything they could to increase their building programs, as well. None of their yards were as efficient as Manticore’s. Best estimate was that the Star Kingdom had at least a twenty-percent edge in building speeds, and probably more. But the People’s Republic had almost twice as many yards, and no one knew how rapidly—or how far—they could expand them. So it was highly probable their production rates would stay ahead of Manticore’s even after the new crop of yards were completed.

All of which made White Haven’s conclusions about these “people’s commissioners” the Committee of Public Safety had introduced even more worrisome.

“We already knew Pierre was ruthless as hell,” he said out loud. “That being the case, I guess we really shouldn’t be too surprised by this new wrinkle.”

“In retrospect, it was inevitable,” Givens agreed. “Whatever they may say about ‘the people’s will’ or any ‘Legislaturalist coup attempts,’ their Committee of Public Safety’s a product of revolution and murder, not any sort of constitutional or representative political process. It has to be short on legitimacy, even in the eyes of some of its supporters, and who’s most likely to do something about—likely to be able to do something about—restoring the ‘legitimate’ regime?”

She paused rhetorically, then shrugged.

“The military, that’s who,” she said, answering her own question. “And if what we think happened behind the scenes really happened, the military—and especially the People’s Navy—were the ones most likely to figure out Parnell and the Octagon didn’t have a damned thing to do with what happened to Harris and his Cabinet. So the senior officers, the ones most likely to want to restore the previous system, had to go. And that meant bringing up inexperienced, junior officers, a lot of whom were going to be in over their heads . . . and know they were. So how to encourage them to do their jobs or die trying while simultaneously discouraging any thoughts about regime change? Answer—first, create this new ‘State Security’ abortion to smash any potential recidivist collusion between the old intelligence and security organs, and then, second, recruit ‘commissioners’ to ride herd on their brand-new commodores and admirals. And because the commissioners will inevitably be so outnumbered by the military types they’re supposed to keep an eye on, you give them a great big spiked club. You give them this . . . doctrine of ‘collective responsibility.’”

Givens’ hazel eyes showed her sick loathing for the concept, and she grimaced. But then she inhaled deeply and sat back in her own chair.

“It’s sick, and it’s disgusting, and I hate the very thought of it,” she said flatly, “but that doesn’t mean it won’t work. At least in the short term. Who in her right mind will risk disobeying orders, even if following them is almost certainly going to get her killed, when her husband, her parents—her children—are all hostages at the mercy of something like this State Security? They may not be experienced, and there’s no way they could be up to our people’s level of training, but they’re damned well going to fight. And they’re going to fight hard.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, too,” Caparelli said heavily. “And if you see that, and I see that, and a smart pain-in-the-ass like White Haven sees that, I doubt we’re all wrong.” He shook his head, his expression disgusted. “You and I have both beaten the same dead horse hard enough, but—God, I wish we could’ve hit these people even six months earlier!”

“It wasn’t our idea, Sir. Doesn’t make it feel any better or hurt any less, but it’s not like we didn’t tell anyone who’d listen what was coming.”

“You ever hear the story of a lady named Cassandra?” Caparelli asked dryly, and Givens barked a laugh.

“All right.” Caparelli let his chair come fully upright and planted his forearms on his desk. “White Haven’s also right that we’ve got to get the Peep wall-of-battle to come out and fight before they finish training up all these new officers of theirs. In fact, I think he’s also right that the reason they aren’t coming out—yet, at least—is that someone back in Nouveau Paris has figured out how badly they need as much training time as they can get before they have to face us. They’re working on that—hard—and that’s the very reason we need to prune them back and keep them pruned back. Every additional month we give them will only cost us more dead and wounded in the end.”

Givens nodded somberly, although even with Manticore’s tech advantages, taking the war to someone who outnumbered the RMN so heavily was not a thought to induce a night of sound sleep.

“I think Sixth Fleet has to remain our main hammer,” Caparelli continued. “White Haven’s right that if we keep grinding away, keep eroding their prewar base structure, sooner or later they’ll have to come out and fight. They can’t just let us keep picking them off, if only because of how catastrophic that’ll be for their people’s morale, commissioners or no commissioners. So he’s got the ball for now, and we have to trust him to take it downfield. But we’ve got to keep the center and fullbacks off of him while he does it. That means we need to reinforce Kuzak, and we probably need to pry another battle squadron or so loose for Hemphill down on the southern lobe, too. But all of that means coming up with the ships somewhere, and I only see one place.”

“Sir, we have too many pickets of our own spread around to—”

“I know.” Caparelli waved a hand. “I know! But we’ve got some of the same constraints the Peeps do. They can’t afford to let us keep shooting bases out from under them—not indefinitely—but we can’t afford to let them get in with a raiding squadron somewhere like Alazon. Not only would it be politically disastrous, but we have a moral responsibility to look out for our allies. So much as you and I would both love to reverse the ‘penny-packet’ tendency, we can’t. And with so many of our lighter wallers tied down doing system security duty, there’s only one other place to look for reinforcements.”

“Admiral Webster will scream bloody murder, Sir.”

“Probably.” Caparelli nodded. “On the other hand, he used to be First Space Lord himself, so he’ll understand when I explain. I’m more worried about the civilians’ reaction to any notion of reducing Home Fleet, actually.”

“Better you than me, Sir!”

“Your selflessness overwhelms me.” Caparelli’s tone was even drier than before. Then he drew a deep breath. “I think that’s everything you and I needed to cover today. But do me a favor and shoot me an annotated copy of White Haven’s report. Include O’Hanlon’s analysis of their officer corps. Better include everything we’ve got on this State Security monstrosity—you may want to make that a separate briefing paper—and see if you can confirm whether or not they really are staffing it with ex-terrorists. I want the most detailed breakdown I can get in hand when I sit down with Baroness Morncreek, and I’ll probably—or, since it’s an intelligence matter, you’ll probably—end up having to brief the Cabinet on it, too.”

“The Cabinet?” Givens seemed less than enthralled by the notion, and he grinned sourly.

“To paraphrase something I heard someone say not so very long ago, ‘better you than me,’ Pat.”


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