“Maybe not, but I’d feel a lot better if we had a couple of dozen Invictus-class wallers in Beowulf orbit.”
“I’m not sure I disagree with you,” Jacques said slowly, “but that was a political decision, and I can see their point. It’s one thing for us to call on Manticoran assistance to prevent Tsang from forcibly seizing control of the Beowulf Terminus. And I don’t think anyone on Beowulf has any problem with the notion that your Navy is going to make damned sure it hangs on to the terminus and deploys however many ships it has to to do it. But if we start putting Manty ships-of-the-wall in orbit around the planet, it’s going to look coercive as hell. Beowulfers who have reservations about our joining the Alliance — and there are some of those, after all — are likely to feel threatened, and that’s not what we want in the run-up to the vote. For that matter, if we had Manty wallers orbiting Beowulf, it could only make Reid and Neng’s job in the Assembly even easier. A lot easier to convict us of treason under those circumstances, don’t you think?”
“But as you just pointed out, we already know how that vote’s going to come out in the end, anyway,” Honor shot back.
“I said I wasn’t sure I disagreed with you.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou shook his head. “But there’s another consideration to it, as well. Felicia’s going to drop her little nuke in the Assembly as soon as the votes are tallied on Reid’s motion, and we can’t afford to let the Mandarins or their mouthpieces cast doubt on the legitimacy of her actions or of the vote. If there’s anything but Beowulfan warships in orbit around the planet, you know they’re going to claim that whatever the Board of Directors says or however the electorate votes, it was all coerced by the threat of Manticoran warheads.”
“I hate to say it, but I think they’ve got a point, Honor,” Hamish pointed out, and even Emily nodded in agreement.
“I didn’t say they didn’t have a point, Hamish,” Honor said a bit tartly. “What I said is that I question whether or not it’s a good enough point to park all of our modern wallers too far from the inner system to intervene if something…untoward happens.”
“Which is why we’re working on Mycroft,” Hamish pointed out, and Honor was forced to nod in acknowledgment. Sneaky of him to use Mycroft, since she was the one who’d first suggested the concept to Sonja Hemphill.
One of the problems the Alliance was bound to face if the situation continued to deteriorate was the need to free up capital ships for mobile operations rather than tying them down in static defenses. Honor, as the unwilling beta tester for Shannon Foraker’s Moriarity system, had developed a profound respect for the effectiveness of massed MDM pods in the system defense role. Michelle Henke’s success at Spindle had reconfirmed that respect even before Filareta’s spectacular demise. Which was why Honor had devoted quite a bit of thought to ways in which Moriarity’s system-wide network of dispersed sensor and fire control stations could be updated to take advantage of the Mark 23 and the Mark 23 E. The answer Hemphill had come up with was Mycroft, named for a character out of the same pre-space detective fiction which had given Foraker Moriarity in the first place.
Essentially, Mycroft was simply a couple of dozen Keyhole-Two platforms parked at various points in a star system. It was a little more complicated than that, since the platforms were designed to operate on beamed power from their motherships, so it was necessary to provide each platform with its own power plant. And it was also necessary to provide the raw fire control and the rest of the supporting hardware and software which was normally parked aboard the platform’s deploying ship-of-the-wall. Those were relatively straightforward problems in engineering, however, especially with an entire planet to work with, and tech crews were working at breakneck pace even as Honor stood with her uncle and her spouses to meet them.
Mycroft’s advantages over Moriarity would be profound. Unlimited by Moriarty’s lightspeed control links, Mycroft would be able to take full advantage of the Mark 23 E and the FTL reconnaissance platforms which were also being thickly seeded throughout the system’s volume. And unlike Moriarity — which had been unarmed and defenseless when Honor used Hemphill’s Baldur to take it out — Keyhole-Two platforms were simply crammed with active antimissile defenses. No doubt they could be taken out, but it would be a difficult task, and enough of them were being deployed as part of Mycroft to ensure survivability through sheer redundancy.
“I agree that once Mycroft’s up and running, anybody who goes after Beowulf is going to get bloodied in a hurry,” she said now. “I guess my main concerns are that Mycroft isn’t a visible deterrent, especially since we’re keeping it so completely under wraps till it’s actually up and running, and, secondly, that it isn’t up and running yet and won’t be for at least another couple of months. Maybe longer.” She shook her head. “It’s that window that worries me,” she said soberly. “In the Mandarins’ place, I’d make it a point to assume that we had to be aware of Beowulf’s vulnerability and be doing something about it, but I’m not at all sure they will.”
“Well,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said with a shrug that was just a bit more philosophical than his mind-glow tasted, “I guess there’s one way to find out.”
“And that’s what I’m afraid of, Uncle Jacques,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Felicia Hadley sat once more in the Beowulf delegation’s box in the Chamber of Stars.
Her head was erect, her shoulders squared, and anyone looking at her could have been excused for not recognizing the mixture of anger, weariness, frustration, grief, and…emptiness behind those outwardly tranquil eyes. After all, she couldn’t sort out all those feelings herself, so why should she have expected anyone else to understand the way she felt?
The two weeks of scheduled debate on Tyrone Reid’s motion had been the ugliest Hadley could remember ever having seen. That was hardly a surprise, given the position Kolokoltsov and the rest of the Mandarins faced. They’d pulled out all the stops to focus the League’s fear and anxiety on someone else in order to save themselves, and they knew all the tricks of the game. The attacks had been carefully orchestrated, aimed from every imaginable quarter and endlessly repeated by flocks of coopted newsies and media talking heads, to give them maximum credibility with the public. There were a few reporters, like Audrey O’Hanrahan, who genuinely seemed to be trying to cover both sides of the debate, just as there were some Assembly delegates who’d tried to get the truth out. But those delegates, like the newsies trying to do their jobs, were drowned in the tide of attackers. There were simply too many members of the Assembly — and too many in the media — who owed the Mandarins too many favors (and about whom Malachai Abruzzi’s operatives knew too many secrets) for there to be any other outcome.
Two things had surprised her, however. One was the degree of genuine hatred some of her fellow delegates had spewed out in their attacks on Beowulf. Reid’s allies had placed their darts carefully, wrapping their fiery denunciations around a core of cold calculation, but others had joined the assault on their own, lashing out in an almost incoherent fury that didn’t care what the law might say, wasn’t concerned with why Beowulf might have done what it had done. No, that fury fed only on panic stricken reports of the Manticorans’ superior weaponry and fear that Beowulf’s “treason” had somehow freed that weaponry to ravage the entire Solarian League. Of course, no one had bothered to explain how Beowulf’s permitting Imogene Tsang’s fleet to be massacred would have averted that threat, now had they?