His voice trailed off, and silence enveloped the conference room as the people in it looked at one another.
“Tester, you may be right,” Yanakov said softly into that silence at last. “It could be, anyway.”
“I think he is right,” White Haven said grimly. “Think about it. If they’d gone with a standard fire plan, they had the fire control channels to’ve fired at least three targeted salvos out of those missile pods. There’d have been time to feed actual target coordinates to their birds, and those salvos would have been in final acquisition by the time anything we fired could’ve reached their ships. Sure, we’d have stopped a lot of them — most of them — before they inflicted any damage, but their chances of actually getting through with at least some hits would have been a lot higher than they could do simply trying to saturate our defenses without even assigning targets!”
“And look at the delay between that first launch and the first follow-on salvo from their broadside tubes,” Lester Tourville said, eyes distant. “It was a good — what? Ten seconds? Something like that?”
“Thirteen,” Theisman said. “You’re right, Les.”
“Pat hasn’t had time for any prisoner interviews yet,” Sir Thomas Caparelli said thoughtfully, lips pursed. “I wonder if anyone’s going to be able to explain that delay to us? It does almost sound like there was a hole of some kind in the order queue, doesn’t it?”
“Possibly,” White Haven agreed. “But that doesn’t change the fact that Filareta could have used the time Honor gave him to set up a sequenced, targeted, controlled launch, and he didn’t. Why not?”
“Because that would have required a series of actions?” Yu murmured, then nodded slowly. “They’d have to select the pods to be enabled. Then they’d have to choose the targets, feed the coordinates, enable at least the first salvo’s telemetry links, update their electronic warfare plan. It would have taken more than one man, and it would have taken a complex series of commands and keystrokes. Whereas—”
“Whereas this way, if you’re right, all they needed was for some poor damned soul to punch one button and they could count on me to kill over a million people for them,” Honor grated harshly.
More than one of the humans present winced. Her husband reached out to lay one hand on her forearm, and she looked at him with bitter eyes.
“You didn’t have any choice,” he told her. “Not with fifty thousand missiles coming at your command.”
“I could have just taken the fire,” Honor replied flatly. “Look at how few people we lost anyway! I could’ve waited to be sure—”
“Oh, stop it!” Thomas Theisman snapped, and Honor’s head snapped around in surprise at the genuine anger in his voice.
“No, you could not have ‘just taken the fire’!” the Republic’s Secretary of War told her sharply. “And if you had done something that stupid, you’d deserve to be broken for it!”
“But—”
“Don’t you ‘but’ me! You didn’t know — you couldn’t know — if they’d come up with some kind of fire control fix we’d never heard of before. You had no right, not one shred of a moral justification, to risk the lives of personnel under your command just because somebody on the other side had done something suicidal! Your responsibility is to your people, not theirs! It’s your job to neutralize an enemy before he kills them, and you’d damned well better do it if you’re going to be worthy of the uniform you wear!”
His brown eyes blazed, and she tasted the white-hot fury, the total sincerity, behind them.
“That’s your responsibility, Admiral Harrington, and you lived up to it! You reacted to the threat you knew about, the one you saw, and I was right there on that flag bridge with you. It took those missiles three minutes to reach us, and you had a Hermes buoy sitting right off his flagship’s bow. There was plenty of time for him to get on the com and tell you the launch was a mistake, if he hadn’t meant to launch it! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe he did that, now did he? Not only that, but thirteen-second lag or not, the rest of his damned fleet was firing full broadsides at you on its heels! I understand that realizing you gave the order to kill that many people has to make you sick to your stomach. It makes me want to puke, and I didn’t have to give it. But the only ones responsible for what happened to Filareta and the people under his command are whoever arranged to get him sent here and — assuming there’s any basis to all this speculation in the first place — whoever got to his tac officer. Not you; not me—them!”
She looked around the conference room and saw the agreement in every other face. More than that, she tasted the agreement, and her brain knew they were right. Maybe someday she’d be able to accept that as easily as they did. But even if that day came, she would never be free of the soul-deep regret, she felt at this moment.
Silence lingered for several moments, then Pritchart cleared her throat.
“How do you think the League is going to react to all this?” she asked the group at large.
“Poorly?” Tourville suggested with a sour smile.
“Oh, I think you can take that for granted,” White Haven agreed. “And I don’t think it’s going to be a very good idea for us to suggest Mesa somehow manipulated Filareta into firing.” He rolled his eyes. “Even if anyone in Old Chicago was willing to entertain any evidence which might support our ‘ridiculous conspiracy theory paranoia’ in the first place, we don’t have any evidence. We’d play straight into Abruzzi’s hands if we handed him that kind of propaganda hook.”
“And there are plenty of Sollies ready to go along with him,” Elizabeth agreed sourly, then gave herself a shake and drew a deep breath. “Not that I suppose I can blame them, really, given the official party line, Solly newsies’ well known impartial reporting, and how ridiculous the whole notion still seems to me sometimes!”
“The fact that we can’t blame them for it doesn’t keep their refusal to entertain the truth from being inconvenient as hell,” Pritchart observed even more sourly. “And the fact that Tsang is going to get to Old Terra with what happened in Beowulf well before anybody in Old Chicago finds out what happened out here isn’t going to help one bit. The Mandarins are going to have at least a few days to start drumming up anti-Beowulf sentiment before word of what happened to Filareta lands on them like a nuke, and just imagine what the ’faxes are going to be like then.”
“Not exactly something we didn’t anticipate,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou sighed. “Mind you, we’d all have been happier if Tsang had been bright enough to back down without Admiral Truman having to take a hand.”
“At least she was smart enough not to pull a Crandall or a Filareta,” Honor observed grimly.