Which, White Haven thought with admiration-tinged bitterness, only reemphasized the danger of allowing an officer of Theisman's caliber time to recover his balance and plan his own shots.
We should be moving on Barnett right now, the Earl thought. Hell, we should've concentrated Eighth Fleet two years ago, as originally planned, and damned well hit Theisman then! But even granted that we lost that chance a long time ago, we're still back at Trevor's Star and concentrated again, and why the hell did the Admiralty and the Joint Chiefs send us back out here if they didn't mean for us to carry out our original orders?
But he hadn't been given permission to reactivate his original attack plan, and despite his need to vent frustration, he knew why. The Alliance was afraid... and this time it had too much to lose.
He snorted savagely at the thought, yet it was true. He suspected that Queen Elizabeth and Protector Benjamin were as determined as he himself was that the initiative had to be regained, and he had complete faith in Sir Thomas Caparelli's fighting spirit. Lack of courage had never been one of the things he'd held against the burly First Space Lord. But even though Elizabeth and Benjamin were, by any measure, the two most important heads of state in the Alliance, they weren't the only ones, and their smaller allies saw what had happened to Zanzibar and Alizon—and Basilisk—and were terrified that the same would happen to them. Nor had the Star Kingdom or the Protectorate of Grayson maintained as unified a front as their rulers must have desired.
The Manticoran Opposition had been as stunned as anyone else for the first few weeks. But then, as the true scope of the disaster became clear, that had changed. Their leaders had stormed into the public eye, plastering the 'faxes and domestic news services with condemnations of the Cromarty Government's "lax and inefficient," "inexcusably overconfident," and "culpably negligent" conduct of the war. Never mind that the Opposition had done its level best in the decades leading up to that self-same war to ensure that the Star Kingdom would never have had the Navy to survive its opening weeks. Or that it had paralyzed the Star Kingdom's government and delayed military operations for months following the Harris Assassination, and so allowed the Committee of Public Safety to get its feet under it. Nothing in the universe had a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts, and people like Countess New Kiev, Baron High Ridge, Lady Descroix, and their tame military analysts like Reginald Houseman and Jeremiah Crichton had even shorter memories than most. They sensed an opening, an opportunity to blacken Cromarty and his advisers in the eyes of the electorate, and they'd seized it with both hands.
The political fire on Grayson had come from another source... and been leveled upon a different target. A group of dissident steadholders had coalesced under the leadership of Steadholder Meuller, denouncing not the war as such, but rather the fashion in which Grayson's "so-called allies unfairly—and unwisely—dominate the decision-making process." They knew better than to expect the Grayson people to shrink from the dangers of war, but they had hit a responsive nerve in at least some of their people. Centuries of isolation could not be totally forgotten in a few years, and there were those on Grayson who believed Meuller was right when he implied that their world would be better off if it were to go its own way rather than marrying its military power and policy to someone—like the Star Kingdom—who had obviously miscalculated so hideously.
And listening to all that drivel were the voters of the Star Kingdom and the steaders of Grayson. Men and women who had steeled themselves for the perils of war before the shooting began, but who had become increasingly confident as the actual fighting went on. Few of them had been happy about the war's cost, or about the lives which were being lost, or about rising taxes, reduced civilian services, or any of the hundreds of other petty and not so petty inconveniences they'd been forced to endure. But they had been confident in their navies, sure the ultimate victory would be theirs.
Now they were confident no longer. Esther McQueen had accomplished that much, at least, and the repercussions had been severe. Now all too many voters demanded that the Navy hold all it had taken, as a glacis against additional Peep attacks. They had gotten out of the habit of thinking in the stark terms of victory or slavery, and with the loss of that habit, they had also lost the one of accepting that risks had to be run. That an outnumbered Navy had to take chances to seize and control the initiative. Indeed, they no longer even thought of themselves as outnumbered, for how could an overmatched fleet have accomplished all theirs had? That was why the shock of McQueen's offensives had cut so deep... and why the critics vociferously demanded that "the incumbent incompetents be replaced by new, better informed leaders who will let our incomparable Navy safeguard our star systems and our worlds!"
Which came down in the end to calling the Navy home to "stand shoulder to shoulder" in defense of the inner perimeter... which was the worst possible thing they could do.
White Haven scrubbed a hand over his face and took himself sternly to task. Yes, things were worse now than he remembered their ever having been before. And, yes, the Opposition was making inroads into Alien Summervale's authority and popular support. But the Manticoran electorate was not composed solely of credulous fools. In the long run, he estimated, the damage popular trust in the Cromarty Government had suffered might take years to completely heal, but it would be healed in the end. And quite possibly faster than White Haven might believe at this moment that it could be, given the Queen's unwavering, iron support for her embattled prime minister and his cabinet. As for Grayson... White Haven snorted a laugh. Samuel Meuller might have assembled a coterie of vocal supporters, but they were a definite minority, and Hamish Alexander knew he wouldn't care to be the one who challenged Benjamin Mayhew's strength of will!
Nor was the military front hopeless. Despite heavy losses, Alice Truman, Minotaur, and the carrier's LAC wing had proved the new LAC concept brilliantly at Hancock, and ONI's best estimate was that the Peeps still hadn't figured out exactly what had hit them, though they must obviously have some suspicions. In the meantime, the new construction programs were going full blast. Within another few months, the first of an entire wave of LAC-carriers would be joining the Fleet, and the new Medusa-class—
No, he corrected himself. Not the Medusa-class. For the first time in its history, the Royal Manticoran Navy had followed the lead of a foreign fleet, and the Medusa-class missile pod superdreadnoughts—the wisdom of whose construction no one doubted any longer—had been redesignated as the Harrington-class.
White Haven felt a familiar bittersweet loss as he contemplated the change, but the pain had become less. It would never go completely away. He knew that now. But it had become something he could cope with because he had accepted the nature and depth of his feelings for her. And she would have been proud of the way her namesake had performed at the Battle of Basilisk. Almost as proud as she would have been of how furiously her adopted navy had fought not just at Basilisk but in half a dozen engagements since. The GSN was young, but it continued to expand explosively, and the RMN was beginning to realize its true quality. Manticoran officers had begun to pay it the supreme compliment: they truly were as confident going into battle with GSN units in support as they were with fellow Manticorans.
The Alliance was regaining its balance. It had been knocked back on its heels, but it was still a long way from on the ropes, and while people like Hamish Alexander sparred for time, the massive construction programs behind them were churning out the ships which would take the war to the Peeps again someday much sooner than most people would have believed possible, and—
The chirp of his com interrupted his thoughts, and he hit the acceptance key. Lieutenant Robards' face appeared on it, but White Haven had never seen his aide with an expression like the one he wore. His eyes were huge, and he looked as stunned as if someone had used his head for target practice with a blunt object.