"And even if that weren't true," Kolokoltsov continued, "it would probably be even more disastrous in the long run than simply giving in to the Manties' demands right this minute. God only knows how many ships and how many people we'd lose, but despite everything Rajani's been saying, I strongly suspect casualties would only get worse, not better, and there comes a point when phrases like 'favorable rates of exchange' lose their meaning. If we managed to 'defeat' Manticore only at the expense of casualties ten times, or twenty times—or a hundred times—as great as theirs—and right now, the ratio is even worse than that, by a considerable margin—we'd've set exactly the precedent we wanted to avoid all along. Sure, Manticore would be history, but do you think the example of what they'd done to us first would just disappear in the minds of all those people out there in the Verge—or the Shell, for that matter—who don't like us very much? Not to mention the possibility that we'd take so much damage against Manticore that someone else—maybe someone who's not even on our radar horizon at the moment—saw an opportunity to come at us from behind. I don't know about you, but I can think of at least a couple of System Defense Forces whose loyalty might be just a tad less than totally reliable under those circumstances."
"So what can we do?" MacArtney demanded.
"At the moment, I think we don't have any choice but to play defense," Kolokoltsov said frankly. "The bottom line is that even if we can't afford to go after Manticore until we figure out how to match their weapons, they can't realistically come after us , either. They've got to worry about the Republic of Haven, and even if they manage to settle with Haven somehow, it's going to take time.
"What we have to do is use that time to accomplish two things. First, we have to make it clear to everyone here in the League that what's happening is the result of Manticoran decisions, not ours. The only way to stay ahead of the mob this time around is to run even faster and shout even louder, so I say we keep right on bearing down on Green Pines and endorse that recording someone sold O'Hanrahan as the real version of what happened at New Tuscany. As for what happened to Crandall at Spindle, we can't conceal our losses, but we don't have to confirm that the Manties did it to her with cruisers and battlecruisers."
"What about the newsies' reports?" Wodoslawski asked skeptically.
"We don't challenge them directly," Abruzzi said, his eyes narrowed in intense thought as he considered what Kolokoltsov had just said. "We point out that none of the newsies were aboard either side's ships during the actual battle. Oh, sure, some of them were allowed aboard a couple of the surrendered superdreadnoughts afterward, but none of them had access to the raw sensor data of the battle, and none of them have been allowed aboard any of the Manty ships to see firsthand whether they were really cruisers and not ships-of-the-wall. They're taking other people's word for what happened when you come right down to it, aren't they? So we take the position that our analysts 'strongly doubt' the Manticoran version—the only one that's been 'leaked' to the media—of what happened. We should be properly open to all possibilities, including the possibility the Manties are telling the truth, but insist the available evidence is far too sparse to confirm the truth either way at this point."
"Exactly." Kolokoltsov nodded, and Wodoslawski's skepticism eased visibly. After all, this was a game they'd played many times.
"In the meantime," Kolokoltsov went on, "we point out that everything that's happened in the Talbott Cluster is the result of Manticoran imperialism. We've had our concerns over their actions and intentions for some time, and what they did at New Tuscany, and their attack on Admiral Byng, have made us even more concerned. After all, the mere fact that they've changed their name officially to the Star Empire of Manticore is surely an indication of their expansionism and ambitions! And the reports of their backing for outright acts of terrorism and mass murder by the Audobon Ballroom—the fact that they're clearly using the Ballroom as a weapon against someone they've unilaterally decided is their enemy—only underscores the kind of lunatic excesses their territorial ambitions and arrogance produce.
"As for what happened at Spindle, there are a couple of ways we might come at it. We could always toss Crandall to the wolves, exactly the way she deserves, especially since she's not around to dispute anything we say. We could observe more in sorrow than in anger that while her intentions were good, and her suspicions about Manticoran imperialism were undoubtedly justified, she approached the situation far too impetuously. Or we could argue that the only records we have of her conversations with the Manties come from Manticoran sources . . . just like the falsified sensor recordings from New Tuscany. In reality, she was nowhere near as confrontational and bloody-minded as the Manties' version indicates. I'm sure someone over at Rajani's could create a much more reasonable version of her conversations with O'Shaughnessy and Medusa for domestic consumption. And the fact that she's so conveniently dead, under mysterious circumstances, would be only logical if the Manties were going to falsify the official record of what she'd said to them. After all, it would never do for them to have left her alive to tell the galaxy they were lying, would it?
"The first possibility—laying the blame off on Crandall—could blow up in our faces if it leads to a demand that we acknowledge her fault and more or less accept the Manties' demands in full. That would push us back into that unacceptable outcomes area. The second possibility has risks of its own, of course. The biggest one is that eventually, someone—like O'Hanrahan—is going to start screaming that we knew the truth all along and suppressed it. If that happens, we might be looking at exactly the sort of domestic witch hunts we most need to avoid. On the other hand, the majority of the public's so jaded where conspiracy theories are concerned that we could probably fob off any inquiry with a suitable cover story . . . unlike what would happen if the wrong people started nosing around our actual immediate post-New Tuscany decisions."
"And the reason we're doing all of this is—?" Wodoslawski asked.
"We're doing it because, in the end, we're going to have to go to war with Manticore, no matter what we want," Kolokoltsov said flatly. "And under the circumstances, given the fact that we can't go to war right now , the groundwork has to be set up carefully. We have to explain why the war is their fault and why we can't just go smack the hell out of them the way they deserve right this minute."
"Sounds like a tall order to me," she said dubiously, and he nodded.
"It is. But I think we've got at least a decent shot at it, if we handle things right. First, we go ahead and admit that, however many ships of whatever classes they deployed at Spindle, they've clearly demonstrated that at least some of their weaponry is, in fact, superior to anything we have currently deployed . Obviously, the Navy's been pursuing similar weapons developments for some time, but has declined to put them into service because the League was unwilling to take responsibility for such a dramatic escalation in the lethality of weapons of war. Which, by the way, also helps buy us a little time. Because of that unwillingness to pursue such an escalation, we didn't press the R&D on it, and there's going to be an inevitable delay before we can bring our own systems fully up to operational status and start getting them deployed.
"In the meantime, however, the Manties have become aware both of their current superiority and also of the fact that it's a fleeting one, and they've decided to push their imperialist agenda while they still have a decided edge in combat. Clearly, the way in which they've distorted what happened in both incidents at New Tuscany—and probably what happened at Monica, as well—is all part of an elaborate deception plan. It's intended to erect a faзade of Solarian aggression in order to create a peace lobby here in the League which will agitate in favor of allowing their new 'Empire' to retain its ill-gotten gains rather than risk a lengthy, expensive war to force them to surrender those gains. That's probably why they're insisting on this nonsense about Manpower being behind it all, too."