"I wish we'd taken out more of their wall, too, Father," he said finally. "On the other hand, the point about their missile supply is extremely well taken. Especially if we can get them to use up most of the ones they've got on the Sollies."
"I know."
Albrecht sipped more wine, then looked down into his glass.
"I know," he repeated, "but I've been thinking. I know they got away from us in the yards, but we know where they are , and—"
"No, Father."
The two words came out very firmly, and Albrecht looked up to see Benjamin sitting back from the table and folding his arms across his chest. For a moment, there was something almost comical about the father's wheedling expression and the stern light in the son's eyes.
"I know what you're about to say, Father," Benjamin continued. "In fact, Dan and Collin and I figured it might occur to you as soon as we realized we hadn't caught as many ships in the yards as we'd hoped."
"So the three of you sat down and discussed it behind my back, is that it?" Albrecht's voice could have been ominous, but instead, it was almost quizzical, and Benjamin shrugged.
"You're the one who put me in charge of the Navy, Daniel in charge of research, and Collin in charge of intel, Father. I don't think you did it because you expected us to sit on our brains."
"No, you're right about that," Albrecht acknowledged.
"Well, since we were using them as something besides cushions, it occurred to us to think the same thing you're thinking. If Topolev and Colenso could get into Manticore and Yeltsin's Star undetected, why not do the same thing to Trevor's Star? Pick off the warships we didn't get first time around?"
"That is what I was thinking," Albrecht said. "From your response, I'm assuming the three of you decided it wasn't such a great idea after all?"
"Oh, the idea' s just fine, Father. The problem is how likely it is that we wouldn't get away with it. Let's face it, Oyster Bay was in many ways a one-off operation. It succeeded because the Manties didn't have a clue about our capabilities. Well, now they do—have a clue, I mean. They still don't know how we did it, but they damned well know we did do it, and if nothing else, they're going to be pouncing on every 'ghost footprint' their hyper sensors pick up with everything they've got. And, frankly, the fact that we haven't been able to come up with an effective detector for the spider drive doesn't fill me with unbounded confidence that the Manties might not have something we don't even know about that could do the job. I think it's unlikely , but I'm not prepared to assume it's impossible.
"So looking at it from the perspective of getting in in the first place, things would be a lot more iffy a second time around—especially a second time around that came close on the heels of Oyster Bay."
Benjamin looked across the table at his father until Albrecht nodded to show he was following so far.
"Secondly," Benjamin continued then, "the force levels we'd require would actually be higher. Oyster Bay succeeded because we could plan on achieving total surprise and our targets were civilian installations. They weren't armored, they didn't have any active or passive defenses in operation, and they couldn't dodge. After what happened to their home system, I can guarantee you no one as experienced as the Manties is going to let us catch their battle fleet under circumstances like that. At the very minimum, their impellers are going to be permanently hot. Most likely, they'll have minimum station-keeping wedges up, for that matter, and they're going to have their damned FTL recon platforms deployed widely enough to give them plenty of time to get wedges and sidewalls fully up before anything gets close enough to attack. So we'd need a hell of a lot more firepower to achieve decisive results, and, unfortunately, the Sharks are too small—and we don't have enough of them—to provide that level of combat power. Worse, in a lot of ways, they're too fragile to survive the kind of damage Manty laserheads can hand out.
"And that brings me to the third point, which is—and, frankly, Father, I think this is probably the most important consideration—that we literally cannot afford to lose the Sharks . More specifically, we can't afford to lose their crews . The people aboard those ships right now are the seed corn for the crews of the ships we're building here in Darius. We've just blown an enormous hole in the Manties' trained manpower, one that's going to be a huge factor in how long it takes them to recover from Oyster Bay. Given the way things are proceeding, and given our own operational and strategic planning, we can't afford to have the same thing happen to us. We're going to be in the position of having to enormously expand our naval personnel no matter what happens, and we don't have the institutional base the Manties do. We need every single one of the men and women who carried out Oyster Bay. We need their skills and their experience, and we need them here— alive—not vaporized at Trevor's Star."
"Do you really think that would be a likely outcome?" Albrecht asked after several seconds. His tone was curious, not confrontational, and Benjamin shrugged again.
"Frankly? No. I don't think the attack would be anywhere near as successful as Oyster Bay was, and I think giving the Manties another look—or the chance for another look, anyway—at our new hardware would be risky, but I don't really think they'd be likely to detect, track, and kill the Sharks wholesale. Unfortunately, 'don't think they'd be likely to' isn't a very good basis for operational planning. One thing you taught all of us a long time ago was that we can't make the universe be what we want it to be, so we'd better figure out what it really is and factor that into our planning. And in this case, the potential return, even assuming everything went near perfectly, doesn't begin to compare to the potential damage we'll take if everything doesn't go near perfectly."
Albrecht sat in evident thought for a few moments, then finished the wine in his glass and set it back down on the table.
"You're right. I didn't put any of you boys where you are just so you could watch me make mistakes. And I hadn't really thought about all the implications you've just pointed out. I still wish we could do it, but you're right. The last thing we need to do is to start making the kind of 'we're invincible' mistakes those jackasses in the League are making. As Isabel would have said, this isn't the time for us to be flying by the seat of our pants if we don't have to."
"Thank you, Father," Benjamin said quietly.
"In the meantime, though," his father said rather more briskly, "I want you and Daniel to come to Mannerheim with me."
"Excuse me?" Benjamin looked at him quizzically, and Albrecht snorted.
"Hurskainen and the others will all be there, and I want you two along to answer any questions—with due regard for operational security, of course—they may have about Oyster Bay."
"Are you sure that's a good idea? If you want us there, we'll come, of course. On the other hand, do we really want to be answering questions about the new systems and the new hardware?"
"That's a very well taken point," Albrecht acknowledged. "On the other hand, these people have all demonstrated their ability to maintain operational security, or we'd never have gotten as far as we have. I think a couple of them are feeling a bit nervous now, though. The way we accelerated Oyster Bay came at them cold, and while I wouldn't say any of them are experiencing what I'd call second thoughts, I do think the . . . anxiety quotient, let's say, is a bit higher than we might like."