"As far as security risks go," she said after a moment, "they aren't going to risk pissing us off a second time anytime soon, Aivars, I don't think those issues are going to be a deal breaker, but I think the lack of reprisals could be. For that matter, I'm inclined to think it should be."
"Which is why we specifically left open the question of the amount of the reparations to be assessed," Van Dort pointed out. "Both sides know it's coming and that the price tag's going to be stiff, and if you'll notice, I specifically didn't rule out the possibility of reprisals against the New Tuscan industrial establishment if we can't come to a meeting of minds on that particular topic."
"I'm not too sure it's a meeting with their minds I'm concerned about," Michelle said with a wry smile. "I know the Queen a bit better than most people do, and I don't think she's going to be very happy with New Tuscany. It must've been bad enough when the initial report about what happened to Bear and his ships hit her desk a week or so ago. When she gets the one on what happened to Byng here in New Tsucany, it's going to be even worse. And when she gets our follow-up, including everything Vézien and the others had to say about Ms. Anisimovna, I think she's going to be just a bit peeved with them."
"I don't doubt it for a moment," Van Dort acknowledged, "and I'm not saying they should get off scot-free. But look at the way it worked out from their side for a moment. I don't have any great store of sympathy for Vézien, Boutin, and the others, and I'm not going to shed any tears if they get kicked out on their blood-sucking, power-mongering, oligarchical asses. But New Tuscany as a star nation's already lost in the vicinity of forty-three thousand lives. That's a pretty hefty price to pay, and I'd say the Vézien Government is just as furious at Manpower as it says it is. I'm sure that in time, he and his cabinet members will get over their current spasm of sanity and revert to type, but in the meantime why kick them any harder than we need to? We've got enough problems already without nurturing any ill will we don't absolutely have to."
"Well, that's certainly true," Michelle agreed glumly. "For the admiral who just handed the Solarian League Navy its first ever task group-level defeat, I'm not feeling all warm and fuzzy inside over my accomplishment."
Terekhov looked up from Dicey and chuckled with very little humor, and Michelle gave him a crooked smile.
After the destruction of Jean Bart, Rear Admiral Evelyn Sigbee, commanding the 112th Battlecruiser Squadron, had seen reason very quickly indeed. The fact that Michelle had made it clear she knew which ship was Sigbee's flagship might well have contributed to that, but it was obvious the woman was also considerably smarter—or at least willing to actually use whatever intelligence she had—than Byng had been. Michelle wondered how much of that was because she was Frontier Fleet, not Battle Fleet.
There'd been no survivors from Jean Bart, and the other ships of the Solarian task group had returned very promptly to their parking orbit around New Tuscany. Sigbee had been a little stickier about meekly transporting her personnel down to the planetary surface and handing her ships over to Michelle's boarding parties with their computers intact, but Michelle had held her battlecruisers and heavy cruisers well outside the Solarians' effective missile range while she sent just the destroyers in to be sure Sigbee was complying with her instructions. As she'd hoped, the memory of what had just happened toJean Bart—and her obvious willingness to repeat the demonstration—had carried the day.
The anchor watches who'd been left aboard had been no more cooperative than they had to be, but they'd displayed no overt resistance, either. Again, not too surprisingly, given the heavily armed Marines who'd accompanied the naval boarding parties. And once those boarding parties were aboard, it had quickly become evident that the Sollies' computer security was far inferior to that of Manticore. On the other hand, it was also inferior to some of the civilian-market Solarian software the navy computer techs had seen, so that didn't necessarily prove anything about the tech base available to the SLN; only about the tech base of which it had actually availed itself.
Once through the fences and into the data banks, it hadn't taken very long to determine that the Sollies own tactical recordings clearly demonstrated that Commodore Chatterjee's ships hadn't had a thing to do with the destruction of the New Tuscan space station. How much good that was going to do after more recent events in the star system was debatable, but Michelle's technicians had made complete copies of the original files.
For that matter, they had some of the actual computers in which those files had been stored, since she'd also chosen to take the battlecruisersResourceful andImpudent home with her.Resourceful was one of theIndefatigable class, like the ships captured in Monica, and she felt certain BuShips and BuWeaps would want to compare her electronics and weapons loadouts with that of the ships Technodyne had provided to President Tyler.Impudent, despite the letter with which her name began, was one of the newNevada-class ships. As such, she represented the very latest in deployed SLN technology, and Michelle knew how eagerly the engineers and analysts back home would greet her arrival.
Aside from those two units, she'd left the rest of Byng's ships in New Tuscany with Sigbee. She'd seen no reason to try to take any more of them with her, for several reasons, including the fact that the newer Manticoran designs didn't provide a lot of redundant personnel to make up passage crews for prize vessels. Besides that, she'd quickly come to the conclusion that there was no particular point in trying to refit them for Manticoran use. They were clearly inferior do anything presently in Alliance service, and the expense and effort to bring such manpower-intensive designs up to something like current standards could be far more profitably applied to other ends.
She'd considered scuttling them, and under accepted interstellar law, she would have been entirely within her rights to do so. In the end, though, she'd decided that actually scuttling them might be a case of pouring unnecessary salt into a wound. Nothing she could do was going to make the SLN happy with her, but sailing off into the sunset with every one of their ships, or blowing them up in orbit, was only likely to piss them off even worse. Not that she was any too sure that what she'd ended up doing would make them any happier. Eighty percent of their ships and ninety-five percent of their personnel were still there, and both ships and people were pretty much physically intact, but before leaving, Michelle's boarding parties had deliberately triggered those ships' internal security charges . . . which had reduced all of the surviving battlecruisers' central computer nets to so much slagged molecular circuitry, as inert and useless as a solid block of granite. No one would be reprogramming those computers; it was going to take physical replacement if the Sollies ever wanted one of those ships to get underway under her own power again. That wouldn't necessarily take them permanently out of service, but it would take months to get a suitably equipped repair fleet all the way out to New Tuscany. In fact, it might actually be cheaper and faster in the long run to send out a fleet of tugs and tow them back to a Solarian shipyard.
And if they're not permanently out of service, at least they aren't going to be available to the other side any time soon, she reflected grimly. If this goes as far south as it could, that's not exactly anything to sneer at, I suppose.