A Rising Thunder-ARC (57 page)

“Are you saying we should just go ahead and surrender?” he asked, deliberately putting an edge into his voice, and Kingsford shook his head.

“For better or worse, Sir, I don’t think we can. Whether we want to fight or not, we don’t have a choice after the defeats we’ve suffered. And that’s what they were, Mr. Senior Permanent Undersecretary—make no mistake about that, because nobody in the Verge will. It’s not just the Manties and Havenites we have to worry about. We’re going to have other people, other star systems, pushing to see how they can exploit the situation. We can contain a lot of that, since none of those other systems will have the kind of missiles the Manties and Haven do, but if we don’t ultimately defeat the people who’ve hurt us this badly, their example’s going to remain and we’ll be fighting smaller scale wars for decades.”

“I see. But if we can’t send our wall of battle out to fight
their
wall of battle, what do we do?”

“Actually, Sir, if I may, I’d like to bring in one of our analysts to present a little additional background before I respond to that question.”

“What sort of analyst, Fleet Admiral?”

“Captain Gweon, Sir—Captain Caswell Gweon. He’s the CO of the Office of Economic Analysis over at ONI.”

“Really? Only a captain?” Kolokoltsov said with a small smile, and Kingsford smiled back.

“He’s already been selected for rear admiral, Sir. His name’s on the next list to be submitted to the Assembly for approval.”

“I see,” Kolokoltsov repeated. “Very well, Fleet Admiral. How soon can Captain Gweon get here?”

“If you have the time for it now, Sir, he’s waiting with your assistant.”

“Ah.” Kolokoltsov touched a key on his chair arm. “Astrid?”

“Yes, sir?” a female voice said out of thin air.

“If you have a Captain Gweon squirreled away in your office, would you be kind enough to send him in now?”

“Of course, Sir.”

The office door opened to admit a somewhat taller than average, immaculately uniformed SLN captain with brown hair and brown eyes. He struck Kolokoltsov as looking even younger than his rank would have suggested, and the permanent senior undersecretary frowned slightly as Astrid Wang uploaded a brief bio on to the holo display which could be seen only from behind Kolokoltsov’s desk.

It was a
very
brief bio in this case, consisting of about the barest bone vital statistics he’d ever seen. Normally, he would have expected much more, but Gweon wasn’t one of the political figures Astrid would already have had prepackaged bios for.

Not as young as he’d thought, Kolokoltsov observed. Prolong could fool anyone, but it must’ve worked uncommonly well in Gweon’s case. He scarcely looked sixty-five T-years old, at any rate! Without a more detailed bio, Kolokoltsov couldn’t be certain, but it looked as if Gweon was well connected within the Navy’s hierarchy, which raised the interesting question of why he’d gone into intelligence. That wasn’t—or hadn’t been, anyway—the fast track to senior rank. For that matter, Gweon had only inherited his present position less than five T-months earlier, when Vice Admiral Yountz managed to slip and break his neck on the wet surround of his swimming pool.

“Mr. Permanent Senior Undersecretary, Fleet Admiral Kingsford,” Gweon murmured, bowing respectfully to both men.

“I understand you’re one of the Navy’s economic experts, Captain,” Kolokoltsov replied. “And Fleet Admiral Kingsford wanted you in here to talk to me about something. What would that happen to be?”

If the bluntness of the question flustered Gweon in any way, it wasn’t apparent. He only nodded, as if he’d expected it.

“I believe that would be in regards to my analysis of the economic consequences of a war with the Star Empire of Manticore, Sir.”

“I think we’ve already come to the conclusion that the consequences are going to be unhappy, Captain,” Kolokoltsov said dryly. “Should I assume you have some additional illumination to cast upon them?”

“I can’t really promise to cast any
new
illumination without having had access to the reports you’ve already seen, Mr. Permanent Senior Undersecretary,” Gweon replied calmly. “I do have the Navy’s perspective on them, however.”

“Then share that with me, if you would.”

“Of course, Sir.”

Kolokoltsov hadn’t invited the captain to be seated, but that didn’t seem to faze Gweon, either. The intelligence officer simply clasped his hands behind him, standing with the easy poise of someone accustomed to presenting briefings, and began.

“I’m going to assume, Sir, that you don’t want the detailed statistical basis for my analysis at this time. I have that material with me, on chip, and I can provide it if you’d prefer. I’ve also already left a copy of it with Ms. Wang for you to review at a later time, if you wish. For now, I’ll simply concentrate on the conclusions of our analysis, if that’s acceptable?”

Kolokoltsov nodded a bit brusquely.

“In that case, Mr. Permanent Senior Undersecretary, the critical point is simply that any extended war with the Manties is going to be an economic as well as an overtly military conflict. At the moment, their technological advantages are overwhelming, but our economic and industrial power is many times as great as theirs, even allowing for their new alliance with the Havenites. The essential question is whether or not our size and economic capacity are great enough to withstand a concerted attack by this new ‘Grand Alliance’ long enough for us to produce what we need to match its war fighting capability. And the answer, I’m afraid, is that they may well
not
be.”

“I beg your pardon?” Kolokoltsov’s brows lowered in surprise at hearing someone finally say that in so many words.

“A great deal depends upon the political cohesiveness of the two sides,” Gweon said. “Given the lengthy period of hostilities between Manticore and the Republic of Haven, one would anticipate internal strains within their alliance which would work against its stability. I wouldn’t invest much hope in that prospect, however, for several reasons, including the fact that I think both Manticore and Haven genuinely believe this nonsense they’re spouting about sinister Mesan manipulation of the League’s policies. Another factor would be their shared resentment for what they regard as Solarian arrogance. And yet another, frankly, would be the fact that both of them obviously smell the opportunity to make extensive territorial gains at the League’s expense.

“In the case of the Republic of Haven, we’re talking about a star nation with a long tradition of conquest. Even if we assume the Pritchart Administration might not wish to be as expansionist as the Legislaturalists and Committee of Public Safety, it’s still confronted with a
military
accustomed to thinking in terms of expansion by force of arms, and a civilian population habituated to accept that sort of foreign policy.

“In the case of the Star Kingdom—excuse me, the Star
Empire
—of Manticore, there’s no previous tradition of imperialism. Not in the territorial sense, at any rate. Manticoran power has traditionally been extended on an economic basis, by continually increasing the Star Empire’s inroads into the League’s shipping industries and penetrating market areas in the Verge and the Shell for its own goods. And, of course, there’s the enormous advantage the Manticoran Wormhole Junction bestows on its financial sector. Yet while all of that’s true, its recent expansion into the Silesian Confederacy and then into the Talbott Sector suggest there’s been a fundamental change in the Manticorans’ internal calculus. Our best guess over at Economic Analysis is that they believe it’s time to expand their political control in order to bolster their economic dominance and give them greater strategic depth. This may actually be a result of their conflict with the Havenites, a response to the awareness that a single-system star nation, however wealthy, is at a serious disadvantage when fighting a much larger multi-star system star nation because a single defeat can cost it everything. Which is rather ironic, I suppose, since the star nation it was worried about fighting is currently its ally against us.

“Regardless of the motivations in Haven and Manticore, however, we probably have to accept that the ambition for expansion will reinforce all the other reasons they believe they have for standing together against us. In which case, their alliance is going to have a lot more stability and staying power than anyone in the League would prefer.”

He paused politely to allow Kolokoltsov to digest what he’d already said, and the permanent senior undersecretary nodded slowly. He was impressed. Gweon might be young, but he was also articulate, and it sounded as if he had a much clearer and more detailed appreciation of the situation out in the Verge than any of the Navy briefers
Rajampet
had ever brought along with him.

“If I’m correct,” Gweon continued after he’d given Kolokoltsov a few moments, “and we can’t realistically expect the ‘Grand Alliance’ to self-destruct, we have to look at the balance of economic power as it exists and to consider just how stable we are ourselves.

“Economically, we have many times as many industrialized, heavily populated systems. Almost all of our Core Worlds have tech bases at least as good, overall, as the Manties and probably superior to anything Haven can produce at this time. Some of them don’t, and we need to be aware of that, as well. On balance, though, it would certainly appear the scales are heavily weighted in our favor.

“Appearances, I’m afraid, can be deceiving, however.” Gweon’s expression turned somber. “With the withdrawal of Manticoran freighters and the holes their closure of so many wormholes have blown in our shipping routes, our economy’s been very severely damaged. It’s not evident to most of our citizens yet, but I’m afraid they’ll be figuring it out shortly. With the curtailment of available shipping, our star systems are going to be thrown back on their internal resources. Most of them will ultimately be able to absorb the blow, especially if we can expand our own merchant marine to compensate for at least some of what we’ve lost. It’s going to take a lot of time, though, and there’s going to be a lot of pain involved. Civilian morale is going to suffer, and even worse from the federal government’s perspective, it’s going to mean a major loss in revenues at the very time military expenses are going to be skyrocketing.”

He must have been reading Wodoslawski’s and Quartermain’s reports, Kolokoltsov thought sourly.

“In the meantime,” Gweon continued, “Manticore’s dealt its own economy a very significant blow, especially coupled with the damage their home system apparently took from the recent ‘mystery’ attack upon it. However, they’re actually in a position to begin recovering from it much more rapidly than we are, for several reasons. One is that they have access to the Silesian Confederacy and now to the entire Republic of Haven. The latter, in particular, represents an entirely new market for them—one which has been completely closed for the last twenty or thirty T-years. In addition, they have control of the wormholes they’ve denied to us, which means they can continue to reach markets and trading partners in the Verge and even in the Shell we literally
cannot
reach. In those areas, they’ll be in a position to pick up the direct trade, not just the carrying trade, which was previously dominated by Solarian manufacturers and transstellars. When those opportunities are coupled with the fact that—unlike the citizens of the League—both Manticorans and Havenites are experienced in and thus far better inured to the strains and tensions of interstellar warfare, their alliance is probably in a position to recoup everything it’s lost as a result of the Manties closure of our trade lanes within a very few T-years. Certainly in a shorter time than
we
can recover. In fact, our projections over at Economic Analysis indicate that we’ll reach a tipping point at which the combined economies of Manticore and Haven will effectively match the economic power of the League within no more than ten to fifteen T-years.”

“You’re joking.” Surprise startled the comment out of Kolokoltsov. That was a considerably grimmer projection than Agatá Wodoslawski or Omosupe Quartermain had yet presented to him.

“No, Mr. Permanent Senior Undersecretary,” Gweon said respectfully. “I’m afraid I’m not. Those projections, including the data upon which they rest and the models and methodology we employed, are included in the data chips I’ve left with Ms. Wang. I’d be happy to sit down with your own analysts and explain our thinking to them. For that matter, I’d welcome an outside critique of our results. At the moment, however, I believe those projections are solid. And I’m very much afraid that even they rest on some fairly optimistic assumptions.”

“
Optimistic?
” Kolokoltsov’s eyes widened.

“Yes, Sir,” Gweon said grimly. “The two most problematic of those assumptions are that, first, we’ll be able to muster the resources on the federal level to support an ongoing, lengthy conflict. And, second, that the League will maintain its political cohesiveness long enough for us to overcome the other side’s technological advantages.

“As far as the first assumption is concerned, to be honest, we simply don’t know what revenues will be available. We can make a good guess at the percentage of revenues we’ll lose because of lost shipping duties, and it isn’t pretty. What we can’t begin to estimate at this point is how badly our revenue stream from the Protectorates is going to be affected. Frankly, if I were the Manties, I’d be doing everything I could to further disrupt the Protectorates. For that matter, I’d be stirring up all the unrest I could among the Office of Frontier Security’s…client states.”

The captain’s tone shifted very slightly on the last two words, and Kolokoltsov grimaced mentally. Apparently Gweon wasn’t one of the greater admirers of OFS’ policies in the Verge.

“Whether Manticore does that deliberately or not, there’s going to be a lot of unrest, anyway,” Gweon continued. “Worse, anywhere we lose control, the Manties will be able to move in and begin taking our place. So they’ll very probably gain most of the revenue
we
lose, which will have a highly adverse affect on the bottom line. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons we believe we’ll reach that tipping point I mentioned so quickly.