He sat back, studying the holo and feeling Citizen Commissioner Pritchart study it beside him. Unlike many officers of the People’s Navy, Giscard actually looked forward to hearing his citizen commissioner’s impressions and opinions. Partly, that was because Pritchart had one of the better minds he had ever met and frequently spotted things which a trained naval officer’s professional blinders might prevent him from considering, which helped explain what made her and Giscard one of the PN’s few smoothly functioning command teams. There were, however, other reasons he valued her input.

“As you can see, Citizen Admiral Giscard,” Bukato said after a moment, “while the Manties have pushed deeply into our territory since the beginning of the war, they haven’t pushed very much further into it since taking Trevor’s Star. It is the opinion of our analysts that this reflects their need to pause, refit, catch their breath, replace losses, and generally consolidate their position before resuming offensive operations. In addition, a large minority opinion holds that they may be becoming rather less offensively minded now that they’ve added so much of our territory to their defensive commitments.

“Neither Citizen Secretary McQueen nor I believe that they contemplate voluntarily surrendering the initiative, however. We subscribe to the belief that they definitely plan to resume the offensive in the very near future, and that when they get around to it they will go after Barnett from Trevor’s Star. To that end, we have been continuing to reinforce Citizen Admiral Theisman. Citizen Secretary Kline’s intention—or perhaps I should say ‘hope’—was that Citizen Admiral Theisman would attract Manty attention to his command area and hold it there as long as possible in order to divert the enemy from deeper thrusts into the Republic. And, of course, he was to entice the enemy into a battle of attrition in hopes of costing the Alliance more tonnage than he himself lost. What he was not expected to do was to defend Barnett successfully.”

Giscard managed not to sit sharply upright in his chair or otherwise draw attention to his reaction, but his eyes widened at the acid tone of Bukato’s last two sentences. Giscard had known Citizen Secretary Kline was unpopular with his uniformed subordinates—not surprisingly, since the man had been an incompetent political hack with a taste for humiliating any officer he decided was “an elitist recidivist” hungering to restore the officer corps to its old independence of action. But for Bukato to show contempt for even an ex-secretary so openly in front of both Pritchart and Fontein indicated that the changes at the top of the War Office must have been even more sweeping than most people suspected.

“We, however, have somewhat greater aspirations than to achieve another glorious defeat,” Bukato continued. “We are reinforcing Theisman in hopes that he will actually hold Barnett—if possible, for use as a springboard to retake Trevor’s Star. That isn’t something we’ll be able to do next week, or even next month, but the time to stop giving ground every time the Manties hit us has come now.”