It was probably the closest the Sollies would ever come to a clear-cut foreign policy decision, at least in his lifetime, Tourville reflected. But it was one they came by naturally… and one they had implemented five times since 1410 p.d.

The first two centuries after the Warshawski sail had rendered interstellar warfare practical had seen more than their share of atrocities, including ruthless attacks on defenseless planetary populations. It had been bad enough then; with the weapons available now, it would be far worse. A single superdreadnought—for that matter, even a single battlecruiser—could exterminate every city, town, and village on any planet once the target’s defenses had been suppressed. These days, they could do it with kinetic missile strikes, duplicating on a far grander scale the so-called “Heinlein Maneuver” Old Earth’s rebellious colonists had employed in the Lunar Revolt of 39 a.d. The Lunar rebels had settled for dropping cargo shuttles loaded with rock into Old Earth’s gravity well; a missile capable of eighty or ninety thousand gravities of acceleration was incomparably more effective than such crude, improvised weapons. And a kinetic strike would do minimal damage to the rest of a planet and leave it suitably empty for the attacker’s own colonists.

Except that the Solarian League, having experienced the bitter horrors of trying to clean up after such an atrocity on one of its member worlds, had not only unilaterally issued the Eridani Edict but incorporated it as Amendment Ninety-Seven of the League Constitution. Seven billion human beings had died in the Epsilon Eridani Massacre. The Solarians had not forgotten them, even today, and no one who was still in shouting distance of sanity wanted to remind them once again and bring the League Navy down on his head by violating the edict.

He pushed the thought to the back of his brain with an impatient flick of a mental hand. The Eridani Edict had no bearing on today’s mission, and it was time he stopped fretting about the Sollies and started concentrating on the Manties.

“Well, you said you wanted to push him into cooking the exercise,” Jackie Harmon observed to Alice Truman as the two captains rode the lift down to Harmon’s wing briefing room.

“I did,” Truman agreed calmly. “On the other hand, I’m a little disappointed in him if this is the best he can do.”

“ ’Best he can do’?” Harmon echoed. The COLAC shook her head. “Let’s see, he’s increased our vulnerability to detection by about eighty-five percent, reduced our EW’s ability to confuse his fire control by the same amount, and reduced the effectiveness of our active defenses by forty percent. Just what exactly did you expect him to do for an encore?”

“Oh, I admit it should do the job,” Truman agreed with a chuckle. “He’s going to wax most of our wing, though your people are enough better than he’s willing to admit that I think he’s still going to get hurt a lot worse than he expects. But it’s a purely brute force approach… and one he’s going to find extremely hard to justify when Admiral Adcock and Admiral Caparelli start asking pointed questions.”