The Manticoran Opposition had been as stunned as anyone else for the first few weeks. But then, as the true scope of the disaster became clear, that had changed. Their leaders had stormed into the public eye, plastering the ’faxes and domestic news services with condemnations of the Cromarty Government’s “lax and inefficient,” “inexcusably overconfident,” and “culpably negligent” conduct of the war. Never mind that the Opposition had done its level best in the decades leading up to that self-same war to ensure that the Star Kingdom would never have had the Navy to survive its opening weeks. Or that it had paralyzed the Star Kingdom’s government and delayed military operations for months following the Harris Assassination, and so allowed the Committee of Public Safety to get its feet under it. Nothing in the universe had a shorter half-life than a politician’s memory for inconvenient facts, and people like Countess New Kiev, Baron High Ridge, Lady Descroix, and their tame military analysts like Reginald Houseman and Jeremiah Crichton had even shorter memories than most. They sensed an opening, an opportunity to blacken Cromarty and his advisers in the eyes of the electorate, and they’d seized it with both hands.

The political fire on Grayson had come from another source… and been leveled upon a different target. A group of dissident steadholders had coalesced under the leadership of Steadholder Meuller, denouncing not the war as such, but rather the fashion in which Grayson’s “so-called allies unfairly—and unwisely—dominate the decision-making process.” They knew better than to expect the Grayson people to shrink from the dangers of war, but they had hit a responsive nerve in at least some of their people. Centuries of isolation could not be totally forgotten in a few years, and there were those on Grayson who believed Meuller was right when he implied that their world would be better off if it were to go its own way rather than marrying its military power and policy to someone—like the Star Kingdom—who had obviously miscalculated so hideously.

And listening to all that drivel were the voters of the Star Kingdom and the steaders of Grayson. Men and women who had steeled themselves for the perils of war before the shooting began, but who had become increasingly confident as the actual fighting went on. Few of them had been happy about the war’s cost, or about the lives which were being lost, or about rising taxes, reduced civilian services, or any of the hundreds of other petty and not so petty inconveniences they’d been forced to endure. But they had been confident in their navies, sure the ultimate victory would be theirs.

Now they were confident no longer. Esther McQueen had accomplished that much, at least, and the repercussions had been severe. Now all too many voters demanded that the Navy hold all it had taken, as a glacis against additional Peep attacks. They had gotten out of the habit of thinking in the stark terms of victory or slavery, and with the loss of that habit, they had also lost the one of accepting that risks had to be run. That an outnumbered Navy had to take chances to seize and control the initiative. Indeed, they no longer even thought of themselves as outnumbered, for how could an overmatched fleet have accomplished all theirs had? That was why the shock of McQueen’s offensives had cut so deep… and why the critics vociferously demanded that “the incumbent incompetents be replaced by new, better informed leaders who will let our incomparable Navy safeguard our star systems and our worlds!”