Which is all well and good, but doesn’t change the fact that they may actually be able to do exactly what Carmichael’s threatening. And if they are, and if they really are prepared to hand all their notes to someone like O’Hanrahan…

His expression turned bleak as he contemplated just how damaging the publication of Carmichael’s correspondence could prove if things went to hell on Filareta. Yet it would be almost as damaging to take the ambassador’s “advice.” Sending the stand down orders Manticore was demanding could only be seen as a sign of weakness. It would damage the League’s prestige still further, and that could only worsen the consequences they all feared in the Verge and the Shell, which didn’t even consider the personal consequences to him and his colleagues. Or, for that matter, the potential constitutional train wreck when everyone began assigning blame and, in the process, revealed just how threadbare the pretense of representative government in the Solarian League truly was.

But if we don’t order him to stand down and it turns out remotely as badly as Carmichael’s warning us it will, we’ll have all of those consequences plus the deaths of thousands of our own spacers!

He considered calling yet another meeting to consider Carmichael’s latest message, but what could it accomplish? The others would argue, they’d worry, try to weasel around into a position which heaped the blame on everyone else, and in the end decide to do what he and, perhaps, MacArtney suggested. And the truth was, God help him, that he couldn’t see any choice but to continue backing Rajampet’s strategy.

It was simply too late to make any other decision.

Besides, everything I’ve been able to dig up on Filareta suggests he’s at least four or five times as smart as Crandall was. And he knows what happened at Spindle. If the Manties really are in a position to chew him up and spit him out, he’s smart enough to stand down on his own rather than get his fleet killed for nothing. That’d be bad enough, but a hell of a lot less bad than actually getting himself blown out of space!

And relying on Filareta to be smart enough also just happened to avoid the consequences of caving in to Carmichael’s demands without even trying to find out if they were a bluff.

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