“You may understand the numbers, Commander,” she said then, her nostrils flaring, “but whatever you think, you probably don’t have a clue how bad the consequences would be. I’ve got a note coming due in six T-months. A big one. If I a forfeit this charter, I’ll probably come up short on the due date. If I get hit with a nondelivery penalty on top of that, I’ll certainly come up short. And if I do, I lose my ship.”

“You’re right, I didn’t know about that part of it,” Wu said after a long, silent moment. “And I’m sorrier than I can say that you’re facing that kind of a problem. But the order isn’t discretionary—not for you, and not for me. You’re required to obey it, and I’m required to enforce it…by whatever means are necessary.”

“But Klondike isn’t even a Solly system,” Malachai pointed out, and there was a note of pleading in her voice—a note that obviously came hard for her. “We’d be in hyper the entire way there, and nobody could even find us there, much less touch us. I drop into Klondike, I offload my cargo, and that’s all there is. Then I’ll come straight home, I promise!”

Wu stared into those angry, pleading, desperate blue eyes and hated himself and his orders. But they were orders, and he was responsible for enforcing them.

The government’s got to come up with some kind of compensatory arrangement, he told himself. They have to know what kind of economic hardship this kind of order’s bound to inflict, and it’s not the Crown’s job to put honest merchants skippers out of work. Take away their life savings!

Unfortunately, no requirement for compensation had been written into the Wartime Commerce Security Act when Parliament passed it over three hundred T-years earlier. Maybe nobody had thought of it at the time, but maybe someone had, too. Maybe somebody had realized just how stupendous the price tag might become, given the size the Manticoran merchant marine might attain in the next three T-centuries, and declined to obligate the government to pay it. And even if they had, where was the government going to find the cash to pay it after the Yawata Strike? And especially if it was calling home the enormous merchant fleet which provided so much of its total revenue flow?

And then there was the minor question of just how the Star Empire of Manticore was going to manage to pay the bills for a war against something the size of the Solarian League. Even with a healthy tax base, that would’ve been a Herculean task. With what the Yawata Strike had left behind and the inevitable loss of Solly traffic through the Junction on top of everything else…