“Tom,” Pritchart said, as if she’d been reading his mind—a possibility he wasn’t prepared to discount, after watching her in action for over three years—“we’re going to have to take the wraps off of Bolthole sooner or later, anyway, you know.”

“Not yet,” he replied with spinal-reflex promptness.

“Tom—”

“Not yet,” he repeated even more firmly, then made himself pause for a moment.

“You’re right,” he acknowledged then. “Sooner or later, we’ll have to admit Bolthole exists. In fact, I doubt we’ll be able to hide the funding for it for more than another year or two, max. But I’m not ‘taking the wraps off’ until we’ve produced enough of the new ships and hardware to deter the Manties from a preemptive strike.”

“Preemptive strike?” Pritchart arched both eyebrows at him. “Tom, we can’t even get them to respond to an offer of a formal peace treaty after better than three full T-years of trying! What in the world makes you think they care enough about what’s going on inside the Republic to worry about preemptive strikes?”

“We’ve been over this before, Eloise.” Theisman said, then reminded himself that despite her long Navy association as Giscard’s people’s commissioner and even her own career as a guerilla commander, the President was essentially a civilian by inclination and orientation alike.

“Right this minute,” he went on after a second or so, “the Manties are completely confident that no one poses a significant threat to their naval superiority. Their new missile pods, their new superdreadnoughts, and—especially—their new LACs give them a degree of tactical superiority which would make it suicide for any conventional navy to engage them. Janacek may be an idiot, and he may have brought in other idiots to help him run the Manty Admiralty, but it’s obvious that they recognize their technical advantages. That’s the only possible explanation for their build-down in conventional hulls. They’re actually reducing their fleet to very nearly its prewar size, Eloise. They’d never do that if they weren’t so confident of their tech edge that they figured they could hack extremely heavy numerical odds if they had to.

“But look at what that means. Their entire current strategic stance is built on that edge in technology, and their First Lord of Admiralty is stupid. He’s going to be upset enough if he suddenly discovers Pierre and Saint-Just managed to build a shipyard complex even bigger than the one here in the Haven System without anyone in the Star Kingdom so much as suspecting it. But if he figures out what we’ve had Foraker and her people doing out there for the last couple of T-years, he’s not going to be upset—he’s going to panic.”

“Panic?” Pritchart shook her head. “Tom, this is your area of expertise, not mine. But isn’t ‘panic’ just a little strong? Let’s be honest. You and I both know the Manties kicked our butt up one side and down the other. If Saint-Just hadn’t managed to snooker them into ‘truce talks’, White Haven would have smashed straight through Twelfth Fleet, punched out Capital Fleet, and dictated terms right here on Haven. I was there with Javier and Lester. I know there was nothing we could have done to stop him.”