“I’m fully aware of that possibility,” Pritchart assured him. “I don’t think the situation is likely to get out of hand—not quickly, anyway. There’s too much inertia on the other side. But it’s possible I’m wrong about that. Which is the real reason I commed you.”

She held his eyes for perhaps three heartbeats, then asked the question.

“How are your war plans coming?”

“I was afraid you were going to ask that.” He sighed.

“I wouldn’t if I had a choice.”

“I know. I know.” He drew a deep breath. “Actually,” he admitted, “they’re coming along better—if that isn’t an obscene word to use, under the circumstances—than I’d anticipated.”

“Oh?”

“The more we’ve looked at it, the more evident it’s become that Case Red is our best option. I don’t like that, in some ways, because of the mindset it engenders in my planners. And in myself, if I’m going to be honest.” He frowned. “I’m happier thinking in offensive terms, of making an enemy respond to my actions, and I worry sometimes that it predisposes me towards the most aggressive solution to a problem.”

“I don’t think anyone who knows you is ever going to confuse you with a bloodthirsty maniac, Tom,” Pritchart told him.

“As long as I don’t do it myself,” he replied wryly. She snorted, and he shrugged.

“With that said, though, I really believe our best chance would be an early, powerful offensive. It would give us our best opportunity to recover the occupied systems and to neutralize their ability to do anything about it, at least in the short term. Hopefully, that would provide a breather, during which diplomacy might actually accomplish something. And if that doesn’t happen, at least we’d be as advantageously placed as possible if we’re forced to fight it out to the end after all.

“How close are we to being ready to do that if we have to?”

He regarded her expressionlessly for several seconds.

“That depends,” he said finally. “In the narrow technical sense, we could launch the operation tomorrow. And assuming our assumptions are valid and that the Manties didn’t do anything drastic to change the operational parameters before we actually kicked off, I’d say we’d have at least a seventy or eighty percent chance of pulling it off.”

“That good?” Pritchart sounded surprised, and he frowned.

“Let me point out that that’s just another way of saying I estimate that even if all our assumptions are sound, there’s still a twenty or thirty percent chance of getting our asses kicked.”

“Hardly the resounding confidence of a committed militarist,” the President observed with an almost-chuckle.

“If you wanted a committed militarist, you should have fired me,” Theisman told her. “In my considered opinion anybody who actually wants to go to war is a lunatic, and that’s especially true when we’ve just managed to somehow stave off complete military defeat as recently as four or five T-years ago. Eloise, I have to encourage aggressive thinking in my planners if I’m going to have any realistic prospect of winning a war with the Manties and their allies. But the truth is that even if we win, our problems won’t be over unless we’re willing to try to conquer the Star Kingdom outright. And even if we hurt them as badly in the opening stages as I think we could, any actual conquest is going to be bloody, expensive, and very, very ugly… while any sort of occupation on the old Legislaturalist model would be a whole lot uglier than that. Not to mention completely unworkable in the long run. I really cannot over emphasize my opposition to resuming active military operations if there’s any possible alternative.”