“I appreciate that, Tom,” she told him quietly, impressed by his obvious sincerity. “And the fact that I know you feel that way is the exact reason—one of many—I would never dream of replacing you with someone else.”

“It’s my job to advise you on all the reasons not to go to war as well as to figure out how to fight the damned thing if it happens anyway,” he replied. “And while I’m thinking about reasons not to do it, don’t overlook the potential cost to our relations with other star nations.”

“I haven’t overlooked it,” she assured him. “We’ve gone a long way towards recovering from the damage the Parnell Hearings did to our public image in the Solarian League. Their newsies have given full play to our domestic reforms, and I’ve exchanged several very friendly notes with the League’s President. For that matter, we’ve been making ground steadily with our closer neighbors. They’re no more blind to which side has been dragging its feet in our talks with the Star Kingdom than we are, and the fact that we’ve been willing to go on talking—especially since it’s become common knowledge that we have the military potential to pursue other options if we chose to—has worked very strongly in our favor. I don’t have any desire to throw all of that away. But we have got to get these talks off of dead center, and not just because Arnold is making himself such a pain. We have a moral responsibility to the people who want to return to our citizenship. And, for that matter, we have a moral responsibility to the people who don’t want to do that—a responsibility to resolve their uncertainty once and for all.”

“I understand that,” he said. “But the plan that gives us our best chance under Case Red calls for an all-out offensive, Eloise. All-out. We’d hit Trevor’s Star with a sufficiently powerful force to take out Kuzak’s entire fleet. That would account for at least half of their SD(P)s and over a third of their entire CLAC strength. Simultaneously, we’d hit every occupied system in succession with sufficient strength to overwhelm any of their local system pickets and roll them up. At the same time, we’d direct strikes at their more important perimeter bases. In particular, they’ve been very careless with their security arrangements for Grendelsbane. We could hurt them badly there with a much lighter attack force than I’d assumed before we began really studying Case Red. And we’ve been looking at the distinct possibility that we could surprise their Sidemore Station task force, as well. In effect, if our operations succeeded completely, the Manties would be reduced to only their Home Fleet, and they couldn’t commit that to offensive operations without uncovering their home system. Which, in theory at least, would leave them with no option but to negotiate peace on our terms.

“We have the ships and the weapons to do all of that… but our safety margin would be much narrower than anything I’d be comfortable with. And to make it all work, we’d have to hit them before they realized we were coming and redeployed.”