But the war, Giscard thought, would start even sooner than that. In approximately ninety-eight minutes, assuming Admiral Evans met his ops schedule at Tequila the way Giscard expected him to.

The admiral laid out his own thoughts before his mind’s eye and tried to decide—again—what he truly felt.

Wary, he thought. And yet, if he was honest, confident, as well. No one in the history of interstellar warfare had ever attempted to coordinate a campaign on such a scale. The operational plan Theisman and the Naval Staff had worked out included literally dozens of minutely coordinated operations. The timing was tight, yet they had avoided situations in which it was truly critical. There was plenty of room for slippage, for schedules to be readjusted on the fly. And the strategic audacity at its core was almost literally breathtaking for an officer who had survived the desperate, uncoordinated defensive efforts of the People’s Navy following the Legislaturalist purges.

Dozens of operations, each with its own objectives, its own place in the overall strategy. And each—even Giscard’s own attack on Trevor’s Star—independent of one another. Any one, or two, or even three, of them could fail completely without spelling the defeat of Operation Thunderbolt as a whole. To be sure, the destruction of Third Fleet at Trevor’s Star was the most important single objective, but even if Giscard failed there, the other operations would inflict a defeat upon the Star Kingdom which would utterly surpass even the one Esther McQueen had delivered in Operation Icarus.

The objective of Thunderbolt, Giscard knew, was to convince the Manties that they must negotiate in good faith and compel them to begin the process. Eloise had no ambitions beyond that point, as she had made crystal clear in her address to the Congress. But much as Giscard loved her, he wasn’t blind to the blind spots in her own judgment. By and large, they were so minor, especially compared to her strengths, as to be completely negligible. But sometimes… sometimes her faith in the rationality of others betrayed her.

It seemed so obvious to her that all the Republic wanted was to be treated fairly, for the Star Kingdom to negotiate in good faith, that some essential part of her couldn’t quite believe anyone else could fail to see that. She didn’t want to conquer the Star Kingdom. She didn’t want to reconquer Trevor’s Star. All she wanted was for the Star Kingdom to talk to her. To once and for all negotiate an end to this ugly, festering, endless conflict. And so, because that was all she wanted and because it was so obvious to her that it was all she could want, she truly believed that the Manties would recognize both the justice of her demands and the realities of their hopelessly weakened position and allow her to achieve the equitable diplomatic solution she craved.

But Javier Giscard, as both the lover who knew her better than anyone else in the galaxy and as the senior field commander of her Navy, suspected she was wrong. Not in what she wanted, but in how likely she was to get it. Even if the High Ridge Government fell, no Manticoran successor government was going to simply roll over and quit—not without additional proof of how Thunderbolt had crippled them. Nor were the Manties likely to believe that peace was truly all she wanted. Especially not if Thunderbolt secured the level of advantage Giscard expected it to. The Star Kingdom would have no choice but to expect the opportunities Thunderbolt would offer to tempt the Republic into exploiting them. Into imposing a peace on its own terms, not negotiating for one equitable to both sides. And just as Eloise had been unwilling to accept such an imposition for the Republic, so any new Manty government would be unwilling to accept one for the Star Kingdom. Which meant the war that Eloise hoped would be both begun and ended with a single campaign wouldn’t be.