“I asked myself those same questions a lot when I was trying to take the system away from the Peeps,” White Haven replied. “The biggest problem is that the terminus and the inner system are close enough to offer each other a degree of mutual support that just isn’t possible at the Manticore end. It’s not the easiest thing in the galaxy for the defense to arrange, you understand, but an attacker going after one objective can never afford to forget about what can come up his backside from the other while he’s doing it. That was bad enough for us when the Peeps held the system. For the Peeps, who can never be absolutely certain that a sizable chunk of Home Fleet isn’t in range for an emergency transit direct from Manticore, it’s even worse.”

“Granted,” MacDonnell agreed. “But if you’re going to attack this system at all, you have to pick one objective.”

“Oh, certainly!” White Haven grinned wryly. “In my case, I chose to concentrate on their fleet, squeezing it to defend the inner system. After all, San Martin was a lot more important to them than the terminus of a wormhole junction they couldn’t use anyway! And they didn’t have anywhere near the terminus fortifications we’ve put into place since we took the system away from them. Even so, I had to be pretty cautious.”

“That’s not exactly the way I heard it, My Lord,” MacDonnell told him with a smile. “I heard that in the end you threw an assault straight through the Junction.”

“Well, yes,” the earl said with a slightly uncomfortable expression. “It was something close to a council of despair, you understand. Esther McQueen was commanding here at the time, and she was a holy terror. Just between you and me, I’ve often thought that she may well have been a better tactician than I was, and she was a devilishly good strategist, as well. She’d forted up here with battleships and superdreadnoughts in a defense in depth, and however I maneuvered, she managed to stay close enough to keep me from having a free hand for either objective. So I settled in to convince her that I was prepared for what amounted to a siege of the inner system, and when I’d convinced her—or, rather, her replacement, after Pierre and Saint-Just pulled her out for Octagon duty—to redeploy to face it, well—”

“So basically, you forced the Peeps to commit to protecting one objective, then hit the other one with a surprise attack,” MacDonnell observed.

“Yes. But I had certain advantages Theisman and his people wouldn’t have in attacking the system. Despite the disadvantages a fleet faces in using a junction as an avenue of attack, the element of surprise tends to offset them to a considerable degree. But Theisman won’t have a friendly fleet sitting at the other end of the terminus. So he can’t really threaten it from two directions at once, the way I did. That would have given Theodosia the opportunity to repeat McQueen’s defensive deployments against him.