"You really think things are that bad, Sid?" Bergren asked, and the President shrugged.

"No, not really. But we can live with being overly pessimistic, whereas if the CRU did okay it—and if Pierre knew something about it but chose not to tell us—and we assume they didn't, we could talk ourselves into a serious domestic policy error."

"Are you suggesting that we abandon Walters BLS proposals?" George De La Sangliere asked. The portly, white-haired De La Sangliere had succeeded Frankel as secretary of the economy... not without strenuous efforts to decline the "honor." No one in his right mind wanted to take responsibility for the Republic's decrepit fiscal structure, and De La Sangliere's expression was unhappy as he asked the question.

"I don't know, George." Harris sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"I hate to say it, but I don't really think we can," De La Sangliere replied. "Not unless we can cut military spending by at least ten percent."

"Impossible," Dumarest snapped instantly. "Mr. President, you know that's out of the question! We have to maintain our fleet strength at current levels—at least—until we deal with the Manticoran Alliance once and for all."

De La Sangliere frowned without looking at her while he kept his eyes almost pleadingly upon his president, but the hope faded from them at Harris' expression.

"We should have hit them four years ago," Duncan Jessup grunted. The secretary of public information was a stocky, perpetually disheveled man who cultivated the public image of a grumpy but golden-hearted uncle. Public Information was the official government spokesman, its main propaganda pipeline, but it had also wrested the Bureau of Mental Hygiene away from the Ministry of Public Health twenty years before. Jessup employed the Mental Hygiene Police with a cold and ruthless dispatch which sometimes frightened even Harris, and his personal control of the MHP made him the most powerful member of the cabinet, after the President himself.

"We weren't ready," Dumarest protested. "We were overextended digesting our new acquisitions, and—"

"And you got too fucking fancy," Jessup interrupted with a rude snort. "First that screw-up in Basilisk and then the disaster in Yeltsin and Endicott. All we've done is let them build their 'alliance' while our military potential held steady. Are you seriously suggesting we're in a stronger relative position now than we were then?"

"That's enough, Duncan," Harris said quietly. Jessup glowered at him for a moment, then lowered his eyes, and the President went on more calmly than he felt, "The entire cabinet endorsed both operations, and I'll remind all of you that however spectacular those failures were, most of our other operations have succeeded. We may not have prevented the Manticorans from building up their alliance, but we have secured countervailing positions. At the same time, I think we all know the showdown with Manticore is coming." Heads nodded unhappily, and Harris turned his eyes to Fleet Admiral Amos Parnell, CNO of the Peoples' Navy, who sat at Dumarest's elbow. "How do the odds really stack up, Amos?"

"Not as well as I'd like, Sir," Parnell admitted. "The evidence suggests Manticore has a considerably greater technical advantage than anyone thought four years ago. I've personally debriefed the survivors from the Endicott-Yeltsin operation. None of our people were involved in the final action there, and we don't have any hard data to support our analyses of what happened, but it's pretty clear the Manties took out a Saladin-class battle-cruiser with only a heavy cruiser and a destroyer. Of course, the Masadans crewing Saladin were hardly up to our standards in terms of training and experience, but that's still a disturbing indication of our hardware's relative capabilities. On the basis of what happened to Saladin and reports of survivors from the earlier actions, we're estimating that, ton-for-ton, their technical superiority probably gives their units a twenty to thirty percent edge over our own."

"Surely not that much," Jessup objected, and Parnell shrugged.

"My personal gut feeling is that that's conservative, Mr. Secretary. Let's face it, their education and industrial systems are much better than ours, and it's reflected in their R&D establishment."

The admiral allowed his eyes to angle towards Eric Grossman as he spoke, and the secretary of education reddened. The catastrophic consequences of the "democratization of education" in the People's Republic were a sore point between his ministry and the ministries of economics and war alike, and the exchanges between him and Dumarest since the superiority of Manticore's technology had become evident had been acid.

"At any rate," Parnell went on, "Manticore has a definite edge, however pronounced it may actually be. On the other hand, we have something like twice their absolute tonnage, and forty percent of their wall of battle consists of dreadnoughts. RMN dreadnoughts may be bigger than our own, but ninety percent of our wall are superdreadnoughts. Added to that, we've got a lot of combat experience, and their alliance partners don't add much to their actual fighting power."

"Then why are we so worried about them?" Jessup demanded.

"Because of astrography," Parnell replied. "The Manties already had the advantage of the interior position; now they've built up a defense in depth. I doubt it's as deep as they'd like—in fact, it's barely thirty light-years across at Yeltsin—but now that they've closed the gap at Hancock, they've got an entire network of interlocking fortified supply and maintenance bases all along the frontier. That gives them the advantages of forward surveillance, and each of those bases is a potential nexus from which they can raid our supply lines if we advance against them, as well. Their patrols already cover every axis of approach, Mr. Secretary, and it's only going to get worse once the actual shooting starts. We'll have to fight our way through them, taking out the bases in our path as we go to protect our flanks and rear, and that means they're going to have advance notice of our line of attack and be able to deploy their strength to meet us head on."

Jessup grunted and leaned back, lumpy face set in a frown, and Parnell went on levelly.

"At the same time, we've established our own bases to cover theirs, and as the attacker, we'll hold the advantage of the initiative. We'll know when and where we actually intend to strike; they'll have to cover all the points we might choose to attack, and do it with a numerically inferior fleet, to boot. I don't think they can stop us if we commit to an all-out offensive, but they're going to hurt us worse than anyone else has."

"Are you saying we should attack them, or not, then?" Harris asked quietly. Parnell glanced sideways at the secretary of war, who gestured for him to go ahead and answer, and cleared his throat.

"Nothing is ever certain in a military campaign, Mr. President. As I've said, I have serious reservations about the inferiority of our hardware. At the same time, I feel we currently have a decisive quantitative edge, and I suspect the gap in our technical capabilities is only going to get worse. I'll be perfectly honest with you, Sir. I don't want to take Manticore on—not because I think they can defeat us, but because they can weaken us— but if we have to fight, we should probably do it as soon as possible."

"And if we do, how should we go about it?" Jessup asked sharply.

"My staff and I have drawn up plans, under the overall operational code name of 'Perseus,' for several possible approaches. Perseus One envisions the capture of Basilisk as a preliminary in order to allow us to attack Manticore directly via the Manticore Wormhole Junction with simultaneous assaults down the Basilisk-Manticore and Trevor's Star-Manticore lines. It gives us the best chance to attain surprise and win the war in a single blow, but runs the greatest risk of catastrophic losses if we fail.