House of Steel The Honorverse Companion - By David Weber Page 0,68

an assault through the Junction, especially with only one terminus in their possession. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to guarantee they won’t be lunatics about it, and as I’ve said more than once before, even a failed Junction assault on their part would result in a state of war between us, anyway. We won’t have any choice but to upgrade and strengthen the Junction forts if we lose Trevor’s Star, either, which won’t help our naval budgets one bit. And that doesn’t even consider the consequences for trade patterns or the implications for morale. Losing Trevor’s Star would have to have a depressing effect on our people’s psychology. By the same token, it would have to pump up domestic support for the Peeps. Not only would San Martin be the wealthiest single planet they’ve managed to pick off yet, but it would give them a claim—potentially, at least—on San Martin’s share of the Junction transit fees under the Treaty of 1590. And if we don’t let them cash in on the treaty, they can always withdraw from it and charge whatever damned fees they want. That would be a shot in the arm for their economy . . . and one that would only make them even hungrier to grab off the mother lode for themselves. It would also give us the choice between accepting whatever fee schedule they set or trying to do something about it by force, which would simply get us into that war we’re all trying so hard to postpone. You know their propagandists would use the fact that they’d gotten away with punching out Trevor’s Star as another way to suggest to their domestic news market that we’re not willing to face them militarily, despite all our ‘posturing’ and ‘unilateral hostility towards the peaceloving citizens of the People’s Republic.’ And if they got away with jacking up the terminus fees, they’d just use our restraint as another example of how frightened of them we are.’”

“Of course they would.” Adcock’s grimace was as sour as Roger’s had been . . . and owed equally little to his beverage of choice. “And I’m sure they’d find all sorts of ways to use their possession of Trevor’s Star and our proximity to it, thanks to the Junction, to stage-manage tensions—and incidents—between us and them for their advantage whenever they felt like it.”

“Exactly.” Roger took another sip of whiskey and shook his head. “Like I say, I don’t want to fight them right now, but I’m a lot more willing to do that than to give up Trevor’s Star. Of course, if this visit with Ramirez works out next month, we may be able to have our cake and eat it too.”

“And if pigs had wings they’d be pigeons, Roger.” It was Jonas’ turn to shake his head. “You’re not going to convert the Legislaturalists into pacifists just by standing up beside San Martin.”

“No, but I genuinely believe from everything we’re hearing out of ONI and the SIS that we’d at least cause them to rethink, and probably rethink hard. Big Sky’s gotten better penetration than I think a lot of people realize. We don’t have anyone actually inside the Octagon, but we’ve managed to recruit or place agents a lot more broadly at lower levels, and we’ve gotten a better look inside their hardware than I ever expected.”

Roger sipped whiskey again, then shrugged.

“He’s going to shoot a copy of our latest tech analysis over to you—top-secret, burn-before-reading, of course—and I think you’ll find it interesting. Unless it’s a really clever example of disinformation, we’ve opened an even bigger edge in conventional weapons systems—especially ECM and our missile targeting systems—than we’d realized. It looks like our current-generation laser head grav lensing’s a lot better than theirs than we’d thought, too. They’re basically using the straight Astral design, without any upgrades, and I know Rodriguez has routed Section Thirteen’s latest throughput numbers to Gram. Our capital missile laser heads are almost twice as powerful as their current-generation hardware, assuming these numbers are good. And they’re nowhere near deploying a cruiser or destroyer grade version, whereas we—”

He shrugged, and Jonas nodded in understanding. Gram’s researchers had played a not insignificant role in pointing Section Thirteen at the component miniaturization which had permitted BuWeaps to engineer the newest laser heads down to something that would fit a missile body which could be launched from light units’ tubes. And carried in sufficient numbers to be useful, he reminded himself. One disadvantage of the RMN’s increasing