Galactic Sapper wrote:NortonIDaughter wrote:As you say, she's seen regime changes on Haven before-- one of the major drivers in SVW and FoD was that the Libs et al wanted to believe that the Pierre Coup could be a change for good that ended the war (ha!). And through them all, the Peeps had remained a vicious threat.
Which is why I think she was negligent as hell for not sending a treecat to Haven after the Theisman Coup. I cannot think of a single thing more important than knowing whether these were more leopards with the same spots, or tigers of a different stripe.
A point to consider: immediately after the Theisman coup, Elizabeth could not know how stable Pritchard's government would be. Haven had seen two successful coups and at least two failed coups in ten years. Regardless of how genuine Theisman and Pritchard were personally, Elizabeth had to keep in mind that they might not be in power by the time a treaty was worked out.
It obviously didn't stop her from negotiating at all, but at that point she needed a treaty that even a possibly-belligerent government formed by a new coup would also find acceptable. Later on, as the stability of the new-old constitution and government became apparent - maybe the six months before Thunderbolt - then maybe Elizabeth could have risked negotiating around the High Ridge government and sent a treecat with the negotiator.
Also remember that treecats were just starting to use sign language a few months prior to thunderbolt. Even though a treecat could have read people as well as they could ever do, their ability to communicate their insights into a person's personality was lacking
There are all kinds of reasons for Eloise not to have personally negotiated with or sent a special envoy, outside the High Ridge negotiators, to Haven. Part of it is constitutional, since she would have been stepping on a Parliamentary prerogative to do anything of the sort without the approval and support of the current government (which was High Ridge's). Part of it is that fact that she hated and distrusted all Peeps, and with damned good cause. Part of it was that as has been pointed out she had no idea if the Theisman-Pritchart government was ultimately going to stand or fall. Part of it was that the (accurate) rumors that Theisman had simply shot Saint-Just out of hand without even a pretense of due process left his escutcheon just a tad tarnished in her eyes . . . and suggested that he
wasn't all that different from Saint-Just (and, of course, it was well known that Pritchart had been a leading terrorist, assassin, and murderer before the Pierre Coup and then served the SS as a political commissar).
My point here is that it would never have occurred to her to send a treecat-augmented "fact-finding mission" to Nouveau Paris for a whole bunch of reasons, including the fact that right up until the very verge of Operation Thunderbolt, the treecats wouldn't have been able to communicate very much except "we like these guys" about what they were picking up.
That, however, is secondary — if not tertiary — to the fact that all the evidence she possessed told her
that there was no significant difference between the Theisman-Pritchart regime and the Pierre-Saint-Just regime. Both had come to power in a violent coup, both of them had ruthlessly eliminated the group previously in power, one of them was a self-confessed terrorist/assassin, and they were currently involved in a four-way (or more) civil war, so it wasn't at all clear for quite a while that they were even going to survive.
Frankly, it didn't
matter who they were or how they might differ from the preceding regime(s). I mean, literally, it
did not matter, for a bunch of reasons. One was that the Havenite navy was totally out-classed against the RMN. There was
no way that any Havenite admiral was going to be stupid enough to go up against the Royal Manticoran Navy when Haven didn't even have podnoughts yet, much less the MDMs to put aboard them, and according to all of her intelligence agencies, that was the case. I mentioned that she had a little of the Manticoran hubris herself, but that's another way of saying that she was guided by the expert analysis of all of her intelligence agencies. And what they were telling her was that Haven had been totally defeated (militarily), whether or not Nouveau Paris had been occupied, and that — judging from the self-evident capabilities of the ships actually engaged in their civil war (bearing in mind that Theisman was deliberately concealing the existence of the SD(P)s being built at Bolthole) — there was no prospect whatsoever of Haven being able to successfully resume hostilities. That's why she was so focused on the domestic front.
From Manticore's perspective, at least until the existence of Havenite SD(P)s became known, what happened in Nouveau Paris and the rest of the former People's Republic's territory was up to the Peeps. It wasn't even on Manticore's radar at that point, and wouldn't be until it was clear that someone was going to win. That was the whole basis of Descroix's delaying tactic of "waiting until the situation stabilizes," and that tactic was effective because when she first began deploying it, it was totally apropos. Eloise and Tom's personal character really became relevant only after it was clear that the Theisman coup (unlike the Levelers and two or three other abortive attempts against the Committee) was going to stand. And even then, until they demonstrated that they had podnoughts of their own, there was no way that they represented any realistic threat to the Star Kingdom's interests or citizens.
From our perspective outside, looking in, and having lived behind Eloise's and Tom's eyes while they were fighting to redeem the Republic of the Péricard constitution,
of course Elizabeth needed to send Honor to discover that, under the skin, she and Eloise were soul sisters. From my perspective as the author, that would have sort of tended to short-circuit the story line, but from the perspective of people living in the Honorverse, that would have been a far better outcome than Thunderbolt, the Battle of Manticore, and all of the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed. The thing is that it was not at all evident to people living inside the Honorverse, without that omniscient narrator perspective, and that Elizabeth's actions — and responsibilities — can be judged only on the basis of what
Elizabeth knew and on her judgment as quite possibly the most experienced wartime head of state in the entire human-explored galaxy.
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And in response to why Eloise made the call for Operation Beatrice rather than simply telling Manticore "we surrender," I thought I had made the logic fairly clear in the book, although I may not have.
Haven's problem was that Manticore had just demonstrated the existence of Apollo (although Haven still didn't know all of its capabilities); Haven's attempt to arrange a summit to negotiate peace had failed (and been vehemently rejected by Elizabeth); it was obvious to Theisman and Pritchart that Elizabeth had decided there was no difference between them and the team of Pierre and Saint-Just; and if Apollo was put into full production and deployment, Haven's military position was hopeless.
The one point that I didn't mention in that paragraph is that the restored Republic
was still incredibly fragile. Eloise believed that an abject surrender to Manticore would fatally undercut the legitimacy of her new government in the eyes of the Havenite electorate. That was also the reason that she couldn't simply tell Elizabeth "Hey, Arnie Giancola forged the diplomatic correspondence he showed us! Can we talk?" because the evidence that the ranking member of her Cabinet (remember, he was her legal successor under the Constitution if she died in office) had been guilty of treason would also have seriously undermined her administration's legitimacy, and that (by process of extension) would have undermined — indeed, probably fatally wounded — the Péricard Constitution she had fought for
decades to restore.
That was the context against which she had to make the go/no go decision on Operation Beatrice, and
at that time her intelligence people (who had been doing a pretty damned good job so far) did not believe Apollo was in general deployment. (In fact, they were pretty much right; it
wasn't in general deployment, just
closer to that than they had estimated.) So according to everything she knew, there was still a very brief window in which the operational and tactical balance of power would still be very close to even on a ship-for-ship basis . . . and the Republic had a definite edge in tonnage and total podnoughts.
If the Republic surrendered, or if the Haven System was militarily conquered, the odds favored the collapse of the restored constitution and Republic and the high probability that something
at least as bad as the Committee of Public Safety would emerge to replace it.
If Operation Beatrice succeeded, Haven could extend the most generous terms imaginable to
Manticore, and thereby
prove that the restored Republic was
not the People's Republic of Haven. And doing that, would give her administration, and by extension her entire government
and above all the Constitution a degree of legitimacy that virtually no other outcome could have afforded.
This was a woman who had dedicated her entire life to restoring the Republic and who had seen the man she loved die in that Republic's defense. The restoration of the Péricard constitution was her memorial to her raped and murdered sister and every other human being who had been casually destroyed by the Legislaturalists and State Security. It was the vindication of all the friends she had sacrificed and lost in her long fight, and it was the justification for all the blood she had personally shed.
She was prepared to do
whatever it took to honor her oath to "protect and defend" the Constitution of the Republic of Haven and the Republic itself "against all enemies, foreign and
domestic."
So she did.
As it turned out, the discovery of the Mesan Alignment and the Manties' face-off with the Solarian League, gave Eloise a trump card which probably far exceeded the value of winning the Battle of Manticore, both domestically and — most assuredly — in interstellar terms. Unfortunately, no one in-universe could have seen that coming, and so she launched Operation Beatrice not because she wanted to, and not because she thought it was a good option, but because she thought it was the
at least bad of the options available to her.
