"And you think they wouldn't still be able to kill a lot of our ships and a lot of our spacers?" Wodoslawski demanded skeptically.

"Oh, they could hurt us," Rajampet conceded. "There's no way in the universe they could stop us, but I don't doubt we'd get hurt worse than the Navy's ever been hurt before. But that's beside the point, Agatб."

Her eyebrows arched skeptically, and he barked a short, sharp—and ugly—laugh.

"Of course it's beside the point!" he said. "The point of this is that a jumped up neobarb Navy's opened fire on the SLN, destroyed one of our warships, and captured an entire Solarian task group. We can't let that stand. No matter what it costs, we have to establish that no one—no one —fucks with the Solarian Navy. If we don't make that point right here, right now, who else is likely to suddenly decide he can issue ultimatums to the fleet?" He turned his glower on MacArtney. "You should understand that if anyone can Nathan!"

"All right," MacArtney replied, manifestly unhappily. "I take your point." He looked around the conference table at his civilian colleagues. "The truth is," he told them, "that big as it is, Frontier Fleet can't possibly be everywhere it needs to be—not in any sort of strength. It manages to maintain nodes of concentrated strength at the various sector HQs and support bases, but even they get stretched pretty thin from time to time. And most of the time, we send a single ship—at most a division or two—to deal with troublespots as they turn hot because we can't afford to weaken those concentrated nodes by diverting more units from them. And what Rajani's saying is that because we're spread so thinly, there are a lot of times when we don't actually have the firepower on the spot to enforce our policies. But what we do have on the spot is a representative of the entire Navy. Under the wrong circumstances, an unfriendly power may well have enough combat power to destroy whatever detachment we've sent out to show it the error of its ways. But they don't, because they know that if they do, the rest of the Navy—however much of it it takes—is going to turn up and destroy them ."