Mission of Honor

else had systematically ignored, as well, and her own sense of anxiety had grown steadily sharper in the process. The number of other reports which had apparently been creatively misfiled—and they'd discovered and managed to hunt down—had only made things even worse.

Then had come news of the Battle of Spindle. Despite all her own concerns, despite al-Fanudahi's most pessimistic projections, the two of them had been shocked by the totality of the Manticoran victory. Not even they had anticipated that an entire fleet of superdreadnoughts could be casually defeated by a force whose heaviest unit was only a battlecruiser. That was like . . . like having a professional prizefighter dropped by a single punch from her own eight-year-old daughter, for God's sake!

But if the two of them had been shocked, the rest of the Navy had been stunned. The sheer impossibility of what had happened was literally too much for the Navy's officer corps to process.

The first reaction had been simple denial. It couldn't have happened, therefore, it hadn't happened. There had to be some mistake. Whatever the initial news reports might have seemed to indicate, the Manties had to have had a task force of their own ships-of-the-wall present!

Unfortunately for that line of logic (if it could be dignified by that description), the Manties appeared to have anticipated such a response. They'd sent Admiral O'Cleary herself home along with their diplomatic note, and they'd allowed her to bring along tactical recordings of the engagement.

At the moment, O'Cleary was a pariah, tainted with the same contamination as Evelyn Sigbee. Unlike Sigbee, of course, O'Cleary was home on Old Earth, where she could have her disgrace rubbed firmly in her face, and even though she was Battle Fleet, not Frontier Fleet, Teague found herself feeling a powerful sense of sympathy for the older woman. It was hardly O'Cleary's fault she'd found herself under the orders of a certifiable moron and then been left to do the surrendering after Crandall sailed her entire task force straight into the jaws of catastrophe.

Despite the convenience of the scapegoat O'Cleary offered, however, there was no getting around the preposterous acceleration numbers of the Manty missiles which had ravaged TF 496. The reports which had confidently been dismissed as ridiculous turned out to have been firmly based in fact, exactly as al-Fanudahi had been warning his superiors. Indeed, they'd actually understated the threat by a significant margin, and as fresh proof of the fundamental unfairness of the universe, Admiral Cheng had seized upon Al- Fanudahi's original estimates, based on the lower acceleration and accuracy numbers in the original reports, and sharply reprimanded him for not having 'fully appreciated the scope of the threat' in the analyses Cheng had then proceeded to ignore.

Nonetheless, the fact that al-Fanudahi had been right all along couldn't be completely ignored. Not any longer. And so the despised prophet of doom and gloom had suddenly found himself presenting briefings flag officers actually listened to. Not only that, but the Office of Operational Analysis was finally being asked to do what it should have been doing all along. Of course, its efforts were a little handicapped by the fact that it had been systematically starved of funds for so long and that ninety percent of its efforts had gone into feel-good analyses of Battle Fleet's simulations and fleet problems instead of learning to actually think about possible external threats to the League. Of which, after all, there had been none. Which meant, preposterous and pathetic though it undoubtedly was, that the only two people it had who were actually familiar with those threats happened to be in Teague's office at that very moment.

To be fair, at least some of their colleagues were immersed in crash efforts to familiarize themselves with the same data, but most of them were still running about like beheaded chickens. They simply didn't know where to look —not yet—and Teague felt grimly confident that they wouldn't figure it out in time to avoid an entire succession of disasters.

Not, at least, if the idiots in charge of the Navy didn't start actually paying attention— really paying attention, as in processing the information, not simply ackowleding it—to al-Fanudhi. Which, even now, they seemed remarkably disinclined to do.

If there'd truly been such a thing as justice, Cheng Hai-shwun and Admiral Karl-Heinz Thimбr would have been out of uniform and begging for handouts on a corner somewhere, Teague thought bitterly. In fact, if there'd been any such thing as real justice, they'd have been in prison! Unfortunately, both of them were far too well connected. In fact, it seemed unlikely either of them would even be relieved of his present assignment, despite the catastrophic intelligence failure represented by the Battle of Spindle. And, given the fact that al-Fanudahi had been the bearer of uniformly bad tidings in the briefings people were finally listening to, Teague had an unpleasant feeling that she knew exactly who would end up scapegoated to save Cheng and Thimбr's well protected posteriors.

For the moment, though, people had finally been at least listening to what al-Fanudahi had been trying to tell them all along, which was why his present mixture of anger and despair was so frightening to her.

'Ready to talk about it now?' she asked gently after a moment.

'I suppose so,' he replied. He took one more sip, then lowered the cup into his lap and looked at her.

'What have they done this time?' she prompted.

'It isn't so much what they've done as what they're getting ready to talk themselves into doing ,' he said, and shook his head. 'They've decided that what's happened to the Manties offers them the perfect opening, and I think they're getting ready to take advantage of it.'

'What?' Teague's tone was that of a woman who felt pretty sure she'd misheard something, and he snorted in harsh amusement.

'I've just come from a meeting with Kingsford, Jennings, and Bernard,' he told her. 'They're working on a brainstorm of Rajampet's.'

Teague's stomach muscles tightened. Admiral Willis Jennings was Seth Kingsford's chief of staff, and Fleet Admiral Evangeline Bernard was the commanding officer of the Office of Strategy and Planning. Under most circumstances, the notion of the commanding officer of Battle Fleet meeting with his chief of staff and the Navy's chief strategic planner to consider the implications of combat reports might have been considered a good thing. Under the present circumstances, and given al-Fanudahi's near despair, she suspected that hadn't been the case this time around. Maybe it was his use of the word 'brainstorm,' she thought mordantly.

'What sort of brainstorm?' she asked out loud.

'As Rajampet sees it, what just happened to the Manties' home system offers what he calls a 'strategic window of opportunity'. He wants to mount an immediate operation to take advantage of the opening, and he proposes to use Admiral Filareta for the purpose.'

'Filareta?' Teague repeated a bit blankly, and al-Fanudahi shrugged.

'He's Battle Fleet, so you probably don't know him. Trust me, you're not missing much. He's smarter than Crandall was. In fact, I'm willing to bet his IQ is at least equal to his shoe size. Aside from that, his only recommendation for command is that he has a pulse.'

It was a mark of just how much he'd come to trust her—and vice-versa—she reflected, that he dared to show open contempt for such a monumentally senior officer in front of her.

'What makes Admiral Rajampet think this Filareta's in a position to do anything?'

'For some reason known only to God and, possibly, Admiral Kingsford, Filareta is swanning around in the Shell, half way to Manticore, with a force even bigger than Crandall's was.'

She looked at him sharply, and he looked back with a carefully expressionless face.

'And just what is this Admiral Filareta doing out in the Shell?' she asked.

'By the oddest coincidence, he, too, is conducting a training exercise.' Al-Fanudahi smiled without any humor at all. 'You might be interested to know—I checked myself, out of idle curiosity, you understand—that in the last thirty T-years Battle Fleet has conducted only three exercises which deployed more than fifty of the wall as far out as the Shell. But this year, for some reason, Crandall was authorized to conduct her training exercise in the Madras Sector and Fleet Admiral Massimo Filareta was simultaneously authorized to conduct 'wargames' in the Tasmania Sector. And, unlike Crandall, Filareta's exercise constitutes—and I quote—'a major fleet exercise'. Which is how he comes to be parked out in Tasmania with three hundred wallers, plus screen. Rajampet wants to reinforce him with another seventy or eighty of the wall which 'just happen' to have been deployed to various sector bases within a couple of weeks' hyper time from Tasmania, then send him off to attack Manticore directly.'

'What? '