Mission of Honor

brain, and he gave himself a shake.

'Sorry, Pat. Woolgathering, I guess.'

'There's a lot of that going around,' she said with biting irony, then inhaled sharply. 'Sorry,' she said in turn.

'Don't worry about it.' He smiled. 'But now that we're both here, what was it you needed to tell me?'

'Actually, this may be something we need to take to the PM and Her Majesty,' Givens said, her expression and her tone both suddenly much more serious. 'One of my people just brought me something from one of our 'black'—in this case, very black—Beowulf conduits.'

Caparelli stiffened very slightly. Beowulf was, by any measure, Manticore's staunchest ally within the Solarian League. It was also the home system's biggest single trading partner, and a lot of Manticorans had married Beowulfers—and vice versa—over the centuries since the Junction had been discovered. The Harrington family was a case in point. Or, he corrected himself grimly, it had been, at least. When there'd been a Harrington family.

Beowulf was also the only League member system which had been kept routinely up to date on Manticoran military developments. The Beowulf System-Defense Force and the Royal Navy had been quietly in agreement that it would be in both services' best interests if Beowulf didn't suddenly began introducing Manticore's new tech goodies into its own ships, where they might find their way into the SLN's less than pristine hands, and the BSDF had somehow mysteriously failed to provide any of those 'observers' the SLN had been so busily ignoring for so long. But that didn't mean Beowulf didn't have a very good basic grasp of what Manticore had been up to. Not only that, but Beowulf was the only non-Manticoran star system which had been included from the beginning in planning for Case Lacoцn, and there were all sorts of open channels of communication between the Beowulf Planetary Board of Directors and Her Majesty's Government.

Which was all well and good, but one of those little secrets polite people never mentioned was that even allies spied on one another. There were lots of reasons for that, particularly if the allies in question were less than totally confident about their 'ally's' long-term intentions. That wasn't the case here, but another reason—and one which had operated in the case of Beowulf more than once—was because 'spies' could exchange information that couldn't be exchanged openly. The sort of information that, for one reason or another, one government couldn't risk openly handing to another, no matter how friendly they were. And any 'black' Beowulf conduits which reported to Pat Givens and ONI almost certainly came under that heading.

'All right,' he told her. 'I'm braced.'

* * *

'This,' Hamish Alexander-Harrington said, 'is not good.'

It was probably the most unnecessary observation he'd ever made, and he knew it. Still, someone had to break the ice of shocked dismay and get the conversation moving.

His wife glanced at him, her lips moving in a shadow of a smile as she sensed his thoughts, but his brother— seated across the conference table from them—snorted harshly.

'I suppose you could say it comes under that heading,' he said. 'Of course, it's had a lot of company there lately, hasn't it?'

'How much confidence do you have in this source, Admiral Givens?' Elizabeth Winton asked from her place at the head of the table.

'A high level, Your Majesty,' Givens replied, and White Haven noticed that she looked more alive, more engaged, than he'd seen her since what everyone had come to think of as The Attack. 'We haven't used this particular conduit very often. In fact, this is only the third message—aside from a handful of 'is this channel still open?' sort of exchanges—that's been passed through it, and it's been in existence for the better part of seventy T-years. Both of the other messages that came to us this way proved to be completely accurate, which is significant in its own right. More to the point, in my own mind, at least, that's a long time to maintain a back channel 'just in case.' Someone's invested a lot of effort in making sure it stayed open despite any changes in personnel—at either end. Which, to be honest, is the main reason I'm inclined to put so much trust in it now.'

'If the information's as reliable as you believe it is, then I can see why they didn't want to pass it to us openly,' William Alexander said.

'I suppose that technically it does come under the definition of treason against the Solarian League,' Elizabeth agreed.

'That's arguable, Your Majesty,' Sir Anthony Langtry said. The queen looked at him, and he shrugged. 'First, 'treason' is a particularly elusive term as defined—more or less—in the Solarian Constitution. Secondly, if the warning's accurate, someone could make a good case for Rajampet's plans being the real act of treason. He's bending Article Seven into a pretzel if that's what he's using to justify this.'

'Not that anyone's going to call him on it, Tony,' Honor Alexander-Harrington observed, and her soprano voice was almost as shadowed as Patricia Givens' eyes. 'Or, not in time to do us any good, at any rate.'

'I'm afraid that's entirely too likely,' Elizabeth said, smiling at Honor in unhappy agreement.

'So, if we assume the information is accurate, what do we do with it?' Grantville asked.

'That depends in part on how serious the actual military threat is, Willie,' the queen replied, and looked at the first space lord. 'Sir Thomas?'

'In some ways, that's harder to say than I'd like, Your Majesty,' Caparelli told her. 'If the numbers are correct—if they're really talking about throwing four hundred or so of the wall at us—then the initial attack is going to be toast, to use Hamish's favorite term. We've got almost that many wallers of our own, all of which are longer- ranged and far better protected in any missile duel than the wallers Admiral Gold Peak took out at Spindle, and that doesn't even include our system-defense pods. So I'm totally confident of our ability to defeat this force decisively. The only question, to be brutally honest, would be whether or not any of them survived long enough to strike their wedges.'

He paused, looking around the conference table, and his steely confidence was plain to see.

'Unfortunately, a lot depends on what the thinking behind this is, and, frankly, we don't know that. One thing I do know is that if we defeat another Solarian task force—although this one, frankly, is going to be big enough no one's going to be able to get away with calling it anything except a 'fleet,' which is going to present its own problems when it comes around to psychological impact time—it's going to have an enormous influence on Solarian public opinion where we're concerned. As I see it, there are two possible extremes to their potential reactions. First, they could be so horrified by the devastating nature of the SLN's defeats that they could turn completely against any future operations. Possibly even completely enough to present Kolokoltsov and the rest of them with a genuine challenge to their control of the League. Second, though, they could be so horrified and infuriated by the devastating nature of their defeats that they basically give Rajampet a blank check. There's room for all sorts of variations between those two extremes, of course, but I think that's what it really comes down to. And in some ways, unfortunately, I think it's a crapshoot which way they'll jump.'

'Hamish? Honor?' Elizabeth looked at them, eyebrow arched.

Honor glanced at her husband for a moment, then squared her shoulders and faced Elizabeth with Nimitz pressing his cheek into the side of her neck from the back of her chair.

'I think Sir Thomas has it pretty much right, Elizabeth,' she said. 'To be honest, even if the League threw its entire active wall of battle at us in a single wave, we could be fairly confident of defeating it. Throwing in their wallers in dribs and drabs is simply going to make the job even easier from our perspective. The only real worry, in the short term, is the question of our ammunition supply, and judging from what happened at Spindle, I'm pretty sure we've got enough to deal with their entire active superdreadnought strength.

'Unfortunately, if we end up having to do that, it'll make a huge hole in our supply of missiles, which will present all kinds of potential problems if we can't work something out with Haven after all. Which, of course, doesn't even consider what we might need against Manpower.'

Her voice turned harder and flatter on the last word, and the light glittering in her brown eyes for just a moment sent a shiver down Elizabeth Winton's spine. Most of the Star Empire's senior officers and political leaders were careful to emphasize—in public, at least—that they still didn't know exactly who'd attacked the home system. There was no doubt whatsoever in Honor Alexander-Harrington's mind, however.

And there was no doubt in Elizabeth's mind exactly what Honor intended to do about it. It wasn't that