Mission of Honor

Matthews chuckled, and the protector's grin broadened. Then it slowly faded, and he let his chair come back upright, laying his forearms on his desk and leaning forward over them.

'And in some ways, that's where we are, isn't it?' he asked. 'We've been too closely allied with Manticore for too long, and we've already had personnel involved in active combat with the SLN. If the League decides to hammer the Star Kingdom over something that was clearly the League's fault in the first place, what makes anyone think they'll hesitate to hammer any of the uppity neobarbs' uppity neobarb friends, at the same time? What's one more star system when you're already planning on destroying a multi-system empire, with the largest independent merchant marine in the entire galaxy, just because you can't admit one of your own admirals screwed up by the numbers?'

Matthews looked back at his protector, wishing he could think of an answer to Benjamin's questions.

'So that's where we are,' the protector repeated quietly. 'In the long term, unless we're prepared to become another nice, obedient Frontier Security proxy and go around bashing other 'neobarbs' for the League, I'm sure they'll decide one of their flag officers should have another unfortunate little accident that gets our Navy trashed along with Manticore's before we turn into a threat to them. So all I can see for us to do is the best we can and hope that somewhere, even in the Solarian League, someone's going to be bright enough to see the shipwreck coming and try to avoid it. After all,' Benjamin grinned again, this time without amusement, 'the horse really may learn to sing.'

* * *

'All right, boys and girls,' Commander Michael Carus said. 'It's official. We can go home now.'

'Hallelujah!' Lieutenant Commander Bridget Landry said from her quadrant of his com display. 'Not that it hasn't been fun,' she continued. 'Why I haven't enjoyed myself this much since they fixed that impacted wisdom tooth for me.'

Carus chuckled. The four destroyers of the Royal Manticoran Navy's Destroyer Division 265.2, known as 'the Silver Cepheids,' had been sitting a light-month from Manticore-A for two weeks, doing absolutely nothing. Well, that wasn't exactly fair. They'd been sitting here maintaining a scrupulous sensor watch looking for absolutely nothing, and he was hardly surprised by Landry's reaction.

No, I'm not , he admitted. But somebody had to do it. And when it comes to perimeter security for the entire star system, better safe than sorry any day, even if it does mean somebody has to be bored as hell .

DesDiv 265.2 had been sent to check out what was almost certainly a sensor ghost but which could, just possibly, have been an actual hyper footprint. It was extraordinarily unlikely that anyone would have bothered to make his alpha translation this far out, be his purposes ever so nefarious, since his impeller signature would certainly have been detected long before he could get close enough to the Manticore Binary System to accomplish anything. But Perimeter Security didn't take chances on words like 'unlikely.' When a sensor ghost like this one turned up, it was checked out—quickly and thoroughly. And if the checker-outers didn't find anything immediately upon arrival, they stayed put for the entire two T-weeks SOP required.

Which was precisely what the Silver Cepheids had just finished doing.

'Should I assume, Bridget,' Carus said, 'that you have some pressing reason for wanting to head home at this particular moment?'

'Oh, how could you possibly suspect anything of the sort?' Lieutenant Commander John Pershing asked from the bridge of HMS Raven , and Lieutenant Commander Julie Chase, CO of HMS Lodestone chuckled.

'I take it your senile old skipper is missing something?' Carus said mildly.

'She's got one of those creative archaism thingies,' Chase said.

'That's creative anachronisms , you ignorant lout,' Landry corrected with a frown.

'Are you going off to play dress-up again , Bridget?' Carus demanded.

'Hey, don't you start on me!' she told him with a grin. 'Everyone's got her own hobby—even you. Or was that someone else I saw tying trout flies the other day?'

'At least he eats what he catches,' Chase pointed out. 'Or is it that what catches him eats him?' She frowned, then shrugged. 'Anyway, it's not as silly as all those costumes of yours.'

'Before you go around calling it silly, Julie,' Pershing suggested, 'you might want to reflect on the fact that 'the Salamander' is an honorary member of Bridget's chapter.'

'What?' Chase stared at him from her display. 'You're kidding! Duchess Harrington's part of this silly SCA thing?'

'Well, not really,' Landry said. 'Like John says, it's an honorary membership. One of her uncles is a real big wheel in the Society on Beowulf, and he sponsored her back, oh, I don't know . . . must've been thirty T-years ago. I've actually met her at a couple of meetings though, you know. She took the pistol competition at both of them, as a matter of fact.'

'There you have it,' Carus said simply. 'If it's good enough for the Salamander, it's good enough for anyone. So let's not have anyone abusing Bridget over her hobby anymore, understand? Even if it is a remarkably silly way for an adult human being to spend her time, at least she's being silly in good company. So there.'

Landry stuck out her tongue at him, and he laughed. Then he looked sideways at Lieutenant Linda Petersen, his astrogator aboard HMS Javelin .

'Got that course figured for us, Linda?'

'Yes, Skipper,' Petersen nodded.

'Well, in that case pass it to these other characters,' Carus told her. 'Obviously, we have to get Commander Landry back to Manticore before she turns back into a watermelon, or a pumpkin, or whatever it was.'

* * *

Commodore Karol Шstby leaned back in the comfortable chair, eyes closed, letting the music flow over him. Old Terran opera had been his favorite form of relaxation for as long as he could remember. He'd even learned French, German, and Italian so he could listen to them in their original languages. Of course, he'd always had a pronounced knack for languages; it was part of the Шstby genome, after all.

At this moment, however, he found himself in rather greater need of that relaxation than usual. The seven small ships of his command had been creeping tracelessly about the perimeter of the Manticore Binary System for over a T-month, and that wasn't something calculated to make a man feel comfortable. Whatever those idiots in the SLN might think, Шstby and the Mesan Alignment Navy had the liveliest possible respect for the capabilities of Manty technology. In this case, though, it was the Manties' turn to be outclassed—or, at least, taken by surprise. If Шstby hadn't been one hundred percent confident of that when Oyster Bay was originally planned, he was now. His cautious prowling about the system had confirmed that even the Alignment's assessment of its sensor coverage had fallen badly short of the reality. Any conventional starship would have been detected long ago by the dense, closely integrated, multiply redundant sensor systems he and his personnel had painstakingly plotted. In fact, he was just a little concerned over the possibility that those surveillance systems might still pick up something soon enough to at least blunt Oyster Bay's effectiveness.

Stop that, Karol , he told himself, never opening his eyes. Yes, it could happen, but you know it's not very damned likely. You just need something to worry about, don't you?

His lips twitched in sour amusement as he acknowledged his own perversity, but at the same time, he was aware that his worrier side was one of the things that made him an effective officer. His subordinates probably got tired of all the contingency planning he insisted upon, yet even they had to admit that it made it unlikely they would truly be taken by surprise when Murphy decided to put in his inevitable appearance.

So far, though, that appearance hadn't happened, and Шstby's flagshipChameleon and her consorts were past the riskiest part of their entire mission. Their own reconnaissance platforms were the stealthiest the Alignment could provide after decades of R&D and more capital investment than he liked to think about, and those platforms hadn't transmitted a single byte of information. They'd made their sweeps on ballistic flight profiles, using purely passive sensors, then physically rendezvoused with their motherships to deliver their take.

And, overall, that take had been satisfying, indeed. Passive sensors were less capable than active ones, but the multiple systems each platform mounted compensated for a lot of that. From the numbers of energy sources