Mission of Honor

they'd picked up, it appeared the ships the Manties currently had under construction weren't as far along in the building process as intelligence had estimated. If they had been, there'd have been more onboard energy sources already up and running. But at least Шstby now knew exactly where the orbital yards were, and the external energy sources his platforms had picked up indicated that most of them had projects underway. From the numbers of signatures, and they way they clustered, it looked as though more than a few of the yards were at early stages of their construction projects, and he hoped that didn't mean intelligence's estimate of the Manties' construction times was off. It was hard to be certain, given how cautiously he had to operate, but if all those new projects meant the yards in question had finished their older projects ahead of estimate . . . .

And the fact that the Manties seem to be sending all their new construction off to Trevor's Star for working up exercises doesn't help, either , he admitted sourly.

Which was true enough—it didn't help one bit. Still, there was a lot of work going on in those dispersed yards of theirs, and while his estimates on what their space stations were up to were more problematical, he had no doubt there were quite a few ships under construction in those highly capable building slips, as well.

And we know exactly where they are , he reminded himself.

Now it was just a matter of keeping tabs on what their recon platforms had located for them. He'd really have preferred to send the platforms through on another short-range sweep closer to their actual execution date, but his orders were clear on that. It was more important to preserve the element of surprise than it was to monitor every single detail. And it wasn't as if there'd been any effort to conceal the things Шstby and his people were there looking for. People didn't normally try to hide things like orbital shipyards (even if they'd wanted to, Шstby couldn't imagine how someone would go about doing it), nor did they move them around once they were in position. And if anyone did move them,Chameleon and her sisters would be bound to know, given the distant optical watch they were keeping and the fact that the impeller wedge of any tug that started moving shipyards would certainly be powerful enough to be detected by at least one of the watching scout ships.

So all we have to do now is wait , he told himself, listening to the music, listening to the voices. One more T-month until we put the guidance platforms in place .

That was going to be a little risky, he admitted in the privacy of his own thoughts, but only a little. The guidance platforms were even stealthier than his ships. Someone would have to almost literally collide with one of them to spot them, and they'd be positioned well above the system ecliptic, where there was no traffic to do the colliding. He would have been happier if the platforms had been a little smaller—he admitted that to himself, as well—but delivering targeting information to that many individual missiles in a time window as short as the Oyster Bay ops plan demanded required a prodigious amount of bandwidth. And, despite everything, it was highly likely the Manties were going to hear something when they started transmitting all that data.

Not that it was going to make any difference at that late date, he reflected with grim pleasure. Everything he and his squadron had done for the last three and a half T-months all came down to that transmission's handful of seconds . . . and once it was made, nothing could save the Star Empire of Manticore.

Chapter Four

'Have you got a copy of that memo from Admiral Cheng?' Captain Daud ibn Mamoun al-Fanudahi asked, poking his head into Captain Irene Teague's office.

'Which memo?' Teague rolled her eyes in an expression she wouldn't have let any other Battle Fleet officer see. In fact, she wouldn't have let al-Fanudahi see it as recently as a month or so ago. Displaying contempt—or, at the very least, disrespect—for a flag officer was always risky, but even more so when the officer doing the displaying was from Frontier Fleet and the object of the display was from Battle Fleet. And especially when the flag officer in question was the Frontier Fleet officer in question's CO.

Unfortunately, Irene Teague had c concluded that al-Fanudahi had been right all along in his belief the 'preposterous reports' of the Royal Manticoran Navy's 'super weapons' weren't quite so preposterous after all. A point which, in her opinion, had been abundantly proved by what had happened to Josef Byng at New Tuscany. And a point which apparently continued to elude Cheng Hai-shwun, the commanding officer of the Office of Operational Analysis, to which she and al-Fanudahi happened to be assigned.

'The one about that briefing next week,' al-Fanudahi said. 'The one for Kingsford and Thimбr.'

'Oh.'

Teague frowned, trying to remember which of her voluminous correspondence folders she'd stuffed that particular memo into. Half the crap she filed hadn't even been opened, much less read. No one could possibly keep track of all of the memos, letters, conference reports, requests, and just plain garbage floating around the Navy Building and its annexes. Not that the originators of all that verbiage felt any compulsion to acknowledge that point. The real reason for most of it was simply to cover their own posteriors, after all, and the excuse that there simply weren't enough hours in the day to read all of it cut no ice when they produced their file copy and waved it under one's nose.

She tapped a command, checking an index. Then shrugged, tapped another, and snorted.

'Yeah. Here it is.' She looked up. 'You need a copy?'

'Bang one over to my terminal,' al-Fanudahi replied with a slightly sheepish grin. 'I don't have a clue where I filed my copy. But what I really needed was to see if Polydorou or one of his reps is supposed to be there.'

'Just a sec.' Teague skimmed the memo, then shrugged. 'No mention of it, if they are.'

'I didn't remember one.' Al-Fanudahi grimaced. 'Not exactly a good sign, wouldn't you say?'

'Probably not,' Teague agreed, after a moment. 'On the other hand, maybe it is a good thing. At least this way if they listen to you at all, he'll have less warning to start covering his arse before someone starts asking him some pointed questions.'

'And just how likely do you really think that is?'

'Not very,' she admitted.

If Cheng had so far failed to grasp the nature of the sausage machine into which the SLN was about to poke its fingers, Admiral Martinos Polydorou, the commanding officer of Systems Development was in active denial. The SysDev CO had been one of the masterminds behind the 'Fleet 2000' initiative, and he was even more convinced of the inevitability of Solarian technological superiority than the majority of his fellow officers.

In theory, it was SysDev's responsibility to continually push the parameters, to search constantly for improved technologies and applications. Of course, in theory, it was also OpAn's responsibility to analyze and interpret operational data which might identify potential threats. Given that al-Fanudahi's career had been stalled for decades mostly because he'd tried to do exactly that, it probably wasn't surprising Polydorou's subordinates were unlikely to disagree with him. After all, Teague was one of the very few OpAn analysts who'd come to share al-Fanudahi's concerns . . . and he'd specifically instructed her to keep her mouth shut about that minor fact.

'There might be a better chance of getting some of those questions asked if you'd let me sign off on your report, Daud,' she pointed out now.

'Not enough better to risk burning your credibility right alongside mine.' He shook his head. 'No. It's not time for you to come out into the open yet, Irene.'

'But, Daud—'

'No,' he interrupted her with another headshake. 'There's not really anything new in Sigbee's dispatches. Aside from the confirmation their missiles have a range from rest of at least twenty-nine million kilometers, at any rate, and that'd already been confirmed at Monica, if anyone'd been interested in looking at the reports.' He shrugged. 'Someone's got to keep telling them about it, but they're not going to believe it, no matter what we say, until one of our units gets hammered in a way that's impossible even for someone like Cheng or Polydorou to deny. Everybody's got too much of the 'not invented here' syndrome. And they don't want to hear from anyone who disagrees with them.'

'But it's only a matter of time before they find out you've been right all along,' she argued.

'Maybe. And when that happens, do you think they're going to like having been proved wrong? What usually happens to someone like me—someone who's insisted on telling them the sky is