Mission of Honor

had also loomed as a major factor in her designers' minds, since the Ghosts were going to be deployed on long-endurance missions, but the architects had accepted some significant compromises even in that regard in favor of knitting the most effective possible cloak of invisibility.

Unlike the starships of most navies, the MAN's scouts hadn't settled for simple smart paint. Other ships could control and reconfigure their 'paint' at will, transforming their hulls—or portions of those hulls—into whatever they needed at any given moment, from nearly perfectly reflective surfaces to black bodies. The Ghosts ' capabilities, however, went much further than that. Instead of the relatively simpleminded nanotech of most ships' 'paint,' the surface of Apparition 's hull was capable of mimicking effectively any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Her passive sensors detected any incoming radiation, from infrared through cosmic rays, and her computers mapped the data onto her hull, where her extraordinarily capable nannies reproduced it. In effect, anyone looking at Apparition when her stealth was fully engaged would 'see' whatever the sensors exactly opposite his viewpoint 'saw,' as if the entire ship were a single sheet of crystoplast.

That was the theory, at least, and in this case, what theory predicted and reality achieved were remarkably close together.

It wasn't perfect, of course. The system's greatest weakness was that it couldn't give complete coverage. Like any stealth system, it still had to deal with things like waste heat, for example. Current technology could recapture and use an enormous percentage of that heat, but not all of it, and what they couldn't capture still had to go somewhere. And, like other navies' stealth systems, the MAN's dealt with that by radiating that heat away from known enemy sensors. Modern stealth fields could do a lot to minimize even heat signatures, but nothing could completely eliminate them, and stealth fields themselves were detectable at extremely short ranges, so any ship remained vulnerable to detection by a sufficiently sensitive sensor on exactly the right (or wrong) bearing.

In this instance, though, they knew right where the Graysons were. That meant they could adjust for maximum stealthiness against that particular threat bearing, and as part of his training, Sung had personally tried to detect a Ghost with the MAN's very best passive sensors. Even knowing exactly where the ship was, it had been all but impossible to pick her out of the background radiation of space, so he wasn't unduly concerned that Bogey Two would detect Apparition with shipboard systems as long as she remained completely covert. He was less confident that the spider drive would pass unnoticed at such an absurdly short range, however. Chernevsky's people assured him it was exceedingly unlikely—that it had taken them the better part of two T-years to develop their own detectors, even knowing what they were looking for, and that those detectors were still far from anything anyone would ever call reliable—but Sung had no desire to be the one who proved their optimism had been misplaced. Even the Spider had a footprint, after all, even if it wasn't something anyone else would have associated with a drive system. All it would take was for someone to notice an anomalous reading and be conscientious enough—or, for that matter, bored enough—to spend a little time trying to figure out what it was.

And the fact that the Spider's signature flares as it comes up only makes that more likely , he reflected. The odds against anyone spotting it would still be enormous, but even so, they'd be a hell of a lot worse than the chance of anyone aboard Bogey Two noticing us if we just keep quietly coasting along .

At the same time, he knew exactly why Tsau had asked his question. However difficult a sensor target they might be for Bogey Two's shipboard systems, the rules would change abruptly if the Grayson cruiser decided to deploy her own recon platforms. If she were to do that, and if the platforms got a good, close-range look at the aspect Apparition was keeping turned away from their mothership, the chance of detection went from abysmally low to terrifyingly high in very short order. Which meant what Sung was really doing was betting that the odds of the Grayson's choosing to deploy recon platforms were lower than the odds of her shipboard systems detecting the Spider's activation flare if he maneuvered to avoid her.

Of course, even if we did try to crab away from her, it wouldn't help a whole hell of a lot if she decided to launch platforms. All we'd really manage to do would be to move her target a bit further away from her, and there's a reason they call remote platforms remote, Rod .

No. He'd play the odds, and he knew it was the right decision, however little comfort that might be if Murphy did decide to take an even more active hand.

I wonder if Шstby and Omelchenko are having this much fun wandering around Manticore? he thought dryly. I know no one ever promised it would be easy, and I've always enjoyed a hand of poker as much as the next man, but this is getting ridiculous .

Roderick Sung settled himself even more comfortably in his command chair and waited to see exactly what sort of cards Murphy had chosen to deal this time.

Chapter Ten

Honor Alexander-Harrington hoped she looked less nervous than she felt as she and the rest of the Manticoran delegation followed Alicia Hampton, Secretary of State Montreau's personal aide, down the short hallway on the two hundredth floor of the Nouveau Paris Plaza Falls Hotel.

The Plaza Falls had been the showplace hotel of the Republic of Haven's capital city for almost two T- centuries, and the Legislaturalists had been careful to preserve it intact when they created the People's Republic of Haven. It had served to house important visitors—Solarian diplomats (and, of course, newsies being presented with the Office of Public Information's view of the galaxy), businessmen being wooed as potential investors, off-world black marketeers supplying the needs of those same Legislaturalists, heads of state who were being 'invited' to 'request Havenite protection' as a cheaper alternative to outright conquest, or various high-priced courtesans being kept in the style to which they had become accustomed.

The Committee of Public Safety, for all its other faults, had been far less inclined towards that particular sort of personal corruption. Rob Pierre, Cordelia Ransom, and their fellows had hardly been immune to their own forms of empire building and hypocrisy, but they'd seen no reason to follow in the Legislaturalists' footsteps where the Plaza Falls was concerned. Indeed, the hotel had been regarded by the Mob as a concrete symbol of the Legislaturalists' regime, which explained why it had been thoroughly vandalized during the early days of Rob Pierre's coup. Nor was that the only indignity it had suffered, since the Committee had actually encouraged its progressive looting, using it as a sort of whipping boy whenever the Mob threatened to become dangerously rowdy. The sheer size of the hotel had meant looting it wasn't a simple afternoon's work, so it had made a useful diversion for quite some time.

In the end, even something with two hundred and twenty floors had eventually run out of things to steal, break, or deface, and (fortunately, perhaps) a ceramacrete tower was remarkably nonflammable. Several individual rooms, and one complete floor, had been burned out by particularly persistent arsonists, but by and large, the Plaza Falls had survived . . . more or less. The picked-clean carcass had been allowed to molder away, ignored by any of the Committee's public works projects. It had sat empty and completely ignored, and most people had written it off as something to be eventually demolished and replaced.

But demolishing a tower that size was no trivial task, even for a counter-gravity civilization, and to everyone's considerable surprise, the privatization incentives Tony Nesbit and Rachel Hanriot had put together after Theisman's coup had attracted a pool of investors who were actually interested in salvaging the structure, instead. More than that, they'd honestly believed the Plaza Falls could be restored to its former glory as a piece of living history—and a profit-making enterprise—that underscored the rebirth of the Republic as a whole.

Despite their enthusiasm, the project had been bound to run into more difficulties than any sane person would have willingly confronted, but they'd been thoroughly committed by the time they figured that out. In fact, failure of the project would have spelled complete and total ruin for most of the backers by that point. And so they'd dug in, tackled each difficulty as it arose, and to everyone's surprise (quite probably their own more than anyone