Mission of Honor

him here at all.

With the formal greetings and introductions disposed of, Pritchart waved at the conference table, with its neatly arranged data ports, old-fashioned blotters, and carafes of ice water. The chairs around it, in keeping with the Plaza Falls's venerable lineage, were unpowered, but that didn't prevent them from being almost sinfully comfortable as the delegates settled into them.

Pritchart had seated her own delegation with its back to the suite's outer wall of windows, and Honor felt a flicker of gratitude for the president's thoughtfulness as she parked Nimitz on the back of her own chair. Then she seated herself and gazed out through the crystoplast behind Pritchart and her colleagues while the other members of her own team plugged personal minicomps into the data ports and unobtrusively tested their firewalls and security fences.

Nouveau Paris had been built in the foothills of the Limoges Mountains, the coastal range that marked the southwest edge of the continent of Rochambeau where it met the Veyret Ocean. The city's pastel colored towers rose high into the heavens, but despite their height—and, for that matter, the sheer size and population of the city itself—the towering peaks of the Limoges Range still managed to put them into proportion. To remind the people living in them that a planet was a very large place.

Like most cities designed and planned by a gravitic civilization's engineers, Nouveau Paris incorporated green belts, parks, and tree-shaded pedestrian plazas. It also boasted spectacular beaches along its westernmost suburbs, but the heart of the original city been built around the confluence of the Garronne River and the Rhфne River, and from her place at the table, she looked almost directly down to where those two broad streams merged less than half a kilometer before they plunged over the eighty-meter, horseshoe-shaped drop of Frontenac Falls in a boiling smother of foam, spray, and mist. Below the falls which had given the Plaza Falls' its name, the imposing width of the Frontenac Estuary rolled far more tranquilly to the Veyret, dotted with pleasure boats which were themselves yet another emblem of the Republic of Haven's renaissance. It was impressive, even from the suite's imposing height.

She gazed at the city, the rivers, and the falls for several seconds, then turned her attention politely to Pritchart.

The president looked around the table, obviously checking to be certain everyone was settled, then squared her own shoulders and looked back at Honor.

'It's occurred to me, Admiral Alexander-Harrington, that this is probably a case of the less formality, the better. We've already tried the formal diplomatic waltz, with position papers and diplomatic notes moving back and forth, before we started shooting at each other again, and we're all only too well aware of where that ended up. Since your Queen's been willing to send you to us under such . . . untrammeled conditions, I'd like to maintain as much in formality as possible this time around, in hopes of achieving a somewhat more satisfactory outcome. I do have a certain structure in mind, but with your agreement, I'd prefer to allow frank discussion among all the participants, instead of the standard procedure where you and I—or you and Leslie—simply repeat our formal positions to one another over and over while everyone else sits back, watches, and tries valiantly to stay awake.'

'I think I could live with that, Madam President,' Honor replied, feeling the slight smile she couldn't totally suppress dance around her lips.

'Good. In that case, I thought that since you've come all this way to deliver Queen Elizabeth's message, I'd ask you to repeat it for all of us. And after you've done that, I would appreciate it if you would sketch out for us—in broad and general strokes, of course—a preliminary presentation of the Star Kingdom—I'm sorry, the Star Empire's —view of what might constitute the terms of a sensible peace settlement.'

'That sounds reasonable,' Honor agreed, sternly telling the butterflies in her stomach to stop fluttering. Odd how much more unnervingthis was than the mere prospect of facing an enemy wall of battle.

She settled further back into her chair, feeling Nimitz's warm, silken presence against the back of her head, and drew a deep breath.

'Madam President, Ladies and Gentlemen,' she began, 'I'll begin by being blunt, and I hope no one will be offended by my candor. Please remember that despite any titles I may have acquired, or any diplomatic accreditation Queen Elizabeth may have trusted me with, I'm basically a yeoman-born naval officer, not a trained diplomat. If I seem to be overly direct, please understand no discourtesy is intended.'

They gazed back at her, all of them from behind the impassive faзades of experienced politicians, and she considered inviting them to just relax and check their poker faces at the door. It wasn't as if those well-trained expressions were doing them any good against someone as capable of reading the emotions behind them as any treecat. And anything she missed, Nimitz wouldn't when they compared notes later.

Still, judging by the way they taste, Pritchart, Theisman, and Montreau—at the very least— already know that as well as McGwire and Tullingham do. Interesting that none of them've made a point of their knowledge, though .

'As I've already told President Pritchart, both my Queen and I are fully aware that the view of who's truly responsible for the conflict between our two star nations isn't the same from Manticore and Haven. I've also already conceded to President Pritchart that the High Ridge Government must bear its share of blame for the diplomatic failure which led to the resumption of hostilities between our star nations. I think, however, that no one in Nouveau Paris, anymore than anyone in Landing, can deny that the Republic of Haven actually fired the first shots of this round when it launched Operation Thunderbolt. I'm confident the decision to do so was not lightly taken, and I don't doubt for a moment that you felt, rightly or wrongly, both that you were justified and that it was the best of the several bad options available to you. But the fact remains that Manticore didn't start the shooting in any of our conflicts with Haven.

'Nonetheless, ladies and gentlemen, we've come to a crossroads. I know some of you blame the Star Empire for all that's happened. I assure you, there are more than sufficient people in the Star Empire who blame the Republic for all that's happened. And the truth, of course, is that both sides must bear their own share of the responsibility. Yet at this moment, the Star Empire's military advantage is, quite frankly, overwhelming.'

They weren't liking what they were hearing; that much was painfully obvious to her empathic sense, despite their impressive control of their faces. But she also tasted the bleak awareness that what she'd just said was self- evidently true. It was strongest from Pritchart and Theisman, but she tasted a surprisingly strong flare of the same awareness from Nesbitt. Montreau and Bourchier clearly recognized the same unpalatable truth, but there was something different, less personal about their recognition than Honor tasted in Nesbitt's.

Younger, on the other hand, seemed to be one of those people who were constitutionally incapable of accepting the very possibility of failure. It was as if he was able to intellectually recognize that Apollo gave the Manticoran Alliance a huge military advantage yet un able to accept the corollary that he could no longer 'game' his way to the outcome he wanted.

McGwire and Tullingham, unlike Younger, clearly did recognize how severely the tectonic shift in military power limited their options, but that didn't mean they were prepared to give up. She suspected they'd be willing to bow to the inevitable, in the end, but only after they'd cut the best personal deals they could.

Well, they're welcome to cut all of the domestic political deals they want to , she thought grimly.

'The simple truth,' she continued, 'is that it's now within the power of the Royal Manticoran Navy to systematically reduce the orbital infrastructure of every star system of the Republic to rubble.' Her voice was quiet, yet she felt them flinching from her words as if they'd been fists. 'You can't stop us, however courageous or determined Admiral Theisman's men and women may be, even with the advantages of the missile defense system—Moriarity, I believe you call it—Admiral Foraker devised before the Battle of Solon, as we demonstrated at Lovat.'

A fresh stab of pain ripped through Pritchart, and it was Honor's turn to flinch internally, in combined sympathy and guilt. Guilt not so much for having killed Javier Giscard, as for the way in which killing him had wounded Eloise Pritchart, as well.

'There are those in the Star Empire,' she went on, allowing no trace of her awareness of Pritchart's pain to color her own expression or tone, 'who would prefer to do just that. Who think it's time for us to use our advantage to completely destroy your fleet, along with all the casualties that would entail, and then to turn the entire Republic