Mission of Honor

'Why do I have th' impression you just this minute decided t' add that particular wrinkle t' th' sim, Milady?'

'Because you have a nasty, suspicious mind and know me entirely too well. But look at it this way. It's bound to be a very enlightening experience for you.' She smiled sweetly at him. 'I'll expect you at oh-one-thirty, Admiral. Don't be late!'

Michelle terminated the connection and tipped back in her flag bridge chair, shaking her head wryly.

'Are you really going to give the aggressor force Mark 23s, Ma'am?' a voice asked, and Michelle looked over her shoulder at Captain Cynthia Lecter, Tenth Fleet's chief of staff.

'I'm not only going to give the op force Mark 23s, Cindy,' she said with a wicked smile. 'I'm probably going to give it Apollo, too.'

Lecter winced. The current iteration of the Mark 23 multidrive missile carried the most destructive warhead in service with any navy, and it carried it farther and faster than any missile in service with any navy outside what was still called the Haven Sector. That was a sufficiently significant advantage for most people to be going on with, she supposed, but when the faster-than-light command and control link of the Apollo system was incorporated into the mix, the combination went far beyond simply devastating.

'You don't think that might be a little bit of overkill, Ma'am?' the chief of staff asked after a moment.

'I certainly hope it will!' Michelle replied tartly. 'He deserves worse, actually. Well, maybe not deserves , but I can't think of a word that comes closer. Besides, it'll be good for him. Put a little hiccup in that unbroken string of four-oh simulations he's reeled off since he got here. After all,' she finished, lifting her nose with a slight but audible sniff, 'it's one of a commanding officer's responsibilities to remind her subordinates from time to time of their own mortality.'

'You manage to sound so virtuous when you say that, Ma'am,' Lecter observed. 'And you can actually keep a straight face, too. I think that's even more remarkable.'

'Why, thank you, Captain Lecter!' Michelle beamed benignly and raised one hand in a gesture of blessing which would have done her distant cousin Robert Telmachi, the Archbishop of Manticore, proud. 'And now, why don't you sit down with Dominica, Max, and Bill to see just how devious the three of you can be in putting all of those unfair advantages into effect?'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Lecter acknowledged, and headed off towards the tactical section, where Commander Dominica Adenauer was discussing something with Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Tersteeg, Michelle's staff electronic warfare officer.

Michelle watched her go and wondered if Cindy had figured out the other reason she was thinking about giving the op force Apollo. They weren't going to find a more capable system-defense CO than Michael Oversteegen, and she badly wanted to see how well the Royal Manticoran Navy's Apollo—in the hands of one Vice Admiral Gold Peak and her staff—could do while someone with all the Royal Manticoran Navy's war-fighting technology short of Apollo pulled out all the stops against her.

Her own smile faded at the thought. None of her ships currently had Apollo, nor did they have the Keyhole- Two platforms to make use of the FTL telemetry link even if they'd had the Apollo birds themselves. But unless she missed her guess, that was going to change very soon now.

I hope to hellit is, anyway , she reflected grimly.And when it does, we'd damned well better have figured out how to use it as effectively as possible. That bastard Byng may have been a complete and utter incompetent—as well as an asshole—but not all Sollies can be that idiotic .

She settled back, contemplating the main plot with eyes that didn't see it at all while she reflected on the last three T-months.

Somehow, when she'd just been setting out on her naval career, it had never occurred to her she might find herself in a situation like this one. Even now, it seemed impossible that so much could have happened in so short a period, and she wished she knew more about what was going on back home.

Be glad of what you do know, girl , she told herself sternly. At least Beth approved of your actions. Cousin or not, she could've recalled you as the sacrificial goat. In fact, I'm sure a lot of people think that's exactly what she should've done .

The four-week communications loop between the Spindle System, the capital of the newly organized Talbott Quadrant of the Star Empire of Manticore, and the Manticoran Binary System was the kind of communications delay any interstellar naval officer had to learn to live with. It was also the reason most successful navies simply assumed flag officers on distant stations were going to have to make their own decisions. There just wasn't time for them to communicate with their governments, even though everyone recognized that the decisions they made might have significant consequences for their star nations' foreign policy. But however well established that state of affairs might be, the potential consequences for Michelle Henke this time around were rather more significant than usual.

'More significant than usual.' My, what a fine euphemistic turn of phrase, Mike! she thought sourly.

It didn't seem possible that it was one day short of two months since she'd destroyed a Solarian League battlecruiser with all hands. She hadn't wanted to do it, but Admiral Josef Byng hadn't left her much in the way of options. And, if she was going to be honest, a part of her was intensely satisfied that the drooling idiot hadn't. If he'd been reasonable, if he'd had a single functioning brain cell and he'd stood-down his ships as she'd demanded until the events of the so-called First Battle of New Tuscany could be adequately investigated, he and his flaship's entire crew would still be alive, and that satisfied part of her would have considered that a suboptimal outcome. The arrogant bastard had slaughtered the entire complements of three of Michelle's destroyers without so much as calling on them to surrender first, and she wasn't going to pretend, especially to herself, that she was sorry he'd paid the price for all those murders. The disciplined, professional flag officer in her would have preferred for him (and his flagship's crew) to be alive, and she'd tried hard to achieve that outcome, but only because no sane Queen's officer wanted to contemplate the prospect of a genuine war against the Solarian League. Especially not while the war against Haven was still unresolved.

But Elizabeth, Baron Grantville, Earl White Haven, and Sir Thomas Caparelli had all approved her actions in the strongest possible language. She suspected that at least some of that approval's firmness had been intended for public consumption, both at home in Manticore and in the Solarian League. Word of the battle—accompanied by at least excerpts of Elizabeth's official dispatch to her, approving her actions—had reached Old Terra herself via the Beowulf terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction a month ago now. Michelle had no doubt Elizabeth, William Alexander, and Sir Anthony Langtry had given careful thought to how best to break the news to the Sollies; unfortunately, 'best' didn't necessarily equate to 'a good way to tell them.'

In fact, Michelle had direct evidence that they weren't even remotely the same thing. The first wave of Solarian newsies had reached Spindle via the Junction nine days earlier, and they'd arrived in a feeding frenzy. although Michelle herself had managed to avoid them by taking refuge in her genuine responsibilities as Tenth Fleet's commanding officer. She'd retreated to her orbiting flagship and hidden behind operational security and several hundred kilometers of airless vacuum—and Artemis ' Marine detachment—to keep the pack from pursuing her.

Agustus Khumalo, Baroness Medusa, Prime Minister Alquezar, and Minister of War Krietzmann had been less fortunate in that regard. Michelle might have been forced to put in appearances at no less than four formal news conferences, but her military and political superiors found themselves under continual siege by Solarian reporters who verged from the incredulous to the indignant to the outraged and didn't seem particularly concerned about who knew it. From her own daily briefings, it was evident that the flow of newsies—Manticoran, as well as Solarian—was only growing. And just to make her happiness complete, the insufferable gadflies were bringing their own reports of the Solarian League's reaction to what had happened along with them. Well, the Old Terran reaction, at least, she corrected herself. But the version of the 'truth' expounded on Old Terra—and the reaction to it on Old Terra—always played a hugely disproportionate part in the League's policies.

And it was evident that Old Terra and the deeply entrenched bureaucracies headquartered there were not reacting well.

She reminded herself that all of her information about events on the League's capital world was at least three