Mission of Honor

wrong .' She shrugged. 'Either way, though, they're hardly likely to run potential operations by him for approval.'

'Or material support?'

'Torch has made its position on actively supporting strikes like this crystal clear, Elizabeth. You've heard what they've said as well as I have, and I promise you, they mean it. Like I say, Jeremy's not stupid enough not to see all the downsides of something like this.'

Elizabeth tipped back her chair, regarding her 'guest' with narrow eyes and scant cheerfulness. There was a certain brittleness to the office's silence, then the queen raised an eyebrow and pointed an index finger at Montaigne.

'You've been talking in generalities, Cathy,' she said shrewdly. 'Why aren't you being more specific about how you know Captain Zilwicki wasn't involved in this?'

'Because—' Montaigne began firmly, then paused. To Elizabeth's astonishment, the other woman's face crumpled suddenly, and Montaigne drew a deep, ragged breath.

'Because,' she resumed, 'they've specifically linked Anton with this, and I don't think they just picked his name at random. Oh, I know how vulnerable our relationship makes me—and, by extension, the Liberal Party and the entire Star Empire—where something like this is concerned. But making that link in their propaganda is more sophisticated than Mesa's ever bothered to be before. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense from their perspective, because both of us know it does. I'm just afraid that . . . it didn't occur to them out of the clear blue sky.'

She had her voice under iron control, but Elizabeth had known her for far too long to be fooled. There was more than simple pain in her eyes; there was something very like terror, and the Queen of Manticore felt the personal concern of friendship go to war with the cold-blooded detachment her position as a head of state demanded of her.

'Tell me, Cathy,' she said, and her own voice was softer.

'Beth,' Montaigne looked her squarely in the eye, 'I swear to you on my own immortal soul that Anton Zilwicki would never—never —sign off on nuking a public park full of kids— anybody's kids, for God's sake!—in the middle of a town. He'd die, first. Ask anyone who knows him. But having said that . . . he was on Mesa. And I'm afraid the Mesans know he was. That that's the reason they decided to pin this on him, by name, and not just on Torch and the Ballroom in general. And—'

Her voice broke off, and Elizabeth's felt her own eyes widen.

'You think they caught him,' she said gently.

'Yes. No!' Montaigne shook her head, her expression showing an uncertainty and misery she would never have allowed herself to display in public.

'I don't know,' she admitted after a moment. 'I haven't spoken to him in almost six T-months—not since June. He and . . . someone else were headed for Mesa. I know they got there, because we got a report from them through a secure conduit in late August. But we haven't heard a word from them since.'

'He was on Mesa?' Elizabeth stared at her, stunned by the notion that Zilwicki had voluntarily walked into that snake pit. 'What in God's name was he thinking? '

Montaigne drew a deep breath, visibly forcing herself back under control. Then she sat for several seconds, considering the queen with an edge of calculation.

'All right, Elizabeth—truth time,' she said finally. 'Six months ago, you weren't exactly . . . rational about the possibility that anyone besides Haven could have been behind Admiral Webster's assassination or the attack on Torch. I'm sorry, but it's true, and you know it. Don't you?'

Brown eyes locked with blue, tension hovering between them for a dozen heart beats. Then Elizabeth nodded grudgingly.

'As a matter of fact, I'm still not convinced—not by a long chalk—that Haven wasn't involved,' she acknowledged. 'At the same time, I've been forced to admit there are are other possibilities. For that matter, I've even been forced to concede my own anti-Haven prejudices probably help account for at least some of my suspicion where Pritchart is concerned.'

'Thank you.' Montaigne's eyes softened. 'I know you, Beth, so I know how hard it was for you to admit that. But at the time, Torch and the Ballroom had pretty compelling evidence that whatever might have been the case with Admiral Webster, Haven wasn't involved in the attack on Berry and Torch. Which suggested someone else had to be, and that led in turn to their taking a very hard look at Mesa.

'You just admitted your 'anti-Haven prejudices' might predispose you to assume Pritchart was behind it. Well, fair's fair, and I'll admit that our prejudices naturally predispose us to feel the same way about Manpower. But there was more to it, and a lot of that 'more' came from Anton and Ruth, not the Ballroom.'

'What kind of 'more'?' Elizabeth asked, frowning intently.

'Well, the first thing was that we knew—and I mean knew , Beth, with absolute, goldplated certainty—Haven hadn't been involved in the Torch operation. And the more Ruth and Anton modeled Manpower's behavior in Monica, the less its actions looked like those of any plausible transstellar—even of a renegade, outlaw transstellar. They were more like something a star nation would have been doing.'

Elizabeth nodded slowly, her eyes narrow. She recalled Michelle Henke's suggestion to the same effect after she'd broken Josef Byng's New Tuscany operation. It had seemed preposterous, but both ONI and SIS had come, at least tentatively, to the conclusion Michelle was onto something. As of yet, no one had any idea exactly what she was onto, unfortunately.

'Assuming it was Manpower—or Mesa, assuming there's even as much difference between the two as we thought there was—the attacks seemed to fit in neatly with Manpower's obvious ambitions in Talbott. In fact, they seemed to imply that everyone was still just scratching the surface of what those ambitions might really be. And, frankly, Torch's position as an at least semi-official ally of the Star Empire, the Republic, Erewhon, and the Solarian League—or the Maya Sector, at least—had Anton and . . . Jeremy wondering just how many birds Manpower was trying to hit with a single stone.'

Now whose name, I wonder, did she'd just substitute Jeremy's for? Elizabeth thought. She considered pressing the point, but not very hard.

'Under the circumstances, they decided someone needed to take a good, hard look at Manpower from inside the belly of the beast, as it were. They didn't have a specific action plan, beyond getting inside Mesa's reach. They wanted to be close enough to be hands-on, able to follow up leads directly instead of being weeks or even months of communications time from the investigation. I think they were probably thinking in terms of setting up a permanent surveillance op, if they could figure out a way to pull it off, but, mostly, they were looking for proof of Manpower's involvement in Webster's assassination and the attack on Berry.'

She paused, with the look of a woman deciding against mentioning something else, and despite her focused intensity, Elizabeth smiled ever so slightly.

Unwontedly tactful of you, Cathy. Don't want to come right out and say 'And they wanted that proof to be good enough it could convince even you to think logically about other candidates, Elizabeth,' now do you?

'At any rate,' Montaigne went on more briskly, 'the one thing they weren't going to do was link up with any 'official' Ballroom cells on Mesa. We have reason to believe, especially in light of a few recent discoveries, that any Ballroom cell on the planet is likely to be compromised. So there's zero possibility Anton or . . . any of his people were involved in any Ballroom operation against Green Pines. They were there expressly to keep a low profile; the information they were after—especially if it confirmed their suspicions—was far more important than any attack could have been; and they were avoiding contact with any known Ballroom operative.'

Elizabeth's eyes had narrowed again. Now she leaned back and cocked her head to one side.

'Would it make this any simpler for you, Cathy,' she asked almost whimsically, 'if you just went ahead and said 'Anton and Agent Cachat' instead of being so diplomatic?'

It was Montaigne's eyes' turn to narrow, and the queen chuckled, albeit a bit sourly.

'I assure you, I've read the reports on just exactly how Torch came into being with a certain closeness. And I've had direct reports from Ruth, too, you know. She's done her best to be . . . tactful, let's say, but it's been obvious Agent Cachat's still something of a fixture on Torch. And, for that matter, that he and Captain Zilwicki have formed some sort of at least semi-permanent partnership.'