Mission of Honor

perhaps, be a good idea to have a staff intelligence officer who actually knew something about local conditions. Which was how Commander Shavarshyan found himself the single Frontier Fleet officer attached to a fleet whose staff , like every one of its senior squadron and division commanders, consisted otherwise solely of Battle Fleet officers, all of whom outranked him, and all of whom seemed to be competing to see who could agree most vehemently with their admiral.

Those thoughts floated through the back of Shavarshyan's brain as he stood behind the briefing officer's podium while Crandall and the other members of her staff settled down around the long briefing room table aboard SLNSJoseph Buckley .

'All right,' Crandall growled once they were seated. 'Let's get to it.'

'Yes, Ma'am.'

Shavarshyan squared his shoulders and put on his best professional expression, although everyone in the briefing room knew he'd received no fresh data in the thirty-five days since they'd left Meyers. That, unfortunately, wasn't what Crandall wanted to hear about.

'As you know, Ma'am,' he continued briskly, 'Admiral Ou-yang's people and I have continued our study of Admiral Sigbee's New Tuscany dispatches. We've combined their contents with all the information available to Frontier Fleet's analysts, as well, of course, and I've compiled a report of all our observations and conclusions. I've mailed copies of it to all of you, which should be waiting in your in-baskets, but for the most part, unfortunately, I'm forced to say we really don't have any startling new insights since my last report. I'm afraid we've pretty much mined out the available ore, Admiral. I wish I could offer you something more than that, but anything else would be pure speculation, at best.'

'But you stand by this nonsense about the Manties' missile ranges?' Vice Admiral Pйpй Bautista, Crandall's chief of staff, asked skeptically. Bautista's manner was more often than not caustic even with his fellow Battle Fleet officers, if they were junior to him. He clearly saw no reason to restrain his natural abrasiveness where a mere Frontier Fleet commander was concerned.

'Exactly which nonsense would that be, Sir?' Shavarshyan inquired as politely as possible.

'I find it hard enough to credit Gruner's report that the Manties opened fire on Jean Bart from forty million kilometers out.' He grimaced. 'I'd like to see at least some reliable sensor data before I jump onto that bandwagon! But even granting that's correct, are you seriously suggesting they may have even more range?'

'Sir, I'd like to have better data myself,' Shavarshyan acknowledged, and that much was completely sincere. Lieutenant Aloysius Gruner was the commanding officer ofDispatch Boat 17702 , the only unit of Josef Byng's ill-fated command to escape before Byng's death and Sigbee's surrender. Gruner had been sent off very early in the confrontation, which explained how he'd evaded the Manties to bring back news of the catastrophe in the first place. Apparently, Admiral Byng, in yet another dazzling display of incompetence, had seen no reason even to order his other courier boats to bring up their nodes, which meant they'd all still been sitting heplessly in orbit when Sigbee surrendered. They were fortunate the one boat he had ordered to get underway had still been close enough to receive Sigbee's burst-transmitted final dispatch—the one which had announced Jean Bart 's destruction and her own surrender—but there'd been no time for her to send DB 17702 detailed tactical reports or sensor data on the Manties' weapons. And, through no fault of Gruner's, he couldn't provide that information either, since courier boats' sensor suites weren't what anyone might call sophisticated. Although he'd been able to tell them what had happened, more or less, they had virtually no hard information on how the Manties had made it happen. Additional information might well have been sent to Meyers by now, but if so, it was still somewhere in the pipeline astern of Task Force 496.

Of course it is , Shavarshyan thought bitingly. Anything else would actually have suggested there was at least a smidgeon of competence somewhere among the people running this cluster-fuck .

'At the same time, Lieutenant Gruner was there,' he continued out loud. 'He saw what actually happened, and even if we don't have the kind of data I'd prefer, he was very emphatic about the engagement range. Nothing in Sigbee's dispatch suggests he was wrong, either. And given the geometry of the engagement, forty million kilometers at launch equates to something on the order of twenty-nine or thirty million kilometers from rest. Now, nothing we have—not even those big, system-defense missiles Technodyne deployed to Monica—have that kind of range, that kind of powered endurance, but thirty million klicks from rest would work out pretty close to the consecutive endurance for two missile drives at the observed acceleration. So, the only conclusion I can come up with, is that they must really have gone ahead and put multiple drives into their missiles. And if they've put in enough drives to give them a powered envelope of thirty million kilometers, I just think it might be wiser to consider the possibility that they might have even more range than that.'

His tone could not have been more respectful or nonconfrontational, but he'd seen Bautista's jaw tighten at the reference to Monica. Not, Shavarshyan felt confident, so much at the reminder of the Technodyne missiles' enhanced range as at the fact that the Manties' missiles had out-ranged even them. Which, of course, was the reason the Shavarshyan had mentioned it.

Bautista started to open his mouth angrily, but Vice Admiral Ou-Yang Zhing-Wei, Crandall's operations officer, spoke up before he could.

'I'm disinclined to think they could have a great deal more range Pйpй, but Commander Shavarshyan is right. It's a possibility we have to bear in mind.'

'Yes, it is,' Crandall agreed, although she manifestly didn't like doing so. 'All the same,' she continued, 'it really doesn't matter in the long run. Assuming Gruner's observations and Sigbee's report were accurate at all, we already knew we were going to be out-ranged by at least some of these people's missiles. On the other hand, I agree with Sigbee—and with you, Commander—that no missile big enough to do that could be fired from missile tubes the size of the ones we've actually observed aboard even those big-assed Manty battlecruisers. So they had to come from pods.'

She shrugged. Like the woman herself, it was a ponderous movement, without grace yet imbued with a self- aware sense of power.

'But whether they came from pods or missile tubes, they can't have the fire control links to coordinate enough of them to swamp the task force's point defense, and their accuracy at such extended ranges—assuming they actually have even more range—has to be poor. I know some of them will get through. We'll take damage— hell, we may even lose a ship or two!—but there's no way they're going to stop a solid wall of battle this size by just chucking missiles at it. And I'm not going to let them bluff me into going easy on them because of some kind of imagined 'super weapon' they've got!'

She snorted in contempt, and her eyes were harder than ever.

'By now that damned destroyer of theirs must've gotten back to Spindle. I imagine that once they all got done crapping their skinsuits, they sent home for reinforcements. But after the reaming they got from the Havenites, they can't have much left to reinforce with . So we're just going to turn up and be their worst nightmare, and we're going to do it right now.'

'I understand your thinking, Ma'am,' Ou-yang said. 'And I agree we need to move quickly. But it's one of my responsibilities to see to it that we don't get hurt any worse than we can help while we pin their ears back the way they've got coming. And just between you and me, I'm not all that fond of surprises, even from neobarbs.'

She rolled her almond eyes drolly with the last phrase, and Crandall chuckled. At least, that was what Shavarshyan thought the sound was. It was difficult, sometimes, to differentiate between the admiral's snorts of contempt and snorts of amusement. In fact, the commander wasn't certain there was a difference.

At the same time, he had to admire Ou-yang's technique. The operations officer was the closest thing to an ally he had on Crandall's staff, and he rather thought she shared some of the suspicions which kept him awake at night. For example, there was that nagging question of exactly how someone like Josef Byng, a Battle Fleet officer with limitless contempt for Frontier Fleet, had ended up in command of the Frontier Fleet task force he'd led so disastrously to New Tuscany. Given the involvement of Manpower and Technodyne in what had happened in Monica, and knowing some of the dirty little secrets he wasn't supposed to know about Commissioner Verrochio and Vice Commissioner Hongbo, Shavarshyan had a pretty fair idea of who'd been pulling