Mission of Honor

to be precise—when she could just as easily have fired on all of them. She also ceased fire and extended yet another opportunity to avoid bloodshed—further bloodshed—after Admiral Byng's . . . demise.'

Crandall's expression was livid, but Medusa continued in that same tone of deadly calm.

'Secondly,' she said, 'we happen to be in possession of the file copies from Admiral Sigbee's flagship of both her own and Admiral Byng's standing orders, which I presume must have been at least generally similar to your own. Oddly enough, there's nothing in them about committing blatant acts of war against sovereign star nations. Aside from little things like 'Case Buccaneer,' that is, but we won't go into that particular 'contingency plan' at this point. Unless you insist on discussing Frontier Fleet, OFS, piracy, and 'disappeared' merchant ships officially and on the record, of course.'

Her dark eyes glittered, and Shavarshyan inhaled sharply as the Manticoran's steely smile challenged Crandall to press her on that point in an official exchange both sides knew was being recorded.

'I make this point only to clarify the fact that we're well aware you're acting at the present moment on your own authority,' Medusa continued after a moment.'Mind you, I'm equally well aware that one of the functions of a flag officer this far from her star nation's capital is to do precisely that in moments of crisis. However, you would do well to consider that in this instance the Star Empire of Manticore has already communicated formally with the Solarian League on Old Terra about both New Tuscan incidents. I am in receipt of copies of the League's official responses to those communiques, should you care to view them. And if you would care to avail yourself of the Lynx Terminus, we would be quite happy to send your own dispatches directly to Old Chicago, should you wish to seek guidance from your superiors before we have another of those . . . misunderstandings, I believe you called them? I suspect those superiors might not be entirely pleased if some avoidable 'misunderstanding ' on your own part leads to a further regrettable escalation of the tensions between the Solarian League and the Star Empire.'

From the corner of his eye, Shavarshyan saw Ou-yang Zhing-wei purse her lips as that salvo went home. Medusa's confirmation that Manticore had not simply captured Sigbee's databases but hacked their most secure files was bad enough. The Manticoran's pointed suggestion that she knew far more about the League's official reaction to New Tuscany than Crandall possibly could had been even worse. Whether Bautista and Crandall were prepared to face the implications or not, Ou-yang clearly recognized the diplomatic minefield Task Force 496 was about to enter. And, just as clearly, she understood that no naval officer's connections were so good she couldn't be thrown to the wolves if she screwed up too egregiously. Crandall, fortunately for her blood pressure, if not for anything else, was too busy glaring at Medusa to notice the ops officer's expression. It was, perhaps, less fortunate that she was so totally infuriated that she also completely ignored Medusa's offer to put her into direct communication with her superiors on Old Terra. Clearly, the baroness was telling her it wasn't too late to take a deep breath and back down under cover of the diplomatic smokescreen of seeking guidance from above.

It was a pity Crandall wasn't paying attention.

'I have no intention of sitting here for a solid T-month while you and your 'Star Empire' redeploy your own warships, Madame Governor,' the admiral said coldly. 'My standing orders require what I believe my standing orders require, and the terms I've already stated are the minimum I'm prepared to accept.'

And then she sat there again, glaring at Medusa's image, while rage and fury fermented inside her.

'And if I should happen to reject your 'minimum terms'?'

Shavarshyan couldn't decide whether the ever so slight curl of Medusa's lip was deliberate or an involuntary response which had escaped her formidable self-control. In either case, the unstated contempt came through quite nicely.

'In that case, Governor ,' Crandall responded, 'I will advance upon the inhabited planet of your star system. I will engage and destroy every military starship in the system. And after I've done that, I'll land Marines on your planet and secure control of it in the name of the Solarian League until an appropriate civilian administration can be set up by the Office of Frontier Security. And, I feel confident, Frontier Security will continue to administer this world—and every other planet of your so-called Talbott Quadrant—until such time as the Solarian League's just requirements for accountability and redress are fully satisfied.'

She paused very briefly, her smile thin and cold, as she deliberately raised the stakes. Then she continued in that same, cold voice.

'I'm prepared to to give you the opportunity to comply with my reasonable demands without further loss of life or destruction, but the Solarian League Navy doesn't intend to permit an act of war against the League to pass unanswered. I have no doubt you have indeed been in communication with the League. I also have no doubt of where my own duty lies, however. Because I have no desire to see additional avoidable bloodshed, I will give you precisely three T-days from the moment my ships made their alpha translations to accept my terms. If you do not do so within that time, I will cross the limit and proceed exactly as I've described, and the consequences of that will rest upon your shoulders. In the meantime, I'm uninterested in any further communication of yours, unless it is for the purpose of accepting my terms. Good day, Governor.'

She stabbed a button, and the display went blank.

* * *

'All right, Clement,' Karol Шstby said quietly, 'let's not stub our toes at this point, okay?'

'Yes, Sir.' Commander Clement Foreman, Шstby's operations officer, smiled tautly at him on MANS Chameleon' s cramped flag bridge.

The scout ship had reached her rendezvous with Ghost and Wraith as all three of them crept ever so cautiously towards the final deployment point. This was, in many ways, the most critical aspect of their entire lengthy mission—or the riskiest moment of it, at any rate; all of its elements had been 'critical' to the operation's success—and the tension on the flag bridge could have been carved with a blade.

Foreman considered his displays for a moment, then keyed his mike.

'All emplacement teams, this is Control,' he said. 'Proceed.'

Absolutely nothing changed on the flag bridge itself, yet Шstby felt an almost tangible release as the order was finally given. Which was about as irrational as responses came, he supposed. The scout ships themselves were extraordinarily stealthy, and the arrays they were about to emplace were equally so. Which meant they were actually entering the moment of maximum danger as they deployed their work parties with the tools and equipment necessary for their task, since those tools and that equipment, while still very hard to detect, were considerably less stealthy. And still, however unreasonable it might be, there was that sense of relief—not relaxation, only relief— as they actually set about it at last.

He watched his own displays, listening over his earbug as progress reports flowed into flag bridge. He knew perfectly well that it wasn't really taking as long as it felt like it was taking, just as he knew how critical it was that they take the time to be sure it was done right, but whatever he might know intellectually, it didn't feel that way.

He looked at the date/time display, and a fresh sense of confidence swept through him. His people had trained far too hard, mastered their duties far too completely, to screw up now. They would fail neither him nor the Alignment . . . and in another fifteen days, the entire galaxy would know that as well as he did.

Chapter Twenty

'All right, Jacomina,' Sandra Crandall said flatly. 'These people have just run out of time.'

'Yes, Ma'am.' Captain Jacomina van Heutz, SLNS Joseph Buckley 's commanding officer, nodded from the small display on Crandall's flag bridge. The admiral looked over her shoulder at Bautista and Ou-yang, and both of them nodded, as well. Shavarshyan thought Ou-yang's nod seemed less cheerful than Bautista's, although that could have been his imagination.

But whatever the ops officer might be feeling, it didn't matter. Not anymore. As Crandall had just observed,