The Honor of the Qween

'I see.' Yu pursed his lips, then shrugged. 'Sir, my orders are to support your decisions, but I'm also charged with advising you on the best use of Thunder and Principality in pursuit of our common goals. Obviously, that includes giving you my honest opinion of the best timing for Jericho, and frankly, the best timing has already escaped us. I hope my saying that doesn't offend you, but I'm a military man, not a diplomat. As such, my first concern must be avoiding misunderstandings, not the formal nuances of courtesy.'

'I realize that, Captain, and I appreciate it,' Simonds said, and, in fact, he did. He might worry about his blood pressure when Yu disagreed too bluntly with him, and keeping him ignorant of Maccabeus made things much harder all around, but it was far better to hear the man out, heathen or no, than drive him into working behind Simonds' back.

'Within those limitations, then,' Yu continued, 'I must respectfully argue that God helps those who help themselves. This `escort force' may not withdraw at all, at least until it's time to convey Manticore's diplomats home, and even a draft treaty of alliance might very well bring the Manticorans in against you if you hit Grayson after their delegation leaves. I believe the probability that a binding alliance between them will make any future action far more dangerous must be balanced against the possibility that the escort's current orders are simply to protect the convoy and their own representatives.'

'You may be correct, Captain,' Simonds admitted, 'but that supposes that we act openly at all. The Council believes—rightly, I think—that even if they sign their cursed treaty it will be primarily defensive. Without a Manticoran guarantee to support offensive action, the Apostate won't dare attack us alone, and one thing the Faithful have learned is patience. We would prefer to be your friends and to strike now, but if doing so jeopardizes the security of the Faith, we're prepared to wait. Sooner or later you and Manticore will settle your differences, one way or the other, and Manticore's interest in this region will wane. Either way, our chance will come in time.'

'Perhaps, Sir—and perhaps not. As you say, you've waited six centuries, but those have been six centuries of relative peace in this region. The odds are very high that that peace will soon be a thing of the past. My superiors hope and believe that any war with Manticore will be short, but we can't positively guarantee that, and Endicott and Yeltsin's Star will be caught squarely between us when the shooting starts. If Manticore secures base rights in Yeltsin, that shooting is almost certain to move right onto your doorstep, with consequences no one can predict.'

Simonds tasted the distant tang of iron in the captain's measured words. Yu was being careful not to say that one of those consequences might well be the annexation of both star systems by Masada's present 'ally,' but they both knew what he meant.

'Under the circumstances, Sir,' Yu went on quietly, 'it's my opinion that any operation which promises a significant chance of victory now is well worth a few risks. From our perspective, it relieves us of the necessity of dealing with an advanced enemy base squarely in our path to Manticore; from your perspective, it avoids the high probability that your star system will be caught in the crossfire at a later date.'

'There's a great deal of truth in that, Captain,' Simonds conceded, 'and I'll certainly bear it in mind when next I speak with the Council. On the other hand, some of the Elders may feel your victory over Manticore is less assured than you seem to believe.'

'Nothing is ever assured in war, Sir, but we're far bigger than they are, with a much larger fleet. And, as you yourself have pointed out, Manticore is weak and degenerate enough to allow a woman to hold the reins of power.'

Simonds twitched, face flushing, and Yu hid a smile. The Sword would undoubtedly recognize the manipulation of that last sentence, but it appealed too strongly to the man's intolerance for him to simply shrug it off as someone from a more civilized culture might.

Simonds swallowed a harsh remark and looked long and hard at the captain, sensing the smile behind those courteous eyes. He knew Yu didn't believe his own dismissal of Manticore's degeneracy ... but, then, Yu himself sprang from a degenerate society. The People's Republic of Haven was even more corrupt than most foreigners, yet the Faithful were willing to use any tool that was offered for God's Work. And when one used a tool, one need not tell it of all of one's other tools. Especially not when the object was to use one of them to displace another at the proper time, and Haven's cynical ambition was too barefaced, and far too voracious, for anyone to trust. That was the very reason anything Yu said, however professional and reasonable, must be examined again and again before it was accepted.

'Your point is well taken, Captain,' the Sword said after a moment, 'and, as I say, the Elders and I will consider it carefully. I believe the decision to wait until the Manticoran escort withdraws will stand, but I also feel certain God will guide us to the correct decision in the end.'

'As you say, Sir,' Yu replied. 'My superiors may not share your religion, Sword Simonds, but we respect your beliefs.'

'We're aware of that, Captain.' Simonds said, though he didn't for a moment believe Yu's superiors respected the Faith. But that was acceptable. Masada was accustomed to dealing with unbelievers, and if Yu was sincere, if Haven did, indeed, believe in the religious tolerance it prated about, then their society was even more degenerate than Simonds had believed.

There could be no compromise with those who rejected one's own beliefs, for compromise and coexistence only opened the door to schism. A people or a faith divided against itself became the sum of its weaknesses, not its strengths, and anyone who didn't know that was doomed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Hyper space's rippling energy fluxes and flurries of charged particles hashed any sensor beyond a twenty- light-minute radius, but the convoy's clustered light codes were clear and sharp and gratifyingly tight on Honor's maneuvering display as it approached the hyper limit of Yeltsin's Star at a comfortable third of light-speed.

The translation from n-space to hyper was speed critical—at anything above .3 C, dimensional shear would tear a ship apart—but the reverse wasn't true. Which didn't make high-speed downward translations pleasant. The energy bleed as the convoy crossed each hyper wall would slow them to a crawl long before they reached the alpha bands, and shear wasn't a factor as far as hardware was concerned, but the effect on humans was something else again. Naval crews were trained for crash translations, yet there was a limit to what training could do to offset the physical distress and violent nausea, and there was no point in putting anyone—especially her merchant crews—through that.

'Ready to begin translation in forty-one seconds, Ma'am,' Lieutenant Commander DuMorne reported from Astrogation.

'Very well, Mr. DuMorne. The con is yours.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. I have the con. Helm, prepare for initial translation on my mark.'

'Ready for translation, aye,' Chief Killian replied, and the helmsman's hand hovered over the manual override, just in case the astrogator's computers dropped the ball, while Honor leaned back to watch.

'Mark!' DuMorne said crisply, and the normally inaudible hum of Fearless's hyper generator became a basso growl.

Honor swallowed against a sudden ripple of nausea as the visual display altered abruptly. The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted 'down' the hyper space gradient.

Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor's stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn't even detect. DuMorne's calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced again—less violently this time—as their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight 'down' across a 'distance' which had no physical existence,