The Honor of the Qween

now. It could be argued either way, yet she thought she was right, and if she stayed and the treaty negotiations failed, she would always blame herself, rightly or wrongly, for that failure.

'Still planning to take Troubadour with you?' he asked at last.

'I don't know... .' Honor rubbed her nose. 'I was thinking I should at least leave both tin-cans to show the flag if I pull the cruisers out, Sir.'

'I don't think a single destroyer would make much difference in that regard. And you were right originally; you are going to need someone to do your scouting if the reports of pirate activity are accurate.'

'I could use Apollo for that—' Honor began, but he shook his head.

'You could, but it might be just a bit too pointed to pull both ships with female skippers and leave both ships with men in command, don't you think?'

Honor cocked her head, considering his question, then nodded.

'You may be right.' She drew a deep breath, her hands motionless on Nimitz's fur as she met his eyes again. 'Do I have your permission, then, Sir?'

'All right, Honor,' he sighed, and smiled sadly at her. 'Go ahead. Get out of here—but I don't want you dilly-dallying around to delay your return, young lady! You be back in eleven days and not one minute longer. If I can't sort these bigoted barbarians out in that much time, the hell with them!'

'Yes, Sir!' Honor smiled at him, her relief evident, then looked back down at Nimitz. 'And ... thank you, Sir,' she said very, very softly.

* * *

'Take a look at this, Sir.'

Commander Theisman laid his memo board in his lap and turned his command chair to face his executive officer, and a mobile eyebrow arched as he saw the impeller drive sources glowing in the main tactical display.

'Fascinating, Allen.' He climbed out of his chair and crossed to stand beside his executive officer. 'Have we got a firm ID on who's who?'

'Not absolutely, but we've been tracking them for about three hours, and they just passed turnover for the belt. That far out from Grayson, and on that heading with that acceleration, Tracking's pretty confident they aren't headed anywhere in this system, so they must be the convoy. And if they are, these—' five light codes glowed green '—are almost certainly the freighters, which means these —' three more dots glowed crimson in a triangle about the first five '—are the escorts. And if there're three of them, they're probably the cruisers and one of the tin-cans.'

'Um.' Theisman rubbed his chin. 'All you've got is drive sources, not any indication of mass. That could be both of the cans and the light cruiser,' he pointed out in his best devil's advocate's voice. 'Harrington could be holding her own ship on station and sending the others off.'

'I don't think that's very likely, Sir. You know how terrible the pirates have been out this way.' Their eyes met with a shared flicker of amusement, but Theisman shook his head.

'The Manticorans are good at commerce protection, Al. One of their light cruisers, especially with a couple of destroyers to back her, would make mincemeat out of any of the `outlaw raiders' out here.'

'I still think this one—' one of the crimson lights flashed '—is Fearless, Sir. They're too far away for decent mass readings, but the impeller signature looks heavier than either of the other warships. I think she's got one tin-can out front and the cruisers closed up to cover the merchies' flanks.' The exec paused, tugging at the lobe of one ear. 'We could move in closer, take a little peek at the planetary orbital traffic to see who's left, Sir,' he suggested slowly.

'Forget that shit right now, Al,' his skipper said sternly. 'We look, we listen, and we don't get any closer to Grayson. Their sensors are crap, but they could get lucky. And there's still at least one Manticoran around.'

The exec nodded unhappily. One thing the People's Navy had learned since Basilisk was that Manticore's electronics were better than theirs. How much better was a topic of lively wardroom debate, but given that Captain Honor Harrington's eighty-five-thousand-ton light cruiser had taken out a seven- point-five-million —ton Q-ship, prudence suggested that Haven err on the side of pessimism. At least that way any surprises would be pleasant ones.

'So what do we do, Sir?' he asked finally.

'An excellent question,' Theisman murmured. 'Well, we know some of them are out of the way. And if they're going on to Casca, they can't be back here for ten or twelve days.' He tapped on his teeth for a moment. 'That gives us a window, assuming these turkeys know what to do with it. Wake up Engineering, Al.'

'Yes, Sir. Will we be heading for Endicott or Blackbird, Sir?'

'Endicott. We need to tell Captain Yu—and Sword Simonds, of course—about this. A Masadan courier would take too long getting home, so I think we'll just take this news ourselves.'

'Yes, Sir.'

Theisman returned to his command chair and leaned back, watching the outgoing impeller traces crawl across the display under two hundred gravities of acceleration. Readiness reports flowed in, and he acknowledged them, but there was no rush, and he wanted to be certain one of those crimson dots wasn't going to turn around and head back to Grayson. He waited almost three more hours, until the light codes' velocity had reached 44,000 KPS, and they crossed the hyper limit and vanished from his gravitic sensors.

'All right, Al. Take us out of here,' he said then, and the seventy-five-thousand-ton Masadan destroyer Principality, whose wardroom crest still proclaimed her to be the PNS Breslau, crept carefully away from the asteroid in whose lee she had lain hidden.

Passive sensors probed before her like sensitive cat's whiskers while Theisman made himself sit relaxed in his command chair, projecting an air of calm, and the truth was that Principality herself was safe enough. There wasn't a ship in the Grayson Navy capable of catching or engaging her, and despite the belt's bustling mining activity, the extraction ships tended to cluster in the areas where the asteroids themselves clustered. Principality avoided those spots like the plague and crept along under a fraction of her maximum power, for if the locals' sensor nets were crude and short-ranged, there was at least one modern warship in Grayson orbit, and Theisman had no intention of being spotted by her. Detection could be catastrophic to Haven's plans ... not to mention the more immediate problem that Captain Yu would no doubt string his testicles on a necklace if he let that happen.

It took long, wearing hours, but at last his ship was far enough from Grayson to increase power and curve away from the asteroid belt. Principality's gravitics would detect any civilian vessel far out of radar range and long before she was seen herself, with plenty of time to kill her drive, and her velocity climbed steeply as she headed out-system. She needed to be at least thirty light-minutes from the planet before she translated into hyper, far enough for her hyper footprint to be undetectable, and Theisman relaxed with a quiet sigh as he realized he'd gotten cleanly away once more.

Now it only remained to be seen what Captain Yu—and Sword Simonds, of course—would do with his data.

CHAPTER EIGHT

'Thank you for coming, Admiral Courvosier.'

High Admiral Yanakov stood to greet his guest, and Courvosier's eyebrows twitched as he saw the two women at the table, for the richness of their clothing and jewelry proclaimed that they were two of Yanakov's wives. It was almost unheard of for a Grayson wife to appear at even a private dinner unless the guests were among her husband's closest friends, and Yanakov knew Courvosier knew that ... which made their presence a message.

'Thank you for inviting me,' Courvosier replied, ignoring, as etiquette demanded, the women's presence, for no one had introduced them. But then—

'Allow me to present my wives,' Yanakov continued. 'Rachel, my first wife.' The woman to his right