The Honor of the Qween

'Wellington, I think. Or maybe it was Rommel.' Courvosier frowned. 'Tanakov?' He shrugged it away. 'The point is, we want them to make the mistake.'

'I don't see how it can hurt us,' Yanakov argued. 'Holding the Fleet in-system accomplishes absolutely nothing. At least this gives us a chance. And, as you say, Captain Harrington will be back in four days. If they have missile colliers out there, we may be able to knock them out and choke off their supplies, even if we miss an actual interception. And even if we only derail their operations for a few days, that'll still be long enough to prevent further damage before she gets back and kicks the bas—'

He broke off, a curious expression on his face, and Courvosier cocked an eyebrow.

'Sorry,' Yanakov half-muttered. 'I was simply assuming you'd commit her ships to help us.'

'Why in the galaxy shouldn't you assume that?' Courvosier demanded.

'But you're not— I mean, we're not—' Yanakov paused and cleared his throat. 'We don't have a treaty yet. If you lose ships or take damage on your own responsibility without one, your government may—'

'My government will do what Her Majesty tells it to do,' Courvosier said flatly, 'and Her Majesty told me to come back with a treaty with Grayson.' Yanakov looked at him wordlessly, and he shrugged. 'I can't very well do that if I let Masada wipe you out, can I?' He shook his head. 'I'm not too worried about the Crown's reaction, or even Parliament's. The Queen's honor is at stake here. And even if it weren't, I wouldn't sleep too well nights if I turned my back on you people, Bernie.'

'Thank you,' Yanakov said very softly, and Courvosier shrugged again, uncomfortably this time.

'Forget it. It's really just a sneaky maneuver to bring your own conservatives around.'

'Of course it is.' Yanakov smiled, and Courvosier grinned back.

'Well, I can pretend, can't I?' He rubbed his chin again and fell silent for a moment. 'In fact, with your permission, I'm going to take Madrigal out with your interception force.'

'What?!' Surprise betrayed Yanakov into the undiplomatic exclamation, but Courvosier only shook his head in mock sorrow.

'I told you you need sleep. Madrigal's sensors are better than anything you—and, ergo, the Masadans—have. If we include her in your intercept force, her gravitics'll pick them up a minimum of two light-minutes before they have the reach to see you. That means you can keep your force under power longer, build a higher base vector, because you'll only have to shut down when they do come back, not when we think they might come back. And just between the two of us, I don't think any Masadan cruiser out there is going to enjoy meeting up with her, Bernie.'

'But ... but you're the head of a diplomatic mission! If anything happens to you—'

'Mr. Houseman will be only too happy to take over in that unhappy event.' Courvosier grimaced. 'Not the happiest of outcomes, I agree, but scarcely disastrous. And I told the FO when I took the job that it was only temporary. As a matter of fact—' he grinned slyly '—I believe I may have slipped up and packed a uniform or two along with all these civvies.'

'But, Raoul—!'

'Are you saying you don't want me along?' Courvosier asked in hurt tones.

'Of course I do! But the possible repercussions—'

'—are far outweighed by the probable benefits. If a Queen's ship fights alongside you against your traditional enemy, it can only be a plus for the ratification of any treaty, don't you think?'

'Of course it would,' Yanakov said, but the words cracked around the edges, for he knew it wasn't diplomatic considerations which shaped the offer. 'Of course,' he went on after he got his voice back under control, 'you're senior to any of my other officers. Hell, you're senior to me!'

'I'll certainly waive seniority,' Courvosier said wryly. 'After all, my entire `fleet' consists of a single destroyer, for God's sake.'

'No, no. Protocol must be observed,' Yanakov said with a tired smile. 'And since this is all a sneaky diplomatic ploy, not a spontaneous and generous offer to help people who have done their best to insult your senior subordinate and half your other officers, we might as well play it to the hilt.' He held Courvosier's eyes warmly and extended his hand.

'I hereby offer you the position of second in command of the Grayson-Manticoran Combined Fleet, Admiral Courvosier. Will you accept?'

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

An admiral's vac suit looked out of place on HMS Madrigal's cramped bridge, for a destroyer had never been intended as a flagship. The assistant astrogator had been squeezed out of his position at Lieutenant Macomb's elbow to provide Courvosier with a chair and a maneuvering display, and if Commander Alvarez seemed totally unbothered, almost everyone else was clearly a little ill at ease in his august presence.

But Lieutenant Commander Mercedes Brigham wasn't. Madrigal's exec had other things on her mind as she stood at the tactical officer's shoulder and peered at her displays, and those displays were why Courvosier wouldn't have been anywhere else, for they gave Madrigal infinitely better information than any other ship in the small fleet accelerating away from Grayson.

The admiral leaned back, resting one hand on his chair's waiting shock frame, and watched his own readouts. His cramped screen wasn't as detailed as the one Brigham and Lieutenant Yountz studied so intently, but it showed the Grayson ships deployed protectively about Madrigal. They'd lost a half-hour of their anticipated 'free time' because a single Masadan destroyer had lagged behind her withdrawing consorts for some reason; aside from that everything was exactly on schedule, and two Grayson destroyers led Madrigal by a light-second and a half, covered by her sensors yet interposing themselves between her and any threat. Not that they were likely to meet one with her to watch their backs, but the Graysons were guarding her like a queen.

It was odd, Courvosier thought. Manticoran destroyers had excellent sensor suites for their displacement, but they were hardly superdreadnoughts. Yet at this moment, Madrigal was the closest thing around. She was a pygmy beside Honor's Fearless, much less a battlecruiser or ship-of-the-wall, but she massed barely twelve thousand tons less than Yanakov's flagship, and her command and control facilities, like her firepower, were light-seconds beyond the best the Graysons could boast.

Given the way Grayson's original colonists had marooned themselves, it was little short of miraculous their descendants had managed to rediscover so much—and survive—on their own, but their tech base was patchy. They'd been fifteen hundred years behind the rest of the galaxy when they were finally rediscovered, yet the progeny of Austin Grayson's anti-tech followers had demonstrated a positive genius for adapting what they already knew to any new scrap of technology they got their hands on.

Neither Endicott nor Yeltsin had been able to attract significant outside help until the Haven-Manticore confrontation spilled over on them. Both were crushingly impoverished; no one in his right mind voluntarily immigrated to an environment like Grayson's; and Masada's theocratic totalitarians didn't even want outsiders. Under the circumstances, the Graysons had made up a phenomenal amount of ground in the two centuries since their rediscovery by the galaxy at large, but there were still holes, and some of them were gaping ones.

Grayson fusion plants were four times as massive as modern reactors of similar output (which was why they still used so many fission plants), and their military hardware was equally out of date—they still used printed circuits, with enormous mass penalties and catastrophic consequences for designed lifetimes—though there were a few unexpected surprises in their mixed technological bag. For example, the Grayson Navy had quite literally invented its own inertial compensator thirty T-years ago because it hadn't been able to get anyone else to explain how it was done. It was a clumsy, bulky thing, thanks to the components they had to use, but from what he'd seen of its stats, it might just be marginally more efficient than Manticore's.

For all that, their energy weapons were pitiful by modern standards, and their missiles were almost worse. Their point defense missiles used reaction drives, for God's sake! That had stunned Courvosier—until he discovered that their smallest impeller missile massed over a hundred and twenty tons. That