Ashes Of Victory

process instead of leaving the impression that we'd just shot her out of hand and dumped her in a shallow grave. And we were hardly in a position to risk shaking public confidence by announcing Cordelia's death or what had really happened to Tepes, so—'

He shrugged, and no one in the conference room needed any maps to figure out what he'd left unsaid. None of them had been part of Cordelia Ransom's faction on the Committee. If they ever had been, they would not have been in this room... or any longer on the Committee. They all knew how useful Pierre and Saint-Just had found the delay in the official announcement of Ransom's death when it came time to purge her supporters. But still...

'That's the thing I find hardest to understand,' Turner murmured with the air of a man thinking out loud. 'How could she possibly have survived what happened to Tepes? And if she did, how could we not have known?'

'Esther?' Pierre glanced at McQueen. 'Would you have any thoughts on those questions?'

Carefully, now, she thought. Let's speak very carefully, Esther.

'I've had a lot of thoughts about them, Citizen Chairman,' she said aloud, and that much at least was true. 'I've gone back and pulled the scan records from Count Tilly's flag deck and combat information center, and I've had them analyzed to a fare-thee-well over at the Octagon.' She reached inside her civilian jacket and extracted a thin chip folio, tossing it on the table so that it slid to a stop directly in front of Pierre. 'That's the result of our analyses, and also the actual records of the explosion, and none of my people have been able to find anything to explain how Harrington and her people could have gotten off the ship and down to the planet before she blew. Or, for that matter, how Citizen Brigadier Tresca and his people groundside could possibly have missed something like that. Obviously they must have used some of Tepes' small craft, although how they could have taken control of them in the first place is beyond me. There were less than thirty of them aboard, and I can't even begin to imagine how so few people could fight their way through an entire ship's company to the boat bays. But even assuming they could pull that off, the only small craft anyone actually saw was the single assault shuttle that Camp Charon used the orbital defenses to destroy.'

She paused, watching Pierre (and Saint-Just) as neutrally as possible. The chips she'd passed to the Citizen Chairman contained exactly what she'd said they did. What they did not contain was the footage from Count Tilly's flag deck immediately after Tepes had blown up. McQueen had been very specific about the time chops she'd assigned when she instructed the Navy experts to analyze the records. She still wasn't certain what Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville had been up to when he bent over his tac officer's console, and she had no intention of allowing anyone else to figure that out if there was anything at all she could do to prevent it. Lester Tourville was entirely too good a fighting officer to hand over to StateSec. And the fact that she'd covered for him, once she found a discreet way to let him know she had, ought to prove extremely useful as a loyalty enhancer down the road...

'The one thing I can suggest with some degree of confidence,' she went on after a moment, 'is that Harrington and her people must have used the temporary degradation of the Hades sensor net caused by the destruction of the known shuttle to slip their own small craft through to the surface without anyone groundside seeing them coming.'

'Degradation?' Turner repeated, and she cocked an eyebrow at Pierre. The Citizen Chairman nodded almost imperceptibly, and she turned to Turner.

'The ground defense center at Camp Charon used high megaton-range orbital mines to destroy the Manties' escape shuttle — or what everyone had assumed was their escape shuttle — just before Tepes blew up. The blast and EMP from that, coupled with the effect of Tepes' own fusion plants when they let go, created a very brief window in which the sensor net was effectively `blinded' and reduced to a fraction of its normal efficiency. That has to be when Harrington's people slipped through to the planet.'

'Are you suggesting that they planned from the beginning to use our own response to open the way for them?'

'I think it's obvious that they must have,' McQueen replied. 'And we're talking about Honor Harrington here, Avram.'

'Harrington is not some sort of boogeyman,' Saint-Just said in frosty tones. Several people cringed, but McQueen met his cold eyes steadily.

'I didn't say she was,' she said. 'But it's obvious from her record that she's one of the best, if not the best, Manty officers of her generation. With the sole exception of what happened at Adler — where, I might add, she still succeeded in her primary mission of protecting the convoy under her command, despite atrociously bad luck — she's kicked the crap out of every commander we've put up against her, Navy and StateSec alike, apparently. All I'm saying here is that this is exactly the sort of maneuver I would expect from her.' She raised a hand as Saint-Just's eyes narrowed and continued before he could speak. 'And, no, I'm not saying that I would have anticipated something like this before the fact. I wouldn't have, and I have no doubt she would have taken me completely by surprise, as well. I'm simply saying that, looking back after the fact, I'm not in the least surprised that she managed to anticipate Camp Charon's logical response to an `escaping' shuttle and found a way to use it brilliantly to her advantage. It's exactly the sort of thing she'd been doing to us for the last ten or twelve years now.'

'Which is why she is a boogeyman.' Pierre sighed. 'Or why altogether too many of our people regard her as one. Not to mention the reason the Manties and their allies are so ecstatic about having her back.' He showed his teeth in an almost-smile. 'Bottom line, it doesn't really matter whether or not she's some sort of warrior demigoddess if that's what her people think she is.'

'I wouldn't go quite that far, Sir,' McQueen said judiciously. 'What she actually manages to do to us is nothing to sneeze at. Still, you're essentially correct. She's much more dangerous to us, right this moment, as a symbol than as a naval officer.'

'Especially given how badly shot up she seems to be,' Turner agreed with a nod.

'I wouldn't count too heavily on her injuries to keep her out of action,' McQueen cautioned. 'None of them appear to have affected her command abilities. Or not,' she added dryly, 'to judge by the rather neat little operation she apparently just pulled off, at any rate. And it's entirely possible, if the situation turns nasty enough for them, for the Manties to send her back out, arm or no arm.'

'On the other hand, that would appear, at the moment, to be one of the brighter spots of the situation,' Pierre pointed out. 'For right now, at least, your people are still pushing the Manties back, Esther. Are you in a position to keep on doing that?'

'Unless something changes without warning, yes,' McQueen said. 'But I caution you again, Sir, that my confidence is based on the situation as it now exists and that the situation in question is definitely open to change. In particular, we know from the Operation Icarus after-battle reports that the Manties hit us with something new in both Basilisk and Hancock, and we're still not certain exactly what it was in either case.'

'I still believe you're reading too much into those reports.' Saint-Just's tone was just a tiny bit too reasonable, and McQueen allowed her green eyes to harden as they met his. 'We know they used LACs at Hancock,' the StateSec CO went on, 'but we've known ever since our commerce raiding operations went sour in Silesia that they had an improved light attack craft design. My understanding is that the analysts have concluded the Hancock LACs were simply more of the same.'

'The civilian analysts have concluded that,' McQueen replied so frostily several people winced.

McQueen and Saint-Just had clashed over this before, and their differences, however cloaked in outward propriety, had become ever more pointed over the last few months. McQueen wanted to resurrect the old Naval Intelligence Bureau as a Navy-run shop, staffed by Navy officers. Her official reason was that the military needed an in-house intelligence capability run by people who understood operational realities. Saint-Just was equally determined to retain the present arrangement, in which NavInt was merely one more section of State Security's sprawling intelligence apparatus. His official reason was that centralized control insured that all relevant information was available from a single set of data banks and eliminated redundancy and the inefficiency of turf wars. In fact, his real reason was that he suspected that her real