Echoes Of Honor

citizen major general still didn't like the citizen lieutenant a bit, but he'd been forced to change his mind about him in at least one regard. He'd figured the smarmy, apple-polishing little bastard to be completely useless, but he'd been wrong. The citizen lieutenant wasn't particularly skilled at his official duties, but he attacked them (when anyone was looking, at any rate) with enormous energy, and he'd displayed a facile wit at borrowing other people's work or at least explaining away his own failures. More to the point, however, he had a quality StateSec occasionally needed badly: amorality.

It grieved Thornegrave to admit that, for he disliked seeing people in SS uniform who were devoted to the Revolution solely out of ambition, not conviction. He despised such fellow-travelers on a personal level, and on a professional one, he regarded them as dangerous soft spots in the People's armor. If they would profess one belief out of expediency, there was no reason to believe they wouldn't embrace conversion to another the instant the winds of advantage looked like shifting.

Yet much as he disliked admitting it, he knew people like Citizen Lieutenant Rodham made the best informers. One had to be careful to ensure that they weren't 'informing' on some obstacle to their own advancement simply to get the unfortunate person out of their way, but people who had no convictions would not be led by mistaken convictions to risk their own hides to protect others. More to the point, perhaps, they had a priceless gift any really good informer needed: they made people trust them. In Rodham's case, for example, he had not only inveigled Citizen Major Regina Sanderman into his bed, but also into some highly indiscreet pillow talk. Sanderman didn't know it yet, but Thornegrave did. He and his chief of staff were watching the citizen major very carefully, waiting for the actions which would confirm the disaffection her talks with Rodham had suggested.

I really do hate this little bottom-feeder, Thornegrave reflected as, once again, the citizen lieutenant punched the code to summon a lift car, but the People can't afford to throw away a perfectly useful tool just because its handle is a little slimy. And at least he does know his way around this damned ship better than I do. I wonder how much of that comes from nipping in and out of other people's bunks?

'Does the Citizen General wish the Citizen Lieutenant to escort him to the observation blister, Sir?' Rodham asked when the car arrived, and Thornegrave looked at him sharply. Rodham hadn't been on Flag Bridge when Yang made her offer, nor had Thornegrave yet told him where they were headed.

It seems I underestimated him. He's got better sources than I thought. But he may be even stupider than I thought, too, if he's going around showing off the fact that he's keeping tabs on me. Or else he's clever enough— and gutsy enough—to deliberately risk pissing me off by displaying that his ability as an information gatherer extends even to my own movements because he figures his demonstrated value will impress me enough to outweigh my irritation with him?

'Yes,' he said after a moment. 'Please do escort me to the blister, Citizen Lieutenant.'

'Of course, Sir! If the Citizen General will follow me, please?'

Oh, I will. I will! Thornegrave decided. And I'll give you a little more rope, too, Citizen Lieutenant. You're too full of your own cleverness to last forever, but it'll be interesting to see how far you get before you fall off that cliff you're so busy building... and how far you bounce.

* * *

'Hyper footprint!'

Honor looked up as the grav scanner chief of the watch called out the warning. All other sound ceased in the control room, and every eye joined Honor's in swinging to the master plot as the bright red icons of unidentified hyper translations blinked into life. She realized she was holding her breath, counting the sources as they appeared, and forced herself to breathe out and look away, displaying her calmness to the troops.

'Seventeen point sources, Ma'am!' the chief petty officer announced.

'Acknowledged, Scan. Thank you, and stay on it,' Commander Phillips replied. She was the CO of Charon Control now, for Harriet Benson was back in space, commanding ENS Bacchante while Alistair McKeon commanded ENS Krashnark and Jesus Ramirez acted as the fledgling 'Elysian Space Navy's' senior officer in space. Honor would have preferred to be out there herself, but her place was here, with the bulk of her people, and between them, Jesus and Alistair made a team which would be hard to beat. Especially with Benson to back them up.

The scan tech said something else to Phillips—a question this time, asked too quietly for Honor to hear— and the commander nodded. Then she patted the CPO on his shoulder and crossed to Honor.

'Any orders, Milady?'

'No,' Honor replied, watching the plot once more. 'I—'

'Excuse me, Admiral, but we have their probable course plotted,' the senior tracking officer said. Honor looked at the woman and nodded for her to continue. 'We make it right on six hours for a zero-zero intercept, Ma'am. Their present accel is two-point-one-six KPS squared, which is right on the money for the Longstops, and they haven't had time to ask for course directions yet, but their heading is right to take them exactly to Point Alpha. I'd say it has to be the Shilo Force.'

'Thank you, Commander.' Point Alpha was the entry point for the shortest of the four cleared routes through the Hades minefields. All four entry points were marked on the standard SS charts, which was evidence that those were StateSec ships out there, but Charon Control routinely shifted the actual routes around. That meant the newcomers certainly would ask for course directions shortly... assuming Commander Ushakovna was correct, of course.

Honor suppressed a desire to grimace and nobly refrained from pointing out that she hadn't asked Tracking to speculate, and she heard (and felt) Nimitz's quiet bleek of entertainment from her shoulder at her restraint. Commander Ushakovna was almost certainly right, after all, and Nimitz and Honor both knew Honor's fleeting temptation to say something cutting stemmed solely from her own nervous tension.

Well, at least I didn't do it, Honor thought wryly, and tasted Nimitz's agreement over their link. The cat leaned forward in the carrier she wore on her back now, and the tip of his nose whuffled gently through her hair to find the back of her ear while his amused love flowed into her.

'All right, people,' she said, turning to look over the staff manning the control room. 'We should be receiving their ID transmission within the next ten minutes or so, but it's going to be a long, slow haul before they get close enough for us to make our move. I want you all to take a deep breath and settle down. We only get one shot at this, but we've done it before on a smaller scale, and we can do it again. Commander Phillips.'

'Yes, Milady?'

'If you would, please, I want everyone relieved in rotation. We've got the trained personnel. Let's be sure the people who are going to be carrying the ball when the penny drops are rested and fed.'

'Aye, aye, Milady. I'll see to it.'

* * *

Citizen Major General Thornegrave paused, his hands resting lightly on his keyboard. The words of the memo on the living conditions to be provided for the forced laborers in Seabring glowed steadily on his terminal, but his attention drifted away from them once more. It wasn't like him to be distracted this way... but, then, he seldom had a memory quite so spectacular to do the distracting, either.

The hyper translation had been all Citizen Commodore Yang had promised. He'd never imagined anything like it, and he knew he'd stood there, gawking through the observation blister's magnifying grav lens, as ship after ship followed Farnese across the hyper-space wall into the Cerberus System. The sleek battlecruisers had been magnificent enough, with the two hundred and fifty-kilometer disks of their Warshawski sails bleeding blue lightning, but the transports had been even more awesome. They outmassed the battlecruisers by over five-to-one, and despite their weaker drives, the actual area of their sails was much greater. They had flashed into existence like huge, azure soap bubbles, blazing against the blackness like brief-lived blue suns, and the sight had driven home the reality of their sheer size. There were many larger ships in space, yet for the first time in his memory, Thornegrave had been pushed into standing back and appreciating the sheer scale of the human race's dreams. By many standards, the Longstops were little more than moderately oversized cargo barges, and he knew it, but they didn't feel that way as they glowed and flashed in the long night.

And if we can build ships like that, surely we also have the capability to complete the Revolution, he'd thought, gazing in awe at the spectacle. But then he'd felt a cold chill as the unsought counterargument trickled through his brain: Unless someone equally capable— like the goddamned Manties—manages to stop us.

It was at such moments that he most missed Cordelia Ransom. Unlike ninety-nine-point-nine percent of his personnel, Prestwick Thornegrave knew what had really happened to Ransom right here in this system. In his