position us quite nicely for a later activation of Perseus One or Three.'
'And if Manticore chooses to continue operations rather than accept our peace terms?' Palmer-Levy asked.
'In that case we could proceed with Perseus Three—unless we've been hurt far worse than I expect—or retreat to our pre-war positions and negotiate a ceasefire from there. The second option would be far more disadvantageous, but it would still be available if military operations blow up in our faces.'
'And do you have a preference for one of the four attack plans, Amos?' Harris asked.
'My personal preference is for Perseus Three, if we want a permanent decision, or for Perseus Four, which substantially lessens our overall risk, if our objectives are more limited. Exactly what our actual objective is, of course, is a political decision, Mr. President.'
'I see.' Harris pinched the bridge of his nose again, then looked around the table. 'Comments, ladies and gentlemen?'
'We've got to continue expanding our economic base if we're going to maintain the Basic Living Stipend payments,' De La Sangliere said heavily, 'And if the CRU did take Walter out, I think we have to be very cautious about curtailing the BLS.'
Harris nodded somberly. Two-thirds of Havens home-world population was now on the Dole, and rampant inflation was an economic fact of life. Faced with a treasury which had been effectively empty for over a century, desperation had driven Frankel to propose limiting BLS adjustments to the inflation rate, maintaining its actual buying power without increase. The carefully phrased 'leaks' Jessup had arranged to test-flight the idea had provoked riots in virtually every Prole housing unit, and, two months later, Kanamashi had put twelve explosive pulser darts into Frankel's chest, requiring a closed-coffin state funeral.
It was, Harris reflected grimly, one of the less ambiguous 'protest votes' on record, and he understood the near panic thoughts of actual BLS cuts woke in his cabinet colleagues.
'Given those considerations,' De La Sangliere went on, 'we've got to gain access to the systems beyond Manticore, especially the Silesian Confederacy. If anyone knows some way we can grab them off without fighting Manticore first, I, for one, would be delighted to hear of it.'
'There isn't one.' Palmer-Levy looked around the table, daring anyone to disagree with her flat assertion. No one did, and Jessup endorsed her comment with a sharp nod. Bergren looked far more unhappy than either of his colleagues, but the dapper foreign minister also nodded unwilling assent. 'Besides,' the security minister went on, 'a foreign crisis might help cool off the domestic front, at least in the short term. It always has before.'
'That's true.' There was an almost hopeful note in De La Sangliere's voice. 'Traditionally, the People's Quorum's always accepted a freeze in the BLS for the duration of actual military operations.'
'Of course they have.' Dumarest snorted. They know we're fighting for more slops for their trough!'
Harris winced at her caustic cynicism. It was just as well Elaine was in charge of the war ministry and not something with more public exposure, he reflected, but he couldn't fault her analysis.
'Exactly.' Palmer-Levy's smile was cold as she glanced at Parnell. 'You say we may take losses against the Manticorans, Admiral?' Parnell nodded. 'But would operations against them be extended?'
'I don't see how they could be too extended, Ms. Secretary. Their fleet simply isn't large enough to absorb the kind of losses we can. Unless they somehow managed to inflict an incredibly lopsided loss ratio, it would have to be a fairly short war.'
'That's what I thought,' Palmer-Levy said in a satisfied tone. 'And it might actually work in our favor to take a certain number of casualties. I'm sure you could put the right spin control on it and use the deaths of our gallant defenders to mobilize public opinion in our time of crisis, couldn't you, Duncan?'
'I could, indeed.' Jessup almost licked his chops—and did rub his hands—at the prospect of such a propaganda coup, oblivious to the sudden, angry glitter in Parnell's eyes 'In fact, we can probably build up a balance of support for future need, if we handle it right. It would certainly be a far cry from the kind of growing unrest we're seeing now, anyway.'
'There you are, then,' Palmer-Levy said. 'What we need is a short, victorious war... and I think we all know where we can find one, don't we?'
CHAPTER ONE
Dame Honor Harrington dropped her long, rolled bundle and removed a hat someone on Old Earth of two millennia past would have called a fedora. She dried the sweatband with a handkerchief, then sat on the weatherworn rock outcrop with a sigh of relief, laid the hat beside her, and looked out over the magnificent panorama.
Wind cold enough to make her grateful for her leather jacket ruffled sweat-damp hair that was longer than it had been before her convalescence. It was still far shorter than current fashion decreed, but she ran her fingers through it with a curiously guilty sensuality. She'd worn it cropped close for helmets and zero-gee for so long she'd forgotten how satisfying its curly, silken weight could feel.
She lowered her hands and stared out over the endless reaches of the Tannerman Ocean. Even here, a thousand meters above its wrinkled blue and silver, she smelled salt on the chill wind. It was a smell she'd been born to, yet it was perpetually new, as well. Perhaps because she'd spent so little time on
She turned her head and looked down, down, down to where she'd begun her climb. A small splash of bright green stood out boldly against the red-gold and yellow of autumn-touched grass, and she twitched the muscles of her left eye socket in one of the patterns she'd learned in the endless months of therapy.
There was a moment of disorientation, a sense that she was moving even while she sat still, and the green splash was suddenly much larger. She blinked, still not fully accustomed to the effect, and reminded herself to get more practice with her new eye. But the thought was distant, almost absentminded, as the prosthesis' telescopic function brought the sprawling, green-roofed structure and the greenhouses clustered about it into sharp focus.
That roof rose in a steep, snow-shedding peak, for Sphinx lay so far from the GO component of the Manticore binary system that only an exceptionally active carbon dioxide cycle made it habitable at all. It was a cold world, with huge icecaps, a year sixty-three T-months long, and long, slow seasons. Even here, barely forty-five degrees below the equator, its natives measured snowfall in meters, and children born in autumn—as she herself had been—learned to walk before spring came.
Off-worlders shuddered at the very thought of a Sphinx winter. If pressed, they might agree that Manticore-B IV, otherwise known as Gryphon, had more violent weather, but it was also warmer, and its year was much shorter. At least whatever happened there was over three times as quickly, and nothing could change their considered opinion that anyone who voluntarily lived on Sphinx year-round had to be crazy.
Honor smiled at the thought as she studied the stone house where twenty generations of Harringtons had been born, but there was an edge of truth in it. Sphinx's climate and gravity made for sturdy, independent inhabitants. They might not be crazy, but they were self-sufficient and stubborn—one might even say obstinate.
Leaves rustled, and she turned her head as a fast-moving blur of cream-and-gray fur snaked out of the pseudo-laurel behind her. The six-limbed treecat belonged to the crown oak and picket wood of lower elevations, but he was at home here in the Copper Walls, as well. Certainly he'd spent enough time wandering their slopes with her as a child to become so.
He scampered across the bare rock, and she braced herself as he leapt into her lap. He landed with a solid thump, his nine-plus standard kilos working out at almost twelve and a half here, and she oofed in reproach.
He seemed unimpressed and rose on his haunches, bracing his mid-limbs' hand-paws on her shoulders to gaze into her face with bright, grass-green eyes. Near-human intelligence examined her from those very unhuman eyes, and then he touched her left cheek with a long-fingered true-hand and gave a soft sigh of satisfaction when the skin twitched at the contact.
'No, it hasn't stopped working again,' she told him, running her own fingers over his fluffy fur. He sighed again, this time in unabashed pleasure, and oozed down with a buzzing purr. He was a limp, heavy warmth across
