War Of Honor

'I'm glad you enjoyed it,' she said, her smile broadening as James MacGuiness stepped in from his pantry with a fresh cup of the hot tea her chief of staff preferred. 'Of course, I'm not the person you ought to be complimenting about it.'

'No, and I wasn't complimenting you,' Brigham told her. 'I was simply commenting. The person I intended to compliment about it wasn't here at the moment. Now he is.' She sniffed and looked up at MacGuiness. 'That was delicious, Mac,' she said with dignity.

'Thank you, Commodore,' MacGuiness said gravely. 'Would you like another egg?'

'Some of us, unfortunately, have to be a bit more careful than others about what we eat,' Brigham said in regretful tones.

'Cheer up, Mercedes,' Honor told her while Nimitz bleeked a laugh of his own around a stalk of celery. 'There's always lunch.'

'And I'll look forward to it,' Brigham assured her with a chuckle while she smiled at the steward.

'I'll do my best not to disappoint,' MacGuiness assured her. He was just about to say something more when the com attention signal chimed softly. He made a small face—the grimace of irritation he saved for moments when the outside universe intruded itself into his admiral's mealtimes—and then stepped over to the bulkhead- mounted terminal and pressed the accept key.

'Admiral's day cabin, MacGuiness speaking,' he told the pickup in decidedly repressive accents.

'Bridge, Officer of the Watch, speaking,' Lieutenant Ernest Talbot, Werewolf's communications officer, replied in a respectful voice. 'Sorry to interrupt Her Grace's breakfast, Mr. MacGuiness. But the Captain asked me to inform her that Perimeter Security has just picked up an unidentified incoming hyper footprint. A big one, twenty-two light-minutes from the primary. According to CIC, there are over twenty major drive sources.'

MacGuiness's eyebrows rose, and he started to turn towards Honor, but she was by his side before the movement was more than half completed. She laid one hand on his shoulder and leaned a bit closer to the pickup herself.

'This is the Admiral, Lieutenant Talbot,' she said. 'I assume that the grav-pulse challenge has already been sent?'

'Of course, Your Grace.' Talbot sounded suddenly crisper. 'It was transmitted as soon as they were picked up, exactly—' he paused, obviously checking the time '—seven minutes and forty-five seconds ago. There's been no response.'

'I see.' Honor refrained from pointing out that if there had been a response, the hyper footprint would scarcely have still been unidentified. Then she felt a tiny pang of guilt at the thought. Good officers learned never to assume that someone else was aware of all they were aware of, and subordinates who were willing to risk sounding foolish to be certain their superiors had all relevant information were to be cherished, not scorned.

'Well,' she went on, 'they could still be friendlies who're just a little slow responding, I suppose.' Her tone was that of someone thinking out loud, and Talbot made no response. Nor was any required. Both of them knew that by now every Manticoran or Allied man-of-war was equipped with FTL grav-pulse transmitters . . . and that no Allied com officer was 'slow' enough to not have responded by now.

'Still,' Honor continued, 'this isn't a good time to take chances. My compliments to Captain Cardones, Lieutenant, and ask him to bring the task force to Action Stations.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am!' Talbot said crisply, and the General Quarters alarm woke to clamorous, ear-hurting life less than four seconds later.

* * *

Admiral of the Green Francis Jurgensen felt his belly congeal into a single, massive lump of ice as he stared at the report on the display in front of him. For several seconds, his brain simply refused to work at all.

Then the real panic set in.

Sheer, shocked disbelief had held him paralyzed as he read through the brief, terse communique and the attached copy of the official news release. None of it could possibly have been true! Except that even as he'd told himself that, he'd known that it was. Now the shock had worn off enough to lose its anesthetic edge, and he jerked up out of his comfortable chair with an abruptness which would have startled anyone familiar with the eternally self-possessed exterior he was always so careful to present to the rest of the universe. For a moment, he stood poised, looking almost as if he wanted to physically flee the damning information contained in the report. But, of course, there was nowhere to run, and he licked his lips nervously.

He walked over to the window of his office, his strides jerky, and leaned against the towering panel of crystoplast as he gazed out over the early evening skyline of the City of Landing. The Star Kingdom's capital's air traffic moved steadily against the darkening cobalt vault of the planet Manticore's star-pricked heavens, and he closed his eyes as the serene, jewel-bright chips of light floated steadily about their business. Somehow, the tranquility of the everyday scene only made the report's contents and conclusions even worse.

His brain began to function again, after a fashion. It darted about, like a frightened fish in too small an aquarium, bumping its snout again and again against the unyielding crystal wall which kept it pent. But, like the fish, it found no escape.

There was no point even trying to suppress this information, he realized. It wasn't an agent report, or an analyst's respectfully-phrased disagreement with his own position which could be ignored or conveniently misfiled. In fact, it was little more than a verbatim transcript of Thomas Theisman's own news release. The high-speed courier the agent-in-charge in Nouveau Paris had chartered to get it to him as quickly as possible couldn't have beaten the normal news service dispatch boat by more than a few hours. Perhaps a standard day, at most. Which meant that if he didn't report it to Sir Edward Janacek—and thus to the rest of the High Ridge Government—they would read about it in their morning newsfaxes.

He shuddered at the thought. That prospect was enough to quash any temptation, even one as powerful as the auto-response defensive reaction which urged him to 'lose' this particular report the way he'd lost others from time to time. But this one was different. It wasn't merely inconvenient; it was catastrophic.

No. He couldn't suppress it, or pretend it hadn't happened. But he did have a few hours before he would be forced to share it with his fellow space lords and their political masters. There was time for at least the start of a damage control effort, although it was unlikely to be anywhere near as effective as he needed it to be.

The worst part of it, he reflected, as his brain settled into more accustomed thought patterns and began considering alternative approaches to minimizing the consequences, was the fact that he'd assured Janacek so confidently that the Peeps had no modern warships. That was what was going to stick sideways in the First Lord's craw. Yet even though Jurgensen could confidently expect Janacek to fixate on that aspect of the intelligence debacle, he knew it was only the very tip of the iceberg of ONI's massive failure. Bad enough that the Peeps had managed to build so many ships of the wall without his even suspecting they were doing it, but he also had no hard information at all on what sort of hardware they'd come up with to put aboard them.

He thought still harder, pushing the unpalatable bits of information about, studying them from all angles as he sought the best way to present them.

However he did it, it was going to be . . . unpleasant.

* * *

The rest of Honor's staff was waiting on Werewolf's flag bridge when she and Mercedes, both now wearing their skinsuits, stepped out of the lift. She nodded to them all, but her attention was on Andrea Jaruwalski.

'Still no reply to the challenge?' she asked. She reached up to rub Nimitz's ears where he sat on her shoulder in his custom-built skinsuit, and he pressed back against her hand. He held his miniature helmet tucked under one mid-limb, and she smiled as the taste of his emotions flowed through her.

'No, Ma'am,' Jaruwalski replied. 'They're accelerating in-system at a steady four hundred gravities, and they haven't said a word. CIC has managed to refine its data a little further, though. They make it twenty-two superdreadnoughts or dreadnoughts, eight battlecruisers or large heavy cruisers, fifteen or twenty or light cruisers, and what looks like four transports.'

'Transports?' Honor raised an eyebrow at her operations officer, and Jaruwalski shrugged.

'That's CIC's best guess so far, Ma'am. Whatever they are, they're big, but their wedge strength looks low for warships of their apparent tonnage. So it looks like they're military auxiliaries of some sort, whether they're