War Of Honor

aboard Hephaestus on behalf of the Royal Manticoran Astrophysics Investigation Agency, its scientific team, and its Director, Admiral Reynaud.' He turned his head to smile at Reynaud, then returned his attention to the spectators.

'As you know,' he began, 'over the past two and a half T-years, we've been engaged in the systematic search for additional termini of the Manticore Wormhole Junction. It's been a painstaking process, and a time- consuming one. But thanks in no small part to the observations and diligent work of my colleague, Dr. Wix, and to a quite disproportionate amount of pure good fortune, we are considerably ahead of any schedule we could have realistically projected as little as six, or even four, months ago. In fact, we are now in a position to dispatch a properly manned survey ship through the Junction's seventh terminus.

'That ship will depart from the Manticore System next Thursday.' The entire audience seemed to inhale simultaneously, and he produced his most genuine smile of the entire news conference. 'Precisely where it will depart to, and precisely when it will return, are questions I will not be able to answer today. No one will . . . until the ship and its crew have done both of those things. If you have any other questions, however, I'll do my best to answer them.'

* * *

'Excuse me, Ma'am. I apologize for interrupting, but you wanted to know when the Secretary of War's pinnace was fifteen minutes out.'

'Thank you, Paulette.' Shannon Foraker looked up from her earnest conversation with Lester Tourville and smiled briefly at her flag lieutenant. 'Please inform Captain Reumann that we'll be joining him in the boat bay momentarily.'

'Of course, Ma'am,' Lieutenant Baker murmured and withdrew from the day cabin almost as unobtrusively as she'd entered it.

Foraker turned back to her guests. Tourville half-reclined in the cabin's largest chair with all of his usual loose-limbed, casual ease. No one had seemed inclined to dispute his possession of it . . . particularly since it was positioned directly under an air return. Javier Giscard sat rather more neatly in his own chair, his mouth quirked in a fond half-smile as he watched the tendrils of smoke wreathing up from Tourville's cigar towards the ventilator grille. Their chiefs of staff formed the perimeter of the conversational group along with Captain Anders, but Commander Clapp, the most junior officer present, sat directly to Foraker's right. It probably wasn't evident to anyone who didn't know him as well as she did, but the commander was clearly more than a little uncomfortable at finding himself in such high-ranked company. Not that he'd allowed any trace of that to color the informal briefing he'd just given Tourville and Giscard.

'Obviously,' Foraker told the two senior admirals as the hatch closed behind Baker, 'we're going to have to head on down to the boat bay shortly. Before we do, though, did you have any more questions you wanted to ask Mitchell?'

'Not really. Not any specific ones, anyway,' Tourville replied. 'I'm sure some questions will occur to me eventually, but for now I think I need to spend some time digesting what he's already told us. Javier?'

'That sums up my own reaction pretty well, I think,' Giscard agreed. 'But I would like to say, Commander Clapp, that what you've already told us is impressive. To be perfectly honest, I'll be much happier if we never have to put your doctrine to the test, but the fact that we've got it if we need it is a vast relief.'

'I'm flattered that you think that, Sir,' Clapp said after a moment. 'But as I keep pointing out, however well it may have performed in the sims, it hasn't been tested under real-world conditions.'

'Understood.' Giscard nodded. Then he shrugged. 'Unfortunately, the only way to test it in the real world is to find ourselves back in a shooting war with the Manties. That may be going to happen whether we want it to or not, but just between you and me, I'd like to go on being short of real-world test results for as long as possible.'

'I'm sure we all would, Sir,' Foraker agreed, then glanced at her wrist chrono and made a small face. 'And now, I'm afraid, we really do have to head for the lift.'

* * *

Thomas Theisman didn't have to be a mind reader to recognize the disciplined anxiety behind the faces of the three admirals assembled in Sovereign of Space's flag briefing room to meet with him and Admiral Arnaud Marquette, the chief of the Naval Staff which Theisman had painfully rebuilt after its predecessor's destruction in the McQueen coup attempt. The five admirals were alone, aside from the fleet commanders' chiefs of staff and his own senior military aide, Captain Alenka Borderwijk, and he knew Tourville and Giscard, at least, had been a little surprised by his decision to exclude everyone else. Foraker hadn't, but then, he'd spoken directly with her when Sovereign of Space first arrived in the Haven System. Tourville and Giscard might look a bit anxious at the departure from the norm; Foraker, despite her best effort to conceal it, looked a lot anxious because she already knew—or suspected—the reason for that departure.

'First,' the Secretary of War said after everyone was seated, 'let me apologize for the somewhat unusual circumstances of this conference. I assure you all that I'm not trying to be melodramatic, and that I don't think I'm allowing my megalomania or paranoia to get the better of me. On the other hand,' his smile was thin, but it carried an edge of genuine humor, 'I could be wrong about that.'

'Well, Tom,' Tourville said with the answering lazy grin permitted to the Republican Navy's third ranking flag officer, 'I seem to remember an old saying. Something about sometimes even paranoiacs having real enemies. Of course, I can't speak to the megalomania question.'

'How unwontedly tactful of you,' Theisman murmured, and all his junior admirals chuckled. The amusement barely touched their eyes, however, and the Secretary of War leaned slightly forward in his chair.

'All joking aside,' he said quietly, 'one of the main reasons I wanted to come out here with Arnaud to talk to all three of you at once, face-to-face, instead of inviting you down to the New Octagon, was to keep any newsies from realizing we were talking at all. And another, frankly, is my confidence that we can control the information flow and guarantee security here. Not just against the Manties, either, I'm afraid.'

Tourville and Giscard tightened almost visibly, and the temperature in the briefing room seemed to drop perceptibly. Theisman bared his teeth in a grimace which could never have been confused for an expression of amusement, because he knew exactly what sort of memories and resonances his last sentence had to have provoked in officers who had survived both State Security and his own coup.

'Don't worry, the President—' he bestowed a brief, genuine smile on Giscard '—knows exactly where I am, and exactly what I'm going to be talking to you about. In fact, she sent me. And, no, she's not planning a coup d'etat, either. In some ways, it might be simpler if we were, but neither of us is that far along towards throwing out the baby with the bathwater.'

'Well, that's a relief, anyway,' Giscard murmured. 'And it's not much more frustrating than the vague hints and dark mutterings in Eloise's last few letters to me, either,' he added pointedly.

'Sorry,' Theisman said sincerely, and waved his right hand at Marquette and Captain Borderwijk. 'Alenka's brought along a full briefing packet for each of you, and before we head back to Nouveau Paris, Arnaud and I want to hold at least one general session with all of your senior staffers. But I wanted us to meet with just the six of you first, because it's particularly important that all of us be on the same page before we start bringing your staffs into it.'

He tipped his chair back, propped his elbows on the chair arms, and folded his hands across his midsection. For just a moment, as his facial muscles relaxed, the admirals saw the fatigue and worry the animation of his expression normally cloaked. Then he inhaled sharply and began.

'All of you know that, left to my own devices, I still wouldn't have admitted the existence of Bolthole or any of the new ships. Shannon's done a miraculous job at the yards, and people like Captain Anders and Commander Clapp have performed more than a few minor miracles of their own along the way. Despite that, I think everyone in this briefing room has to be aware of the fact that our capabilities on a ship-for-ship basis continue to lag behind those of the RMN. I hope to God all of us are, at any rate!

'Unfortunately, what I wanted—or any of us wanted—doesn't really matter. Thanks to domestic political considerations, like the empire-building ambitions of a certain Secretary of State who shall remain nameless, the President and I found ourselves with no option but to go public with the new fleet. What we haven't yet told Congress, although I feel confident that some of them at least suspect the announcement is coming in the