War Of Honor

ships here to deal with Kuzak. And, for that matter, that whatever we sent to Silesia would be adequate to deal with Harrington's forces there. There isn't much point in splitting our forces if it simply weakens us enough to be beaten in detail.'

'Understood, Sir. In fact, I took that as a given before I ever raised the possibility. Unless the Manties have considerably more in the way of SD(P)s squirreled away somewhere than we know about, I think we can make up the numbers on both fronts.'

'You're probably right. But that still leaves the problem of communicating with someone we've sent off with orders to attack if the situation changes here.'

'Not really, Sir,' Trenis said in that same respectful tone. 'What I would propose doing would be something like this. We'd go ahead and preposition an attack force in Silesia, preferably somewhere close to Marsh but sufficiently out of the way that no one would be likely to stumble across them, and somewhere between Marsh and either Basilisk or Gregor. But that force would be authorized to attack only after receiving a specific release order from here.'

'Which would get there exactly how?' Marquette asked skeptically.

'Actually, Sir, that's the easiest part of all,' Trenis told him. 'The order to attack in Silesia wouldn't be issued until after the order to attack Trevor's Star and the other Manticoran detachments in our space had been given. What would happen is that when our primary attack force, presumably the one tasked with retaking Trevor's Star, received final orders to begin its sortie, its commander would send a dispatch boat to Trevor's Star. That dispatch boat wouldn't be Navy; it would be a civilian vessel, with impeccable documentation to prove that it was. The dispatch boat would arrive at Trevor's Star at least forty-eight hours before our attack force, and it would make transit through the Manties' wormhole junction to Basilisk or Gregor. From there, it would proceed as rapidly as possible to rendezvous with our Silesian attack force to deliver its orders to attack March. If it passed through Trevor's Star forty-eight hours before we attacked, then it would have a forty-eight hour head start on any possible warning to Harrington—more than that, if our attack force was positioned between the courier's arrival terminus and Marsh. Which means that our Silesian units would receive their orders and move to attack her before she had any reason to expect it. Especially since she would never know they were in the area at all, and all of her attention would be directed towards keeping an eye on the Andermani, rather than worrying about anything we might do.'

Theisman looked at her and rubbed his upper lip some more. Then he nodded slowly. 'I'm not saying I think it would be a good idea to spread our forces so widely that it would be effectively impossible for either of them to support the other if it became necessary. That would have to be something we considered very carefully before we did it. But you're right. If we used a scenario similar to the one you're describing, we wouldn't have to worry about an attack in Silesia committing us here, but we could still get the order to attack there into the CO's hands well before Harrington—or whoever was in command there at the time—knew we were at war.'

'It sounds like an excellent idea to me, too,' Marquette agreed. 'Except, of course, that if there was a period of escalating tension between us and the Manties before we attacked Trevor's Star, then Kuzak would probably do what she's done before and close the Trevor's Star terminus to all nonmilitary traffic. Which would freeze our messenger out.'

'I can think of two ways to solve that problem, Sir,' Trenis said confidently. 'One would be to use a diplomatic courier. If nothing else, the Silesians do maintain an embassy right here in Nouveau Paris and, let's be honest, if we offer a sufficiently toothsome bribe to their Ambassador, he'd be perfectly willing to make one of his official dispatch boats available to us. That would still allow us to send the orders to our Silesian commander with a forty-eight-hour head start over any message that could reach Harrington, and Kuzak would never close the junction to a vessel with diplomatic immunity. Not, at least, when no shots had actually been fired.

'The second solution would lose some of our head start time, but it would be even simpler than that. All we really have to do is to plant our courier in the Manticore System ahead of time. I'm sure that if we put our intelligence types to work on it, they could come up with any number of covers for an ostensibly civilian ship— probably one that doesn't even have a Republican registry—to hang around in Manticore for several days, or even a few weeks. If we attack Trevor's Star, it's going to be pretty damned obvious very quickly to everyone in the Manticore System that we've done so. If nothing else, there are going to be enough ship movements in and out of the junction to give it away. So as soon as the skipper of our courier knows that the attack has actually commenced, she goes ahead and transits through the junction to either Basilisk or Gregor and proceeds to rendezvous. She'll probably still have a little bit of head start, since no one in the Star Kingdom, especially with Janacek and his crowd running their Admiralty, is going to spare as much as a single thought for the possibility that we might be contemplating hitting them simultaneously someplace that far away. That means they'll probably be slow off the mark getting word of the attack to their Sidemore Station commander. And even if they're not, the fact that no one is going to be anticipating an attack that far from any of our bases should still give us tactical surprise.'

'Well,' Marquette said with a crooked smile, 'that's knocked that objection on the head, too. You do seem to be in fine form today, Linda.'

'Yes, you do,' Theisman agreed. 'Mind you, I'm still far from convinced that splitting our forces in the first place would be a good idea. Especially when we don't know which way the Graysons are likely to jump. But if we did decide to do any such thing, I think the arrangements you've sketched out would probably work.'

'I'm fairly certain they would, Sir,' Marquette told him. 'And as far as the Graysons are concerned, at the moment Janacek and High Ridge seem to be almost as intent on pissing them off as they were on firing all of their best admirals! According to all our sources in the Star Kingdom, it's pretty obvious Janacek doesn't trust Benjamin Mayhew as far as he could throw him in a two-grav field. Which is uncommonly stupid even for Janacek, but let's not look a gift horse in the mouth.'

'Admiral Marquette is right about that, Sir,' Trenis observed. 'And for that matter, right this minute, Grayson has just sent a sizable chunk of its total navy off on some sort of long-term, long-range training deployment. According to NavInt's sources, they'll be gone for at least the next four to five standard months. If the balloon should happen to go up during that time period, well . . .'

She shrugged, and Thomas Theisman nodded slowly and thoughtfully.

Chapter Thirty Four

'Harvest Joy, you are cleared to proceed. Good luck!'

'Thank you, Junction Control,' Captain Josepha Zachary, commanding officer of the improbably named survey ship HMS Harvest Joy, acknowledged the clearance and the good wishes simultaneously, then turned to Jordin Kare and quirked an eyebrow.

'Junction Control says we can go now, Doctor,' she observed. 'Do you and Dr. Wix agree?'

'Captain, Dr. Wix and I have been ready to go for days!' Kare replied with an amazingly youthful looking grin. Then he nodded more seriously. 'Our people are ready to proceed whenever you are, Captain.'

'Well, in that case . . .' Captain Zachary murmured, and crossed the three paces of deck between her and her command chair. She settled into it, turned it to face her helmsman, and drew a deep breath.

'Ten gravities, Chief Tobias,' she said formally.

'Ten gravities, aye, Ma'am,' the helmsman confirmed, and Harvest Joy began to creep very slowly forward.

Zachary crossed her legs and made herself lean confidently back in her comfortable chair. It probably wasn't strictly necessary for her to project an aura of complete calm, but it couldn't hurt, either.

Her lips tried to twitch into a smile at the thought, but she suppressed it automatically as she watched the navigation plot repeater deployed from the left arm of the command chair. The com screen beside it showed the face of Arswendo Hooja, her chief engineer, and she nodded to the blond-haired, blue-eyed lieutenant commander. Arswendo and she had served together often over the years, and Zachary was grateful for his calm, competent presence at the far end of the com link.

She was just as happy to have avoided a few other presences, whether on the other end of com links or in