War Of Honor

cleared his throat.

'First, allow me to present Captain Ackenheil.'

'Of the LaFroye, I believe?' Honor said, raising one eyebrow at the captain.

'Yes, Your Grace,' Ackenheil replied.

'That was a nice piece of work with Wayfarer,' she complimented him. 'Very nice. I could have wished we hadn't taken a slaver who was a namesake for one of my old ships,' she grimaced, 'but liberating almost two hundred slaves is more than enough to make up even for that. My report on the incident strongly commends you and your people for the job you did.'

'Thank you, Your Grace. We couldn't have done it without the intelligence Commander Reynolds provided, though.'

The captain was obviously extremely curious about just how that intelligence had been developed, but he showed no disappointment when Honor failed to enlighten him. He hadn't really expected her to . . . and she had absolutely no intention of telling him that she strongly suspected the information supporting Operation Wilberforce had come from a proscribed band of terrorists via a security firm on permanent retainer to a recently elected Member of Parliament.

'A successful operation is always the result of a lot of people pulling in the same direction at the same time, Captain,' she told him instead, 'and you and LaFroye were the ones at the sharp end of the stick. ' Not to mention being the ones whose careers would have gone down the toilet if our information had been wrong. 'In addition, your capture of the Wayfarer has given our intelligence on slaving operations in the Confederacy what may turn out to be an even bigger boost than any of us had expected. Under the circumstances, you and your people deserve the credit for a job very well done.'

'Thank you, Your Grace,' Ackenheil repeated, and then gestured to the young woman at his side. 'Please allow me to introduce Lieutenant Commander Zahn, my tac officer.'

'Commander,' Honor nodded to the Sidemorian officer. 'And if I remember correctly, your husband is a civilian analyst attached to the Sidemore Navy.'

'Yes. Yes, he is, Your Grace.' Zahn seemed astonished that the station commander had made the link, and Honor hid a small smile at her reaction.

'Well, Captain,' she said, returning her attention to Ackenheil, 'I understand Commander Reynolds dragged the two of you aboard the flagship to tell us what the Andies have been up to.'

'Actually, Your Grace,' Reynolds told her, 'it was Captain Ackenheil who came to us.' Honor glanced at him, and the intelligence officer shrugged. 'As soon as I heard what he had to say, though, I knew you'd want to hear it firsthand, without waiting for his report to wend its way through the normal channels.'

'If your brief summary of it was as accurate as usual, then you were certainly right,' she told him, and looked back at Ackenheil. 'Captain?' she invited.

'If you don't mind, Your Grace, I'll let Commander Zahn describe what happened. She was on Tactical at the time.'

'Fine.' Honor nodded, and moved her gaze to Zahn. 'Go ahead, Commander.'

'Yes, Your Grace.' Honor could taste the youthful Sidemorian's nervousness, but if she hadn't been able to sense the emotions of others directly, she would never have guessed that someone as outwardly calm and composed as Zahn felt at all uncomfortable.

'Thirteen days ago,' Zahn began, 'we were on station in the Brennan System. We'd been there for five days, and we were scheduled to depart in another three. It had been a thoroughly routine patrol up until that point, although we had picked up a few suspicious movements in-system.'

'According to our sources,' Reynolds put in for Honor's benefit, 'Governor Heyerdahl may have a private arrangement with the Brennan System's domestic criminal element. So far as we can tell, it seems to be mainly fairly small-scale smuggling, not any sort of accommodation with hijackers or pirates . . . or slavers. LaFroye was tasked with tracking any 'black' shipping movements, mostly to confirm that smuggling is all Heyerdahl is up to.'

'Understood.' Honor nodded. If smuggling was all Heyerdahl was involved in, then he was a paragon of law-abiding virtue compared to most Silesian system governors. 'Continue, Commander, please.'

'Yes, Your Grace. As I say, we'd been on station for five days when our FTL recon platforms picked up the arrival of an Andermani battlecruiser. She wasn't squawking any transponder code, but we got a hard ID on her emissions signature from one of the platforms. Then we lost her completely.'

'Lost her,' Honor repeated.

'Yes, Your Grace. She just dropped right off the platforms' passives.'

'What was the range to the closest platform?' Honor asked intently.

'Under eight light-minutes,' Zahn replied, and Honor's eyes narrowed. She glanced expressionlessly at McKeon and Yu, and both of them returned her look with an equal absence of expression. Then all three of them returned their attention to Zahn.

'We were surprised to lose her at such a short range,' the tac officer continued. 'Our latest intelligence update had emphasized that their stealth systems had been substantially improved, but nothing in the briefing had suggested that much improvement. So as soon as we lost her, the Captain ordered me to find her again. Since the main recon platforms were fixed, I deployed a standard shell of Ghost Rider drones to blanket the volume around her last known locus with mobile platforms.' The Sidemorian grimaced. 'We didn't find her.'

'How long did it take your drones to reach the locus, Commander?' Yu asked.

'Approximately sixty-two minutes, Sir,' Zahn replied. 'Given her observed velocity at the time we lost her and Intelligence's latest estimate on her probable maximum acceleration, she ought to have been within five- point-one light-minutes of her last observed position. She wasn't.'

'Are you certain?' Honor asked. 'She wasn't just coasting ballistic?'

'I think that's exactly what she was doing, Your Grace,' Zahn replied. 'But she wasn't doing it within five light-minutes of the last place we'd seen her. My drones covered that volume like a fine-toothed comb. If she'd been there, we would have found her.'

'I see.' Honor's voice was merely thoughtful, but inwardly she was impressed by the lieutenant commander's certitude. Young Zahn might be a bit nervous about finding herself face-to-face with so much seniority, but her confidence in her own competence was impressive. And, judging from the taste of Ackenheil's approving, almost paternal attitude towards her, that confidence was probably justified.

'So what do you think happened?' she asked after a moment.

'I think our estimates of their compensator efficiency are still low, Your Grace,' Zahn told her. 'And I think they may have a better feel for the capabilities of our standard surveillance systems than I'd like. I don't think they have an equally good feel for Ghost Rider's capabilities, but to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't like to make any bets even on that.

'If I'm right, then they were able to make a pretty decent estimate on exactly when and where they'd drop off of our orbital platforms' sensors using whatever improved stealth systems they were employing. I think that's exactly what they did, and that as soon as they were confident they'd pulled it off, they went to a higher acceleration than we thought they could pull on an evasion heading. And when they figured we might be getting drones into position to spot their emissions despite their stealth, they shut down and went ballistic, exactly as you just suggested they might have. But because they were able to pull a higher accel, they were outside the zone where even Ghost Rider's active systems could find them without an impeller signature.'

'And how do you think they were able to make that close a time estimate?' Honor asked. In the wrong tone, her question might have suggested that she thought Zahn was inclined to believe in the improvement in the Andermani's capabilities she had just postulated as a way to excuse a less than stellar effort to find the elusive battlecruiser. The way it came out, it was clearly an honest information request, and she felt Zahn relax a bit more.

'I think there are two possibilities, Your Grace. We know from Captain Ferrero's report that the Andies clearly have an FTL com capability of their own. It's possible that they had stealthed platforms already in-system to observe us—or even a second stealthed starship doing the same thing—so that they knew when we deployed the drones. They're not particularly stealthy during the initial deployment phase,' she pointed out.

'If they tracked the deployment, then they could have sent an FTL warning to the battlecruiser which would