War Of Honor

Something inside Eloise Pritchart tied itself into a knot as his respectful, reasonable tone washed over her. The fact that she still didn't trust him didn't necessarily invalidate his observations or his conclusions, she reminded herself yet again. And whatever she might have thought about his motivations, he wasn't the one who'd drafted the infuriating, arrogant, dismissive note lying on her blotter.

She gazed out at Nouveau Paris, and as her eyes rested on the gleaming walls of the New Octagon, a sudden sense of decision flowed through her. She gazed at the Navy's central HQ for a moment longer, then turned at last to face Giancola once more.

'All right,' she said flatly. 'If they want to play hardball, then we'll damned well play hardball.'

'Excuse me, Madame President?' he asked, and the sudden edge of concern in his voice wasn't entirely assumed. He'd never seen Pritchart quite this angry before—never realized she could be this angry—and he felt a brief, uncharacteristic uncertainty about his ability to continue to manage events properly.

'I said I'll play the game just as hard as they want to play it,' she told him, and crossed to her desk to punch a combination into her com. The connection went through almost instantly, and she nodded briskly as Thomas Theisman's face appeared on her display.

'Madame President,' Theisman said. He seemed unsurprised to see her, but then, only eleven people in the entire Republic of Haven had the combination to his personal New Octagon com.

'Arnold Giancola is in my office with me, Tom,' she told him without preamble. 'He's brought Descroix's official response to our last note, and it isn't good. Not good at all. They're clearly refusing to give a single centimeter.'

'I see,' Theisman said cautiously.

'I think,' she continued in that same, flat voice, 'that it's time to convince them of the error of their ways.'

* * *

'I wish I weren't telling you this,' Thomas Theisman said into the visual pickup as he recorded the 'Eyes- Only' message for Javier Giscard. 'Unfortunately, I am.'

He drew a deep breath.

'This letter is for your personal information, but the official dispatch accompanying it should be considered a war warning. At the present time, Eloise has informed me that she has no intention of firing the first shot, but in my opinion the risk that someone will fire it has just gone up considerably.'

He paused, reflecting upon the fact that he was speaking to the man who loved Eloise Pritchart and probably knew her better than anyone else in the universe, with the possible exception of Kevin Usher. But Giscard was aboard his flagship, orbiting SXR-136, not in Nouveau Paris.

'Eloise and Giancola are drafting a new note for the Manties. It will no longer request that they consider our new proposals. Instead, it will insist that they accept our demands. She's assured me that she doesn't intend —at this time—to specify the potential consequences if they fail to accept them, but it's obvious to me that her language is going to be more than merely 'stiff.'

'We've discussed the operational assumptions and concepts of Case Red Alpha in some detail. She understands that for it to succeed, we need to maintain the advantage of surprise. She also agrees that it's essential for us not to launch an offensive without clearly demonstrating to both domestic and foreign public opinion that we had no choice, however. And, frankly, I hope and believe she continues to agree that renewed hostilities against the Star Kingdom are a disaster to be avoided at almost any cost.'

At least the first verb in that final sentence, he reflected, was still accurate. Unfortunately, he was no longer as confident as he would have liked to be that the second one was.

'This is not an order to commence operations,' he said firmly. 'It is, however, a heads-up. Eloise's new note will be dispatched to Manticore within thirty-six standard hours. I don't think anyone in the capital—not even Giancola—claims to have any idea how High Ridge will respond to it. But it looks like we're going to find out.'

* * *

Arnold Giancola sat in his private office. It was very late, and he smiled in amusement burnished by an undeniable touch of anxiety as he contemplated the text of the document on his reader. The hour was entirely appropriate, he reflected. By long and venerable tradition, conspiracies were supposed to be executed by dark of night.

Not that he would have admitted to anyone else that what he was doing constituted anything conspiratorial, of course, but whatever he might have said to others, there was no point trying to deceive himself. Some might even argue that what he was about to do was illegal, but he'd researched the question with some care, and he rather doubted that a court would have agreed. He might be wrong, but his own judgment was that his actions represented at best a gray area. After all, he was the Secretary of State. Any communication with a foreign government was his responsibility, and the exact way in which that communication was delivered was arguably a matter for his judgment.

Still, the fact was that Eloise Pritchart and he had discussed this particular note at length and agonized over its phrasing. The President obviously expected him to send it in the exact form to which they'd both finally agreed. Unfortunately, she hadn't given him any formal instruction to that effect, and—upon more mature consideration, based solely on his extensive experience with the Department of State and the Manticoran government and acting on his own authority as Secretary of State—he had identified a few small modifications which would make it far more effective.

Although, he admitted with a thin smile as he studied the revised text, the effect towards which it was directed might not be exactly the one the President had had in mind. . . .

Chapter Forty Four

Sir Edward Janacek had discovered that he no longer enjoyed going to work in the morning. He would never have believed that might come to pass when Michael Janvier first invited him to return to Admiralty House, but things had changed since that heady day of triumph.

He nodded to his yeoman and strode on into his inner office. His desk was waiting, and there in the middle of the blotter sat the locked dispatch case containing chips of the overnight communications. Like the trip to his office itself, that box had become something he dreaded, especially in light of the arrival of Eloise Pritchart's most recent missive the day before. He didn't really want to admit its existence, but he glanced at it as he started to walk past the desk towards the coffee carafe sitting in its accustomed place on the credenza. Then he stopped dead. A crimson light blinked on top of the dispatch case, and his stomach muscles tightened as it flashed at him.

Given the inevitable lags in communication time for units deployed over interstellar distances, there wasn't a great deal of sense in awakening senior members of the Admiralty when dispatches arrived in the middle of the night. Even if their contents were desperately important, getting them into the hands of their recipients an hour or two sooner wasn't going to have any significant effect on the turnaround time for a decision loop a dozen light-years or so across. There were, of course, exceptions to that rule, especially for star nations which possessed wormhole junctions, and senior communications staffers were expected to recognize when those exceptions occurred. Except in those very special circumstances, however, the Admiralty's most senior echelons could anticipate a night's sleep unflawed by the precipitate delivery of bad news.

But that flashing light indicated that Simon Chakrabarti, as First Space Lord, had already read the overnight dispatches . . . and that in his opinion one of them was of special importance.

The First Space Lord had been becoming steadily more unhappy for months now. Janacek was prepared to accept his in-house expression of a certain degree of concern, of course. It was the First Space Lord's job to warn his civilian superiors of any worries he might entertain, after all. But Chakrabarti had gone beyond private discussions of concern or even verbal expressions of those same concerns in face-to-face meetings. He'd actually begun drafting formal memos whose arguments were becoming steadily more pointed, and he'd been following the message traffic—especially from Silesia—with what Janacek privately considered obsessive attentiveness.