War Of Honor

As part of that attentiveness, he'd taken to recording marginal notes on the dispatches he found of particular concern. Which, Janacek thought as he watched the malignant, blinking red eye with a sort of dread fascination, was not something he wanted to deal with just now.

Unfortunately, as Pritchart's response to Elaine Descroix's most recent note had reminded the entire High Ridge Government, what he wanted didn't always bear a great deal of resemblance to what he was going to get.

He squared his shoulders, inhaled deeply, and marched across to the desk. He sank into his chair, scarcely noticing its comfort, and reached out to key the combination into the dispatch case lock plate. The combination of fingerprints, proper numerical code, and DNA tracers convinced it to open for him, and he pulled out the chip on top of the pile.

For just a moment, he felt an undeniable sense of relief, because it was in a Fleet message folio, not one with the flashings of the ONI. So at least it wasn't a fresh admission from Francis Jurgensen that that insufferable son-of-a-bitch Theisman had managed to deceive them as to his navy's combat capabilities after all. But that fleeting relief vanished as he read the header that identified it as a message from Sidemore Station.

Oh my God, he thought around the fresh sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. What's that lunatic done now?

He drew another deep breath, slipped the chip into his desk top reader, and called up the message header.

* * *

'Just how bad is it, Edward?'

The Prime Minister's anxiety showed far more clearly than he wanted it to. Indeed, Janacek thought, it undoubtedly showed far more clearly than High Ridge thought it did. Not that the baron was alone in that, and the First Lord felt the echo of his own tension and strain coming back from the other members of the working cabinet. Aside from Janacek and High Ridge himself, that working cabinet currently consisted of Elaine Descroix, Countess New Kiev, Earl North Hollow, and Sir Harrison MacIntosh.

'That's very difficult to say,' the First Lord replied. 'I'm not trying to dodge the question, but all we have right now is Harrington's initial report about the Zoraster System incident itself. It will be at least a few days before we get anything more than that, I'd imagine. It would have taken at least that long for the Andies to respond to the incident—or to Harrington's message to their station commander in Sachsen. So any later report from her is going to be delayed at least that long before reaching here.'

'But when those messages do get here,' Marisa Turner pointed out anxiously, 'the events in them will be over two weeks old. There's absolutely no way for us to tell how far Harrington may have pushed the Andies even as we sit here.'

'Now, just a moment, Marisa,' Janacek replied strongly. 'Everyone in this room knows my opinion of 'the Salamander.' I'm not about to change it at this late date, either. But, much as I may distrust her judgment, in this instance she's certainly showed far more restraint than I would ever have anticipated.'

He tapped the hardcopy of Harrington's report, where it lay on the conference table in front of him. An identical copy lay in front of each of them, and he wondered for a moment if New Kiev had even bothered to read hers.

'To be perfectly honest, my initial fear when I read her account of the incident was that she was likely to head for Sachsen cleared for action to demand satisfaction from Admiral Sternhafen. Instead, to my considerable surprise, she actually seems to be working actively to reduce tensions. Of course, there's no way to tell how Sternhafen reacted to her suggestion of a joint investigation, but the fact that she came up with the idea at all has to be taken as a good sign, I think.'

'On the surface,' she agreed. Then she shook her head and made a face. 'No, you're right,' she admitted. 'It's just that I worry about her temper. Her first reaction has always seemed to be to resort to force immediately —or, at least, to meet force with greater force. I suppose it's just . . . difficult for me to conceive of her in the role of peacemaker.'

'For you and me both,' Janacek admitted. 'Nonetheless, that does seem to have been her initial response, at least, in this case.'

'If so,' North Hollow observed acidly, 'it's undoubtedly for the first time in her entire life!'

'I won't disagree with you there, Stefan,' Janacek replied.

'But you say there's no way to predict how Sternhafen reacted to her proposal,' High Ridge pressed, and Janacek shrugged.

'Obviously not. If this really was an accident, an unintended confrontation, then the man would have to be a bigger lunatic even than Harrington not to seize this opportunity to back off and cool things down. Of course, given the provocative behavior the Andies have been evincing out there, it's impossible to say whether or not it really was accidental. Admiral Jurgensen, Admiral Chakrabarti, and I, are currently inclined towards the view that it was unintended. If the Andies had intended to begin a war with us, then surely they would have done it by attacking more than a single, isolated heavy cruiser. Moreover, it seems fairly evident that their ship took Jessica Epps by surprise. Whether that's the case or not, they'd at least managed to get into attack range well before Jessica Epps initially ordered this suspected slave ship to heave to. What that suggests to us, is that the Andies didn't go into this looking for a fight. If that had been their objective, then it's virtually certain that they would have fired sooner—probably before Jessica Epps even knew they were there.'

'So you think they were responding to our effort to intercept this slaver, this Sittich,' Elaine Descroix said.

'It certainly looks that way,' Janacek agreed. 'Precisely why they responded the way they did is more than we can say at this point. If Harrington's report's conclusions about the ship and the tonnage discrepancy our shipping list information indicated are correct, then I have to say I'm baffled by the Andy captain's actions. We may not get along with the Andermani all that well, but as far as we've been able to tell, they don't especially care for the slave trade, either. They don't have the long-term standing commitment to its suppression which the Star Kingdom's had, but they've certainly acted promptly to stamp on it whenever it's reared its head in their backyard.'

'And very properly so,' New Kiev put in. 'But as you say, Edward, given that history of theirs, then surely their captain should have acted to assist Jessica Epps, not fired on her!'

'I believe that's approximately what I just said, Marisa,' Janacek observed.

'I realize that,' she said a bit snippily. 'My point was that perhaps his reaction suggests that Harrington's suspicions about this particular ship weren't as well founded as she believes. Or, at least, as her report suggests.'

'The same thought had occurred to me,' Janacek replied. 'But Admiral Jurgensen pulled the central file copy of the real Sittich's emissions fingerprint and compared it to the sensor data from Chantilly.' He shook his head. 'There's no question, Marisa—the ship squawking Sittich's transponder code wasn't Sittich. I can't say for certain who she was, but she wasn't who she claimed to be.'

'I must say,' Descroix observed, 'that I'm afraid Harrington may have put us all in a false position with this quixotic crusade of hers.'

'What 'quixotic crusade'?' New Kiev asked.

'This 'Operation Wilberforce' of hers,' Descroix said.

'I may question her judgment and temper, and even at times her motivation,' New Kiev said sharply, 'but I hardly think it's appropriate to call the Star Kingdom's long-standing commitment to the suppression of the interstellar genetic slave trade a 'quixotic crusade.' '

Descroix glared at her and opened her mouth to fire back, but High Ridge interrupted before she could.

'Marisa, no one is suggesting that we ought to abandon that policy. For that matter, no one is suggesting that it was inappropriate for Harrington to act in accordance with it.'

And we're especially not going to suggest it, he reflected, with that maniac Montaigne holding our feet— and yours—to the fire over the entire slavery issue in the Commons!