War Of Honor

determine, Hecate hadn't even cleared completely for action. Her people weren't even in skinsuits, and only four of their broadside laser mounts appear to have been manned. As soon as they saw our weapons, they opened fire with those four and blew the ever living hell out of two of our main cargo holds, three of our starboard graser mounts, and our backup enviro plant. They also killed eleven of my people and wounded eighteen more.'

'Nineteen,' Gruber corrected grimly. Honor glanced at him, and he jabbed a finger at Bachfisch.

'Nineteen,' Bachfisch conceded. Honor looked back towards him, and he twitched his shoulders. 'Compared to some of the rest of my crew, I got off easy.'

'We're not going to have that particular conversation, Captain,' Honor told him firmly. 'You and I have both been there before, and I'm not going to help you beat yourself up over it. Even,' she added with a wry smile, 'if this does seem to happen to both of us quite a bit out here in Silesia!'

Bachfisch blinked at her, then laughed out loud, and she smiled more naturally as she felt the cold, bleak knot of his guilt ease . . . for the moment, at least.

'At any rate,' he went on more briskly, 'they blew the crap out of us. But a destroyer isn't much better armored than a merchie, and they were wide open. I didn't even suspect just how wide open they were, but it was like pushing baby chicks into a pond, Honor. We fired a single broadside and—'

He broke off, shaking his head, and Honor tasted a brief, intense layer of a completely different sort of guilt. This time she didn't try to do anything about it. No one could have, anyway.

'We took her survivors aboard afterward,' he said heavily. 'There were only forty-three of them, and we lost two of them to wounds despite everything we could do. Then we came here.'

'We have all forty-one of the remaining survivors in custody, Admiral,' Gruber put in. Honor looked back up at him, and the exec shrugged. 'The Captain told me to get to Marsh as quickly as we could to report to you, but it occurred to me on the way here that with everything else you already have going on, you don't need to be officially involved in an attack on a Havenite warship.'

'I'd hardly call what you and the Captain have described an 'attack' on a warship,' Honor observed.

'No, Your Grace,' Gruber agreed. 'But you're not the government that warship belonged to. At any rate, we're prepared to present the evidence of our own sensor logs before any admiralty court and to stand by an impartial verdict on our actions. At the moment, however, any court would be considering the actions of a Silesian- flag vessel holding a warrant as a Silesian Navy auxiliary merchant cruiser. As such, we could argue that we had a legitimate Silesian security interest in investigating Hecate's actions and intentions. If we hand them over to the Manticoran authorities, however, we bring the Star Kingdom officially into all of this. From all we've heard out here about the current relations between the Star Kingdom and the Republic, I wasn't at all sure that would be a good idea.'

'So he has them confined in the secure quarters I had fitted up for pirates,' Bachfisch said, smiling approvingly at his executive officer. 'They don't know where we are at the moment. In fact, they don't even know we're not still underway. So if you prefer, we can continue on to a Silly naval base and turn them over to 'proper authorities' there.'

'I'm impressed, Commander Gruber,' Honor said. 'And I appreciate your forethought.' She didn't add that she felt confident his forethought had been exercised more because of what he knew his captain would want than because he really cared all that much himself about relations between Manticore and Haven.

'All the same,' she said thoughtfully, 'I think handing them over to us would probably be the best course. We're the closest naval base to the point at which this action actually occurred. It would make sense for a ship as badly damaged as the Bane to head for the closest authorities, particularly since you have wounded from both ships' companies who need medical attention.'

'But if we hand them over to you,' Bachfisch pointed out, 'then you have to take official cognizance of their presence, and you have enough hand grenades to juggle just now without that.'

'Yes, I have to take 'official cognizance,' ' she agreed. 'On the other hand, the way I do that is up to me. I think I'll just hold these people here until my own medical people are willing to sign off on their release from hospital, then send them home by way of the Star Kingdom aboard one of our regularly scheduled supply runs.' She smiled thinly. 'Right off the cuff, I'd estimate that it will probably take at least a couple of months to get them as far as Manticore. By which time, hopefully, things will have settled down.'

'And if they haven't?' Bachfisch asked.

'And if they haven't,' Honor said much more bleakly, 'then things are probably going to be so bad that throwing this into the mix won't matter at all.'

* * *

'Fritz says Captain Bachfisch will recover fully,' Honor told her assembled staff and senior flag officers two hours later in the briefing room aboard Werewolf. 'Unlike some of us,' she added wryly, 'the captain responds quite well to regeneration. It will take him a while to grow new legs, but he should be fine. And under the circumstances, I believe he and all the rest of his wounded personnel are definitely entitled to have the Navy pick up the tab on their medical bills.'

'You can say that again,' Alistair McKeon agreed.

His expression was grim, and he shook his head. The handful of survivors from Hecate were still in a state of semi-shock, but they'd been remarkably and uniformly reticent about precisely what their ship had been doing. Some of that was probably inevitable, given the history between the RMN and the Havenite navy, but this went beyond traditional dislike or antipathy. These people were clearly maintaining operational security, and like everyone else in the briefing room, McKeon could think of only one star nation against which any Havenite operation in Silesia could possibly be directed.

'We certainly owe Pirate's Bane and her crew an enormous debt for alerting us to the Peeps' presence,' Mercedes Brigham added.

'Agreed.' Honor nodded. 'Which is why I instructed the Fleet repair base here in Sidemore to see to all of her damages gratis. If anyone back at Admiralty House has a problem with that, they can take it up with me.'

Her tone and expression alike suggested that anyone who did fault her decision probably would not enjoy her response.

'In the meantime, however,' she went on briskly, 'the question is how we respond to this information.'

'I agree fully,' Alfredo Yu said. 'The problem is that we're still not entirely sure what information we have.'

'Captain Bachfisch's people did get a few more facts out of Hecate's database,' Lieutenant Commander Reynolds pointed out.

'But not very many,' Alice Truman objected. Reynolds looked at her, and she shrugged. 'We know she was assigned to their 'Second Fleet,' ' she said. 'But nothing in our intelligence files even shows that fleet's existence. We have no idea how powerful it is, who's in command of it, or precisely what its mission out here may be!'

'With all due respect, Dame Alice,' Reynolds replied, 'we do know at least a little. For one thing, there's a fragment of a report which refers to the fact that Hecate was assigned to this Second Fleet's third task group. If it's organized into at least three task groups, then it's obviously a fairly good-sized force. And since Hecate's survivors are being so intensely uncooperative with us, I think we have to assume that whatever reason it was sent out here for has something directly to do with us. And I'm very much afraid that I can think of only one scenario which would send a large Havenite fleet to an uninhabited star system this close to Marsh in complete secrecy.'

'You're suggesting that they're planning to attack us,' Anson Hewitt said flatly.

'I'm suggesting that they may be planning to attack us, Sir,' Reynolds corrected. Then he sighed. 'No,' he admitted. 'That's being wishy-washy.' He faced Hewitt squarely. 'The truth is, Sir, that I can't really believe they'd send a heavy force out here under these conditions if they weren't planning to jump us.'

Silence hovered in the conference room, bleak and bitter as the implications of the intelligence officer's analysis sank into the brains of officers already confronting the early stages of a shooting war with the Andermani Empire.

'You may well be right, George,' Honor said after several seconds. 'On the other hand, there's one point