War Of Honor

isn't all that time-critical. Even if my suspicions are completely unfounded, we would lose little by waiting a few more weeks, or even months. If, on the other hand, there is any substance to them, we might court disaster by not waiting.'

Troubadour's data code reached the hyper limit and vanished, and Chien-lu Rabenstrange inhaled deeply.

'Inform Communications that I will require a dispatch boat,' he said quietly.

* * *

'Do you think it did any good, Your Grace?' Mercedes Brigham asked.

'I don't know,' Honor replied honestly. 'I can tell you that Herzog von Rabenstrange believed I was telling him the truth. Or, at least, that nothing I told him was a lie. But precisely how he'll react …?' She shrugged.

'Well,' her chief of staff observed, 'whatever comes of that part of it, at least we managed to nail down a little more definite information on Andy capabilities. Unfortunately.'

'Ah?' Honor glanced at Brigham, and the commodore nodded.

'I don't think they even suspected Captain Conagher had deployed the drones, Ma'am.' She smiled thinly. 'Whatever else they've done, it doesn't look like they've solved our EW capabilities just yet.'

'I'm glad . . . I think,' Honor said. 'I almost wish I hadn't let you and Alistair talk me into deploying them in the first place. If we'd been caught at it, it could have convinced Rabenstrange that my entire visit was only an intelligence ploy.'

Brigham started to reply, then decided not to. She still believed that even if the drones had been detected, a bunch as pragmatic as the Andermani Imperial Navy would have accepted it as no more than the way the game was played. In fact, she suspected, Honor probably believed the same thing, deep down inside. But if fretting about it represented her sole concession to the anxiety Brigham knew she must be feeling, then the chief of staff was perfectly willing to put up with it.

'At any rate,' she continued after a moment, 'we got good visuals on several of their ships. Admiral Bachfisch was right about their new battlecruisers, too. They have at least one pod-based design in service; we got confirming visual imagery on three of them.'

'I wish I could say it was a surprise,' Honor observed.

'You and I both, Your Grace,' Brigham agreed. 'But after seeing those strap-on pods of theirs, a surprise is one thing it isn't. As a matter of fact, I'd have been delighted if that were the only thing the drones had confirmed.'

Honor crooked an eyebrow at her, and the chief of staff shrugged.

'They definitely have at least one SD(P) class in commission, Ma'am. We're not positive how many of them they have in Sachsen. For that matter, neither Captain Conagher's tac people nor George and I are prepared to give you any definitive estimate on their total ship strength in Sachsen. They'd clearly dispersed their units and gone to emissions control before we got far enough in-system to spot them all. But we picked up at least twenty superdreadnoughts, and the drones say that at least five of the twenty were SD(P)s.'

'Darn,' Honor said with a mildness which deceived neither Brigham nor herself.

'We didn't pick up any sign of CLACs,' Brigham told her. 'That doesn't prove anything, of course. And we did see an awfully high number of LAC drive signatures scattered around the system.' She shrugged. 'Call me paranoid, but to my suspicious mind, the existence of pod-based main combatants suggests that they have to have solved the problems of building something as simple as a LAC carrier.'

'You're probably right,' Honor agreed. 'And if you are, then they're going to be a lot more dangerous. You know,' she went on slowly, 'I wonder if they really failed to spot the drones at all.'

'You think they may have wanted us to know about their new hardware?' Brigham sounded skeptical, and it was Honor's turn to shrug.

'I think it's possible,' she said. 'Think about it. If they're still hoping to convince us to pull out without a fight, letting us know that they're going to be tougher opponents than we might have assumed would make sense. And they could kill two birds with one stone, in a way, if they deliberately failed to respond to our drones. First, they let us 'steal' the data they wanted us to have anyway. And second, by 'not noticing us' when we did, they lead us to assume that they can't crack our electronic warfare capabilities. Which could come as a very nasty surprise down the road if we didn't take the hint and withdraw from Silesia completely.'

'You know, Your Grace, I'd just hate double— and triple-think situations like this.'

'And you think I don't?' Honor smiled crookedly, then gave her head a little toss. 'But at least we know a bit more than we did, whether the Andies wanted us to know it or not. And they know a bit more about what's going on than they did before we went to call on them. I'm sure that someone back at Admiralty House is going to be upset with me for 'consorting with the enemy,' but I can't help thinking that this is the first positive contact between us and the Andermani since the entire escalation in tensions began.'

'I'd have to agree with that,' Brigham said. 'But even so, that just brings me back to my original question, I'm afraid. Do you think it did any good?'

Chapter Fifty Three

'Starlight, you are Alpha-One for transit at the inner beacon.'

'Astro Control, Starlight copies Alpha-One for transit. Beginning final approach to insertion now.'

'Starlight, Astro Control shows you on nominal approach. Enjoy your trip. Astro Control, clear.'

'Thank you, Astro Control. Starlight, clear.'

Lieutenant Commander Sybil Dalipagic watched the data code of the Silesian Confederacy diplomatic courier blink out of existence as it disappeared into the Junction's central terminus on its way to Basilisk. As she'd informed Starlight's astrogator, the dispatch boat's flight path had been nominal, but that hadn't kept her from sweating the transit, anyway. Diplomatic couriers were the one type of vessel with which Astro Control could not establish direct telemetry links. Dalipagic shuddered to think what would have happened if she'd even suggested to Starlight that she could have handled the entire transit much more safely and efficiently from her own console. The very idea would have violated at least half a dozen solemn interstellar accords, although in Dalipagic's professional opinion, those solemn accords were pretty damned stupid. It wasn't as if establishing an interface and an override with the ship's maneuvering computers would have in any way compromised the sacred integrity of its diplomatic files. Or, not at least if the people the dispatch boat belonged to had an IQ recorded in double digits.

She snorted in familiar amusement at the thought. Her brother-in-law had served for almost forty T-years aboard the ships of the Royal Manticoran Mail Service. The RMMS was never used for secure diplomatic dispatches, but there were plenty of other people who wanted to be sure their mail was transmitted in complete security. Which was why the mail ships' secure data banks were completely separated—physically, not just by electronic firewalls—from any other computer they carried. Somehow, Dalipagic thought, it was . . . unlikely that a diplomatic courier wouldn't have built in security measures at least that good. Which would just happen to have obviated any possibility that she could have hacked into Starlight's dispatches simply by interfacing with the dispatch boat's astrogation systems. Hell, not even a hacker as celebrated as the Navy's Sir Horace Harkness could have managed that!

Not that any properly paranoid diplomat was likely to let her do any interfacing anytime soon. For that matter, even Manticoran couriers were often picky as hell about the degree of remote access they granted Astro Control. Of course—The comfortable, well worn rhythm of Dalipagic's thoughts faltered abruptly as the master plot suddenly altered. She stared at the thick rash of icons which had dropped unannounced out of hyper and begun decelerating towards the Junction. There were at least forty of them, and alarms began to whoop and wail as the ACS sensor platforms identified them as warships.