War Of Honor

In some respects, it was even harder on her than her first visit had been.

There were no pretenses now, and she was grateful for that, at least. The painful truths had been spoken. There were no more masks, no more attempts at self-deception or refusal to face reality. And there was no anger, for this had gone beyond anger. But the jagged edges remained. She had yet to even begin to explore the new bond, her new awareness of Hamish, nor had she had any opportunity to discuss it with him. But, wonderful as it was, she already recognized its potential to make the pain infinitely worse. She knew herself well enough to know she could not feel what she felt and refuse to act upon it. Not for very long. And with a new certainty, and ability to see even more deeply and clearly into Hamish Alexander's soul, she knew that he couldn't, either.

If there had been any way in the world to refuse tonight's dinner invitation without wounding Emily, Honor would have done it. She couldn't be here. She didn't know where she could be, but she knew it wasn't here. Yet she'd had no choice but to come, and she and Hamish had done their level best to act completely normally.

She was quite certain she'd failed, but for the first time in years, however hard she tried, her own empathic sense had failed her. She couldn't sample Emily Alexander's emotions for the simple reason that she could not separate herself from those of Emily's husband. Not yet. It would take time, she knew— lots of time, and matching amounts of effort—for her to learn to tune down and control this new awareness. She could do it. If she had enough time, enough peace to work at it, she could learn to control its 'volume' just as she had finally learned to control the sensitivity of her original empathic awareness. But for now, the blinding power of her bond to Hamish was still growing, still gaining in power, and until she could learn to control it, its power and vibrancy would drown out the mind-glow of anyone else as long as he was present. And she couldn't do it yet. She couldn't disengage herself from the glowing background hum of Hamish, and she felt oddly blinded, almost maimed, by her inability to reach out to Emily.

'—so, yes, Honor,' Emily was saying in response to Honor's last attempt to keep something like a normal dinner table conversation moving, 'I'm afraid Elizabeth is entirely serious. And to be honest, I don't know if I blame her for her attitude.'

'Willie certainly doesn't,' Hamish put in. He handed Samantha another stick of celery, and she took it with dainty, delicate grace. Even without that maddeningly glorious link with Hamish, Honor would have recognized the ease and familiarity into which their adoption bond had blossomed.

'I suppose I can understand it, myself,' Honor admitted with a troubled expression. 'It's just that she's painting with such a broad brush. She's lumping Sidney Harris, Rob Pierre, Oscar Saint-Just, and Thomas Theisman into the same group, and I'm telling you, there is no way in the universe that Theisman belongs in that same category.'

'But what about this Pritchart?' Hamish asked in a tone of reasonable challenge. 'You've never met her, and she is their President. Not to mention having been some sort of terrorist before the Pierre Coup. What if she's the one driving it all and Theisman is just going along? From all you told me about him, he sounds like someone who would do his duty and obey duly constituted authority whatever his personal feelings.'

'Hamish,' Honor said, 'this is the man who overthrew State Security, probably shot Saint-Just personally, single-handedly convinced Capital Fleet to support him, called a constitutional convention, turned power over to the first duly elected President of the star nation whose constitution he had personally rescued from the dust bin, and then spent the better part of four T-years fighting a six or seven-cornered civil war in order to defend that constitution.' She shook her head. 'That's not the description of a man who's a weakling. And a man who would do all of that because he believes in the principles the old Republic of Haven's constitution enshrined, is not a man who's going to stand by and watch someone else grossly abuse power.'

'Put that way, Hamish,' Emily said slowly, 'Honor certainly seems to have a point.'

'Of course she does,' White Haven said a bit testily. 'And as far as I'm aware, she's the only person in the 'inner circle,' as it were, who's ever personally met the man. Not to mention the . . . special insight she has into people. I'm not trying to discount anything she's said. But the central, unpalatable fact remains. Why ever he did it, he's publicly signed off on the Pritchart version of the negotiating process.' He shrugged. 'Honor, he hasn't simply said that he's 'following orders' because Pritchart is his President, or even because he believes what she's told him. He's publicly on record as having seen diplomatic correspondence which we know for a fact didn't exist.'

He shook his head, and Honor sighed and nodded in unhappy acknowledgment of his point. She still couldn't believe it, not of the Thomas Theisman she'd met. And yet, there it was. Whether she could believe it or not, it had happened. And God knew people often changed. It was just that she couldn't imagine what sort of process could have so completely warped the internal steel of the man she'd known in so short of time.

'Well, whatever is going on there,' she said, 'how bad is it, really, on the military front? And can we really afford to have you sitting in a dirtside office as First Lord instead of in a fleet command? I'm supposed to visit the Admiralty tomorrow afternoon for a formal briefing from Admiral Givens, but the bits and pieces I've already heard aren't very encouraging.'

'I suppose that's one way to put it,' White Haven said grimly. He reached for his wineglass and sipped deeply, then put it down and leaned back in his chair.

'As far as where we can 'afford' for me to be, I don't see any alternative to my taking on the Admiralty. I don't want to, but someone has to do it, and Elizabeth and Willy are right about how important is it for that someone to be a person the entire Alliance trusts. Which, for our sins, means either me or you. And, to be perfectly honest about it, it makes a lot more sense for it to be me. So I suppose—' he smiled crookedly at her '—that this war is going to be yours, Honor. Not mine.

'As for how bad the situation is, High Ridge and Janacek between them, with more than a little help from Reginald Houseman, managed to do even more damage than we'd guessed. Of course, what happened when the Peeps hit us made it far worse, but if they hadn't set us up for the blow, our backs wouldn't be so firmly against the wall.

'Basically, we've lost in excess of twenty-six hundred LACs, seventy cruisers and light cruisers, forty-one battlecruisers, and sixty-one superdreadnoughts.' Honor inhaled sharply as he listed the figures. 'None of which includes all of the ships which were currently under construction at Grendelsbane, or the construction personnel we lost there and in half a dozen minor repair facilities scattered around what were occupied Peep star systems. And we've lost,' he finished in a granite voice, 'every single system we'd taken away from them—with the sole exception of Trevor's Star—since the war started. We're back where we were strategically on Day One, aside from controlling all of the Junction termini, and proportionately, we're much weaker now compared to the Peep navy than we were before the Battle of Hancock.'

Honor gazed at him in dismay, and he shrugged.

'It's not all doom and gloom, Honor,' he told her. 'First of all, thank God for Grayson! Not only did they save our asses at Trevor's Star and help bail you out at Sidemore, but they constitute the only true strategic reserve the Alliance has. Especially now that Erewhon has effectively gone over to the Peeps.' He glowered again. 'Erewhon didn't have the full Ghost Rider tech package, or the beta-squared nodes, or the LAC fission plants, but they had just about everything else . . . including the newest compensator version and the latest grav-pulse transmitters. When Foraker gets her hands on that and starts reverse-engineering it, we're going to be in an even worse mess than we are now.

'Maybe even worse than that, though, Pat has been engaged in a massive reevaluation of ONI's files, cross-indexed with information Greg Paxton has made available, and she's come up with some possible ballpark figures for what the Peeps may still have in reserve. I'm inclined to think that she's probably overestimating their capabilities, which would be a natural enough reaction to how badly we were surprised by what they hit us with. On the other hand, I've seen her basic analysis, and it certainly doesn't seem to me that she's being alarmist in the way she approaches it. So it may be that she's right. But if she is, then the Peeps have a minimum of another three hundred of the wall currently under construction. A minimum, Honor. That's at a time when Grayson has just under a hundred SD(P)s, and we're all the way up to seventy-three. Since we seem to have observed damned close to two hundred of them in action exclusive of the ones they sent to Sidemore, we're looking at what might conservatively be called an unfavorable balance of forces.'

Honor had felt her face become stiff and drawn as the figures rolled over her. She'd already had first-hand experience of how effectively the Republic was using its new ships and hardware. Now she had a sense for the