War Of Honor

here, Shannon.'

'I think you can safely assume all of us realize that, Sir,' she told him dryly. 'At least, we all know we've spent the better part of four T-years—some of us over five—more or less in exile while we did it!'

'I know you have, and I expect the entire Navy is going to appreciate it just as much as I do when we finally tell them what you've been doing,' he said seriously. 'And although I have rather mixed feelings about the timing, it's possible that the rest of the Service is going to begin finding out just a bit sooner than we thought.'

'It is?' Foraker's eyes narrowed, and he nodded.

'I know you've been working to my original timetable. And to be candid, I'd really prefer to stick to that timetable. Unfortunately, that may not be possible. And if it isn't, at least you and Captain Anders and the rest of your people have gotten more done in less time then I'd believed would be possible when I first sent you here.'

'I'm happy to hear that . . . mostly, Sir,' she said cautiously when he paused. 'At the same time, and as much as all of my people deserve to be recognized, we're still well short of the deployment levels you specified when you assigned me here. And while I've gotten the number of building slips up to target levels, we've only laid the first keels in a third of them within the last six months or so.'

'Believe me, Shannon, you can't be more aware of that than I am. On the other hand, there are things going on back at Nouveau Paris that may not leave me much choice about accelerating the deployment schedule.'

'May I ask what sort of things, Sir?' she inquired even more cautiously, and he snorted.

'Nothing catastrophic!' he reassured her. 'Probably not even anything serious . . . yet, at least. But basically, and for your private information, the President and I are finding ourselves more and more likely to be locking horns with Secretary Giancola. That,' his eyes narrowed and his voice turned just a bit crisper, 'doesn't leave this day cabin, Shannon.'

'Of course not, Sir,' she reassured him, and inwardly she felt an undeniable glow of pleasure that he trusted her enough to share what he obviously considered sensitive information with her.

'I don't know that anything is actually going to come of it,' he went on after a moment. 'In fact, it's entirely possible that the President and I are worrying unduly. But the Secretary of State is becoming more and more impatient with the Manties, and it looks to us as if he's in the process of building a block of support for his position in Congress. As a part of his efforts, we believe he's been dropping a few hints here and there about Bolthole.'

Foraker's expression tightened indignantly, and he gave her a crooked smile.

'I know. I know! He's not supposed to be doing that, and if he is, then he's in violation of the Classified Information Act. But even if he is, we can't whack him the way we would some underling. Or, rather, we could, but the President feels that the political cost might be extremely high. Both because of the support he's managed to build in Congress and because if we acted to punish him for violating the Information Act, at least some people would see our charges as no more than a justification for purging a political opponent. We'd have every legal right to proceed against him—assuming he's guilty of what we think he is—but the practical consequences of doing so might very well be to undermine the legitimacy we've worked so hard to earn.'

'I understand that, I suppose, Sir,' Foraker said. 'I don't much like it, but I can see what you're saying.'

'I don't much like it either,' Theisman told her with massive understatement. 'But whether we like it or not, we still have to decide how we're going to respond. Obviously, my original concerns about coming out into the open too soon and panicking the Manties into doing something hasty still apply. On the other hand, you've done much better than I'd hoped at tweaking the production queue. How many Sovereigns are you projecting by the end of this quarter?'

'Assuming we don't hit any more bottlenecks, I believe we'll be looking at right on sixty-six of them, Sir,' she told him with simple, well justified pride. 'We have thirty-eight currently in full commission, with another sixteen in various stages of working up, and the yard is supposed to hand a dozen more over to us next month.'

'And the Astra class?'

'As you know, we haven't assigned them quite the same priority the superdreadnoughts have had, Sir. And Commander Clapp came up with a few LAC modifications we decided were worth retrofitting to the completed birds as well as incorporating in those still on the production line, which has slowed things still further. We have about thirty of the Astras either in commission or working up, but we don't have complete LAC groups to put aboard them. And the same shortage of LACs is putting a crimp into our training schedule, as well. I don't think we could deploy more than twenty, or possibly two dozen, by the end of the quarter.'

'I understand.' Theisman leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the deckhead, lips pursed in thought. He stayed that way for quite some time, then shrugged.

'You're still enormously far ahead of where I expected you to be,' he told her. 'What I'm hoping is that we can keep you and Bolthole under wraps for at least one additional quarter, possibly two, but I don't think we can hope for much more than that. And, in a worst-case scenario, we may have to go public this quarter.'

He saw her slightly puzzled expression and waved one hand.

'If Secretary Giancola creates a situation in which he and the President and the rest of the Cabinet end up on opposite sides of a public debate, I don't want him dropping any bombshells about our new and improved military posture. Not out of the blue, anyway. I can't be positive, but I suspect that he's at least considering the advantages of suddenly revealing the capabilities of the ships you've been building and working up out here.

'The Manties clearly don't have any serious interest in negotiating a treaty which would return any of our occupied planets. There's some disagreement as to why that should be true. I personally tend to agree with General Usher over at FIA—that they could care less about hanging onto our territory except for the political advantages it secures the High Ridge crowd domestically—but other people have different theories. Including, I'm afraid, quite a few of the analysts at FIS . . . and at NavInt, for that matter.'

Foraker nodded. General Kevin Usher had been President Pritchart's personal choice to head the new Federal Investigation Agency when Oscar Saint-Just's repressive StateSec machine was demolished. The old organization had been split into two new ones—Usher's FIA, and the Federal Intelligence Service, specifically charged with foreign intelligence at the federal level. The new agencies' carefully chosen names had the advantage of a complete break with names like Internal Security and State Security, but they performed many of the same intelligence functions. With Usher in command, Pritchart could be confident that the FIA would not perform the old suppressive functions, and there were rumors that the President had wanted him in charge of the functions now assigned to both agencies. But many members of Congress had balked at the notion of creating yet another single intelligence/security umbrella organization. And, much as Foraker respected President Pritchart, she agreed with their disinclination. Not just because she, too, feared the potential for such an agency to become a new StateSec under a President other than Eloise Pritchart and a director other than Kevin Usher, either. She'd been less impressed with Wilhelm Trajan, the FIS's new director, than she was with Usher, but she'd been delighted when Theisman resurrected Naval Intelligence as an independent agency within the Navy, as well. There were simply some questions civilian analysts wouldn't think to ask, much less know how to answer.

Unfortunately, it sounded as if the old turf wars between competing intelligence outfits were rearing their ugly heads once more. Which, she reflected, was probably inevitable, given that each set of analysts would come at the raw data with its own institutional priorities and preconceptions. And to be completely fair-minded, Usher was supposed to be concerning himself with domestic matters and counter —intelligence, not with analyzing foreign intelligence data. Not that having several competing analyses might not offer its own advantages, since a rigorous debate was probably the best way to get at the actual truth.

'The people who disagree with General Usher tend to fall into two main camps,' Theisman told her. 'One group, which agrees with Secretary Giancola's position and probably represents the largest number of dissidents, believes the Manticoran government intends to hang onto the occupied planets indefinitely. Their view is that Descroix's refusal to respond to any of our proposals or to make any serious offers of her own is simply a ploy to waste time until they've properly prepared public opinion in the Star Kingdom to accept outright annexation of at least some of the occupied planets. For the most part, they point to Trevor's Star as their example, although at