War Of Honor

didn't expect any of them to have any objections at all to the little side project she'd codenamed Operation Wilberforce. But given the ... sensitive nature of the intelligence data which would make Wilberforce possible, she preferred to restrict the details to the smallest possible circle until they were safely in Silesia.

'So you think the LAC crews are going to be up to snuff by the time we reach Sidemore?' she asked, turning her attention back to Truman, and her second in command raised one hand and waggled it back and forth in a maybe-maybe not gesture.

'I think they ought to be,' she said. 'I'm confident that they'll be up to Scotty's standards eventually, but I won't absolutely guarantee that 'eventually' will happen before we reach our station.'

'You're the LAC expert here, Alice,' McKeon said, 'but I think you may be being a bit overly pessimistic. To me, they look like they're already starting to shape up nicely from what I've seen in the sims. But what do I know? As I understand it, Her Grace,' he grinned at Honor, 'asked me along to ride herd on the old-fashioned side of things.'

'Not all that old-fashioned,' Honor demurred.

'More old-fashioned than you may have thought, Ma'am,' Jaruwalski said sourly. She grimaced when Honor glanced at her. 'The latest from Admiral Chakrabarti's office is that we're going to have to leave one of our squadrons of Medusas here with Home Fleet. They're going to give us two squadrons of the pre-pod types, instead. And according to my sources, at least two of the non-pod ships are going to be dreadnoughts, not superdreadnoughts.'

'Only two squadrons?' Mercedes Brigham demanded, and turned to face Honor. 'I know you warned me they were being tight about turning tonnage loose, Your Grace, but that's ridiculous! There's no way two squadrons of pre-pod ships equate to a single squadron of SD(P)s!'

'No, there isn't,' Honor agreed with massive restraint. Privately, she wondered if it was possible that some of Benjamin's apprehensions about the Republic of Haven might finally have begun to percolate through what passed for the brain of ONI. She reminded herself that she still had to bring William Alexander and Elizabeth up to speed on all of Benjamin's concerns ... including Erewhon's possible intentions. But at the moment, that was secondary to her own immediate concerns, and she certainly couldn't think of any other reason to reduce the ships being sent off to deter the Andermani so severely. If the new force levels held up, the Admiralty would be giving her task force only one squadron of SD(P)s. Admittedly, there would be eighteen older-style superdreadnoughts—or dreadnoughts, if Andrea is right, she corrected herself—to back them, plus the two weak battle squadrons already on station under Admiral Hewitt. And it was also true that six of the new ships ought to be capable of destroying an entire fleet of the older types all by themselves, but it still seemed like a foolhardy move.

Should I tell them about the Protector's Own? she wondered. There was no real reason she shouldn't . . . except that she and Benjamin had agreed that no one would be told—except Alfredo Yu himself—until the Grayson ships actually reached Silesia. The Protector had decided upon more mature consideration that the simplest way to avoid potential domestic arguments over his decision was simply not to tell anyone about it. As far as the rest of the Navy and the Grayson population at large were concerned, the Protector's Own was merely being dispatched on an extended deep-space training cruise, accompanied by its organic support ships. The primary purpose was to demonstrate its ability to sustain itself out of its own logistic resources in long- distance, independent operations. The fact that its training cruise would just happen to take the entire Protector's Own to the star system where its official commander just happened to have been stationed by the RMN would just happen to be one of those happy coincidences which just happened to happen from time to time.

Besides, as Wesley Matthews had pointed out when his opinion was sought, if someone like Sir Edward Janacek or Simon Chakrabarti knew Grayson was planning to make up the difference in the force levels Honor would require, their response almost certainly would be to see it as an opportunity to reduce the purely Manticoran forces available to her even further. Which analysis took on an additional point in the wake of Jaruwalski's news.

No, she decided. It's not really fair for me to tell them when Benjamin won't even be telling his own people about it. And even though it may not be very nice of me, if I don't tell them about it, it'll probably encourage them to try even harder to make what we do officially have adequate. Besides, she hid a sudden mental grin, think what a pleasant surprise it will be for them when Alfredo turns up in Marsh. Assuming, of course, that they don't decide to lynch the admiral who didn't warn them he was coming!

'Well,' she said aloud, 'we'll just have to find a way to get along without them, I suppose, won't we?'

Chapter Twenty

The brilliant white icon representing Trevor's Star glared at the center of the enormous holographic plot in Sovereign of Space's CIC, but Shannon Foraker had no attention to spare for unimportant distractions like suns and planets. Her eyes were riveted to the dense rash of crimson dots sweeping outward from the larger bloody icons of the defending fleet.

'Looks like they've got us on their sensors, Ma'am,' Captain Anders observed quietly beside her, and she nodded. Despite all the Republican Navy's improvements in its stealth technology, its systems remained far inferior to those available to the Manticorans. It had been a given that they would be detected on their inbound vector; what remained uncertain was how much of an edge that would give the other side.

'We're getting initial contact reports back from the lead LACs,' Commander Clapp announced, and Foraker turned to look at him. 'Composition is about what we'd projected, Admiral,' the commander told her, cupping one hand over the earbug screwed into his right ear and listening intently. 'It looks as if their missile LACs are taking the lead.' He listened a moment longer, then grimaced. 'We can't absolutely confirm that, Ma'am. Their EW is still too good to penetrate at this range, and CIC's interpretation of the contact reports suggests that they may already be seeding their formation with decoys.'

'Understood,' Foraker acknowledged, and returned her attention to the plot. Like Clapp, she would have preferred for CIC to have been able to download the raw sensor data directly, rather than relying on the interpretive reports of the LACs' tactical officers. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible . . . yet. On the other hand, no one on the other side (we hope, she amended dutifully) had any reason to suspect that the Republican Navy had finally managed to crack the secret of the Royal Manticoran Navy's faster than light communications capability. Actually, the RHN had known roughly what the Manties were doing for years; they just hadn't known how to do it themselves. Until now.

To be honest, Foraker's techs had needed a bit of a leg up from the Solarian League firms which had been trading military technology to Rob Pierre's People's Republic in return for combat reports and the largest payments the cash-starved Committee had been able to scrape up. But it had been a very small leg up, and Foraker felt a deep, uncomplicated sense of pride in the way her own R&D people had picked it up and run with it. She was far too self-honest to believe Haven's researchers were in the same league as Manticore's, yet they were much better than they had been. They were still playing catch-up, but they'd managed to considerably narrow the gap between themselves and their potential enemies.

And that's another of the things we can 'thank' Pierre and his butchers for, she thought. At least they blasted loose the old R&D hierarchies and actually found a few people who could think to take over instead!

'I wish we could deploy drones like the Manties',' Anders murmured beside her, and her mouth twitched in a small, wry grin at the confirmation that he'd been thinking exactly what she had. The power requirements and mass costs of the RHN's current grav-pulse transmitters were far too high to permit it to employ the remote drones the RMN and its allies could deploy. The Manties were considerably ahead in super-dense fusion bottle technology and several other areas—including the newest generation of superconductor capacitor systems—and Haven was unable to match the onboard power levels of their remote platforms. But even without that, the sheer size of the early-generation RHN hardware would have made it impossible to squeeze it into such tight quarters. Indeed, it could be fitted into nothing smaller than a LAC. And, as Foraker strongly suspected had been the case for the Manties when they first developed the system themselves, any LAC or starship had to temporarily cut its acceleration to zero in order to transmit a message. Coupled with the slow pulse repetition frequency rate they'd so