War Of Honor

of law,' I don't think there's much question about his ability as a naval officer. Would you agree with that?'

'Anyone but an idiot would,' McGwire half-snapped.

'I'm glad to hear you say that,' Giancola told him. 'Because it just happens that that's what my 'smartass hints' have been about. It would appear that without his having bothered to tell anyone about it, the Secretary of War has been quietly but rather effectively doing something about our military inferiority.'

'Doing what?' McGwire asked intently.

'By a fortunate turn of circumstances, we're actually in a position to answer that question for you, Samson,' Arnold Giancola said calmly, and looked at his brother. 'Jason, why don't you tell Samson and Gerald about the good Admiral's little Bolthole.'

Chapter Twenty Two

It wasn't the usual route for deploying to Silesia.

Under normal circumstances, a Manticoran task force making transit to the Confederacy would have gone out by way of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction's Gregor terminus. But Gregor was an Andermani star system located in the very heart of the Empire. The Star Kingdom might hold title to the terminus itself, along with the legally recognized right to fortify the area around it and to maintain a fleet base orbiting the system's secondary component, but it was the Empire who held sovereignty over the rest of it.

Which was why Honor had opted to travel the Triangle Route in reverse. Rather than making transit to Gregor, and from there to Silesia and home again by way of Basilisk, as most merchant skippers would have, she and the reinforcing units of Task Force Thirty-Four had moved 'north' to Basilisk, and then 'west' to Silesia. It wasn't the fastest possible way to get there, since it required her to effectively cross the entire breadth of the Confederacy to reach Marsh, but it was one way to avoid any possible . . . unpleasantness with the Andies before she even reached her new command area. She didn't really like tacking on the additional thirty-four light-years, but even in the zeta hyper-space band, that amounted to less than five days of travel time, and the additional delay was acceptable under the circumstances which actually applied.

Not that every one of her officers agreed with her about that.

'I still say that all of this pussyfooting around is ridiculous,' Alistair McKeon grumbled.

He, Alice Truman, and their chiefs of staff had come aboard Werewolf by pinnace in response to one of Honor's dinner invitations. Her dinners were something of a legend in the Fleet, and everyone knew her guests were expected to bring their opinions and any problems they might be wrestling with along with them when they came. McKeon knew that even better than most, and she'd more than half-expected to hear from him—again—on this topic once the wine had been poured.

'It's not 'pussyfooting,' Alistair,' she replied mildly, sipping her own cocoa while her guests nursed a particularly good Sphinxian burgundy. She knew it was a good one, although she personally didn't care for it particularly, because her father had selected it for her.

'I calls it as I sees it,' he told her with a lopsided grin. 'And pussyfooting is exactly what it feels like to me. No offense, Nimitz,' he added with a nod to the treecat in the highchair beside Honor, who showed him bone-white fangs in a yawn of amusement.

'In a lot of ways, I have to agree with Alistair,' Truman put in. 'Not that Wraith and I can't find a lot of useful things to do with the additional time, of course.'

She cocked her head at Captain (senior-grade) Craig Goodrick, her chief of staff. Goodrick, who'd earned the nickname 'Wraith' for his work with the electronic warfare capabilities of the first Shrike—class LACs, was an unremarkable-looking officer. The brain hiding behind his unassuming facade, however, was one of the better ones in the RMN, at least when it could be pried away from contemplating a hand of spades. Now he shrugged.

'Actually, Ma'am, I don't mind the longer transit time at all. I'm not especially crazy about anything that looks like tiptoeing around the Andies' sensibilities when they're being such pains in the posterior, but given the realities where our LAC groups are concerned, I'll take all the exercise time I can get and be glad of it.'

'Heresy!' McKeon proclaimed, but there was a twinkle in his eye, and Commander Roslee Orndorff, his own chief of staff, chuckled out loud. It was a very substantial chuckle from a very substantial woman, and the 'cat in the chair beside her bleeked a laugh of his own. Honor didn't know Orndorff very well, but the ash-blond commander was another of the handful of naval officers who had been adopted. Her Banshee didn't seem to mind that his human-style name was derived from a mythological female harbinger of death. He was a good bit younger than Nimitz, around Samantha's age, in fact, but it was obvious to Honor that he shared Nimitz's low sense of humor.

'You're outnumbered, Sir,' Orndorff told McKeon now. 'And it's not just the LAC jocks who need time to work up to full efficiency, is it?'

'We could take any batch of Andies I ever saw exactly like we are this minute,' McKeon proclaimed.

'In your dreams, Alistair,' Truman said dryly. McKeon looked at her, and she shook her head at him. 'I make all due allowance for patriotism and esprit de corps, even parochialism, but you know better than that.'

'Well, maybe,' he conceded. 'But the Andies aren't exactly four meters tall and covered with long, curly hair, either. And while I'm prepared to admit we have more than our fair share of rough edges, we also have a bunch of combat-experienced veterans, which is more than the Andies can say.'

'That's fair enough,' Honor acknowledged. 'But you might want to think about the fact that before we and the Peeps started shooting at one another, they were the ones with all of the in-depth backlog of combat experience. We'd done our share of chasing down pirates and dealing with the occasional squadron of 'privateers,' but we didn't have any real, recent war-fighting experience to go with it. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty decent description of where the Andermani probably are right now.'

'Maybe it is,' McKeon agreed with a more serious expression, 'but we're not exactly the Peeps. They might have had a lot of experience at knocking off single-star system opponents, but most of their 'wars' hadn't really amounted to all that much more than polishing off privateer squadrons of their own.'

'Somehow I rather doubt President Ramirez would agree with your analysis where the San Martin navy was concerned,' Truman pointed out in an even drier tone.

'Your ganging up on me,' he complained plaintively.

'That's what happens when someone rushes in where angels fear to tread,' Honor told him. 'Besides, it's dangerous to draw too close an analogy between the prewar Peep navy and the one we actually wound up fighting. The officers who'd amassed all the experience tended to be Legislaturalists, and they disappeared in Pierre's purges without our having to face most of them in combat. The ones we did go up against, like Parnell—or Alfredo Yu, when he was still in Havenite service—certainly gave us a run for our money, even with our hardware edge.'

'You're undermining your own argument,' McKeon objected. 'If we're supposed to be the overconfident Peeps and the Andies are supposed to be the underestimated but plucky underdogs, then pointing out how competent people like Parnell and Yu were sort of defeats your purpose, doesn't it?'

'Not really. Even Parnell clearly underestimated what we could do to him, and the fact that he was so good in so many ways only underscores how easy it is for it even a competent officer to get overconfident on the basis of his people's superior levels of experience. Which is what the lot of us are ever so gently suggesting to you that you might be doing, Alistair.'

She smiled seraphically, and Truman snorted at his expression.

'Gotcha!' she announced.

'All right. All right!' McKeon surrendered. 'I admit we can use the additional training time. But all joking aside, I really am more than a little . . . irked to see a Manticoran task force sneaking around through the backdoor route this way.'

'I know,' Honor acknowledged. 'And I know you're not alone in feeling that way, either. But remember that our most recent reports on what's going on in Marsh were three weeks old before we even left Manticore. I don't want to appear any more provocative than we can help. If Emperor Gustav really is planning an aggressive move in Silesia, we don't need to go around providing any military pretexts he can capitalize on. And, by the same token, if