War Of Honor

there's a genuine probability of hostilities with the Empire, I don't want our task force to be caught deep in Imperial territory when the shuttle goes up.'

'I understand entirely,' McKeon said, and this time there was no humor at all in his expression or tone. 'And I don't really disagree with you. That's the main reason I'm so irritated. We shouldn't have to be so worried about provocations that we go thirty-five light-years out of our way just to avoid the possibility. Much as I may complain about it, I understand exactly why no responsible station commander would be in a position to make any other routing decision. But understanding it doesn't mean I have to like the circumstances which make it the responsible thing to do.'

'No,' Honor agreed. 'And on that level, I have to agree with you. But Alice and Wraith are right about how much we can use the additional time for training.'

McKeon nodded, and she tasted the agreement behind the gesture. It was a bit grudging, but that wasn't because Alistair rejected her position. It was because he didn't like the reasons her ships' companies needed the additional drill time any more than he liked the reasons she felt no choice but to avoid actions which might be—or might be construed as—provocative.

And he's right, she reflected. It's absolutely ridiculous for the Queen's Navy to have gotten so . . . out of shape in barely four T-years. I suppose this is what Hamish meant when he started talking about 'victory disease.' But I know darned well that it never would have happened if Baroness Mourncreek were still First Lord and Sir Thomas were still First Space Lord.

But that was the real crux of the matter, when she came right down to it. Any military organization had a pronounced tendency to take its direction from the attitudes of its senior commanders, and the complacency and arrogance of the political admirals currently running the Admiralty were reflected among an unfortunately large and growing proportion of the Navy's officers. The manpower reductions mandated as part of the build down had been disproportionately concentrated among experienced personnel, particularly in the senior noncom and enlisted grades, which helped explain some of the problem, but it certainly didn't excuse it. Total numerical reductions in the regular officer corps had been lower than anywhere else, since the first priority had been to release reservist officers back to the merchant marine and civilian economy. That had actually increased the proportion of active-duty officers who were Academy graduates, but all too many of the better regulars had become so disgusted with the Janacek Admiralty that they had voluntarily gone on half-pay status and followed their reserve fellows into merchant service. The ones who remained were all too often the ones who found the current Admiralty attitude a comfortable fit. Which didn't say anything good about their own training and readiness attitudes.

It wasn't anything overt enough for the officers who hadn't been affected to effectively combat. It was just . . . sloppiness. It was the Navy's smugly comfortable belief in its own God-given superiority to anyone who might be foolish enough to cross swords with it. The belief that the inherent supremacy of the RMN would suffice to crush any opponent . . . which made the unrelenting drills and training exercises which had always been so much a part of the Royal Navy seem superfluous.

The inexperience of the LAC crews which had been assigned to Alice Truman's CLACs was one thing. The huge expansion in LACs which the Janacek Admiralty had undertaken as its low-cost answer to rear area security had spread the surviving combat-experienced LAC crews all too thin, and the LAC groups had taken their own losses of experienced personnel. The vast majority of her own LAC crews had been assigned to their present duties only after the truce had brought active operations to a close, which certainly explained their rough edges. Whether or not it justified them was another matter entirely. The people who'd trained them had had access to all of the after-action reports of the COLACs who'd actually led the Shrikes and Ferrets in combat. They'd also had Truman's original training syllabus and notes to draw upon. But no one would have guessed that from the initial performance of the LAC groups of green, inexperienced crews Honor had been assigned for Sidemore Station.

Yet however understandable her LACs deficiencies might be, her battle squadrons weren't a lot better, and with far less excuse. The same complacency and lack of attention to routine training had spread its subtle malaise through the ships of the wall, as well. Especially the older, pre-pod classes. Those ships were almost universally regarded as obsolescent, at best, and even the personnel assigned to them seemed to have come to regard them as secondary units. As little more than backup for the SD(P)s.

'To be completely honest,' she told her guests, 'I probably would have taken the long way around even if I hadn't been concerned about the Andies' sensibilities. God knows we needed the time to get the rust blown off.' She shook her head. 'I hate to admit it, but the whole time Earl White Haven and I have been fighting with Janacek and High Ridge over procurement policies, we managed to take our eyes off an even more important ball. We were so worried about the hardware that we forgot to worry about how well our people were trained to use the hardware they actually had.'

'Even if you hadn't, how much could you realistically have expected to accomplish, Ma'am?' Mercedes Brigham's tone was respectful, but it was also firm, almost brisk. 'There were only so many battles you could fight,' she pointed out. 'And if you'll forgive me for pointing it out again, there's no point for blaming yourself for the consequences of policies you opposed. And you did oppose the entire mindset that made this sort of mistake possible.'

'Well, yes. But not because I saw this one coming. I think that's what actually bothers me most about it, to be honest. I like to think I'm smart enough to notice things like this sneaking up on me, and I hate finding out I wasn't.'

'Everyone gets an egg in the face every so often,' McKeon observed philosophically, then grinned. 'Some of us get to savor the sensation more often than others, of course. Like your humble wall of battle commander.'

'Or,' Goodrick said in a darker voice, 'the people who get into bed with people like Manpower.'

The captain smiled thinly and very, very coldly. Of all the people in the dining compartment, Wraith Goodrick had the most intensely personal bone to pick with the Mesan slavers, because his mother had been genetically designed and sold like so much animate property. She'd been consigned to one of the notorious 'pleasure resorts' whose whispered existence was an open secret, however well hidden they might be, and she'd escaped that fate only because she'd been loaded as cargo aboard a freighter which had enjoyed the unhappy experience of straying into the arms of an RMN light cruiser. Which was how she'd come to be emancipated in the Star Kingdom and why Goodrick had imbibed his searing hatred of all things Mesan literally at his mother's breast.

Which, in turn, explained his almost religious experience when Honor and Andrea Jaruwalski explained Operation Wilberforce to Task Force Thirty-Four's senior officers once they were en route to Marsh.

'We can certainly hope that will prove the case for some of them, at least,' Honor told him, with no more doubt than anyone else in the compartment what he was referring to. 'Not that we can absolutely count on it, of course,' she added on a note of caution. 'We are going to be operating in Silesia, not Manticoran space.'

'Judging from the way the Manpower scandal worked out in the Star Kingdom, that may actually be an advantage where bigger fish are concerned, Your Grace,' Orndorff pointed out.

'Maybe,' Honor acknowledged. 'On the other hand, I'm not entirely certain that whole affair has been as completely put to bed as it might appear just now. The circumstances which led to the ... circumscribed nature of the investigation aren't going to obtain forever. And the information that was handed over to the Crown may not be all the information there is. Or that can still be turned up if someone looks in the right place.'

'Well, someone certainly looked 'in the right place' for the Wilberforce information.'

Alice Truman's observation came out in ever so slightly questioning a tone. Everyone in that dining compartment was consumed with curiosity about the source of Honor's private information on the network of Silesian system governors and Navy officers who'd reached highly profitable accommodations with Mesa. It was far too detailed and internally consistent for them to doubt its accuracy, but none of them could begin to imagine how she'd gotten her hands on it.

And she intended to keep it that way. She owed Anton Zilwicki that much for his trust in handing it over to her.

'That particular information does provide an example of what I'm talking about,' she agreed with a slight smile which told Truman her fishing expedition was going to come up dry. 'Not that any of it has any domestic Manticoran connections—or not direct ones, anyway. But I'll settle for progress anywhere, where genetic slavery is concerned. And given that we know which systems and which Silesian freight lines to watch, we may just make a