A Rising Thunder

“Thank you, Captain Emerson,” she said to the smiling senior grade captain whose image had just replaced her “tactical plot.” She nodded to him, then looked at her staff.

“Good work, People,” she told them. “That was solid. Dinner at Harrington House tonight, down on the beach. The beer’s on me; the surf forecast looks good; my dad’s already basting the barbecue; and Mac’s got something special planned for desert. So don’t be late — and bring friends, if you’ve got them!”

“All right!” Brigham responded, and Honor smiled as the others whistled and applauded enthusiastically.

“I hope it doesn’t take you very long to touch up those scuff marks on your paintwork,” another, closer voice said dryly under cover of the staffers’ obvious pleasure.

“Oh, I think we can probably manage our repairs fairly promptly,” she replied, still smiling as she turned to face Thomas Theisman.

The two of them stood in the Advanced Tactical Course Center’s main tactical simulator. It was far from Honor’s first visit — she’d commanded ATC after her return from Cerberus — but Theisman had been obviously impressed by the facility even before the simulation had begun. Now he looked around the enormous room and shook his head.

“That was scary,” he admitted frankly, turning back to Honor. “I knew we were screwed as soon as you people got Apollo deployed, but I genuinely hadn’t realized how badly screwed we’d have been if you hadn’t convinced the Empress to negotiate with us.”

“I was scarcely the only one who ‘convinced’ Elizabeth, Tom. And by now you realize as well as I do that however good she may be at holding grudges, she really doesn’t like killing people.”

“Neither do I.” Theisman’s tone was light, and he grinned, but Honor tasted the emotions behind his words and realized yet again why Nimitz had assigned Thomas Theisman the name “Dreams of Peace.”

“Neither do I,” he repeated, “and I especially don’t like killing my own people by sending them out to face that kind of combat differential. So if it’s all the same to you, I’m just delighted I’m not going to be doing that again anytime soon.”

She nodded, and the two of them started across the huge room towards the exit while Brigham oversaw the simulation’s formal shutdown.

“Did you know they were going to throw MDMs at you?” Theisman asked, and she shook her head.

“No, somehow that managed to slip Captain Emerson’s mind when he was describing the mission parameters,” she said dryly.

“I suspected that might’ve been the case, given Admiral Truman’s reaction,” Theisman said, and she chuckled.

“I’m not certain, but I suspect that that particular wrinkle may have come from a suggestion on the part of my beloved husband.”

“Having faced your ‘beloved husband,’ I can believe that.” Theisman’s voice was equally dry. “Both of you always did have that nasty tendency to think outside the box.”

“We weren’t the only ones.” Honor gave him a level look. “Once you got rid of Saint-Just and State Security, you turned up a bunch of capable COs. In some ways, though, I’d really never realized just how good you were until we finally got a look at just how bad the Sollies are!”

“Please!” Theisman grimaced in mock pain. “I’d like to think you could find someone better than that to compare us to!”

Honor chuckled again and Nimitz bleeked a laugh as they stepped through the exit. Spencer Hawke, Clifford McGraw, and Joshua Atkins fell in behind them, and Waldemar Tummel, who’d been promoted to lieutenant commander following their return from Nouveau Paris, had been waiting with her personal armsmen. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, although the dark memory of the parents, brother, and sister he’d lost with Hephaestus was still there, behind the smile.

“How far ahead of schedule are we, Waldemar?” she asked.

“Almost an hour, Your Grace,” the flag lieutenant who was no longer a lieutenant replied, and his smile got a bit broader. “I don’t think the umpires expected you to polish them off quite that quickly.”

“Well, let’s not get too carried away patting ourselves on the back,” she said. She was speaking to Tummel, but she met Theisman’s eyes as she spoke. “All something like this can really tell us is how well we’re likely to perform against the threats we think we know about, and Filareta seems to be several cuts above the Sollies we’ve seen in Talbott. If it turns out someone with a working brain has something we didn’t know about…”

The Havenite nodded soberly. They’d both had enough unpleasant experience with that sort of discovery.

Honor nodded back. She’d always liked Theisman, and the better she got to know him, the more strongly he reminded her of Alistair McKeon. Although — her lips twitched in a faint, fond smile of memory — he was definitely less inclined than Alistair had been to simply head for the nearest enemy and start slugging.

Ever since Beowulf’s initial warning, however, Honor had studied everything Pat Givens’ ONI had on Massimo Filareta, and Theisman had joined the effort from the moment Pritchart and her delegation arrived. Admittedly, Haven hadn’t had a lot to add to ONI’s meager bio on Filareta, but there’d been enough for her to be cautiously confident that she and Theisman had a feel for his basic personality. He was clearly very different from the late Sandra Crandall, and he had her horrible example to make him even less like her. Whatever the rest of the Solarian League Navy might think, Filareta was unlikely to reject reports of Manticoran technological superiority out of hand. Perhaps he might have, once, but despite some hints in ONI’s dossier about objectionable personal habits, he was obviously too smart to do that after the Battle of Spindle.

“I take your point,” Theisman said out loud now. “That’s one reason I’m so happy — now, at any rate — to see you people base your training on the assumption that the other side’s better than it really is.”

“If you don’t push your own systems and doctrine to the max, all you’re doing is practicing things you already know how to do.” Honor shrugged. “And that’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that you get fat, happy, and dumb. If I had a dollar for every spacer some stupid, overconfident flag officer’s gotten killed—”

She cut herself short, and Theisman nodded again.

“Been there, seen that,” he agreed.

They were silent for a moment as they continued down a hallway towards the lifts. Then Theisman gave himself a little shake.

“I have to say the look inside your hardware’s been even more fascinating than watching the way you set up simulations,” he said. “We’ve never had the opportunity to examine Apollo, of course, and I’m afraid your security arrangements have worked a lot better in general than we really would’ve preferred. Shannon’s been especially frustrated. We’ve managed to recover enough to give us a leg up in quite a few areas, but they’ve mainly been matters of gross engineering.”

Honor nodded. Like every other navy, the Royal Manticoran Navy routinely incorporated security protocols into its sensitive technology. There wasn’t a lot they could do to disguise things like mini-fusion plants or improvements in laser head grav lenses, but computers and molecular circuitry were another matter. Without the proper authorization codes, efforts to access, study, or analyze those triggered nanotech security protocols that reconfigured them into so much useless, inert junk. Trying to find ways to crack, spoof, acquire, or otherwise evade those codes was part of the never-ending cycle of cyber warfare, and she’d been pleased by the confirmation that Manticore had stayed in front of Haven in that contest.

“To be honest,” Theisman continued, “the most useful things we recovered right after Thunderbolt were some of your tech manuals.” He did not, Honor noted, mention the fact that far more tech manuals had come into Havenite hands from their Erewhonese allies before Thunderbolt. Tactful of him. “But those weren’t much help when your new-generation technology started coming online, and by then, you were the ones capturing most of the tech that got captured, anyway. All of which”—he turned his head to look at her sharply—“is my way of segueing tactfully into the question of shared hardware.”

“You know my position, Tom,” Honor replied. “That’s Elizabeth’s and Hamish’s position, too, and as nearly as I can tell, Sonja Hemphill’s firmly on board, as well. So there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s going to happen. The