War Of Honor

He gazed at all of them for several seconds, as if absorbing the evidence of how much time—and life—had truly passed since last he'd seen her. Then he drew a deep breath and returned his attention to her.

"Quite a change since the last time you and I were in Silesia together," he observed wryly.

"I suppose so," she agreed. "But it brings back a lot of memories, doesn't it?"

"That it does. That it does." He shook his head. "Some of them good . . . some of them not so good."

"Sir," she said just a bit hesitantly, "at the court of inquiry after we got home. I asked to testify, but—"

"I know you did, Honor. But I told the court I felt you had nothing to add."

"You told the court?" she looked at him in disbelief. "But I was right there on the bridge. I knew exactly what happened!"

"Of course you did," he agreed, almost gently. "But I knew you too well to let them put you on the stand." She continued to stare at him, her eyes shadowed with sudden hurt, and he shook his head quickly. "Don't misunderstand me. I wasn't worried about anything you might say hurting me or my chances. But the official record already contained everything you could have testified to, including your own after-action report, and you've never been noted for your overly powerful self-preserving instincts. If they'd gotten you on the stand, you were almost certain to say something fierce in my defense, and I didn't want anything splashing on you."

"I'd have been honored to be 'splashed on' if it could have helped you, Sir," she said quietly.

"I know that. I knew it when I refused to let my advocate call you as a witness. But you had enough enemies of your own already for any midshipwoman, and I wasn't about to see you throw away the credit you so richly deserved for saving my ship. Not when anything you said wasn't going to matter, anyway."

"You couldn't know that it wouldn't matter," she protested.

"Oh, yes, I could, Honor," he said with a half-bitter, half-amused smile. "Because the fact of the matter was that I deserved to be dismissed from my ship."

"You did not!" she disagreed instantly.

"I think I'm hearing the midshipwoman who served under me, not the admiral sitting across her coffee table from me," he observed almost lightly. She opened her mouth, but he raised one hand and shook his head at her. "Think about it—as a flag officer, not a midshipwoman. I don't say there weren't extenuating circumstances, but let's be honest. For whatever combination of reasons, I allowed Dunecki and his ship into point-blank range, and I damned near got my own ship blown out of space, as a consequence. I did get too many of my people killed," he added in a much darker tone.

"But you couldn't have known," she protested.

"You were one of Raoul's proteges," he replied. "What did he always tell you about surprises?"

"That they were usually what happened when one captain made a mistake about something she'd actually seen all along," she admitted slowly.

"Which is precisely what I did." He shrugged. "Don't think it wasn't important to me to know you wanted to speak up in my defense, because it was. And don't think that because of that one incident I regard myself as some sort of total failure. But neither of those things changes the fact that I hazarded the ship the King had entrusted to me and that I would have lost her, with all hands, if not for the actions of a midshipwoman on her snotty cruise and a quite disproportionate amount of good luck. To be perfectly honest, I was surprised when they only placed me on half-pay rather than dismissing me from the Service entirely."

"I still say they were wrong," Honor said stubbornly. He looked at her quizzically, and it was her turn to shrug uncomfortably. "All right. I suppose that if I were sitting on a court of inquiry on a similar incident and all I had was the official record, I might have agreed some penalty was appropriate. I might have. But I like to think that by now I've seen enough of the ways in which good, competent officers can do everything right and still crap out to give anyone the benefit of the doubt."

"Perhaps you have," he agreed. "And perhaps, if it hadn't been an incident in peacetime, if the officers of the court had had the sort of experience you have now, their decision might have been different. But it was a different set of rules in a different time, Honor." He shook his head. "I won't pretend it didn't hurt. But I've never felt it was a gross miscarriage of justice, either. And," he gestured at the blue uniform tunic he wore, "it wasn't exactly the end of my life."

"No, I suppose it wasn't. But you'd still look better in black and gold than in blue, if you'll pardon my saying so. And the Navy could darned well have used your experience when the war finally began."

"I suppose if I'm honest, that was what hurt the most," he admitted in a slightly distant tone, gazing at something only he could see. "I'd spent so many years training for exactly what happened, and I wasn't allowed to use all I'd learned in the Star Kingdom's defense when the storm finally broke." He gazed at that invisible something for several more seconds, then shook himself. "But," he said briskly, focusing on her face once more, "there was absolutely no point in sitting around and brooding over what had happened, and I've found the odd project here and there since to keep myself busy."

"I understand you own your own shipping line," Honor said.

"That might be putting it just a bit grandly," he replied wryly. "I do own two ships outright, with majority shares in three others. Not quite on the scale of the Hauptman Cartel—or Skydomes of Grayson—but not too shabby an accomplishment here in Silesia, I suppose."

"From all I've heard that's a pretty severe case of understatement. And they tell me you have at least two armed merchantmen?"

"True," he said. "You're wondering how I managed it?" She nodded, and he shrugged. "Like everything else here in the Confederacy, it all depends on how deep your pockets are, what contacts you have, and who you know. Silesia may be a dangerous place to be a merchant skipper, but for that very reason, there's a lot of money in it if you manage to survive. And I've been out here long enough to've amassed quite a few debts and favors . . . and to learn where a few useful skeletons were buried." He shrugged again. "So, technically, Pirate's Bane and Ambuscade are auxiliary units of the Confederate Navy. Technically."

"Technically," Honor repeated, and he smiled. "And practically speaking?" she inquired.

"Practically speaking, the Confed Navy's official warrants are nothing but ways around the prohibition against armed merchantmen which are available to those with sufficiently well-placed government patrons. Everyone knows the auxiliaries will never be called upon in their naval capacity. For that matter, at least some of them are pirates themselves!" He seemed, she noted, to actually find that amusing, in a grim sort of way.

"May I ask who your patron is?" she asked in a carefully neutral voice, and he chuckled.

"I believe you've probably met her, at some point," he told her. "Her name is Patricia Givens."

"Admiral Givens?" Honor stared at him, startled by the name.

"Indirectly speaking," Bachfisch qualified. "Mind you, I probably would have reached the same point eventually on my own—or I like to think so, anyway. I'd already acquired a half-ownership in Ambuscade, and to be completely honest, I'd already armed her on a minor sort of scale. My partner wasn't entirely happy about that, but we both understood that if the Sillies ever complained about it, I'd take the fall by claiming full responsibility. At least a half dozen Confed skippers—and, for that matter, at least one flag officer—knew she was armed, of course, but by then I'd been out here long enough that I was considered a Silly myself, not one of those pushy Manticoran interlopers.