War Of Honor

"Lieutenant Commander Zahn's husband?" Brigham asked.

"That's the one," Honor agreed. "George just finished reading one of his position papers and briefed me on it last night."

Brigham nodded. Commander George Reynolds was Honor's staff intelligence officer, and Honor had selected him for the post of "spook" at least partly on Brigham's recommendation. The chief of staff had worked with him before and been impressed by his ability to think outside the box.

"George wasn't prepared to unreservedly endorse Zahn's conclusions," Honor continued, "but he did say that the logic seemed tight, assuming the basic facts on which it was based were accurate. And now Captain Bachfisch seems to be confirming those facts from an entirely independent perspective."

"If both of them are right," Brigham said unhappily, "then we're holding an even shorter stick than we thought, Your Grace."

"I wish you were wrong," Honor told her. "Unfortunately, I don't think you are."

"So what do we do about it?"

"I don't know. Not yet. The first thing is this meeting, though. We need to get the rest of the staff brought up to speed, get them started thinking on possible threats and responses. And, of course, I'll want to get Alice and Alistair briefed in and thinking about it, too. Hopefully, at least one or two useful ideas will come out of it. And I'm enlarging the invitation list for di

"Will he be comfortable with that, Your Grace?" Brigham asked. Honor looked a question at her, and she shrugged. "It's pretty obvious he's spent a lot of time establishing himself out here. If word leaks that he's a Manticoran intelligence asset, it could do him a lot of damage. It might even get him killed. I just wondered if he really wanted that many people to know who your information source is. I don't expect any of them to let it get to the wrong ears, but he doesn't know them the way we do."

"I asked him that, more or less," Honor replied after a moment. "He'd already considered the same questions before he ever asked to come aboard Werewolf. I don't think he'd be here in the first place if he weren't prepared for the sorts of questions we're likely to ask him. And he may not know them, but he does know me, and I think he trusts my judgment about who might or might not be a threat to his own security."

"In that case, Your Grace," the chief of staff said as the lift car reached its destination and the doors hissed open, "we'll just have to make certain that none of us is a threat, won't we?"

Chapter Twenty Eight

"…So I did exactly what Mister Pirate told me to," Thomas Bachfisch said with an evil grin. "We hove to, opened our perso

More than one of his listeners winced at the thought of what it must have been like aboard that piratical cruiser in the fleeting instant its crew had to realize what had happened. There was, however, a marked absence of sympathy for the crew in question. These were all experienced naval officers; they'd seen too much of the wreckage pirates left behind.

"Your ships must have come as a nasty surprise to the pirate community out here, Sir," Roslee Orndorff observed as she handed another celery stick to Banshee.

"Not so much to the community as a whole, as to the individuals who ran into us," said Bachfisch. "We haven't really tried to make our presence a secret—after all, half the effect of a Q-ship derives from the fact that potential raiders know she's out there somewhere. If they don't know she exists, then they're not going to be worried over the possibility that any given merchantman might be her. But by the same token, we haven't exactly broadcast a description of any of our ships, and we've been known to change the paint scheme from time to time. The smart paint cost us a pretty pe

"I often think it's more useful to Q-ships than it's ever been to regular men-of-war," Alistair McKeon observed, and several heads nodded. The "paint" used by the RMN and most other navies was liberally laced with nanotech and reactive pigments which allowed it to be programmed and altered, essentially without limit, at will. Unfortunately, as McKeon had just suggested, that was of strictly limited utility for a warship. After all, the distinctive hammerhead hull form of a warship could scarcely be mistaken for anything else, whatever color it might be. Besides, no one was likely to rely on visual identification of any man-of-war, which was one reason most navies also had a distinct tendency to choose one paint scheme—like the RMN's basic white—and leave it that way.

But merchantmen were another matter entirely. Even there, cruisers and pirate vessels alike tended to rely primarily upon transponder codes, but anyone who wanted to steal a ship's cargo had to come close enough to do it. And at that point, visual identifications—or mis identifications, in some very special cases—became the norm.

"I'm guessing that if you're using smart paint, you're also using . . . inventive transponder codes, Admiral," Lieutenant Commander Reynolds put in. Bachfisch looked as if he were about to correct the rank title yet again, then visibly gave up and simply nodded once more.

"I'm confident my people could take just about any pirate out here in straight fight," he said. "But to be honest, our primary function is to carry cargo. Besides, we may be armed, and Pirates' Bane may have started life as an armed auxiliary, but that doesn't make her a dreadnought. She's got a military-grade compensator and the impellers and particle shields to go with it, and she and Ambuscade both have fairly respectable sidewall generators. But none of our ships have real military hulls or damage control capability.

"You were with Her Grace when her Q-ships deployed out here several years back, weren't you, Admiral Truman?" he asked, turning to Honor's second-in-command, and shrugged when Truman nodded in agreement. "Well, then you know what happens to a merchant hull that takes a hit from any heavy shipboard weapon. So under the circumstances, neither my crews nor I are particularly interested in 'fair fights' with pirates. Which is why we practically never sail under our own transponder codes until we're actually ready to make port."

"And the Confed Navy doesn't have a problem with that, Sir?" Rafe Cardones asked. It was a reasonable question, given that falsifying transponder codes was a moderately severe offense under the law of most star nations . . . including the Silesian Confederacy.

"Officially, they don't know anything about it," Bachfisch replied with a slight shrug, "and what they don't know about, they don't object to. In fact, most of their skippers know we're doing it, but they're not going to object to almost anything we do as long as we keep nailing the occasional pirate for them."

"Makes sense to me," Truman agreed, and reached for her wineglass. James MacGuiness materialized magically to refill the glass before she quite touched it, and she smiled her thanks at him, sipped the ruby wine, and turned her attention back to Bachfisch.

"I have to say that we're probably luckier than we deserve to have you run into us, Admiral Bachfisch," she said in a more formal tone.

"I didn't exactly 'run into' you, Admiral," Bachfisch replied with a crooked smile. "I came looking for you."

"I know." Truman considered him thoughtfully. "I'm grateful that you did. But at the same time, I'm sure you understand why we might be a little hesitant to accept one person's testimony, however credible that person might seem, when it flatly contradicts certain aspects of our ONI briefings."