War Of Honor

"I can think of two ways to solve that problem, Sir," Trenis said confidently. "One would be to use a diplomatic courier. If nothing else, the Silesians do maintain an embassy right here in Nouveau Paris and, let's be honest, if we offer a sufficiently toothsome bribe to their Ambassador, he'd be perfectly willing to make one of his official dispatch boats available to us. That would still allow us to send the orders to our Silesian commander with a forty-eight-hour head start over any message that could reach Harrington, and Kuzak would never close the junction to a vessel with diplomatic immunity. Not, at least, when no shots had actually been fired.

"The second solution would lose some of our head start time, but it would be even simpler than that. All we really have to do is to plant our courier in the Manticore System ahead of time. I'm sure that if we put our intelligence types to work on it, they could come up with any number of covers for an ostensibly civilian ship—probably one that doesn't even have a Republican registry—to hang around in Manticore for several days, or even a few weeks. If we attack Trevor's Star, it's going to be pretty damned obvious very quickly to everyone in the Manticore System that we've done so. If nothing else, there are going to be enough ship movements in and out of the junction to give it away. So as soon as the skipper of our courier knows that the attack has actually commenced, she goes ahead and transits through the junction to either Basilisk or Gregor and proceeds to rendezvous. She'll probably still have a little bit of head start, since no one in the Star Kingdom, especially with Janacek and his crowd ru

"Well," Marquette said with a crooked smile, "that's knocked that objection on the head, too. You do seem to be in fine form today, Linda."

"Yes, you do," Theisman agreed. "Mind you, I'm still far from convinced that splitting our forces in the first place would be a good idea. Especially when we don't know which way the Graysons are likely to jump. But if we did decide to do any such thing, I think the arrangements you've sketched out would probably work."

"I'm fairly certain they would, Sir," Marquette told him. "And as far as the Graysons are concerned, at the moment Janacek and High Ridge seem to be almost as intent on pissing them off as they were on firing all of their best admirals! According to all our sources in the Star Kingdom, it's pretty obvious Janacek doesn't trust Benjamin Mayhew as far as he could throw him in a two-grav field. Which is uncommonly stupid even for Janacek, but let's not look a gift horse in the mouth."

"Admiral Marquette is right about that, Sir," Trenis observed. "And for that matter, right this minute, Grayson has just sent a sizable chunk of its total navy off on some sort of long-term, long-range training deployment. According to NavInt's sources, they'll be gone for at least the next four to five standard months. If the balloon should happen to go up during that time period, well . . ."

She shrugged, and Thomas Theisman nodded slowly and thoughtfully.

Chapter Thirty Four

"Harvest Joy, you are cleared to proceed. Good luck!"

"Thank you, Junction Control," Captain Josepha Zachary, commanding officer of the improbably named survey ship HMS Harvest Joy, acknowledged the clearance and the good wishes simultaneously, then turned to Jordin Kare and quirked an eyebrow.

"Junction Control says we can go now, Doctor," she observed. "Do you and Dr. Wix agree?"

"Captain, Dr. Wix and I have been ready to go for days!" Kare replied with an amazingly youthful looking grin. Then he nodded more seriously. "Our people are ready to proceed whenever you are, Captain."

"Well, in that case . . ." Captain Zachary murmured, and crossed the three paces of deck between her and her command chair. She settled into it, turned it to face her helmsman, and drew a deep breath.

"Ten gravities, Chief Tobias," she said formally.

"Ten gravities, aye, Ma'am," the helmsman confirmed, and Harvest Joy began to creep very slowly forward.

Zachary crossed her legs and made herself lean confidently back in her comfortable chair. It probably wasn't strictly necessary for her to project an aura of complete calm, but it couldn't hurt, either.

Her lips tried to twitch into a smile at the thought, but she suppressed it automatically as she watched the navigation plot repeater deployed from the left arm of the command chair. The com screen beside it showed the face of Arswendo Hooja, her chief engineer, and she nodded to the blond-haired, blue-eyed lieutenant commander. Arswendo and she had served together often over the years, and Zachary was grateful for his calm, competent presence at the far end of the com link.

She was just as happy to have avoided a few other presences, whether on the other end of com links or in the flesh. First and foremost among them was Dame Melina Makris, who had made herself a monumental pain in the posterior from the moment she came aboard. So far as Zachary had been able to determine, Makris had no redeeming characteristics, and the captain had taken carefully concealed but nonetheless profound satisfaction in ba

Now she nodded to Hooja in welcome. Neither of them felt any particular need for words of a time like this, and in Arswendo's case, she was reasonably certain that calm was completely genuine. Which was more than she could say for most of the people aboard her ship. She could feel the tension of her entire bridge crew. Like her, they were all far too professional to be obvious about showing it, yet it was almost painfully evident to someone who knew them as well as she did. And not surprisingly. In the entire two thousand-T-year history of humankind's expansion through the galaxy, exploration ships had done what Harvest Joy was about to do less than two hundred times. It had been almost two T-centuries since the Basilisk terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction had been mapped, and so far as Zachary knew, no living officer in the Star Kingdom, naval or civilian, had ever commanded the first transit through a newly discovered terminus . . . until her. And although she'd been a survey and exploration officer for the better part of fifty T-years, during which she'd made more Junction transits than she could have counted, no one had ever made this particular transit before. That would have been exciting enough, but, logical or not, the perversity of the human imagination persisted in projecting potential disaster scenarios to hone anticipation's edge still sharper.

The icon representing Harvest Joy on the astrogation plot slid slowly down the gleaming line of her projected transit vector. In some respects, it was exactly like a routine transit through one of the well-established Junction termini. And, as far as the navigation guidance from ACS and the pre-transit calculations from Dr. Kare's team were concerned, it might as well have been precisely that. But for all the similarities, there was one enormous difference, because in this case, the figures upon which those calculations were based had never been tested by another ship.

Stop that, she scolded herself. They may never have been tested by another ship, but Kare and his crowd have put over sixty probes into this terminus to compile the readings your precious numbers are based on! Which was true, as far as it went. On the other hand, she reflected with another almost-smile, not a single one of those probes has ever come back again, has it now?