War Of Honor

"We've discussed the operational assumptions and concepts of Case Red Alpha in some detail. She understands that for it to succeed, we need to maintain the advantage of surprise. She also agrees that it's essential for us not to launch an offensive without clearly demonstrating to both domestic and foreign public opinion that we had no choice, however. And, frankly, I hope and believe she continues to agree that renewed hostilities against the Star Kingdom are a disaster to be avoided at almost any cost."

At least the first verb in that final sentence, he reflected, was still accurate. Unfortunately, he was no longer as confident as he would have liked to be that the second one was.

"This is not an order to commence operations," he said firmly. "It is, however, a heads-up. Eloise's new note will be dispatched to Manticore within thirty-six standard hours. I don't think anyone in the capital—not even Giancola—claims to have any idea how High Ridge will respond to it. But it looks like we're going to find out."

Arnold Giancola sat in his private office. It was very late, and he smiled in amusement burnished by an undeniable touch of anxiety as he contemplated the text of the document on his reader. The hour was entirely appropriate, he reflected. By long and venerable tradition, conspiracies were supposed to be executed by dark of night.

Not that he would have admitted to anyone else that what he was doing constituted anything conspiratorial, of course, but whatever he might have said to others, there was no point trying to deceive himself. Some might even argue that what he was about to do was illegal, but he'd researched the question with some care, and he rather doubted that a court would have agreed. He might be wrong, but his own judgment was that his actions represented at best a gray area. After all, he was the Secretary of State. Any communication with a foreign government was his responsibility, and the exact way in which that communication was delivered was arguably a matter for his judgment.

Still, the fact was that Eloise Pritchart and he had discussed this particular note at length and agonized over its phrasing. The President obviously expected him to send it in the exact form to which they'd both finally agreed. Unfortunately, she hadn't given him any formal instruction to that effect, and—upon more mature consideration, based solely on his extensive experience with the Department of State and the Manticoran government and acting on his own authority as Secretary of State—he had identified a few small modifications which would make it far more effective.

Although, he admitted with a thin smile as he studied the revised text, the effect towards which it was directed might not be exactly the one the President had had in mind. . . .

Chapter Forty Four

Sir Edward Janacek had discovered that he no longer enjoyed going to work in the morning. He would never have believed that might come to pass when Michael Janvier first invited him to return to Admiralty House, but things had changed since that heady day of triumph.

He nodded to his yeoman and strode on into his i

Given the inevitable lags in communication time for units deployed over interstellar distances, there wasn't a great deal of sense in awakening senior members of the Admiralty when dispatches arrived in the middle of the night. Even if their contents were desperately important, getting them into the hands of their recipients an hour or two sooner wasn't going to have any significant effect on the turnaround time for a decision loop a dozen light-years or so across. There were, of course, exceptions to that rule, especially for star nations which possessed wormhole junctions, and senior communications staffers were expected to recognize when those exceptions occurred. Except in those very special circumstances, however, the Admiralty's most senior echelons could anticipate a night's sleep unflawed by the precipitate delivery of bad news.

But that flashing light indicated that Simon Chakrabarti, as First Space Lord, had already read the overnight dispatches . . . and that in his opinion one of them was of special importance.

The First Space Lord had been becoming steadily more unhappy for months now. Janacek was prepared to accept his in-house expression of a certain degree of concern, of course. It was the First Space Lord's job to warn his civilian superiors of any worries he might entertain, after all. But Chakrabarti had gone beyond private discussions of concern or even verbal expressions of those same concerns in face-to-face meetings. He'd actually begun drafting formal memos whose arguments were becoming steadily more pointed, and he'd been following the message traffic—especially from Silesia—with what Janacek privately considered obsessive attentiveness.

As part of that attentiveness, he'd taken to recording marginal notes on the dispatches he found of particular concern. Which, Janacek thought as he watched the malignant, blinking red eye with a sort of dread fascination, was not something he wanted to deal with just now.

Unfortunately, as Pritchart's response to Elaine Descroix's most recent note had reminded the entire High Ridge Government, what he wanted didn't always bear a great deal of resemblance to what he was going to get.

He squared his shoulders, inhaled deeply, and marched across to the desk. He sank into his chair, scarcely noticing its comfort, and reached out to key the combination into the dispatch case lock plate. The combination of fingerprints, proper numerical code, and DNA tracers convinced it to open for him, and he pulled out the chip on top of the pile.

For just a moment, he felt an undeniable sense of relief, because it was in a Fleet message folio, not one with the flashings of the ONI. So at least it wasn't a fresh admission from Francis Jurgensen that that insufferable son-of-a-bitch Theisman had managed to deceive them as to his navy's combat capabilities after all. But that fleeting relief vanished as he read the header that identified it as a message from Sidemore Station.

Oh my God, he thought around the fresh sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. What's that lunatic done now?

He drew another deep breath, slipped the chip into his desk top reader, and called up the message header.

"Just how bad is it, Edward?"

The Prime Minister's anxiety showed far more clearly than he wanted it to. Indeed, Janacek thought, it undoubtedly showed far more clearly than High Ridge thought it did. Not that the baron was alone in that, and the First Lord felt the echo of his own tension and strain coming back from the other members of the working cabinet. Aside from Janacek and High Ridge himself, that working cabinet currently consisted of Elaine Descroix, Countess New Kiev, Earl North Hollow, and Sir Harrison MacIntosh.

"That's very difficult to say," the First Lord replied. "I'm not trying to dodge the question, but all we have right now is Harrington's initial report about the Zoraster System incident itself. It will be at least a few days before we get anything more than that, I'd imagine. It would have taken at least that long for the Andies to respond to the incident—or to Harrington's message to their station commander in Sachsen. So any later report from her is going to be delayed at least that long before reaching here."