War Of Honor

Yet not a one of them had questioned him. They might not have a clue about what he was up to, but they were obviously prepared to go along with him even in the absence of any explanation.

He looked up as someone walked by his command chair. It was Gruber, and Bachfisch smiled and beckoned for his executive officer to step a little closer.

"Yes, Skipper?" Gruber said quietly.

"Where do you think this fellow is headed?" Bachfisch asked, waving a hand at the single icon glowing on the tactical repeater plot.

"I haven't got the faintest idea," Gruber admitted. "There are a lot of places he could be headed to out this way. The only problem is that I can't think of a single reason for a Peep to be going to any of them. Or not any reasons I'd like, anyway."

"Um." Bachfisch rubbed his chin for a few moments, then reached out and punched a command into the touchpad on the arm of his chair. The tactical repeater reconfigured to a navigational display, and he punched another key, shifting it from maneuvering to astrographic mode.

"Look here," he invited, and his index finger tapped the bright green line of the Havenite destroyer's projected course. Gruber leaned over the plot, and Bachfisch tapped the course line again.

"You pointed out that there were a lot of places he could be headed," the captain said. "But he started changing course about an hour ago, and on his new heading, there don't seem to be any."

"Skipper, he's got to be going somewhere," Gruber objected.

"Oh, he's going somewhere, all right. Only I don't think it's to any of the settled systems out here."

"What?" Gruber blinked, then looked up from the plot to meet his CO's eyes. "Why not? And where do you think he's headed?"

"First," Bachfisch said reasonably, "like you, I can't think of a single reason for a Havenite warship to be headed for any of the inhabited systems out this way. Second, he's angling steadily across this grav wave, heading roughly southwest. If he maintains his present course, he's going to separate from the wave in the middle of nowhere, Jinchu. He's not headed to pick up another wave, and according to our charts, there's not an inhabited system within a good seven or eight light-years of where he'll leave this one. Which suggests to me that he's probably headed right about here."

He tapped another light code on the display. It was the small red-orange starburst that indicated a K-class main sequence star, but it lacked the green circle which denoted an inhabited system, and no name appeared beside it. Instead, there was only a catalog number.

"Why do you think he should be headed there, Skipper?" Gruber asked intently.

"I could say it's because it lies within less than a light-year and a half of the point at which his projected course leaves the wave. But that's not really the question you're asking, is it Jinchu?"

He cocked an eyebrow at the exec, and, after a moment, Gruber nodded slowly.

"What I'm afraid of," Bachfisch said then, "is that he's headed there because he has friends waiting for him. Probably quite a lot of them."

"Peep naval units in the middle of Silesia camped out in an uninhabited star system?" Gruber shook his head. "I'm not quite ready to call you crazy, Skipper, but I'm damned if I can think of any reason for them to be doing something like that."

"I can think of one," Bachfisch said, and his voice was suddenly grim. "Horus is the only star system in the Saginaw Sector which has an official Havenite diplomatic mission. It also happens to lie on an almost direct line from the Basilisk terminus of the Wormhole Junction to the Sachsen Sector. And if you extend our destroyer's course from Horus to this star," he tapped the icon on his display yet again, "you'll see that it also forms a straight line . . . from Horus towards Marsh."

Gruber dropped his eyes to the plot and stared at it for several seconds, then looked back up at his captain.

"With all due respect, Skipper, that's crazy," he said. "You're suggesting that the Peeps have sent some sort of naval force clear from the Republic to the Confederacy and parked it in a star system in the middle of nowhere so they can attack Sidemore. Unless you're suggesting that they're out here to attack the Andies for some reason!"

"I can't see any reason for them to be picking a fight with the Andies right now, no," Bachfisch said. "And I admit that sending a big enough force out here to mount a credible attack on Duchess Harrington's forces at Sidemore would be a fairly lunatic act under any normal set of circumstances. But you've heard just as many rumors about the tension between the Star Kingdom and the Republic as I have, Jinchu. It's possible the new ships Theisman has been talking about really do exist. In fact, it's possible that there are more of them than he's chosen to tell us about.

"Now, if I were the Havenite Secretary of War, and I knew my government was getting sick and tired of being put continually on hold in its so-called peace negotiations with the Star Kingdom, I might be thinking very seriously about my war plans. And if the Admiralty had been kind enough to send one of the Star Kingdom's better admirals out to a distant station, with only a handful of modern ships and a lot of obsolescent ones, then I might figure that it would be worth my while to send a much larger force of my own modern capital ships out here to pounce on her as part of a coordinated offensive against the Star Kingdom and the Manticoran Alliance."

"Skipper, are you seriously suggesting that the Peeps are not only pla

"Frankly," Bachfisch said grimly, "I've been surprised they didn't do it months ago. If I were President Pritchart or Thomas Theisman, I'd have been thinking about it very seriously for at least a T-year now."

Gruber's surprise showed, and Bachfisch chuckled harshly.

"Of course I would have, Jinchu! It's been obvious from the begi

"To bring pressure to bear on the Star Kingdom," Gruber replied.

"Of course. But the kind of pressure they brought to bear is significant, too. I think in a lot of ways it amounted to a deliberate warning that they've developed the capacity to stand up to the Royal Navy. A warning they delivered in the forlorn hope that someone in Landing would be able to rub at least two brain cells together and realize the Star Kingdom has to start treating the Republic as a legitimate government and began negotiating in good faith.

"Neither of which High Ridge has done."

"You sound almost as if you're on the Republic's side, Skipper," Gruber said slowly.

"I'm not. But that doesn't mean I can't recognize that they have a perfect right to be angry at having their legitimate concerns so persistently ignored."

"So what, exactly, do you think we're doing out here, Skipper?" Gruber asked after a moment.

"At the moment, all I'm really after is confirming the point at which this fellow is going to leave the grav wave. If we can get away with it, I'd really like to see the point at which he begins translating back down to n-space. That would confirm whether or not he's headed where I think he's headed. But I don't cherish any illusions about how likely they are to let an unidentified freighter go traipsing through the middle of their fleet if they really are out here. And given that the system I think this destroyer is bound for is officially uninhabited, I can't think of any possible way to come up with a convincing story for why we might 'just happen' to be dropping in on them."