War Of Honor

"But if we hand them over to you," Bachfisch pointed out, "then you have to take official cognizance of their presence, and you have enough hand grenades to juggle just now without that."

"Yes, I have to take 'official cognizance,' " she agreed. "On the other hand, the way I do that is up to me. I think I'll just hold these people here until my own medical people are willing to sign off on their release from hospital, then send them home by way of the Star Kingdom aboard one of our regularly scheduled supply runs." She smiled thinly. "Right off the cuff, I'd estimate that it will probably take at least a couple of months to get them as far as Manticore. By which time, hopefully, things will have settled down."

"And if they haven't?" Bachfisch asked.

"And if they haven't," Honor said much more bleakly, "then things are probably going to be so bad that throwing this into the mix won't matter at all."

"Fritz says Captain Bachfisch will recover fully," Honor told her assembled staff and senior flag officers two hours later in the briefing room aboard Werewolf. "Unlike some of us," she added wryly, "the captain responds quite well to regeneration. It will take him a while to grow new legs, but he should be fine. And under the circumstances, I believe he and all the rest of his wounded perso

"You can say that again," Alistair McKeon agreed.

His expression was grim, and he shook his head. The handful of survivors from Hecate were still in a state of semi-shock, but they'd been remarkably and uniformly reticent about precisely what their ship had been doing. Some of that was probably inevitable, given the history between the RMN and the Havenite navy, but this went beyond traditional dislike or antipathy. These people were clearly maintaining operational security, and like everyone else in the briefing room, McKeon could think of only one star nation against which any Havenite operation in Silesia could possibly be directed.

"We certainly owe Pirate's Bane and her crew an enormous debt for alerting us to the Peeps' presence," Mercedes Brigham added.

"Agreed." Honor nodded. "Which is why I instructed the Fleet repair base here in Sidemore to see to all of her damages gratis. If anyone back at Admiralty House has a problem with that, they can take it up with me."

Her tone and expression alike suggested that anyone who did fault her decision probably would not enjoy her response.

"In the meantime, however," she went on briskly, "the question is how we respond to this information."

"I agree fully," Alfredo Yu said. "The problem is that we're still not entirely sure what information we have."

"Captain Bachfisch's people did get a few more facts out of Hecate's database," Lieutenant Commander Reynolds pointed out.

"But not very many," Alice Truman objected. Reynolds looked at her, and she shrugged. "We know she was assigned to their 'Second Fleet,' " she said. "But nothing in our intelligence files even shows that fleet's existence. We have no idea how powerful it is, who's in command of it, or precisely what its mission out here may be!"

"With all due respect, Dame Alice," Reynolds replied, "we do know at least a little. For one thing, there's a fragment of a report which refers to the fact that Hecate was assigned to this Second Fleet's third task group. If it's organized into at least three task groups, then it's obviously a fairly good-sized force. And since Hecate's survivors are being so intensely uncooperative with us, I think we have to assume that whatever reason it was sent out here for has something directly to do with us. And I'm very much afraid that I can think of only one scenario which would send a large Havenite fleet to an uninhabited star system this close to Marsh in complete secrecy."

"You're suggesting that they're pla

"I'm suggesting that they may be pla

Silence hovered in the conference room, bleak and bitter as the implications of the intelligence officer's analysis sank into the brains of officers already confronting the early stages of a shooting war with the Andermani Empire.

"You may well be right, George," Honor said after several seconds. "On the other hand, there's one point that confuses me."

"Only one?" McKeon laughed harshly. "There are dozens of them confusing me right now!"

"Only one main point of confusion," Honor told him, then let her gaze sweep over the other officers in the compartment. "If all they wanted to do was to attack us, then the logical way for them to proceed would have been to move straight into the attack as soon as they reached Silesia, before some freak accident—like this one—betrayed their presence. But they didn't do that. Instead, we've got this Second Fleet of theirs hiding out in an out of the way star system close enough to use as a jump-off point while one or two of their destroyers play postman back and forth between them and their closest diplomatic mission."

"You think they're waiting for orders to attack?" Truman mused aloud.

"Or for orders to turn around and go home and pretend they were never here," Honor replied.

"There may something to that," Yu said slowly. Of all the officers in the compartment, he was probably the least happy. "On the other hand," he continued with stubborn integrity, "much as I would prefer for my old homeland not to be the heavy of the piece, there's no way they would sent a force as heavy as the one Commander Reynolds is postulating this far if they didn't seriously intend to use it. They may be waiting for orders from home to kick off the attack, and they may actually be hoping they'll get recall orders, instead. But the mere fact that they've sent an attack force into a region where they know the Star Kingdom is already confronting a possible war scenario indicates all sorts of things I'd really rather not think about."

"Things none of us would like to think about, Alfredo," Honor agreed grimly. "Nonetheless, I think we do have to consider them. And whatever may be going on closer to home, we still have to respond to our own situation out here."

"What did you have in mind, Your Grace?" Jaruwalski asked, regarding her intensely. Honor glanced at her, and the ops officer shrugged. "I've known you for a while now, Your Grace," she said, "and I've heard that tone of voice before. So since you've already made up your mind about what it is you're pla

A rumble of laughter rolled around the compartment as Jaruwalski's wry tone punctured the tension, and Honor smiled at her. Any number of flag officers would have stamped on an operations officer who semi-twitted them that way in front of the rest of the staff, but no one thought twice about it on this staff.

"Actually," she said, "I have made up my mind. Alice," she turned to Truman, "I'm going to pull Werewolf out of your task group to hold her here. I'll swap you the Glory from the Protector's Own to replace her; she's a little bigger, but her emissions signature is close enough that I doubt anyone who sees her will realize she's Grayson and not Manticoran. Then I want you to take your entire group and run a LAC sweep through the star system Hecate was headed for. And I want you to be obvious about it."

There was a moment of silence, then Truman cleared her throat.

"May I ask why you want me to be obvious, Your Grace?" she asked quietly and a bit more formally than usual.