War Of Honor

"First," Honor told her with a tight smile, "I don't want any more accidents. If we seem to be sneaking LACs into the middle of their fleet under stealth, then there's entirely too much chance that they might mistake it for a serious attack. We don't need that when things are already this tense with the Andies." Several heads nodded, and she went on. "Second, I want them to know that we know they're here."

"What if they have orders to attack if they're discovered, My Lady?" Yu asked.

"I doubt very much that they do. I could be wrong, of course, but we can't afford to paralyze ourselves trying to second-guess what they may or may not be pla

She looked back at Truman.

"So, as I say, I want you to be obvious, Alice. But I also want you to emphasize the need to be cautious when you brief your COLACs. I don't want anyone crowding the Peeps—I mean, Havenites—closely enough to provoke them into defensive fire. Clear?"

"Clear," Truman agreed, and Honor was pleased to taste her intense satisfaction at having been handed the assignment. Some task group commanders would have been wondering if they were being sent out as a way for the station commander to put a convenient scapegoat into the line of fire in case something went wrong. Other station commanders would have been completely unable to delegate the authority, which might have suggested a certain distrust of their subordinate's capabilities. There was no need, she thought, for Alice to know just how hard she really did find it to delegate in this instance. Not because she had any qualms whatsoever about Alice's abilities, but because the responsibility for what she'd just ordered done was hers, not Alice's.

Unfortunately, with everything else that was going on, she needed to be right here, just in case it all hit the fan while Alice was away. Speaking of which . . .

"In the meantime, Alfredo," she continued, turning back to Yu, "we'll keep your other people here with Alistair's at Sidemore to cover it during Alice's absence. I think it's at least possible that no one in Nouveau Paris knew Benjamin had sent you out here when they dispatched this Second Fleet. I'd just as soon keep it that way in case things go south on us."

"Understood," Yu agreed.

"In that case, people, let's be about it."

"Hecate is over two days overdue, Sir," Captain DeLaney pointed out quietly.

"I know, Molly. I know."

Lester Tourville frowned as he contemplated the unhappy implications of DeLaney's reminder. There could be any number of reasons for Hecate's failure to arrive as scheduled. Unfortunately, he couldn't think of one of them that he liked. And whatever it might have been, his orders were clear. It seemed extremely unlikely that anything could have given away Second Fleet's presence, but extremely unlikely wasn't the same thing as impossible. Nor was it impossible, however unlikely, that Hecate's nonarrival was the result of something besides the normal hazards of navigation.

"All right, Molly," he sighed. "Pass the movement instructions. I want to pull out for the alternate rendezvous within the hour."

Chapter Forty Seven

"Nothing, Ma'am."

"Nothing at all, Wraith?" Dame Alice Truman asked.

"No, Ma'am." Captain Goodrick shook his head. "We've swept the system pretty thoroughly. I suppose it's remotely possible that there could be one or two stealthed pickets hiding out there somewhere. After all, any star system is a mighty big haystack. But there's no way there's anything I'd call a fleet inside the system hyper limit."

"Damn," Truman said softly. She and her chief of staff stood on HMS Cockatrice's flag bridge looking at an astrographic display of a completely empty star system. Truman knew how badly Honor had wanted to either confirm or deny the presence of a Havenite fleet. And how badly she'd wanted for any Havenite admiral to know he'd been spotted. Unfortunately, an empty star system accomplished neither of those objectives. The mere fact that there was no one here now didn't indicate a thing about who might have been here when Hecate and Pirate's Bane fought their brief, bloody battle. Indeed, it was entirely possible that the destroyer's failure to arrive with their mail had inspired the people waiting for her to move to another address.

And the fact that there was no one here to note Truman's own arrival prevented her from delivering Honor's message.

"All right, Wraith," she said finally. "We've swept the system without finding anyone; now all we can do is get back to Sidemore ASAP. Her Grace needs to know what we found—or didn't, depending on how you want to look at it—and if there was a fleet here, it's not here now. Which suggests it's somewhere else. I'd just as soon not have it turn out that 'somewhere else' is launching an attack on Sidemore while we're out looking for it here!"

Honor regarded Truman's report with profound dissatisfaction. Not with Truman or her LAC crews, but with the elusiveness of the Republic's "Second Fleet."

George Reynolds had finished his systematic dissection of every fragment Captain Bachfisch's people had been able to extract from Hecate's mangled computers. It was unpleasantly evident from those fragments that Thomas Theisman's navy was extremely good at maintaining operational security. No one aboard Hecate had been in a position to initiate any sort of data purge—not while Pirate's Bane was blowing their ship apart around them. And Reynolds had confided to Honor that it was fairly evident that Lieutenant Ferguson, the "civilian" electronics specialist Gruber had sent across to Hecate's wreck to tackle her computers, was not merely military in background but extremely familiar with Peep naval hardware and software for some reason. Despite the catastrophic damage the destroyer had suffered, it seemed evident that Ferguson had gotten everything that was left in her computers, and there was actually a great deal of background information.

But there was very, very little about the organization and nature of this "Second Fleet" . . . and none at all about its purpose in Silesia.

That lack of information made Truman's failure to find the Havenites even more frustrating. No one on Sidemore Station doubted Second Fleet's existence, but without more information on it, her options for preparing against whatever it intended to do were limited, to say the very least.

She growled something under her breath that made Nimitz raise his head and look at her disapprovingly from his bulkhead perch. She felt him considering something a bit more demonstrative, but he decided to settle for sighing with exaggerated patience, instead.

She looked up from the report long enough to stick her tongue out at him, then returned to her contemplation of unpalatable reality.

At least there hadn't been any fresh shooting incidents with the Andermani while she tried to figure out what to do about this live grenade. Not that she expected that to last much longer. She'd hoped the arrival of Herzog von Rabenstrange might have brought about some easing of the tensions between their forces, but it hadn't happened. At least, unlike Sternhafen, he appeared to have no interest in actively fa