War Of Honor

Chien-lu Anderman was far too smart to believe Sternhafen's version. More than that, he was too good an officer not to have investigated what had happened on his own. So if he was signing off on Sternhafen's obstruction of the truth, it was a very bad sign. Worse still, she couldn't believe he would have been a party to any such action without very specific policy directives from the Emperor. And if his directives precluded the minimization of tensions, then the chances of avoiding a more direct and vastly more dangerous confrontation were slight. Indeed, her greatest fear was that this relative quiet represented the lull before the storm while the Andies finished deploying their assets.

However she looked at it, she was caught between two threats. She would have felt reasonably confident about dealing with either of them alone, at least long enough to be reinforced from home, with the backing of Alfredo and the rest of the Protector's Own. But even with that welcome reinforcement, she lacked the resources to protect her area of responsibility from two totally separate threats. And so far, the High Ridge Government had declined to provide her with any additional support.

But that wasn't the worst of it—not by a long chalk.

She sighed heavily, her face creased with a worry she was careful never to allow anyone else to see, and faced the most unpalatable conclusion of all. If the Republic of Haven was prepared to launch an attack clear out here, then they must be simultaneously prepared to do the same thing much closer to home. Committing an isolated act of war on the scale represented by an attack on Sidemore Station in a region so far away from the front line between them and the Manticoran Alliance would be an act of lunacy. This had to represent only a single aspect of a far larger operations plan . . . and the ships committed to it, however many of them there were, likewise had to represent a force Thomas Theisman felt he could afford to divert from the truly critical theatre of operations.

That was what worried her most. She knew Thomas Theisman personally, something only two other Manticoran admirals could say. Both of those flag officers were right here with her, and all three of them had the utmost respect for him. More, she knew that both Hamish Alexander, who'd also fought him, and Alfredo Yu, who'd been his one-time mentor, shared that respect. So if Thomas Theisman felt he had sufficient naval strength to open a war on what amounted to two totally separated fronts, then it was painfully obvious to Honor that ONI had catastrophically underestimated the new Republican Navy. Theisman might be wrong in his force estimate, but she found it very difficult to believe his calculations could be that far off . . . especially given that the strength of the Royal Manticoran Navy, unlike that of the Republic, was a matter of public record following the bitter budget debates. Unlike Jurgenson, Chakrabarti, and Janacek, he knew exactly what his opponents had.

But there was nothing she could do about that from here. She'd made every defensive adjustment within her own command area that she could think of in the absence of any fresh instructions from home. All she could do now was to report the scraps of information they'd managed to recover from Hecate to the Admiralty and hope someone back home drew the appropriate conclusions.

And not just that Sidemore Station was urgently in need of additional reinforcements, either.

She contemplated Truman's report one more time, mental teeth gnawing at the rocky shell of her dilemma while she felt the impending collision sliding towards her like ground cars on glaze ice. If only Alice had found Second Fleet! At least then she'd have proof for Janacek and Jurgenson. As it was, all she had was circumstantial evidence, and she knew the mere fact that that evidence came from her would make it suspect in Janacek's eyes. Had Patricia Givens or Thomas Caparelli still been at the Admiralty, she wouldn't have worried about that, but Janacek was backed by Chakrabarti and Jurgenson, neither of whom was likely to stand up to his prejudices, and that meant—Her dreary mental recitation of all the disasters looming on the horizon paused, and her eyes narrowed as a new thought thrust itself suddenly into her mind.

Wait, she thought. Wait just a minute, Honor. Janacek and his cronies don't operate in a pure vacuum . . . and the Royal Navy isn't the only one caught in the middle of all this. For that matter, the Manticoran Alliance treaty partners aren't the only people who have a stake in it! Of course, if you do it, and if you're wrong . . .

Nimitz's head snapped up, and she tasted his sudden spike of emotions as he sensed her i

She smiled back fiercely and nodded.

After all, it wasn't as if she wouldn't have another career to fall back on if it didn't work.

"So I'm afraid," Arnold Giancola said regretfully, "that Foreign Secretary Descroix's response is scarcely what I could call forthcoming."

The Cabinet room's oppressive silence underscored the massive understatement in which he'd just indulged himself. The actual text of Descroix's note had been made available to all of them in electronic format before this meeting, which had given all of them plenty of time to reach the same conclusion.

Of course, the text they'd received wasn't exactly the same as the one Descroix had transmitted.

Giancola hid a smile of satisfaction behind his studiously concerned expression. Placing Yves Grosclaude in the ambassador's slot on Manticore had paid off even more handsomely than he'd anticipated. He and Grosclaude had served together in Rob Pierre's State Department before Giancola was recalled to Treasury for the Turner Reforms. They'd become friends along the way, and they understood one another, just as they shared a genuine, implacable distrust of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. Despite their history, Giancola had been very cautious about feeling Grosclaude out, but their old friendship and mutual trust had still been there. Which meant no one in Nouveau Paris was going to be aware of any tiny discrepancies between the note Grosclaude had been handed on Manticore and the one Giancola had delivered in Nouveau Paris.

And the discrepancies truly were tiny, he reflected. High Ridge and Descroix had reacted almost precisely as he'd anticipated. All he'd had to do was to remove a half dozen minor co

"I don't understand," Rachel Hanriot said finally. "I know they've been deliberately stringing these talks out. But if that's what they want to continue to do, then why should they be so flatly confrontational?"

"I agree that they're being confrontational," Eloise Pritchart said. "On the other hand, I suppose it's only fair to point out that our last note to them was pretty stiff, too. Frankly, I lost my temper with them." She smiled thinly, topaz eyes bleak. "I'm not saying I wasn't justified when I did, but the language Arnold and I addressed them in certainly could have put their noses sufficiently out of joint to explain some of this."

"In all fairness, Madame President," Giancola said, "I doubt very much that our last note was really needed to 'put their noses out of joint.' Their assumption from the begi