War Of Honor

The two of them looked at one another for several seconds in silence. There was one more question Janacek badly wanted to ask, but he couldn't quite bring himself to. "Can we at least make sure that any 'power-sharing agreement' contains a guarantee that none of us will be prosecuted?" wasn't exactly the sort of thing one asked the Prime Minister of the Star Kingdom of Manticore even in private. No matter how burningly it presented itself to one's own mind.

"So," he said instead, "should I assume that no formal protest of MacDo

"You should," High Ridge replied. He, too, seemed almost grateful for the change of subject. "That's not to say that we won't be speaking to Protector Benjamin about the high handedness with which he exercised his undoubted rights under his treaty with us. There are, as Admiral Stokes pointed out, proper procedural cha

"I don't like it," Janacek grumbled. "And I'm especially not going to like having to pretend to be civil to their precious High Admiral Matthews after this, either. But if we don't have a choice, then I suppose we don't have a choice."

"If we survive in power, we may be able to find a way to make our displeasure felt at a later date," High Ridge told him. "But to be completely honest, Edward, even that's unlikely. I think this is just one of those insults we're going to have to swallow in the name of political expediency. Not," the Prime Minister assured the First Lord grimly, "that I intend to forget it, I assure you."

Secretary of State Arnold Giancola sat in his office and stared at his chrono. Another nine hours. That was all.

He closed his eyes and leaned back in his comfortable chair while a complex storm of emotions whirled and battered against the back of his bland expression.

He'd never pla

But wherever Giancola's error had lain, it was too late to undo it now. Even if he commed the President this instant, confessed all he'd done, and showed her the originals of the Manties' diplomatic notes, it was still too late. The Navy was in motion, and no one in the Haven System could possibly recall it in time to stop the Thunderbolt from striking.

He could have stopped it, he admitted to himself. He could have stopped it before it ever began. Could have stopped it before Pritchart ever appeared before Congress in the blazing majesty of her righteous indignation, laid the Manties' "duplicity" before it, and carried her request for what amounted to a declaration of war by a majority of over ninety-five percent. Could have stopped it even after that, if he'd been prepared to confess his actions and accept the consequences before the final activation order had been sent to Javier Giscard.

But he hadn't been, and he still wasn't. A huge part of that, he knew with bleak honesty, was simple self-preservation and ambition. Disgrace and a total, irrevocable fall from power would be the very least he could expect. Trial and imprisonment were far from unlikely, however strongly he might argue that he'd actually violated no laws. Neither of those was a fate he was prepared to embrace.

Yet there was more to it than that. He hadn't pla

And, he acknowledged, when Thomas Theisman had displayed a degree of strategic imagination and willingness to take the war to the enemy which Giancola had never imagined for a moment he might possess.

The Secretary of State opened his eyes, looked at the chrono once again, and felt the decision make itself, once and forever.

It was too late to stop what was going to happen. Confessing his true part in the events which had set Operation Thunderbolt in motion could only destroy him without stopping anything. And so he would not admit it.

He turned to his private computer station and brought it online. Half a dozen keystrokes were all it took to erase the record of the original Manticoran notes he had stored "just in case." Another three keystrokes and that portion of the Department of State's molycirc memory core where those notes had been stored was reformatted with a "document shredding" program guaranteed to make the data permanently non-recoverable.

Grosclaude, he knew, had already destroyed all of his records on Manticore, as well as every other sensitive file which might fall into enemy hands, in anticipation of Thunderbolt. The thought held a certain ironic satisfaction, even now, because no one—not even the Manties, when the discrepancy in the diplomatic record became public knowledge—could accuse Grosclaude of destroying incriminating records in the name of self-preservation. Not when he'd had specific orders to do so from the President of the Republic herself.

And that's that, he thought. No tracks, no fingerprints. No proof.

Now, if only the Navy gets it done.

Javier Giscard looked at the bulkhead date-time display, and his bony face was expressionless.

It was very quiet in his day cabin, but that was going to change in little more than three hours. That was when Sovereign of Space's general quarters alarm would sound and First Fleet would clear for battle.

But the war, Giscard thought, would start even sooner than that. In approximately ninety-eight minutes, assuming Admiral Evans met his ops schedule at Tequila the way Giscard expected him to.

The admiral laid out his own thoughts before his mind's eye and tried to decide—again—what he truly felt.

Wary, he thought. And yet, if he was honest, confident, as well. No one in the history of interstellar warfare had ever attempted to coordinate a campaign on such a scale. The operational plan Theisman and the Naval Staff had worked out included literally dozens of minutely coordinated operations. The timing was tight, yet they had avoided situations in which it was truly critical. There was plenty of room for slippage, for schedules to be readjusted on the fly. And the strategic audacity at its core was almost literally breathtaking for an officer who had survived the desperate, uncoordinated defensive efforts of the People's Navy following the Legislaturalist purges.