War Of Honor

Michael Janvier, Baron High Ridge, was also thinking about careers as he paused, some hours later, in the hallway outside the polished wooden door. An armed sentry—a captain in the uniform of the Queen's Own—stood stiffly at attention before that door, and the immaculately uniformed woman didn't even glance at the Prime Minister.

High Ridge knew that the traditions and training of the Queen's Own required that ramrod stiffness, that apparent obliviousness to anything even as the sentry saw and noted everything that happened about her. But there was more to it than mere tradition or training. Something no one could ever have put a finger upon or isolated, but nonetheless there.

An edge of contempt, High Ridge thought as he made certain the mask of his own expression was firmly in place. The hostility that all of Elizabeth III's partisans reflected, each in his or her own way.

The Prime Minister drew an unobtrusive breath, squared mental shoulders, and moved the two meters closer which brought him within the sentry's designated official field of view.

The captain reacted then. Her head snapped to the side, her eyes focused on High Ridge, and her right hand flicked to the butt of the holstered pulser at her side with mechanical precision. It was all meticulously choreographed. Only an idiot would have thought the captain was anything less than a deadly serious professional, yet her response was also a display of formal military theater. One which required an equally formal response from him.

"The Prime Minister," he informed her, as if she didn't already know perfectly well who he was. "I crave a few minutes of Her Majesty's time to attend to affairs of government."

"Yes, Sir," the captain said, never removing her right hand from her pulser, and her left hand moved in a precisely metered arc to activate her com.

"The Prime Minister is here to see Her Majesty," she a

The sentry's eyes held him with unwavering, impersonal concentration—still flawed by that cold little core of contempt—as she listened to her earbug. Then she took her hand from her pulser and pressed the door activation button.

"Her Majesty will receive you, Sir," she said crisply, and snapped back into her original guard position, gazing once more down the hall as if he no longer existed.

He inhaled again and stepped through the door.

Queen Elizabeth waited for him, and his jaw tightened further. She'd received him in this same formal office many times over the past four T-years. Not happily, but with at least a pretense of respect for his office, however poorly she'd concealed the fact that she despised the man who held it. In those same four years, she'd never seen him a single time except for the unavoidable requirements of government and her constitutional duties, yet both of them, by mutual unspoken assent, had used the mask of formal courtesy when she had.

Today was different. She sat behind her desk, but unlike any other time he'd entered this office, she did not invite him to be seated. In fact, there was no chair in which he might have sat. The coffee table, the small couch which had faced it, and the conversational nook of comfortable armchairs, had all vanished. He had no doubt at all that she'd ordered their removal the instant his secretary screened the Palace for an appointment, and he knew his fury—and dismay—showed through his own masklike expression as the unspoken, coldly intentional insult went home.

Even if his own emotions hadn't shown, and even if the Queen had greeted him with smiling affability rather than the cold-eyed silence in which she watched him cross the office, the treecat on the back of her chair would have been a sure and certain barometer of the hostility coiled in that office. Ariel's tufted ears were more than half flattened and his bone-white claws sank deep into the upholstery of the Queen's chair as his green eyes watched High Ridge.

The baron came to a halt before her desk, standing there—like, he thought from a lava field of resentment, an errant schoolboy and not the Prime Minister of Manticore—and she regarded him as coldly as her treecat did.

"Your Majesty," he managed to get out in very nearly normal tones. "Thank you for agreeing to see me so promptly."

"I could hardly refuse to see my own Prime Minister," she replied. The words could have been courteous, even pleasant. Delivered with the tonelessness of a computer they were something else entirely.

"Your secretary indicated that the matter had some urgency," she continued in that same chill voice which pretended that she didn't know precisely what had brought him here.

"I'm afraid it does, Your Majesty," he agreed, wishing passionately that the unwritten portion of the Star Kingdom's Constitution didn't require the formality of a face-to-face meeting between a prime minister and the monarch at a time like this. Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid it, although he'd toyed—briefly, at least—with the thought that since this was technically only a violation of a truce and not a formal declaration of war he might have evaded it.

"I regret," he told her, "that it is my unhappy duty to inform you that your realm is at war, Your Majesty."

"It is?" she asked, and he heard his own teeth grinding together at the proof that she intended to spare him no smallest fraction of his humiliation. She knew precisely what had happened at Trevor's Star, but . . .

"Yes, unfortunately," he replied, forced by her question to formally explain the circumstances. "Although we've received no notification that the Republic of Haven intended to resume active military operations, their Navy violated Manticoran space this morning at Trevor's Star. Their task force was engaged by our own forces and driven off after suffering relatively light casualties. Our own forces suffered no damage, but the Republic's action in violating the Trevor's Star territorial limit can only be construed as an act of war."

"I see." She folded her hands on her desk and looked at him steadily. "Did I understand you to say, My Lord, that our own forces drove the intruders off?"

The emphasis on the possessive pronoun was subtle but unmistakable, and High Ridge's eyes flickered with rage. But, again, still trapped by the prison of formality and constitutional precedent, he had no choice but to reply.

"Yes, Your Majesty. Although, to be more precise, they were driven off as a result of the joint action of our forces and those of the Protectorate of Grayson."

"Those Grayson forces being the ones which made unauthorized transit through the Junction yesterday?" she pressed in those same, chill tones.

"Yes, Your Majesty," he made himself say yet again. "Although, it would be more accurate to call their transit unscheduled rather than unauthorized."

"Ah. I see." She sat there for several seconds, regarding him levelly. Then smiled with absolutely no trace of warmth or humor. "And how do my ministers recommend that we proceed in this moment of crisis, My Lord?"

"Under the circumstances, Your Majesty, I see no option but to formally denounce our own truce with the Republic of Haven and resume unrestricted military operations against it."

"And are my military forces in a fit state to pursue that policy in the wake of this attack, My Lord?"