War Of Honor

"Why not use them, if they've got them?" Ackenheil asked, slipping smoothly into the Devil's advocate role. "After all, they have to blood and train their ships somehow, and it's not as if they had any major wars to do it in. That's one of the reasons the RMN deployed some of its best crews and skippers out here before the war—to use anti-pirate operations as a tactical finishing school."

"That might make some sense, Sir," Zahn agreed. "But it doesn't fit their previous operational patterns. And I asked Tim to do some research for me."

She looked a question at Ackenheil, and he nodded. Her husband was a civilian analyst employed in Fleet Operations' Records Division in Marsh, and he was very highly thought of by Commodore Tharwan, who headed RecDiv. Which was one reason the captain was so interested in the lieutenant commander's opinion, he admitted to himself.

"He says that as far as ONI's database is aware, they've never committed anything as heavy as a battlecruiser division to routine anti-piracy ops," Zahn went on. "Records says that the only times they've used forces that heavy were when someone had managed to put together a force of pirates or privateers capable of carrying out at least squadron-level strikes, like Warnecke did." She shook her head and waved a hand at the red icons on her plot. "Nothing like that has been going on anywhere in the region they're operating across now, Skipper."

"So if they're operating outside their normal parameters, using heavier forces, despite the fact that threat levels have remained basically unchanged, that brings me back to my original question," Ackenheil said. "What do you think they're really up to?"

Zahn gazed at the plot for several silent seconds. The captain didn't think she even saw it, and he could almost physically feel the intensity with which she pondered. Whether she was thinking about the raw data or considering whether or not to tell him what she really thought was more than he could say, but he made himself wait patiently until she turned her head to look back up at him.

"If you want my honest opinion, Sir," she said quietly, "I think they want us to know they're transferring steadily heavier forces into Silesia. And I think they want us to know that they're conducting active operations—against pirates . . . for the moment—all along the periphery of our own patrol areas."

"And they want us to know that because—?" Ackenheil arched one eyebrow as he gazed down at her somber expression, and she drew a deep breath.

"It's only a gut feeling, Skipper, and I don't have a single bit of hard evidence I could use to support it, but I think they've decided it's time to press their own claims in the Confederacy."

Ackenheil's other eyebrow rose to join its fellow. Not in rejection of her theory, but in surprise that so junior an officer, even one whose ability he thought so highly of, should have come up with it. He'd considered the same possibility himself, and he wished he'd been able to dismiss it out of hand.

"Why do you think that? And why should they decide to push it at this particular moment?" he asked, curious about her reasoning.

"I guess one reason the thought has crossed my mind is that I'm from Sidemore," Zahn admitted, turning her gaze back to her plot. "We were never directly in the Andies' path, but before Duchess Harrington came through and rescued us from Warnecke and his butchers, the Empire was the only real interstellar power in our neck of the galaxy. We sort of got used to looking over our shoulders and wondering when the Emperor was going to make his move in Silesia's direction." She shrugged again. "It didn't really threaten us directly, because we didn't have anything anyone wanted badly enough to make it worth the Andies' while to take us over. But even as far off the beaten path as we were, we heard enough to know that the Empire has wanted to bite off chunks of the Confederacy for as long as anyone could remember."

"I can't argue with you there," Ackenheil said after a moment, remembering the intelligence reports he'd studied both before LaFroye deployed to Sidemore and since arriving. No one had officially suggested that the Andies might be contemplating making a move, however long-standing their ambitions in Silesia might have been, but he supposed it made sense for Zahn to consider the possibility very seriously. As she'd just pointed out, she was from the region herself, with a sensitivity to the nuances of its power structure, such as it was, that any outsider—even an outsider who served in the Royal Manticoran Navy—would have to work long and hard to match.

"As to why they might have decided that this was the right time to do something about it, Skipper," Zahn went on, "I can think of a couple of factors. The biggest one, though, is probably the way the Alliance has kicked the Peeps' butts. They don't think they have to worry about Haven coming through Manticore at them, anymore, and if they don't need a buffer zone any longer, they might not see any reason to go on being 'neutral' in our favor. And—"

She stopped speaking abruptly, and Ackenheil looked sharply down at the crown of her head. He started to prompt her to continue, then paused as he suddenly realized what she'd probably been about to say.

And now that we're downsizing the Fleet—like idiots— and we've gotten ourselves a Prime Minister who wouldn't recognize a principle if it bit him on the ass and a Foreign Secretary with a spine about as stiff as warm butter, they probably can't believe the opportunity we've handed them, he told himself sourly. True enough, but not the sort of thing a Sidemorian exactly wants to say to her Manticoran skipper.

"I see what you're getting at," he said aloud, after a few seconds. "I wish I could find some reason to disagree with you. Unfortunately, I can't."

Zahn looked back up at him, her expression anxious, and he shrugged.

"ONI hasn't gotten around to putting the pieces together as well as you have, A

"And what do we do about it, Sir?" the lieutenant commander asked softly.

"I don't know," Ackenheil admitted. He started to say something more, then shook his head with a small smile and turned away.

Zahn watched him go, and just as he had recognized what she'd left unsaid, she knew what he hadn't said. Any Sidemorian would have known, although no one she knew would have been tactless enough to say so to any of their Manticoran allies. All of them knew precisely what the Cromarty Government's policy would have been in the face of any Andermani effort to expand its territory into Silesia.

No one had a clue how the High Ridge Government might react . . . but they didn't expect it to be good.

Chapter Eight

Lady Catherine Montaigne, Countess of the Tor, stalked around her sitting room with all of her characteristic energy . . . and very little of her characteristic cheerfulness.

"Damn the lot of them!" she snarled over her shoulder to the slab-sided, broad shouldered man seated motionlessly in his favorite armchair. In every way, they might have been expressly designed as physical opposites. She was at least fifteen centimeters taller than he was, and so slender she looked even taller than she actually was, while he was so broad that he appeared almost squat. She was golden-haired and blue-eyed; his hair was black, his eyes dark. She literally could not sit still, while his ability to sit motionless in thought frequently reminded an observer of a boulder of his own Gryphon granite. Her staccato speech patterns and blindingly fast changes of subject often bewildered those unprepared to keep pace with the speed of her thoughts; he was deliberate and disciplined to a fault in his own. And where she held one of the Star Kingdom's thirty oldest peerages, he was a Gryphon highlander, with all of the bred-in-the-bone hostility towards all things aristocratic which that implied.