War Of Honor

Chapter Sixteen

"I don't know what you did, Ma'am, but it certainly had some horsepower."

Captain (senior grade) Rafael Cardones smiled cheerfully and tipped back his chair while he nursed the stein of beer James MacGuiness had bestowed upon him. They sat in Honor's home office, and the sliding crystoplast wall of the bay window was open, turning it into a balcony onto the cool spring night. Night birds, both Manticoran and Old Earth imports, sang in the darkness, brilliant stars glittered above Jason Bay, and one of Manticore's moons poured silver light like syrup over the mansion's manicured grounds while the red, white, and green jewels of air car ru

"The last I'd heard," Cardones went on, "Werewolf was slated for a routine—and very boring—deployment to Trevor's Star. And then—"

He shrugged and waved his Old Tillman enthusiastically, and Honor used her stein to hide a smile as she sipped her own beer. She remembered rather clearly an inexperienced, overly anxious, bumbling, but extremely talented junior-grade lieutenant who'd suddenly found himself acting tactical officer aboard the elderly light cruiser Fearless. There was very little of that young man's anxiety or lack of confidence in the relaxed, handsome, competent-looking captain sitting across her coffee table from her, but the bright-eyed eagerness she also remembered was still very much in evidence.

"BuPers works in mysterious ways, Rafe," she said, after a moment, her expression serene. "I simply explained to Admiral Draskovic how badly I needed you, and she took it from there."

He cocked his head at her, his expression quizzical, and she tasted his amused disbelief. Apparently, he'd had the misfortune to meet Josette Draskovic, and he obviously suspected just how . . . congenial the Fifth Space Lord and Honor must have found one another's personalities. He started to say something, then visibly changed his mind and said something else entirely.

"Well, I can't say I'm going to miss Trevor's Star, Ma'am. It's a perfectly nice star system, and the San Martinos are perfectly nice people, but there's not a whole lot to do there except drill. And I hope you know without my saying it how pleased and flattered I am by the assignment. It's really good to see you again, and having you fly your lights aboard Werewolf —Well, that's something the entire ship's company was delighted to hear about."

"I'm glad . . . assuming you're not just buttering the Admiral up, of course," Honor told him with a grin, and he chuckled as he shook his head in denial of the charge. "Seriously," she went on, allowing her grin to fade, "I was really impressed by how well you and your ship performed in Operation Buttercup, Rafe. You did darned well, and your experience will stand us in good stead if it falls into the toilet in Silesia."

"How likely is that to happen?" her new flag captain asked. His expression was much more sober, and he sat forward in his chair, elbows on thighs and clasping his stein in both hands while he watched her face with sharp, dark eyes.

"I wish I could tell you for certain," Honor sighed. "ONI is supposed to be sending us complete copies of its analysis of Andy ship movements in and around Marsh. Our information on those should be pretty good for the immediate neighborhood, but from what I've seen so far, its reliability is going to fall off pretty steeply outside that area."

She paused and gazed at Cardones thoughtfully. She'd already decided not to discuss her confrontation with Draskovic with him, for several reasons. First, of course, it was her fight, and not his. Second, while she rather doubted even Draskovic would attempt to retaliate by wrecking the careers of the junior officers whose services Honor had requested, she couldn't be certain of that. And she could be certain that if Rafe upped the ante by choosing sides in his seniors' quarrel the consequences for his career would be catastrophic, at least in the short term. In the longer term, he would probably survive whatever happened, because eventually, Janacek was bound to lose his position at the Admiralty. When that happened, his successor's first priority was probably going to be the rehabilitation of the officers Janacek's administration had purged. But rehabilitation after the fact wouldn't make the sort of vengefulness in which someone like Draskovic would indulge any more enjoyable at the time, and she knew her Rafe Cardones. He gave his loyalty the same way he did everything else—with conviction, enthusiasm, and a hundred and ten-percent effort. Worse, he had a passion (carefully hidden, he fondly imagined) for dragon-slaying, which only reinforced her decision not to tell him everything. She didn't need anyone else to fight her battles for her, but if she wanted Rafe safely out of the line of fire, the only way to keep him there was never to tell him a battle was being fought.

Yet there were other unpleasant truths about the current Admiralty administration, and although she hadn't pla

"This stays in this room unless I tell you differently, Rafe," she said after a moment, and watched him settle deeper into his chair. It was a subtle thing, more sensed through her empathic link than seen, but his shoulders squared ever so slightly and his eyes narrowed intently.

"I don't trust our intelligence assessments," she said quietly, meeting his gaze levelly. "Just between the two of us, Admiral Jurgensen isn't the right man for ONI. He's always been an administrator, a bureaucrat and not an actual 'spook.' And my impression is that he has a tendency to . . . shade, let's say, his analyses to suit his superiors' needs. Or desires."

She raised her artificial left hand, palm uppermost and slightly cupped in a questioning gesture, and Cardones nodded slowly.

"I'm not comfortable about the sources our assessments are apparently based on, either," she went on. "ONI is always reticent about naming sources, and rightly so. But from reading between the lines, and especially from looking at what isn't there to be read at all, it looks to me like our human resources are thin on the ground in both Silesia and the Empire right now. Admiral Jurgensen has assured me that my concerns in that area were u

"The Foreign Office assessments aren't a lot better, either. In their case, however, it's not because of any lack of sources. Actually, it's almost a case of information overflow. There's too much detail, too much minutiae and not enough hard indicators of what it is the Andermani are up to. The official Foreign Office position at this moment is that the Andies themselves aren't certain just what they have in mind. That they're testing the waters, as it were, with these shows of force around Sidemore Station. The official opinion is that the Empire's position hasn't yet hardened, and that there's an opportunity for us to shape the ultimate Andermani intentions by demonstrating 'firmness and consistency.' "

"Excuse me, Ma'am," Cardones said, "but have any of these Foreign Office types ever actually been to Silesia? Or the Empire?"

Honor's lips twitched at his plaintive tone, and even more at the emotions behind it. But she ordered herself sternly not to smile and shook her head at him.