War Of Honor

He paused and cocked an eyebrow at Honor. She gazed back at him, her expression a mask while she considered what he'd just said. The implications were frightening. She'd suspected that the briefings Jurgensen and his staffers had laid on for her had been overly optimistic, but she hadn't suspected that they might actually be ignoring or even actively suppressing the sort of evidence Benjamin was implying existed. She wished she could feel confident that the Graysons were wrong, but she'd worked too closely with them to underestimate their abilities.

Which, she reminded herself, was definitely not the case where Sir Edward Janacek and Francis Jurgensen were concerned.

"Now I know I don't like what I'm hearing," she told him after a moment. "I hope you and Greg will share your own information and analyses with me."

"Of course we will!" Benjamin sounded testy, and she tasted his sudden flash of anger, almost as if he felt insulted that she should even wonder about such a thing for a moment. She waved her right hand in a small gesture of apology, and he continued to eye her sternly for a handful of heartbeats, then made a face and snorted.

"Sorry. I know you didn't mean it like that, but the fact that I even considered taking it that way is probably a sign of how hard High Ridge and Janacek and their cronies are making it for us to work with them. Trust me, the last thing I want is to let my frustration with them spill over onto you, Honor!"

"I know. And I know it's hard, too. Especially when I'm sort of caught between two stools the way I am. You'd have to be superhuman to forget that I was a Manticoran first, Benjamin, and right now you've got every reason in the universe to be irritated with all Manticorans."

"But not with one of them who happens to be not only a Grayson but the person who's catching the most grief from both sides," he pointed out.

"Trust me, compared to what I've been putting up with on the other side of the line, any 'grief' any Graysons have been giving me is a pillow fight!"

"Maybe," he conceded, then brushed that aside and returned to his original topic.

"I said there were two areas we were concerned about, and Silesia is only one of them. And, if we're going to be honest about it, Silesia is the lesser of the two."

"The lesser?" Honor tilted her head to one side and frowned. "It sounds more than bad enough to be going on with to me!"

"I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't, but compared to what we're hearing out of the Republic of Haven, it's definitely secondary."

"Out of Haven?" Honor sat bolt upright in her chair, and Nimitz stiffened in her lap as her sudden stab of anxiety went through him.

"Out of Haven," Benjamin confirmed grimly. "Again, we don't have a great deal of hard evidence and Jurgensen's refusal to share sources with us contributes to a major uncertainty factor, but there are three things we think his reports have significantly understated or overlooked completely.

"First, is his analysis of what the fighting against the StateSec holdouts and the regular Navy officers has meant for Theisman's officer corps."

"I think I know where you're going with this one," Honor interrupted, "and if I'm right, I agree with you completely. You're about to say that Jurgensen's view is that the fighting has constituted a steady drain on their experienced perso

"That's exactly what I was going to say," he agreed.

"Well, only an idiot—or a political admiral, if there's a difference—could think anything of the sort," Honor said roundly. "Of course they've lost some people and some ships along the way. But a lot more of their officers and crews have survived, and they've spent the last few T-years picking up experience. During the war, we managed to keep their officer corps trimmed back, for the most part, although Giscard and Tourville were turning that around before Operation Buttercup. Now, though . . ." She shrugged. "I don't know any way to quantify what it's done for them, but I'm absolutely convinced that it's improved their combat worthiness by an uncomfortably large factor, not reduced it the way Jurgensen argues that it has."

"So are we." Benjamin nodded. "Which is one reason we're concerned about the second point I was going to raise. You know that Pierre's financial reforms actually brought about a significant improvement in the Havenite economy."

He made the statement almost a question, and Honor nodded back.

"Well, we've been doing our best to evaluate just how much their economy has improved. Obviously, it's a matter of guess piled on top of conjecture, particularly given the fact that any officially published figures on the Peep economy were completely fabricated to hide the rot for at least four or five decades before the war. But we've run our models backward and forward, and they all agree that there ought to be more cash in the Republic's budgets than is being publicly reported."

Honor looked a question at him, and he shrugged.

"We know what their tax structure is, and we've managed to come up with a ballpark figure for their total economy which we feel is probably within ten or fifteen percent of accurate. And even taking the lower limit we've been able to postulate, the revenues they say they're collecting and spending are low to the tune of several hundred billion Manticoran dollars per year. And if our higher limit is closer to correct, the discrepancy gets much, much worse."

"Several hundred billion?" Honor repeated very carefully. She tried to remember if any of the High Ridge Government's intelligence types had ever expressed any qualms about the a

Which, she reflected, was uncommonly stupid of me.

"At an absolute minimum," Benjamin told her. "We haven't been able to find out where the money's actually going—not with any degree of certainty, at any rate. Part of the problem is that the Republic's so large and constitutes such a huge internal market that virtually all of it could be being plowed back into the domestic economy. More to the point, so much of their economy's been so distressed for so long that it's literally impossible to single out all of the perfectly legitimate places they could be pumping funds back into it. Unfortunately, we don't think that's the case. Or, rather, we're afraid it is the case, but that we wouldn't like the place they're spending all of that money if we could confirm it."

"And that place is?" Honor prompted as he paused.

"We don't know," Benjamin admitted, "but we have two straws in the wind, as it were. One is the existence of some top-secret project, one that was apparently launched under the Committee as much as several years before the McQueen Coup but which has been continued under Pritchart and Theisman. All we know about it for certain is its codename: 'Bolthole.' That, and the fact that Pierre and Saint-Just fu

"That's straw number one. Straw number two is the name of the one officer our sources have been able to identify as being closely associated with whatever 'Bolthole' is since Theisman's little revolution. I believe you know her."