War Of Honor

He smiled brightly around the conference table, pleased with his compromise, and New Kiev nodded. Descroix's agreement was a bit more grudging, but it came anyway, and his smile grew broader.

"Excellent!" he said once more. "In that case, I'll have Clarence contact Admiral Reynaud immediately to arrange it. Now, about those new shipbuilding subsidies you wanted to recommend, Marisa. It seems to me . . ."

"It's good to see you home again, Honor!" Rear Admiral Alistair McKeon said feelingly as Honor walked into the flag briefing room aboard HMS Werewolf. He and Alice Truman had reached Honor's new flagship before the Paul Tankersley's shuttle made rendezvous with her. Mercedes Brigham had arrived with Honor, and Rafael Cardones and Captain Andrea Jaruwalski had met them in the boat bay and accompanied them to the briefing room.

"Rafe and Alice and I have managed to keep things moving, more or less," McKeon went on as he reached out to grip her hand firmly. "But no one at the Admiralty seems to have the least sense of urgency about all of this, and I think we need someone a little more senior to kick ass over there!"

"If it's all the same to you, Alistair," she said mildly, squeezing his hand back, "I'd prefer to spend at least—oh, an hour or two, perhaps—getting my bags unpacked before I go over to do battle with Admiral Draskovic and the First Space Lord."

"Sorry." He grimaced, then gri

"I wouldn't be at all surprised if Alistair's suspicions are justified," Dame Alice Truman put in, reaching out to shake Honor's hand in turn. Her own smile was genuine but carried a decidedly sour edge. "I don't know exactly what you did to Draskovic to make her sign off on your staff and command selections, but I suspect we'd be getting considerably more—and prompter—cooperation out of the Admiralty if you'd picked a slate that was in somewhat better odor with the Powers That Be. Starting with your choice for your second in command."

"Starting with the station commander herself, you mean, Ma'am," Jaruwalski put in. The dark, hawk-faced captain had come a long way from the defensive, half-defeated woman who'd once been branded with responsibility for the Seaford Nine disaster, and she met Honor's sharp look with a sardonic smile.

"That might not be exactly the most diplomatic possible thing to say, Andrea," Honor observed, and her new ops officer shrugged.

"One thing I've already learned about trying to work with the new management at the Admiralty, Your Grace—we're never going to get anything done if we count on Admiralty House to do it for us. And with all due respect, Ma'am, you know that as well as we do. So we might as well be open about it here 'in the family,' don't you think?"

"You're probably right," Honor conceded after a moment, then shrugged and turned back to McKeon. "We'll have to sit down and discuss exactly where we are now that Mercedes and I are back from Grayson," she told him. "And if it looks like there's something we need that I can get the Admiralty to move on, then I'll certainly use whatever size stick it requires. But if it's something we can take care of ourselves, even if we have to go through back cha

"I can understand that," he agreed. "And I suppose it wouldn't hurt any for the rest of us to carry as much of the weight as we can instead of consigning you to Admiralty House's tender mercies."

"I wouldn't put it quite that way myself—even 'here in the family,' " Honor replied. "But in general, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to keep me in reserve whenever we can rather than squandering whatever clout I have. Speaking of which," she continued her interrupted trip to the chair at the head of the briefing room table and sat down, moving Nimitz from her shoulder to her lap, "where, exactly, are we?"

"About two weeks behind your projected timetable," Truman responded. Honor looked at her with one raised eyebrow, and the golden-haired rear admiral shrugged. "Hephaestus turned Werewolf loose ahead of schedule, and Rafe and Scotty have done really well at working up her LAC group. We're at least a week behind on assembling the rest of the carrier force, though, and until we get all of the CLACs and all of the LACs gathered in one place, it's going to be impossible to form any judgments on the LAC groups as a whole. I doubt they'll be fully up to Werewolf's standards, but that would be true of just about anyone they could send us. Scotty's LAC jocks could use as much additional exercise time as we can steal for them, but at least two-thirds of them are veterans, and in my opinion, they're shaping up very nicely. Would you agree, Alistair?"

"It's certainly looks that way to me," McKeon confirmed.

"I see." Honor nodded and glanced at Jaruwalski. "And that other project we discussed, Andrea?"

"That much is on schedule, Your Grace," Jaruwalski assured her. "The data is tucked away as per instructions, and Commander Reynolds and I have already had a few thoughts about it. We're not quite ready to share them yet, but I don't think you'll be disappointed."

"Good." Honor smiled thinly. It was a strangely hungry smile, but it became broader and warmer as she tasted the puzzlement of her senior subordinates. Well, there would be time enough to enlighten them later. She didn't expect any of them to have any objections at all to the little side project she'd codenamed Operation Wilberforce. But given the ... sensitive nature of the intelligence data which would make Wilberforce possible, she preferred to restrict the details to the smallest possible circle until they were safely in Silesia.

"So you think the LAC crews are going to be up to snuff by the time we reach Sidemore?" she asked, turning her attention back to Truman, and her second in command raised one hand and waggled it back and forth in a maybe-maybe not gesture.

"I think they ought to be," she said. "I'm confident that they'll be up to Scotty's standards eventually, but I won't absolutely guarantee that 'eventually' will happen before we reach our station."

"You're the LAC expert here, Alice," McKeon said, "but I think you may be being a bit overly pessimistic. To me, they look like they're already starting to shape up nicely from what I've seen in the sims. But what do I know? As I understand it, Her Grace," he gri

"Not all that old-fashioned," Honor demurred.

"More old-fashioned than you may have thought, Ma'am," Jaruwalski said sourly. She grimaced when Honor glanced at her. "The latest from Admiral Chakrabarti's office is that we're going to have to leave one of our squadrons of Medusas here with Home Fleet. They're going to give us two squadrons of the pre-pod types, instead. And according to my sources, at least two of the non-pod ships are going to be dreadnoughts, not superdreadnoughts."

"Only two squadrons?" Mercedes Brigham demanded, and turned to face Honor. "I know you warned me they were being tight about turning to

"No, there isn't," Honor agreed with massive restraint. Privately, she wondered if it was possible that some of Benjamin's apprehensions about the Republic of Haven might finally have begun to percolate through what passed for the brain of ONI. She reminded herself that she still had to bring William Alexander and Elizabeth up to speed on all of Benjamin's concerns ... including Erewhon's possible intentions. But at the moment, that was secondary to her own immediate concerns, and she certainly couldn't think of any other reason to reduce the ships being sent off to deter the Andermani so severely. If the new force levels held up, the Admiralty would be giving her task force only one squadron of SD(P)s. Admittedly, there would be eighteen older-style superdreadnoughts—or dreadnoughts, if Andrea is right, she corrected herself—to back them, plus the two weak battle squadrons already on station under Admiral Hewitt. And it was also true that six of the new ships ought to be capable of destroying an entire fleet of the older types all by themselves, but it still seemed like a foolhardy move.