Echoes Of Honor

I’m impressed, Giscard admitted to himself. He’d never actually served with McQueen, though their paths had crossed briefly a time or two before the Harris Assassination, and he didn’t know her well. Not on a personal level, at any rate; only an idiot would have failed to study her intensely since her elevation to Secretary of War. He could well believe the stories he’d heard about her ambition, but he hadn’t quite been prepared for the magnetism she radiated.

Of course, radiating it too openly could be a Bad Thing, he reflected. Somehow I don’t see StateSec being comfortable with the notion of a charismatic Secretary of War who also happens to boast an excellent war record.

They reached the end of the hall, and a Marine sentry came to attention as McQueen keyed a short security code into the panel beside an unmarked door. The door slid open silently, and Giscard and Pritchart followed McQueen and Fontein into a large, well-appointed briefing room. Citizen Admiral Ivan Bukato and half a dozen other officers, the most junior a citizen captain, sat waiting at the large conference table, and nameplates indicated the chairs Giscard and Pritchart were expected to take.

McQueen walked briskly to the head of the table and took her seat, her compact frame seeming even slighter in the comfortable grasp of her oversized, black-upholstered chair, and waved her companions to their own places. Fontein deposited himself in an equally impressive chair on her right, and Giscard found himself at her left hand, with Pritchart to his own left. Their chairs, however, were much less grand than the ones their betters had been assigned.

"Citizen Admiral Giscard, I believe you know Citizen Admiral Bukato?" McQueen said.

"Yes, Ma’am. The Citizen Admiral and I have met," Giscard admitted, nodding his head at People’s Navy’s de facto CNO.

"You’ll get to know the rest of these people quite well over the next month or so," McQueen went on, "but for now I want to concentrate on giving you a brief overview of what we have in mind. Citizen Admiral Bukato?"

"Thank you, Citizen Secretary." Bukato entered a command into the terminal in front of him, and the briefing room lights dimmed. An instant later, a complex hologram appeared above the huge table. The biggest part of it was a small-scale star map that showed the western quarter of the PRH, the war front, and the territory of the Manticoran Alliance clear to the Silesian border, but there were secondary displays, as well. Graphic representations, Giscard realized, of the comparative ship strengths of the opponents on a class-by-class basis, with sidebars showing the numbers of units sidelined for repairs or overhaul.

He sat back, studying the holo and feeling Citizen Commissioner Pritchart study it beside him. Unlike many officers of the People’s Navy, Giscard actually looked forward to hearing his citizen commissioner’s impressions and opinions. Partly, that was because Pritchart had one of the better minds he had ever met and frequently spotted things which a trained naval officer’s professional blinders might prevent him from considering, which helped explain what made her and Giscard one of the PN’s few smoothly functioning command teams. There were, however, other reasons he valued her input.

"As you can see, Citizen Admiral Giscard," Bukato said after a moment, "while the Manties have pushed deeply into our territory since the begi

"Neither Citizen Secretary McQueen nor I believe that they contemplate voluntarily surrendering the initiative, however. We subscribe to the belief that they definitely plan to resume the offensive in the very near future, and that when they get around to it they will go after Barnett from Trevor’s Star. To that end, we have been continuing to reinforce Citizen Admiral Theisman. Citizen Secretary Kline’s intention—or perhaps I should say ‘hope’—was that Citizen Admiral Theisman would attract Manty attention to his command area and hold it there as long as possible in order to divert the enemy from deeper thrusts into the Republic. And, of course, he was to entice the enemy into a battle of attrition in hopes of costing the Alliance more to

Giscard managed not to sit sharply upright in his chair or otherwise draw attention to his reaction, but his eyes widened at the acid tone of Bukato’s last two sentences. Giscard had known Citizen Secretary Kline was unpopular with his uniformed subordinates—not surprisingly, since the man had been an incompetent political hack with a taste for humiliating any officer he decided was "an elitist recidivist" hungering to restore the officer corps to its old independence of action. But for Bukato to show contempt for even an ex-secretary so openly in front of both Pritchart and Fontein indicated that the changes at the top of the War Office must have been even more sweeping than most people suspected.

"We, however, have somewhat greater aspirations than to achieve another glorious defeat," Bukato continued. "We are reinforcing Theisman in hopes that he will actually hold Barnett—if possible, for use as a springboard to retake Trevor’s Star. That isn’t something we’ll be able to do next week, or even next month, but the time to stop giving ground every time the Manties hit us has come now."

A soft sound circled the table, and something inside Giscard shivered. It had been a long time since he’d heard that hungry growl of agreement from anyone but his own staff, and a part of him wondered how McQueen had put so much iron into her senior subordinates’ spines so quickly. No wonder she’s been so effective in combat, if she can do this, he thought. Then: And no wonder just thinking about her political ambitions scares the shit out of the people’s commissioners!

"Our data on the enemy’s currently available fleet strength are not as definite as we’d like," Bukato went on. "Our espionage operations in the Star Kingdom have taken a heavy hit since the war started. Indeed, we now suspect—" he glanced sidelong at Fontein and Pritchart "—that NavInt’s major prewar networks there had been compromised even before the start of hostilities. It looks like the Manties actually used our own spies to feed us fabricated information to draw us into false initial deployments."

Again, Giscard kept his face expressionless, but it was hard. Most of the PN’s new crop of senior officers must have speculated about that. Giscard certainly had, though, like all the others, he’d dared not say so aloud. But it made sense. Certainly something had caused Amos Parnell to radically realign his force structure on the very eve of the war, and no one really believed it had been part of some obscure plot the Legislaturalist officer corps had hatched to betray the People for enigmatic reasons of their own. But the official line had been that the disastrous opening phases of the war had been entirely the fault of that officer corps, and that "crime" had been the pretext for which the new political management had ordered most of its senior members to be shot. So if Bukato was openly saying that it might not have been Parnell’s fault—that the disgraced CNO had been snookered by Manty counterintelligence...

My God, things really are changing! he thought wonderingly, and looked over at Fontein. The Citizen Commissioner hadn’t even blinked. He simply sat there impassively, without as much as a frown, and that impassivity told Giscard even more than Bukato’s statement had.