At All Costs

"Makes sense to me," Mikl¢s said. "But you said it was mainly the op force?"

"The other part is that Scotty seems to have visualized what we're going to be doing more clearly than most of the other COLACs. His sims are almost all built around raids and how the bad guys might respond. No one's given him any official briefings all the others didn't get, but he's clearly figured out what these operations are going to entail."

"Then by all means let's get them as widely distributed as we can," Honor decided.

"Yes, Ma'am," Jaruwalski acknowledged, making a note in her memo pad.

"And while she's doing that, Mercedes," Honor decided, "you and I are going to hop one of the shuttle flights back to Manticore. We can make the round-trip in thirty-six hours, even allowing for time at the Admiralty, and I want to touch base with Sir Thomas one last time before we actually kick off."

"Of course, Your Grace," Mercedes murmured, and Honor tasted her chief of staff's carefully concealed fond amusement. Obviously, Mercedes realized she was also looking forward to "touching base" with Hamish Alexander, as well as his First Space Lord. While Brigham clearly continued to nurse some serious reservations about the wisdom of the entire affair-Honor managed not to wince at her own unintentional double entendre-she'd apparently come to the conclusion that it had been good for Honor, at least in a personal sense.

On the other hand, she didn't know about certain rapidly approaching consequences of their relationship.

"While we're there," Honor continued serenely, "I'll inform Sir Thomas that, barring any unforeseen eventualities, we'll be launching Operation Cutworm in approximately seven days from now."

"All of that sounds excellent, Honor," Sir Thomas Caparelli said. He was tipped back in his chair behind the desk in his Admiralty House office, where Honor and Mercedes Brigham had just finished a final briefing on Cutworm.

"I'm sorry it's taken us so long to get organized, Sir Thomas," Honor said.

"Not your fault." He shook his head quickly. "After episodes like that fiasco in Zanzibar, and the pressure of the Alizon raid, we've been forced to do more redeploying of assets than anyone here at the Admiralty ever wanted to. The delays in building up your order of battle have been entirely our fault, not yours."

"I know. But at the same time, I also know how badly we need to do something to keep them from launching more attacks like the one on Zanzibar."

"We do. But you were absolutely right when you pointed out that attacking in insufficient strength would be worse than useless." He sighed. "I just wish it didn't feel so much like 'insufficient strength' is all we've got."

"We'll just have to maximize the edges we have, " Honor replied. She glanced at Brigham for a moment, then went on. "Mercedes and I haven't mentioned anything about the new targeting systems in our staff sessions, Sir Thomas. We don't like to think about losing people or having them captured, but it can happen, and we decided to restrict that information as tightly as possible. But the last time I spoke to Commander He

"Yes, we do." Caparelli nodded. "I've only seen the preliminary report so far, not the details, but I understand it looked promising. Very promising. No one's talking about deploying it tomorrow, but it's begi

"That quickly?" Honor smiled. "If it lives up to He

"That's a bit less cheerful," Caparelli replied. "It's not coming along as well as I'd hoped, nor as badly as I'd feared. It's going to take at least a few weeks more than Admiral Hemphill's original projections suggested to get their pod-layers refitted with our old-style MDMs. The good news is that we'll probably get a bigger 'python lump' of them delivered in a single shot. Of course," he grimaced, "Silesia's drawing a lot of the Andies' attention just now. Ours, too, for that matter."

"I haven't been following the reports on Silesia as closely as I should have," Honor admitted. "Still, the last I heard, things seems to be going fairly well."

"Compared to the cesspool the Confederacy used to be? Certainly. Compared to any half-way honestly governed section of the galaxy, though, it's entirely too interesting for my taste. Admiral Sarnow has his hands full, believe me."

"What do you mean?" Honor asked, just a trifle anxiously. Mark Sarnow was an old friend, and she would have thought he was an almost perfect choice for the new Silesia Station's CO.

"Oh, it's nothing he isn't going to be able to deal with eventually," Caparelli said reassuringly. "But some of the old Silesian administrators obviously didn't really believe us when we told them it wasn't going to go right on being business as usual. And although most of the appointive system governors were simply retired as part of the a

"Trust me, Sir Thomas," Honor said dryly, "there was nothing 'free' about an old-style Silesian election. The wi

"I know, I know. But we can't simply go in and depose elected governors, however they got themselves elected in the first place, without excellent justifying cause. Some of them are stupid enough to think that will let them get away with ru

"Thirty percent, Sir?" Surprise startled the question out of Mercedes Brigham, despite her relative lack of seniority, and Caparelli chuckled with very little humor.

"It's nowhere near as bad as that sounds, Commodore," he reassured her. "At least half-more probably two-thirds-of the ships we can't account for were long gone before we ever came along. Hell, one of the more audacious system governors and his local naval commander were listing an entire squadron of battlecruisers-eight ships, and the next best thing to twenty thousand perso

He shook his head, obviously bemused by anything which could operate on that sort of basis and still call itself a "navy."

"Still," he continued after a moment, his voice a bit bleaker, "some of those ships really did disappear, crew and all. I suspect that more than a few of the ones that did were already doing a little freelance piracy on the side, and I'm quite certain a lot of them think they can get away with doing it full-time, given how distracted we are by the Peeps. Which means, of course, that the very ship types Sarnow needs to chase them down are also the ones Eighth Fleet needs for operations like Cutworm. And then, of course, there's always Talbott."