On Basilisk Station

"I know. Good luck, Captain McKeon."

"The same to you, Captain Harrington." McKeon stepped back, saluted sharply, and vanished down the passage, and Honor smiled after him. Then she turned back to Venizelos.

"Did you get that crew list glitch straightened out, Andreas?"

"Yes, Skipper. You were right—it was a snafu at BuPers. They promised to have it corrected by tomorrow morning."

"Good." She cocked her head in thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I suppose you'd better get back to the slip, then. These yard dogs need a real officer keeping an eye on them."

"Yes, Ma'am." Venizelos gri

Taken all in all, it had ended well, she thought a bit sadly. Too many good people had died to undo the mistakes and greed and stupidity of others, but they'd done it. The Hauptman Cartel had been cleared of knowing collusion in Basilisk, but the Queen's Bench had decided they ought to have known what their employees were doing and slapped them rather firmly on the wrist with several million dollars worth of fines. And the Court of Admiralty had condemned Mondragon as a legitimate prize for smuggling—a decision which had, just incidentally, made Captain Honor Harrington a millionaire. Most importantly of all, Haven's attempt to grab off Medusa and the Junction terminus had galvanized the political situation. Fear that Haven might try again had turned the Conservative rank and file against Janacek's long fight to downgrade Basilisk Station, and the Liberals and Progressives had been driven into full retreat. In fact, the Act of A

And then there was Pavel Young.

Honor allowed herself a rare, gloating smile as she considered Young, and Nimitz echoed it with a purr. His family and political co

He and Warlock had been banished to escort duty, poking along through hyper to guard tramp freighters plying back and forth to the Silesian Confederacy. Not even First Lord Janacek or his father had been able to save him from that. He was lucky they'd been able to keep him on active duty at all.

As for the People's Republic of Haven, Queen Elizabeth's Government and Navy weren't yet strong enough to embrace open war, especially not when the battered Opposition could still point out—accurately—that all evidence linking Haven to the mekoha and rifles on Medusa was circumstantial. It was highly suspicious to find a member of the Havenite Consulate's staff (and a full colonel in the Republic's army, no less), supplying the shaman's army, but he was dead, and the Republic had insisted—and produced the splendidly official documentation to "prove"—that Colonel Westerfeldt had been discharged from his consular position for peculation weeks before the unfortunate incident. No doubt he had been involved even then with the Manticoran criminals who had really supplied the natives. The criminals in question, captured by Papadapolous's Marines, hadn't been able to prove Haven had been their paymaster, nor would they ever be able to prove anything again. The last of them had faced the firing squad over a month ago.

Not that anyone who mattered doubted Haven's involvement. The Opposition parties might claim that they did in their determination to avoid the war they dreaded, but they knew the truth as well as Honor did. Nor would anyone who had been on Medusa—who had seen what the Medusans had done to Lieutenant Malcolm's patrol, who remembered the drug lab explosion or the slaughter to which Haven had delivered the Medusan nomads—forget or forgive, and in the meantime, the Queen had taken steps to express her displeasure.

By Crown Proclamation, any Haven-registered ship passing through the Junction, regardless of destination or normal diplomatic immunity, must submit to boarding and search before she would be allowed passage. Moreover, no Havenite warship would be permitted transit under any circumstances. There had been no negotiation on those points; Haven could take it or leave it . . . and add months to every cruise their freighters made.

The Republic had accepted the deliberate, calculated humiliation, for refusal would have driven even their own cargoes into freighters which could use the Junction, with disastrous effects upon their carrying trade. But because there was no proof, Haven had still been able to protest its i

No Manticoran believed them, of course, just as no one in the Kingdom believed their violent protests about one Commander Harrington's unprovoked attack upon an unarmed merchantman and her callous murder of its entire crew. It wasn't as if they'd had much choice about protesting, unless they wanted to admit what they'd actually been up to, but they'd gone so far as to demand Honor's extradition to stand trial for murder in a Havenite court. She'd been amused by that, until one of the government's foreign affairs experts explained the propaganda theory of the "big lie" to her.

She found it difficult to credit, even now, that anyone, anywhere, could possibly believe the nonsense being spouted by the Haven Information Ministry, but the expert had only shaken his head and sighed. The bigger the lie, apparently, the more likely the uninformed were to accept it, simply because they couldn't believe any government would tell such an absurd story unless it were true. And, she supposed, the fact that Haven had tried her in absentia (legal under what passed for Havenite law when Manticore refused to extradite her), found her guilty, and condemned her to death, had been the frosting on the cake.

But the Kingdom had responded to Haven's claims in unambiguous fashion. Honor smiled and straightened her cuffs, brown eyes glinting as she savored the four gold rings of a Captain of the List. They'd jumped her two full grades, clear past captain (junior grade), and Admiral Cortez had been almost apologetic about the fact that she hadn't been knighted. He'd talked his way around the point for several minutes, concentrating rather unconvincingly on the diplomatic repercussions and the effect on "neutral opinion" should the Crown knight someone Haven's courts had sentenced to death as a mass murderer, but the way he'd said it had carried quite another message. It wasn't Haven or the Solarian League which concerned the Government; it was the Liberals and Conservative Association. They'd taken a beating over Basilisk, but their power hadn't been broken, and in typical politico fashion, they blamed all their trials on Captain Harrington and not their own stupidity and short-sightedness.