Mission of Honor

"Fascinating."

"I thought so, too. But after I'd had the opportunity to digest that information for a few moments, I pointed out that even sixty or seventy of their wallers would presumably be more than enough to deal with three or four hundred of ours, given their newly revealed advantage in missile warfare. Which, I noted, didn't even consider any fixed defenses their capital system might have deployed after a couple of decades of active warfare with the Republic of Haven.

"Admiral Bernard agreed that that was certainly a reasonable cause for concern, but it's apparently the joint view of Admiral Rajampet and Admiral Kingsford that no one could have gotten in to hammer the Manties' shipyards and space stations that hard without blowing his way through the fixed defenses first. In other words, whoever it was must have already taken out a lot of the combat capability they might have used against us. And with the damage to their industrial sector, not to mention their losses in trained military manpower, they won't have been able to do very much to replace lost capability."

Teague realized she was shaking her head, slowly, again and again, and made herself stop.

"They're insane," she said flatly.

"Or a reasonable facsimile thereof," he agreed glumly.

"Haven't they even considered the implications of what happened to the Manties?" she demanded.

"The only implications they're interested in are the ones that have left Manticore vulnerable," al-Fanudahi replied flatly. "I pointed out to them that we don't have a clue how whoever it was did whatever the hell he did. All we have so far are news reports, for God's sake! It's obvious someone got in and blew the crap out of Manticore's infrastructure, but that's all we know."

"Bullshit it's all we know!" Teague snapped. "We know damned well that nothing we have could've done it! What happened to Crandall at Spindle's proof enough of that . I guarantee you that there's no way Spindle had anything like the depth of sensor coverage their home system has, and their Home Fleet is a hell of a lot more powerful than a handful of cruisers and battlecruisers. So if somebody got through all of that and got in close enough to do the kind of damage the newsies are reporting—or anything remotely like the damage they're reporting—they had to do it with some kind of hardware we've never even heard of. Another kind of hardware we've never even heard of!"

"My own thoughts exactly," al-Fanudahi agreed heavily.

The two of them sat looking at one another in silence for at least a couple of minutes. Then Teague leaned back and inhaled deeply.

"You realize who it was, of course," she said quietly.

"Well, we've just agreed it wasn't us," he replied. "And if Haven had anything like this—or if they'd even been close to getting something like this deployed—they never would've launched that do-or-die attack of theirs. So, from where I sit, that eliminates most of the usual suspects. And given what's been going on in Talbott, and the assassination of the Manty ambassador right here in Old Chicago, and that obvious nonsense about Manty sponsorship of that attack on Green Pines, and that attack on Congo, the name that pops to the top of my list begins with the letter 'M'."

"Mine, too." Her eyes were as dark as his had been, and her expression was very, very grim. "Daoud, I'm starting to have a really bad feeling. The sort of feeling a person might get if she believed the Manties had been right all along about Manpower's involvement. It doesn't seem possible, but . . . ."

Her voice trailed off, and al-Fanudahi nodded.

"I agree," he said. "And, frankly, the fact that no one—not Rajampet, not Kingsford, not Je

"So you think this goes a lot farther than just getting Manticore out of the Talbott Cluster and away from Mesa."

"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that was a big part of it, maybe even some kind of triggering event," al-Fanudahi said. "But anyone who could pull this entire sequence of events together—anyone who could get whole task forces and fleets of Solarian capital ships deployed where he wants them, when he wants them, then pull something like the attack on Manticore out of his ass—isn't just improvising as he goes along. Either of those operations must have required a massive organization and very careful—and lengthy—pla

"And whoever it is—whether it's Manpower or someone else who's just been using Manpower as a front—there has to be a reason she's decided to go ahead and show us all she has that kind of capability," Teague said quietly.

"Precisely." Al-Fanudahi rubbed his forehead wearily. "Maybe at least part of it was opportunism. Maybe the real target's been Manticore all along, and the combination of the Manties' confrontation with us in Talbott and their losses in the Battle of Manticore was just too great a temptation, like Rajampet's 'strategic window of opportunity', and the bad guys jumped before they were ready. But I don't think it's that simple. I don't think someone who was able to build up the capabilities we're talking about in the first place without anyone even noticing is going to just throw away all that careful concealment, however great the strategic temptation, before he was pretty much ready to move anyway."

"Move against Manticore, you mean." Teague frowned with a dissatisfied air. "I don't think you're wrong, Daoud, but at the same time, I don't see the point." She waved one hand. "Oh, don't get me wrong. Obviously, if we didn't even know these people were pla

"No, it doesn't," al-Fanudahi agreed quietly. "That's why I'm so worried by the fact that no one else even seems to care about 'Manpower's' involvement in all this. Because I agree with you, Irene. Nobody's going to go to all this trouble and the huge expense which must've been involved just because they don't like the Star Empire of Manticore. There's got to be more to it, and the very unpleasant question that's been occurring to me over the last day or so is why they got us involved in the first place. If they already had the capability to carry off something like this attack of theirs, why run the risk of trying to manipulate us into squashing Manticore? They could've done this on their own anytime they wanted to without involving the League at all. And if their intelligence on Manty capabilities was as good as it must've been for them to have pla