by David Weber
"No," he said mildly, picking up his napkin and brushing crumbs from his lips. "I don't know what you hate most about our political lords and masters, TJ. But I feel somehow certain that you can scarcely wait to enlighten me."
"Um?" Wix stopped just inside the door, alerted by his superior's tone of voice that he'd just committed a social faux pas. Then he had the grace to blush. "Oops. Sorry, Boss. I forgot it was breakfast time for you."
"For me? Most people eat breakfast even earlier than I do, TJ—between the time they get up and the time they begin work," Kare pointed out. Then he noticed Wix's somewhat scruffy appearance and sighed. "TJ, you did go home last night at some point, didn't you?"
"Well, actually . . . no," Wix admitted. Kare drew a deep breath, but before he could deliver yet another homily on the desirability of something resembling a normal sleep schedule, the younger scientist hurried on.
"I was going to, honest. But one thing led to another, and, well—" He twitched one shoulder in impatient dismissal. "Anyway," he went on more enthusiastically, "I was looking at that latest data run—you know, the one Argonaut pulled in last week?"
Kare recognized the futility of trying to introduce any other topic until Wix had run down about this one and resigned himself.
"Yes," he said. "I know the data you're talking about."
"Well," Wix went on, starting to bounce around the office in his excitement, "I went back and reran them, and damned if I don't think we've actually hit the proper approach vector. Oh," he waved one hand as Kare let his chair come suddenly back upright, "we still have a lot of refining to do, and I want to make at least two or three more runs to get a broader observational base to double-check my rough calculations. But unless I'm mistaken, the analysis is going to confirm that we've hit the target pretty much on the nose."
"I wish," Kare said after a moment, "that you'd stop doing this, TJ."
"Doing what?" Wix asked, obviously confused by his superior's tone of voice.
"Finding things ahead of schedule," Kare told him. "After the Director and I spent days hammering home the need for us to do all of the time-consuming detail work, you turn around and find the damned approach vector a good four months early! Do you have any idea how hard this is going to make it to convince the politicos that they should listen to us the next time we tell them we need more time to complete our research?"
"Of course I do," Wix told him in a moderately affronted tone. "That's what I hate most about our political lords and masters, if you'll remember the way I began this conversation. Besides, it really sours my day to start it off by literally stumbling across something which I ought to feel only pleased about finding and then realize how much it pisses me off to realize I'm going to do exactly what the idiots I work for wanted done all along. Well, that and the way the assholes are going to steal the credit for it."
"You do realize how paranoid—if not petty—this entire conversation makes two reasonably intelligent adults sound, don't you?" Kare asked with a wry grin, and Wix shrugged.
"I don't feel particularly paranoid, and I don't think we're the petty ones. In fact, that's why it pisses me off—I don't like working for a prime minister who's so damned petty. Besides, as soon as we tell them about it, that asshole Oglesby is going to be back over here for another news conference. At which you and Admiral Reynaud will be doing well to get a single word in edgewise."
"Oh, no, TJ! Not this time," Kare said with a seraphic smile. "You found it, so this time you're the one who's going to be doing well to get a single word in edgewise."
* * *
"That was delicious, Your Grace," Mercedes Brigham sighed, sitting back from the breakfast table with a comfortable sense of repletion. The plate before her bore the sticky remains of her eggs Benedict's hollandaise sauce and a few bacon crumbs, while the rind of a musk melon stood up like the keel of a stripped ark on a smaller plate, accompanied by two purple grapes which had somehow escaped the massacre of their fellows.
Honor's breakfast, as always, had been considerably more substantial, as a concession to her enhanced metabolism, and she smiled at Brigham's comment as she reached for the cocoa carafe and poured herself another mug.
"I'm glad you enjoyed it," she said, her smile broadening as James MacGuiness stepped in from his pantry with a fresh cup of the hot tea her chief of staff preferred. "Of course, I'm not the person you ought to be complimenting about it."
"No, and I wasn't complimenting you," Brigham told her. "I was simply commenting. The person I intended to compliment about it wasn't here at the moment. Now he is." She sniffed and looked up at MacGuiness. "That was delicious, Mac," she said with dignity.
"Thank you, Commodore," MacGuiness said gravely. "Would you like another egg?"
"Some of us, unfortunately, have to be a bit more careful than others about what we eat," Brigham said in regretful tones.
"Cheer up, Mercedes," Honor told her while Nimitz bleeked a laugh of his own around a stalk of celery. "There's always lunch."
"And I'll look forward to it," Brigham assured her with a chuckle while she smiled at the steward.
"I'll do my best not to disappoint," MacGuiness assured her. He was just about to say something more when the com attention signal chimed softly. He made a small face—the grimace of irritation he saved for moments when the outside universe intruded itself into his admiral's mealtimes—and then stepped over to the bulkhead-mounted terminal and pressed the accept key.
"Admiral's day cabin, MacGuiness speaking," he told the pickup in decidedly repressive accents.
"Bridge, Officer of the Watch, speaking," Lieutenant Ernest Talbot, Werewolf's communications officer, replied in a respectful voice. "Sorry to interrupt Her Grace's breakfast, Mr. MacGuiness. But the Captain asked me to inform her that Perimeter Security has just picked up an unidentified incoming hyper footprint. A big one, twenty-two light-minutes from the primary. According to CIC, there are over twenty major drive sources."
MacGuiness's eyebrows rose, and he started to turn towards Honor, but she was by his side before the movement was more than half completed. She laid one hand on his shoulder and leaned a bit closer to the pickup herself.
"This is the Admiral, Lieutenant Talbot," she said. "I assume that the grav-pulse challenge has already been sent?"
"Of course, Your Grace." Talbot sounded suddenly crisper. "It was transmitted as soon as they were picked up, exactly—" he paused, obviously checking the time "—seven minutes and forty-five seconds ago. There's been no response."
"I see." Honor refrained from pointing out that if there had been a response, the hyper footprint would scarcely have still been unidentified. Then she felt a tiny pang of guilt at the thought. Good officers learned never to assume that someone else was aware of all they were aware of, and subordinates who were willing to risk sounding foolish to be certain their superiors had all relevant information were to be cherished, not scorned.
"Well," she went on, "they could still be friendlies who're just a little slow responding, I suppose." Her tone was that of someone thinking out loud, and Talbot made no response. Nor was any required. Both of them knew that by now every Manticoran or Allied man-of-war was equipped with FTL grav-pulse transmitters . . . and that no Allied com officer was "slow" enough to not have responded by now.
"Still," Honor continued, "this isn't a good time to take chances. My compliments to Captain Cardones, Lieutenant, and ask him to bring the task force to Action Stations."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Talbot said crisply, and the General Quarters alarm woke to clamorous, ear-hurting life less than four seconds later.
* * *
Admiral of the Green Francis Jurgensen felt his belly congeal into a single, massive lump of ice as he stared at the report on the display in front of him. For several seconds, his brain simply refused to work at all.
Then the real panic set in.
Sheer, shocked disbelief had held him paralyzed as he read through the brief, terse communique and the attac
hed copy of the official news release. None of it could possibly have been true! Except that even as he'd told himself that, he'd known that it was. Now the shock had worn off enough to lose its anesthetic edge, and he jerked up out of his comfortable chair with an abruptness which would have startled anyone familiar with the eternally self-possessed exterior he was always so careful to present to the rest of the universe. For a moment, he stood poised, looking almost as if he wanted to physically flee the damning information contained in the report. But, of course, there was nowhere to run, and he licked his lips nervously.
He walked over to the window of his office, his strides jerky, and leaned against the towering panel of crystoplast as he gazed out over the early evening skyline of the City of Landing. The Star Kingdom's capital's air traffic moved steadily against the darkening cobalt vault of the planet Manticore's star-pricked heavens, and he closed his eyes as the serene, jewel-bright chips of light floated steadily about their business. Somehow, the tranquility of the everyday scene only made the report's contents and conclusions even worse.
His brain began to function again, after a fashion. It darted about, like a frightened fish in too small an aquarium, bumping its snout again and again against the unyielding crystal wall which kept it pent. But, like the fish, it found no escape.
There was no point even trying to suppress this information, he realized. It wasn't an agent report, or an analyst's respectfully-phrased disagreement with his own position which could be ignored or conveniently misfiled. In fact, it was little more than a verbatim transcript of Thomas Theisman's own news release. The high-speed courier the agent-in-charge in Nouveau Paris had chartered to get it to him as quickly as possible couldn't have beaten the normal news service dispatch boat by more than a few hours. Perhaps a standard day, at most. Which meant that if he didn't report it to Sir Edward Janacek—and thus to the rest of the High Ridge Government—they would read about it in their morning newsfaxes.
He shuddered at the thought. That prospect was enough to quash any temptation, even one as powerful as the auto-response defensive reaction which urged him to "lose" this particular report the way he'd lost others from time to time. But this one was different. It wasn't merely inconvenient; it was catastrophic.
No. He couldn't suppress it, or pretend it hadn't happened. But he did have a few hours before he would be forced to share it with his fellow space lords and their political masters. There was time for at least the start of a damage control effort, although it was unlikely to be anywhere near as effective as he needed it to be.
The worst part of it, he reflected, as his brain settled into more accustomed thought patterns and began considering alternative approaches to minimizing the consequences, was the fact that he'd assured Janacek so confidently that the Peeps had no modern warships. That was what was going to stick sideways in the First Lord's craw. Yet even though Jurgensen could confidently expect Janacek to fixate on that aspect of the intelligence debacle, he knew it was only the very tip of the iceberg of ONI's massive failure. Bad enough that the Peeps had managed to build so many ships of the wall without his even suspecting they were doing it, but he also had no hard information at all on what sort of hardware they'd come up with to put aboard them.
He thought still harder, pushing the unpalatable bits of information about, studying them from all angles as he sought the best way to present them.
However he did it, it was going to be . . . unpleasant.
* * *
The rest of Honor's staff was waiting on Werewolf's flag bridge when she and Mercedes, both now wearing their skinsuits, stepped out of the lift. She nodded to them all, but her attention was on Andrea Jaruwalski.
"Still no reply to the challenge?" she asked. She reached up to rub Nimitz's ears where he sat on her shoulder in his custom-built skinsuit, and he pressed back against her hand. He held his miniature helmet tucked under one mid-limb, and she smiled as the taste of his emotions flowed through her.
"No, Ma'am," Jaruwalski replied. "They're accelerating in-system at a steady four hundred gravities, and they haven't said a word. CIC has managed to refine its data a little further, though. They make it twenty-two superdreadnoughts or dreadnoughts, eight battlecruisers or large heavy cruisers, fifteen or twenty or light cruisers, and what looks like four transports."
"Transports?" Honor raised an eyebrow at her operations officer, and Jaruwalski shrugged.
"That's CIC's best guess so far, Ma'am. Whatever they are, they're big, but their wedge strength looks low for warships of their apparent tonnage. So it looks like they're military auxiliaries of some sort, whether they're actually transports or not."
"I see." Honor continued across the flag deck to her command chair and racked her own helmet on its side. Her command station was no more than three long strides from the flag plot, and her small com screen blinked to life as she eased Nimitz down from her shoulder and set him on the back of her chair. Rafe Cardones' face looked out of it at her, and she smiled in welcome.
"Good morning, Rafe," she said.
"Good morning, Ma'am," he responded more formally, and his smile was a bit tighter than hers had been. "It looks like we've got visitors," he added.
"So I've heard," she agreed. "Give me a few minutes to get myself brought up to speed, and we'll decide what sort of welcome mat we want to put out."
"Yes, Ma'am," he said, and she turned her attention to the plot.
Werewolf was a new ship, and she and her sisters had been designed from the keel out to serve as task force or fleet flagships, so her flag plot's holo sphere was at least two-thirds the size of CIC's master plot. It was less cluttered than the master plot because the automatic filters removed distracting items—like the Marsh System's civilian spacegoing infrastructure—which were both unnecessary and possibly confusing. They could be put back if Honor really wanted to see them, but at the moment she had eyes only for the red icons of unknown starships sweeping steadily inward from the system hyper limit.
"What's their time to Sidemore orbit?" she asked.
"They came out on our side of the primary, Your Grace," Lieutenant Theophile Kgari, her staff astrogator, replied crisply. Kgari's grandparents had migrated to the Star Kingdom directly from Old Earth, and his skin was almost as dark as Michelle Henke's. "They made transit at a very low velocity—no more than a hundred KPS or so, almost directly in-system. But they've been piling on the accel ever since. They translated out of hyper just under—" it was his turn to consult a time readout "—nineteen minutes ago, so they're up to four-point-three-four thousand KPS. Assuming a zero/zero intercept with Sidemore, they'll hit turnover in almost exactly two hours, at which time they'll be up to approximately three-two-point-niner thousand KPS at seven-point-six-five light-minutes from the planet."
"Thank you, Theo," Honor said, turning to smile briefly at him before she returned her attention to the plot. She reached down to caress Nimitz's ears once more as he sat upright on the back of her command chair. She stood that way for several thoughtful seconds, gazing at the light dots in the plot silently, then drew a deep breath, shrugged, and turned to face her staff.
"Until they tell us differently, we'll consider them hostiles," she told them. "It would take a lot of chutzpah for anyone to come in on us with only twenty-two of the wall, but that's not to say someone might not be crazy enough to try it. So we won't take any chances. Andrea," she looked at the ops officer, "this looks like an excellent opportunity to dust off Buckler Bravo-Three, wouldn't you say?"
"Yes, Ma'am, I would," Jaruwalski agreed.
"Mercedes?" Honor asked, cocking her head at her chief of staff, and Brigham frowned ever so slightly.
"As you say, Your Grace, it would take someone with more guts than good sense to take us on with what we've seen so far. The only thing that bothers me about that supposition is that presumably whoever they are, they realize that too. Which leads me to reflect upon that axiom of Admiral Courvoisier's you're so fond of quoting."
"T
he same thought had occurred to me," Honor told her. "That's why I figure this is a good time to run Buckler Bravo-Three. If it turns out it's only an exercise, well and good. But if it should turn out we need it, I want those pods and those LACs in space and in position when it hits the fan."
"That's more or less what I was thinking, Ma'am," Brigham said. "My only problem is that Bravo-Three takes us out of Sidemore orbit towards them. If it's all the same to you, I'd really prefer Bravo-Two." She shrugged. "I may be being paranoid, but if these really are hostiles and not just terminally stupid friendlies who think it's humorous not to respond to our challenges, then I'd just as soon not be drawn any further from the planet than we have to be."
"Um." Honor rubbed the tip of her nose thoughtfully, considering what the chief of staff had said.
Buckler Bravo-Three called for the task force to advance to meet any potential enemy, closing into extreme Ghost Rider missile range with the ships of the wall behind an advanced screen of LACs. Bravo-Two, on the other hand, kept the ships of the wall in close proximity to Sidemore while LAC scouting forces fanned out to make a more precise ID and, if appropriate, launch the initial attacks independently of the wall. It was the more cautious approach, and the LACs, unlike the capital ships, would have to enter any adversaries' range to engage them. That meant exposing them to potential losses the ships of the wall could avoid, thanks to the range advantage Ghost Rider gave their missile pods. On the other hand, the LACs could go out, make positive identification, and then report back rather than sweeping in to attack automatically, and there ought to be time to bring the wall into range instead if that seemed appropriate.
She considered a moment longer, then nodded.
"I can't think of any good reason for them to be trying to suck us away from the planet—not on the basis of anything we've seen up to this point, anyway. But that doesn't mean there isn't one, and you're right. Bravo-Two will do the job just as well as Three."
She turned her attention to the com screen and her flag captain.
