Echoes Of Honor hh-8

by David Weber

  "Jesus Christ!" McKeon breathed, and Honor fought to keep the shock out of her own expression. It was hard—and even harder because she was still tapped into Ainspan's emotions.

  "Why do I have the feeling there's more, Commander?" she asked flatly.

  "Because there is, Milady," Ainspan replied just as flatly. "They also hit Hancock and Seaford Nine. I don't know exactly what happened at Hancock. I'd guess they got their asses kicked there, because I haven't run into any of our people who were captured there, and the Peep propaganda's made a big deal out of all the naval losses they supposedly inflicted but never claimed that they'd taken the system. They did take Seaford, though, and punched out another picket squadron and all the fleet facilities, as well. But that's not the worst of it."

  He drew a deep breath, as if stealing himself. Then—

  "They hit Basilisk, too, Milady," he said quietly. "They killed Admiral Markham and destroyed the inner-system picket, then went on and wrecked everything in Medusa orbit."

  "Basilisk?" McKeon sounded strangled. "They hit Basilisk, too?!"

  "Yes, Sir," Ainspan looked as if he wanted nothing in the universe more than to give McKeon a different answer, but he couldn't. "I don't have anything like official numbers, Milady," he went on, turning back to Honor, "but I know we got hurt and hurt bad. According to the Peeps, we've lost sixty-one of the wall, plus most of their screening units. I think that has to be an exaggeration, but I've personally met prisoners who can confirm the attacks on Zanzibar, Alizon, and Seaford Nine. I think—" He drew another deep breath. "I think this time they're actually telling the truth, Milady—at least about the systems they hit."

  Honor felt Ramirez and Benson flinch at last as the number sixty-one hit them. They might not be sufficiently familiar with the Alliance's astrography to know where Zanzibar was or what the significance of an attack on it might be, but they thought they knew how hard the Alliance had been hit if the Peeps' claims about Allied ship losses were anywhere near accurate.

  Only they were wrong, she thought, and her brain was so numb she felt almost calm. The ship losses and loss of life were serious enough—even assuming the Peeps had inflated them by thirty or forty percent, they were still the worst the Royal Manticoran Navy had suffered in its entire four hundred-year history—but the impact of that paled beside the sheer audacity of the Peep attack.

  It must have hit the Admiralty like a thunderbolt, she thought. After all this time, no one could have anticipated the possibility that the Peeps might try something like this. I certainly never would have! But if they've really punched out Zanzibar and Alizon and hit Basilisk, then—

  She closed her eyes, and despite the insulation of her shock, her thoughts raced. Even the total destruction of all industry in Zanzibar and Alizon would be a relatively minor blow to the industrial base of the Alliance as a whole, and the civilian loss of life wouldn't have been too bad—not if Ainspan was right about who'd commanded the raids. Lester Tourville would have done everything humanly possible to hold down the noncombatant death count. And from an industrial viewpoint, the RMN satellite yard at Grendelsbane Station alone had more capacity than Zanzibar and Alizon combined. All of which meant the Alliance could take up the slack without dangerously overstraining itself.

  But that hardly mattered, for the political and diplomatic consequences of a successful strike of this magnitude upon two allies of the Star Kingdom must have been devastating. And the destruction of the Basilisk support structure must have been even worse. Basilisk was Manticoran territory, and no one had dared to attack the Star Kingdom's home space in three hundred and seventy years. The economic cost alone had to have been catastrophic, at least as bad as the Zanzibaran and Alizonian losses combined, but the other consequences of such an attack must have cut deeper than any financial loss. And—

  "We're on our own," she said softly, not even aware she'd spoken aloud.

  "What did you say?" It was McKeon. He sounded far more abrupt than usual, but at least he was beginning to fight sufficiently clear of his own shock to think again, and she looked at him.

  "I beg your pardon?" she said.

  "You said 'we're on our own,'" he told her. She looked at him blankly for a moment, then nodded. "So what did you mean?" he asked.

  "I meant that we can't whistle up a rescue expedition after all," she told him bleakly. He cocked his head as if to invite fuller explanation. The beginnings of understanding already showed in his eyes, but she went on anyway, looking up at Ainspan while she explained it to him, as if using the words to hammer home her own acceptance of them.

  "We thought we could send a ship like Krashnark back to Alliance space if we could ever take her in the first place," she said. "Then all we'd have to do would be sit tight while the Admiralty organized a convoy and escorts and came to get us out. But if the Peeps have hit us that hard back home, the Alliance couldn't possibly justify sending a force big enough to lift us all out of here. Even if the Admiralty were willing to, the Government would never authorize it—not when every voter in the Star Kingdom and every member government of the Alliance has to be screaming for ships of the wall to reinforce their picket forces!"

  McKeon's gaze met hers. He started to open his mouth, but she'd read the thought behind his eyes and gave a sharp, tiny shake of her head. His mouth closed again, and she looked away, watching her non-Manticoran officers grapple with the news. It didn't seem to have occurred to any of them that the Allies certainly would send a ship to pick up Steadholder Harrington if they knew she was alive, and Honor hoped it never did occur to them. Sending a single fast ship to collect one person—or even a few dozen people—was one thing. Sending enough personnel lift to take everyone else off Hell as well was something else entirely.

  "But if we can't call for help," Harriet Benson said at last, speaking very quietly, "then we're screwed, aren't we? We needed that support, Honor. What the hell do we do if we can't get it?"

  "Do, Harry?" Honor turned to look at her, and the living side of her mouth turned up in a grim, cold smile. "We do what we have to do," she said in a voice that matched the smile perfectly. "And if we can't do it the easy way, then we do it the hard way. But I'll tell you this now—all of you. There aren't enough Peeps in this galaxy to keep me from taking my people home, and I am not going to leave a single person I promised to get off this planet behind me when we go!"

  Chapter Forty-Two

  "So that's what I intend to do," Honor told the officers around the conference table. "I know it's risky, but given Commander Ainspan's news—" she nodded her head courteously at the Commander, who sat at the foot of the table, where he'd just finished briefing her senior officers "—I don't see that we have any choice."

  "Risky? That plan isn't 'risky'—it's insane!" Rear Admiral Styles' voice was flat and hard. No doubt he meant for it to sound firm, decisive and determined, but she heard the naked terror behind it only too clearly. And when she glanced around the conference table at the expressions of her other senior officers, she knew that impression was neither her imagination nor solely due to her link to Nimitz.

  "Keeping Krashnark here in the Cerberus System is the worst thing we could possibly do," he went on, turning slightly away from her to address her other officers as if lecturing a crowd of school children. "I've never heard a senior officer suggest anything so reckless and ill-considered! I remind you all that she is the only means of communication with the Alliance we have! If we don't use her to send for help, no one can have the least possible idea that we're even here awaiting rescue!"

  "I'm aware of the risks, Admiral." Honor managed—somehow—to keep her voice level and wondered if she were being wise to do so. Speaking around a senior officer to her subordinates, especially when criticizing that senior officer's plan in such immoderate language, constituted a serious offense by RMN standards. At the very least it was insubordinate; at worst, it was an attempt to undermine the chain of command, and she knew she ought to bring the hammer down. But Styles re
mained the second-ranking Allied officer on Hell and this was no time for divisiveness, and so she gritted mental teeth and made herself speak to him as reasonably as if he had a functioning brain and a desire to use it.

  "Risk or no, however, I don't believe the Alliance could possibly justify sending a sufficient force to lift all of our people off this planet so far from the front under the circumstances. Even assuming that there haven't been still more raids on Allied systems since Commander Ainspan was captured, the threat of such attacks has to have thrown all our dispositions into confusion. Allowing for the inevitable communications delays, the Joint Chiefs and Admiralty probably don't even know where all our vessels are at the moment! And even if they decided that they could risk uncovering the core systems just to send an expedition out here after us, it would be criminal for us to ask them to." She shook her head. "No, Admiral Styles. We have to accomplish whatever we can on our own, and that means I can't possibly justify sending Krashnark to ask for help."

  "That's one opinion," Styles shot back, "and I suggest that the decision as to what the Alliance can and can't do ought to be made at a much higher level than this. More than that, allow me to point out—in case it's slipped your own attention—that by keeping Krashnark here you're probably throwing away our only chance to get at least some of the people on this planet to safety! If we stripped her down and cut her life-support margins to the minimum, we could get forty percent of the people currently on Styx aboard her. Surely getting at least some of us out is better than having StateSec recapture all of us!"

  "And just which forty percent would you advocate we get out, Admiral?" Alistair McKeon asked flatly. The other officers present—Jesus Ramirez, Gaston Simmons, Harriet Benson, Cynthia Gonsalves, Solomon Marchant, and Warner Caslet—all looked acutely uncomfortable, and their expression got still more uncomfortable at McKeon's question. None of them were Manticoran and all were junior to Styles, and they looked like family friends trying to stay out of a domestic quarrel. But they'd also come to know Styles much better than any of them would really have preferred, and, like McKeon, they knew exactly which forty percent of the eight thousand people actually on Styx Styles would advocate sending to safety. After all, it just happened that approximately forty percent of those people were members of one or another of the Allied militaries... just as forty percent of the people in this conference room were.

  But however furious and terrified he might be, the admiral seemed unwilling to be quite that explicit.

  "That's neither here nor there," he said instead. "Obviously some sort of screening or selection process would have to be worked out. But the point is that we could get at least that forty percent—whoever it was—to safety and inform higher authority of the situation here at the same time. Given that, it would be the height of irresponsibility even to contemplate holding Krashnark here! And," he took his eyes from McKeon's just long enough to dart a sideways glance at Honor but went on as if speaking solely to McKeon, "I suspect a board of inquiry might well conclude that it went beyond simple irresponsibility into criminal disregard of duty and—"

  "That will be enough, Admiral Styles." Honor's voice had changed. Unlike Styles', her tone was now cool and calm, almost conversational, but Andrew LaFollet smiled coldly when he heard it. He stood against the conference room wall behind her, able to see and hear everything yet so unobtrusive no one even noticed his presence after so many weeks, and he watched Styles' choleric face with anticipation. The Steadholder had put up with more than enough from this big-mouthed fool, and LaFollet felt himself silently urging Styles to misread her tone and manner.

  "I beg your pardon, Admiral Harrington, but it is not enough!" the Manticoran said sharply, and satisfaction widened LaFollet's smile. The idiot had misread her voice. He actually thought her apparent calmness was a good sign. Or perhaps he simply thought it indicated that she was uncertain and trying to hide it, or that he finally had a pretext he could use to undercut her authority in the eyes of her subordinates for his own gain.

  "I have questioned the wisdom of many of your decisions here on Hades," he went on, "but this one goes beyond unwise to insane! I have accepted your command authority despite the... irregularity of your claimed seniority in a non-Manticoran navy, but your current course of conduct leads me to seriously question my own wisdom in doing so. Whatever the actual status of your commission—or even the legality of your holding commissions in two different navies simultaneously—this decision absolutely proves you lack the experience for your supposed rank!"

  Alistair McKeon had started to lunge furiously up out of his chair when Styles began. Now he sat back instead, regarding the Rear Admiral with the same sort of fascination with which people watched two ground cars slide inexorably towards one another on icy pavement. Honor sat very still in her chair beside him, watching Styles with her single hand flat on the table before her and her head tilted slightly to one side. Her only expression was the small, metronome-steady tic at the living corner of her mouth, and Nimitz crouched on his perch, as motionless as she... except that the very tip of his tail flick-flick-flicked in exact rhythm with the tic of her mouth.

  McKeon looked away from Honor long enough to glance at the others around the table and felt reassured by what he saw. None of them really understood why Honor hadn't already crushed Styles, and while none of them wanted to get involved in a fight between her and an officer of her own navy—or one of her own navies, at least—they were entirely prepared to support her against him now. McKeon happened to agree with them that Honor should have stepped on the loathsome bastard the first time he got out of line, but he also knew (far better than they) that she didn't do things that way. Sometimes—as in McKeon's own case, once upon a time—that could be a good thing. This time, as far as he was concerned, she'd waited far too long, and he felt an anticipation very much like Andrew LaFollet's as Styles went right on running his mouth.

  "I'll accept that you believe you're doing the right thing and performing to the very best of your ability," the Manticoran went on, his voice oozing damning-with-faint-praise scorn, "but one of the things experience teaches is the ability to recognize the limitations of reality. Yes, and the true nature of responsibility, as well! Your primary duty as a Queen's officer is—"

  "I don't believe you heard me, Admiral Styles," Honor said, still in that conversational tone, her body language completely relaxed. "I said I had heard enough, and I remind you—for the final time— of the penalties laid down by the Articles of War for insubordination."

  "Insubordination?" Styles glared at her, apparently oblivious to the dangerous glitter in her single working eye. "It's not 'insubordination' to point out to a manifestly inexperienced officer that her conception of her own duty and importance is obviously and completely divorced from reality and—

  "Major LaFollet!" Honor's voice was no longer calm. It was a blade of chilled steel, cutting across Styles' hotter, bombastic bellicosity like a sword.

  "Yes, My Lady?" LaFollet snapped to attention behind her.

  "Do you have your side arm, Major?" she asked, without so much as looking over her shoulder or taking her steely gaze from Styles' congested face.

  "I do, My Lady," her armsman replied crisply.

  "Very good." The right side of her lips curled up in a thin, dangerous smile, and Styles' eyes began to widen as the fact that she had been anything but intimidated by his bluster finally started to seep into his awareness. LaFollet was already moving, circling the table towards Styles in anticipation of Honor's orders, but the rear admiral didn't even notice that. He stared at Honor instead, opening his mouth as if to speak, but it was much too late for that.

  "You will place Rear Admiral Styles under arrest," Honor went on to LaFollet in that arctic voice. "You will escort him immediately from this conference room to the brig, and you will there place him under close confinement on my authority. He will not be allowed to return to his quarters. He is not to be permitted contact with any other individual betw
een this conference room and his cell."

  "This is preposterous—an outrage—!" Styles lunged to his feet and started to lean threateningly towards Honor, only to break off with a gurgle as Andrew LaFollet's left hand caught the collar of his tunic from behind. LaFollet no more believed Styles had the courage to physically assault his Steadholder than anyone else in that conference room did... but he didn't very much care. It was far too good a pretext to pass up. He was a good five centimeters shorter than Styles, but he was all wiry muscle and bone, and he got his back and shoulders into it as he pivoted and heaved.

  Styles pitched backward, arms windmilling. He sailed through the air, crashed down on his back with a grunt of anguish, and slid across the floor until his head slammed into the wall and stopped him. He lay for an instant, half-stunned, then blinked and started to push himself back up—only to freeze as he found himself looking into the muzzle of Andrew LaFollet's rock-steady pulser from a range of two meters.

  His eyes went huge. Then they traveled slowly up the Grayson's arm to the armsman's face, and his heart seemed to stop as he recognized LaFollet's complete willingness to squeeze that trigger.

  "I have tolerated your gross insubordination, incompetence, cowardice, defiance, and disrespect for as long as I intend to, Admiral Styles," Honor told him coldly. "You have been warned dozens of times, and you have steadfastly declined to amend your behavior, despite repeated warnings that my patience was not without limit. Very well. I will not warn you again. You will now accompany Major LaFollet to the brig, where you will be held in close confinement until such time as formal charges are preferred against you before a court-martial board of Her Majesty's Navy. I have no doubt that those charges will be sustained... and you know as well as I what the penalty attached to them will be."