by David Weber
"No, but—"
"Excuse me, Your Grace," Fritz Montoya put in, "but I'd appreciate it if the three of you could argue about this later." Honor turned to crook one eyebrow at the doctor, and Montoya shrugged. "I've already sent the worst half dozen cases across to Werewolf. Or, perhaps I should say, the worst half dozen other cases. I'd really like to get Captain Bachfisch over there sometime this week, too."
"I'm not leaving the Bane," Bachfisch said stubbornly.
"Oh yes you are, Captain," the blond-haired surgeon captain told him with an implacable calm Honor knew altogether too well from personal experience. "We can argue about it for a while first, if you really want to. But you are leaving."
Bachfisch opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Honor put one hand gently on his shoulder.
"Don't argue," she told him, resolutely not looking at the space where his legs ought to have tented the sheets. "You'll lose. For that matter, you'd lose even if Fritz was the only person who was going to be arguing with you. And he isn't."
Bachfisch looked back up at her for a moment, and then smiled crookedly.
"You always were a stubborn woman," he murmured. "All right, I'll go. But since you're here now . . ." He looked past her, indicating her staff officers with his eyes, and she nodded.
"I gathered from Commander Gruber's message that you were going to insist on a bedside debrief," she said serenely. "Now, if I were inclined to indulge in calling any kettles black, I might comment on the stubbornness involved in that. Since I'm far too broad-minded to do anything of the sort, however, why don't we just get started?"
Bachfisch's chuckle might have been tight with pain, but it was also genuine, and she tasted his gratitude for her manner.
"Commander Gruber," she waved at the exec, "already told us about your decision to shadow the Peep—Hecate, wasn't it?" She glanced up at Gruber, who nodded, and Honor looked back down at her old captain. "He told us you'd decided to, but what he couldn't tell us was what the hell you thought you were doing?"
Bachfisch's eyebrows flew up, and Honor tasted the surprise of all of her officers at hearing even that mild an oath out of her, but she never took her own eyes from Bachfisch's. She was willing to be calm and collected about his state, but she wanted him to cherish no illusions about her opinion of the sanity involved in getting himself and his ship mixed up in something like this.
"What I thought I was doing," he told her after a moment, "was trying to figure out what a Havenite fleet might be doing in your bailiwick, young lady. And I might point out that I've been old enough to make decisions for myself for quite some time. Why, just last week I picked out which shirt I wanted to wear without any help at all."
Their eyes held, and then, almost against her will, she smiled.
"Point taken," she told him. "On the other hand, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't try quite so hard to get yourself killed next time. You think we could compromise on that?"
"I'm certainly willing to take it under advisement," he assured her.
"Thank you. Now, getting back to business. You followed Hecate until she left the grav wave."
"Yes." Bachfisch leaned back against his pillow. "We hit a bad patch. Particle densities went way up, and I had to close up on her if I wanted to hold her on sensors. From what her survivors say, that was probably what drew her attention to us. At any rate, she was waiting when we transitioned to wedge."
"And she ordered you to stand by for boarding?"
"Yes." Bachfisch grimaced. "I wouldn't have been too crazy about that under the best of conditions, but out in the middle of nowhere, dealing with a Havenite warship, I really didn't want an armed boarding party to discover that the 'merchie' who'd been shadowing them was armed to the teeth. Besides, there wouldn't have been much point in following her if we'd just let ourselves be hauled off and incarcerated."
"Assuming they'd been willing to simply incarcerate you, Captain," Lieutenant Commander Reynolds put in quietly.
"That thought did occur to me, Commander." Bachfisch grimaced again. "I know there's been a change of government in the People's Republic, but I'm inclined to take that with a grain of salt where the safety of my own people is concerned. Besides, if they're here covertly, it might be . . . inconvenient for them if witnesses to their presence ever turned up."
"I understand your concerns, Captain," Honor said. "And, in your place, I would have felt exactly the same way. But I strongly suspect that you and George are both doing whoever Thomas Theisman sent out here a disservice. Theisman isn't the sort of man to countenance atrocities or to send anyone who would countenance them off to an independent command. I speak from a certain degree of personal experience."
"You may be right," Bachfisch agreed. "But either way, I didn't want a Havenite boarding party aboard the Bane. If Hecate had been a pirate, it would have been easy enough. Just let them come in close to drop their pinnace, then run out the grasers and blow her to hell." He shrugged. "We've done that often enough.
"But this wasn't a pirate, and I didn't want to kill anyone I didn't have to. Maybe I was too squeamish. Or maybe I was just stupid. Anyway, I refused to be boarded."
"Was that when she opened fire?" Honor asked quietly when he paused.
"Yes and no," Bachfisch replied. Then he sighed. "She certainly did fire," he said. "The only problem is that I'm still not sure it wasn't intended solely as a warning shot to encourage us to cooperate. We were so close by that point that her captain may simply have chosen to use an energy mount instead of a missile, and the shot did miss. But it didn't miss by very much, and I didn't feel I could take a chance—not with a regular warship already in energy range. And besides," he admitted, "I was nervous as a cat." He shook his head. "At any rate, I jumped. I didn't pull the trigger, perhaps, but I did stop requesting him to stand clear and order him to. And I also ordered the plating over our weapons bays jettisoned."
"At which point," Gruber put in harshly, "they definitely opened the ball."
"Yes," Bachfisch agreed heavily. "Yes, they certainly did."
Honor gazed down at him and nodded slowly while her always excellent imagination showed her what must have happened in the instant that Pirate's Bane trained out her own grasers. There'd been no way the destroyer's captain could have guessed that he was accosting a ship which was actually more heavily armed than his own. He'd fired his warning shot—which, as Bachfisch had just suggested, was almost certainly what he'd done—in the belief that he was dealing with a typical, unarmed merchantman. The shock when he realized what he was actually facing, coupled with the way Bachfisch had followed him, must have been . . . profound.
"The entire 'engagement' lasted about twenty-seven seconds," Bachfisch said. "As nearly as I can determine, Hecate hadn't even cleared completely for action. Her people weren't even in skinsuits, and only four of their broadside laser mounts appear to have been manned. As soon as they saw our weapons, they opened fire with those four and blew the ever living hell out of two of our main cargo holds, three of our starboard graser mounts, and our backup enviro plant. They also killed eleven of my people and wounded eighteen more."
"Nineteen," Gruber corrected grimly. Honor glanced at him, and he jabbed a finger at Bachfisch.
"Nineteen," Bachfisch conceded. Honor looked back towards him, and he twitched his shoulders. "Compared to some of the rest of my crew, I got off easy."
"We're not going to have that particular conversation, Captain," Honor told him firmly. "You and I have both been there before, and I'm not going to help you beat yourself up over it. Even," she added with a wry smile, "if this does seem to happen to both of us quite a bit out here in Silesia!"
Bachfisch blinked at her, then laughed out loud, and she smiled more naturally as she felt the cold, bleak knot of his guilt ease . . . for the moment, at least.
"At any rate," he went on more briskly, "they blew the crap out of us. But a destroyer isn't much better armored than a merchie, and they were wide open. I didn't even su
spect just how wide open they were, but it was like pushing baby chicks into a pond, Honor. We fired a single broadside and—"
He broke off, shaking his head, and Honor tasted a brief, intense layer of a completely different sort of guilt. This time she didn't try to do anything about it. No one could have, anyway.
"We took her survivors aboard afterward," he said heavily. "There were only forty-three of them, and we lost two of them to wounds despite everything we could do. Then we came here."
"We have all forty-one of the remaining survivors in custody, Admiral," Gruber put in. Honor looked back up at him, and the exec shrugged. "The Captain told me to get to Marsh as quickly as we could to report to you, but it occurred to me on the way here that with everything else you already have going on, you don't need to be officially involved in an attack on a Havenite warship."
"I'd hardly call what you and the Captain have described an 'attack' on a warship," Honor observed.
"No, Your Grace," Gruber agreed. "But you're not the government that warship belonged to. At any rate, we're prepared to present the evidence of our own sensor logs before any admiralty court and to stand by an impartial verdict on our actions. At the moment, however, any court would be considering the actions of a Silesian-flag vessel holding a warrant as a Silesian Navy auxiliary merchant cruiser. As such, we could argue that we had a legitimate Silesian security interest in investigating Hecate's actions and intentions. If we hand them over to the Manticoran authorities, however, we bring the Star Kingdom officially into all of this. From all we've heard out here about the current relations between the Star Kingdom and the Republic, I wasn't at all sure that would be a good idea."
"So he has them confined in the secure quarters I had fitted up for pirates," Bachfisch said, smiling approvingly at his executive officer. "They don't know where we are at the moment. In fact, they don't even know we're not still underway. So if you prefer, we can continue on to a Silly naval base and turn them over to 'proper authorities' there."
"I'm impressed, Commander Gruber," Honor said. "And I appreciate your forethought." She didn't add that she felt confident his forethought had been exercised more because of what he knew his captain would want than because he really cared all that much himself about relations between Manticore and Haven.
"All the same," she said thoughtfully, "I think handing them over to us would probably be the best course. We're the closest naval base to the point at which this action actually occurred. It would make sense for a ship as badly damaged as the Bane to head for the closest authorities, particularly since you have wounded from both ships' companies who need medical attention."
"But if we hand them over to you," Bachfisch pointed out, "then you have to take official cognizance of their presence, and you have enough hand grenades to juggle just now without that."
"Yes, I have to take 'official cognizance,' " she agreed. "On the other hand, the way I do that is up to me. I think I'll just hold these people here until my own medical people are willing to sign off on their release from hospital, then send them home by way of the Star Kingdom aboard one of our regularly scheduled supply runs." She smiled thinly. "Right off the cuff, I'd estimate that it will probably take at least a couple of months to get them as far as Manticore. By which time, hopefully, things will have settled down."
"And if they haven't?" Bachfisch asked.
"And if they haven't," Honor said much more bleakly, "then things are probably going to be so bad that throwing this into the mix won't matter at all."
* * *
"Fritz says Captain Bachfisch will recover fully," Honor told her assembled staff and senior flag officers two hours later in the briefing room aboard Werewolf. "Unlike some of us," she added wryly, "the captain responds quite well to regeneration. It will take him a while to grow new legs, but he should be fine. And under the circumstances, I believe he and all the rest of his wounded personnel are definitely entitled to have the Navy pick up the tab on their medical bills."
"You can say that again," Alistair McKeon agreed.
His expression was grim, and he shook his head. The handful of survivors from Hecate were still in a state of semi-shock, but they'd been remarkably and uniformly reticent about precisely what their ship had been doing. Some of that was probably inevitable, given the history between the RMN and the Havenite navy, but this went beyond traditional dislike or antipathy. These people were clearly maintaining operational security, and like everyone else in the briefing room, McKeon could think of only one star nation against which any Havenite operation in Silesia could possibly be directed.
"We certainly owe Pirate's Bane and her crew an enormous debt for alerting us to the Peeps' presence," Mercedes Brigham added.
"Agreed." Honor nodded. "Which is why I instructed the Fleet repair base here in Sidemore to see to all of her damages gratis. If anyone back at Admiralty House has a problem with that, they can take it up with me."
Her tone and expression alike suggested that anyone who did fault her decision probably would not enjoy her response.
"In the meantime, however," she went on briskly, "the question is how we respond to this information."
"I agree fully," Alfredo Yu said. "The problem is that we're still not entirely sure what information we have."
"Captain Bachfisch's people did get a few more facts out of Hecate's database," Lieutenant Commander Reynolds pointed out.
"But not very many," Alice Truman objected. Reynolds looked at her, and she shrugged. "We know she was assigned to their 'Second Fleet,' " she said. "But nothing in our intelligence files even shows that fleet's existence. We have no idea how powerful it is, who's in command of it, or precisely what its mission out here may be!"
"With all due respect, Dame Alice," Reynolds replied, "we do know at least a little. For one thing, there's a fragment of a report which refers to the fact that Hecate was assigned to this Second Fleet's third task group. If it's organized into at least three task groups, then it's obviously a fairly good-sized force. And since Hecate's survivors are being so intensely uncooperative with us, I think we have to assume that whatever reason it was sent out here for has something directly to do with us. And I'm very much afraid that I can think of only one scenario which would send a large Havenite fleet to an uninhabited star system this close to Marsh in complete secrecy."
"You're suggesting that they're planning to attack us," Anson Hewitt said flatly.
"I'm suggesting that they may be planning to attack us, Sir," Reynolds corrected. Then he sighed. "No," he admitted. "That's being wishy-washy." He faced Hewitt squarely. "The truth is, Sir, that I can't really believe they'd send a heavy force out here under these conditions if they weren't planning to jump us."
Silence hovered in the conference room, bleak and bitter as the implications of the intelligence officer's analysis sank into the brains of officers already confronting the early stages of a shooting war with the Andermani Empire.
"You may well be right, George," Honor said after several seconds. "On the other hand, there's one point that confuses me."
"Only one?" McKeon laughed harshly. "There are dozens of them confusing me right now!"
"Only one main point of confusion," Honor told him, then let her gaze sweep over the other officers in the compartment. "If all they wanted to do was to attack us, then the logical way for them to proceed would have been to move straight into the attack as soon as they reached Silesia, before some freak accident—like this one—betrayed their presence. But they didn't do that. Instead, we've got this Second Fleet of theirs hiding out in an out of the way star system close enough to use as a jump-off point while one or two of their destroyers play postman back and forth between them and their closest diplomatic mission."
"You think they're waiting for orders to attack?" Truman mused aloud.
"Or for orders to turn around and go home and pretend they were never here," Honor replied.
"There may something to that," Yu said slowly. Of all the officers in th
e compartment, he was probably the least happy. "On the other hand," he continued with stubborn integrity, "much as I would prefer for my old homeland not to be the heavy of the piece, there's no way they would sent a force as heavy as the one Commander Reynolds is postulating this far if they didn't seriously intend to use it. They may be waiting for orders from home to kick off the attack, and they may actually be hoping they'll get recall orders, instead. But the mere fact that they've sent an attack force into a region where they know the Star Kingdom is already confronting a possible war scenario indicates all sorts of things I'd really rather not think about."
"Things none of us would like to think about, Alfredo," Honor agreed grimly. "Nonetheless, I think we do have to consider them. And whatever may be going on closer to home, we still have to respond to our own situation out here."
"What did you have in mind, Your Grace?" Jaruwalski asked, regarding her intensely. Honor glanced at her, and the ops officer shrugged. "I've known you for a while now, Your Grace," she said, "and I've heard that tone of voice before. So since you've already made up your mind about what it is you're planning to do, perhaps you'd care to share it with the rest of us?"
A rumble of laughter rolled around the compartment as Jaruwalski's wry tone punctured the tension, and Honor smiled at her. Any number of flag officers would have stamped on an operations officer who semi-twitted them that way in front of the rest of the staff, but no one thought twice about it on this staff.
"Actually," she said, "I have made up my mind. Alice," she turned to Truman, "I'm going to pull Werewolf out of your task group to hold her here. I'll swap you the Glory from the Protector's Own to replace her; she's a little bigger, but her emissions signature is close enough that I doubt anyone who sees her will realize she's Grayson and not Manticoran. Then I want you to take your entire group and run a LAC sweep through the star system Hecate was headed for. And I want you to be obvious about it."
There was a moment of silence, then Truman cleared her throat.
