by David Weber
But he never gave that order. A shout from his staff jerked him around, and new green light codes pocked the holo tank's system and tactical displays. Forty—fifty!—new ships appeared on the hyper limit, Manticoran ships led by ten dreadnoughts, and Sarnow watched tautly as they swept around onto an intercept course and began to accelerate.
He turned back to his link to Captain Harrington, his eyes bright... and in that instant Nike heaved and twisted like a mad thing as x-ray lasers smashed through her armor and gouged deep into her hull. Displays flashed and died on her bridge as her combat information center was blown apart, but her flag bridge was a holocaust.
Cordwainer rocked back in her seat, hands clenching in fists of shock, as the flag bridge's after bulkhead exploded with an ear-shattering roar. White-hot chunks of battle steel screamed across it, smashing through computers, displays, command consoles, and flesh with gory abandon while a hurricane of outraged atmosphere screamed through the rents in Nike's hull. The JAG had never seen combat. She was an imaginative, keenly intelligent woman, yet nothing less than reality could have prepared her for the horror and chaos of that moment, for the appalling fragility of humans they commanded, and her stomach heaved as Admiral Sarnow was blown out of his command chair, legs horribly mutilated, skinsuit soaked in sudden blood.
She ripped her eyes from the smoke and the wail of alarms, the shouts of the survivors and the screams of the dying, and saw the shock in Honor Harrington's face. The awareness of what had happened to her admiral and her ship. Cordwainer saw it all in that moment—the recognition of what it meant and the instant, instinctive decision that went with it. No inkling of it shadowed Honor's voice as she acknowledged the torrent of damage reports, but the JAG knew. Harrington was Sarnow's flag captain, his tactical exec, but authority passed with the admiral. She had no legal choice but to inform the next senior officer he was in command, yet she made herself lean back in her command chair as the damage reports ended... and said nothing.
The task group raced onward, flailed with fire, and hit after hit screamed in on HMS Nike. Whether the Peeps had realized she was the flagship or simply that she was the largest and most powerful of their enemies was immaterial; their missiles ripped at her like a whirlwind of flame, and Nike writhed at its heart. The heavy cruisers Merlin and Sorcerer clung to her flanks, joining their defensive fire with hers and Intolerant's, but they couldn't stop it all, and the holo of Harrington's command deck shuddered and jerked again and again and again as the hits got through. Her ship twisted in agony, but a new icon glowed ahead of the task group in the display, a brilliant crosshair that even Cordwainer recognized: the point at which it would become mathematically impossible for the pursuing Peeps to evade the freshly arrived Manticoran dreadnoughts still beyond their own onboard detection range.
Minutes oozed past, slow and terrible, written in thunder and the death of human beings, twisting the hushed audience's nerves in pincers of steel, and the bleeding survivors of TG H-001 swept toward that crosshair, paying in blood and courage to lure their enemies to their doom. Debris and atmosphere streamed from Nike's wounded hull as the enemy battered her slowly toward destruction, and Cordwainer crouched in her chair, watching the blazing purpose in Harrington's eyes, seeing the anguish as her people died, and urged her silently on, straining with her to reach her objective.
And then it happened.
A single missile targeted HMS Warlock. It evaded the so far unwounded heavy cruisers point defense, racing in to attack range. It detonated, and two lasers slashed into the ship. The damage was sudden and shocking, if minuscule compared to what other ships had suffered, but a shrill, terrified tenor voice wrenched all eyes from Nike's command deck to Captain Lord Pavel Young.
"Squadron orders! All ships scatter! Repeat, all ships scatter!"
Cordwainer snapped her gaze back to the tactical display, watching in horror as Heavy Cruiser Squadron Seventeen obeyed its orders. Its units arced away from the main formation—all but HMS Merlin , who clung grimly to Nike's flanks, fighting desperately to beat aside the fire screaming in upon her flagship—and chaos struck the fine-meshed, interlocking network of the task group's missile defenses. The light cruiser Arethusa blew apart under a direct hit, more hits battered the suddenly exposed target of HMS Cassandra, lacerating the battlecruiser's hull, knocking out her entire port sidewall and leaving her naked and vulnerable, and Honor Harrington's voice rose through the chaos like a cold, clear trumpet.
"Contact Warlock! Get those ships back in position!" Cordwainer's head turned back to Warlock's bridge in automatic reflex as Harrington's com officer relayed her orders... and Pavel Young said nothing. He only stared at his com officer, unable—or unwilling—to respond, and his executive officer's face hardened in disbelief.
"Orders, Sir?" the exec asked harshly, and Young wrenched his wild eyes back to his own display, face white and stark with terror, and watched the Peeps savage the ships his desertion had exposed to their fire.
"Orders, Sir?!" the exec half-shouted, and the muscles of Captain Lord Pavel Young's face ridged as he clamped his jaw and hunkered down in his command chair and stared at his display in silence.
"No response from Warlock, Ma'am." Stunned surprise echoed in the voice of Harrington's com officer as Nike quivered to yet another hit, and the captain's head whipped up.
The com officer flinched back from her, for her face was cold and focused no longer. Shock and fury and something more—something raw and ugly with hate—blazed in her eyes, and her voice was a lash.
"Give me a direct link to Captain Young!"
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Her com officer stabbed buttons, and a screen at Harrington's knees lit with Young's sweat-streaked face.
"Get back into formation, Captain!" Harrington snapped. Young only stared at her, his mouth working soundlessly, and Harrington's soprano was harsh with hatred and contempt.
"Get back into formation, damn you!" she barked... and the screen went dead as Young cut the circuit.
Harrington stared at the blank com for one shocked second, and even as she stared, her ship heaved and shuddered to fresh hits. Frantic damage reports crackled, and she wrenched her eyes from the screen to her com officer.
"General signal to all heavy cruisers. Return to formation at once. Repeat, return to formation at once!"
The system tactical display shifted and changed once more as four of the five fleeing cruisers reversed course. They socketed back into the task group formation, locking back into the point defense net. All of them but one. HMS Warlock continued to flee, racing away from the rest of the formation while Young's exec shouted curses at him from the holo of his command deck and Young returned a screaming torrent of invective raw with panic, and then the entire holo tank went blank and the lights came up once more.
"I believe," Captain Ortiz said into the dead, stunned silence, "that that concludes the relevant portion of the evidence." A JAG Corps commander raised his hand, and Ortiz nodded to him. "Yes, Commander Owens?"
"Did Warlock return to formation at all, Ma'am?"
"She did not." Ortiz's voice was flat, its very neutrality shouting her own opinion of Pavel Young, and Owens sat back in his chair with a cold, hard light in his eye.
Silence returned, hovering for long, still moments, and then Vice Admiral Cordwainer cleared her throat and looked at Sir Lucius Cortez.
"I don't think there's any question that Lady Harrington exceeded her own authority in failing to pass command, Sir Lucius. At the same time, however, there can be neither doubt about nor excuse for Lord Young's actions. I endorse Admiral Parks' recommendation without reservation."
"Agreed." Cortez's voice was grim, his eyes and mouth even tighter than what they'd just seen seemed to justify, then he shook himself. "As for Lady Harrington's actions, Admiral Sarnow, Admiral Parks, the First Space Lord, Baroness Morncreek, and Her Majesty herself have all endorsed them. I don't think you need to concern yourself over them, Alyce."
"I'm relieved
to hear that," Cordwainer said softly. She drew a deep breath. "Shall I have Data Services begin officer selection for the court-martial board?"
"Yes. But let me add something—something for everyone here." The Fifth Space Lord stood and turned to the white-faced JAG officers seated behind the two admirals, and his expression was stern. "I wish to remind you—all of you—that what you have just seen is privileged information. Lady Harrington and Lord Young have not yet even returned from Hancock, and neither this briefing nor anything else which you have heard, seen, or read concerning this case is for public consumption until the formation of the court itself is announced by my office. Is that clear?"
Heads nodded, and he jerked a nod of his own, then turned once more and walked slowly from the silent, shaken amphitheater.
CHAPTER ONE
The tall, glass-fronted clock in the corner ticked slowly, endlessly, its swinging pendulum measuring off the seconds and minutes in old-fashioned mechanical bites, and Lord William Alexander, Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Manticoran government's second ranking member, watched its mesmerizing motion. A modern chrono glowed silently and far more precisely on the desk at his elbow—the clock face was actually divided into the twelve standard hour increments of Old Earth's day, not Manticore's twenty-three-plus-hour day—and he wondered, not for the first time, why the man whose office this was surrounded himself with antiques. Lord knew he could afford them, but why was he so fascinated by them? Could it be because he longed for a simpler, less complicated time?
Alexander hid a small, sad smile at the thought and glanced at the man behind the desk. Allen Summervale, Duke of Cromarty and Prime Minister of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, was a slender man whose fair hair had turned silver long since, despite all prolong could do. It wasn't age which had bleached his hair or cut those deep, weary lines in his face; it was the crushing responsibilities of his job, and who could blame him if he hungered for a world less complex and thankless than his own?
It was a familiar thought, and a frightening one, for if anything ever happened to Cromarty, the burdens of his office would fall upon Alexander's shoulders. He could conceive of nothing more terrifying... nor understand what in his own character had driven him to place himself in such a position. Which was only fair, for he couldn't even imagine what had compelled Cromarty to shoulder the office of prime minister for over fifteen years.
"He didn't say anything about his reasons?" Alexander asked finally, breaking the ticking silence that gnawed at his nerves.
"No." Cromarty's voice was a deep, whiskey-smooth baritone, a potent and flexible political weapon, but it was frayed by worry now. "No," he repeated wearily, "but when the leader of the Conservative Association requests a formal meeting rather than a com conference, I know it has to be something I'm not going to like."
He smiled crookedly, and Alexander nodded. Michael Janvier, Baron High Ridge, was not high on either man's list of favorite people. He was cold, supercilious, and filled with a bigot's awareness of his own "lofty" birth. The fact that both Alexander and Cromarty were far more nobly born than he seemed beside the point to him, a mere bagatelle, something to be resented, perhaps, but not something a Baron of High Ridge need concern himself with.
That was typical of the man, Alexander thought sourly. Alexander seldom considered his own birth—except, perhaps, to wish from time to time that he'd been born to a less prominent and powerful family, free to ignore the tradition of public service his father and grandfather had bred into his blood and bone—but it was the core of High Ridge's existence. It was all that really mattered to him, a guarantor of power and prestige, and the narrow-minded defense of privilege lay at the heart of his political philosophy, such as it was. Indeed, it was the rallying point of the entire Conservative Association, which explained why it had virtually no representation in the House of Commons, and it went far to explain the Association's xenophobic isolationism. After all, anything that might cause stress and change in the Manticoran political system was one more dangerous force to conspire against their exalted lot!
Alexander's mouth twisted, and he slid further down in his chair, reminding himself not to curse in the Prime Minister's office. And, he thought, to strangle his own dislike when High Ridge finally turned up. If only they didn't need him and his reactionaries! Their own Centrist Party held a clear sixty-vote majority in the Commons, but only a plurality in the Upper House. With the alliance of the Crown Loyalists and the Association, the Cromarty Government could poll a narrow majority in the Lords; without the Association, that majority disappeared, and that made High Ridge, insufferable as he was and loathsome as he might be, critically important.
Especially now.
The com unit on Cromarty's desk hummed for attention, and the duke leaned forward to key it.
"Yes, Geoffrey?"
"Baron High Ridge is here, Your Grace."
"Ah. Send him in, please. We've been expecting him." He released the key and grimaced at Alexander. "Expecting him for the past twenty minutes, in fact. Why in hell can he never be on time?"
"You know why," Alexander replied with a sour expression. "He wants to be sure you realize how important he is."
Cromarty snorted bitterly, and then the two of them stood, banishing their honest expressions with false smiles of welcome as High Ridge was ushered through the door.
The baron ignored his guide. Of course, Alexander thought. That was what peasants existed for—to bow and scrape for their betters. He shoved the thought deep and nodded as pleasantly as he could to their tall, spindly visitor. High Ridge was even more slender than Cromarty, but on him it was all long, gangling arms and legs, and a neck like an emaciated soda straw. He'd always reminded Alexander of a spider, except for the vulpine smile and cold little eyes. If central casting had sent him to an HD producer for the role of an over-bred, cretinous aristocrat, the producer would have sent him back with a blistering memo about stereotypes and typecasting.
"Good evening, My Lord," Cromarty said, extending his hand in greeting.
"Good evening, Your Grace." High Ridge shook hands with an odd, fastidious gesture—not, Alexander knew, something assumed for the occasion but simply his normal mannerism—and seated himself in the chair before the Prime Ministers desk. He leaned back and crossed his legs, placing his seal of possession upon the chair, and Cromarty and Alexander resumed their own seats.
"May I ask what brings you here, My Lord?" the duke asked politely, and High Ridge frowned.
"Two things, actually, Your Grace. One is a rather, um, disconcerting bit of information which has reached my ears."
He paused, one eyebrow cocked, enjoying his own sense of power as he waited for the duke to ask what he meant. It was another of his more irritating little tricks, but, like all of the others, the realities of political survival required his host to swallow it.
"And that bit of information is?" Cromarty inquired as pleasantly as possible.
"I'm told, Your Grace, that the Admiralty is considering pressing charges against Lord Pavel Young before a court-martial," High Ridge said with an affable smile. "Naturally I realized there could be no foundation to the rumors, but I thought it wisest to come directly to you for a denial."
Cromarty's was a politician's face, accustomed to telling people what he wanted it to tell them, but his lips tightened and his eyes smoldered as he glanced at Alexander. His political second in command looked back, and his expression was equally grim—and angry.
"May I ask, My Lord, just where you heard this?" Cromarty asked in a dangerous voice, but High Ridge only shrugged.
"I'm afraid that's privileged, Your Grace. As a peer of the realm, I must safeguard my own channels of information and respect the anonymity of those who provide me with the facts I require to discharge my duty to the Crown."
"Assuming a court-martial were being contemplated," Cromarty said softly, "that fact would be legally restricted to the Admiralty, the Crown, and this office until the decision was made and
publicly announced—a restriction designed, among other things, to protect the reputations of those against whom such actions are contemplated. The individual who provided it to you would be in violation of the Defense of the Realm Act and the Official Secrets Act, and, if a serving member of the military, of the Articles of War, not to mention the oaths he—or she—has personally sworn to the Crown. I insist that you give me a name, My Lord."
"And I respectfully refuse, Your Grace." A corner of High Ridge's lip curled in disdain at the very thought that laws applied to him, and a dangerous, fulminating silence hovered in the office. Alexander wondered if the baron even realized just how fragile was the ice upon which he stood. Allen Summervale would tolerate a great many things in the name of politics; violation of DORA or the Official Secrets Act wasn't one of them, especially not in time of war, and High Ridge's refusal to identify his informant constituted complicity under the Star Kingdoms law.
But the moment passed. Cromarty's jaw ridged, and his eyes glittered ominously, but he shoved himself further back in his chair and made himself inhale deeply.
"Very well, My Lord. I won't press you—this time," he said in a hard voice that, for once, made no effort to conceal his opinion of the other. Not that High Ridge seemed to notice; the threatening qualifier rolled off the armor of his arrogance like water, and he smiled again.
"Thank you, Your Grace. I'm still waiting for you to deny the rumor, however."
Alexander's fist clenched under the cover of the edge of Cromarty's desk at the man's sheer gall, and Cromarty regarded the baron with icy eyes for several long seconds of silence. Then he shook his head.
"I can't deny it, My Lord. Nor will I confirm it. The law applies even to this office, you see."
"Indeed." High Ridge shrugged off the pointed reminder and tugged delicately at the lobe of one ear. "If, however, there were no truth to it, I feel certain you would deny it, Your Grace. Which, of course, suggests that the Admiralty does, indeed, intend to prosecute Lord Young. Should that be the case, I wish to register the strongest protest, not simply for myself, but for the entire Conservative Association."
