Uncompromising Honor - eARC

by David Weber

  “Understood, Admiral.” Gaddis nodded. “In fact, that’s why I’m here. There are a few things you need to know.”

  HMS Duke of Cromarty

  In Hyper-Space

  “Skipper, I realize we’re in a hurry, but Her Majesty’s going to be really, really pissed if we break the Duke. You do realize that, don’t you? And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like it when Her Majesty is pissed at me.”

  Captain Steven Firestine looked up from his mug of coffee at Commander Rice. The commander looked back, and his expression showed rather more genuine concern than his tone had.

  “I don’t plan on breaking anything, Alex,” he said mildly.

  “People don’t usually plan on things like that,” Rice pointed out. “It just sort of happens. Especially when you’ve pulled the governors on the hyper generator. I seem to remember reading somewhere that that’s what you might call a bad idea.”

  “I have total confidence in your ability to keep everything on the green,” Firestine said. “And, if it should happen that my confidence is misplaced, the Empress’s temper’s likely be the last thing you’ll have to worry about.”

  Rice looked remarkably unreassured.

  “Skipper,” he said in a much more serious tone, “if we pick up a harmonic this high in the Theta Bands, there’s no tomorrow. And we’re right on the edge of bouncing off the Iota wall. My systems are in good shape, but I’d be lying if I said I felt anything like confident about the way we’re stressing them.”

  “Understood.” Firestine took a long, slow sip of coffee, then lowered the cup. “Understood. But we’re not backing off.”

  “Sir—”

  “You’ve made your point, Alex. But we’re not backing off.” Firestine shook his head. “I understand what you’re saying, and the truth is, I tend to agree. But there’s too much riding on this.”

  Rice couldn’t quite keep skepticism out of his expression, and in some ways, Firestine didn’t blame him. If Empress Elizabeth’s personal yacht hit the Iota wall, it was unlikely there’d be any survivors. But Rice hadn’t been party to Firestine’s sickbay conversation. He didn’t understand the implications, the reason Firestine was determined to set a new record for the Beowulf-Sol run. He was going to shave every second he could off that passage. And if that meant hazarding his command, so be it.

  There were some people you didn’t fail and some missions whose success was worth any risk, and Steven Firestine was not going to be the one who failed this time.

  CNO’s Office

  Admiralty Building

  City of Old Chicago

  Old Earth

  Sol System

  The private lift car slid to a stop, and Caswell Gweon allowed himself a final grimace before putting his professional expression firmly in place. He didn’t expect this to be a pleasant conversation. That wasn’t the same as not wanting to have it, however, and he wondered exactly why he’d been summoned.

  The rumors had truly started to fly only about twelve hours earlier, which was fairly remarkable, really, since it was almost four days since TF 790’s return. He wasn’t sure if those rumors had spurted out of the usual leaks or if other Alignment agents had been feeding them to the newsies, but so far there’d been no mention of any mysterious gatekeepers helping the SLN penetrate Beowulf’s defenses.

  His own analyses had viewed any official conclusions in that direction with careful skepticism. He couldn’t just pretend those two drones hadn’t seen something, but he’d come down heavily on the “probably just a sensor glitch” side. At the moment, though, the influence his analysis exerted was…ambiguous. He’d gotten a lot of credit as the analyst who’d first warned that something like the Manties’ new missile defense system was in the course of deployment. On the other side, he’d been hammered over his estimate of how long it would take them to actually put it online. At the moment, at least as long as it was still a matter of “sensor glitches,” he could argue they hadn’t put it online—not the FTL component, at any rate—and that even if they had, his worst-case estimate had been that it might already be in place by the time Fabius actually got there. It would be so much better all around, though, if no one figured out that the Alignment really had been plowing the road for the Solarian Navy.

  In the meantime, he needed to start shoring up his position with Winston Kingsford, repairing any damage it might have suffered after TF 790’s disastrous experiences. That required opportunities to give the CNO good analysis, demonstrate how engaged he was, and impress him with his general competence, which was why he was glad he’d been summoned even if he expected a certain amount of reaming out.

  The lift door slid open and he stepped out of it.

  “You wanted to see me, Sir?” he said as Winston Kingsford rose behind his desk and nodded in greeting.

  “Actually, yes, I did. Or, rather, we did.”

  The CNO waved one hand, and Gweon’s head turned as his eyes followed it. Then his eyebrows rose as he saw the Gendarmerie brigadier and colonel standing just inside the door to the office’s public anteroom.

  “Caswell,” Kingsford said, “this is Brigadier Simeon Gaddis and Lieutenant Colonel Okiku.”

  Gweon nodded and held out his hand, his expression calm and merely mildly surprised, despite the sudden flurry of questions racing through his brain.

  “Brigadier,” he said a bit cautiously, shaking Gaddis’s hand and nodding across the brigadier’s shoulder at Okiku. “Colonel. What can I do for you?”

  “Actually, Admiral,” Gaddis replied releasing his hand and stepping back a pace. “You can keep your hands where we can see them.”

  “What?” Gweon’s eyes went wide as Okiku produced a stunner and pointed it at him. Something about the colonel’s dark, almond eyes suggested that she really, really wanted to squeeze its trigger.

  “I’m afraid you’re under arrest, Rear Admiral Gweon,” Gaddis said coldly.

  “Excuse me?” Gweon stared at him, his expression one of shocked disbelief, segueing with perfect timing into outraged innocence. “Under arrest?” His voice gained volume. “What for?!”

  “Treason against the Solarian League will do for starters.” Gaddis’s voice was carved from Ganymedian ice. “We know about you and your fiancée, and our other agents are picking up Rajmund Nyhus and Shafiqa Bolton at this very moment.” He smiled thinly. “I’m sure that between them and your other friends, you’ll have plenty to tell us about the people you’re really working for.”

  Gweon froze. The surprised innocence flowed off his face like water, and his eyes went cold and very focused for just a moment. Then his hands rose to clutch his head, his knees sagged, and he toppled forward.

  He was dead by the time his face hit the carpet.

  * * *

  “My God, Gaddis!” Winston Kingsford said shakenly, two minutes later, as Natsuko Okiku rose from checking Gweon’s pulse and shook her head once. “My God! When you suggested this, I thought you had to be crazy! What do we do now?”

  “That’s the million-credit question, Sir.” Gaddis scowled down at the body. “To be honest, I’d really have preferred to take this son-of-a-bitch alive, but as what just happened damned well proves, the odds of our doing that were never good. That’s why I was willing to run our bluff and risk his dropping dead as our test case to give you the proof we weren’t just lunatics. And, over all, I’d say Barregos’s story about what happened when he arrested those ‘Manty agents’ has just been pretty thoroughly corroborated. But if every one of them drops dead like this bastard, proving who they’re really working for—and I will absolutely guarantee you it isn’t the Manties—will be the next damned thing to impossible.”

  “Jesus!” Kingsford sat abruptly. “The Manties.”

  “The Manties.” Gaddis nodded grimly. “They may not have both oars all the way in the water, and so far, it looks to us like they were a hundred percent wrong about what they were going to find on Mesa. But they’re absolutely right about the way we�
�ve been played, and when that little tidbit gets out—”

  Kingsford nodded as his brain began to function once more.

  He hadn’t believed a word of it when Gaddis began spinning his preposterous tale. Only the fact that he knew Gaddis’s reputation—knew the man was one of the very few honest cops inside the Kuiper—had led him to even listen. But as the brigadier laid out his case, one damning bit of circumstantial evidence at a time, his skepticism had begun to erode. To be honest, he’d still thought Gaddis and his fellow “Ghost Hunters” were insane, but if there’d been even the faintest chance they weren’t, he’d had to know. And if there wasn’t, Gweon and he could have a good laugh about it later.

  Of course, that wasn’t going to happen now, he thought, looking down at the corpse in front of his desk.

  There’s still no way the Manties are right about this “Alignment” of theirs, he thought. Everything coming out of Mesa proves that. But what if whoever the “Other Guys” really are deliberately led the Manties to suspect Mesa? What if the very first card they put on the table was to provide the Manties with a bogeyman they knew the rest of the galaxy would laugh off? Get everyone so invested in dismissing the Manties’ paranoid fantasies that any evidence there really was someone pulling the strings would be automatically dismissed right along with it?

  Which is exactly what we’ve all done.

  Ice clogged his circulatory system and he drew a deep breath.

  “I’ll give you that someone’s orchestrating all of this,” he said, looking up at Gaddis. “You’ve had longer to think about this than I have, though. Would it be too much to hope you have some damned idea of what the hell they’re really after? Or some suggested course of action on our part?”

  “Frankly, Sir, we don’t have a clue exactly what the Other Guys are up to or why. Not in terms of their endgame strategy, at any rate. But at least one of their immediate goals is obviously to keep turning up the heat between us and the ‘Grand Alliance.’ We can’t decide whether their primary target is the League or the Star Empire, but they clearly want us at one another’s throats. The lengths they’re prepared to go to to keep us that way are what pushed us to contact you, in fact. Captain al-Fanudahi and Captain Teague took one look at those ‘data anomalies’ from Fabius and realized what they were really seeing. Of course,” he smiled thinly, “they had an advantage your other analysts lacked; they actually believed the Manties were telling the truth.

  “What really worries us, though,” his smile disappeared, “are the implications for the Other Guys’ reach. Those grasers were killing the Manties’ fire control system, and however they did it, they had to have been positioned well before Task Force Seven-Ninety ever arrived. In fact, they had to be coordinated with the task force’s arrival, which required detailed prior knowledge. In our judgment, that pretty much proved the Other Guys had been deeply involved in the decision to launch Fabius in the first place. They couldn’t have coordinated their missile-killers into the plan if they hadn’t known all about it ahead of time, which strongly suggested they had a significant hand in shaping it, and what just happened to Gweon seems to prove that. That’s bad enough, but given how thoroughly they seem to have us penetrated, we don’t know how much reach they may have into manipulating Manty decisions. It’d be a hell of a lot harder for them to do that, since the Manties obviously know they exist and have to be trying to protect themselves against penetration, but I’m not going to say it’s impossible. And Captain al-Fanudahi’s suggested a pretty scary possibility.”

  “Which is?”

  “Our ships were busy withdrawing from the system just as fast as they could run,” Gaddis said grimly. “It’s for damned sure no one was hanging around to monitor the take from our recon drones. What if something else happened in Beowulf? Something like what happened when the Manties moved in on Mesa?”

  Kingsford felt the blood drain from his face.

  “The only good thing—assuming the Other Guys have managed to kill a couple of million Beowulfers—is that the Manties have shown an incredible amount of restraint,” Gaddis told him. “So far, at least. But if the Other Guys keep hammering away this way, that restraint’s likely to erode. So I think it behooves us to drag this out into the open as quickly as we can.”

  “I can’t go to Kolokoltsov and the others with this,” Kingsford said. “Not yet. Because you’re right. If everyone we arrest just dies on us, we’ll never be able to prove who’s behind this or why they’re doing it. If I expect anyone else to believe something this insane, I’ve got to have something more concrete than a stack of dead bodies.” He scowled down at Gweon. “You’ve convinced me; the ‘Mandarins’ have invested a hell of a lot more—including their own survival, probably—in the ‘the Manties are paranoid lunatics’ argument. They’d deny everything and fire my arse the minute I told them anything of the sort. If I handled it just right and approached them gradually enough I might be able to convince Wodoslawski or Quartermain to listen. Abruzzi and McArtney would never believe it though. I don’t know about Kolokoltsov. He actually might—but even if he would, it doesn’t sound to me like we can afford the time it’d take to get any of them to accept it.”

  Gaddis glanced at Okiku and saw his own relief in the colonel’s eyes. Discovering Kingsford was clean had been an enormous relief. The evidence that the CNO’s brain was beginning to function again was an even greater one.

  “Sir, I don’t know how much time we’ve got,” Gaddis said, turning back to Kingsford, “but we haven’t been able to come up with any ideas that would be much faster than that. The only approach we’ve been able to come up with is that with you in our corner and provided with the evidence we’ve turned up so far, it should be possible for you—and us—to begin quietly clearing people we know we can trust. We need to have a…a support structure in place before we go public or I approach Deputy AG Rorendaal and her people.”

  “Why?” From Kingsford’s narrowed eyes, he already knew the answer to his own question, but he asked it anyway, and Gaddis snorted harshly.

  “Because anybody else who’s even come close to these people is dead, Admiral,” he said, his expression grim. “None of us want to end up that way, and I doubt you do either. But there’s no point pretending it won’t happen if the Other Guys figure out what we’re doing. Believe me, we’ve lived with that for quite a while. And that’s why we need to clear as many people as we can. We need to build up a deep enough bench, enough people who have the same information we have, that an army of assassins couldn’t get us all before we go public and start dragging snakes out into the light and clubbing the sons-of-bitches to death.”

  He looked Kingsford straight in the eye.

  “Like I say, none of us want to die, but if that’s what it takes, then that’s what it takes. We know that. And we’re willing to take the chance. But if we do that, then we need to do it smart and we need to be sure the Other Guys don’t manage to sweep us under the rug along with all the other bodies before we get it done.”

  Kingsford looked at him for several seconds, then glanced down at Gweon’s corpse again. Then he looked back at Gaddis.

  “Sign me up, Brigadier,” he said.

  Sol System

  Solarian League

  The screaming alarm yanked Rear Admiral Bethany Ning-ju out of a deep sleep. She bolted upright in her bunk, reaching for the bedside com key before her eyes were fully open.

  “Battle stations! Battle stations!” the strident voice filled every compartment, melding with the alarm. “All hands, battle stations! This is not a drill! Battle stations! Battle sta—”

  An icicle went through Ning-ju, and the voice cut off—in her sleeping cabin, at least—as her hand came down on the com key and overrode the speakers.

  “Ning-ju,” she said, swinging her feet to the deck. “Talk to me!”

  “Commander Rangwala, Ma’am.” The voice on the other end was flat, as hard as an iron bar. If it hadn’t identified itself, Ning-ju would neve
r have recognized Daiichi Rangwala, SLNS Andromeda’s executive officer. “We’re picking up a major hyper footprint, Ma’am. It’s right on top of us!”

  “Define ‘right on top’!” she snapped.

  “Under eight million kilometers, Ma’am!”

  Ning-ju went white. Eight million kilometers was less than twenty-seven light-seconds!

  “How big is it?” she demanded.

  “So far we’ve got over three hundred point sources, Ma’am!”

  Ning-ju’s mind froze. Three hundred point sources? That was…that was…that was insane. Her entire squadron consisted of only eight Mikasa-class heavy cruisers. But what in God’s name could—?

  Her heart seemed to stop. There was only one place that many ships could have come from. And they could be here for only one purpose.

  “Get on the com! Raise them now!”

  * * *

  “Your Grace, we have what look like eight Solly heavy cruisers at seven-point-eight million kilometers,” Captain Rafe Cardones said. “Closing velocity about thirty-five thousand KPS. Not sure from their vectors what they’re doing out here, but we’re right on top of them. They’ve just brought up their sidewalls.”

  “I see them, Rafe,” Honor Alexander-Harrington replied.

  She gazed down into the tactical plot, never raising her eyes to look at Cardones on her command chair com display, and her flag captain bit his lip. He’d seen her like this—or almost like this—once before, the night before her duel with Pavel Young. But, no, he thought. She hadn’t been like this even then. She’d been focused, lethal, determined, prepared to pay the price of sacrificing her entire career to avenge the death of the man she’d loved, but she’d still been her. Still been Honor Harrington.