Mission of Honor-ARC (10 page)

"There you have it," Carus said simply. "If it's good enough for the Salamander, it's good enough for anyone. So let's not have anyone abusing Bridget over her hobby anymore, understand? Even if it is a remarkably silly way for an adult human being to spend her time, at least she's being silly in good company. So there."

Landry stuck out her tongue at him, and he laughed. Then he looked sideways at Lieutenant Linda Petersen, his astrogator aboard HMS
Javelin
.

"Got that course figured for us, Linda?"

"Yes, Skipper," Petersen nodded.

"Well, in that case pass it to these other characters," Carus told her. "Obviously, we have to get Commander Landry back to Manticore before she turns back into a watermelon, or a pumpkin, or whatever it was."

* * *

Commodore Karol Østby leaned back in the comfortable chair, eyes closed, letting the music flow over him. Old Terran opera had been his favorite form of relaxation for as long as he could remember. He'd even learned French, German,
and
Italian so he could listen to them in their original languages. Of course, he'd always had a pronounced knack for languages; it was part of the Østby genome, after all.

At this moment, however, he found himself in rather greater need of that relaxation than usual. The seven small ships of his command had been creeping tracelessly about the perimeter of the Manticore Binary System for over a T-month, and that wasn't something calculated to make a man feel comfortable. Whatever those idiots in the SLN might think, Østby and the Mesan Alignment Navy had the liveliest possible respect for the capabilities of Manty technology. In this case, though, it was the Manties' turn to be outclassed—or, at least, taken by surprise. If Østby hadn't been one hundred percent confident of that when Oyster Bay was originally planned, he was now. His cautious prowling about the system had confirmed that even the Alignment's assessment of its sensor coverage had fallen badly short of the reality. Any conventional starship would have been detected long ago by the dense, closely integrated, multiply redundant sensor systems he and his personnel had painstakingly plotted. In fact, he was just a little concerned over the possibility that those surveillance systems might still pick up something soon enough to at least blunt Oyster Bay's effectiveness.

Stop that, Karol
, he told himself, never opening his eyes.
Yes, it
could
happen, but you know it's not very damned likely. You just need something to worry about, don't you?

His lips twitched in sour amusement as he acknowledged his own perversity, but at the same time, he was aware that his worrier side was one of the things that made him an effective officer. His subordinates probably got tired of all the contingency planning he insisted upon, yet even they had to admit that it made it unlikely they would truly be taken by surprise when Murphy decided to put in his inevitable appearance.

So far, though, that appearance hadn't happened, and Østby's flagship
Chameleon
and her consorts were past the riskiest part of their entire mission. Their own reconnaissance platforms were the stealthiest the Alignment could provide after decades of R&D and more capital investment than he liked to think about, and those platforms hadn't transmitted a single byte of information. They'd made their sweeps on ballistic flight profiles, using purely passive sensors, then physically rendezvoused with their motherships to deliver their take.

And, overall, that take had been satisfying, indeed. Passive sensors were less capable than active ones, but the multiple systems each platform mounted compensated for a lot of that. From the numbers of energy sources they'd picked up, it appeared the ships the Manties currently had under construction weren't as far along in the building process as intelligence had estimated. If they had been, there'd have been more onboard energy sources already up and running. But at least Østby now knew exactly where the orbital yards were, and the
external
energy sources his platforms had picked up indicated that most of them had projects underway. From the numbers of signatures, and they way they clustered, it looked as though more than a few of the yards were at early stages of their construction projects, and he hoped that didn't mean intelligence's estimate of the Manties' construction times was off. It was hard to be certain, given how cautiously he had to operate, but if all those new projects meant the yards in question had finished their
older
projects ahead of estimate . . . .

And the fact that the Manties seem to be sending all their new construction off to Trevor's Star for working up exercises doesn't help, either
, he admitted sourly.

Which was true enough—it didn't help one bit. Still, there was a lot of work going on in those dispersed yards of theirs, and while his estimates on what their space stations were up to were more problematical, he had no doubt there were quite a few ships under construction in those highly capable building slips, as well.

And we know exactly where
they
are
, he reminded himself.

Now it was just a matter of keeping tabs on what their recon platforms had located for them. He'd really have preferred to send the platforms through on another short-range sweep closer to their actual execution date, but his orders were clear on that. It was more important to preserve the element of surprise than it was to monitor every single detail. And it wasn't as if there'd been any effort to conceal the things Østby and his people were there looking for. People didn't normally try to hide things like orbital shipyards (even if they'd wanted to, Østby couldn't imagine how someone would go about doing it), nor did they move them around once they were in position. And if anyone did move them,
Chameleon
and her sisters would be bound to know, given the distant optical watch they were keeping and the fact that the impeller wedge of any tug that started moving shipyards would certainly be powerful enough to be detected by at least one of the watching scout ships.

So all we have to do now is wait
, he told himself, listening to the music, listening to the voices.
One more T-month until we put the guidance platforms in place
.

That was going to be a little risky, he admitted in the privacy of his own thoughts, but only a little. The guidance platforms were even stealthier than his ships. Someone would have to almost literally collide with one of them to spot them, and they'd be positioned well above the system ecliptic, where there was no traffic to do the colliding. He would have been happier if the platforms had been a little smaller—he admitted that to himself, as well—but delivering targeting information to that many individual missiles in a time window as short as the Oyster Bay ops plan demanded required a prodigious amount of bandwidth. And, despite everything, it was highly likely the Manties were going to hear
something
when they started transmitting all that data.

Not that it was going to make any difference at that late date, he reflected with grim pleasure. Everything he and his squadron had done for the last three and a half T-months all came down to that transmission's handful of seconds . . . and once it was made, nothing could save the Star Empire of Manticore.

"Have you got a copy of that memo from Admiral Cheng?" Captain Daud ibn Mamoun al-Fanudahi asked, poking his head into Captain Irene Teague's office.

"
Which
memo?" Teague rolled her eyes in an expression she wouldn't have let any other Battle Fleet officer see. In fact, she wouldn't have let al-Fanudahi see it as recently as a month or so ago. Displaying contempt—or, at the very least, disrespect—for a flag officer was always risky, but even more so when the officer doing the displaying was from Frontier Fleet and the object of the display was from Battle Fleet. And especially when the flag officer in question was the Frontier Fleet officer in question's CO.

Unfortunately, Irene Teague had c concluded that al-Fanudahi had been right all along in his belief the "preposterous reports" of the Royal Manticoran Navy's "super weapons" weren't quite so preposterous after all. A point which, in her opinion, had been abundantly proved by what had happened to Josef Byng at New Tuscany. And a point which apparently continued to elude Cheng Hai-shwun, the commanding officer of the Office of Operational Analysis, to which she and al-Fanudahi happened to be assigned.

"The one about that briefing next week," al-Fanudahi said. "The one for Kingsford and Thimár."

"Oh."

Teague frowned, trying to remember which of her voluminous correspondence folders she'd stuffed that particular memo into. Half the crap she filed hadn't even been opened, much less read. No one could possibly keep track of all of the memos, letters, conference reports, requests, and just plain garbage floating around the Navy Building and its annexes. Not that the originators of all that verbiage felt any compulsion to acknowledge that point. The real reason for most of it was simply to cover their own posteriors, after all, and the excuse that there simply weren't enough hours in the day to read all of it cut no ice when they produced their file copy and waved it under one's nose.

She tapped a command, checking an index. Then shrugged, tapped another, and snorted.

"Yeah. Here it is." She looked up. "You need a copy?"

"Bang one over to my terminal," al-Fanudahi replied with a slightly sheepish grin. "I don't have a clue where I filed my copy. But what I really needed was to see if Polydorou or one of his reps is supposed to be there."

"Just a sec." Teague skimmed the memo, then shrugged. "No mention of it, if they are."

"I didn't remember one." Al-Fanudahi grimaced. "Not exactly a good sign, wouldn't you say?"

"Probably not," Teague agreed, after a moment. "On the other hand, maybe it
is
a good thing. At least this way if they listen to you at all, he'll have less warning to start covering his arse before someone starts asking him some pointed questions."

"And just how likely do you really think that is?"

"Not very," she admitted.

If Cheng had so far failed to grasp the nature of the sausage machine into which the SLN was about to poke its fingers, Admiral Martinos Polydorou, the commanding officer of Systems Development was in active denial. The SysDev CO had been one of the masterminds behind the "Fleet 2000" initiative, and he was even more convinced of the inevitability of Solarian technological superiority than the majority of his fellow officers.

In theory, it was SysDev's responsibility to continually push the parameters, to search constantly for improved technologies and applications. Of course, in theory, it was also OpAn's responsibility to analyze and interpret operational data which might identify potential threats. Given that al-Fanudahi's career had been stalled for decades mostly because he'd tried to do exactly that, it probably wasn't surprising Polydorou's subordinates were unlikely to disagree with him. After all, Teague was one of the very few OpAn analysts who'd come to share al-Fanudahi's concerns . . . and he'd specifically instructed her to keep her mouth shut about that minor fact.

"There might be a better chance of getting some of those questions asked if you'd let me sign off on your report, Daud," she pointed out now.

"Not enough better to risk burning your credibility right alongside mine." He shook his head. "No. It's not time for you to come out into the open yet, Irene."

"But, Daud—"

"No," he interrupted her with another headshake. "There's not really anything new in Sigbee's dispatches. Aside from the confirmation their missiles have a range from rest of at least twenty-nine million kilometers, at any rate, and that'd already been confirmed at Monica, if anyone'd been interested in looking at the reports." He shrugged. "Someone's got to keep telling them about it, but they're not going to believe it, no matter what we say, until one of our units gets hammered in a way that's impossible even for someone like Cheng or Polydorou to deny. Everybody's got too much of the 'not invented here' syndrome. And they don't want to hear from anyone who disagrees with them."

"But it's only a matter of time before they find out you've been right all along," she argued.

"Maybe. And when that happens, do you think they're going to
like
having been proved wrong? What usually happens to someone like me—someone who's insisted on telling them the sky is falling—is that if it turns out he was right, his superiors are even more strongly motivated to punish him. The last thing they want is to ask the advice of someone who's told them they were idiots after the universe demonstrates they really were idiots. That's why it's important you stay clear of this. When the crap finally hits the fan, you'll be the one who had access to all of my notes and my reports, who's in the best position to be their 'expert witness' on that basis, but who hasn't been pissing them off for as long as they can remember."

"It's not right," she protested quietly.

"So?" Teague had seen lemons less tart than al-Fanudahi's smile. "You were under the impression someone ever guaranteed life was fair?"

"No, but . . . ."

Her voice trailed off, and she gave her head an unwilling little toss of understanding. Not
agreement
, really, but of acceptance.

"Well, now that that's settled," al-Fanudahi said more briskly, "I was wondering if you'd had any more thoughts on that question of mine about the difference between their missile pods and tube-launched missiles?"

"About the additional drive system, you mean?"

"Yeah. Or even about the additional drive
systems
, plural."

"Daud, I'm on your side here, remember, and I'm willing to grant you that they might be able to squeeze one more drive into a missile body they could shoehorn into a pod, but even I don't see how they could've put in
three
of the damned things!"

"Don't forget our esteemed colleagues are still arguing they couldn't fit in even two of them," al-Fanudahi retorted, eye a-gleam with combined mischief, provocation, and genuine concern. "If they're wrong about that, then why couldn't
you
be wrong about drive system number three?"