Mission of Honor-ARC (6 page)

Honor smiled wryly. Yet again, Elizabeth had a point. The notion that any outlaw corporation, however big, powerful, and corrupt it might be, was actually in a position to manipulate the military and foreign policy of something the size of the Solarian League was preposterous on the face of it. Honor herself had been part of the discussion about whether or not to go public with that particular aspect of Michelle Henke's summary of her New Tuscan investigation's conclusions. It really did sound paranoid—or possibly just like the ravings of a lunatic, which wasn't all that much better—but she agreed with Pat Givens and the other analysts over at ONI. Lunatic or not, the evidence was there.

"I agree some people think it's a little far fetched," she said after a moment. "At the same time, a lot of other people seem to be looking very hard at the possibility Mike's onto something. And, to be perfectly frank, I'm just as happy to have that aspect of it out in the public 'faxes because of the possible out it gives those idiots on Old Terra. If Manpower really was behind it, maybe it will occur to them that cleaning their own house—and letting their public know they're doing it—is one response that might let both of us step back from the brink. If they can legitimately lay the blame on Manpower, then maybe they can admit they were manipulated into a false position. They've got to know that if they'll only do that, we'll meet them halfway at the negotiating table. And after what already happened to them in Monica, and with Technodyne, surely the groundwork for that kind of response is already in place!"

"Sure it is. And you can add in the fact that they're going to be pissed as hell at Manpower when they realize we're right. So they've got all sorts of reasons to climb on board and do exactly what you're suggesting. But they're not going to."

Elizabeth's expression was no longer worried; now it was grim, and Honor frowned a question at her.

"If they'd been going to be reasonable, they never would've taken better than three weeks just to respond to our first note. Especially when their entire response amounted to telling us they'd 'look into our allegations' and get back to us. Frankly, I'm astounded they managed to leave out the word 'ridiculous' in front of 'allegations'." The queen shook her head. "That's not a very promising start . . . and it
is
very typically Solly. They're never going to admit their man was in the wrong, no matter
how
he got there, if there's any way they can possibly avoid it. And do you really think they're going to want to admit that a multi-stellar that isn't even based in a League star system—and
is
involved up to its eyebrows in a trade the League's officially outlawed—is able to manipulate entire squadrons of their battlecruisers and ships-of-the-wall?" She shook her head again, more emphatically. "I'm afraid a lot of them would rather go out and pin back the uppity neobarbs' ears, no matter how many people get killed along the way, than open any windows into corners of the League's power structure that are that filled with dirty little secrets."

"I hope you're wrong about that," Honor said quietly, and Elizabeth's lips twitched.

"I notice you only 'hope' I am," she said.

"I'd prefer a stronger verb myself," Honor acknowledged. "But . . . ."

"'But', indeed," Elizabeth murmured. Then she pushed herself more briskly upright in her chair. "Unfortunately, I don't think either of us can afford to treat ourselves to any of those stronger verbs of yours. Which, along with thinking about the possibility of past errors, brings me to what I really wanted to ask you about."

"Four days," Honor said, and Elizabeth chuckled.

"That obvious, was I?"

"I have been thinking about it a bit myself, you know," Honor replied. "The ops plan's been finalized, even if everyone hopes we won't have to use it; Alice Truman's running the fleet through the rehearsal exercises; and I'm just about finished up with my briefings from Sir Anthony. So, about four days."

"You're sure you don't want a couple of more days with the fleet yourself?"

"No." Honor shook her head, then smiled. "Actually, I could probably be ready to leave even sooner than that, especially since I'm taking Kew, Selleck, and Tuominen with me. But if it's all the same to you, I'm not going anywhere until after I've celebrated Raoul's and Katherine's first Christmas with Hamish and Emily."

"Of course 'it's all the same' to me." Elizabeth's face softened with a smile of her own, and it was her turn to shake her head. "It's still a bit hard sometimes to remember you're a mother now. But I always figured on your at least having Christmas at home before we sent you off. Are your parents going to be there, too?"

"And Faith and James. Which, by the way, made Lindsey happy, when she found out about it. This would've been the first Christmas she hadn't spent with the twins since they were a year old."

"I'm glad for all of you," Elizabeth said. Then she inhaled deeply. "But getting back to business, and allowing for your schedule, you're sure about how you want to go about this?"

"I wouldn't go so far as to say I was sure about it, and I'm not going to pretend I'm anything anyone would be tempted to call an expert at something like this, either. I just think it's the best shot we've got . . . and that we can at least be pretty sure of getting their attention."

"I see." Elizabeth looked at her for several seconds, then snorted. "Well, just remember this little jaunt was your idea in the first place. Mind you, now that I've had time to really think about it, I think it's a
good
idea. Because whether you were right in the beginning or I was"—her expression sobered once more—"it would be a really, really good idea for us to get at least one forest fire put out. If this entire situation with the League turns out as badly as I am afraid it could, we're not going to need to be dealing with more than one problem at a time."

* * *

Honor Alexander-Harrington stood as James MacGuiness ushered the tallish man in the uniform of the Republican Navy into her Landing mansion's office. Behind her, beyond the crystoplast wall and the office balcony, the dark blue waters of Jason Bay were a ruffled carpet under a sky of dramatic clouds and brilliant late-afternoon sunlight, patterned in endless lines of white-crested waves as a storm pushed in from the open sea, and Honor supposed that made a fitting allegory, in many ways, for her relationship with her visitor.

"Admiral Tourville," she said, rising and extending her hand across her desk while Nimitz sat upright on his perch and cocked his head thoughtfully at the Havenite.

"Admiral Alexander-Harrington." Lester Tourville reached out to shake the offered hand, and she tasted his own flicker of ironic amusement. His lips twitched in a brief almost-smile under his bushy mustache, and she released his hand to indicate the chair in front of her desk.

"Please, take a seat."

"Thank you," he said, and sat.

Honor settled back into her own chair, propped her elbows on the armrests, and steepled her fingers in front of her chest as she contemplated him. The two of them had, as the newsies might have put it, "a history." He was the only Havenite officer to whom Honor had ever been forced to surrender; the man she'd defeated at the Battle of Sidemore in the opening phases of Operation Thunderbolt;
and
the fleet commander who'd come perilously close to winning the war for the Republic of Haven five months earlier.

But as Andrew always says, "close" only counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and tactical nukes
, she reminded herself.

Which was true enough, but hadn't prevented the Battle of Manticore from killing better than two million human beings. Nor did it change the fact that Honor had demanded the surrender of his intact databases as the price for sparing his surviving superdreadnoughts. She'd been within her rights to stipulate whatever terms she chose, under the rules of war, yet she'd known when she issued the demand that she was stepping beyond the customary
usages
of war. It was traditional—and generally expected—that any officer who surrendered his command would purge his computers first. And, she was forced to concede, she'd had Alistair McKeon do just that with his own data when she'd ordered him to surrender his ship to Tourville.

I suppose if I'd been going to be "honorable" about it, I should have extended the same privilege to him
. He
certainly thought I should have, at any rate
.

Her lips twitched ever so slightly as she remembered the seething fury which had raged behind his outwardly composed demeanor when they'd finally met face-to-face after the battle. Nothing could have been more correct—or icier—during the "interview" which had formalized his surrender, but he hadn't known about Honor's ability to directly sense the emotions of those about her. He might as well have been bellowing furiously at her, as far as any real ability to conceal his feelings was concerned, and a part of her hadn't cared. No, actually, a part of her had taken its own savage satisfaction from his anger, from the way he his sense of failure burned so much more bitterly after how agonizingly close to total success he'd come.

She wasn't proud of the way she'd felt. Not now. But then the deaths of so many men and women she'd known for so long had been too fresh, wounds too recent for time to have stopped the bleeding. Alistair McKeon had been one of those dead men and women, along with every member of his staff. So had Sebastian D'Orville and literally hundreds of others with whom she had served, and the grief and pain of all those deaths had fueled her own rage, just as Tourville's dead had fanned his fury.

So I guess it's a good thing military courtesy's as iron bound as it is,
she thought.
It kept both of us from saying what we really felt long enough for us to stop feeling it. Which is a good thing, because even then, I knew he was a decent man. That he hadn't taken any more pleasure in killing Alistair and all those others than I'd taken in killing Javier Giscard or so many of Genevieve Chin's people
.

"Thank you for coming, Admiral," she said out loud, and this time there was nothing halfway about his smile.

"I was honored by the invitation, of course, Admiral," he replied with exquisite courtesy, exactly as if there'd been any real question about a prisoner of war's accepting an "invitation" to dinner from his captor. Nor was it the first such invitation he'd accepted over the past four T-months. This would be the seventh time he'd dined with Honor and her husband and wife. Unlike him, however, Honor was aware it would be the last time they'd be dining together for at least the foreseeable future.

"I'm sure you were," she told him with a smile of her own. "And, of course, even if you weren't, you're far too polite to admit it."

"Oh, of course," he agreed affably, and Nimitz bleeked the treecat equivalent of a laugh from his perch.

"That's enough of that, Nimitz," Tourville told him, wagging a raised forefinger. "Just because
you
can see inside someone's head is no excuse for undermining these polite little social fictions!"

Nimitz's true-hands rose, and Honor glanced over her shoulder at him as they signed nimbly. She gazed at him for a moment, then chuckled and turned back to Tourville.

"He says there's more to see inside some two-legs' heads than others."

"Oh?" Tourville glowered at the 'cat. "Should I assume he's casting aspersions on the content of any particular two-leg's cranium?"

Nimitz's fingers flickered again, and Honor smiled as she watched them, then glanced at Tourville once more.

"He says he meant it as a general observation," she said solemnly, "but he can't help it if
you
think it ought to apply to anyone in particular."

"Oh, he does, does he?"

Tourville glowered some more, but there was genuine humor in his mind glow. Not that there had been the
first
time he'd realized the news reports about the treecats' recently confirmed telempathic abilities were accurate.

Honor hadn't blamed him—or any of the other POWs who'd reacted the same way—a bit. The thought of being interrogated by a professional, experienced analyst who knew how to put together even the smallest of clues you might unknowingly let slip was bad enough. When that professional was assisted by someone who could read your very thoughts, it went from bad to terrifying in record time. Of course, treecats couldn't really read any human's actual
thoughts—
the mental . . . frequencies, for want of a better word, were apparently too different. There'd been no way for any of the captured Havenites to know that, however, and every one of them had assumed the worst, initially, at least.

And, in fact, it was bad enough from their perspective as it was. Nimitz and his fellow treecats might not have been able to read the prisoners'
thoughts
, but they'd been able to tell from their emotions whenever they were lying or attempting to mislead. And they'd been able to tell when those emotions spiked as the interrogation approached something a POW most desperately wanted to conceal.

It hadn't taken very long for most of the captured personnel to figure out that even though a treecat could guide an interrogator's questioning, it couldn't magically pluck the desired information out of someone else's mind. That didn't keep the 'cats from providing a devastating advantage, but it did mean that as long as they simply refused to answer, as was their guaranteed right under the Deneb Accords, the furry little lie detectors couldn't dig specific, factual information out of them.

That wasn't enough to keep at least some of them from bitterly resenting the 'cats' presence, and a significant handful of those POWs had developed a positive hatred for them, as if their ability to sense someone's emotions was a form of personal violation. The vast majority, however, were more rational about it, and several—including Tourville, who'd had the opportunity to interact with Nimitz years before, when Honor had been
his
prisoner—were far too fascinated to resent them. Of course, in Tourville's case, the fact that he'd done his dead level best to see to it that Nimitz's person had been decently and honorably treated during her captivity had guaranteed that Nimitz liked
him
. And, as Honor had observed many times over the five decades they'd spent together, only the most well armored of curmudgeons could resist Nimitz when the 'cat set out to be charming and adorable.