by David Weber
"Then again, I was one of the Navy's old 'Silesian hands.' Like you, I'd been deployed out here several times in the course of my career, and there were people who knew me, either personally or by reputation. They don't get to see too many Manticoran officers of my seniority or experience in private service out here, so in some ways it was easier for me to write my own ticket in the Confederacy than it would have been in the Star Kingdom."
He paused for several seconds, and she tasted his emotions as he considered whether or not to leave it at that. Then he gave his head a little toss—a mannerism she remembered well as an indicator of decision.
"And if the truth be known, I think it was also a case of looking for the grand gesture. A way of proving to the galaxy at large that whatever the court of inquiry might have decided, I was—well, a force to be reckoned with, I suppose. I needed to go out and demonstrate that I could succeed out here and simultaneously cut a swathe through any pirates who got in my way."
"And perhaps just a bit of knight errantry?" Honor asked gently. He looked at her expressionlessly, and she tipped her chair back and smiled. "I don't doubt anything you just said, Sir. But I think there's also at least a trace of 'once a Queen's officer, always a Queen's officer.' "
"If by that you mean I thought the universe would be a better place with fewer pirates in it, you may have a point," Bachfisch conceded. "But don't make the mistake of assigning me too much purity of motive."
"I didn't say anything about purity of motive," Honor replied. "I just couldn't quite picture you quietly fading away under any circumstances. Finding you out here in command of what amounts to privately flagged Q-ships simply suggests to me that you're still in the business of suppressing piracy. And given that you just let drop the name of the previous Second Space Lord, my naturally suspicious mind suggests that there might be a more direct connection between you and Her Majesty's Navy than most people would suspect."
"There's something to that," he admitted. "Not that I started out with any such connection in mind. Even if one had occurred to me, the circumstances which had gotten me placed on half-pay in the first place would have discouraged me from approaching anyone in the Admiralty. But ONI has always done its best to keep track of the Navy's officers, active-duty or not, and as my support base grew out here, ONI approached me. In fact, it was ONI which quietly greased the way for me to acquire official approval for Ambuscade's guns. And unless I'm very much mistaken, it was also ONI which even more quietly helped send the Bane in my direction when she was listed for disposal by the Andies. No one ever said so in as many words, but there were one or two coincidences too many in the way things came together when I put in my bid on her.
"And whether I'm right about that or not, Admiral Givens—or her minions, at least—were in fairly regular contact with me right up to the truce with the Peeps. I suppose that technically I was one of those 'HumInt' sources ONI keeps referring to when they brief officers for Silesia."
"You said ONI was in regular contact with you?" Honor asked, looking at him very thoughtfully, and he nodded.
"That's exactly what I said," he agreed. "And I meant precisely what you think I meant. Since Jurgensen took over from Givens, Intelligence seems to've cut back drastically on its use of human resources here in Silesia. I can't say what the situation might be elsewhere, but here in the Confederacy, no one seems to be paying much attention to old sources or networks. And, frankly, Honor, I think that's an enormous mistake."
"I wish I could say I disagreed with you, Sir," Honor said slowly. "Unfortunately, if you're right, it only confirms fears I already had. The closer I look at the intelligence packets they sent out here with me, the less in touch with reality the analysts who wrote them up seem to be."
"I was afraid of that," he sighed. "Obviously, there was no way for me to know what ONI was or wasn't telling the officers the Navy was sending out, but the fact that no one was asking me any questions anymore suggested that the information contained in their briefings was probably . . . incomplete. And unless I'm very mistaken about the Andies' intentions, that could be a very, very serious oversight on someone's part."
* * *
"Do you think he's right, Your Grace?" Mercedes Brigham asked quietly as she, Honor, Nimitz, Lieutenant Meares, and LaFollet rode the lift towards the flag briefing room and an already scheduled meeting with Honor's entire staff.
"I'm afraid I do," Honor replied equally quietly.
"I know you and he go way back, Your Grace," Brigham said after a moment, and Honor chuckled humorlessly.
"Yes, and he was my very first captain. And, yes, again, Mercedes, that gives him a certain aura of authority in my eyes. But I'm not blind to the ways people can change in thirty or forty T-years. Nor am I overlooking the possibility that however good his intentions, his information—or his interpretation of it—could still be badly flawed." She shook her head. "I'm considering what he's said as impartially and skeptically as I can. Unfortunately, too much of it fits entirely too well with all the other straws in the wind we've been identifying."
"I didn't mean to suggest that he might be trying to dump disinformation on you, Your Grace. And to be honest, I have to agree that his analysis of what the Andies probably have in mind jibes altogether too damned well for comfort with what we were already afraid they were thinking. I guess my greatest concern is that he's so much more emphatic about the Andies' new hardware than anything we had from ONI suggests. For that matter, he's more emphatic than anything we got from the Graysons would suggest."
"Agreed. But by the same token, he's had a much closer look at the Andies than either ONI or Benjamin's people. In ONI's case, that's purely because Jurgensen and his people have chosen not to avail themselves of the resource that was available to them. Unless I'm mistaken, the Captain wasn't the only human source Jurgensen decided he could dispense with, either. In the Graysons' case, it's simply a matter of time and distance. Well, that and the fact that they never even knew the Captain was here, so they can hardly be blamed for not getting his input.
"Even conceding all of that, though, what he's been able to piece together about the new Andermani systems tallies much too closely for comfort with what Greg Paxton did manage to put together. Not to mention what Captain Ferrero's had to say in her reports. Or that Sidemorian analyst, what's-his-name?" She frowned, then nodded. "Zahn."
"Lieutenant Commander Zahn's husband?" Brigham asked.
"That's the one," Honor agreed. "George just finished reading one of his position papers and briefed me on it last night."
Brigham nodded. Commander George Reynolds was Honor's staff intelligence officer, and Honor had selected him for the post of "spook" at least partly on Brigham's recommendation. The chief of staff had worked with him before and been impressed by his ability to think outside the box.
"George wasn't prepared to unreservedly endorse Zahn's conclusions," Honor continued, "but he did say that the logic seemed tight, assuming the basic facts on which it was based were accurate. And now Captain Bachfisch seems to be confirming those facts from an entirely independent perspective."
"If both of them are right," Brigham said unhappily, "then we're holding an even shorter stick than we thought, Your Grace."
"I wish you were wrong," Honor told her. "Unfortunately, I don't think you are."
"So what do we do about it?"
"I don't know. Not yet. The first thing is this meeting, though. We need to get the rest of the staff brought up to speed, get them started thinking on possible threats and responses. And, of course, I'll want to get Alice and Alistair briefed in and thinking about it, too. Hopefully, at least one or two useful ideas will come out of it. And I'm enlarging the invitation list for dinner tonight, as well. I want you, George, Alistair, Alice, Roslee, Wraith, and probably Rafe and Scotty, at a minimum to join the Captain and me over supper."
"Will he be comfortable with that, Your Grace?" Brigham asked. Honor looked a question at her, and she shrugged. "It's pretty ob
vious he's spent a lot of time establishing himself out here. If word leaks that he's a Manticoran intelligence asset, it could do him a lot of damage. It might even get him killed. I just wondered if he really wanted that many people to know who your information source is. I don't expect any of them to let it get to the wrong ears, but he doesn't know them the way we do."
"I asked him that, more or less," Honor replied after a moment. "He'd already considered the same questions before he ever asked to come aboard Werewolf. I don't think he'd be here in the first place if he weren't prepared for the sorts of questions we're likely to ask him. And he may not know them, but he does know me, and I think he trusts my judgment about who might or might not be a threat to his own security."
"In that case, Your Grace," the chief of staff said as the lift car reached its destination and the doors hissed open, "we'll just have to make certain that none of us is a threat, won't we?"
Chapter Twenty-Eight
"...So I did exactly what Mister Pirate told me to," Thomas Bachfisch said with an evil grin. "We hove to, opened our personnel locks, and stood by to be boarded. And then, when their boarding shuttles were about five hundred klicks out, we opened the weapons ports and put an eighty-centimeter graser straight through their ship."
More than one of his listeners winced at the thought of what it must have been like aboard that piratical cruiser in the fleeting instant its crew had to realize what had happened. There was, however, a marked absence of sympathy for the crew in question. These were all experienced naval officers; they'd seen too much of the wreckage pirates left behind.
"Your ships must have come as a nasty surprise to the pirate community out here, Sir," Roslee Orndorff observed as she handed another celery stick to Banshee.
"Not so much to the community as a whole, as to the individuals who ran into us," Bachfisch. "We haven't really tried to make our presence a secret—after all, half the effect of a Q-ship derives from the fact that potential raiders know she's out there somewhere. If they don't know she exists, then they're not going to be worried over the possibility that any given merchantman might be her. But by the same token, we haven't exactly broadcast a description of any of our ships, and we've been known to change the paint scheme from time to time. The smart paint cost us a pretty penny, but it was worth it."
"I often think it's more useful to Q-ships than it's ever been to regular men-of-war," Alistair McKeon observed, and several heads nodded. The "paint" used by the RMN and most other navies was liberally laced with nanotech and reactive pigments which allowed it to be programmed and altered, essentially without limit, at will. Unfortunately, as McKeon had just suggested, that was of strictly limited utility for a warship. After all, the distinctive hammerhead hull form of a warship could scarcely be mistaken for anything else, whatever color it might be. Besides, no one was likely to rely on visual identification of any man-of-war, which was one reason most navies also had a distinct tendency to choose one paint scheme—like the RMN's basic white—and leave it that way.
But merchantmen were another matter entirely. Even there, cruisers and pirate vessels alike tended to rely primarily upon transponder codes, but anyone who wanted to steal a ship's cargo had to come close enough to do it. And at that point, visual identifications—or misidentifications, in some very special cases—became the norm.
"I'm guessing that if you're using smart paint, you're also using . . . inventive transponder codes, Admiral," Lieutenant Commander Reynolds put in. Bachfisch looked as if he were about to correct the rank title yet again, then visibly gave up and simply nodded once more.
"I'm confident my people could take just about any pirate out here in straight fight," he said. "But to be honest, our primary function is to carry cargo. Besides, we may be armed, and Pirates' Bane may have started life as an armed auxiliary, but that doesn't make her a dreadnought. She's got a military-grade compensator and the impellers and particle shields to go with it, and she and Ambuscade both have fairly respectable sidewall generators. But none of our ships have real military hulls or damage control capability.
"You were with Her Grace when her Q-ships deployed out here several years back, weren't you, Admiral Truman?" he asked, turning to Honor's second-in-command, and shrugged when Truman nodded in agreement. "Well, then you know what happens to a merchant hull that takes a hit from any heavy shipboard weapon. So under the circumstances, neither my crews nor I are particularly interested in 'fair fights' with pirates. Which is why we practically never sail under our own transponder codes until we're actually ready to make port."
"And the Confed Navy doesn't have a problem with that, Sir?" Rafe Cardones asked. It was a reasonable question, given that falsifying transponder codes was a moderately severe offense under the law of most star nations . . . including the Silesian Confederacy.
"Officially, they don't know anything about it," Bachfisch replied with a slight shrug, "and what they don't know about, they don't object to. In fact, most of their skippers know we're doing it, but they're not going to object to almost anything we do as long as we keep nailing the occasional pirate for them."
"Makes sense to me," Truman agreed, and reached for her wineglass. James MacGuiness materialized magically to refill the glass before she quite touched it, and she smiled her thanks at him, sipped the ruby wine, and turned her attention back to Bachfisch.
"I have to say that we're probably luckier than we deserve to have you run into us, Admiral Bachfisch," she said in a more formal tone.
"I didn't exactly 'run into' you, Admiral," Bachfisch replied with a crooked smile. "I came looking for you."
"I know." Truman considered him thoughtfully. "I'm grateful that you did. But at the same time, I'm sure you understand why we might be a little hesitant to accept one person's testimony, however credible that person might seem, when it flatly contradicts certain aspects of our ONI briefings."
"Well," Bachfisch said, letting his smile grow a bit broader, "I know why I might be a little hesitant, but then, when I was on active duty, the people running ONI could usually find their own asses . . . if they used both hands, at least."
Despite herself, Truman's lips twitched, and Cardones grinned openly.
"What I meant to say, Sir," the golden-haired admiral said after a moment, when she was confident she had her voice fully under control once more, "was that I'd feel more comfortable about relying on your information if you could describe firsthand how you came into possession of it."
"I understand what you're getting at, Dame Alice," Bachfisch said more seriously. "And I certainly don't blame you for wanting to be a bit cautious about relying on fortuitous windfalls of information. I've already promised Admiral Harrington to make my sensor log recordings available to support some of my observations—like the acceleration rates I've seen the new cruisers pulling, and the stealth capabilities that Andy heavy cruiser demonstrated in the Melbourne System. You can make your own analysis of those events from them, and, frankly, you have better facilities for doing that than I do.
"But I suspect that what probably concerns you most are the reports I don't have any log recordings to back up. Especially the ones about the new Andy battlecruisers."
"I will admit that that's one of the areas which causes me concerns," Truman agreed, clearly relieved that Bachfisch understood her worries and chose not to take them as aspersions upon his veracity.
"I've already given Commander Reynolds here as detailed a written description as I could put together," Bachfisch told her. "You'll probably do better to get the details from him, because it's based on notes I jotted down immediately after I saw the ship, not on what I can recall from unaided memory right this moment. But the way I came to be in a position to observe it has a lot to do with the Q-ship operations we were just discussing. I had a fresh crop of pirates to turn over to the Silly authorities in Crawford, but an Andy battlecruiser squadron was passing through the system and shortstopped my delivery. Not," he added wryly, "that the Confederate governor
was at all happy about it. He seemed to feel the Andy admiral was being just a bit high-handed about the whole thing."
"Why am I not surprised?" McKeon murmured with a grimace. "Lord knows the only people the Sillies think are more arrogant and high-handed than the Andies are Manticorans, after all!"
"With all due respect, Admiral," Bachfisch told him, "and speaking as someone who's seen it from both sides, the Sillies have a point. From their perspective, both the RMN and the IAN are high-handed as hell. The fact that they know perfectly well, whatever they may choose to pretend, that they don't have the capability to police their own space lanes without outside interference only makes it worse, but how would you feel if foreign navies came sweeping into the Star Kingdom at will to police our commerce? Or if they took custody of criminals captured in our space because they distrusted the integrity of our legal system . . . or the honesty of our government officials?" He shook his head. "I know the situations are different, but the fact that our lack of confidence in them is justified so much of the time only makes them resent it even more. And too many Andy and Manty naval officers let their contempt for the locals show. For that matter, I probably did the same thing when I was on active duty!
"At any rate, I don't think the squadron CO realized I was a Manticoran myself when he ordered me to deliver my prisoners to him. He certainly didn't realize I was a half-pay Navy officer, anyway! I was just as happy to hand them over to the Andies, because I could be fairly confident they weren't going to simply be turned loose again that way, but I have to admit that I didn't much care for his attitude, myself. Interesting how it changed when he realized he wasn't talking to a Silesian after all.