by David Weber
Honor tried—almost successfully—to keep her mouth from tightening in repugnance. Not, she told herself after the instant initial shock, that she had anything against Tankersley himself. To be honest, she hardly even remembered him. She tried to recall what he looked like, and frowned at the image's vagueness. Short, she thought, but square and solid looking. That was all that came to mind—that and his obvious discomfort at the situation he'd found himself in at the time.
"Paul told me about it," Henke said after a moment, breaking into her thoughts. "Or some of it, anyway. I think he'd have said more if he hadn't thought it would sound disloyal to an ex-CO. He's funny that way, even when the CO in question was Pavel Young."
This time Honor couldn't keep the cold, bleak hatred off her face, and her hand tightened about her cocoa mug in poisonous memory.
"You know," Henke went on, her voice carefully light, "you never did tell me what really happened that night."
"What?" Honor shook her head and blinked.
"I said, you never told me what really happened that night."
"Which night?"
"Oh, don't be silly, Honor! You know perfectly well which night." Henke sighed as Honor looked at her without expression. "The night," she explained, "when you beat the holy living hell out of Mr. Midshipman Lord Pavel Young. You do remember that night?"
"He fell down the stairs," Honor said almost automatically, and Henke snorted.
"Sure he did. That was why I found you hiding under the covers with Nimitz ready to go rip someone's face off!" Honor winced, remembering a time when Nimitz had done just that, but Henke didn't seem to notice. "Look, Honor, I know the official story. I also know it's bullshit, and in case no one's ever told you, there are all sorts of rumors floating around about it—especially since Basilisk."
"Rumors?" Honor set her mug down, feeling a sort of distant surprise as she saw the tremors in her fingers. "What rumors? I haven't heard anything about them!"
"Of course not. Who's going to breathe a word about them around you? But after the way he tried to stab you in the back at Basilisk, there aren't too many people who doubt them."
Henke leaned back, eyes steady, and Honor shifted uncomfortably under their weight. She'd done her level best never to reveal any hint of what had actually happened, and she'd hoped—more desperately than realistically, she thought now—that the story had finally died a natural death.
"All right," Henke said after a moment, "let me tell you what I think happened. I think the bastard tried to rape you, and you kicked his balls up between his ears. Yes?"
"I—" Honor stopped and took a sip of cocoa, then sighed. "More or less," she said at last.
"Well, for God's sake, why didn't you say so at the time?! Lord knows I tried to get it out of you, and I'm sure Commandant Hartley did, too!"
"You're right." Honor's soprano was uncharacteristically soft, almost inaudible, as she stared down into her mug. "I didn't realize it at the time, but he must have known. Or guessed. But I was just—" She broke off and inhaled deeply. "I felt so dirty, Mike. Like he'd soiled me somehow, just by touching me. I was . . . ashamed. Besides, he was an earl's son, and I wasn't even pretty. Who would have believed me?"
"I would have," Henke said quietly, "and so would Hartley. So would anyone who knew both of you and heard both sides of the story."
"Oh?" Honor's smile was crooked. "You would have believed the Earl of North Hollow's son tried to rape a hatchet-faced overgrown horse like me?"
Henke flinched inside at her friend's bitter tone but bit her tongue against a quick reply. She suspected very few people guessed how ugly Honor had thought she was at the Academy. And, in truth, she had been on the homely side then, but her sharp-planed face had matured into a clean-cut beauty in the years since. She wasn't "pretty," and she never would be, Henke thought, but she also had no idea how other women envied her unique bone structure and dark, exotically slanted eyes. Her face had a mobile, expressive aliveness, despite the slight stiffness of its left side, and she didn't even know it. Yet the pain in her eyes now wasn't for her supposed homeliness. It was for the girl she had been, not the woman she was. And, Henke knew, for the way she'd betrayed that girl by not seeking justice for her.
"Yes," she said softly. "I would have believed you. As a matter of fact, that was pretty much what I thought had happened at the time. That's why I went to Hartley."
"You went to Hartley?!" Honor's eyes widened, and Henke shrugged uncomfortably.
"I was worried about you—and I was fairly sure you weren't going to come forward with the truth. So, yeah, I told him what I thought happened."
Honor stared at her, and her memory replayed the agonizing scene in the commandant's office, the way he'd almost begged her to tell him what had really happened, and she wished—again—that she had.
"Thank you," she said softly. "You're right. I should have spoken up. They might've have broken him if I had . . . but I didn't think about all that then, and it's too late now. Besides—" she squared her shoulders and inhaled again "—he finally got his."
"Yes and no," Henke countered gently. "His reputation's shot to hell, and he knows it, but he's still in the service. And he's still on active duty."
"Family influence." Honor gave a ghost of a smile, and Henke nodded.
"Family influence. I guess none of us who have it can really help using it, whether we want to or not. I mean, everyone knows who we are, and there's always someone who wants us to owe them a favor, even if we never asked for it. But North Hollow—" She shook her head distastefully. "People like him make me sick. Even if you weren't my friend, I would have loved to see Young busted. Hell, with a little luck, he might even have drawn brig time, but—" Henke's mouth quirked "—I forgive you. It's hard, you understand, but I guess I'm just naturally big-hearted."
"Gee, thanks," Honor said, relieved by the lightening tone of the conversation, and Henke grinned.
"Don't mention it. But I think you should know that Paul never did like Young, and he likes him a lot less now. As far as I can tell, it's mutual, too. Something about Paul's helping the brass deliberately sabotage his refit so Warlock didn't get back to Basilisk in time to keep you from making him look like the stupid sack of shit he is."
"What? I never knew that was deliberate!"
"Paul never said it was, but he sure did something Admiral Warner liked. They pulled him out of Warlock and transferred him to Hephaestus before you were even back from Basilisk, and he's been playing yard dog ever since. He's up to captain junior grade now, and Daddy tells me they're probably going to sneak him onto the list sometime soon. But don't you dare tell him I told you that!" Henke said with a sudden, ferocious frown. "He'd be madder than hell if he thought someone was pulling strings for him."
"Is someone?"
"Not as far as I know. Or, at any rate, not any more than they do for anyone they think is good at his job. So don't breathe a word to him."
"My lips are sealed. Not that I expect to have much opportunity to exchange confidences with him."
"No?" Henke cocked her head again, then grinned. "Well, just remember to keep mum if you do get the chance," she said. "Now, about those orders—"
CHAPTER FIVE
"—so we're on schedule for our construction projects, and the yard is fully operational for local repairs," Commander Lord Haskel Abernathy concluded.
The commander shut his memo pad down, and Vice Admiral of the Green Sir Yancey Parks nodded in approval.
"Thank you, Hack," he said to his logistics officer, then raised his eyes to the staff officers and squadron commanders in the flag briefing room of the superdreadnought HMS Gryphon. "And well done," he went on. "That goes for all of you, and especially for Admiral Sarnow's people. Between you, you've put the yard a good month ahead of projections."
Abernathy smiled at the compliment, and Sarnow gave a silent nod. It was a courteous gesture, yet Parks felt an instant stir of irritation.
He stepped on it quickly,
castigating himself for feeling it at all, but it was hard. There was always a certain awkwardness when an officer relieved a junior who stayed on under him, and Parks resented being put in such a position. Knowing the situation couldn't be any easier for Sarnow didn't help much, either. Parks had been in Hancock for barely a T-month, and the rear admiral would be more than human if a part of him weren't gauging Parks' successes against what he might have achieved if he'd retained command. To his credit, he'd never let a sign of it show, but that didn't prevent the new station commander from feeling challenged by his very presence.
Parks pushed the thought aside and cleared his throat.
"All right, ladies and gentlemen. That brings us up to date on what we're doing. What do we think the Peeps are up to, Zeb?"
Commander The Honorable Zebediah Ezekial Rutgers O'Malley, Parks' staff intelligence officer, was a tall, rangy man with mournful eyes whom everyone but his admiral knew as "Zero." He also had a lively sense of humor (fortunately, given the burden of his initials) and a memory like a computer, and he didn't even bother to key his memo pad.
"At this moment, Sir, Seaford Nine has been reinforced to two squadrons of superdreadnoughts, one dreadnought squadron, and one understrength battlecruiser squadron, with half a dozen cruiser squadrons and three full destroyer flotillas as escorts."
He paused, as if inviting comment, but there was none.
"That means, of course, that we've got an edge of about forty percent in ships of the wall," O'Malley went on, "and once we have the rest of Admiral Sarnow's squadron on hand, we'll have sixteen battlecruisers to their six, though we have reports a third superdreadnought squadron may be en route to Admiral Rollins. That would give him the edge, but, according to ONI, he's sticking with the same basic activities—drills and maneuvers, never more than a light-year or two out from Seaford—and there's no sign of any particular increase in preparedness on his part.
"There is one item in my latest download which concerns me, however." He raised an eyebrow at his admiral, and Parks nodded for him to continue.
"Our attaché on Haven has expressed a belief that the assassination of the Peeps' finance minister represents a significant increase in domestic instability. His analysis of the situation—which differs somewhat from that of ONI's analysts back home—is that the Harris Government might welcome some sort of foreign crisis to defuse Dolist tensions."
"Excuse me, Commander," Mark Sarnow's melodious tenor interrupted politely, "but how, exactly, does the attaché's analysis differ from ONI's?"
"I'd say it was more a matter of degree than of kind, Sir. ONI agrees the domestic front is giving Harris and his stooges grief and feels Harris probably wouldn't be heartbroken by an opportunity to posture and view with alarm where we're concerned, but their analysts think his hands are too full for him to actively seek a confrontation. Commander Hale, our attaché, thinks they're wrong. That the pressure Harris feels might push him into seeking just that as a diversion from economic problems which are fundamentally insoluble."
"I see." Sarnow rubbed one thick eyebrow, his dark face intent. "And do you have any feeling for which of them is correct?"
"That's always difficult to say without access to the raw data, Sir. Having said that, I happen to know Al Hale, and I don't think he's an alarmist. You want my honest opinion?" O'Malley raised his eyebrows, and Sarnow nodded. "Under the circumstances, I'd give Al a seventy-thirty chance of being closer to right."
"And if they do decide to create an incident," Parks put in, "this region is certainly a logical place for them to do it."
Heads nodded around the table. The Basilisk terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction, which lay another hundred and sixty light-years to galactic north of Hancock Station, had become of constantly growing economic importance as the terminus drew ever more colonization and exploration to itself, but stars were sparse out here, and there was precious little of intrinsic worth between Manticore and Basilisk. Which meant, since the Star Kingdom had never been particularly interested in expansion for expansion's sake, that the Navy had developed virtually no bases to cover the region.
That might not have been a problem . . . except that the People's Republic had already made one try at seizing Basilisk. If the Peeps tried a second time and succeeded, Manticore would lose perhaps ten percent of its total out-system revenue. Worse, Haven already controlled Trevor's Star, which meant conquest of Basilisk would give it two termini, raising the specter of direct invasion of the Manticore System via the Junction, and leave the Royal Manticoran Navy no choice but to take it back at any cost.
Getting Basilisk back would be a grim task under any circumstances, but especially if the Peeps established a powerful fleet presence to block access from the home system. Seaford Nine was obviously the first step in creating that fleet presence, and until Manticore had gotten Alizon and (especially) Zanzibar to join the Alliance—and established Hancock Station—there had been nothing to counter it. As it was, the local treaty structure remained untested and quite possibly a little shaky, and Haven was doing all it could to prevent it from stabilizing. Their activities—including political recognition of the "patriots" of the Zanzibar Liberation Front—left Parks an unenviable strategic equation.
Given the disparity in capital ship tonnage and, even more, Manticore's technical edge, he had an excellent chance of crushing the Peeps' local forces. Unfortunately, he had three allies to defend, spread over a sphere nearly twenty light-years in diameter. As long as both sides stayed concentrated, he could handle anything the Peeps dished out. But if he divided his forces to cover all of his responsibilities and Haven chose to mass its full strength against a single target, they could overwhelm the detachment covering it and smash his units in isolation.
"I think," the admiral said at last into the quiet, "that we have to assume a worst-case scenario. I also know Commander Hale, and I've been impressed by his past work. If he's right and ONI is wrong, we could find ourselves looking at two particularly dangerous situations. First, the Peeps may try to engineer a crisis, even create an incident or two, solely for the consumption of their propaganda machine. That's bad enough, given the potential for an incident to get out of hand, but, frankly, it worries me less than the second alternative. They could have finally reached the point of being ready to pull the trigger on a real war.
"The question, of course"—there was no twinkle in Parks' blue eyes to match the whimsy of his smile—"is which they're up to. Comments?"
"I'm more inclined to think in terms of provocations and incidents," Admiral Konstanzakis said after a moment. The tall, big-boned commander of Superdreadnought Squadron Eight leaned slightly forward, looking down the table to meet Parks' eyes, and tapped her index finger on the folder of hardcopy before her. "According to these reports, the ZLF's activities are increasing, and if Haven wants a low-risk, cheap incident, the Liberation Front's their best bet. They're already providing the ZLF'S raggedy-assed 'fleet' with sanctuaries. If they decide to back a major terrorist push against the Caliph's government, as well—" She shrugged, and Parks nodded.
"Zeb?" he asked.
"It's certainly a possibility Sir, but getting significant support to Zanzibar through the Caliph's own navy and the light forces we've deployed to back them up would be a real problem. The Caliphate severed diplomatic relations with the Republic and embargoed Havenite trade when the Peeps recognized the ZLF, so they don't have any good covert channels to slip weapons in. If they try to run them in openly, they risk kicking off an escalation they can't control." It was the intelligence officer's turn to shrug. "Frankly, Sir, there are a dozen places they can engineer a confrontation. Zanzibar would be the most dangerous one from our viewpoint, but that very fact might cause them to look elsewhere, especially if their objective is to generate lots of noise but not an actual war."
Parks nodded again, then sighed and rubbed his right temple.
"All right, let's put the engineered crisis scenario on hold until we have some evi
dence of actual activities to guide us. Even if there is an incident, the bottom line will be how we respond to it, and that brings us right back to our options. What's the most effective thing we can do with our forces to protect our allies and insure the security of Hancock itself?"
Silence hovered as he looked around the table. No one spoke for several seconds, then Konstanzakis tapped her folder a second time.
"We should at least strengthen the pickets for Zanzibar, Sir. It might not be a bad idea to split one of the battlecruiser squadrons into divisions and spread its units across all three systems. We'd still be superior to Seaford's current capital ship strength, and, politically speaking, it would both reassure our allies and draw a line for the Peeps."
Parks nodded again, though the thought of parceling out battlecruisers in penny packets which couldn't possibly face a concentrated attack was hardly appealing.
He started to speak, but Mark Sarnow cleared his throat first.
"I think we should consider a forward deployment, instead, Sir," Parks' junior squadron commander said quietly.
"How far forward, Admiral?" The question sounded sharper than Parks had intended, but Sarnow seemed unfazed.
"Right on the twelve-hour limit from Seaford Nine, Sir," he replied, and feet shuffled under the table. "I'm not talking about a permanent presence, but an extended period of maneuvers out there would almost have to make Rollins nervous, and we'd still be outside the territorial limit. He wouldn't have a leg to stand on if he tried to protest our presence, but if he started anything, we'd be close enough to keep our force concentrated and stay with him all the way to his intended target—whatever it might be."
"I'm not sure that would be a good idea, Sir," Konstanzakis objected. "We've already got a light cruiser squadron keeping an eye on the Peeps, and they know it. If we move in with ships of the wall, we up the stakes all around. That sort of deployment makes excellent sense if they're really ready to push the button, but if all they want is an incident, we'd be giving them a golden opportunity to find one, territorial limit or no."