In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V

by David Weber

  At first, she’d tried to pretend to her parents—and possibly to herself, for that matter—that everything would be just fine once it had all been sorted out. The fact that she’d been instructed to keep her mouth shut precluded any possibility of discussing her concerns with them, but she knew her mother and—especially—her ex-Navy father hadn’t experienced any great difficulty guessing something was wrong. Dr. Alfred Harrington had spent enough time in the service to know deployments weren’t cut short on a whim, and that a starship’s scheduled overhaul period wasn’t normally moved forward by almost a full T-year without some sort of significant engineering problem. Yet despite what had to be a burning sense of curiosity—and concern—he and Honor’s mother had painstakingly avoided asking the questions they’d quickly realized she wasn’t going to be permitted to answer.

  Their silent support had been welcome, but as the days dragged by, and as they turned into weeks, still without any word from the Admiralty, Honor’s heart had gradually sunk. Anyone who’d ever served aboard a Queen’s ship had learned about waiting for news, but that was usually because simply transmitting messages across light-years of distance took a long time. It wasn’t because they were sitting around at home, trying to distract themselves with things like long hikes, hang gliders, and sailboats, while they waited for the sword of Damocles to fall. Worse, as the wait stretched out farther and farther, her initial hope that what Hawkwing had achieved might somehow mitigate the consequences of her actions had grown dimmer and dimmer.

  And then, the day before yesterday, had come the summons to report to Admiralty House in person. And not to just anyone—to the First Space Lord, the most senior uniformed member of the Royal Manticoran Navy. Honor had never met Sir James Bowie Webster in person, although he’d addressed her class at Saganami Island when she’d been a midshipwoman. He had a reputation for integrity and fairness, but he enjoyed a matching reputation for hammering those he felt had been derelict in their duty or in meeting their responsibilities as Queen’s officers. She’d heard stories about other officers—most of them far senior to herself—who had been summoned to his office for personal meetings. Most of those stories had . . . ended badly for the officers in question, and despite her painfully maintained calm expression, her stomach felt as if she were stepping into microgravity rather than a luxuriously furnished office whose enormous window looked out over downtown Landing.

  The large room was paneled in light-toned native woods, which wasn’t the extravagance it would have been on one of the Solarian League’s long-settled planets, and there was a fireplace in one corner. It was functional, not merely ornamental, and that was an extravagance. The Admiralty Building was over a Manticoran century-and-a-half old and little more than a hundred stories tall, but that fireplace’s chimney bored up through thirty-odd stories of air shafts and ventilation ducting. Which seemed just a bit much to Honor, given that the capital’s climate was far more likely to require air-conditioning than the toasty warmth of an open fire.

  The rest of the office—and especially the models of starships and old-fashioned oil and acrylic portraits of ships, admirals, and famous battles scattered about it—made it perfectly clear who it belonged to, and there was no one else in it, she noted as she crossed the carpet to Webster’s immense desk. Just the two of them . . . that didn’t strike her as a good sign, either.

  She reached the desk and came to attention, painfully aware of the white beret tucked under her epaulet. She was still entitled to that badge of a starship commander, and she wondered if that would be true an hour from now.

  “Commander Harrington, My Lord,” she said quietly but crisply. “Reporting as directed.”

  “So I see.”

  Webster leaned back in his chair behind the desk and contemplated her, his expression stony. He was a large man, although probably a bit shorter than Honor herself, with the unmistakable Webster chin. At the moment, he didn’t seem precisely delighted to see her.

  “Stand easy,” he said after a wait just long enough to make the point that, starship commander or not, she was a very junior officer reporting to her service’s head under less than ideal circumstances.

  She obeyed the command, dropping into an at-ease posture she hadn’t used very much over the last couple of T-years, and he let her stand that way for several more seconds.

  “So, Commander,” he said finally, with more than a hint of a bite, “I assume you have at least some vague idea of why you’re here. Would that be a correct assumption on my part?”

  “I believe so, My Lord.” Honor kept her own voice level, as steady as her eyes as she met his gaze.

  “And why do you think you are?”

  “My Lord, I expect I was ordered to report to you because of my actions and decisions in Silesia.”

  It was harder than she’d expected to maintain her calm expression and keep her inner tension out of her tone. In another way, though, it was actually easier, as if the relief of finally being here, knowing she was finally about to learn the price of her actions, was a huge relief.

  Or, she realized, as if being here, on the brink of learning that price, had burned away the last month’s growing uncertainty and left her as certain as she’d been the day she launched the attack on Casimir.

  “Well, as it happens, you’re entirely correct about that,” Webster told her coldly. “It’s not every day a mere commander finds herself the focus of a cabinet-level exchange of notes between star nations, Commander Harrington. Indeed, I can’t remember the last time it happened . . . assuming it ever did. Before, at least.”

  He showed a flash of white teeth in what no one would ever have mistaken for a smile.

  “I’m aware, Commander, that certain of Her Majesty’s officers are of the opinion that the Confederacy Navy consists solely of grafters, bunglers, and incompetents. I’m also aware that certain of Her Majesty’s officers feel nothing but contempt for that navy, and that, on the basis of that contempt, they routinely denigrate both it and its officers. For that matter, I’m aware that certain of Her Majesty’s officers see no reason to pay that navy the least heed, or seek to cooperate with it even in its own sovereign space.”

  He paused, his nostrils flaring.

  “That is not, Commander Harrington, an attitude which I or Her Majesty’s Navy are prepared to tolerate. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Honor replied quietly.

  “Secondly, Commander, it is the position of Her Majesty’s Navy that a Queen’s officer obeys the orders he—or she—is given. In particular, I draw your attention to the portion of your own recent orders which stressed the necessity of cooperating with and supporting Sector Governor Charnowska. I believe it was made clear to you at your predeployment briefing that the Sector Governor’s pro-Manticore attitude made it particularly important for us to avoid any incidents in the sector for which she is responsible. Am I mistaken in that belief?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “I thought not.”

  He tipped his chair a bit farther back, regarding her in bleak silence for entirely too many heartbeats, then inhaled deeply.

  “I am not, of course, privy to your innermost thoughts, Commander,” he said then. “However, speaking from my necessarily limited vantage point on what may or may not have passed through your brain before you opted to ally Her Majesty’s Navy with an avowedly terrorist organization before embarking upon a totally unauthorized raid on the sovereign territory of one of the Star Kingdom’s most important trading partners, it would seem to me to be difficult to . . . reconcile, shall we say, your subsequent actions with those orders. Would you care to take this opportunity to expound your no doubt tortuous logic paths to me?”

  “No, Sir,” Honor said levelly, and one of his eyebrows rose. “I made my conclusions and reasoning as clear as I could in my reports, Sir,” she continued in response to that elevated eyebrow. “I don’t believe I could profitably expand on what I wrote and recorded at that time.”

  And I�
�ll be damned if I’m going to start trying to whine and beg for any sort of special consideration at this late date, she added mentally.

  “So you have nothing at all to add to those reports?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “I see.”

  Once again, he contemplated her for several seconds in silence, then shrugged and let his chair come a bit more upright.

  “Let me tell you a little bit about the correspondence which has passed between the Foreign Office and the Silesian ambassador here in Landing,” he said then. “The Confederacy has denounced your actions in the strongest possible language, Commander. They’ve lodged a formal complaint over your violation of their territory and their sovereignty. They’ve made it clear that they totally reject your authority to act as you did, and I’ve been informed that their high court is most likely going to conclude that any so-called evidence of wrongdoing you may have turned up subsequent to your attack on Casimir will be inadmissible in any Silesian legal proceedings. In other words, whatever misconduct on the part of individuals beyond the Elsbietá platform might otherwise have been uncovered and prosecuted will not, because of the nature of your operations there, be prosecutable, after all.”

  Honor kept her face expressionless, but inside, her heart fell. If Obermeyer—and, especially, Charnowska—had managed to get all her evidence thrown out, then none of it would have any effect at all on cleaning up the cesspool of the Confederacy’s political corruption. The possibility that it would have had any effect might always have been slim, but now she knew it wouldn’t. And that the very people responsible for making the Casimir Depot possible were going to use her actions to protect themselves from any consequences for their own deeds.

  “The ambassador,” Webster continued mercilessly, “has specifically pointed out that the Navy’s total failure to approach this matter through the proper channels has thus had a significant negative impact on the ability of Confederacy law enforcement agencies to do their jobs. In fact, Her Majesty’s Government has been informed that your intrusion into the Casimir System has completely negated an ongoing investigation. That criminals—Silesian criminals, not just foreign nationals—who would otherwise have faced trial will now be untouchable because of your contamination of the investigation and evidence against them.”

  Honor felt her gorge trying to rise. If she’d thought for a moment anyone actually had been investigating the situation in Casimir, no doubt she would have felt like weeping, she thought bitterly. As it was, she found it entirely too easy to imagine the smile on Charnowska’s face as that particular bit was inserted into the diplomatic correspondence.

  “I doubt very much, Commander, that it would be possible for me to adequately express to you the severity with which the Foreign Office, Prime Minister Cromarty, First Lord Janacek, and the Navy view these events. The fact that we cannot dispute a single factual element of the Silesian condemnation of your actions does not, to say the least, make any of us one bit happier. I wish you to understand, clearly and without ambiguity, that it is not the part of a single junior starship’s commander to negate the Star Kingdom’s foreign policy. Nor would Her Majesty’s Government be able, even if it so desired, to receive such a strongly worded protest from a foreign star nation without regarding it most seriously and without taking action upon it.”

  Honor said nothing, waiting, wrapped around an inner, singing hollowness.

  “It may surprise you to learn this, Commander,” Webster said in a marginally gentler voice, “but Her Majesty’s Government is neither unaware nor unappreciative of the lives you and your people saved and the slaves you liberated. No one in the Star Kingdom has the least quibble with your desire to save those lives and liberate those slaves. Were it not for the fashion in which you did so, and the interstellar political ramifications of your actions, I feel confident you would find yourself being commended rather than censured. Nor, apparently, is the government of Silesia unaware of that fact. Accordingly, the Confederacy has agreed that if we will take appropriate action in your case, the entire incident will be allowed to pass without public condemnation of your actions. Neither the Confederacy nor the Star Kingdom will make any public reference to or have any official comment upon anything that happened in Casimir. As far as our two governments are concerned, it will never have happened. Is that understood, Commander?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This time, she couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of her voice. Of course the Confederacy was “magnanimously” willing to eschew any public discussion! It would scarcely be in Charnowska’s interests for all this dirty linen to be publicly aired, now would it? The cockroaches were scurrying back into the shadows, and aside from the individual slaves and brutalized civilians she might have freed, nothing would change at all. Deep inside, she’d always known it wouldn’t, but having it confirmed—hearing how sanctimoniously the Confederacy was flaunting the fact that it wouldn’t—bit harder and deeper than she’d ever expected it might.

  “I must also inform you, however, Commander Harrington,” Webster went on, “that Sector Governor Charnowska, in particular, is adamant that actions such as yours cannot be allowed to pass without penalty. That the Confederacy’s willingness not to publicly condemn them cannot be treated as some sort of excuse on the Star Kingdom’s part to avoid the unpleasant necessity of making it abundantly clear how extremely seriously we regard this entire situation. Accordingly, you are relieved immediately of command of Hawkwing.”

  Despite all she could do, Honor’s face tightened. She’d told herself she was prepared for this possibility; now she knew she’d been wrong. Knew that whatever she might have recognized intellectually, she’d never even guessed how deep the emotional hurt would be.

  “It is the opinion of the Admiralty, in which Prime Minister Cromarty has concurred, that no action will be taken against any of the officers or enlisted personnel involved in this operation,” Webster continued. “There will be no boards of inquiry, no courts-martial. Partly, of course, that will be because of the desire on the part of both star nations to minimize the public fallout of this entire episode. More important, frankly, however, is the extent to which your own reports make it abundantly clear that the officers and crew of the starship then under your command simply followed the legal orders of their commanding officer. Their actions were entirely proper—indeed, highly commendable—under those circumstances, and their service records will so reflect.”

  At least she’d managed that much, she thought bitterly.

  “It gives me no pleasure to relieve a starship captain under such circumstances,” the first space lord told her. “Speaking for myself, I find it impossible to condemn your motives. Nor, for that matter, do I think for a moment that you acted as you did without the full awareness that it could produce these consequences. For whatever it may be worth, I believe the intent of your actions, and the consequence of your actions—for others, at least—were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Royal Navy. That may seem like cold comfort at this moment, Commander Harrington. I hope though that, at some time in the future, you may remember I feel that way. And that there are a great many other people in Her Majesty’s Navy who would almost certainly feel the same way, if they were ever to learn of your actions.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” she managed to say, and was astounded by how calm her own voice sounded.

  “There will be no official letter of reprimand in your file, Commander. Your relief will be treated as a simple administrative move in keeping with Hawkwing’s expedited overhaul schedule. When you leave my office, you will report promptly to the Bureau of Personnel, where you will be given your official end-of-commission leave and your name will be placed in the pool of officers awaiting reassignment.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  They really were going to make it all go away, as if it had never happened, she thought bitterly. Not even a letter of reprimand to explain why she’d been stripped of command—explain why she would spend the re
st of whatever Navy career she might have beached on half-pay like any number of other officers who’d been found wanting in their Queen’s service.

  “That will be all, then, Commander.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  She braced to attention again, then turned mechanically towards the door through which she’d entered the office. She’d taken a single step when Webster spoke again.

  “Just a moment, Commander.”

  “Sir?”

  She turned back towards him, and he frowned.

  “I believe Admiral Courvoisier was one of your instructors at the Academy?”

  “Yes, Sir. He was.”

  Honor wondered if her puzzlement showed, and Webster grimaced.

  “I’m afraid Admiral Courvoisier is one of the officers who’s been fully informed on this unfortunate affair,” he told her. “Given the outcome, you may find this difficult to believe, but before deciding how to respond to the Confederacy’s protests, I instructed my staff to interview as many senior officers with personal acquaintance with you as possible. It was my hope that by doing so I might form a better understanding of your motives . . . and, perhaps, be helped in reaching a decision in your case which would combine at least some elements of fairness with consideration of the needs of the Service.”

  Honor’s jaw tightened. She didn’t even want to imagine how her old mentor had reacted to the news of her utter disgrace.

  “The reason I mention this to you, Commander,” Webster told her, “is that in the course of my personal conversation with Admiral Courvoisier, he informed me that he was extremely saddened to hear about all of the trouble in which you’d landed yourself. I thought you might perhaps like to know that he argued quite passionately in your defense. That, in his opinion, you have never demonstrated less than total dedication to your profession, to the men and women under your command, to the Service, and to the honor of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. Nor does he feel that anything which has emerged out of your actions in Casimir alters his opinion one millimeter in that regard.”