Uncompromising Honor - eARC

by David Weber

  “So, Admiral,” Commissioner Hirokichi Floyd said as his butler poured the after-dinner wine, set the bottle at his elbow, and withdrew, “I assume you’re eager to depart and get on with it?”

  “We’re certainly ready, anyway, Commissioner,” Vice Admiral Hajdu Gyôzô replied. He lifted his wineglass and sipped, then set it back down with a rather tight smile. “Shifting targets at such a late date offered a bit of a challenge, since all our planning had focused on Exapia. But the truth is that there’s not really much change in the parameters of the operation.” He shrugged. “More a matter of plugging in new names and addresses than confronting any new threats or logistics issues. We’ve completed all of our preparations and pre-op planning and we’ll translate out Thursday at zero-seven-thirty. After that?” He shrugged again.

  “After that, Admiral,” Floyd’s piercing green eyes flashed, “Buccaneer will teach the frigging Manties and their arse-kissers that, as my Uncle Chojiro used to say, when you fuck with the bull, you get the horns.”

  “Indeed.”

  Admiral Hajdu produced another smile. It wasn’t easy, because what he wanted to do was to roll his eyes. Unlike Floyd, who was a product of one of Old Terra’s mega-urb towers, Hajdu had been born and raised on the planet Crişul Negru on a twelve thousand-hectare cattle ranch. He rather doubted “Uncle Chojiro” had possessed any personal experience with irate cattle of either sexual persuasion, and—having personally dealt with very irate, two-thousand-kilo, genetically-enhanced Chianina bulls upon more than one occasion—he’d always loathed that particular cliché and the people who seemed so fond of it.

  Then again, there was a lot to loathe about Uncle Chojiro’s nephew, too.

  “The arrogant bastards have it coming,” the commissioner continued. He drained his own wineglass in a single swallow and refilled it from the bottle without ever looking away from Hajdu. “God only knows how many people they’ve already gotten killed!”

  “Indeed,” Hajdu repeated. He found that noncommittal response useful in dealing with people who could be relied upon to interpret it as agreeing with whatever the hell it was they’d just said.

  “I’m looking forward to your after-action report, Admiral.” Floyd showed his teeth. “I don’t think anybody in Manticore’s going to enjoy reading it, though!”

  “Indeed,” Hajdu said yet again, and shook his head mentally as the repetitions sailed right by Floyd. That was another thing the word was good for. The number of times in a row he could repeat it before it produced a reaction was a faithful barometer of his current audience’s stupidity. And despite the misleading impression of mental acuity produced by the commissioner’s piercing eyes, the admiral suspected he could set a new record with Floyd, if he really put his mind to it.

  The commissioner only smiled broadly at him, but Hajdu reminded himself that just because Floyd was stupid didn’t mean he couldn’t be dangerous in the Byzantine infighting of the Solarian League’s entrenched bureaucracy. Someone of his towering incompetency wouldn’t hold a sector governorship, even of one as piss-poor as the Genovese Sector, unless he had the right gutter-fighter instincts and patrons at a high level. He was not the sort with whom a prudent flag officer engaged in pissing contests. Which was a pity, given his record to date.

  I agree with him that the Manties need to be taken down a peg or three, Hajdu thought from behind his answering smile. I’m not happy about the change in targets for our op—and neither were some of my staff people—but I’m not going to shed many tears for it at the end of the day. Any of the Manties’ buddies who get run over along the way only have to look in the mirror to see who pasted the target on their backs, and looking after their interests is nowhere in my job description. I’m no more eager to trash star systems than the next man, but I’m a Solarian officer. My loyalty’s to the League and its vital interests, not theirs, and anything that makes the Manties’ supporters—any of their supporters—rethink their positions can’t be all bad. And whatever I may think of Floyd, he’s got a point about this op. Hajdu’s nostrils flared just a bit—a minute change of expression his staff would have recognized as his equivalent of a shouted profanity—at that thought. Neobarb neutrals are one thing, but someone who chooses to stab the League in the back when it’s his responsibility to represent it, deserves whatever the hell he gets. In spades.

  Still, even this cretin ought to realize it’s not just the Manties getting people killed. The Manties may be the ones pulling the trigger, but fair’s fair, Governor. It’s idiots like you—and certain other idiots in Old Chicago—who keep shoving our people in front of them before they do!

  In fairness, Floyd hadn’t gotten anyone killed…yet. Not for lack of trying, though. And while no actual blood had been shed, there’d been plenty of other consequences, including the sudden end of one of Hajdu’s personal friends’ career. Liam Pyun had made Floyd look bad five T-months ago by showing the moral courage to disobey the governor’s direct (and suicidal) orders in the Zunker System, and in the Solarian League, embarrassing a superior—especially one who deserved it—was the only truly unforgiveable sin.

  I’m sure he wishes we were headed back to Zunker to beat the hell out of the Manties who helped humiliate him, but maybe even he’s smart enough to realize the real basis for target selection has a hell of a lot more to do with hitting the Manties where they aren’t than going toe-to-toe with them.

  Not yet, anyway.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t say this, Admiral,” the commissioner continued, like a man confiding in a lifetime friend, “but there’s a part of me that actually hopes they’ll be stupid enough to refuse your demands. I’d just as soon not see anyone killed, but—” he tapped an index finger heavily on the table for emphasis “—it’s about frigging time people figured out there are consequences for supporting rogue regimes like Manticore.”

  “Indeed,” Vice Admiral Hajdu replied.

  HMS Phantom

  Task Group 110

  Beowulf System

  “I just got off the com with Admiral Truman,” Rear Admiral Jan Kotouč told the men and women around the briefing room table aboard HMS Phantom.

  A Nike-class battlecruiser, barely seven T-months old and built by Pardubice Shipbuilding in its Hephaestus module, Phantom was 2.5 million tons of lethality, the fastest and most deadly broadside-armed warship in the galaxy. The Royal Manticoran Navy needed about ten times as many of her as it actually had and, under other circumstances, it would have had most of them. Unfortunately, almost eighty of her sisters had died stillborn when the Yawata Strike tore Hephaestus and Vulcan apart.

  Kotouč was even better aware than most of how sorely those dead ships were missed, since he’d been slated to command an entire squadron of them. That squadron had died with Hephaestus, however, along with entirely too many of the men and women he’d already come to know. Eighty-five percent of the squadron’s six thousand personnel had been aboard ship or elsewhere on Hephaestus, preparing to take over their new ships from the yard dogs.

  None of them had survived.

  A charmed ship, he thought, looking at the shrouded, ghostly figure on Phantom’s bulkhead-mounted crest. That’s what they call her, anyway. And who knows? They may even be right.

  In the absence of the squadron’s other Nikes, the Admiralty was building him a replacement out of Saganami-Cs and Saganami-Bs, with emphasis on the latter. The Charlies were in almost as urgent demand as the Nikes themselves, and he’d been warned that he’d be lucky to see a single full-strength division of them. Unfortunately, it would be at least two more T-weeks before he even knew how many of them he’d be receiving. Although he’d been formally named as Commanding Officer (designate), Task Group 110.2, which would ultimately become a vest-pocket task force—and one cut for a generous-sized vest—all he had at the moment was Phantom and the Saganami-B-class cruisers Cinqueda, Shikomizue, and Talwar, supported by a single Roland-class destroyer, HMS Arngrim. He’d been supposed to receive the CLAC Vukodlak last
week, but she’d suffered a major impeller room engineering casualty two weeks before that, and the Beowulf yards would need at least another ten days to put her back in service. In fact, ten days would be something of a miracle, given that they’d been required to replace no less than four of her after beta nodes.

  So at the moment, he was a task group commander with all of five ships under his command.

  “The Admiral,” he continued now, “had just finished a conversation with Director of State Longacre, and Director of State Longacre had just finished a conversation with Special Representative Lambrou and Special Representative Tsakabikou. Which is the reason Admiral Truman was talking to me and the reason that I’m talking to you.”

  He smiled without very much humor.

  “We have our movement orders, people,” he said, and several of his officers stiffened in obvious surprise.

  “Movement orders, Sir?” Captain Jim Clarke repeated after the briefest of pauses, and Kotouč smiled a bit more broadly.

  “Movement orders,” he confirmed. “It would appear President Vangelis has changed his mind about an Allied presence in his star system.”

  Clarke sat back in his chair, eyebrows raised, and Kotouč shrugged.

  “It’s not really hard to understand why his administration didn’t want us there to begin with, Jim,” he pointed out. “We’ve been careful to keep any fleet units out of Beowulf orbit during the debate over the referendum. The Hypatian government had even better reasons to avoid any appearance that their referendum vote was coerced by foreign warships.”

  “Agreed, Sir.” Clarke nodded. “I’m just wondering what’s changed?”

  “According to Lambrou and Tsakabikou, what’s changed is that the most probable outcome of the referendum’s become…abundantly clear.”

  The rear admiral paused and looked around the briefing room until every head had nodded. Brad Lambrou and Sofronia Tsakabikou were the designated Hypatian “special representatives” to Beowulf. Technically, they were simply observers of the Beowulfan plebiscite. Actually, they were Adam Vangelis’s ambassadors to the star system with which he intended to seek formal political union as soon as his referendum validated his intent and Beowulf got its own, slower-paced plebiscite out of the way.

  “Apparently,” Kotouč continued, “something new has been added to the mix in Hypatia.”

  “That com conversation between MacArtney and Abruzzi, Sir?” Lieutenant Albamonte, Kotouč’s electronic warfare officer, asked. News of the leaked soundbite—and the first intimations of Hypatia’s fiery reaction to it—had reached Beowulf over a T-week ago.

  “Sounds like it.” Kotouč shrugged. “Never underestimate the pure fury that kind of talk can generate, Paul, whether there’s any serious intent behind it or not. I really doubt even MacArtney or Abruzzi thought they could get away with any kind of decapitation of the Hypatian government. Mind you, they are Sollies—and Mandarins, for that matter—so anything’s possible. But I’m pretty sure that if that’s even really their voices, they never had any intention of pursuing that nonsense as an actual policy. Nobody in Hypatia seems inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, however, which—let’s face it—isn’t such a bad thing from our viewpoint. A very…clarifying thing, moral outrage. If I had a dollar for every time emotion’s trumped reason—or, for that matter, gotten behind reason and pushed like hell—I’d be Klaus Hauptman.”

  Several people chuckled, and he grinned. Then his expression sobered.

  “Whether it was the mention of intervention battalions or something else, Lambrou and Tsakabikou told Director Longacre that it’s no longer a question of whether or not the referendum’s going to pass. It’s not even a question of whether or not it’ll be a landslide. The only real question in Vangelis’s mind now is how big a landslide it’ll be.

  “At any rate, he’s confident enough of the outcome—and, I think, that com conversation’s made him nervous enough about how the Mandarins are likely to respond when they hear the vote total—that he’s decided to go ahead and invite us now. The referendum’s scheduled for next Wednesday. If we leave within forty-eight hours, we’ll hit Hypatia sometime Thursday. That’ll keep us out of the system until after the vote’s counted—or until enough of it’s been counted to project the outcome with certainty, at any rate—but also close up the window in which the Sollies can just waltz into Hypatia unopposed.”

  “Sir, I understand what you’re saying,” Commander Markéta Ilkova, TG 110.2’s operations officer (designate) was five centimeters shorter than her admiral. She was also attractive, with red-hair and sharp, intelligent blue-green eyes. Indeed, Kotouč had discovered she was rather more attractive than he might have wished, given the restrictions of Article 119. She was also at least as competent as she was attractive…and obviously less than delighted by the news of their impending departure. “But we’re still all the task group you’ve got.”

  “And we’re more than enough to beat the holy living hell out of any light Solly squadron that comes our way,” Kotouč pointed out with just a bit more confidence than he actually felt. Then he sighed.

  “Admiral Truman doesn’t expect us to hold off a fleet the size of Filareta’s or Crandall’s, Markéta, but Director Longacre’s made the point—and it’s a valid one, people—that if Hypatia’s willing to pin a big target on its chest by standing up beside the Alliance, the least we can do is provide President Vangelis’s citizens with visible, tangible proof the Alliance will be just as determined to look after them as we are to look after our own star systems. Nobody in Hypatia’s likely to mistake five ships—even Queen’s ships—for a system-defense fleet. But what they’ll see are the lead elements of the task group that will be capable of defending them when it’s fully assembled. And it won’t hurt a bit for us to be there, getting a feel for the system astrography and establishing a working relationship with Vangelis and his people, while we wait for the rest of the task group to join us.”

  “Understood, Sir,” Ilkova said.

  “Admiral Truman assures me she’ll send forward at least four more Bravos within the next seven or eight days. And Vukodlak should be out of the yard dogs’ hands a couple of days after that. As soon as she’s finished testing her repairs, she’ll be sent to join us along with a freighter load or two of system-defense pods. And by the time she gets to Hypatia, we’ll have worked out the best way to use her and be ready to start deploying the pods.”

  Harrington House

  Jason Bay

  City of Landing

  Manticore Binary System

  Admiral Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington, Steadholder and Duchess Harrington, kicked off her house shoes, folded her legs under her on the chaise lounge, and dropped a pair of marshmallows into her hot chocolate.

  Manticore’s small moon, Thorson, was low on the western horizon, touching the banked clouds in that direction with dramatic bands of silver and ebony. Lightning flickered very occasionally—and very distantly—along that cloud wall, but the weather sats all insisted the bad weather wouldn’t reach Landing until sometime after dawn. In the meantime, there were no clouds over Jason Bay or the capital city, and the sky overhead glittered with a storm of stars. As always, there was a lot of orbital traffic, as well. In fact, it was much heavier than normal and the usual moving dots of the communication and solar collector satellites were accompanied by scores of other lights as near-Manticore space swarmed with repair ships, and temporary habitats for construction workers.

  A lot of repair ships and construction workers.

  The horrific damage and casualties of the Yawata Strike were barely six T-months in the past, but the replacement spacestations’ skeletons were already growing, far more quickly than they’d dared to hope for in their initial estimates of how long it would take to rebuild. Then again, their initial estimates hadn’t included the full-fledged support of the Beowulf System…or of the Republic of Haven. For that matter, they’d seriously underestimated the amount of civilian infra
structure that could be repurposed. And Lacoön had produced an unexpected side effect. An unexpected good side effect, that was, she thought with a mental grimace.

  At least three quarters of the Star Kingdom’s civilian shipbuilding industry had been co-located with the Navy yards on the major spacestations. From the perspective of efficiency and cost, that had been a no-brainer, and no one had ever anticipated something like the Yawata Strike. Attacks, yes, but not attacks nobody saw coming in time to take a single defensive measure. Just over half of all the rest of the Manticore Binary System’s civilian industry had also been located aboard one of the stations or in close enough proximity to be destroyed when Hephaestus and Vulcan were taken out. So it wasn’t all that surprising the immediate post-attack estimates had been so bleak.

  Haven’s return of the interned Grendelsbane construction force had been a huge help, as much from a morale perspective as from any other. The workers from the forty-seven percent of the civilian infrastructure which hadn’t been co-located with the spacestations had proved to be a far greater resource, however. And the fact that Lacoön had idled close to ninety percent of the massive Manticoran merchant marine had been another unexpected asset.

  Lacoön’s consequences for the Star Empire’s economy had been less dire—a little less dire—than initially predicted because no one had expected the Republic of Haven’s markets to be opened to Manticore. For that matter, they hadn’t anticipated the addition of the Talbott Quadrant. That hadn’t kept the loss of their markets in the Solarian League and—especially—their carrying trade in the League from being catastrophic for what had been by far the largest single component of Manticore’s economy. Quite a few of the smaller cartels were unlikely to survive, and even the major cartels like Hauptman were looking at enormous losses. The “act of war” clause in standard insurance policies meant most of the commercial enterprises on Hephaestus or Vulcan would be unable to recover their losses, and the…uncertainty (to put it mildly) of the Star Empire’s future relations with the Solarian League cast a serious cloud over the smaller shipping lines’ futures. The last estimate she’d seen predicted at least a third and possibly as many as half of the independent lines were going to go under.