by David Weber
On the other hand…
“Since you’re unofficially mentioning it to me, can I ask just why Tom feels his presence is required?”
“I wouldn’t say he thinks it’s ‘required,’ but he does think it could be worthwhile. I’m pretty sure L’anglais, personally, accepts what we’ve told her about Mesa. Having Zilwicki and Harahap personally brief her with treecat lie detectors looking on was one of your better notions, and God knows you’ve had enough of those over the years!”
Hamish smiled warmly at her, but then his smile faded just a bit.
“Having said that, I’m not sure she doesn’t still have a few lingering doubts about whether or not Tenth Fleet—and she includes Tourville in that, I’m pretty sure—may have been…overly hasty in the way it moved on Mesa to begin with. And Theisman tells me Alenka Borderwijk’s picking up on a few rumbles from some of TF Two’s other senior officers. Below the squadron CO level, they still aren’t cleared to be fully briefed on everything we know. Given how little we really do know, the fact that they aren’t cleared for all of it leaves a lot of room for…unhappy speculation, let’s call it. Tom wants a little quality time to do some speculation-squashing.”
Honor’s nod of understanding wasn’t completely happy. She understood what Theisman was thinking, and she could see a lot of arguments in favor of keeping his efforts “in the family,” as it were. She was irked by the fact that she’d apparently missed whatever Borderwijk had picked up upon, however. And she rather wished Theisman had mentioned it to her before discussing it with Hamish.
“I’m pretty sure Tom plans on mentioning this to you himself at the Palace tomorrow,” Hamish said, as if he’d read her mind. “He only mentioned it to me this morning when I asked him if he wanted to make the trip with me in Cromarty.”
“Her Majesty’s letting you use Cromarty?” Honor laughed. “Talk about delusions of grandeur!”
“Excuse me? You think there’s some reason why someone of my stupendous seniority and toweringly noble birth shouldn’t use the royal yacht?”
“Oh, no. I don’t think there’s a reason why you shouldn’t!”
“I see that you are, sadly, no respecter of persons, Duchess Harrington,” Hamish said sorrowfully, then chuckled. “Actually, we’re going to need something at least Cromarty’s size, given all the people and staff will be taking along. Thomas Caparelli, Pat Givens, Victor Dyson, Lucien Cortez, me, Francine Maurier, Tony, Tyler Abercrombie…” He shook his head. “Seems like damned near two thirds of Landing’s going to be shut down, and that doesn’t even count the other folks we’ll be taking along. Michael Mayhew, his ambassador—even the ambassador from Torch!”
“My God, Hamish!” Emily said. “How in heaven’s name will you get anything accomplished with that many cooks busy stirring the broth?”
“Oh, we’ll be breaking down into subcommittees. I haven’t seen the detailed agenda yet, but the actual working committees will be a lot smaller than you’d think just from the guest list. Some of us will have seats on more than one of them, but I think they’ve actually managed to divide the areas of responsibility logically enough—and keep each subcommittee small enough—it really will get a lot accomplished.”
“And each subcommittee will be in the same place if they need some sort of quick feedback from one of the others.” Honor nodded in approval. “I hate conferences, myself, but this one’s overdue, really. The truth is, we’ve needed to fundamentally reassess our strategic assumptions from the moment we found out about Operation Buccaneer, and nothing that’s happened since has made that any less true.”
“Exactly.” Hamish nodded. “That’s another reason I wish you were going to be there, too. We do need to reassess all of our assumptions, and the truth is that you’ve got a better grasp of them than ninety percent of the other people I just mentioned.”
“Nonsense.” She snorted. “I don’t think I’d be exactly useless, but at least a dozen of those ‘other people’ are a lot better informed than I am outside Grand Fleet, Hamish, and you know it. The lot of you will do just fine without my own invaluable input!”
“Maybe, but that won’t keep me from feeling lonely.” He let his voice waver on the final word, and his head drooped mournfully.
“Kick him for me, Honor?” Emily requested.
“My pleasure,” Honor assured her, and did so.
“Bullies!” He rubbed his kneecap. “Spouse abusers!”
“Of course we are.” Emily looked at him in astonishment. “You didn’t understand how that works?”
“Then maybe it’s a good thing Honor will be the one staying home to mind the store,” Hamish said with a laugh.
“I’ll try to take that as a compliment,” Honor told him. “But I will be sorry not to see Uncle Jacques and Grandmother. Give them both a hug for me. Especially Uncle Jacques.”
“I’ll pass along the sentiment,” Hamish said dryly, “but if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just reserve any hugs for the ladies in my life.”
“What? Not for Raoul?” Emily demanded.
“Oh, and for him, too, of course!”
“Wise decision,” Honor told him. “A very wise decision.”
SLNS Québec
Task Force 790
Solarian League Navy
“—so everything looks pretty good, Sir,” Rear Admiral Rutgers said. “I know all of us would feel more comfortable if we had some operational experience using Hasta against live opposition, but that’s sort of the nature of a ‘secret weapon,’ I suppose.” He smiled thinly. “Not much of a secret, if you’ve used it against the other side before, and I’m all in favor of the element of surprise! That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be happier with better projections for how well the Manties’ systems might see Hasta coming, but at least we know our systems have a hell of a time finding it at any sort of extended range.”
Vincent Capriotti allowed himself a small smile of his own. There might be a bit of a kid whistling in the graveyard about Rutgers’s humor, he reflected, but the ops officer had a point.
“I’d have to agree with Lyang-tau, Sir,” Vice Admiral Helland said. “I understand the ops plan’s logic, and the profile’s going to keep us from getting in too deep. But we’ve all had to admit the Manties’ stealth systems are better than ours, and we don’t have any confirmation their sensor systems haven’t been improved in tandem with that. Their missile defense has damned well gotten a hell of a lot better to keep pace with their range and throw weight! I’d be a lot happier myself if we had a better feel for how likely Hasta really is to get in undetected.”
The strawberry-blond chief of staff didn’t sound happy to find herself concurring with Rutgers, Capriotti noted. Their own Cachalot operation had been a walkover, despite Rutgers’s reservations, and she’d done quite a bit of crowing in its immediate aftermath. She hadn’t been too heavy-handed about it, but she’d gotten her jabs in, and her initial response when Capriotti had been named to command Operation Fabius had been to see it as the just due of the victors of Cachalot. But that had been when Fabius was basically a contingency plan. One that might be executed, but probably wouldn’t be.
The ops officer—true to form—had been less impressed than she with their own success, and his relationship with her hadn’t improved when they crossed swords over Cachalot’s outcome. But that had been before she’d read Thomas Yountz’s after-action report and discovered what had happened at places named Hypatia and the Prime Terminus. Before she’d admitted to herself, little though she’d wanted to, that TF 783’s success had resulted at least as much from good fortune as from skill. Her breezy confidence had undergone a slight revision since, and now that Fabius had gone from contingency to active operation, she—like Rutgers—was less than delighted by the notion of relying so heavily upon a weapon which had never been tested in combat to attack one of the most heavily defended star systems in human history.
Sure she is, Capriotti thought now. Nobody ever said Angelica wasn
’t smart, so it’s no wonder she’s no happier than Lyang-tau about playing guinea pig with Hasta at Beowulf, of all damned places. But face it, Vincent! She may be worried about that, but what she’s pissed about is that we’re only a “task force.”
He was forced to stifle an inappropriate chuckle at the thought, yet it was true. Helland was of the opinion that any force committed to an attack of this magnitude and importance ought to be designated a fleet, not a mere task force. And as she’d pointed out to him rather snippily—and privately, thank God!—there were over four hundred ships in TF 790’s wall of battle. Unfortunately, all of them were battlecruisers, not superdreadnoughts, and the Navy had decided long ago that only a force which contained actual ships-of-the-wall qualified as a “fleet.” Personally, Capriotti didn’t give a damn what they were designated. What he cared about was actual combat power—and, he acknowledged, the acceleration to get out from under if things went to hell on them.
And even if Fabius goes perfectly—which no military op in history ever has—speed is still the name of the game, he reminded himself. If everything works the way it’s supposed to, this will be one of the shortest decisive battles in history, and we need fast footwork to make that happen. Of course, if everything doesn’t go perfectly, it’ll be an even shorter battle.
At which point speed will be really important!
And whether they were a fleet or a mere task force, they were also two subjective days—just over three days, by the rest of the galaxy’s clocks—out of the Sol System. They’d reach Beowulf early the day after tomorrow…at which point they’d find out just how good Hasta really was.
“I’m glad we seem to be in good shape,” he said out loud. “And, to be honest, I’m glad to see everyone seems to be bearing in mind that there are a lot of unknowns in the situation. Having said that, I’ve been giving a little more thought to how we want to deploy our recon platforms, especially to help with the background ‘clutter’ to hide the Hasta launch.
“Lyang-tau, it’s occurred to me that if we deliberately—”
Private Yacht Anachronism
Beowulf System
“Honor didn’t warn me about your toy, Jacques,” Hamish Alexander-Harrington said. Samantha lay sprawled across his lap, and he rubbed her ears gently as he gazed around the flight deck.
“My ‘toy,’ is it?” Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou asked mildly. He arched a haughty eyebrow and the ’cat on the back of his flight couch bleeked in amusement. “I’ll have you know I acquired this vessel as a legitimate business expense.”
“A business expense?!” White Haven said. “This has got to be the most…ostentatious thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m astonished the toilet seats aren’t plated in gold!”
“I tried that,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou told him earnestly, “but it was so damned cold every time I sat down I had it stripped back off. You don’t think the vibrating near-mink lining is an adequate substitute?”
White Haven laughed, but the truth was that his comments weren’t far off the mark. Honor’s runabout in Grayson was almost as big as Anachronism, and considerably newer, but Honor was a naval officer, and while Jamie Candless was perfectly comfortable, she was also a no-frills, all-business vessel.
Anachronism wasn’t. Or she was about the farthest thing imaginable from “no-frills,” at least. She was a rich man’s toy, from sleek prow to stern-mounted docking bay. Her décor was sumptuous, her passenger suites gave opulence a whole new meaning, there was an actual water fall in the luxurious main saloon, and any cordon bleu chef would have traded his first two offspring for her galley.
And that was only her interior. The exterior was even worse.
There wasn’t a single centimeter of her length that didn’t gleam under bright, self-polishing smart paint which displayed a constantly changing color scheme, and the architect who’d laid out her lines for Benton-Ramirez y Chou must have thought he was out of his mind. There was no conceivable need to streamline a forty-nine thousand-ton space-going craft which would never enter atmosphere, but Anachronism had not only the needle sharp, aerodynamic prow of one of Saganami Island’s Javelin training aircraft but sharply swept wings—wings that doubled as radiators to dispose of waste heat when her wedge was down, admittedly—and purely decorative vertical stabilizers. She even had false portholes along her sides, above each “wing,” and what looked like air intakes for atmosphere-breathing turbines on either side of her bow.
She was, in short, the most ridiculous looking thing he’d ever seen in his life.
“Are you seriously telling me you managed to charge this…this flying brothel off on your taxes?” he demanded now.
“Oh, I did much better than that,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said smugly. “I got the system government to pay for all the really good bits.”
“You did what?” White Haven stared at him in disbelief.
“I got the government to pay for it.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou smiled broadly. Then his expression sobered.
“Seriously, Hamish. Somebody in the Biological Survey Corps decided that if my cover was going to be the idle layabout, dilettante diplomat it said I was, then I should look the part. And since everyone knows the Benton-Ramirez y Chou clan is filthy rich—not all of us are, by the way, whatever ‘everyone knows’—I should probably buy something ridiculous to help that along.” He shrugged. “Well, I’d been an SCA member for twenty or thirty T-years at that point, so when The Powers That Were decreed I should commission something only a rich, bored, totally frivolous idiot would want, I decided to re-create an Ante Diaspora airliner—or everyone’s popular impression of one, at least—on a somewhat larger scale. And the BSC picked up the tab. Not the complete tab, but the Corps did pay for the cosmetic mods, and they provided the, ah…security features, let’s say, out of their operating budget.”
White Haven shook his head slowly as he realized Benton-Ramirez y Chou was serious. He really had had the audacity to “let” the BSC pay for his toy. And, in all fairness, calling it a “toy” was probably a bit unfair.
A tiny bit, anyway.
Hamish Alexander-Harrington was two months shy of his hundred and eighth birthday, and he’d been a professional naval officer for almost ninety T-years. In that time, he’d seen more spacecraft, of every imaginable size, than he could possibly have counted, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou had checked him out thoroughly on the yacht’s systems before he’d listed him as the second pilot which was now mandatory on all impeller-drive craft operating in the vicinity of inhabited planets or their orbital infrastructure. In the process, White Haven had discovered that however ridiculous she looked, Anachronism was as well-found and maintained an intrasystem vessel as he’d ever seen. And he’d been impressed by those “security features,” too. Like the discreetly concealed lasers whose emitters were hidden in those false air intakes. He’d almost missed the fact that the “auxiliary astrogation plot” was actually a sophisticated tactical plot, built in to help manage not simply those lasers but also Anachronism’s two counter-missile tubes and an ECM suite which was probably as good as the one installed in Planetary Chairman Benton-Ramirez’s official transport.
Anachronism really did look ridiculous, and no one would ever confuse Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s yacht with a Shrike, but there were some sharp teeth under all that sheep’s clothing.
“I know Honor doesn’t talk about it much,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou continued, reaching back to scratch Bark Chewer’s Bane’s ears. “For that matter, I don’t think she even thinks about it much, thanks to Allison.” He smiled faintly. “My sister was determined to get as far away from any Beowulf ‘dynasties’ as she possibly could, and she did a damned good job of it. So I’m sure that until she fell into Benjamin Mayhew’s clutches, Honor really did think of herself as a simple yeoman’s daughter. Not—” his expression sobered slightly “—that anyone who ever knew Alfred or a single thing about his service record ever thought of him as a ‘simple’ anything.” He shook his head. “Not e
veryone gets to know his twin is married to someone who’d storm the gates of hell—literally, not figuratively—to get her back again.”
White Haven nodded silently. He hadn’t known about Doctor Alfred Harrington’s Marine career—or how he’d originally met Allison Benton-Ramirez y Chou—until he and Emily married Honor. Now he did. And given who her parents were, perhaps it wasn’t surprising Honor had grown up to be who she was.
“Anyway,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou went on, “the thing is that we have what are commonly referred to as ‘connections.’ I’m sure the Alexander family has them back in the Star Empire, too. So it wasn’t as hard as it might have been for someone else for me to convince the SDF to sneak the weapons into Anachronism. And while I never had any intention of using her operationally, I did take a certain comfort from knowing that if I had to—here in Beowulf, at least—I could. In fact, I had her freighted to Sebastapol for the Gomez Cup Race when we were conducting an op there. Took second place, too, and it really was the perfect cover. The bastards we were after never even saw us coming. Besides,” he smiled again, this time devilishly, “building her was so much fun.”
“My God, if Emily and I had only known about the sad mental state of the family we were marrying into!”
“Don’t blame me! How long did you know Honor before Emily got the two of you off the decicredit?” Benton-Ramirez y Chou rolled his eyes. “If anybody should’ve known what you were getting into, it was you.”
“True, true,” White Haven conceded.
He gave Samantha’s ears another rub, then turned to lay her across the back of his own flight couch as a proximity alarm pinged.