Mission of Honor

Chapter Nineteen

"All right, Darryl," Sandra Crandall said grimly. "I suppose it's time. Let's go ahead and talk to these people."

"Yes, Ma'am," Captain Darryl Chatfield, her staff communications officer replied, and turned to the attention light at his flag deck station which had been blinking for a studiously ignored forty-five minutes.

Task Force 496, Solarian League Navy, lay just outside the twenty-two light-minute hyper limit of the G0 star known as Spindle. The planet of Flax—the capital of both the star system and the Talbott Quadant itself—lay nine light-minutes inside the limit, well beyond the range of any shipboard weapon. Which didn't change the fact that TF 496 was in flagrant violation of the territorial limit recognized by centuries of interstellar law. No government could have expected to actually police every cubic light-second of a sphere twelve light-hours across, yet warships were still legally required to repond to the challenges and requests for identification of any star nation once they crossed its "twelve-hour" limit. They were also legally required to acknowledge and obey any lawful instructions they received from that star nation, even if the star nation in question were some dinky little single-system neobarb in the back of beyond. They were normally granted at least some leeway in exactly how quickly they responded, but they were still supposed to honor their legal obligations in a reasonably timely fashion.

Which was precisely the reason Sandra Crandall had waited a carefully considered three-quarters of an hour before deigning to respond to the Manticorans' challenges, Commander Shavarshyan reflected. Not to mention the reason she'd decided to conduct her first contact with them from such an extended range. She could say all she wanted in her official report about remaining far enough out to respect the Spindle hyper limit in order to preclude any avoidable incidents, but the real reason was to make the Manties sweat during the nine-minute transmission lag each way. Conducting any sort of official conversation with that kind of delay built in between exchanges came under the heading of calculated insult—additional calculated insult, given her refusal even to identify herself as legally required—and she hadn't bothered to hide her enjoyment of the thought, at least in her private meetings with her senior staffers.

After all , he thought, it would never do to have these neobarbs thinking we take them seriously, would it? He shook his head mentally. I think she'll take it as a personal failure if she misses a single opportunity to piss one of them off. And if she finds out she has missed one, I'm sure she'll go back and —

His thoughts broke off rather abruptly, and his lips twitched with a sudden and utterly inappropriate desire to grin as a shortish, slender man with thinning gray hair appeared on the master com display. Instead of the cringing, perspiring poor devil Crandall had expected to discover bending anxiously over his com, imploring her to respond to his terrified communications pleas while he waited for the looming Solarian juggernaut to take note of his wretched existence, the man on the display wasn't even looking into his own pickup. Instead, he was angled two-thirds of the way away from his terminal, tipped back in his chair, heels propped on the seat of another chair which had been turned to face him, while he gazed calmly at the book reader in his lap. A book reader which was aligned—not, Shavarshyan suspected, just coincidentally—so that a sharp eyed observer could look over his shoulder and recognize a novel about the psychically gifted detective Garrett Randall by the highly popular Darcy Lord.

The man on the display went right on looking at his book reader, hit the page advance, then twitched as somebody outside the field of his own pickup hissed something in what had to be a carefully audible stage whisper. He glanced over his shoulder at his own display, then straightened, bookmarked his place, turned to face the com, pressed a button to terminate what had obviously been a purely automated repeating challenge, and smiled brightly.

"Well, there you are!" he said cheerfully.

For a moment, Shavarshyan cherished the hope apoplexy might carry Crandall off. Her demise would have to improve the situation. Although, he reminded himself conscientiously, that might be wishful thinking on his part. Admiral Dunichi Lazlo, BatRon 196's CO, her second-in-command, was no great prize . . . and no mental giant, either. Still, watching Crandall froth at the mouth and collapse in convulsions would have afforded the Frontier Fleet commander no end of personal satisfaction.

His hopes were disappointed, however.

"I am Admiral Sandra Crandall, Solarian League Navy," she grated.

"I see." The man on the display nodded politely, eighteen minutes later. "And I'm Gregor O'Shaughnessy, of Governor Medusa's staff. What can I do for you this afternoon, Admiral?"

He asked the question cheerfully enough, but as soon as he had, he nodded equally cheerfully to the pickup, turned back to the other chair, put his feet back up in it, and switched his book reader back on. Which made a sort of sense, if not exactly polite sense, given the two-way lag. After all, he had to do something while he waited. Unfortunately, Crandall didn't seem to feel that way about it. For just a moment she resembled an Old Earth bulldog who couldn't understand why the house cat draped along the sunny window sill was completely unfazed by her own threatening presence on the other side of the crystoplast, and her blood pressure had to be attaining interesting levels as O'Shaughnessy did to her precisely what she'd intended to do to him . Then she gave herself an almost visible mental shake and leaned closer to her own terminal.

"I'm here in response to your Navy's unprovoked aggression against the Solarian League," she told O'Shaughnessy icily.

"There must be some mistake, Admiral," he replied in a calm reasonable tone, looking back up from his novel again after the inevitable delay. Which did not, Shavarshayn thought, add to Admiral Crandall's sunny cheerfulness. "There hasn't been any unprovoked aggression against any Solarian citizens of which I'm aware."

"I'm referring, as you know perfectly well, to the deliberate and unprovoked destruction of the battlecruiser Jean Bart , with all hands, in the New Tuscany System two and a half months ago," she half-snapped, then slashed one finger at Chatfield. The com officer cut the visual from her end, and she turned her chair to face Bautista.

"This bastard's just asking for it, Pйpй!" she snarled, still watching the Manticoran perusing his novel.

"Which will only make it even more satisfying when he finally gets it," the chief of staff replied. Crandall grunted and looked at Ou-yang.

"I don't think this brainstorm about 'negotiating' is going to work out very well, Zhing-wei." It wasn't quite a snarl, this time, although it remained closer to that than to a mere growl.

"Probably not, Ma'am," the operations officer acknowledged. "On the other hand, it was never for their benefit, was it?"

"No, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable."

"Well, Ma'am, at least it's giving us plenty of time to take a look at what they've got in orbit around the planet," Ou-yang pointed out. "That's worthwhile in its own right, I think."

"I suppose so," Crandall admitted irritably.

"What do they have, Zhing-wei?" Bautista inquired, and Shavarshyan wondered—briefly—if the chief of staff was deliberately trying to divert Crandall's ire from the Manticorans. But the question flitted through his brain and away again as quickly as it had come. If anyone aboard Joseph Buckley was even more pissed off at the Manties than Crandall, that person was Vice Admiral Pйpй Bautista.

"Unless we want to take the remotes in close enough the Manties may pick them up and nail them, we're not going to get really good resolution," Ou-yang replied. "We are picking up a superdreadnought and a squadron—well eight, anyway—of those big heavy cruisers or small battlecruisers or whatever of theirs, but I'm pretty sure that isn't everything they've got."

"Why?" Crandall sounded at least a bit calmer as she focused on Ou-yang's report.

"We've got some fairly persistent 'sensor ghosts,'" the ops officer told her. "They're just a bit too localized and just a shade too strong for me to believe the platforms are manufacturing them. The Manties' EW capabilities are supposed to be quite good, so I'm willing to bet at least some of those 'sensor ghosts' are actually stealthed units."

"Makes sense, Ma'am," Bautista offered. "They probably want to keep us guessing about their actual strength." He snorted harshly. "Maybe they think they can pull off some sort of 'ambush!'"

"On the other hand, they might just be trying to make us worry about where the rest of their ships are," Ou-yang pointed out. The chief of staff frowned, and she shrugged. "Until we actually turned up, they couldn't have been confident about what kind of strength we'd have. They may have expected a considerably smaller force and figured we'd be leery of pressing on when the rest of their fleet might turn up behind us at any moment."

Shavarshyan started to open his mouth, then closed it, then drew a deep breath and opened it again.

"Is it possible," he asked in a carefully neutral tone, "that what they're really trying to do is to convince us they're even weaker than they actually are in order to make us overconfident?"

He knew, even before the question was out of his mouth, that the majority of his audience was going to find the very idea preposterous. For that matter, he didn't really expect it to be true himself. Unfortunately, suggesting possibly overlooked answers to questions was one of an intelligence officer's functions.

Crandall and Bautista, however, didn't seem to appreciate that minor fact. In fact, they both looked at him in obvious disbelief that even a Frontier Fleet officer could have offered such a ludicrous suggestion.

"We've got seventy-one ships-of-the-wall , Commander," the chief of staff said after a moment in an elaborately patient tone. "The last thing these people want to do is actually fight us! They know as well as we do that any 'battle' would be a very short, very unhappy experience for them. Under the circumstances, the last thing they'd want would be to make us even more confident than we already are. Don't you think they'd be more interested in encouraging us to feel cautious ?"

Shavarshyan's jaw tightened. It was hardly a surprise, however; he'd known how Bautista would react before he ever spoke. That, unfortunately, hadn't relieved him of his responsibility to do the speaking in question. But then, to his surprise, someone else spoke up.

"Actually, Pйpй," Ou-yang Zhing-wei said, "Commander Shavarshyan may have a point." The chief of staff looked at her incredulously, and she shrugged. "Not in the way you're thinking. As you say, they can't want to fight us, but they may have orders to do just that. And I suggest all of us bear in mind that this particular batch of neobarbs has been fighting a war for the better part of twenty T-years."

"And that experience is somehow supposed to make battlecruisers and heavy cruisers capable of taking on superdreadnoughts?" Bautista demanded.

"I didn't say that," Ou-yang replied coolly. "What I'm suggesting is that whether they want to fight us or not, there probably aren't a whole lot of shy and retiring Manty flag officers these days. Hell, look at what this Gold Peak's already done! So if they've got orders to fight, I expect they'll follow them. And in that case, it's entirely possible they'd want us to underestimate their strength. It might not help them a lot , but when the odds are this bad, I'd play for any edge I could find, if I were in their place."

"I see your point, Zhing-wei," Crandall acknowledged, "but—"

"Excuse me, Ma'am," Captain Chatfield said. "Two minutes to the Manties' response."

"Thank you, Darryl." Crandall nodded to him, then looked back at Bautista and Ou-yang. "There may be something to this, Pйpй. At any rate, let's not automatically assume there isn't . I want you and Zhing-wei to give me an analysis based on the possibility that all of her sensor ghosts are those big-assed battlecruisers. And another based on the possibility that all of them are superdreadnoughts that managed to get here from Manticore faster than we got here from Meyers. Understood?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Bautista acknowledged, although it was evident to Shavarshyan that he continued to put very little credence in the suggestion.

Crandall turned back to face the com display and composed her features just as O'Shaughnessy nodded from it.

"Oh, I'm perfectly well aware of what happened in New Tuscany, of course, Admiral," O'Shaughnessy said with an affable smile. Then his eyes narrowed, and his voice hardened ever so slightly. "I'm just not aware of any unprovoked aggression on the Star Empire's part."

He looked out of the display at her for another heartbeat, then deliberately cocked his chair back and returned his attention to his novel.

Crandall seemed to swell visibly, and Shavarshyan closed his eyes. He wasn't especially fond of Manties himself, but he had to admire the skill with which O'Shaughnessy had planted his picador's dart. On the other hand, he also had to wonder what the lunatic thought he was doing, baiting the CO of such a powerful force.

"Unless you wish me to move immediately upon your pathetic little planet, I advise you to stop splitting semantic hairs, Mr. O'Shaughnessy," Crandall said, as if underlining Shavarshyan's last thought, and her expression was as ugly as her tone. "You know damned well why I'm here!"

"I'm afraid that since I'm not a mind reader, and since you haven't bothered to respond to any of our earlier communication attempts, I really don't have a clue as to the reasons for this visit," O'Shaughnessy told her coolly eighteen minutes later, looking up from his reader once more. "Perhaps the Foreign Ministry protocolists back in Old Chicago will be able to figure it out for me when they play back the recording of your edifying conversation which will undoubtedly be attached to Her Majesty's next note to Prime Minister Gyulay."

Crandall twitched as if he'd tossed a glass of ice water over her, and her face turned a full shade darker at his none too subtle reminder that whatever her ultimate intentions might be, this was at least theoretically an exchange between official representatives of two sovereign star nations.

"Very well, Mr. O'Shaughnessy," she said with icy precision three or four fulminating seconds later. "In order to avoid any misunderstandings—any additional misunderstandings, I should say—I would like to speak to . . . 'Governor Medusa' personally."

She slashed her finger at Chatfield again, bringing up Joseph Buckley 's wallpaper in place of her own image. Then she went a step further, pressing the stud that cut off the Manticorans' video feed as well, and glared at the blank display.

No one offered any theories this time as the admiral sat stolidly and silently in her command chair. Bautista, Ou-yang, and Ou-yang's assistants were poring over the take from the remote reconnaissance platforms, and Shavarshyan suspected they were just as happy to have something else to do while their admiral fulminated. He wished he did. In fact, he punched up his own threat analysis files and sat earnestly—and obviously—studying the already thoroughly studied and over-studied data. The minutes dragged by until Chatfield cleared his throat.

"One minute to the Manties' response, Ma'am," he said in an extraordinarily neutral tone.

"Turn it back on," Crandall growled, and the display came back to life.

O'Shaughnessy had been reading his book again until Crandall's demand to speak to Medusa actually reached him nine minutes earlier. Now he looked up.

"I see." He gazed at her for a moment, then nodded. "I'll see if the Governor's available," he said, and his image was replaced by the Star Empire of Manticore's coat of arms.

The silence on Joseph Buckley 's flag bridge was intense as this time the Manties turned on their wallpaper. As the single Frontier Fleet outsider present, what Shavarshyan felt was mainly dark, bitter amusement as he sensed the conflicting tides within Crandall's staffers. They were only too well aware of her fury, and most of them obviously wanted to express their own anger to show how deeply they agreed with her. But at the same time, a countervailing survival instinct left them hesitant to launch into a flood of vituperation at O'Shaughnessy's arrogance for fear of drawing Crandall's ire down upon themselves when her frustration lashed out at the nearest target of opportunity. It was an interesting dilemma, he reflected, since their silence might also be construed as an effort to avoid any suggestion that O'Shaughnessy had just humiliated Crandall by putting her in her place.

He was just making a mental bet with himself that Bautista would be driven to speak before Ou-yang when the Manticoran wallpaper disappeared and a smallish woman with dark, alert, almond-shaped eyes appeared on the master display in its place. He recognized Dame Estelle Matsuko, Baroness Medusa, from his file imagery, and she looked remarkably composed. But there was something about the glitter in those dark eyes . . . .

Not a woman to take lightly, Shavarshyan decided. Particularly not after the exchanges between O'Shaugnessy and Crandall. In fact, her obvious self-control only made her more dangerous. And if anger sparkled in the depth of those eyes, there was no more sign of fear than there'd been in O'Shaughnessy's, as far as he could see. Indeed, she looked much too much like the matador, advancing into the ring only after her picadores had well and truly galled the bull. Which, given that she was clearly not an idiot and had to be aware of the minor fact that she had nine obviously hostile squadrons of ships-of-the-wall deliberately violating her star system's territoriality, made Hago Shavarshyan extremely nervous.

"Good afternoon, Admiral Crandall," she said frostily. "What can I do for the Solarian League Navy?"

"You can begin by surrendering the person of the flag officer who murdered Admiral Josef Byng and three thousand other Solarian military personnel," Crandall said flatly. "After that, we can discuss the surrender of every warship involved in that incident, and the matter of reparations to both the Solarian League and to the survivors of our murdered spacers."

This time, neither party was prepared to retreat behind its wallpaper. Personally, Shavarshyan thought that was fairly foolish, given that they couldn't reduce the awkward intervals between exchanges even if they'd wanted to. Yet if it was arguably foolish for Medusa, it was much more obviously foolish for Crandall. She was an admiral in the Solarian League Navy—a Battle Fleet admiral—on what she'd intended from the beginning to be a punitive expedition, and there she sat, locking eyes—uselessly—with a com image which was nine minutes old by the time she even saw it. The image of the official representative of the star nation of neo-barbarians she'd set out to chastise.

"I see," Medusa said finally. "And you think I'm going to submit to your demands because—?"

She cocked her head slightly and raised polite eyebrows.

"Unless you're considerably more foolish than I believe," Crandall's tone made it obvious no one could be more foolish than she believed Medusa was, "the nine squadrons of ships-of-the-wall just outside your hyper limit should suggest at least one reason."

Yet another endless interval dragged past; then Medusa nodded calmly.

"Which means I should assume this enumeration of warships is intended to communicate the threat that you're prepared to commit yet more acts of deliberate aggression against the Star Empire of Manticore?"

"Which means I am prepared to embrace whatever means are necessary to safeguard the sovereignty of the Solarian League, as every Solarian flag officer's standing orders require," Crandall retorted.

It was remarkable, Shavarshyan thought, still studiously pondering the facts and figures on his own display, how an eighteen-minute wait between exchanges undeniably robbed threats of immediacy and power while simultaneously distilling the pure essence of anger behind them.

"First of all, Admiral Crandall," Medusa said calmly after the inevitable delay, "no one's transgressed against the sovereignty of the Solarian League. We've simply taken exception to the massacre of our ships and our personnel and insisted that the man responsible for that massacre answer to the applicable provisions of interstellar law. Interstellar law, I might add, which has been formally recognized and codified by the Solarian League in several solemn treaties.

"Admiral Gold Peak gave Admiral Byng every opportunity to avoid any additional violence, and when he refused to take any of them, she fired on only one of his ships—the one he happened to be aboard at the moment, to be precise—when she could just as easily have fired on all of them. She also ceased fire and extended yet another opportunity to avoid bloodshed—further bloodshed—after Admiral Byng's . . . demise."

Crandall's expression was livid, but Medusa continued in that same tone of deadly calm.

"Secondly," she said, "we happen to be in possession of the file copies from Admiral Sigbee's flagship of both her own and Admiral Byng's standing orders, which I presume must have been at least generally similar to your own. Oddly enough, there's nothing in them about committing blatant acts of war against sovereign star nations. Aside from little things like 'Case Buccaneer,' that is, but we won't go into that particular 'contingency plan' at this point. Unless you insist on discussing Frontier Fleet, OFS, piracy, and 'disappeared' merchant ships officially and on the record, of course."

Her dark eyes glittered, and Shavarshyan inhaled sharply as the Manticoran's steely smile challenged Crandall to press her on that point in an official exchange both sides knew was being recorded.

"I make this point only to clarify the fact that we're well aware you're acting at the present moment on your own authority," Medusa continued after a moment."Mind you, I'm equally well aware that one of the functions of a flag officer this far from her star nation's capital is to do precisely that in moments of crisis. However, you would do well to consider that in this instance the Star Empire of Manticore has already communicated formally with the Solarian League on Old Terra about both New Tuscan incidents. I am in receipt of copies of the League's official responses to those communiques, should you care to view them. And if you would care to avail yourself of the Lynx Terminus, we would be quite happy to send your own dispatches directly to Old Chicago, should you wish to seek guidance from your superiors before we have another of those . . . misunderstandings, I believe you called them? I suspect those superiors might not be entirely pleased if some avoidable 'misunderstanding ' on your own part leads to a further regrettable escalation of the tensions between the Solarian League and the Star Empire."

From the corner of his eye, Shavarshyan saw Ou-yang Zhing-wei purse her lips as that salvo went home. Medusa's confirmation that Manticore had not simply captured Sigbee's databases but hacked their most secure files was bad enough. The Manticoran's pointed suggestion that she knew far more about the League's official reaction to New Tuscany than Crandall possibly could had been even worse. Whether Bautista and Crandall were prepared to face the implications or not, Ou-yang clearly recognized the diplomatic minefield Task Force 496 was about to enter. And, just as clearly, she understood that no naval officer's connections were so good she couldn't be thrown to the wolves if she screwed up too egregiously. Crandall, fortunately for her blood pressure, if not for anything else, was too busy glaring at Medusa to notice the ops officer's expression. It was, perhaps, less fortunate that she was so totally infuriated that she also completely ignored Medusa's offer to put her into direct communication with her superiors on Old Terra. Clearly, the baroness was telling her it wasn't too late to take a deep breath and back down under cover of the diplomatic smokescreen of seeking guidance from above.

It was a pity Crandall wasn't paying attention.

"I have no intention of sitting here for a solid T-month while you and your 'Star Empire' redeploy your own warships, Madame Governor," the admiral said coldly. "My standing orders require what I believe my standing orders require, and the terms I've already stated are the minimum I'm prepared to accept."

And then she sat there again, glaring at Medusa's image, while rage and fury fermented inside her.

"And if I should happen to reject your 'minimum terms'?"

Shavarshyan couldn't decide whether the ever so slight curl of Medusa's lip was deliberate or an involuntary response which had escaped her formidable self-control. In either case, the unstated contempt came through quite nicely.

"In that case, Governor ," Crandall responded, "I will advance upon the inhabited planet of your star system. I will engage and destroy every military starship in the system. And after I've done that, I'll land Marines on your planet and secure control of it in the name of the Solarian League until an appropriate civilian administration can be set up by the Office of Frontier Security. And, I feel confident, Frontier Security will continue to administer this world—and every other planet of your so-called Talbott Quadrant—until such time as the Solarian League's just requirements for accountability and redress are fully satisfied."

She paused very briefly, her smile thin and cold, as she deliberately raised the stakes. Then she continued in that same, cold voice.

"I'm prepared to to give you the opportunity to comply with my reasonable demands without further loss of life or destruction, but the Solarian League Navy doesn't intend to permit an act of war against the League to pass unanswered. I have no doubt you have indeed been in communication with the League. I also have no doubt of where my own duty lies, however. Because I have no desire to see additional avoidable bloodshed, I will give you precisely three T-days from the moment my ships made their alpha translations to accept my terms. If you do not do so within that time, I will cross the limit and proceed exactly as I've described, and the consequences of that will rest upon your shoulders. In the meantime, I'm uninterested in any further communication of yours, unless it is for the purpose of accepting my terms. Good day, Governor."

She stabbed a button, and the display went blank.

* * *

"All right, Clement," Karol Шstby said quietly, "let's not stub our toes at this point, okay?"

"Yes, Sir." Commander Clement Foreman, Шstby's operations officer, smiled tautly at him on MANS Chameleon' s cramped flag bridge.

The scout ship had reached her rendezvous with Ghost and Wraith as all three of them crept ever so cautiously towards the final deployment point. This was, in many ways, the most critical aspect of their entire lengthy mission—or the riskiest moment of it, at any rate; all of its elements had been "critical" to the operation's success—and the tension on the flag bridge could have been carved with a blade.

Foreman considered his displays for a moment, then keyed his mike.

"All emplacement teams, this is Control," he said. "Proceed."

Absolutely nothing changed on the flag bridge itself, yet Шstby felt an almost tangible release as the order was finally given. Which was about as irrational as responses came, he supposed. The scout ships themselves were extraordinarily stealthy, and the arrays they were about to emplace were equally so. Which meant they were actually entering the moment of maximum danger as they deployed their work parties with the tools and equipment necessary for their task, since those tools and that equipment, while still very hard to detect, were considerably less stealthy. And still, however unreasonable it might be, there was that sense of relief—not relaxation, only relief— as they actually set about it at last.

He watched his own displays, listening over his earbug as progress reports flowed into flag bridge. He knew perfectly well that it wasn't really taking as long as it felt like it was taking, just as he knew how critical it was that they take the time to be sure it was done right, but whatever he might know intellectually, it didn't feel that way.

He looked at the date/time display, and a fresh sense of confidence swept through him. His people had trained far too hard, mastered their duties far too completely, to screw up now. They would fail neither him nor the Alignment . . . and in another fifteen days, the entire galaxy would know that as well as he did.