Mission of Honor

Chapter Thirty-Two

"I never knew idiocy came in so many flavors!"

Irene Teague looked up from her display, eyebrows raised, as Daud ibn Mamoun al-Fanudahi stalked into her office. Powered doors weren't very suitable for slamming behind oneself, but al-Fanudahi did his best.

"I beg your pardon?" Teague said as he hammered the manual close button savagely with the heel of his hand. Her tone was only politely interested, but that fooled neither of them, and he glared at her.

His obvious disgust and ire weren't directed at her—that much was readily apparent, but it was also remarkably cold comfort at the moment. It had become obvious, over the past few days, that even his earlier concerns over possible Manticoran military hardware had fallen short of the reality, yet even that hadn't been enough to fray his habitual control this way. So if something finally had . . . .

"I cannot believe that even those . . . those cretins could—!"

She'd been wrong, she realized. It wasn't disgust and ire; it was blind, naked fury.

"What is it, Daud?" she asked considerably more urgently.

"It's just—"

He broke off again, shaking his head, and then, abruptly, the power of his anger seemed to desert him. He sank into the chair facing her deck, legs stretched out before him, shaking his head again, this time with an air of weariness, and Teague felt a tingle of something entirely too much like outright fear as she saw the darkness in his eyes.

She started to say something else, then stopped, got up, and poured a cup of coffee. She glanced at him speculatively for a moment, then added a healthy slug from the bottle of single-malt she kept in her credenza before she poured another cup, this one without the whiskey, for herself. She passed the first Navy-issue mug across to him, then perched on the edge of her deck, holding her own in both hands, and cocked her head at him.

"Drink first," she commanded. "Then talk to me."

"Yes, Ma'am," he replied and managed a wan smile. He sipped, and his smile turned more natural. "I think it's probably a bit early in the morning for this particular cup of coffee," he observed.

"It's never too early for coffee," she replied. "And somewhere on this planet, it's well past quitting time, so that means it's late enough for any little additions."

"Creative timekeeping has its uses, I see."

He drank more whiskey-laced coffee, then settled back into the chair, and she saw his shoulders finally beginning to relax.

The sight relieved her. The last thing he needed was for fury to betray him into saying something unfortunate to one of his superiors, and she didn't want that. In fact, she was a bit surprised by how genuinely fond of him she'd become over the last few months. The fact that he was Battle Fleet and she was Frontier Fleet had become completely irrelevant as she began to realize just how justified his anxiety over possible Manticoran weapons really was. His persistent refusal to allow her to endorse his more "alarmist" analyses left her feeling more than a little guilty, even though she followed his logic. Unfortunately, she'd also followed his tracks through the reports everyone else had systematically ignored, as well, and her own sense of anxiety had grown steadily sharper in the process. The number of other reports which had apparently been creatively misfiled—and they'd discovered and managed to hunt down—had only made things even worse.

Then had come news of the Battle of Spindle. Despite all her own concerns, despite al-Fanudahi's most pessimistic projections, the two of them had been shocked by the totality of the Manticoran victory. Not even they had anticipated that an entire fleet of superdreadnoughts could be casually defeated by a force whose heaviest unit was only a battlecruiser. That was like . . . like having a professional prizefighter dropped by a single punch from her own eight-year-old daughter, for God's sake!

But if the two of them had been shocked, the rest of the Navy had been stunned. The sheer impossibility of what had happened was literally too much for the Navy's officer corps to process.

The first reaction had been simple denial. It couldn't have happened, therefore, it hadn't happened. There had to be some mistake. Whatever the initial news reports might have seemed to indicate, the Manties had to have had a task force of their own ships-of-the-wall present!

Unfortunately for that line of logic (if it could be dignified by that description), the Manties appeared to have anticipated such a response. They'd sent Admiral O'Cleary herself home along with their diplomatic note, and they'd allowed her to bring along tactical recordings of the engagement.

At the moment, O'Cleary was a pariah, tainted with the same contamination as Evelyn Sigbee. Unlike Sigbee, of course, O'Cleary was home on Old Earth, where she could have her disgrace rubbed firmly in her face, and even though she was Battle Fleet, not Frontier Fleet, Teague found herself feeling a powerful sense of sympathy for the older woman. It was hardly O'Cleary's fault she'd found herself under the orders of a certifiable moron and then been left to do the surrendering after Crandall sailed her entire task force straight into the jaws of catastrophe.

Despite the convenience of the scapegoat O'Cleary offered, however, there was no getting around the preposterous acceleration numbers of the Manty missiles which had ravaged TF 496. The reports which had confidently been dismissed as ridiculous turned out to have been firmly based in fact, exactly as al-Fanudahi had been warning his superiors. Indeed, they'd actually understated the threat by a significant margin, and as fresh proof of the fundamental unfairness of the universe, Admiral Cheng had seized upon Al-Fanudahi's original estimates, based on the lower acceleration and accuracy numbers in the original reports, and sharply reprimanded him for not having "fully appreciated the scope of the threat" in the analyses Cheng had then proceeded to ignore.

Nonetheless, the fact that al-Fanudahi had been right all along couldn't be completely ignored. Not any longer. And so the despised prophet of doom and gloom had suddenly found himself presenting briefings flag officers actually listened to. Not only that, but the Office of Operational Analysis was finally being asked to do what it should have been doing all along. Of course, its efforts were a little handicapped by the fact that it had been systematically starved of funds for so long and that ninety percent of its efforts had gone into feel-good analyses of Battle Fleet's simulations and fleet problems instead of learning to actually think about possible external threats to the League. Of which, after all, there had been none. Which meant, preposterous and pathetic though it undoubtedly was, that the only two people it had who were actually familiar with those threats happened to be in Teague's office at that very moment.

To be fair, at least some of their colleagues were immersed in crash efforts to familiarize themselves with the same data, but most of them were still running about like beheaded chickens. They simply didn't know where to look —not yet—and Teague felt grimly confident that they wouldn't figure it out in time to avoid an entire succession of disasters.

Not, at least, if the idiots in charge of the Navy didn't start actually paying attention—really paying attention, as in processing the information, not simply ackowleding it—to al-Fanudhi. Which, even now, they seemed remarkably disinclined to do.

If there'd truly been such a thing as justice, Cheng Hai-shwun and Admiral Karl-Heinz Thimбr would have been out of uniform and begging for handouts on a corner somewhere, Teague thought bitterly. In fact, if there'd been any such thing as real justice, they'd have been in prison! Unfortunately, both of them were far too well connected. In fact, it seemed unlikely either of them would even be relieved of his present assignment, despite the catastrophic intelligence failure represented by the Battle of Spindle. And, given the fact that al-Fanudahi had been the bearer of uniformly bad tidings in the briefings people were finally listening to, Teague had an unpleasant feeling that she knew exactly who would end up scapegoated to save Cheng and Thimбr's well protected posteriors.

For the moment, though, people had finally been at least listening to what al-Fanudahi had been trying to tell them all along, which was why his present mixture of anger and despair was so frightening to her.

"Ready to talk about it now?" she asked gently after a moment.

"I suppose so," he replied. He took one more sip, then lowered the cup into his lap and looked at her.

"What have they done this time?" she prompted.

"It isn't so much what they've done as what they're getting ready to talk themselves into doing ," he said, and shook his head. "They've decided that what's happened to the Manties offers them the perfect opening, and I think they're getting ready to take advantage of it."

"What?" Teague's tone was that of a woman who felt pretty sure she'd misheard something, and he snorted in harsh amusement.

"I've just come from a meeting with Kingsford, Jennings, and Bernard," he told her. "They're working on a brainstorm of Rajampet's."

Teague's stomach muscles tightened. Admiral Willis Jennings was Seth Kingsford's chief of staff, and Fleet Admiral Evangeline Bernard was the commanding officer of the Office of Strategy and Planning. Under most circumstances, the notion of the commanding officer of Battle Fleet meeting with his chief of staff and the Navy's chief strategic planner to consider the implications of combat reports might have been considered a good thing. Under the present circumstances, and given al-Fanudahi's near despair, she suspected that hadn't been the case this time around. Maybe it was his use of the word "brainstorm," she thought mordantly.

"What sort of brainstorm?" she asked out loud.

"As Rajampet sees it, what just happened to the Manties' home system offers what he calls a 'strategic window of opportunity'. He wants to mount an immediate operation to take advantage of the opening, and he proposes to use Admiral Filareta for the purpose."

"Filareta?" Teague repeated a bit blankly, and al-Fanudahi shrugged.

"He's Battle Fleet, so you probably don't know him. Trust me, you're not missing much. He's smarter than Crandall was. In fact, I'm willing to bet his IQ is at least equal to his shoe size. Aside from that, his only recommendation for command is that he has a pulse."

It was a mark of just how much he'd come to trust her—and vice-versa—she reflected, that he dared to show open contempt for such a monumentally senior officer in front of her.

"What makes Admiral Rajampet think this Filareta's in a position to do anything?"

"For some reason known only to God and, possibly, Admiral Kingsford, Filareta is swanning around in the Shell, half way to Manticore, with a force even bigger than Crandall's was."

She looked at him sharply, and he looked back with a carefully expressionless face.

"And just what is this Admiral Filareta doing out in the Shell?" she asked.

"By the oddest coincidence, he, too, is conducting a training exercise." Al-Fanudahi smiled without any humor at all. "You might be interested to know—I checked myself, out of idle curiosity, you understand—that in the last thirty T-years Battle Fleet has conducted only three exercises which deployed more than fifty of the wall as far out as the Shell. But this year, for some reason, Crandall was authorized to conduct her training exercise in the Madras Sector and Fleet Admiral Massimo Filareta was simultaneously authorized to conduct 'wargames' in the Tasmania Sector. And, unlike Crandall, Filareta's exercise constitutes—and I quote—'a major fleet exercise'. Which is how he comes to be parked out in Tasmania with three hundred wallers, plus screen. Rajampet wants to reinforce him with another seventy or eighty of the wall which 'just happen' to have been deployed to various sector bases within a couple of weeks' hyper time from Tasmania, then send him off to attack Manticore directly."

"What? "

She stared at him in disbelief, and he grinned sourly, then extended his whiskey-laced coffee mug towards her.

"Care for a little belt?" he invited.

"I don't think an entire bottle would help a lot," she replied after a moment, and shook her head. "You're serious, aren't you?"

"Believe me, I wish I wasn't."

"What can he be thinking? "

"I'm not sure I'd apply that particular verb to whatever's going on inside his skull at the moment," al-Fanudahi said tartly. Then he sighed.

"As nearly as I could figure out from what Jennings and Bernard were saying to Kingsford, and the kinds of questions all three of them were asking me, Rajampet thinks that even if reports of what happened to them are grossly exaggerated, the Manties have to be reeling. As Jennings put it, the moment is 'psychologically ripe'. After a pounding like that, they aren't going to have the stomach for a standup fight against the SLN."

"Just like a handful of their cruisers didn't have the stomach for a standup fight against Crandall, you mean?" Teague said bitterly.

"I think they expect things to work out a little better this time."

"They think the Manty Home Fleet won't fight to defend their home system when a batch of cruisers were willing to go toe-to-toe with Crandall over the administrative center of a province they haven't even firmly integrated into their empire yet?"

Teague hadn't even tried to keep the incredulity out of her savage tone, and al-Fanudahi grinned with at least a trace of genuine humor.

"There you go using that verb again," he said. Then he sobered.

"It does tie in with existing strategic planning," he pointed out. "And, apparently, the theory is that getting hammered that way, completely out of the blue, is bound to have had a devastating effect on the Manties' morale and confidence, completely disregarding whatever effect it's had on their actual, physical capabilities. In fact, Jennings suggested that the psychological impact was probably even greater because it came so close on the heels of what happened at Spindle. And, of course, they can't be certain we weren't the ones who did it. So when a fresh Solarian fleet turns up on their doorstep in about half the time they can have expected anyone to take getting there, and when they realize we're willing to go at them again, this time on their home ground, despite Spindle, they'll realize they're screwed and throw in the towel. Especially if they do think we're the ones who just hit them and they're looking over their shoulder, waiting for us to do it t again at the moment they're engaged against our conventional wallers."

Teague looked at him again, then sighed, walked back around her desk, and flopped into her own chair.

"Go on. I'm sure there's more and better still to come."

"Well, I did point out—diffidently, you understand—that even allowing for the fact that Filareta is a lot closer to Manticore than anyone would have expected, it's going to take around a month to get him reinforced the way they're talking about, and then another month and a half to get him to Manticore, by which point at least some of the shock effect should have dissipated. Bernard agreed that was a possibility, but her staff psychologists"—his eyes met Teague's and rolled—"estimate that would actually work in our behalf. Apparently they feel three months or so would be about right for the anesthetizing effect of the shock to wear off and give way to despair as 'a more sober evaluation of their situation' sinks in fully."

"I don't suppose any of these staff psychologists are planning on accompanying Admiral Filareta to Manticore?"

"Oddly enough, I don't believe they are."

"Neither would I," Teague muttered.

"After that concern of mine had been suitably allayed," al-Fanudahi continued, "I pointed out that our reports indicate the Manties probably have at least a hundred or so wallers of their own left in Home Fleet. Given the outcome of the Battle of Spindle, it seemed to me that perhaps a greater numerical advantage on our part would be in order. Admiral Jennings, however, informed me that Admiral Thimбr's reports indicate the Manties took heavier losses than we'd originally assumed when Haven attacked their home system. You'll be interested to know that ONI's best estimate is that the Manties have no more than sixty or seventy of the wall left."

"I thought we were the Office of Naval Intelligence," Teague observed.

"No, we're the Office of Operational Analysis ," al-Fanudahi corrected in a chiding tone of voice. "Admiral Kingsford was kind enough to point that out to me. Apparently, additional human intelligence reports you and I haven't had access to strongly support Admiral Thimбr's conclusions about Manticoran losses."

"Fascinating."

"I thought so, too. But after I'd had the opportunity to digest that information for a few moments, I pointed out that even sixty or seventy of their wallers would presumably be more than enough to deal with three or four hundred of ours, given their newly revealed advantage in missile warfare. Which, I noted, didn't even consider any fixed defenses their capital system might have deployed after a couple of decades of active warfare with the Republic of Haven.

"Admiral Bernard agreed that that was certainly a reasonable cause for concern, but it's apparently the joint view of Admiral Rajampet and Admiral Kingsford that no one could have gotten in to hammer the Manties' shipyards and space stations that hard without blowing his way through the fixed defenses first. In other words, whoever it was must have already taken out a lot of the combat capability they might have used against us. And with the damage to their industrial sector, not to mention their losses in trained military manpower, they won't have been able to do very much to replace lost capability."

Teague realized she was shaking her head, slowly, again and again, and made herself stop.

"They're insane," she said flatly.

"Or a reasonable facsimile thereof," he agreed glumly.

"Haven't they even considered the implications of what happened to the Manties?" she demanded.

"The only implications they're interested in are the ones that have left Manticore vulnerable," al-Fanudahi replied flatly. "I pointed out to them that we don't have a clue how whoever it was did whatever the hell he did. All we have so far are news reports, for God's sake! It's obvious someone got in and blew the crap out of Manticore's infrastructure, but that's all we know."

"Bullshit it's all we know!" Teague snapped. "We know damned well that nothing we have could've done it! What happened to Crandall at Spindle's proof enough of that . I guarantee you that there's no way Spindle had anything like the depth of sensor coverage their home system has, and their Home Fleet is a hell of a lot more powerful than a handful of cruisers and battlecruisers. So if somebody got through all of that and got in close enough to do the kind of damage the newsies are reporting—or anything remotely like the damage they're reporting—they had to do it with some kind of hardware we've never even heard of. Another kind of hardware we've never even heard of!"

"My own thoughts exactly," al-Fanudahi agreed heavily.

The two of them sat looking at one another in silence for at least a couple of minutes. Then Teague leaned back and inhaled deeply.

"You realize who it was, of course," she said quietly.

"Well, we've just agreed it wasn't us," he replied. "And if Haven had anything like this—or if they'd even been close to getting something like this deployed—they never would've launched that do-or-die attack of theirs. So, from where I sit, that eliminates most of the usual suspects. And given what's been going on in Talbott, and the assassination of the Manty ambassador right here in Old Chicago, and that obvious nonsense about Manty sponsorship of that attack on Green Pines, and that attack on Congo, the name that pops to the top of my list begins with the letter 'M'."

"Mine, too." Her eyes were as dark as his had been, and her expression was very, very grim. "Daoud, I'm starting to have a really bad feeling. The sort of feeling a person might get if she believed the Manties had been right all along about Manpower's involvement. It doesn't seem possible, but . . . ."

Her voice trailed off, and al-Fanudahi nodded.

"I agree," he said. "And, frankly, the fact that no one—not Rajampet, not Kingsford, not Jennings or Bernard—seems to be so much as thinking about that worries me even more than the fact that they don't seem to be aware that our hardware has just been demonstrated to be the third -best—if that—in the galaxy. It's bad enough they aren't tearing their own commands apart trying to figure out just how the hell Manpower got so deep inside they can actually influence major deployment decisions, but even that pales beside the rather more pressing question of what could have inspired Manpower—or whoever—to hit Manticore so directly. To risk stepping that far out of the shadows."

"So you think this goes a lot farther than just getting Manticore out of the Talbott Cluster and away from Mesa."

"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that was a big part of it, maybe even some kind of triggering event," al-Fanudahi said. "But anyone who could pull this entire sequence of events together—anyone who could get whole task forces and fleets of Solarian capital ships deployed where he wants them, when he wants them, then pull something like the attack on Manticore out of his ass—isn't just improvising as he goes along. Either of those operations must have required a massive organization and very careful—and lengthy—planning. Byng and Crandall—even Filareta—could probably have been steered into position by somebody with enough money and enough political clout to influence a handful of high-level strategic decisions. After all, as far as anyone knew, they were just routine peacetime deployments, so why not do a little favor for someone with deep enough pockets? But this direct assault on Manticore required serious industrial power, military planning, and almost certainly some sort of technological breakthrough that neither we nor the Manties know anything about. That's way outside the parameters for even the biggest and nastiest transstellar, Irene. It's an entirely different level of capabilities."

"And whoever it is—whether it's Manpower or someone else who's just been using Manpower as a front—there has to be a reason she's decided to go ahead and show us all she has that kind of capability," Teague said quietly.

"Precisely." Al-Fanudahi rubbed his forehead wearily. "Maybe at least part of it was opportunism. Maybe the real target's been Manticore all along, and the combination of the Manties' confrontation with us in Talbott and their losses in the Battle of Manticore was just too great a temptation, like Rajampet's 'strategic window of opportunity', and the bad guys jumped before they were ready. But I don't think it's that simple. I don't think someone who was able to build up the capabilities we're talking about in the first place without anyone even noticing is going to just throw away all that careful concealment, however great the strategic temptation, before he was pretty much ready to move anyway."

"Move against Manticore, you mean." Teague frowned with a dissatisfied air. "I don't think you're wrong, Daoud, but at the same time, I don't see the point." She waved one hand. "Oh, don't get me wrong. Obviously, if we didn't even know these people were planning whatever the hell it is they're planning, it's not very likely we're going to be able to magically discern what it is they're after. What their endgame is. And I know Manticore's richer than sin, for its size, at least, and its merchant marine is all over the damned galaxy, with its nose in everybody else's business. And I don't doubt for a minute that Manpower resents the hell out of the Manties' enforcement of the Cherwell Convention. I'll grant you all of that. But why go to such lengths to crush Manticore? God only knows how long they must've spent planning and building up their resources before they could pull something like this off. So why do it? Why make that kind of investment just to attack a relatively small star nation on the far side of the damned League from them? It doesn't make any sense!"

"No, it doesn't," al-Fanudahi agreed quietly. "That's why I'm so worried by the fact that no one else even seems to care about 'Manpower's' involvement in all this. Because I agree with you, Irene. Nobody's going to go to all this trouble and the huge expense which must've been involved just because they don't like the Star Empire of Manticore. There's got to be more to it, and the very unpleasant question that's been occurring to me over the last day or so is why they got us involved in the first place. If they already had the capability to carry off something like this attack of theirs, why run the risk of trying to manipulate us into squashing Manticore? They could've done this on their own anytime they wanted to without involving the League at all. And if their intelligence on Manty capabilities was as good as it must've been for them to have planned and executed this operation, they must've had a damned good idea of just how outclassed our Navy was going to be when it went up against the Manties. So they obviously weren't counting on us to do the job for them."

"You're sure about that?" Teague's question wasn't a challenge, but her eyes were troubled. "You don't think they might have resorted to doing the job themselves only because they'd realized we weren't going to be able to after all?"

"No way." He shook his head. "Just getting their strike forces into position would have taken a long time. Unless I'm sadly mistaken, they would have had to start moving them before the first New Tuscan incident. Certainly before the second one. So that means they had both wings of their plan in motion at the same time. No. They knew we wouldn't be able to take the Manties, but they maneuvered us into a war with them, anyway. And that suggests to me that maybe it wasn't so much that they wanted the Manties at war with us as they wanted us at war with the Manties."

"Why?" Teague's frown was deeper than ever, and al-Fanudahi shrugged unhappily.

"If I knew the answer to that question, I might be able to do something about it," he said. "But what I'm very much afraid of, Irene, is that we just thought this was all about using the League to crush Manticore. I think it goes a lot deeper than that, and as preposterous as it sounds, I can only see one other target on the range at the moment."

He looked across her desk at her, his dark eyes worried.

"Us," he said very, very softly.