The Short Victorious War

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Nike altered course for home, and Mike Henke hid a grin as she glanced across the bridge at her captain. Honor seldom displayed satisfaction with her own efforts, especially on the bridge. Satisfaction with the performance of her officers and crew, yes; yet her own competence was something to be taken for granted. But today she leaned back against her command chair's contoured cushions, legs crossed, and a small smile played about her lips while Nimitz preened shamelessly on the chair's back.

Henke chuckled and looked over to Tactical to bestow a wink of triumph on Eve Chandler. The diminutive redhead grinned back and raised her clasped hands over her head, and Henke heard someone else snort with laughter behind her.

Well, they had every excuse to be insufferably pleased with themselves—and their captain, Henke reflected. The squadron had worked hard in the week since Vice Admiral Parks' departure. Its steadily developing snap and precision had actually brought smiles of approval from Admiral Sarnow, and Nike's escape from the repair slip couldn't have come at a better time.

Henke wasn't the only one of Honor's officers who'd heard about Captain Doumet's concern that the flagship's enforced inactivity might have made her rusty enough to embarrass his own Agamemnon, but she'd been better placed than most to do something about it. Honor had been too submerged in squadron affairs to take on Nike's day-to-day training efforts. Besides, that sort of ongoing activity was really the exec's responsibility, and all the long, grueling simulator hours Henke had inflicted on Nike's crew had paid off handsomely in yesterday's maneuvers. Nike hadn't embarrassed Agamemnon. In point of fact, Doumet's ship had had all she could handle just to stay in shouting distance of her division mate, and Henke looked forward to her next meeting with Agamemnon's exec.

Nike had turned in the best gunnery performance of the exercise, as well, outshooting Captain Daumier's Invincible by a clear eight percent, much to the disgust of Daumier's crew, but that hadn't been the best part. No, Henke thought with a lazy smile, the best part had come when Admiral Sarnow divided his small task group in half for war games.

Commodore Banton had commanded the squadrons second and third divisions and their screen while Sarnow commanded the first and fourth, but that was only for the record. In fact, Sarnow had informed Honor five minutes into the exercise that both he and Captain Rubenstein, Division 54s senior officer, had just become casualties and that she was in command.

That was all the warning she'd gotten, but it was obvious she'd been thinking ahead, for her own orders had come without any hesitation at all. She'd used the FTL sensor platforms to locate Bantons ships, split her own force into two two-ship divisions, accelerated to intercept velocity, then killed her drives and gone to the electronic and gravitic equivalent of "silent running." But she hadn't stopped there, for she'd known Banton's Achilles had the same ability to spot and track her. And since Honor knew the commodore had plotted her base course before she closed down her emissions, she'd launched electronic warfare drones, programmed to mimic her battlecruisers' drives, on a course designed with malice aforethought to draw Banton into a position of her choice.

The commodore had taken the bait—partly, perhaps, because she didn't expect anyone to use up EW drones (at eight million dollars a pop) in an exercise—and altered course to intercept them. By the time she realized what was really going on, Honor had brought both her own divisions slashing in on purely ballistic courses, wedges and sidewall down to the very last instant and still operating separately in blatant disregard of conventional tactical wisdom. She'd hit Banton's surprised formation from widely divergent bearings, and her unorthodox approach had used Banton's more traditional formation against her, pounding her lead ships with fire from two directions, confusing her point defense, and using her own lead division to block the return fire of her rearmost ships for almost two full minutes. And, just to make it even better, she'd had Commander Chandler reprogram their screens antimissile decoys so that the heavy cruisers suddenly looked like battlecruisers.

The decoys had come on-line at the worst possible moment for Banton's tac officer. With no running plot on Honor's "invisible" ships until their drives suddenly came back up, he'd had to sort out who was who before he engaged, and the decoys had confused him just long enough for Nike,Agamemnon,Onslaught, and Invincible to "MI" Banton's flagship and "cripple" her division mate Cassandra with no damage of their own. Defiant and Intolerant had done their best after that—indeed, Captain Trinh's stellar performance had gone far to redeem his earlier problems—but they'd never had a chance. The final score had shown the complete destruction of Banton's force, moderate damage to Agamemnon and Invincible, and a mere two laser hits on Nike.Onslaught had escaped completely unscathed and even recovered all but two of the EW drones Honor had used. The drones would require overhaul before they could be reused, but their recovery had saved the Navy something like forty-eight million dollars, and Henke suspected Rubenstein's crew was going to do even more gloating than her own people.

Admiral Sarnow hadn't said a word, but his grin when he ambled onto Nike's bridge for the closing phase of the "battle" had been eloquent. Besides, Commodore Banton was a fair-minded woman. She knew she and her people had been had, and she'd commed her personal congratulations to Honor even before the computers finished calculating the final damage estimates.

A most satisfactory two days, taken all together, Henke decided. A whole week had passed without incident since Admiral Parks disappeared over the hyper limit, which had produced a deep sense of relief but hadn't lessened the squadron's determination to disprove any reservations Parks might entertain about their admiral and his flag captain... and the last couple of days' successes looked like an excellent first step.

Of course, she thought smugly, it had been an even better step for some than for others. Eve Chandler was already licking her chops in anticipation of her next conversation with Invincible's tac officer. Queen's Cup for gunnery, indeed! And Ivan Ravicz was as happy as a treecat with his own celery patch. His new fusion plant had performed flawlessly, and Agamemnon had been pushed to the limit matching the acceleration of Nike's superbly tuned drive. Even George Monet had been seen to crack a smile or two, and that constituted an historic first for the com officer.

Besides, Commodore Banton had already promised that her ships' companies were buying the beer.

Honor noted the gleam in Henke's eyes and smiled fondly as her exec turned back to her own panel. Mike had a right to be pleased. It was her training programs which had kept Nike in such top-notch fighting trim, after all.

But there was more to it than training alone. Exercises and simulations could do many things, but they couldn't provide that indefinable something more that separated a crack crew from one that was simply good. Nike had that something more. Perhaps it came from the mysterious esprit de corps which always seemed to infuse the ships of her name, the sense that they had a special tradition to maintain. Or perhaps it came from somewhere else entirely. Honor didn't know, but she'd felt it crackling about her like latent lightning, begging her to use it, and she had. She hadn't even thought about her maneuvers—not on a conscious level; they'd simply come to her with a smooth, flawless precision. Her people had executed them the same way, and they had every right to feel pleased with themselves.

It helped that Commodore Banton was a good sort, of course. Honor could think of several flag officers who would have reacted far less cheerfully to the drubbing Banton had just taken, especially when they discovered they'd been beaten not by their admiral but by his flag captain. But she suspected Banton shared her own suspicions about the Admiral's motive for declaring himself a casualty. Honor might be his flag captain, yet she was also junior to six of the seven other battlecruiser captains under his command, and it was the first chance she'd had to show her stuff anywhere but in the simulators. Sarnow had deliberately stepped aside to let her win her spurs in the squadron's eyes, and she wanted to preen like Nimitz at how well it had gone.

In fact, she thought, leaning back to steeple her fingers under her pointed chin, "preen" was exactly what she intended to be doing very shortly... among other things. It was Wednesday, and the squadron was going to rendezvous with the repair base well before supper. She intended to arrive in Paul's quarters with a bottle of her father's precious Delacourt and find out just what his laughing hints about hot oil rubdowns were all about.

The corners of her mouth quirked at the thought, her right cheek dimpled, and she felt her face heating up, and she didn't care at all.

"Captain, I'm picking up a hyper footprint at two-zero-six," Commander Chandler announced. "One drive source, range six-point-niner-five light-minutes. It's too heavy for a courier boat, Ma'am."

Honor looked at the tac officer in faint surprise, but Chandler didn't notice as she queried her computers and worked the contact. Several seconds passed, and then she straightened with a satisfied nod.

"Definitely a Manticoran drive pattern, Ma'am. Looks like a heavy cruiser. I won't know for sure till the light-speed sensors have her."

"Understood. Keep an eye on her, Eve."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am."

A cruiser, hmmm? Honor leaned back in her chair once more. One cruiser wouldn't make much difference, but Van Slyke would be happy to see her. She would bring his squadron up to full strength at last, and the rest of the task group would probably see her as a harbinger of the far more powerful reinforcements they'd been promised. Besides, she'd probably have dispatches on board, and even the tiniest scrap of fresh information would be a vast relief.

She reached up and drew Nimitz down into her lap, rubbing his ears and considering the com conference the Admiral had scheduled for tomorrow morning. There were several points she wanted to make—not least how lucky she'd been to get away with that EW drone trick—and she slid further down in the chair as she considered the best (and most tactful) way to express them.

Several minutes ticked away, and the quiet, orderly routine of her bridge murmured to her like some soothing mantra. Her mind toyed with phrases and sentences, maneuvering them with a sort of languid, catlike pleasure. Yet her dreamy eyes were deceptive. The soft chime of an incoming signal from the com section brought her instantly back to full awareness, and her gaze moved to Lieutenant Commander Monet's narrow back.

The com officer depressed a button and listened to his earbug for a moment, and Honor's eyes narrowed when his shoulders twitched. If she hadn't known what an utterly reliable, totally humorless sort he was, she might actually have thought he was chuckling.

He pressed another sequence of buttons, then swiveled his chair to face her. His face was admirably grave, but his brown eyes twinkled slightly as he cleared his throat.

"Burst transmission for you, Captain." He paused just a moment. "It's from Captain Tankersley, Ma'am."

Faint, pink heat tingled along Honors cheekbones. Did every member of her crew know about her... relationship with Paul?! It was none of their business, even if they did, darn it! It wasn't as if there were anything shady or underhanded about it—Paul was a yard dog, so even the prohibition against affairs with officers in the same chain of command didn't come into it!

But even as she prepared to glower at the com officer, her own sense of the ridiculous came to her rescue. Of course they knew—even Admiral Sarnow knew! She'd never realized her nonexistent love life was so widely noticed, but if she'd wanted to keep a low profile she should have thought of it sooner. And the twinkle in Monet's eyes wasn't the smutty thing it could have been. In fact, she realized as she sensed the same gentle amusement from the rest of her silent bridge crew, he actually seemed pleased for her.

"Ah, switch it to my screen," she said, suddenly realizing she'd been silent just a bit too long.

"It's a private signal, Ma'am." Monet's voice was so bland Honors mouth twitched in response. She shoved herself up out of her chair, cradling Nimitz in her arms and fighting her rebellious dimple.

"In that case, I'll take it on my briefing room terminal."

"Of course, Ma'am. I'll switch it over."

"Thank you," Honor said with all the dignity she could muster, and crossed to the briefing room hatch.

It slid open for her, and as she stepped through it, she suddenly wondered why Paul was screening her at all. Nike would reach the base in another thirty minutes or so, but the transmission lag at this range was still something like seventeen seconds. That ruled out any practical real-time conversation, so why hadn't he waited another fifteen minutes to avoid it?

An eyebrow arched in speculation, and she deposited Nimitz on the briefing room table as she sat in the captains chair at its head and keyed the terminal. The screen flashed a ready signal, and then Paul's face appeared.

"Hi, Honor. Sorry to disturb you, but I thought you'd better know." Her eyebrows knitted in a frown as his grim expression registered. "We just got an arrival signal from a heavy cruiser," his recorded voice continued, then paused. "It's Warlock, Honor," he said, and she went rigid in her chair.

Paul looked out of the screen as if he could see her reaction, and there was compassion in his eyes—and warning—as his image nodded.

"Young's still in command," he said softly, "and he's still senior to you. Watch yourself, okay?"

PNS Napoleon drifted through blackness, far from the dim beacon of the system's red dwarf primary. The light cruiser's drive was down, her active sensors dead, and her captain sat tensely on her bridge as she coasted along her silent course, well inside the orbit of Hancock's frozen outermost planet. He could see two different Manty destroyers' impeller signatures in his display, but the nearest was over twelve light-minutes from Napoleon, and he had absolutely no intention of attracting its attention.

Commander Ogilve hadn't thought much of Operation Argus when he was first briefed for it. The whole idea had struck him as an excellent way to start a war and get his ship fried in the process, yet it had worked out far better than he'd expected. It was horribly time-consuming, and the fact that none of the ships involved had been caught yet didn't mean none of them ever would be, but it only had to go on working for a little longer. Just long enough for Admiral Rollins to receive the data he needed... and for PNS Napoleon to get the hell out of Hancock in one piece.

"Coming up on the first relay, Sir." His com officer sounded as unhappy as Ogilve felt, and the commander took pains to exude calm as he withdrew his gaze from the display and nodded in response. Wouldn't do to let the troops know their captain was as scared as they were, he thought dryly.

"Prepare to initiate data dump," he said.

"Yes, Sir."

The bridge was silent as the com officer brought his communication lasers up from standby. Any sort of emission was extremely dangerous under the circumstances, but the relay's position had been plotted with painstaking care. The people who'd planned Operation Argus had known the perimeters of all Manticoran star systems were guarded by sensor platforms whose reach and sensitivity the People's Republic couldn't match, but no surveillance net could cover everything. Their deployment patterns and plans had taken that into consideration, and—so far, at least—they'd been right on the money.

Ogilve snorted at his own choice of cliché, for Argus had cost billions. The heavily stealthed sensor platforms had been inserted from over two light-months out, coasting in out of the silence of interstellar space with all power locked down to absolute minimum. They'd slid through the Manties' sensors like any other bits of space debris, and the tiny trickle of power which had braked them and aligned them in their final, carefully chosen positions had been so small as to be utterly indetectable at anything over a few thousand kilometers.

In point of fact, getting the platforms in had been the easy part. Laymen tended to forget just how huge—and empty—any given star system was. Even the largest star-ship was less than a mote on such a scale; as long as it radiated no betraying energy signature to attract attention it might as well be invisible, and the sensor arrays were tinier still and equipped with the best stealth systems Haven could produce. Or, Ogilve amended, in this case buy clandestinely from the Solarian League. The biggest risk came from the low-powered, hair-thin lasers that tied them to the central storage relays, but even there the risk had been reduced to absolute minimum.

The platforms communicated only via ultra high-speed burst transmissions. Even if someone strayed into their path, it would require an enormous stroke of bad luck for him to realize he'd heard something, and the platforms' programming restricted them from sending if their sensors picked up anything in a position to intercept their messages.

No, there was very little chance of the Manties tumbling to the tiny robotic spies—it was the mailmen who collected their data who had to sweat. Because small as it might be, a starship was larger than any sensor array, and harvesting that information meant a ship had to radiate, however stealthily.

"Light beam standing by, Sir. Coming up on transmission point in... nineteen seconds."

"Initiate when we reach the bearing."

"Aye, Sir. Standing by." The seconds ticked past, and then the com officer licked his lips. "Initiating now. Sir."

Ogilve tensed, and his eyes returned to his display with unseemly haste. He watched the Manty destroyers with painful intensity, but they continued along their blissfully unobservant way, and then—

"Dump completed, Sir!" The com officer didn't quite wipe his brow as he killed the laser, and Ogilve smiled despite his own tension.

"Well done, Jamie." He rubbed his hands and grinned at his tac officer. "Well, Ms. Austell, shall we see what we've caught?"

"An excellent idea, Sir." The tac officer returned his grin, then began querying the data dump. Several minutes passed in silence, for the last Argus collection had been a month and a half earlier. That left a great deal of information to sort through, but then she stiffened and looked up sharply.

"I've got something very interesting here, Sir."

The suppressed excitement in her voice drew Ogilve out of his chair without conscious thought. He crossed the bridge in a few, quick strides and leaned over her shoulder as she tapped keys. Her display flickered for a moment, then settled, and a date and time readout glowed in one corner.

Ogirve sucked in sharply as the data before him registered. A score of heavy capital ships—no, more than that. By God, there were over thirty of the bastards! Jesus, it was the Manties' entire wall of battle!

He stared at the display, holding his breath, unable to believe what he was seeing as the massive fleet movement played itself out. The time scale was enormously compressed, and the incredible mass of impeller signatures slid across the star system at breakneck speed.

It had to be some sort of maneuver. That was the only thing it could be. Ogilve told himself that over and over, like some sort of mental incantation against the disappointment that had to come.

But it didn't come. The stupendous dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts went right on moving, sweeping out from Hancock until they hit the hyper limit.

And then they vanished. Every goddamned one of them simply vanished, and Ogilve straightened with slow, almost painful caution.

"Did they come back, Midge?" he half-whispered, and the tac officer shook her head, eyes huge. "Would this sector's platforms necessarily have spotted them if they had come back?" the commander pressed.

"Not automatically, Sir. The Manties could have come back on a course outside their search envelope. But unless they knew about the sensors and deliberately set this up to fake us out, they would've come back in from any maneuvers on roughly reciprocal headings. If they'd done that, the platforms would have seen them ... and they've been gone for over a week, Sir."

Ogilve nodded and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was incredible. The idea that the Manties would conduct some sort of exercise that took them away from Hancock at a time of such tension was ridiculous on the face of it. But impossible as it seemed, they'd done something even stupider. They'd pulled out entirely. Hancock Station was wide open!

He drew another deep breath and looked at his astrogator.

"How soon can we get the hell out of here?"

"Without our hyper footprint being detected?'

"Of course without being detected!"

"Um." The astrogators fingers flew as he worked through the problem. "On this vector, niner-four-point-eight hours to clear known Manty sensor arrays, Sir."

"Damn," Ogilve whispered. He rubbed his hands up and down the seams of his trousers and forced his impatience back under control. This was too important to risk blowing. He was going to have to wait. To make himself sit on it for another four days before he could head home with the unbelievable news. But once they reached Seaford—

"All right," he said crisply. "I want a complete shutdown. Nothing goes out from this ship. Jamie, abort the remainder of the data dumps. Midge, I want you to damned well live up here with your passive sensors. If anything even looks like it could be coming our way, I want to know it. This data just paid the entire cost of this operation from day one, and we're getting it home if we have to hyper out of here right under some Manty's nose!"

"But what about operational security, Sir?" his exec protested.

"I'm not going to call any attention to us," Ogilve said tightly. "But this is too important to risk losing, so if it looks like they may be going to spot us, we're out of here, and the hell with the rest of Operation Argus. This is exactly what Admiral Rollins has been waiting for, and we, by God, are going to tell him about it!"