War Of Honor

Chapter Twenty Seven

"It really is wonderful to see you again, Sir," Honor said quietly as she ushered him into her day cabin and waved for him to seat himself in one of the comfortable chairs around the beaten copper coffee table. She saw him glance down at the table and watched the corners of his eyes crinkle in amused pleasure as he saw the bas relief Harrington Steading coat of arms which adorned it.

"It was a gift from Protector Benjamin," she half-apologized, but he only shook his head.

"I was only admiring it, Your Grace. And reflecting on just how well you truly have done . . . not on the vainglory of putting your monogram on a simple piece of furniture."

"I'm relieved to hear it," she said dryly, and she was immensely relieved by the sparkle of mischievous humor which accompanied his words.

"To be perfectly honest," he said more seriously, "the galaxy would probably cut you at least a little slack if your head had gotten a bit too big for your beret. On the other hand, I'd have been surprised if the midshipwoman I remembered had let that happen."

"I try to remember I'm merely mortal." Her attempt to make it come out humorously wasn't entirely successful, and she felt her cheekbones heat slightly. He glanced at her sidelong, then shrugged.

"And I'll try not to embarrass you any more, Your Grace. Except to say that one of my greatest regrets is that Raoul Courvoisier didn't live to see you now. He wrote to me after Basilisk Station to make sure I had the entire story straight, so I know he'd had proof his faith in you had been amply rewarded. But I also know how delighted he'd have been to see that others had seen fit to reward it, as well."

"I miss him," Honor said softly. "I miss him a lot. And it means a lot to me to know that you and he stayed in touch."

"Raoul was always a loyal friend, Your Grace."

"Captain," Honor said, meeting his eyes, "it's been thirty-nine T-years, but the last time we saw each other, I was only a midshipwoman. And half-pay or not, you are an admiral yourself. If it's all the same to you, I'd be grateful if you could remember that I was once one of your snotties and forget about the 'Your Graces.' "

"That's easier said than done, Yo—" Bachfisch paused, then chuckled. "Put it down to automatic social reflexes," he requested. "On the other hand, if I'm not supposed to call you 'Your Grace,' what would you prefer? Somehow, I don't think 'Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington' is really appropriate anymore, do you?"

"Probably not," she conceded with a chuckle of her own. "And I don't think I'd prefer 'Admiral Harrington,' either. So suppose we try just 'Honor.' "

"I—" the captain started, then paused again and cleared his throat. "If that's what you'd really prefer . . . Honor," he said after a moment.

"It is," she told him, and he nodded, then sat in the indicated chair and created a small space in the conversation by leaning back and crossing his legs before he let his attention sweep around the rest of the day cabin.

His eyes rested for just a moment on the crystal case protecting the sword rack, the glittering key of a steadholder, and a multi-spired golden star whose crimson ribbon was stained with darker, browner spots. A bronze plaque hung above it, one corner twisted and broken as if by a great heat, bearing the image of an old-fashioned sailplane. And another case held Honor's anachronistic .45 . . . and a more modern ten-millimeter dueling pistol.

He gazed at all of them for several seconds, as if absorbing the evidence of how much time—and life—had truly passed since last he'd seen her. Then he drew a deep breath and returned his attention to her.

"Quite a change since the last time you and I were in Silesia together," he observed wryly.

"I suppose so," she agreed. "But it brings back a lot of memories, doesn't it?"

"That it does. That it does." He shook his head. "Some of them good . . . some of them not so good."

"Sir," she said just a bit hesitantly, "at the court of inquiry after we got home. I asked to testify, but—"

"I know you did, Honor. But I told the court I felt you had nothing to add."

"You told the court?" she looked at him in disbelief. "But I was right there on the bridge. I knew exactly what happened!"

"Of course you did," he agreed, almost gently. "But I knew you too well to let them put you on the stand." She continued to stare at him, her eyes shadowed with sudden hurt, and he shook his head quickly. "Don't misunderstand me. I wasn't worried about anything you might say hurting me or my chances. But the official record already contained everything you could have testified to, including your own after-action report, and you've never been noted for your overly powerful self-preserving instincts. If they'd gotten you on the stand, you were almost certain to say something fierce in my defense, and I didn't want anything splashing on you."

"I'd have been honored to be 'splashed on' if it could have helped you, Sir," she said quietly.

"I know that. I knew it when I refused to let my advocate call you as a witness. But you had enough enemies of your own already for any midshipwoman, and I wasn't about to see you throw away the credit you so richly deserved for saving my ship. Not when anything you said wasn't going to matter, anyway."

"You couldn't know that it wouldn't matter," she protested.

"Oh, yes, I could, Honor," he said with a half-bitter, half-amused smile. "Because the fact of the matter was that I deserved to be dismissed from my ship."

"You did not!" she disagreed instantly.

"I think I'm hearing the midshipwoman who served under me, not the admiral sitting across her coffee table from me," he observed almost lightly. She opened her mouth, but he raised one hand and shook his head at her. "Think about it—as a flag officer, not a midshipwoman. I don't say there weren't extenuating circumstances, but let's be honest. For whatever combination of reasons, I allowed Dunecki and his ship into point-blank range, and I damned near got my own ship blown out of space, as a consequence. I did get too many of my people killed," he added in a much darker tone.

"But you couldn't have known," she protested.

"You were one of Raoul's proteges," he replied. "What did he always tell you about surprises?"

"That they were usually what happened when one captain made a mistake about something she'd actually seen all along," she admitted slowly.

"Which is precisely what I did." He shrugged. "Don't think it wasn't important to me to know you wanted to speak up in my defense, because it was. And don't think that because of that one incident I regard myself as some sort of total failure. But neither of those things changes the fact that I hazarded the ship the King had entrusted to me and that I would have lost her, with all hands, if not for the actions of a midshipwoman on her snotty cruise and a quite disproportionate amount of good luck. To be perfectly honest, I was surprised when they only placed me on half-pay rather than dismissing me from the Service entirely."

"I still say they were wrong," Honor said stubbornly. He looked at her quizzically, and it was her turn to shrug uncomfortably. "All right. I suppose that if I were sitting on a court of inquiry on a similar incident and all I had was the official record, I might have agreed some penalty was appropriate. I might have. But I like to think that by now I've seen enough of the ways in which good, competent officers can do everything right and still crap out to give anyone the benefit of the doubt."

"Perhaps you have," he agreed. "And perhaps, if it hadn't been an incident in peacetime, if the officers of the court had had the sort of experience you have now, their decision might have been different. But it was a different set of rules in a different time, Honor." He shook his head. "I won't pretend it didn't hurt. But I've never felt it was a gross miscarriage of justice, either. And," he gestured at the blue uniform tunic he wore, "it wasn't exactly the end of my life."

"No, I suppose it wasn't. But you'd still look better in black and gold than in blue, if you'll pardon my saying so. And the Navy could darned well have used your experience when the war finally began."

"I suppose if I'm honest, that was what hurt the most," he admitted in a slightly distant tone, gazing at something only he could see. "I'd spent so many years training for exactly what happened, and I wasn't allowed to use all I'd learned in the Star Kingdom's defense when the storm finally broke." He gazed at that invisible something for several more seconds, then shook himself. "But," he said briskly, focusing on her face once more, "there was absolutely no point in sitting around and brooding over what had happened, and I've found the odd project here and there since to keep myself busy."

"I understand you own your own shipping line," Honor said.

"That might be putting it just a bit grandly," he replied wryly. "I do own two ships outright, with majority shares in three others. Not quite on the scale of the Hauptman Cartel—or Skydomes of Grayson—but not too shabby an accomplishment here in Silesia, I suppose."

"From all I've heard that's a pretty severe case of understatement. And they tell me you have at least two armed merchantmen?"

"True," he said. "You're wondering how I managed it?" She nodded, and he shrugged. "Like everything else here in the Confederacy, it all depends on how deep your pockets are, what contacts you have, and who you know. Silesia may be a dangerous place to be a merchant skipper, but for that very reason, there's a lot of money in it if you manage to survive. And I've been out here long enough to've amassed quite a few debts and favors . . . and to learn where a few useful skeletons were buried." He shrugged again. "So, technically, Pirate's Bane and Ambuscade are auxiliary units of the Confederate Navy. Technically."

"Technically," Honor repeated, and he smiled. "And practically speaking?" she inquired.

"Practically speaking, the Confed Navy's official warrants are nothing but ways around the prohibition against armed merchantmen which are available to those with sufficiently well-placed government patrons. Everyone knows the auxiliaries will never be called upon in their naval capacity. For that matter, at least some of them are pirates themselves!" He seemed, she noted, to actually find that amusing, in a grim sort of way.

"May I ask who your patron is?" she asked in a carefully neutral voice, and he chuckled.

"I believe you've probably met her, at some point," he told her. "Her name is Patricia Givens."

"Admiral Givens?" Honor stared at him, startled by the name.

"Indirectly speaking," Bachfisch qualified. "Mind you, I probably would have reached the same point eventually on my own—or I like to think so, anyway. I'd already acquired a half-ownership in Ambuscade, and to be completely honest, I'd already armed her on a minor sort of scale. My partner wasn't entirely happy about that, but we both understood that if the Sillies ever complained about it, I'd take the fall by claiming full responsibility. At least a half dozen Confed skippers—and, for that matter, at least one flag officer—knew she was armed, of course, but by then I'd been out here long enough that I was considered a Silly myself, not one of those pushy Manticoran interlopers.

"Actually, there've always been more more or less honest private armed vessels in Silesia than most people realize. I'm sure you've encountered quite a few of them yourself, during your deployments here?" He raised his eyebrows at her, and she nodded. "The problem, of course, has always been telling the good guys from the bad guys," he went on, "and for whatever reason, the Confed Navy had decided I was one of the good guys. It may have had something to do with the first couple of pirate vessels which suffered a mischief when Ambuscade was in the area."

"I hope you won't take this wrongly, Sir, but why did you stay out here in Silesia at all?" He looked at her, and she waved one hand in the air above her desk. "I mean, you've done well, but surely you had more and better contacts in the Star Kingdom then you did out here, and the Confederacy was scarcely the most law-abiding environment available."

"I suppose shame might have been a part of it," he admitted after a moment. "The language in which the court of inquiry couched its verdict was actually pretty moderate, but the subtext was clear enough, and there was a part of me which wanted sympathy about as little as it wanted condemnation. So there was certainly an element of starting over somewhere where I'd have a clean page.

"Then again, I was one of the Navy's old 'Silesian hands.' Like you, I'd been deployed out here several times in the course of my career, and there were people who knew me, either personally or by reputation. They don't get to see too many Manticoran officers of my seniority or experience in private service out here, so in some ways it was easier for me to write my own ticket in the Confederacy than it would have been in the Star Kingdom."

He paused for several seconds, and she tasted his emotions as he considered whether or not to leave it at that. Then he gave his head a little toss—a mannerism she remembered well as an indicator of decision.

"And if the truth be known, I think it was also a case of looking for the grand gesture. A way of proving to the galaxy at large that whatever the court of inquiry might have decided, I was—well, a force to be reckoned with, I suppose. I needed to go out and demonstrate that I could succeed out here and simultaneously cut a swathe through any pirates who got in my way."

"And perhaps just a bit of knight errantry?" Honor asked gently. He looked at her expressionlessly, and she tipped her chair back and smiled. "I don't doubt anything you just said, Sir. But I think there's also at least a trace of 'once a Queen's officer, always a Queen's officer.' "

"If by that you mean I thought the universe would be a better place with fewer pirates in it, you may have a point," Bachfisch conceded. "But don't make the mistake of assigning me too much purity of motive."

"I didn't say anything about purity of motive," Honor replied. "I just couldn't quite picture you quietly fading away under any circumstances. Finding you out here in command of what amounts to privately flagged Q-ships simply suggests to me that you're still in the business of suppressing piracy. And given that you just let drop the name of the previous Second Space Lord, my naturally suspicious mind suggests that there might be a more direct connection between you and Her Majesty's Navy than most people would suspect."

"There's something to that," he admitted. "Not that I started out with any such connection in mind. Even if one had occurred to me, the circumstances which had gotten me placed on half-pay in the first place would have discouraged me from approaching anyone in the Admiralty. But ONI has always done its best to keep track of the Navy's officers, active-duty or not, and as my support base grew out here, ONI approached me. In fact, it was ONI which quietly greased the way for me to acquire official approval for Ambuscade's guns. And unless I'm very much mistaken, it was also ONI which even more quietly helped send the Bane in my direction when she was listed for disposal by the Andies. No one ever said so in as many words, but there were one or two coincidences too many in the way things came together when I put in my bid on her.

"And whether I'm right about that or not, Admiral Givens—or her minions, at least—were in fairly regular contact with me right up to the truce with the Peeps. I suppose that technically I was one of those 'HumInt' sources ONI keeps referring to when they brief officers for Silesia."

"You said ONI was in regular contact with you?" Honor asked, looking at him very thoughtfully, and he nodded.

"That's exactly what I said," he agreed. "And I meant precisely what you think I meant. Since Jurgensen took over from Givens, Intelligence seems to've cut back drastically on its use of human resources here in Silesia. I can't say what the situation might be elsewhere, but here in the Confederacy, no one seems to be paying much attention to old sources or networks. And, frankly, Honor, I think that's an enormous mistake."

"I wish I could say I disagreed with you, Sir," Honor said slowly. "Unfortunately, if you're right, it only confirms fears I already had. The closer I look at the intelligence packets they sent out here with me, the less in touch with reality the analysts who wrote them up seem to be."

"I was afraid of that," he sighed. "Obviously, there was no way for me to know what ONI was or wasn't telling the officers the Navy was sending out, but the fact that no one was asking me any questions anymore suggested that the information contained in their briefings was probably . . . incomplete. And unless I'm very mistaken about the Andies' intentions, that could be a very, very serious oversight on someone's part."

"Do you think he's right, Your Grace?" Mercedes Brigham asked quietly as she, Honor, Nimitz, Lieutenant Meares, and LaFollet rode the lift towards the flag briefing room and an already scheduled meeting with Honor's entire staff.

"I'm afraid I do," Honor replied equally quietly.

"I know you and he go way back, Your Grace," Brigham said after a moment, and Honor chuckled humorlessly.

"Yes, and he was my very first captain. And, yes, again, Mercedes, that gives him a certain aura of authority in my eyes. But I'm not blind to the ways people can change in thirty or forty T-years. Nor am I overlooking the possibility that however good his intentions, his information—or his interpretation of it—could still be badly flawed." She shook her head. "I'm considering what he's said as impartially and skeptically as I can. Unfortunately, too much of it fits entirely too well with all the other straws in the wind we've been identifying."

"I didn't mean to suggest that he might be trying to dump disinformation on you, Your Grace. And to be honest, I have to agree that his analysis of what the Andies probably have in mind jibes altogether too damned well for comfort with what we were already afraid they were thinking. I guess my greatest concern is that he's so much more emphatic about the Andies' new hardware than anything we had from ONI suggests. For that matter, he's more emphatic than anything we got from the Graysons would suggest."

"Agreed. But by the same token, he's had a much closer look at the Andies than either ONI or Benjamin's people. In ONI's case, that's purely because Jurgensen and his people have chosen not to avail themselves of the resource that was available to them. Unless I'm mistaken, the Captain wasn't the only human source Jurgensen decided he could dispense with, either. In the Graysons' case, it's simply a matter of time and distance. Well, that and the fact that they never even knew the Captain was here, so they can hardly be blamed for not getting his input.

"Even conceding all of that, though, what he's been able to piece together about the new Andermani systems tallies much too closely for comfort with what Greg Paxton did manage to put together. Not to mention what Captain Ferrero's had to say in her reports. Or that Sidemorian analyst, what's-his-name?" She frowned, then nodded. "Zahn."

"Lieutenant Commander Zahn's husband?" Brigham asked.

"That's the one," Honor agreed. "George just finished reading one of his position papers and briefed me on it last night."

Brigham nodded. Commander George Reynolds was Honor's staff intelligence officer, and Honor had selected him for the post of "spook" at least partly on Brigham's recommendation. The chief of staff had worked with him before and been impressed by his ability to think outside the box.

"George wasn't prepared to unreservedly endorse Zahn's conclusions," Honor continued, "but he did say that the logic seemed tight, assuming the basic facts on which it was based were accurate. And now Captain Bachfisch seems to be confirming those facts from an entirely independent perspective."

"If both of them are right," Brigham said unhappily, "then we're holding an even shorter stick than we thought, Your Grace."

"I wish you were wrong," Honor told her. "Unfortunately, I don't think you are."

"So what do we do about it?"

"I don't know. Not yet. The first thing is this meeting, though. We need to get the rest of the staff brought up to speed, get them started thinking on possible threats and responses. And, of course, I'll want to get Alice and Alistair briefed in and thinking about it, too. Hopefully, at least one or two useful ideas will come out of it. And I'm enlarging the invitation list for dinner tonight, as well. I want you, George, Alistair, Alice, Roslee, Wraith, and probably Rafe and Scotty, at a minimum to join the Captain and me over supper."

"Will he be comfortable with that, Your Grace?" Brigham asked. Honor looked a question at her, and she shrugged. "It's pretty obvious he's spent a lot of time establishing himself out here. If word leaks that he's a Manticoran intelligence asset, it could do him a lot of damage. It might even get him killed. I just wondered if he really wanted that many people to know who your information source is. I don't expect any of them to let it get to the wrong ears, but he doesn't know them the way we do."

"I asked him that, more or less," Honor replied after a moment. "He'd already considered the same questions before he ever asked to come aboard Werewolf. I don't think he'd be here in the first place if he weren't prepared for the sorts of questions we're likely to ask him. And he may not know them, but he does know me, and I think he trusts my judgment about who might or might not be a threat to his own security."

"In that case, Your Grace," the chief of staff said as the lift car reached its destination and the doors hissed open, "we'll just have to make certain that none of us is a threat, won't we?"