War Of Honor

Chapter Thirty Four

"Harvest Joy, you are cleared to proceed. Good luck!"

"Thank you, Junction Control," Captain Josepha Zachary, commanding officer of the improbably named survey ship HMS Harvest Joy, acknowledged the clearance and the good wishes simultaneously, then turned to Jordin Kare and quirked an eyebrow.

"Junction Control says we can go now, Doctor," she observed. "Do you and Dr. Wix agree?"

"Captain, Dr. Wix and I have been ready to go for days!" Kare replied with an amazingly youthful looking grin. Then he nodded more seriously. "Our people are ready to proceed whenever you are, Captain."

"Well, in that case . . ." Captain Zachary murmured, and crossed the three paces of deck between her and her command chair. She settled into it, turned it to face her helmsman, and drew a deep breath.

"Ten gravities, Chief Tobias," she said formally.

"Ten gravities, aye, Ma'am," the helmsman confirmed, and Harvest Joy began to creep very slowly forward.

Zachary crossed her legs and made herself lean confidently back in her comfortable chair. It probably wasn't strictly necessary for her to project an aura of complete calm, but it couldn't hurt, either.

Her lips tried to twitch into a smile at the thought, but she suppressed it automatically as she watched the navigation plot repeater deployed from the left arm of the command chair. The com screen beside it showed the face of Arswendo Hooja, her chief engineer, and she nodded to the blond-haired, blue-eyed lieutenant commander. Arswendo and she had served together often over the years, and Zachary was grateful for his calm, competent presence at the far end of the com link.

She was just as happy to have avoided a few other presences, whether on the other end of com links or in the flesh. First and foremost among them was Dame Melina Makris, who had made herself a monumental pain in the posterior from the moment she came aboard. So far as Zachary had been able to determine, Makris had no redeeming characteristics, and the captain had taken carefully concealed but nonetheless profound satisfaction in banning all civilians—except Dr. Kare, of course—from Harvest Joy's bridge for the moment of transit.

Now she nodded to Hooja in welcome. Neither of them felt any particular need for words of a time like this, and in Arswendo's case, she was reasonably certain that calm was completely genuine. Which was more than she could say for most of the people aboard her ship. She could feel the tension of her entire bridge crew. Like her, they were all far too professional to be obvious about showing it, yet it was almost painfully evident to someone who knew them as well as she did. And not surprisingly. In the entire two thousand-T-year history of humankind's expansion through the galaxy, exploration ships had done what Harvest Joy was about to do less than two hundred times. It had been almost two T-centuries since the Basilisk terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction had been mapped, and so far as Zachary knew, no living officer in the Star Kingdom, naval or civilian, had ever commanded the first transit through a newly discovered terminus . . . until her. And although she'd been a survey and exploration officer for the better part of fifty T-years, during which she'd made more Junction transits than she could have counted, no one had ever made this particular transit before. That would have been exciting enough, but, logical or not, the perversity of the human imagination persisted in projecting potential disaster scenarios to hone anticipation's edge still sharper.

The icon representing Harvest Joy on the astrogation plot slid slowly down the gleaming line of her projected transit vector. In some respects, it was exactly like a routine transit through one of the well-established Junction termini. And, as far as the navigation guidance from ACS and the pre-transit calculations from Dr. Kare's team were concerned, it might as well have been precisely that. But for all the similarities, there was one enormous difference, because in this case, the figures upon which those calculations were based had never been tested by another ship.

Stop that, she scolded herself. They may never have been tested by another ship, but Kare and his crowd have put over sixty probes into this terminus to compile the readings your precious numbers are based on! Which was true, as far as it went. On the other hand, she reflected with another almost-smile, not a single one of those probes has ever come back again, has it now?

Of course they hadn't. Nothing smaller than a starship could mount a hyper generator, and only something with a hyper generator could hope to pass through a wormhole junction terminus. The scientists' probes had reported faithfully right up to the moment they encountered the interface of the terminus itself, at which point they had simply ceased to exist.

Unlike them, Zachary's ship did have a hyper generator. Which mean Harvest Joy could pass safely through the hyper-space interface which had destroyed the probes . . . probably. Whether or not she would survive whatever lay on the other side of it was another matter, of course. After all, there were all of those deliciously terrifying, venerable legends about the rogue wormholes whose termini deposited doomed travelers directly into the heart of a black hole or some other suitably lethal destination. Not that anyone had ever actually found a wormhole where warships made transit in but never made transit out again.

As if anyone were about to let anything as boring as reality interfere with perfectly good legends, she told herself, and glanced sideways at Kare.

If the astrophysicist cherished any concerns of his own, they were admirably concealed. He stood at the astrogator's shoulder, blue-gray eyes intent as he watched Harvest Joy's progress with total concentration, and the mere fact of his presence ought to be reassuring. Certainly, the RMAIA would scarcely have allowed its chief scientist, his three senior assistants, and over two hundred of its other scientific personnel to depart aboard Harvest Joy if it hadn't been completely confident of their safety, Zachary thought.

Then she snorted. From what she'd seen of Kare and Wix, it would have taken armed Marines to keep them off Harvest Joy, danger or not. If a first transit was exciting for Zachary, it represented the culmination of Kare's entire academic and professional life, and the same was true for Wix.

"We're starting to pick up the eddy right on schedule, Ma'am," Lieutenant Thatcher reported from Astrogation. "The numbers look good."

"Thank you, Rochelle."

Zachary gazed intently at her display, and her nostrils flared as a bright crosshair icon ahead of Harvest Joy's light code blinked the sudden, brilliant green of a transit threshold. The survey ship was precisely where she was supposed to be, tracking straight down the precalculated vector into the frozen funnel of hyper-space which was all a wormhole junction truly was.

"Dr. Kare?" Zachary said quietly. She was the captain, and hers was the ultimate authority to abort the transit if anything looked less than optimal to her. But Kare was the one in charge of the entire expedition; the official organization chart in Zachary's orders from Admiral Reynaud made that clear, whatever Makris thought. Which meant he was the only one who could finally authorize them to proceed.

"Go ahead, Captain," the scientist replied almost absently without ever looking up from Thatcher's plot.

"Very well." Zachary acknowledged, and looked back down at the face on the small screen beside her left knee. "Prepare to rig foresail for transit, Mr. Hooja," she said formally, precisely as if Arswendo hadn't been prepared to do just that for the last twenty minutes.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Standing by," he replied with equally redundant formality.

"Threshold in three-zero seconds," Thatcher informed her captain.

"Stand ready, Chief Tobias," Zachary said.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Tobias responded, and Zachary consciously reminded herself not to hold her breath as Harvest Joy's icon continued to creep ever so slowly forward.

"Threshold!" Thatcher announced.

"Rig foresail for transit," Zachary commanded.

"Rigging foresail, aye."

To a visual observer, nothing about Harvest Joy changed in any respect as Hooja threw the switch down in Main Engineering, but Zachary's instruments were another matter entirely. Harvest Joy's impeller wedge dropped instantly to half strength as her forward beta nodes shut down and the matching alpha nodes reconfigured. They no longer generated their portion of the survey ship's normal-space stress bands; instead, they projected a Warshawski sail, a circular disk of focused gravitational energy, perpendicular to Harvest Joy's long axis and extending for over three hundred kilometers in every direction.

"Standby to rig aftersail on my mark," Zachary murmured, and Hooja acknowledged once again as Harvest Joy continued to creep forward under the power of her after impellers alone and another readout flickered to life. Zachary watched its flashing numerals climb steadily as the foresail moved deeper and deeper into the Junction. The normal safety margin was considerably wider than usual because of the survey ship's relatively low acceleration and velocity, but that didn't make Zachary feel any less tense.

The numbers suddenly stopped flashing. They continued to climb, but their steady glow told her that the foresail was now drawing sufficient power from the grav waves twisting down the invisible pathway of the Junction to provide movement, and she nodded sharply.

"Rig aftersail now," she said crisply.

"Rigging aftersail, aye," Hooja replied, and Harvest Joy twitched as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and a second Warshawski sail flicked into life at the far end of her hull from the first.

Zachary looked up from her displays to watch Chief Tobias take the ship through the transition from impeller to hyper sail. The maneuver was trickier than the experienced petty officer made it look, but there was a reason Tobias had been chosen for this mission. His hands moved smoothly, confidently, and Harvest Joy slid through the interface into the terminus without so much as a quiver. He held the survey ship rock-steady, and Zachary grimaced around a familiar wave of queasiness.

No one ever really adjusted to the indescribable sensation of crossing the wall between n-space and hyper-space. Precisely what physical sense reported that sensation was debated. Everyone seemed to have his or her own opinion as to which one it was, but however much they might disagree about that, everyone agreed about the ripple of nausea that accompanied the transition. It wasn't particularly severe in a normal transit, but the gradient was far steeper in a Junction transit, and Zachary swallowed hard.

But if the nausea was sharper, it would also be over sooner, she reminded herself. The familiar thought wound its way through the groove decades of naval experience had worn in her mental processes, and then the maneuvering display blinked again.

For an instant, a fleeting interval no chronometer had ever been able to measure, HMS Harvest Joy ceased to exist. One moment she was where she had been, seven light-hours from Manticore-A; the next she was . . . somewhere else, and Zachary swallowed again, this time in relief. Her nausea vanished along with the brilliant blue transit energy radiating from Harvest Joy's sails, and she inhaled deeply.

"Transit complete," Chief Tobias reported.

"Thank you, Chief," Zachary told him, even as her eyes dropped back to the sail interface readout. She watched the numbers spiral downward even more rapidly than they'd risen, and nodded in profound satisfaction at their reassuring normality.

"Engineering, reconfigure to impeller now."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Hooja replied, and Harvest Joy folded her sails back into her impeller wedge and moved forward, once again at the same, steady ten gravities.

"Well, Dr. Kare," Zachary said, looking up from her displays to meet the scientist's eyes. "We're here. Wherever 'here' is, of course."

"Here" proved to be a spot in space approximately five and a half light-hours from an unremarkable looking, planetless M8 red dwarf. That was disappointing, because the next nearest star, a G2 was just over four light-years away. That was a bit less than fourteen hours of travel for a warship, which wasn't really all that bad in a lot of ways. But the local star's lack of planets was going to deprive this terminus of any convenient anchor for the sort of infrastructure which routinely grew up to service wormhole traffic.

But if Zachary was disappointed by the absence of planets, the horde of scientists infesting her ship scarcely even seemed to notice it. They were too busy communing with their computers, Harvest Joy's shipboard sensors, and the reports from the expanding shell of sensor drones they'd deployed even before Zachary reduced velocity to zero relative to the dim dwarf.

She was a bit amused by the fact that none of them seemed to have any interest whatsoever in the local star or even in determining where in the universe they might be. All of their attention was focused on their Warshawskis.

Actually, Zachary reflected, that was completely understandable—from their perspective, at least. And, upon more mature consideration, it was a focus she approved of heartily. After all, until they were able to nail down the precise location of this end of the terminus through which they'd come, it would be impossible for Harvest Joy to find her way home through it once more. Given how faint the readings which had guided them to the Junction end of the terminus had been, and how long and how hard the RMAIA had searched for it, Josepha Zachary was completely in favor of staying precisely where she was until Kare and his crew were totally confident that they'd pinned this one down.

But while they concentrated on that, the merely human hired help who had chauffeured them to their present location were busy with other observations. It was extremely rare—in fact, virtually unheard of—for any modern starship to be required to start completely from scratch in order to determine its location. Navigation through hyper-space depended heavily upon the hyper log, which located a ship in reference to its point of departure, since it was impossible to take observations across the hyper wall into n-space. In this case, however, even the hyper log was useless. There was no way to know how far Harvest Joy had come in Einsteinian terms, because a junction transit could theoretically be of literally any length. In fact, the longest transit "leg" for any known junction spanned just over nine hundred light-years, and the average was considerably shorter than that. Basilisk, for example, was barely two hundred light-years from the Manticore System, while Trevor's Star and Gregor were both even closer than that. Sigma Draconis and Matapan, on the other hand, were each the next best thing to five light-centuries from Manticore, while Phoenix was over seven hundred light-years away, although in terms of actual transit time all of them were equally close.

In this instance, however, with absolutely no way to judge how far from home they'd come, Lieutenant Thatcher and her assistants had to begin with a blank map. The first order of business was to isolate and determine the exact spectral classes of the most brilliant stars in the vicinity. Once that was done, the computers could compare them to the enormous amounts of data in their memory until they managed to positively identify enough of them to tell Thatcher just where the terminus had deposited them. In the immediate sense of this particular mission, Kare's and Wix's work was considerably more important than Thatcher's, since they might never get home again if the scientists failed to nail down their target. In the grand scheme of things, though, Thatcher's quest held far greater significance for the Star Kingdom as a whole.

The only true utility of the terminus was to go from one place to another, after all, and there was no point in going if one didn't know where one was after one arrived. Besides, while it was theoretically possible that they were so far from Manticore that return would be possible only by retracing their course through the terminus, that was also extremely unlikely. Harvest Joy had a cruising endurance of just over four months before she would have to rebunker. That gave her a radius of over eight hundred light-years even assuming she had to make the entire hyper voyage under impellers, instead of Warshawski sail, which ought to be enough to get her back to civilization somewhere, assuming that Thatcher could figure out where they were.

As for Zachary herself, she had absolutely nothing to do until one batch of hunters or the other, or preferably both, succeeded in their quest.

"So," Zachary said nineteen hours later. "What do we know?"

She sat at the head of the table in Harvest Joy's captain's briefing room and let her eyes run around the faces of the other people assembled around it. There were five of them: Lieutenant Commander Wilson Jefferson, her executive officer; Lieutenant Thatcher; Jordin Kare and Richard Wix; and Dame Melina Makris. Of that five, Zachary had discovered that she liked four, which was probably a bit above the average for any group of people. Unfortunately, the one member of the group she actively disliked—Makris—more than compensated for that happy state of affairs. To be honest, Zachary would have preferred to exclude Makris from this meeting (or anything else happening aboard Harvest Joy ), but the immaculately coiffured blonde was the Government's personal representative. It was painfully obvious that in her own not so humble opinion, Makris also considered herself to be the true commander of this entire expedition, whatever the merely official table of organization said. She'd made that painfully evident from the moment she first came on board, and the situation had gotten no better since. The fact that she regarded the personnel who crewed Harvest Joy as the sort of menials who'd obviously joined the Navy because they were incapable of finding anything better to do with their lives was equally apparent.

Now Makris proceeded yet again to demonstrate her enormous natural talent for making any Queen's officer detest her. She cleared her throat loudly and gave the captain a pointedly reproving glare for daring to usurp her authority. With that out of the way, she officiously straightened the sheets of hardcopy in front of her, jogged them sharply (and nosily) on the table just in case anyone had missed the point of her glare, and turned her attention to Kare.

"Yes," she said in a hard-edged, slightly nasal voice which suited her sharp-featured face quite well. "What do we know, Doctor?"

It was remarkable, Zachary mused. Makris obviously had a detailed checklist of Things to Do to Piss Off Survey Ship Captains, and she was determined not to leave any of them undone. The captain couldn't decide which irritated her more: Makris' usurpation of her own authority . . . or the peremptory, almost dismissive, mistress-to-servant fashion in which she'd just addressed Kare.

"Excuse me, Dame Melina," Zachary said, and waited until the civilian turned to give her a look of pained inquiry.

"What?" Makris asked sharply.

"I believe that I was speaking."

Jefferson and Thatcher looked at one another, but Makris didn't know Zachary nearly as well as they did. She only tossed her head dismissively with a grimace of distaste.

"I hardly think—" she began.

"Regardless of what you may believe, Dame Melina," Zachary interrupted in calm, measured tones, "you are not in this vessel's chain of command."

"I beg your pardon?" Makris quite obviously couldn't believe she'd heard Zachary correctly.

"I said that you're not in this vessel's chain of command," Zachary repeated. Makris stared at her, and Zachary smiled thinly. "In point of fact, you're a guest aboard my ship."

"I don't believe I care for your tone, Captain," Makris said coldly.

"You may find this difficult to credit, Dame Melina, but I don't particularly care whether you do or not," Zachary informed her.

"Well you'd better!" Makris snapped. "I warn you, Captain—I'm not prepared to put up with insolence!"

"How odd. That's precisely what I was just thinking," Zachary replied, and something seemed to flicker in Makris' eyes. She opened her mouth again, but Zachary leaned forward in her chair before she could say anything more.

"I understand that you're aboard as the Government's representative, Dame Melina," the captain said flatly. "However, I am the captain of this ship; you are not. Neither are you the chairwoman of this meeting. That, too, is my role. In fact, you have no standing whatsoever in the chain of command aboard this ship, and I'm becoming rather tired of your manner. I think—"

"Now, see here, Captain! I'm not about to—"

"Be quiet." Zachary didn't raise her voice, but it cut through Makris' outraged splutter like a chill scalpel. The other woman closed her mouth with an almost audible click, her eyes wide with astonishment that anyone should dare to address her in such tones.

"That's better." Zachary's hard eyes considered the bureaucrat as if she were inspecting some particularly loathsome bacterium. "As I was saying," the captain resumed, "I think you would do well to practice a certain minimal courtesy while you're aboard my ship. So long as you do, I assure you, the members of the ship's company will reciprocate. If, however, you find that to be beyond your capability, I feel sure we could all dispense with your presence. Do I make myself clear?"

Makris stared at her, looking as if someone had just punched her. But then the paralyzing moment of shock passed and a dark red tide of outrage suffused her face.

"I'm not in the habit of being dictated to by uniformed flunkies, Captain!" she spat. "Not even by ones who seem to think they—"

Zachary's open palm cracked like a pistol shot when it landed on the tabletop. The sharp, explosive sound made more than one person jump, and Makris recoiled as if the blow had landed on her cheek instead. A stab of pure, physical fear chopped her off in mid-sentence, and she swallowed as the cold fury burning behind Zachary's eyes seemed to truly register at last.

"That will be enough," the captain said, very softly, into the ringing silence. "Since you obviously cannot comport yourself with anything like adult self-control, Dame Melina, I believe we can dispense with your presence. Leave."

"I— You can't—" Makris spluttered, only to chop off again under the searing contempt of Zachary's gaze.

"Yes, I can," the other woman assured her. "And I have. Your presence is no longer required here . . . nor will it be required at any other staff meeting for the duration of this cruise." Her impaling gaze nailed the Prime Minister's personal representative into her chair, daring her to open her mouth once more as she was exiled from any further direction of the survey mission.

"And now," Zachary went on after a two-heartbeat pause, "you will leave this compartment and go directly to your berthing compartment. You will remain there until I send word you may leave it."

"I—" Makris shook herself. "The Prime Minister will be informed of this, Captain!" she declared, but her voice was much weaker than before.

"No doubt he will," Zachary agreed. "For now, however, you'll obey my orders or I will have you escorted to your quarters. The choice, Dame Melina, is yours."

Her eyes were unflinching, and Makris' attempt to glare defiantly back shattered on their flint. The civilian's gaze fell, and, after one more awkward second, she stood and walked wordlessly through the compartment hatch. Zachary watched her go, then turned back to those still seated around the table as the hatch closed behind her.

"Please excuse the interruption, Dr. Kare," she said pleasantly. "Now, you were about to say— ?"

"Ah, you do realize she really will complain to the Prime Minister, don't you, Captain?" Kare asked after a moment, rather than answering her question, and she sighed.

"If she does, she does." The captain shrugged. "In either case, I meant every word I said to her."

"I can't disagree with any of them myself," the astrophysicist admitted with a wry grin. Then he sobered. "But she does have influence at the cabinet level. And a vindictive streak a kilometer wide."

"Somehow, I find that very easy to believe," Zachary observed with a wintery chuckle. "But while I also realize that she undoubtedly has a certain amount of influence even with the Admiralty—" that was as close as she was prepared to come to mentioning Sir Edward Janacek by name, not that anyone failed to recognize her meaning "—I still meant it. And while there may be repercussions, they may also be less severe than you expect. After all, we're all heroes, Dr. Kare!" She grinned suddenly. "I expect our towering contribution to the expansion of humanity's frontiers to provide at least a little protection against any winds of official disfavor Dame Melina can stir up. If it doesn't—"

She shrugged and, after a moment, Kare nodded. He was still unhappy, not least because a part of him thought he should have been the one to slap Makris down. But there wasn't much he could do about that now, so he returned to the matter in hand, instead.

"In answer to your original question, Captain, TJ and the rest of our Agency people may not have the exact vector information we need yet, but our preliminary readings have managed to nail down the terminus locus. In fact, we've managed to derive a much tighter initial approximation than anyone anticipated." He chuckled. "It's almost as if all the things that made our end of the terminus so hard to spot for so long were reversed at this end."

"So you're confident that at least we'll be able to go home again?" Zachary asked with a smile.

"Oh, yes. Of course, TJ and I were always confident of that, or we'd never have volunteered to come along in the first place!"

"Of course you wouldn't have," Zachary agreed. "But confidence aside, do you have any sort of estimate on how long it will take you to derive the approach vector?"

"That's harder to say, but I shouldn't think it will take a great deal of time. As I say, our instruments are doing a much better job with this terminus. And we have a great deal more information about its strength and tidal stresses now that we've been through it once from the other side than we had when we began calculating for the trip here. If you want my best guess, bearing in mind that a guess is mostly what it would be, I'd say that we ought to have the numbers we need within the next two weeks—possibly three. I'll be surprised, frankly, if we can pull them together much more rapidly than that. On the other hand, we've rather persistently surprised ourselves with how quickly things came together ever since we finally found this terminus."

"So I understand." Zachary nodded pensively, then pursed her lips as she considered the time estimate. It was considerably better than she'd anticipated, she reflected. Which ought to make everyone—with the possible exception of Dame Melina—happy. She suppressed a sour smile at the thought and turned her attention to Jefferson and Thatcher.

"Well, Wilson. The boffins seem to be holding up their end. Are we holding up ours?"

"Actually," the exec replied with what she suddenly realized was studied calm, "I believe we might reasonably say that we are, Skipper."

"Ah?" Zachary arched both eyebrows, and Jefferson grinned. He was obviously pleased about something, but Zachary had known him for quite some time. It was equally apparent to her that his pleasure was less than complete. In fact, she seemed to sense an undertone of what could almost be anxiety.

"You're the one who put it together, Rochelle," he told Thatcher. "Suppose you break it to her?"

"Yes, Sir," Thatcher said with a smile of her own, then seemed to sober slightly as she turned to her captain.

"Our people have done just about as well as Dr. Wix and his people, Ma'am. So far we've already identified no less than six 'beacon' stars, which has let us place our current position with a high degree of confidence."

"And that position is—?" Zachary prompted when Thatcher paused.

"At this particular moment, Ma'am, we're approximately six hundred and twelve light-years from Manticore. And we've been able to identify that G2 star at four light-years as Lynx."

"Lynx?" Zachary's brow wrinkled, then she shrugged. "I can't say the name rings any bells, Rochelle. Should it?"

"Not really, Ma'am. After all, it's a long way from home. But the Lynx System was settled about two hundred T-years ago. It's part of the Talbott Cluster."

"Talbott?" This time Zachary recognized the name, and her eyes narrowed as she considered the implications of that recognition.

The Talbott Cluster was the thoroughly inaccurate name assigned to one of several regions, most of them rather sparsely settled, just beyond the frontiers of the Solarian League. Whatever else the "cluster's" stars were, they were nothing which remotely resembled anything an astrophysicist would have considered a cluster, but that didn't matter to the people who'd needed to come up with a convenient handle for them.

Most such regions were relatively hardscrabble propositions. Many of them contained colonies which had backslid technologically, severely in some cases, since their settlement, and only a few of them contained star systems which anyone from the Star Kingdom would have considered economically well established. And eventually, all of them would inevitably be incorporated into the glacially expanding frontiers of the League. Whether they wanted to be or not.

No one would resort to anything as crude as outright conquest. Sollies didn't do things that way . . . nor did they have to. The Solarian League was the largest, most powerful, wealthiest political entity in human history. On a per capita basis, the Star Kingdom's economy was actually somewhat stronger, but in absolute terms Manticore's entire gross domestic product would disappear with scarcely a ripple into the League's economy. When that sort of economic powerhouse expanded into the vicinity of star systems which could scarcely keep their heads above water, the train of events leading to eventual incorporation extended itself with the inevitability of entropy.

And if it didn't, the League could be counted upon to give the process a swift kick, Zachary reflected sourly.

Josepha Zachary was scarcely alone among the Star Kingdom of Manticore's naval officers in her dislike for the Solarian League. Actually, a lot of people who had been denied the honor and privilege of Solly citizenship disliked the League. It wasn't because the League went around conquering people. Not officially, anyway. It was just that the towering sense of moral superiority which the League seemed to bring to all of its interstellar endeavors could be absolutely relied upon to irritate every non-Solly who ever experienced it. The antipathy was exacerbated for the Royal Manticoran Navy, however, and Zachary was honest enough to admit it. The embargo which the Cromarty Government had managed to secure on weapons sales and technology transfers to the belligerents in the Star Kingdom's war against the Peeps had irritated the hell out of an awful lot of Sollies. Some of them had been none too shy about making their ire known, and some of those who hadn't been were officers in the Solarian League Navy or Customs Service who had expressed their personal irritation by harassing Manticoran merchant ships in Solarian space.

Even without that, however, Zachary knew, she wouldn't have cared for the Sollies. When the Solarian League was created, the local governments of Old Earth's older daughter worlds had already been over a thousand T-years old. Few of those planets had been prepared to surrender their sovereignty to a potentially tyrannical central government, so the League Constitution had been carefully designed to prevent that from happening. Like the founders of the Star Kingdom, the men and women who'd drafted that Constitution had limited the funding sources for the government they were creating as the best means of ensuring that it could never grow into the monster they feared. Unfortunately, they hadn't stopped there. Instead they'd gone on to give every member system of the League effective veto power in the League legislature.

That combination had created a situation in which the League effectively had no official foreign policy. Or, rather, what it had was a consensus so mushy that it was hopelessly amorphous. About the only clear and unambiguous foreign policy principle the League maintained was the Eridani Edict's prohibition against the unrestricted use of what were still called "weapons of mass destruction" against inhabited planets. And even that was only because the edict's proponents had used the Solarian Constitution's referendum provisions to do an end run around the Assembly and amend it to incorporate the edict into the League's fundamental law after the horrific casualties of the Eridani Incident.

But if the League had no official foreign policy, that didn't mean it lacked a de facto one. The problem was that the League Assembly as such had virtually nothing to do with that policy's formulation.

While the restrictions on the central government's ability to tax had indeed limited that government's power, the limitation was purely relative. Even a very tiny percentage of the total economic product of something the size of the Solarian League was an inconceivable amount of money. Despite that, however, the League was perpetually strapped for revenue, because the relative ineffectuality of the veto-riddled Assembly had resulted in the transfer of more and more of the practical day-to-day authority for managing the League from the legislature to bureaucratic regulatory agencies. Unlike laws and statutes, bureaucratic regulations didn't require the item-by-item approval of the entire Assembly, which, over the centuries, had led to the gradual evolution of deeply entrenched, monolithic, enormously powerful (and expensive) bureaucratic empires.

For the most part, the Sollies appeared to have no particular problems with that. Those regulatory and service agencies seldom intruded directly into the lives of the citizens as a whole. And however distasteful Zachary might have found their existence, they did perform many useful functions which the veto-hobbled Assembly would never have been able to discharge efficiently. But there was an undeniable downside to their existence, even for League citizens.

For one thing, the ever-growing sprawl of regulatory overreach required larger and larger bureaucracies, which, in turn, absorbed an ever growing percentage of the central government's total income. That, Zachary suspected, was one reason the Solarian League Navy, for all of its numerical strength and its perception of itself as the most powerful and modern fleet in existence, was probably at least fifty T-years out of date compared to the RMN. The Navy's budgets were no more immune to the hemorrhaging effect of such uncontrolled bureaucratic growth than any other aspect of the League government, which left too little funding for aggressive research and development and meant that far too many of the SLN's ships of the wall were growing steadily more obsolete as they moldered away in mothballs.

Had Zachary been a Solly, that alone would have been enough to infuriate her. Unfortunately, the Navy was only one example of the pernicious effect of siphoning more and more of the available resources of government into the clutches of bureaucratic entities subject to only the weakest of legislative oversight. But what Zachary found even more objectionable as someone who was not a Solly was the way in which the League bureaucrats made foreign policy without ever bothering to consult with the League's elected representatives. And probably the worst of the lot in that regard was the Office of Frontier Security.

The OFS had originally been conceived as an agency intended to promote stability along the League's frontiers. It was supposed to do that by offering its services to mediate disputes between settled star systems which were not yet part of the League. In order to provide incentives for quarreling star systems to seek its arbitration, it had been authorized to offer security guarantees, backed by the SLN, and special trade concessions to those systems which sought the League's protection.

No doubt the OFS' creators had anticipated that the agency's operations would smooth the inevitable gravitation of such single-system polities into the benign arms of the League. But whatever they might have intended when the OFS was first authorized five hundred T-years ago, what it had become since was an arm of naked expansionism. These days, the OFS manufactured 'requests' for League protection. It didn't worry particularly about whether or not the people making those requests represented local governments, either. All it cared about was that someone had requested 'protection'—often against a local government, in fact—to offer the necessary pretext for its intervention. And there had been occasions when no one at all had requested OFS intervention. Instances in which the OFS had sent in the League Gendarmerie to enforce protectorate status . . . purely in the interests of safeguarding human rights, of course.

Over the centuries, the Office of Frontier Security had become the Solarian League's broom, sweeping the small, independent, poverty stricken star systems along the League's periphery into its maw, whether they chose to be swept or not. To be completely fair, which Zachary admitted she found it difficult to be in this instance, most of the worlds which were dragged into the League eventually found themselves far better off materially.

Eventually. The rub was that in the short term their citizens were given no choice, no voice in their own future. And anyone who objected to becoming a Solly was ignored . . . or repressed. Worse, the OFS was no more immune to the temptations of graft and corruption than any other agency run by fallible human beings. The lack of any sort of close legislative oversight only made those temptations stronger, and by now the agency was in bed with powerful vested interests, using its power and authority to create "sweetheart deals" for favored interstellar corporations, shipping lines, or political cronies and contributors as it reorganized the "protected" worlds under its nurturing care. There were even persistent rumors that some of the OFS administrators had forged connections with the Mesan genetic slavers.

Which brought Zachary right back to the Talbott Cluster, because Talbott had perhaps another twenty or thirty T-years to go until the League's creeping frontiers brought the OFS to it.

"The Talbott Cluster," she mused, half to herself, and Jefferson nodded.

"Yes, Ma'am. I did a little research when Rochelle identified Lynx, too. According to the most recent data in our files, which is probably at least ten or fifteen T-years out of date, the system population is around two-point-three billion. It looks to me as if economically they're about where the Graysons were before they joined the Alliance, or maybe not quite that far along, although their base tech level is probably a bit higher. From what I've found so far, Lynx seems to be one of the two or three more heavily populated systems in the cluster, but the average seems to work out to around one-point-five billion."

"And Lynx is only about fourteen hours from this terminus," Thatcher pointed out.

"That thought had also occurred to me," Zachary said mildly.

"Well, that certainly sounds good!" Kare said. The captain looked at him, and the scientist grinned. "We're going to need someone to help us anchor the terminus, Captain. It might be nice if they were a bit closer than that, but it should still make developing this terminus a lot easier!"

"Yes," Zachary agreed. "Yes, I suppose it will, Doctor."

She watched Kare and Wix smiling at one another in delight, and then her gaze met Wilson Jefferson's and she saw the reflection of her own worry in the exec's eyes.

Erica Ferrero reminded herself not to snarl. It wasn't easy.

She stood at Lieutenant Commander Harris' shoulder, gazing into his tactical display at a flashing crimson dot which had become entirely too familiar.

"Definitely Hellbarde, Skip," Harris reported. "It matches her emissions signature across the board."

"Still nothing from our friend Gortz, Mecia?" Ferrero asked without ever taking her eyes from the plot.

"Not a word, Ma'am," the com officer reported.

"Figures!" Ferrero snorted, continuing to stare hard-eyed at the icon. At least Sidemore's Intelligence files had been able to finally ID Kapitän der Sterne Gortz as one Guangfu Gortz. Intelligence didn't have as much information on him as Ferrero might have wished, but what they did have clearly indicated that he was one of the IAN's cadre of Manticore-haters. Which probably meant that he was enjoying himself immensely at the moment, she thought, baring mental teeth at the memory of the florid, jowly face from the ONI file's imagery. Then she patted Harris lightly on the shoulder, turned, and stalked across to her command chair. She settled herself into it and glared at the small repeater plot that duplicated Harris' in miniature.

Jessica Epps had been spared the company of IANS Hellbarde for almost four weeks—long enough for Ferrero to begin to hope Kapitän zur Sternen Gortz had found someone else to irritate. It had, she'd realized even at the time, been a triumph of optimism over experience, but she'd been properly grateful for the respite anyway.

Now, unfortunately, that respite had come to an end, and Ferrero felt a slow, intense boil of anger bubbling away deep down inside.

She drew a deep breath and forced herself to remember Duchess Harrington's orders. Like most of the ship commanders assigned to Sidemore Station, Ferrero had been delighted when she learned Harrington was being sent out to take command. It wasn't that she had a thing against Rear Admiral Hewitt. He was a good man and a competent flag officer, but Ferrero had hoped Harrington's assignment indicated that someone back home was finally taking the situation in Silesia seriously. Certainly they wouldn't have sent "the Salamander" all the way out here if they hadn't meant for her appointment to send a message to the Andermani!

Unfortunately, it was beginning to look like the people who'd hoped that were going to be disappointed.

It wasn't Harrington's fault. That much was obvious. But the nature and number of the reinforcements the Janacek Admiralty had decided to send out with the duchess made it painfully evident that—to use Bob Llewellyn's colorful phrase—Sidemore was still "sucking hind teat." The astonishing arrival of so many Grayson warships had only underscored the weakness of the reinforcements the Admiralty had seen fit to spare Harrington, and the duchess' instructions to the ships assigned to her new command had been another sign that no one back home gave much of a damn about what was happening out here.

Ferrero knew that no flag officer with Harrington's reputation could have been happy issuing those orders. And the fact that she'd done it had said volumes about just how out of touch with reality the Star Kingdom's government really was. Her Majesty's starships in Silesia were to maintain and protect the traditional interpretation of freedom of space, as well as the territorial integrity of the Silesian Confederacy, against anyone who threatened to violate either, while simultaneously avoiding "provocations" of the Imperial Andermani Navy . . . or responding in kind to Andermani provocations.

That mouthful of platitudes and qualifications must have stuck in Harrington's craw sideways, Ferrero thought. That much had been evident even through the officialese of her orders. And if it hadn't been, the revision of the controlling rules of engagement which had accompanied those orders would have made it clear enough. Although the modified ROE strongly reiterated that officers were to avoid counter provocations—which, Ferrero suspected, was at least partly aimed at her own destruction of Hellbarde's remote sensor platforms, despite the fact that Harrington had officially approved her report of that patrol—they also emphasized that "These orders shall not be construed to in any way supersede or compromise a captain's responsibility to safeguard the vessel entrusted to her command. No officer can do very wrong by taking all such defensive actions as shall seem necessary and prudent in her judgment." Taken together, those seemingly contradictory provisions told Harrington's officers a lot. The most important message was that she really meant it when she ordered them to avoid responding in kind to Andermani provocations . . . and that she would back them to the hilt in any reasonable action they took in self-defense.

It was a dangerous set of instructions for any station commander to issue, and Ferrero knew it. If something did go wrong, Harrington could absolutely rely on someone to suggest that she'd actually encouraged her captains to respond with force if challenged. And to be fair to the sort of rear-area genius who would come up with that sort of suggestion, there were undoubtedly captains who would interpret Duchess Harrington's orders in precisely that fashion. Fortunately, few of them were currently assigned to Sidemore Station, but even one in the wrong place at the wrong time could be enough.

And, Ferrero told herself with bleak honesty, I know who one of those officers could be . . . especially with Gortz pushing me this way.

She drew a deep breath and made herself settle deeper into the command chair. Hellbarde had been matching Jessica Epps' every course change at close range for over sixteen hours . . . and refusing to identify herself when challenged. At the moment, the other cruiser was at least two hundred thousand kilometers inside normal missile range of Ferrero's ship, which put Gortz into a very gray area. Hellbarde hadn't quite violated interstellar law by shadowing Jessica Epps from within weapons range and ignoring all requests that she identify herself and state her intentions. Not quite. But she was pressing the limits. Indeed, Ferrero could have made a strong case before any interstellar court of admiralty for justifying herself in peremptorily ordering the Andermani to stand clear of her own vessel . . . and locking Hellbarde up with her fire control systems to emphasize her point.

Which, she admitted, was precisely what she wanted to do. And, for that matter, precisely what Gortz deserved for her to do.

But it wasn't what she'd done. Not given Lady Harrington's orders. Instead of slapping Gortz down, she'd gritted her teeth, brought Jessica Epps to level two readiness, and manned missile-defense stations. And she had Shawn Harris running constant targeting updates on Hellbarde using passive sensors only. But aside from that, she'd done nothing else. Indeed, after the first three challenges, she hadn't even hailed the other ship.

I wonder if Gortz is as pissed off by the way I'm ignoring his ship as I am by the way he's shadowing mine? Ferrero thought with a sort of mordant humor that did very little to mask the seething heat of her own anger from her.

But at this particular moment, what Gortz felt didn't really matter. Because however angry Erica Ferrero might be, she was going to follow her orders. She would not provide whatever pretext Hellbarde might be seeking to suck her into providing.

But if that bastard even blinks in my direction, she told herself harshly, I'm going to blow him and his goddamned ship to dust bunnies.