Mission of Honor-ARC (73 page)

"None I haven't already shared with you." LePic grimaced. "I
wish
we had confirmation one way or the other about Cachat and Zilwicki! If anyone might be able to shed at least a little light on whatever the hell is going on in Mesa and with Manpower, it would be them."

"You don't think that whatever they got involved with led to this, do you?" Montrose asked. The others looked at her, and she shrugged. "I don't see how it could have, myself, but as Denis just implied, we don't have a clue what's going on inside Mesa, whatever we used to think we knew about it. Since that's true, we can't know if Officer Cachat and Captain Zilwicki didn't stumble across something that provoked whoever's really calling the shots into attacking Manticore."

"I think that's unlikely, Leslie," Theisman said. "This was obviously a carefully planned and prepared operation. I don't think it was a panic reaction, and given how long ago Zilwicki, at least, was killed on Mesa without anyone here or in Manticore making any huge new revelations, they're probably feeling pretty confident on that front."

"I'm still not prepared to write Cachat off," LePic said stubbornly. Theisman looked skeptical, and the attorney general shrugged. "I'm not saying I
expect
him to make it home this time, just that he's managed to run between the raindrops so long that I'm not going to accept he's actually dead until someone delivers his body. And even then, I'll want proof it wasn't a clone!"

"Well," Pritchart said, "I'm going to hope you're right, Denis, and not just because lunatic or not, he's
our
lunatic. As you say, if he's been poking around Manpower, maybe he can give us at least some clue as to what the hell's going on. In fact, I've had a disturbing thought, one that occurred to me after Tom's briefing."

"I've had quite a few of those myself," Theisman observed. "Which one were you referring to?"

"You made the point that we don't know what whoever hit Manticore's ultimate objectives may be, but we have to suspect Manpower's involved, for all the reasons you enumerated. And then we have Cachat's suspicion that Manpower was involved in the attempt on Queen Berry from which it's only a short step to their being involved with Admiral Webster's assassination in Old Chicago. For which"—her eyes bored suddenly into Theisman's—"some form of suicidal compulsion appears to have been used. Very much, now that I think about it. like what happened to a certain Yves Grosclaude."

It was suddenly very, very quiet.

"Are you suggesting
Manpower
was working with Giancola?" LePic asked very carefully.

"No, I'm suggesting Arnold was working with
Manpower
," Pritchart replied grimly. "If they're willing—and able—to manipulate the
Solarian League
into going to war with the Manties, why in the world wouldn't they figure they could do the same with us? I mean, look how much
easier
it would be, given the fact that we didn't even have a formal peace treaty from our last war!"

"My God." Montreau shook her head almost numbly, her face suddenly ashen."That never even occurred to me!"

"No reason it should have, before," Pritchart pointed out.

"It's possible we're seeing conspiracies where there aren't any," Theisman said warningly.

"I know. And the only thing more dangerous than not seeing conspiracies that
are
there is seeing ones that
aren't
," Pritchart acknowledged. "But talking about conspiracies and suicidal assassins, there's that attempt on Alexander-Harrington, too. We know we didn't do it, although I've never blamed the Manties for figuring we were the ones with the best motive. But if Manpower's been moving chess pieces around like this, and if they have the technology—or whatever—they used to control the assassin who killed Webster and that poor patsy who carried out the Torch attack, why shouldn't they have tried to pick off one of the Manties' best military commanders? Especially if the object of the exercise was for us to trash Manticore for them?"

"Oh, how I do hope you're engaging in flights of paranoia," Theisman said after a moment.

"So do I I think." Pritchart frowned thoughtfully for several seconds, then gave herself a shake.

"Maybe I am indulging my paranoia, but maybe I'm not, too. You know, I
almost
went ahead and told Alexander-Harrington about Arnold."

The other three stared at her, visibly aghast, and she chuckled.

"I did say 'almost,'" she pointed out. "Frankly, does anyone in this room think she wouldn't have been more likely to respect my confidence then several members of Congress we could mention right off hand?"

"Put that way, I suppose she would have," Theisman admitted.

"There's no 'supposing' to it," LePic said sourly. "Younger? McGwire?" He shuddered.

"Now, I almost wish I'd gone ahead and told her," Pritchart continued thoughtfully. "Given the depth and murkiness of the water we're all floundering around in at the moment, I'd really like to know what
she'd
think about the possibility of a Giancola-Manpower connection."

Honor Alexander-Harrington sat silently on her flag bridge as HMS
Invictus
decelerated steadily towards the planet of her birth. Nimitz was on the back of her command chair, but not lying stretched along it as he usually was. Instead, he sat bolt upright, gazing into the visual display with her. The two of them might have been carved out of stone, and the silence on the bridge was absolute.

Honor's expression was calm, almost serene, but inside, where thoughts and emotions ought to have been, there was only a vast, singing silence, as empty as the vacuum beyond her flagship's hull.

She no longer needed to look at the plot. Its icons had already told her how short of reality her dread had fallen. The space about the system's two inhabited planets was crowded with shipping, showing far greater numbers of impeller signatures than would have been permitted in such proximity when Eighth Fleet departed for the Haven System. But those ships weren't the evidence her fears might have been too dark—that the damage had actually been less severe than she'd dreaded. No,
those
ships were the proof it had been even worse, for they were still only sorting through the wreckage, better than two weeks after the actual attack, and warning beacons marked prodigious spills of debris—and bodies—which had once been the heart and bone of the Star Empire of Manticore's industrial might.

It's odd
, a corner of her brain whispered.
There was wreckage after the Battle of Manticore, too, but not like this. Oh, no. Not like this. This time every single warship we lost was caught
docked,
not destroyed in action. And most of the dead are
civilians
this time
.

A sense of failure flowed through her, steadily, with all the patience of an ocean, and with it came shame. A dark guilt that burned like chilled vitriol, for she had failed in the solemn promise she'd made when she was seventeen T-years old. The vow she'd kept for all the years between then and now—honored with a fidelity which only made her present failure infinitely worse. This was
exactly
what she'd joined the Navy all those years ago to prevent. This was the wreckage of
her
star nation, these were the bodies of
her
civilians, and all of it was the work of enemies
she
was supposed to have stopped before they ever got close enough to play atrocity's midwife.

Nimitz made a small, soft sound of protest, and she felt him leaning forward, pressing against the back of her neck. She knew, in the part of her brain where conscious thought lived, that he was right. She hadn't even been here. When this attack came sweeping through her star system like a tsunami, she'd been over a light-century away, doing her best to end a war. She wasn't the one who'd let it past her.

But however right he might have been, he was still wrong, she thought grimly. No, she hadn't been here. But she was a full admiral in her queen's service. She was one of the Royal Navy's most senior officers, one of the people who planned and executed its strategy.

One of the people responsible for visualizing threats and stopping them.

Invictus
settled into orbit, farther out than usual to clear the debris fields which had once been Her Majesty's Space Station
Vulcan
, and she gazed at the image of her home world, so far below.

"Excuse me, Your Grace," a voice said quietly.

Honor turned her head and looked at Lieutenant Commander Harper Brantley, her staff communications officer.

"Yes, Harper?"

It was wrong, she thought, that her voice should sound so ordinary, so normal.

"You have a communications request," Brantley told her. "It's from the Admiralty, Your Grace," he added when she arched an eyebrow. "The request is coded private."

"I see." She stood, held out her arms, and caught Nimitz as he leapt gracefully into them. "I'll take it in my briefing room," she continued, cradling the 'cat as she walked across the bridge.

"Yes, Ma'am."

Honor felt Waldemar Tümmel watching her. Her young flag lieutenant had been hit even harder than most of her personnel by the news from home, given that his parents and two of his four siblings had all lived aboard
Hephaestus
. Their deaths hadn't yet been confirmed—not as far as anyone aboard
Invictus
knew, at any rate—but there was no optimism in his bleak emotions. She'd done her best to reach out to him during the voyage back to Manticore by way of Trevor's Star, tried to help him through his anxious grief, but she'd failed. Worse, she didn't know if she'd failed because that grief was too deep or because her own mingled grief and guilt had kept her from trying hard enough.

Yet despite everything, he continued to do his duty. Partly because its familiar demands were comforting, something he could cling to and concentrate upon to distract himself from thoughts of his family. Even more, though, she knew, it was because it
was
his duty. Because he refused to allow what had happened to his universe to prevent him from discharging his responsibilities.

Now she felt him wondering if she would need him in the briefing room, and she looked at him long enough to shake her head. He gazed at her for an instant, then nodded and settled back into his bridge chair.

Spencer Hawke, on the other hand, never even hesitated. He simply followed his Steadholder across her flag bridge and into the briefing room, then arranged himself against the bulkhead behind her.

Honor felt him there, at her back. Technically, she supposed, she should have instructed him to wait outside the briefing room door, given the security code Brantley had said the message carried. That thought had crossed her mind more than once over the years, in similar situations, yet it had never even occurred to her to actually do it with Andrew LaFollet, and she knew she would never do it with Hawke, either. He was a Grayson armsman, and he would guard his steadholder's secrets with the same iron fidelity with which he guarded her life.

She seated herself, set Nimitz on the conference table to one side of her terminal, and brought up the display.

"Put it through, Harper," she told the com officer when his image appeared.

"Yes, Ma'am," he replied, and disappeared, to be replaced almost instantly by a brown-haired, brown-eyed man of average build in the uniform of a captain of the list. She recognized him immediately.

"Good afternoon, Jackson," she said.

"Good afternoon, Your Grace," Captain Jackson Fargo replied quietly. "It's good to see you home again, although I wish it were under other circumstances."

"I know." She smiled briefly at the man who headed Hamish Alexander-Harrington's Admiralty House staff. "It's good to see you again, too, with the same proviso."

"Thank you, Your Grace." Fargo gave her a small half-bow, then cleared his throat. "The First Lord asked me to screen you. He's actually on Sphinx at this moment. Well, more accurately, he's aboard a shuttle which happens to be headed in your direction at this moment. His ETA is about twelve minutes, and he asked me to tell you he would very much like to join you aboard your flagship when he arrives, if that would be convenient."

A tiny flicker of joy flashed like distant lightning across the horizon of the emptiness within her, and she felt herself smiling ever so slightly.

"I believe, Captain," Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington told him, "that I'll be able to find the time somehow."

* * *

God, he looks terrible!

The thought flicked through Honor's mind the instant Hamish swung across the boarding tube's interface and into the internal gravity of
Invictus
' boat bay.

She felt Nimitz's agreement and tasted a fresh stab of the treecat's own concern as Samantha looked across at them from her perch on Hamish's shoulder. Nimitz's mate looked worn, exhausted. Her normally immaculate pelt was almost disheveled, and her tail hung down Hamish's back like the banner of a defeated army.

Hamish looked almost as bad, Honor thought. But then she realized that wasn't really true. His shoulders were as square as always, his back as straight, his head unbowed. He carried himself with assurance, and only someone who knew him well might have noted the fresh lines on his face, the fresh silver at his temples, the shadows in his blue eyes. But Honor didn't need those physical signs. She could taste—share—his inner exhaustion, and beneath his duty to show the confident face the public—and his subordinates—needed to see, there was a bottomless, brooding grief. A sense of failure that fully matched her own, and something else, even darker and more personal. Less corrosive than her own guilt—though she knew he shared that, as well—but colder and even more crushing.

No sign of those emotions was permitted to show as he formally requested the boat bay officer of the deck's permission to board the ship. Then he was through the formalities, past the sideboys, past Captain Cardones, with Tobias Stimson, his own armsman at his heels. Sergeant Stimson was as alert and professional looking as always, the perfect example of a Grayson armsman, yet when she looked at him, she tasted his own dark night of the soul, like a mirror of Hamish's and Samantha's.