Nimitz only laughed harder, and the fingers of his true hands flickered.

  “It was not my own fault!” she told him. “Spencer’s still getting better, and I can’t block all his hits.”

  More finger-flicker, and she snorted.

  “The way my schedule’s packed, I have to schedule sparring bouts whenever I can, and you know it. It’s not my fault Elizabeth decided to throw this shindig tonight!”

  Nimitz considered that for a second or two, then nodded grudgingly, and she laughed and scooped him off the perch. She cradled him in her arms, pressing her face into his silky, clean-smelling coat for a long moment, then carried him out of her palatial quarters’ head into her day cabin. She crossed to the desk, let him flow out of her arms onto the perch above it, and settled into the body-conforming chair.

  She touched the darkening bruise under her right eye again and shrugged. She’d just have to take a little extra care with her cosmetics, she decided. With luck, Hamish wouldn’t even notice…which would spare her the unmerciful ribbing he’d administer if he did. She’d have been less worried if Emily had been going to be present to help divert his fire, but their wife was staying home at White Haven with the kids. That probably said something positive about her sanity.

  She thought about that for a moment, then sighed and brought her terminal online for the first item on today’s installment of her unending paper chase.

  I really hate to think of the number of photons we slaughter every day on personnel reports, she thought glumly. Talk about genocide!

  Her lips twitched in amusement, but then she shook her head and began skimming rapidly through the report before her.

  “Excuse me, My Lady, but that report you asked for is here.”

  “Don’t you mean that other report I asked for?” Honor asked wryly, looking up from the readiness report on her desk display.

  “Well, yes,” Commander Angela Clayton acknowledged. She wore the blue-on-blue of the Grayson Space Navy with the salamander flash of the Protector’s Own, but her accent was Manticoran. In fact, it was pure Gryphon Highlands. “You did ask for it, though,” she pointed out with something close to a twinkle.

  Commander Clayton was a new addition to Honor’s staff, serving both as a liaison with High Admiral Judah Yanakov and as Grand Fleet’s logistics officer. A sturdy, no-nonsense sort, Commander Clayton. Although she’d been born in Rearson, the same barony as Anton Zilwicki, she’d become a citizen of Harrington Steading following five years of “loaner” service with the GSN, which explained why she habitually addressed Honor with the “My Lady” of a steadholder rather than the “Your Grace” of a Manticoran duchess.

  It could get…confusing, sometimes.

  “And what does Phil have to report?” Honor asked now.

  “His survey crews are finished with the first half-dozen superdreadnoughts, My Lady,” the commander replied. The almost-twinkle in her eye had faded and she sighed. “He purely hates the assignment. Says it makes him feel like a swamp grubber.”

  Honor grimaced at the simile. She knew Captain Clayton, just as she’d made it her business to know all of the Protector’s Own captains, so she understood what Angela was saying, but he was being grossly unfair to himself. The Grayson swamp grubber was one of the more loathsome carrion eaters in the explored galaxy, and it was none too picky about how its meal turned into carrion.

  “That aside, his report’s about what we expected, except that his techs are a bit more impressed by the Sollies’ current graser mount than anyone anticipated.” Clayton shook her head. “I glanced at the specs, and he’s right; that is an impressive piece of hardware, My Lady.”

  “Nobody ever said the Solarian League doesn’t have good tech,” Honor pointed out. “Their problem is they don’t always have the right tech when they need it.”

  “Coupled with the fact that they think they do,” Clayton agreed.

  “Point,” Honor conceded. She tipped back in her chair. “So, Phil’s impressed by it?”

  “Yes, My Lady. He did point out that he can’t imagine what we’ll do with all of them, though.”

  Honor nodded. No doubt quite a few people were wondering the same sorts of things, but they had to do something with the wreckage of Massimo Filareta’s Eleventh Fleet. That was why its surviving units had been moved to Manticore-B after the Second Battle of Manticore. The Massacre of Manticore, really, she thought, eyes darkening in memory.

  Under normal circumstances, they might have been parked somewhere as a potential bargaining chip to be returned to the other side following successful peace negotiations. Nobody seemed likely to be doing any negotiating anytime soon, however, and even if they’d been inclined to, no one would want Filareta’s orphans back. In an era of pod-launched missiles, they were deathtraps, hopelessly obsolete both tactically and conceptually, however good the technology with which they’d been built.

  Failing the possibility of repatriation, they’d normally have been sent to the ship breakers to be sawn up into chunks and run through the smelters and refineries for reclamation and separation. No one would have worried too much about the technology; all they would have wanted were the raw materials from which Manticore’s voracious orbital industry would have built the newer and far more useful technology the Star Empire needed.

  But that orbital industry had been hammered into ruin by the Yawata Strike in February. Five months later, it remained less than a shadow of a memory of what it once had been. The fabricating plants to use the raw materials were only beginning to be rebuilt, and even with every gram of assistance Beowulf and the Star Empire’s new Havenite allies could provide, it would be at least six months before the fabricators and nano farms were back online once again. Even then, they’d possess only a fraction of their pre-Yawata capacity for a long time to come. Which was why Phil Clayton and his combined Manticoran-Grayson-Havenite salvage crews were crawling all over the captured Solarian ships. Their internal systems might be of Solarian manufacture, with all the compatibility headaches that promised, but they already existed. Under the circumstances, it made sense to see what could be removed for reuse—from fusion plants to reconfigurable molycircs to point defense lasers—before the gutted hulks were consigned to the reclamation platforms.

  For that matter, Sandra Crandall’s surviving units were Manticore-bound with minimal passage crews to share exactly the same fate. Hopefully they could find someone besides Captain Clayton to deal with them when they arrived.

  “Well,” she said now, “if nothing else, we could probably use the grasers for hellacious wormhole ‘minefields.’ Have you seen the design Admiral Foraker came up with for that?”

  “No, I haven’t, My Lady. I’ll bet it was…interesting, though.”

  “Admiral Foraker does have a tendency to think outside the box,” Honor acknowledged with a smile. “In this case, though, what she’s suggested is basically an array of remotely deployed energy weapons. Capital ship-sized weapons, as a matter of fact. She’s thinking something like Moriarty, not Mycroft. In fact, she’s already worked out the quickest way to run up a remote platform tied into the central fire control system of a standard terminus fort.”

  “I thought that was what the minefields we already have were for, My Lady.”

  “Oh, they are! But those are basically one-shot—either bomb-pumped platforms or IDEWs that get one shot, then have to recharge between engagements. She’s talking about feeding these things with broadcast power for the plasma capacitors. If her numbers hold up, they’d be good for at least five or six full-power shots each before the platforms had to shut down until the maintenance crews could recharge the capacitor reservoirs. So if these Solly grasers are as good as Phil seems to be suggesting, and given the fact that a Scientist-class SD mounts—what? sixty-four? sixty-five?—grasers, stripping a couple of hundred of them could let us build a really nasty defensive array, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, I think you could call it that,” Commander Clayton said, her expression suddenly very thoughtful indeed. The thought of what nine or ten thousand ship-of-the-wall-sized grasers could do to any target emerging from a wormhole terminus—when it could have neither wedge nor sidewalls for protection—was…sobering.

  “I’m not sure how well it’ll work out in the end,” Honor said, “but I’ve observed that Admiral Foraker tends to get what she goes after. And now that Admiral Hemphill’s finally taken the Weyland R&D staff out to Bolthole…”

  Clayton nodded. The notion of sharing the Star Empire’s latest technology and research projects with a star nation with which it had been at war—cold or hot—for the better part of a T-century had…sat poorly with quite a lot of the RMN. In fact, there’d been enough passive resistance and foot-dragging to provoke a display of the famous Winton temper. Clayton hadn’t been present for the meeting at which Empress Elizabeth had made her feelings on the subject abundantly, one might almost have said super-abundantly, clear, but Duchess Harrington had. And it was remarkable how quickly things had begun moving after that little interview.

  On the other hand, the commander thought with a mental smile, it would appear there’d been just as much foot-dragging on the Havenite side when it came to telling their erstwhile enemies and present allies exactly where Bolthole itself lay. Not surprisingly, since it was so much closer to the Manticore System than to the Haven System. In fact, it was the next best thing to six hundred light-years from Nouveau Paris…and less than three hundred and fifty from Landing City.

  No wonder ONI never found it, she thought. We were busy looking for something in the Republic. It never even occurred to us to look on the far side of Manticore for it. And even if it had, a “lost colony” would’ve been the last thing we looked for!

  Still, Bolthole’s location did explain why the Legislaturalists had selected it as a site for their secret naval base once the system more or less fell into the People’s Republic’s lap. And as a Gryphon Highlander—not to mention someone who’d married a Grayson—Angela Clayton had a better idea than most of what it had taken for the people of the planet Sanctuary to survive until Haven’s survey crew rediscovered their existence at the end of the J-156-18(L)-KCR-126-06 warp bridge.

  And how they found the place is a lot less important than what they’ve done with it since, she reminded herself. After the Yawata Strike’s devastation here in Manticore, Bolthole had become easily the largest single shipbuilding facility of the entire Grand Alliance, not to mention the site of the redoubtable Shannon Foraker’s R&D command.

  So if there’s one place in the galaxy none of us want the people behind the Yawata Strike to find, it’s damned well Bolthole!

  “Do we know how Bolthole’s coming on Mycroft, My Lady?” she asked, and Honor smiled as she followed the commander’s obvious chain of thought.

  “It’s going to be a while before they get the system fully up and running,” she said, “but Admiral Hemphill’s taking along an entire squadron of Invictuses to provide Apollo and Keyhole-Two coverage in the meantime. And I understand Admiral Foraker’s already rung in some new variations on her sensor platforms. Once she and Hemphill sit down and put their heads together, the rest of the galaxy better hang onto its socks!”

  “A thought that doesn’t break my heart at all, My Lady,” Clayton said. “Not one little bit.”

  SLNS Québec

  Dzung System

  Solarian League

  “Well, Sir, all I can say is that it’s about frigging time,” Captain Gabriella Timberlake growled, standing at Admiral Vincent Capriotti’s shoulder as they gazed at the latest dispatch on Capriotti’s display. The fact that the Dzung System was just under seventy light-years from Sol meant Task Force 783 had gotten the new general order sooner than most of the rest of the Solarian League Navy, and Capriotti wondered how the Navy’s other flag officers were going to react to them.

  For that matter, he wasn’t entirely certain how he felt about them.

  “I can’t say I disagree, Gabby,” he said finally. “On the other hand, if the stories about what happened to Eleventh Fleet and Admiral Crandall are anything to go by, this could get…interesting.”

  “One way to put it, Sir,” Timberlake agreed. “On the other hand, I think I like the thinking behind this. The bastards can’t have those killer missile pods and their damned superdreadnoughts everywhere!”

  “They don’t need to have them ‘everywhere’ to ruin our whole day,” Capriotti pointed out. “They only have to have them wherever we turn up.”

  “I know, Sir.” The admiral’s flag captain shrugged. “Sooner or later, though, we’ve got to take it to them. And given what they did to Admiral Filareta, it looks like fleet engagements are going to be a really bad idea until our tech people can figure out how to match their damned missiles.”

  Capriotti nodded soberly. The Solarian League did need to “take it to” the Manties after the series of massive black eyes the Star Empire and its allies had handed the SLN. Despite any misgivings he might feel, he agreed with the captain about that. He just wished to hell he was more confident those in charge of the taking in question had at least a vague notion of what they were doing.

  He wasn’t prepared to wholeheartedly accept the Solarian news reports’ version of what had happened to Massimo Filareta. According to the Manties, Eleventh Fleet had opened fire after being summoned to surrender. According to the “usually reliable sources” talking to the newsies “speaking off the record” because they weren’t “authorized to disclose classified information,” Filareta had accepted their surrender terms, then been blown out of space in an act of cold-blooded mass murder. And according to any official ONI analyses, no one in Old Chicago could find his arse with both hands and approach radar well enough to give one Vincent Capriotti a single damned clue which of those diametrically opposed analyses the Navy shared.

  Not a good sign, he thought again. Of course, Intelligence has been caught with its trousers around its ankles every step of the way this far. Maybe the real bad sign would be for the idiots to actually think they did know what happened!

  Vincent Capriotti was Battle Fleet from the ground up, and he’d known dozens—scores—of men and women in the ships Crandall and Filareta had lost. Like Timberlake, he wanted payback, and not just out of bloody-minded vengeance, although he was honest enough to admit that was a great deal of his motivation. In addition to that, however, he had a rather better idea than many of his Battle Fleet compatriots of just how critical the Office of Frontier Security’s unofficial empire of “client star systems” truly was. And along with that, he recognized that OFS’s arrangements were far more fragile than they might appear. The Solarian League literally couldn’t afford what would happen to the federal government’s cash flow if Frontier Security started shedding clients, and unless they demonstrated that they could stand up to the Manties, that was precisely what was going to happen.

  On the other hand, the one thing of which Capriotti was certain was that if the Battle—or massacre, or whatever—of Manticore had been as short as both sets of reports suggested, he did not want to tangle with the sort of defenses Manties seemed to think were appropriate for major star systems.

  Fortunately, judging from the synopsis of “Operation Buccaneer,” that wasn’t what Admiral Kingsford had in mind. So maybe someone in Old Chicago did have a clue what he was doing.

  Maybe.

  “All right,” he said finally, turning away from the dispatch to gaze at SLNS Québec’s main astrogation plot. “I need to get Admiral Helland and Admiral Rutgers up to speed on this. I’m sure they’ll both have useful input. Once Rutgers stops warning us not to be overly optimistic, of course.”

  His lips twitched and Timberlake actually chuckled. Rear Admiral Lyang-tau Rutgers, Task Force 783’s operations officer, had started out in Frontier Fleet and transferred to Battle Fleet barely twenty years ago. That hadn’t been long enough to completely free him of the basic Frontier Fleet attitude that Battle Fleet would have made an excellent paperweight, especially if that got it out of the way of the people doing the Navy’s real work. Along the way, he’d been known to offer pithy analyses of just how out of date Battle Fleet’s strategic and tactical thinking might have become and he’d argued strenuously that training simulations and fleet problems should be restructured to match the Navy against true peer competitors, despite the fact that “everyone knew” there were none in real life. When confronted with that fact, he’d suggested that it might be better to train against an opponent better than anyone one might actually have to fight. At least that error was unlikely to get anyone killed. Not, as his attitude had made evident, that he’d expected anyone in Battle Fleet to give much thought to that possibility.

  The flag captain was pretty sure that attitude explained why an officer of Rutgers’s obvious competence and with the Rutgers family’s military and political connections was still only a rear admiral. But it was rather refreshing in a lot of ways, recent events had sure as hell validated his warnings, and she knew Capriotti both respected and genuinely appreciated his contrarian viewpoint.

  Vice Admiral Angelica Helland, TF 783’s chief of staff, on the other hand, reminded a lot of people of a smarter Sandra Crandall. Of course, she could hardly have been a stupider Sandra Crandall, now that Timberlake thought about it. The contrast between her aggressive near-arrogance and Rutgers’s voice of caution made for occasionally fractious staff meetings, but it also offered Capriotti a robust debate between differing viewpoints. That was something he’d valued even before anyone started shooting at the SLN, which had been rare, to say the least, among Battle Fleet four-star admirals.

  At the moment, Helland and Rutgers were in transit back to Québec from observing a training simulation aboard the battlecruiser Bavaria, the flagship of TG 783.12. Thanks to the classification level of the dispatch, they had no idea why they’d been summoned home so abruptly.