“At any rate, he’s confident enough of the outcome—and, I think, that com conversation’s made him nervous enough about how the Mandarins are likely to respond when they hear the vote total—that he’s decided to go ahead and invite us now. The referendum’s scheduled for next Wednesday. If we leave within forty-eight hours, we’ll hit Hypatia sometime Thursday. That’ll keep us out of the system until after the vote’s counted—or until enough of it’s been counted to project the outcome with certainty, at any rate—but also close up the window in which the Sollies can just waltz into Hypatia unopposed.”

  “Sir, I understand what you’re saying,” Commander Markéta Ilkova, TG 110.2’s operations officer (designate) was five centimeters shorter than her admiral. She was also attractive, with red hair and sharp, intelligent blue-green eyes. Indeed, Kotouč had discovered she was rather more attractive than he might have wished, given the restrictions of Article 119. She was also at least as competent as she was attractive…and obviously less than delighted by the news of their impending departure. “But we’re still all the task group you’ve got.”

  “And we’re more than enough to beat the holy living hell out of any light Solly squadron that comes our way,” Kotouč pointed out with just a bit more confidence than he actually felt. Then he sighed.

  “Admiral Truman doesn’t expect us to hold off a fleet the size of Filareta’s or Crandall’s, Markéta, but Director Longacre’s made the point—and it’s a valid one, people—that if Hypatia’s willing to pin a big target on its chest by standing up beside the Alliance, the least we can do is provide President Vangelis’s citizens with visible, tangible proof the Alliance will be just as determined to look after them as we are to look after our own star systems. Nobody in Hypatia’s likely to mistake five ships—even Queen’s ships—for a system-defense fleet. But what they’ll see are the lead elements of the task group that will be capable of defending them when it’s fully assembled. And it won’t hurt a bit for us to be there, getting a feel for the system astrography and establishing a working relationship with Vangelis and his people, while we wait for the rest of the task group to join us.”

  “Understood, Sir,” Ilkova said.

  “Admiral Truman assures me she’ll send forward at least four more Bravos within the next seven or eight days. And Vukodlak should be out of the yard dogs’ hands a couple of days after that. As soon as she’s finished testing her repairs, she’ll be sent to join us along with a freighter load or two of system-defense pods. And by the time she gets to Hypatia, we’ll have worked out the best way to use her and be ready to start deploying the pods.”

  Harrington House

  Jason Bay

  City of Landing

  Manticore Binary System

  Admiral Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington, Steadholder and Duchess Harrington, kicked off her house shoes, folded her legs under her on the chaise lounge, and dropped a pair of marshmallows into her hot chocolate.

  Manticore’s small moon, Thorson, was low on the western horizon, touching the banked clouds in that direction with dramatic bands of silver and ebony. Lightning flickered very occasionally—and very distantly—along that cloud wall, but the weather sats all insisted the bad weather wouldn’t reach Landing until sometime after dawn. In the meantime, there were no clouds over Jason Bay or the capital city, and the sky overhead glittered with a storm of stars. As always, there was a lot of orbital traffic, as well. In fact, it was much heavier than normal and the usual moving dots of the communication and solar collector satellites were accompanied by scores of other lights as near-Manticore space swarmed with repair ships, and temporary habitats for construction workers.

  A lot of repair ships and construction workers.

  The horrific damage and casualties of the Yawata Strike were barely six T-months in the past, but the replacement space stations’ skeletons were already growing, far more quickly than they’d dared to hope for in their initial estimates of how long it would take to rebuild. Then again, their initial estimates hadn’t included the full-fledged support of the Beowulf System…or of the Republic of Haven. For that matter, they’d seriously underestimated the amount of civilian infrastructure that could be repurposed. And Lacoön had produced an unexpected side effect. An unexpected good side effect, that was, she thought with a mental grimace.

  At least three quarters of the Star Kingdom’s civilian shipbuilding industry had been co-located with the Navy yards on the major space stations. From the perspective of efficiency and cost, that had been a no-brainer, and no one had ever anticipated something like the Yawata Strike. Attacks, yes, but not attacks nobody saw coming in time to take a single defensive measure. Just over half of all the rest of the Manticore Binary System’s civilian industry had also been located aboard one of the stations or in close enough proximity to be destroyed when Hephaestus and Vulcan were taken out. So it wasn’t all that surprising the immediate post-attack estimates had been so bleak.

  Haven’s return of the interned Grendelsbane construction force had been a huge help, as much from a morale perspective as from any other. The workers from the forty-seven percent of the civilian infrastructure which hadn’t been co-located with the space stations had proved to be a far greater resource, however. And the fact that Lacoön had idled close to ninety percent of the massive Manticoran merchant marine had been another unexpected asset.

  Lacoön’s consequences for the Star Empire’s economy had been less dire—a little less dire—than initially predicted because no one had expected the Republic of Haven’s markets to be opened to Manticore. For that matter, they hadn’t anticipated the addition of the Talbott Quadrant. That hadn’t kept the loss of their markets in the Solarian League and—especially—their carrying trade in the League from being catastrophic for what had been by far the largest single component of Manticore’s economy. Quite a few of the smaller cartels were unlikely to survive, and even the major cartels like Hauptman were looking at enormous losses. The “act of war” clause in standard insurance policies meant most of the commercial enterprises on Hephaestus or Vulcan would be unable to recover their losses, and the…uncertainty (to put it mildly) of the Star Empire’s future relations with the Solarian League cast a serious cloud over the smaller shipping lines’ futures. The last estimate she’d seen predicted at least a third and possibly as many as half of the independent lines were going to go under.

  And then there were the enormous Manticoran investments in the Solarian League. No one knew where that was going, either, and she was frankly surprised the League hadn’t simply seized their assets. There was no guarantee Quartermain and Wodoslawski wouldn’t get around to it eventually, but unless the League won an unambiguous victory—which wasn’t going to happen—one of Manticore’s key peace demands was going to be the return of all sequestered assets, and Sir Anthony Langtry had made certain through “neutral sources” that the League was made aware of that.

  Her own financial interests had taken a massive hit, although those had been centered far more in Grayson than here in Manticore. The Blackbird complex had represented a huge chunk of her portfolio there, but Blackbird had been almost exclusively a naval building complex. Ninety percent of the Grayson Space Navy’s suppliers and subcontractors had been located there, but virtually none of the system’s civilian industry had been affected. From Honor’s purely selfish perspective, that meant Skydomes of Grayson had been untouched, which put her in a strong position to recover, especially with her Skydomes labor force redirected to rebuilding Blackbird. From the Graysons’ perspective in general, it did nothing to lessen the brutal loss of human lives but provided a solid basis for reconstruction and recovery. And the Church of Humanity Unchained had thrown its stupendous resources into the recovery effort. There were entire star nations with less wealth than Reverend Sullivan commanded, and his instructions were clear. Where there was want, there also would be Father Church. Not one of the Tester’s children would be allowed to suffer alone and unaided. They would worry about the consequences to the Church’s investment portfolio later. And if they had to rebuild that portfolio from absolutely nothing, why they’d do that, too.

  The good news—the overwhelmingly good news—from the Star Empire’s perspective was that no financier in the galaxy failed to grasp that whatever happened politically, astrography wasn’t going to change. The Manticoran Wormhole Junction wasn’t going anywhere, and neither were its implications for the interstellar movement of goods, people, services, and data. That meant no one doubted the imperial government’s ultimate solvency—as long as it survived its confrontation with the League—and Baroness Morncreek, at the Exchequer, and Bruce Wijenberg at the Ministry of Trade had capitalized on that fact.

  The Exchequer had already instituted the largest program of low-interest government-guaranteed loans in Manticoran history, both to assist those whose losses hadn’t been covered by insurance and to help finance new and replacement ventures. A lot of Havenite money would be looking for a home postwar, as well, which didn’t even consider the opening of what had been closed Solarian markets in the Protectorates. For that matter, whatever the League might think about the Grand Alliance in military and diplomatic terms, economically it wouldn’t have much choice about doing business with the Star Empire, thanks to the Junction. It seemed unlikely to Honor that the Star Empire’s merchant marine would regain its totally dominant position within the League, but in absolute terms, it ought to recover fully to prewar levels.

  Manticore’s traditional fiscal challenge had been to find places to invest the revenues streaming into the Star Kingdom in a way that prevented a financial glut and its resulting inflation. Over the T-centuries, the government and private investors had learned to adjust that cash flow through out-system investment, most of it in the League. Their presence in Solarian markets wasn’t an unqualified plus at the moment, but that pattern helped explain how the Cromarty Government had managed to avoid genuine deficit spending until only a very few T-years before the outbreak of open hostilities between the Manticoran Alliance and the People’s Republic of Haven.

  Since then, for obvious reasons, that had changed, yet until the Yawata Strike, the Junction’s enormous revenue generation, coupled with the Star Kingdom’s huge investment portfolio, had held the national debt within easily manageable dimensions. For the next several years, that wouldn’t be true. Morncreek’s analysts weren’t happy about that, and they projected that it would take twenty or thirty T-years—at least—to pay that debt down, assuming prewar revenue streams. Unlike almost any other star nation in the galaxy, however, the Star Empire could do it, which was why there was remarkably little panic here in the Manticore System.

  Which wasn’t to say there wasn’t a lot of pain or that the Manticoran economic safety net wasn’t under unprecedented strain. On the other hand, the need to rebuild—and the number of skilled technicians who’d been killed in the attack—meant overall unemployment rates were astonishingly low, considering what had happened to the shipping industry. The government was pouring enormous sums into wages for the workers rebuilding Hephaestus, Vulcan, and Weyland, which was a not insignificant factor in its deficit spending. Those sums were being paid as wages, however, not direct transfer payments, which meant they didn’t affect their recipients’ eligibility to vote and that they represented taxable income, which allowed at least some recapture.

  We’ve never—ever—been hurt this badly before, she thought. But I suspect the people who did it to us overestimated how badly it would hurt us by at least as big a factor as we did, right after the strike. And in the end, that’s going to hurt them one hell of a lot worse than they ever hurt us.

  She smiled up at that beautiful sky and the lights swarming across it with grim satisfaction…and more than a bit of proprietary pride. There were quite a few warships, freighters, transports, and naval auxiliaries to keep the rebuilding effort company, and all that overhead activity was directly or indirectly her responsibility, one way and another. But for tonight, she’d left it in the hands of her staff, with Admiral Alfredo Yu, her deputy CO in the Protector’s Own, riding herd upon it.

  The one good thing about being stuck here instead of out actually accomplishing something is that I get to nip home for visits every so often, she reflected, stirring the chocolate with an index finger and then licking it clean. Her mother had tried for years to break her of that particular habit before she’d finally thrown up her hands and admitted defeat. And it is a gorgeous night for sitting on the deck drinking chocolate. The land breeze, blowing out across Jason Bay’s cooling waters fluttered her kimono’s flowing sleeves and molded its silk against her, and she inhaled deeply, gazing out over the bay’s gently moving surface. Wish there was time to spend tomorrow down here, too. I’d love to take the boat out after the front passes through, and I’m overdue for some time with Faith and James. They’d love that! But not with that exercise scheduled for Tuesday, I guess.

  “Excuse me, My Lady.”

  She turned her head as Major Hawke poked his head out onto the deck. That deck stood out from the seaward side of Harrington House, a good seventy meters above sea level, which made it totally inaccessible except through the house itself or from the air. Under the circumstances—given that Harrington House would have made an acceptable fortress on most planets and that Clifford McGraw and Joshua Atkins, the other members of her permanent detail, were undoubtedly parked in the shrubbery with shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and the odd vest-pocket nuke or three—Major Hawke had graciously consented to allow her a modicum of privacy.

  “Yes, Spencer?”

  “The Earl just commed, My Lady. He asked me to tell you he’s about six minutes out. For some reason, he couldn’t seem to reach you.” Hawke raised an eyebrow. “Could it be you didn’t take your uni-link with you?”

  “Guilty as charged,” she admitted while Nimitz bleeked in amusement from the chaise lounge beside hers. “After I got out of the pool and climbed out of the shower, I just threw on my kimono and came straight out here.”

  “I see.”

  Hawke gazed at her for a moment, and she looked back innocently. No respectable traditional Grayson lady would have suggested to anyone other than her equally respectable husband that all she had on was a thin, billowy silk kimono. Hawke had been with her long enough to know when she was pulling his chain, however, and his notion of just what “respectable” meant had been…expanded by contact with Honor.

  And, especially, with Honor’s mother.

  “I’ll just send His Lordship right out when he gets here, then, My Lady,” the armsman said after a moment.

  “Please do. And please ask Lucie to tell Mistress Thorn we’re going to need a pot of coffee for him. For that matter, I’ll bet he missed supper again, so ask Lucie to see about having some sandwiches sent up, too. After all,” she smiled wickedly, “he’ll need his strength.”

  “Of course, My Lady,” Hawke replied just a bit repressively, and her smile grew broader as he withdrew. Then it faded again as she sat back, looking up at the stars, and thought about what she’d just requested. Or, rather, who she’d requested it of.

  She hadn’t wanted to fill the gaping wound Miranda LaFollet’s death in the Yawata Strike had left in her household. It had seemed…disloyal. Worse, just thinking about it had reminded her how horribly she missed Miranda, Farragut, and—especially and always—Andrew. Yet she’d really had no choice. Not only did she need someone to assume the host of duties Miranda had fulfilled for her, but there were certain Grayson norms even her deplorably nontraditional Harringtons wanted observed, and having their Steadholder provided with a proper “personal maid” was one of them.

  At only a hundred and fifty-seven centimeters and with brown hair and dark brown eyes, Lucie was very different physically from Miranda, for which Honor was grateful, but they were very much alike in other ways. Miranda had been far more than a “maid.” In fact, she’d been a female James MacGuiness, acting as the general manager of Honor’s affairs on Manticore whenever her Steadholder and MacGuiness were in space. Despite that, however, she’d always insisted on “looking after” Honor whenever Honor was home. Lucie, for all her social flexibility, was a chip off the same stubborn block of Grayson granite in that respect, and her feelings would have been hurt if Honor hadn’t asked her to see to it that Hamish was fed.

  And the chance to tease Spencer didn’t have a thing to do with it, either, did it? she asked herself.

  Herself chose not to answer, and she sipped her chocolate, enjoying the night, and waited for her husband.

  “Sorry I’m running so late,” the Earl of White Haven said contritely as he stepped out onto the deck.

  The instant he opened the door, a dappled, tawny treecat launched from his shoulder, bounced off the deck flooring once, and landed with precision and style beside Nimitz. She wrapped both her upper sets of limbs—and her tail—around him, buzzing a delighted purr, and Honor laughed.

  “Way to go, Sam!” she congratulated the female ’cat. “Spacers don’t make port often enough to let any opportunities go to waste.”

  “Oh?” White Haven dropped onto the chaise lounge beside her and did a pretty fair job of hugging her, despite the handicap of having only four limbs. “Should I assume from that observation that I’m going to get lucky tonight?”

  “You should assume from that observation that I’d better get lucky tonight,” Honor told him, pausing halfway through to kiss him thoroughly. “I don’t know which is worse, to be in totally different star systems for months on end or to be in the same star system, just an hour or two apart, and unable to take advantage of it.”

  “The latter,” White Haven said promptly. “Definitely the latter.”

  He smiled and kissed her again, choosing not to mention that he could think of quite a few flag officers who would have found ways to “take advantage of it” every other night or so. He’d never been one of them, and neither had Honor.