“Of course, when the opportunity does come along…” she murmured wickedly, nestling deeper into his embrace.

  “Well, when that happens,” he said with a pontifical air, “it’s clearly our responsibility to…to give Samantha and Nimitz the opportunity to spend quality time together while we find some way to occupy ourselves, as well.”

  He elevated his nose, then “oofed” as an elbow jabbed him in the ribs.

  “‘Occupy ourselves,’ is it?” She regarded him darkly. “If I hadn’t been stuck in space so long, somebody would be sleeping on the couch tonight for that one!”

  “Then thank God for sensory deprivation,” White Haven said fervently, and kissed her again.

  “Your Grace?” a voice said.

  “Yes, Lucie,” Honor replied, sitting up a bit straighter. “Come on out, we’re both decent.” She smiled at White Haven. “Your timing’s just about perfect, as always. He hasn’t even had time to muss my hair properly.”

  “I’m certain he’ll get around to it, My Lady,” Lucie Šárová said serenely.

  She guided a counter-grav float with a large pot of coffee, a tray loaded with sandwiches—on seedless rye, White Haven’s favorite bread—and a platter with one of Sue Thorn’s hallmark pound cakes. Unlike Spencer, she simply looked at her Steadholder and Steadholder Consort with an eye of benign approval. In fact, she’d made it clear to Honor that, in her opinion and speaking for Harrington Steading in general, it was time Raoul Alfred Alistair Alexander-Harrington had a younger brother to keep him company. Despite her flexibility on other issues, Lucie was a Grayson, and there were never enough boy babies to go around on Grayson. Especially where a steadholding’s succession was concerned.

  It was, perhaps, unfortunate that her Steadholder’s parents had provided additional grist for her mill, but at least Allison wasn’t expecting twins this time.

  Lucie parked the float between Honor’s chaise lounge and the one occupied by Nimitz and Samantha. Then she whipped the cover off a third platter, and the treecats buzzed with delight as she revealed the plate of stewed rabbit and a dozen sticks of celery.

  “You are a wicked influence, spoiling everyone shamelessly,” Honor told her, and she smiled. Then Lucie nodded respectfully to White Haven and withdrew.

  “Your Grayson henchmen—and henchwomen—do take good care of us,” White Haven observed, sitting up to pour coffee. “And I hate to say this, given the delightfully salacious nature of our earlier conversation, but I’m starving.”

  “I figured you would be.” Honor swung her own feet back onto the decking and reached for one of the sandwiches. She seldom passed up the opportunity to stoke her genetically modified metabolism. “You really do need to stop putting in hours that keep you from eating, though,” she said more severely. “The last thing anyone needs is for the First Lord of Admiralty to work himself into a state of collapse.”

  “I’m a fair way short of that this far, love,” he replied with a twinkle. “Not that you don’t have a point, and I know it. For that matter, Emily’s been beating me about the head and ears over the same minor point.”

  “Good!”

  Honor’s voice showed her firm approval of their spouse’s attitude, but she also gave White Haven a thoughtful look. He was busy looking down to select a sandwich of his own and didn’t notice, but Samantha looked back at her with solemn eyes, and Honor’s lips tightened ever so slightly. Emily seldom visited Landing these days. She’d made an exception for the dinner party announcing Alfred’s return to active duty, but she always preferred to spend her time at White Haven, with the children. Besides, she said Landing always made her tired. That was true enough for all three of them, really, but she seemed to get tired even more rapidly than she’d used to, and—

  “I wish there’d been time to run home to White Haven tonight,” White Haven went on a bit wistfully as he picked out his sandwich.

  “So do I.” Honor agreed, and this time he heard the questioning note and looked back up quickly. She looked at him levelly, and, after a moment, he sighed.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, sweetheart,” he said. “You know her health’s been up-and-down for the last two or three years. She tells me she’s fine—‘all things considered’—and Sandra’s not telling me anything different. I don’t like how tired she seems to be all the time, but she and I have been through patches a lot worse than this one, over the years.” He sighed again and shook his head. “The one thing I can tell you for sure is that if either one of us starts ‘hovering,’ she’ll kick us squarely in the ass, and you know it.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said after a moment, and shook her own head with a smile. “In fact, she did just that the last time I seemed, um…overly solicitous.”

  “An experience we share,” he said wryly, then shook himself, and she felt him deliberately shifting mental gears. “And if we did run home, she’d be perfectly right to read us both the riot act. By the time we flew up we’d be lucky to get three hours of sleep before we had to load up to fly back for Pat’s intelligence brief tomorrow.”

  “Whereas here, we can get at least four or five hours of sleep…once I’ve had my way with you,” Honor agreed with a smile, accepting the change of mood.

  “Precisely!” He beamed at her, then took a bite out of the sandwich and sighed. “Does anything ever come out of Mistress Thorn’s kitchen that doesn’t taste good?”

  “Oh, yes. I remember once—seven years ago, I think, though it might have been eight—she actually scorched some rice.” Honor shuddered delicately. “Quite horrible, it was.”

  “I’m sure.” White Haven’s tone was dry, and he sipped coffee. Then he sat back with sandwich in hand and gazed up at the midnight sky. The light pollution of Landing’s distant towers, on the far side of the house, was scarcely noticeable, and he inhaled deeply.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it?” he murmured, unaware he was voicing Honor’s earlier thought.

  “Yes, it is. Of course, I have a slightly unfair advantage when it comes to enjoying it.”

  “I know. I hope you’ll pardon me for saying I have somewhat ambivalent feelings over that particular advantage, though.”

  “I’ve had a few ‘ambivalent’ feelings about it myself, over the years,” Honor acknowledged. She raised her left hand—her artificial left hand—to her equally artificial left eye. “On the other hand, I’ve been sitting here watching the work boats around Hephaestus Alpha. It’s pretty impressive.” She shook her head. “I’m astonished that they’ve accomplished so much so soon, really.”

  White Haven nodded in agreement. Without her cybernetic eye’s telephoto feature, he couldn’t make out details from here, but he spent more than enough time actually in space touring the projects to know she was right. Current estimates were that the first shipyard modules would be ready to begin construction again in no more than another eight to ten T-months, far sooner than anyone had dared project immediately after the strike, and the new stations—two of them in orbit around each of the Manticore Binary System’s inhabited planets this time, not one—would boast ample active and passive defenses of their own.

  Nothing like a burned hand to teach you what you should have seen coming all along, he thought grimly. And more than a little unfairly, he acknowledged. Without the “invisible” weapons someone—almost certainly the “Mesan Alignment” Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki had discovered—had used in the attack, Hephaestus, Vulcan, and Weyland would have been just fine.

  “I wonder if Cachalot’s going to be as lucky as we have,” he said, then grimaced apologetically as he felt Honor stiffen beside him. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to bring any business up tonight. Just slipped out.”

  “Nothing I wasn’t already thinking about.” She shook her head with a sigh. “I can’t say I’m looking forward to hearing all the gory details from Pat tomorrow. What we’ve already heard is bad enough.” She shook her head again. “You know, I realize we’re talking about the Mandarins, and God knows nobody in the galaxy’s better aware of how far the Solarian League’s fallen from what it was supposed to be, but the idea that the League officially sanctioned something like this ‘Buccaneer’ abortion is just…just more than I can process, I guess. Or more than I want to be able to process, maybe. I know it’s stupid of me, but I’d really rather this had been some rogue flag officer—another Byng or Crandall—acting entirely on her own.”

  “I know. But the truth is, we probably should’ve seen it—or something like it—coming. After what happened to Filareta, even the real idiots in Battle Fleet have to realize they can’t face an Allied wall of battle. That takes any sort of fleet engagement out of their table of options, and you’re a naval historian. You know guerre de course has always been the strategy of the weaker side. Hell, Honor! It’s the strategy you were using with Eighth Fleet after the Havenites hit us with Thunderbolt.”

  “I know, and I hated it then, too,” she said, both eyes bleak as she gazed up at the distant lights. “There’s something obscene about destroying anything that’s taken that long to build. Especially when so many people who never did a single thing to you or yours depend on it for a living.”

  “But we didn’t have a choice, because at that point we were the ones who couldn’t risk a decisive battle,” White Haven pointed out. “And be fair to yourself, sweetheart. You never did the sort of job this Admiral Capriotti apparently did on Cachalot. I don’t think the damage evaluation’s going to get any better after we listen to Pat tomorrow, and it’s pretty damned bad right now! I got a revised update just before Tom Caparelli and I decided to call it a night and head for home.” He shook his head. “It sounds like after he’d taken out every scrap of industrial infrastructure—and one major orbital habitat went with it; we’re not sure that was intentional, but the damage they inflicted on three others damned well was—he rounded up every ship and small craft in the system bigger than a runabout and either took them with him or destroyed them.”

  “What?” Honor’s head snapped around, eyes narrowed, and he nodded.

  “We got a follow-on report from Captain Crouch this afternoon.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her, and she nodded in recognition. She’d known John Crouch for years, ever since her time at the ATC, when he’d been a promising lieutenant commander on her staff. In fact, she’d recommended him for his current command, and his cruiser division had arrived in Cachalot on a routine port visit less than twenty-four hours after the Solarians had completed their work and departed once more. From the Cachalotians’ description of the Solly task force, it was just as well that Crouch’s four Saganami-Bs had missed it, but he’d immediately dug in to do what he could in the wake of such widespread devastation. He’d also sent HMS Mortar, one of his escorting destroyers, from Cachalot to Beowulf and straight on to Manticore. He clearly grasped how seriously the attack was likely to impact other neutral star nations’ public opinion, which hadn’t surprised her a bit. Nor did the fact that he’d sent another dispatch after the first one. Someone like Crouch was only too well aware of how the slow speed of interstellar communications could affect everything from tactical decisions by local commanders to the grand strategy of star nations.

  “I haven’t seen the actual dispatch, but Pat dropped us a preliminary synopsis,” White Haven went on. “According to Crouch, they went after everything, Honor. When you were carrying out Cutworm, you were careful to avoid civilian collateral damage. Oh, it’s not always possible to make a clean separation between military infrastructure and civilian infrastructure. We both know that. But you at least tried to, and you never took out civilian power sats or orbiting agro habitats. And you damned well never collected up every tugboat, repair boat, ore collector, and rowboat in the system and trashed them. There’s no conceivable military justification for that kind of destruction. It’s so…so petty. It’s like a full grown adult punching out a twelve-year-old in a temper tantrum and then deciding to go through his pockets and steal his allowance, too!”

  Honor nodded slowly, her expression tight. She had tried to minimize collateral destruction, and it hadn’t always been possible. But this—!

  “Capriotti made it clear the Mandarins were sending a message,” she said after a moment, memory replaying the record of the com exchange between the Solarian and System President Jahnke, which Crouch had included with his initial dispatch. “From what you’re saying, it’s pretty obvious what the message is, too. Piss us off, and we’ll turn your entire star system into a junkyard.” Something dangerous crackled in the backs of her eyes. “And in answer to your earlier question, I don’t see how Cachalot can be as lucky as we’ve been. Oh, they were a lot luckier about the body count.” The fire behind her eyes turned cold and lethal with the memory of her own dead and how many millions of other Manticorans had joined them. “But they don’t begin to have the depth of resources we have, even without Beowulf and Haven, and at least nobody systematically destroyed anything we might’ve used to start rebuilding!” She shook her head. “I know we’ll do whatever we can to help, but I have to wonder how much we can do, given how much rebuilding we’ve got on our hands.”

  “President Jahnke’s already recognized as much,” White Haven said grimly. “She’s asked for all the assistance we can provide—and she damned well should have, since we’re the ones the Sollies are really trying to get at with this shit—but she obviously understands how constrained our resources are right now.”

  “And from Capriotti’s statement, Cachalot’s not the only system the bastards are going to do this to.” Honor’s voice was harsh, and White Haven could have counted the number of times he’d ever heard her call someone “bastard” on his fingers and toes without taking off both shoes.

  “No, I’m sure it’s not,” he acknowledged. “That’s one of the things we’ll be looking at with Pat tomorrow before you, Tom, and I have the ineffable joy of coming up with some kind of recommendation for Elizabeth. At the moment, I don’t have a clue what that recommendation’s going to be, either.”

  “I don’t either.” Honor’s nostrils flared. “What I’d like to do is to announce a policy of reprisal. You come in and devastate one of our star systems, or somebody you accuse of tilting our way, and we devastate one of yours. Problem is, I’m pretty sure the Mandarins wouldn’t object if we did that.”

  “That might depend on which system we chose for our reprisal,” White Haven countered.

  “Would it?” Honor settled back, resting her head on his shoulder and shaking it as she looked up at those star-strewn heavens. “I don’t think it actually would, Hamish. This isn’t really a military strategy; it’s a psychological strategy. We’re still well enough tapped into Old Chicago’s internal dynamic to know how desperate they’re getting, so maybe we should have seen this coming.”

  White Haven nodded. Despite Lacoön, the Grand Alliance had scrupulously allowed passage for mail, courier ships, and unarmed passenger vessels, and Manticore had very good relations with some of the worlds with which it was technically at war at the moment. There were more than enough unofficial leaks to keep Landing abreast of what was happening in the Sol System…always allowing for the time lag inherent in any interstellar communications loop. Personally, he shared the conclusion of both Special Intelligence and ONI that it was the fact that the Mandarins had to know that some of “their” planets—although, admittedly, not in the Core—were too well inclined towards Manticore to follow the party line which had prevented them from seeking a formal declaration of war.

  On the other hand, they had to be getting desperate. Even accepting the analysts’ least optimistic estimates, they couldn’t keep funding the war effort for more than another T-year or so. The more optimistic ones measured their time window in months. And desperate people did desperate things. That was why Tom Caparelli and his staff were constantly updating plans to embrace an all-out offensive strategy. No one wanted to do that, because of the revanchism it was bound to create in the post-war League. A war against a behemoth that size after it had time to acquire matching weaponry was one no sane person wanted to face, yet they all realized the situation might change in a way which required them to roll the dice and hope the outcome was at least survivable.

  Unfortunately, the last time someone had done that had been in a star system named Manticore, the dice had belonged to the Republic of Haven, and it…ended poorly for Lester Tourville and his fleet.

  “They want to terrify people who might support us into backing away,” Honor continued. “That’s obvious. And it does have military implications, because they want us to do what we forced Tom Theisman to do with Cutworm and dissipate our forces. Spread them over as many potential targets as we can to prevent them from doing this over and over again. If they’re willing to target Cachalot on the basis that it’s simply been trading with us, though, their criteria for target selection’s so broad there’s no way we could separate probable targets from the merely possible ones. And if we can’t identify or prioritize them, we couldn’t really cover them, either, even if we didn’t realize that was one of the things they wanted.

  “But I have to say that, in some ways, I’m almost as worried about what they may be trying to tempt us into doing in response as I am about the actual attacks. If we start demolishing League star systems, we won’t be punishing the people who actually ordered this thing, and we will be alienating League public opinion. Not only that, we’ll be handing Abruzzi and the others a pretext they can use to go on whipping up a Solly war frenzy. Do you really think any of their pet newsies will suggest even for a moment that our attacks are a reprisal in response for their attacks? Especially when Capriotti’s already equated ‘Buccaneer’ with Lacoön? Under their version of reality, we ‘forced’ them to adopt ‘Buccaneer’ when we began waging such brutal warfare against their citizens’ ‘economic lifeblood.’ Nobody in the League’s going to parse Abruzzi’s news releases well enough to realize how absurd that comparison is.”