His tone was considerably grimmer, and his three staffers glanced at one another.

  “Sir, I know you won’t like what I’m about to say,” Admiral Helland said after a moment, “but Strategy and Planning have a point. We can’t afford to look…ineffectual, especially after what happened at Spindle and Manticore.” She did not, Capriotti noticed, mention other events at places with names like Zunker and Saltash. “Under the circumstances, pulling back at what we all know the newsies would label ‘the first sign of resistance’ would undercut Buccaneer’s entire strategic premise.”

  Lyang-tau Rutgers stirred but said nothing.

  “I’m fully aware of that, Angelica.” Capriotti’s voice was a bit frostier than the one in which he normally spoke to his chief of staff. “I’m also aware of the reported loss of life in that mysterious attack on the Manties’ home system. I know there are some who believe their officially released casualty numbers are inflated. Given what obviously happened to their industrial base, though, I doubt they were. And if it hadn’t been for Spindle, how do you think League public opinion would have reacted to them?”

  Helland started to reply, then paused. After a moment, she nodded slightly. One thing about her, Capriotti thought. She’d subscribed fully to Battle Fleet hubris—at least before the Battle of Spindle—and she still considered both Manticore and the Republic of Haven “uppity neobarbs” who needed to be taught their manners. Despite that, her brain actually worked.

  “Point taken, Sir,” she said. “If it hadn’t come so close on Spindle’s heels, the ‘Yawata Strike’ would’ve gotten an enormous amount of sympathetic play on the boards.”

  “And with damned good cause.” Capriotti leaned forward, planting his forearms on the briefing room table. “That was a sheer, wanton slaughter, with no attempt at all to minimize civilian loss of life. Leave the kinetic impact damage on Sphinx completely out of the equation, and it was still unconscionable.”

  “Sir,” Rutgers said cautiously, “should we gather from where you’re going with this that you’re…not in favor of Parthian?”

  “I believe that would be a safe assumption on your part, Lyang-tau.” Capriotti smiled thinly. “I always was a transparent, easily read sort.”

  “Sir, I understand your concerns—and your repugnance. I really do,” Helland said. “But as I just said, if Parthian’s taken off the table, then Buccaneer’s fundamental strategic premise is compromised.”

  “It may be compromised,” Capriotti corrected her. “A lot would depend on how it was taken off the table. If there is a Manty—or Beowulfan—naval presence in Cachalot, and if I choose to avoid Parthian on the basis that it would result in unnecessary and avoidable civilian deaths and make it clear that that’s the only reason I’m not executing Parthian, we come off looking restrained, not ineffectual. Especially in the aftermath of all the contradictory stories about what happened to Eleventh Fleet.”

  Helland looked less than convinced, but she clearly recognized that this wasn’t a good place to push. Capriotti gave what he’d just said a few seconds to sink in, then sat back once more.

  “I don’t see any need to discuss this particular concern with the rest of the staff,” he said. “If S & P’s right and there’s no picket to get in our way, it will never arise. If there is, then the final decision on Parthian will be mine, anyway. I want all three of you, though, to be thinking about the possibility that S & P isn’t right and considering what I suppose you might call a partial Parthian. The outer system’s infrastructure, especially in the Snapper Belt, has a much lower population, and the people in it are much more lavishly equipped with life pods and small craft. Given even a few hours’ warning, they should be able to evacuate almost totally. Going after Snapper would make Buccaneer’s point, I think, and if I emphasized to the system government that we were deliberately avoiding heavier casualties, we should get credit for showing restraint, as well.”

  Helland nodded with what might have been a bit more enthusiasm.

  “All right,” Capriotti stood. “I think we could all use some supper of our own. Why don’t the three of you join me in my dining cabin?”

  “Of course, Sir. Thank you,” Helland said, and the three staffers followed him from the briefing room.

  Angelica has a point about Buccaneer’s premises, Capriotti thought, as they headed for the lift shaft. She’s not the only person who’s going to make it, either. For that matter, it’s a virtual certainty that sooner or later somebody is going to execute Parthian, whatever I do.

  He hid a mental grimace. Parthian was the one part of the detailed ops plan with which he’d totally disagreed from the instant he read it.

  The new, improved Cataphracts in the pods which had been delivered along with TF 783’s instructions, had effectively unlimited range. Well, all missiles had effectively unlimited range, really, but the Cataphract’s second stage meant it was capable of terminal maneuvers at the end of its run as opposed to a purely ballistic weapon coasting helplessly through space after its impellers burned out. That meant, in theory, that missiles launched from well outside the 15.84 LM hyper limit of the Cachalot System’s K4 primary were fully capable of hitting targets in the vicinity of Orca, the system’s inhabited planet, despite the fact that Orca’s orbital radius was less than three light-minutes. For that matter, Orca’s orbital infrastructure wasn’t what one might call an elusive target. Capriotti had no doubt that Lyang-tau Rutgers and his tactical officers would be capable of taking out every bit of it without ever crossing the limit inbound.

  But there were two things no tac officer could possibly guarantee if Capriotti ordered them to do that. First, they couldn’t guarantee Orca wouldn’t suffer exactly the same sort of collateral catastrophe which had destroyed the Manticoran city of Yawata Crossing. And, second, and even worse, if he executed Parthian—essentially a hit-and-run strike from extreme range to avoid entering the Manties’ missile envelope—there would be no time for an orderly evacuation. They’d probably save more lives than the Manties had managed to save in the Yawata Strike, but almost a billion of the Cachalot System’s 6.9 billion citizens lived and worked in that infrastructure.

  In the course of his career, Vincent Capriotti had done more things he hadn’t liked than he cared to contemplate. Committing mass murder wasn’t going to be one of them, whatever Operation Buccaneer called for.

  But sooner or later, someone will, Vincent, he thought. It’s the next best damned thing to an Eridani violation, but someone will. And what the hell do we do when the Solarian League starts violating the Edict?

  He didn’t like that thought.

  He didn’t like it at all.

  SLNS Leonhard Euler

  Unicorn Belt

  Manticore B

  Star Empire of Manticore

  “Sir, I think I’ve got something here you need to look at,” Midshipman Dimas said.

  “That would make a nice change.”

  Commander Bill Knight sounded more than a little sour, although that was scarcely Dimas’s fault. In fact, Knight liked Dimas quite a bit more than an evaluating officer was supposed to admit to a midshipman on his snotty cruise. Dimas was smart and competent…and so bouncy he reminded Knight irresistibly of a Labrador retriever he’d had when he was a kid himself. That dog had been smart, too…and despite what some people might think was possible, he’d definitely had a sense of humor. One that had gotten both him and his youthful master into what his mom had always referred to as “a heap of trouble” more than once. Dimas’s humor never got him into trouble—or not, at least, with his superiors; his fellow snotties might have disputed that value judgment—but he loved practical jokes and he was an accomplished amateur ventriloquist. His ability to mimic sounds and throw his voice into unlikely places had kept Midshipman Styles running around the compartment looking for his “lost” uni-link for almost fifteen minutes a couple of days ago.

  Young Dimas had also won the Lester Allen Kovalenko Prize as the top math graduate in his senior class, however. He’d been the starting goalie on the Saganami lacrosse team during his junior and senior forms, as well, and he took the team’s motto—“Live life fearlessly!”—to heart. In short, he was an outstanding young man who was going to be an outstanding officer.

  None of which made Bill Knight any happier about their current duty.

  There were a lot of things he’d rather be doing than sitting on the command deck of yet another hulked Solly superdreadnought. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be doing any of them for the immediately foreseeable future.

  He grimaced at the thought and shoved up out of the captain’s chair at the center of Leonhard Euler’s bridge. He wasn’t certain who Euler had been—a mathematician, he thought—but his namesake had seen better days. Less damaged than a lot of her consorts, she’d still suffered over four hundred casualties, and lucky it hadn’t been worse. Not that anyone looking around her pristine bridge and smelling its cool, fresh air, would have imagined how severely damaged she was.

  He crossed to the communications officer’s station, where Dimas was ensconced. Knight had been forced to concede that young Dimas had a better touch with Solly computers than he did. He hoped that didn’t say anything about unfortunate, hidden character flaws on the young man’s part. But what had started with Dimas “riding shotgun,” shadowing the older and more experienced Knight while he learned his way around, had segued into something a lot more like a partnership, and the boy had more than held up his end. Along the way, they’d discovered that the com system actually had the best reach into the ship’s computer net, although no one was quite certain why the com officer had needed more access than, say, the tactical officer or the astrogator.

  Probably because there’s a right way, a wrong way, and the Solly way to do just about anything, he reflected as he came to a halt at Dimas’s shoulder. Although, come to think of it, “wrong way” and “Solly way” is probably redundant.

  “So, what’ve you got, Elijah?” he asked.

  “I’ve got the standalones running the deep core analysis, Sir,” the middy said, looking back and up at him, and Knight nodded.

  The reason he and Dimas were currently parked aboard Leonhard Euler was that—for their sins—they were among the better of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s cyberneticists. In fact, both of them had been assigned to HMSS Weyland prior to the Yawata Strike. Knight had been aboard the space station for almost two T-years before the strike, assigned to the R&D side of its complement because of his expertise. Dimas had been sent aboard for his snotty cruise deployment to give him the hands-on, real world experience his Academy instructors had been unable to provide, and he’d ended up under Knight’s mentorship. They were alive today only because Vice Admiral Faraday, Weyland’s CO, had called an emergency evacuation drill which had left the entire R&D staff planet-side when the deadly sneak attack tore the space station apart.

  Technically, Dimas’s snotty cruise had ended five days ago, but things were still badly unsettled following what had been dubbed the Second Battle of Manticore. The lad had been left where he was, assigned to Knight’s team, for the forensic examination of the wreckage. The commander hadn’t told him he’d specifically asked to be allowed to keep “his” midshipman a little longer because he was so good at his job. Nor did young Elijah know about the glowing efficiency report Knight had already composed. But the same gift for computers and—especially—for deep-diving into the cyber depths which had made Dimas so useful aboard Weyland made him even more valuable aboard a hulk like Euler.

  One of the conditions upon which Massimo Filareta’s survivors had been allowed to surrender had been the preservation of their computer cores. Several commanding officers had scrubbed their computers anyway, which was why those particular COs were spending their current confinement in somewhat less than palatial conditions. Most, however, had honored their promise. A lot of them had figured—quite reasonably, in Knight’s opinion—that after what the RMN had done to Sandra Crandall it already had plenty of classified computer banks to play with. There were unlikely to be any shattering new intelligence landfalls in Eleventh Fleet’s memory.

  At the moment, Knight and Dimas were busy probing the memory of their twelfth superdreadnought, and they weren’t the only team involved in the effort. And, so far, no shattering new intelligence had come to light, which tended to suggest those captains had had a point.

  Dimas’s “standalones” were designed to carry out a point by point comparison between Leonhard Euler’s memory and the computers they’d already stripped. There was far too much data for any mere human to sort through, and—in theory, at least—the standalones would make sure anything that wasn’t already in the database was added.

  The communications logs were another matter, however. Computers did a wonderful job of searching for things they were told to look for, and they were doing just that with all of the com traffic. But in something that tended to be as…free-form as inter-human communication, telling them where to look could sometimes be a nontrivial challenge. That was why he and Dimas had made it a point to at least skim the traffic for the last couple of hours before the Solarian surrender. The computers were looking at the same timeframe, but it was entirely possible they’d miss something.

  “Should I take it the standalones have found something earth-shattering?” Knight asked now, with a smile.

  “Actually, Sir,” the middy said seriously, “I think I really may have found something.”

  “Like what?”

  “A fragment of a com conversation between Leonhard Euler and Philip Oppenheimer from about the time the Sollies opened fire. From her flag bridge.” Knight’s eyebrows rose, and Dimas nodded.

  “You’re kidding,” the commander said.

  “No, Sir.” Dimas shook his head, and Knight’s eyes widened.

  They’d been searching for some window into whatever insanity had led Filareta to open fire in an absolutely hopeless situation. Unfortunately, none of Eleventh Fleet’s surviving units had been in direct communication with Admiral Filareta or his staff at the critical moment, and Philip Oppenheimer herself was not among the survivors. They’d found a few megs of recorded com traffic between Oppenheimer’s CO and other units of the fleet from that time window, but nothing that came from her flag bridge…or that shed any light on his decisions. So if his middy—

  “Somebody on this ship was actually in communication with Filareta when everything went to hell?” he demanded.

  “Not quite, Sir.” Dimas shrugged. “What I’ve got here is part of a conversation between Leonhard Euler’s com officer and one of her cousins, Captain Sedgewick.”

  Knight’s eyes narrowed. Captain Reuben Sedgewick had been Filareta’s staff com officer.

  “It’s from the com officer’s private files, not part of the official logs,” Dimas continued. “Maybe that’s because there wasn’t time to worry about anything like that before everything hit the fan. Or it might be because they were violating regs tying up bandwidth on personal matters at a moment like that.”

  “I could see that.” Knight nodded, trying to imagine what would have happened to a Manticoran communications officer who’d been gabbing away with her cousin at “a moment like that.”

  “It’s not quite as bad as you may be thinking, Sir,” Dimas said. “They weren’t on any of the active command net channels; they were talking on one of the redundancy sidebands.”

  “Marginally better, I suppose,” Knight allowed grudgingly. “But if this wasn’t part of the official fleet traffic, why do you think anyone’s going to want to see it?”

  “Well, I sort of doubt that Captain Clarence—she was Leonhard Euler’s com officer—has any idea there was anything significant in what she had here, Sir. For that matter, I’m not even certain she realized she’d recorded it in the first place. If she did, though, I can see why she’s kept her mouth shut since we started beating the bushes trying to figure out why Filareta opened fire.”

  “What are you talking about?” Knight demanded a bit more impatiently, and Dimas gave him a crooked smile.

  “Let me show you, Sir,” he said, and hit the playback button.

  HMS Imperator

  Manticore A

  Star Empire of Manticore

  “—and after that, Your Grace, you’re scheduled for the state dinner at Mount Royal,” Lieutenant Luca Tomei said. “Under the circumstances, I think it might be better if you attended as Steadholder Harrington rather than Duchess Harrington.”

  Honor Alexander-Harrington tried very hard—and almost successfully—not to roll her eyes. It wasn’t Tomei’s fault, but she’d managed her entire career without a dedicated public information officer. Partly, she acknowledged, that was because she’d avoided the limelight as much as possible. More of it was that she’d held primarily combat commands, where providing public information had not been high on her list of priorities. And still more of it was the fact that, unlike some officers she could have named, she vastly preferred to get on with whatever the current job in hand might be and let other people worry about who got public credit for it.

  And not just because I’m such a naturally modest and self-effacing type, either, she thought, remembering the bitter political infighting after the Battle of Hancock and following Paul Tankersley’s death and her own duel with Pavel Young. Then there’d been all the vicious innuendo about her and Hamish during the High Ridge premiership. And that didn’t even count the Mueller dome collapse back on Grayson!

  If there was anyone in the entire Star Empire of Manticore who wanted the spotlight less than she did, she’d never met her.

  Unfortunately, she’d had to accept years ago that she couldn’t avoid it, and she had to admit Tomei made it a less excruciating experience. A year and a half younger than Waldemar Tümmel, he was far more comfortable than the flag lieutenant when it came to social events, like tonight’s state dinner to bid Benjamin Mayhew an official farewell. He was less adroit than Tümmel on the purely military side, but between the two of them—with prodigious assistance from James MacGuiness—they got her most everywhere she needed to be almost on schedule.