“The Manties.” Gaddis nodded grimly. “They may not have both oars all the way in the water, and so far, it looks to us like they were a hundred percent wrong about what they were going to find on Mesa. But they’re absolutely right about the way we’ve been played, and when that little tidbit gets out—”

  Kingsford nodded as his brain began to function once more.

  He hadn’t believed a word of it when Gaddis began spinning his preposterous tale. Only the fact that he knew Gaddis’s reputation—knew the man was one of the very few honest cops inside the Kuiper—had led him to even listen. But as the brigadier laid out his case, one damning bit of circumstantial evidence at a time, his skepticism had begun to erode. To be honest, he’d still thought Gaddis and his fellow “Ghost Hunters” were insane, but if there’d been even the faintest chance they weren’t, he’d had to know. And if there wasn’t, Gweon and he could have a good laugh about it later.

  Of course, that wasn’t going to happen now, he thought, looking down at the corpse in front of his desk.

  There’s still no way the Manties are right about this “Alignment” of theirs, he thought. Everything coming out of Mesa proves that. But what if whoever the “Other Guys” really are deliberately led the Manties to suspect Mesa? What if the very first card they put on the table was to provide the Manties with a bogeyman they knew the rest of the galaxy would laugh off? Get everyone so invested in dismissing the Manties’ paranoid fantasies that any evidence there really was someone pulling the strings would be automatically dismissed right along with it?

  Which is exactly what we’ve all done.

  Ice clogged his circulatory system and he drew a deep breath.

  “I’ll give you that someone’s orchestrating all of this,” he said, looking up at Gaddis. “You’ve had longer to think about this than I have, though. Would it be too much to hope you have some damned idea of what the hell they’re really after? Or some suggested course of action on our part?”

  “Frankly, Sir, we don’t have a clue exactly what the Other Guys are up to or why. Not in terms of their endgame strategy, at any rate. But at least one of their immediate goals is obviously to keep turning up the heat between us and the ‘Grand Alliance.’ We can’t decide whether their primary target is the League or the Star Empire, but they clearly want us at one another’s throats. The lengths they’re prepared to go to to keep us that way are what pushed us to contact you, in fact. Captain al-Fanudahi and Captain Teague took one look at those ‘data anomalies’ from Fabius and realized what they were really seeing. Of course,” he smiled thinly, “they had an advantage your other analysts lacked; they actually believed the Manties were telling the truth about the Yawata Strike and the existence of someone they damned well think is the ‘Mesan Alignment.’

  “What really worries us, though,” his smile disappeared, “are the implications for the Other Guys’ reach. Those grasers were killing the Manties’ fire control system, and however they did it, they had to have been positioned well before Task Force Seven-Ninety ever arrived. In fact, they had to be coordinated with the task force’s arrival, which required detailed prior knowledge. In our judgment, that pretty much proved the Other Guys had been deeply involved in the decision to launch Fabius in the first place. They couldn’t have coordinated their missile-killers into the plan if they hadn’t known all about it ahead of time, which strongly suggested they had a significant hand in shaping it, and what just happened to Gweon seems to prove that. That’s bad enough, but given how thoroughly they seem to have us penetrated, we don’t know how much reach they may have into manipulating Manty decisions. It’d be a hell of a lot harder for them to do that, since the Manties obviously know they exist and have to be trying to protect themselves against penetration, but I’m not going to say it’s impossible. And Captain al-Fanudahi’s suggested a pretty scary possibility.”

  “Which is?”

  “Our ships were busy withdrawing from the system just as fast as they could run,” Gaddis said grimly. “It’s for damned sure no one was hanging around to monitor the take from our recon drones. What if something else happened in Beowulf? Something like what happened when the Manties moved in on Mesa?”

  Kingsford felt the blood drain from his face.

  “The only good thing—assuming the Other Guys have managed to kill a couple of million Beowulfers—is that the Manties have shown an incredible amount of restraint,” Gaddis told him. “So far, at least. But if the Other Guys keep hammering away this way, that restraint’s likely to erode. So I think it behooves us to drag this out into the open as quickly as we can.”

  “I can’t go to Kolokoltsov and the others with this,” Kingsford said. “Not yet. Because you’re right. If everyone we arrest just dies on us, we’ll never be able to prove who’s behind this or why they’re doing it. If I expect anyone else to believe something this insane, I’ve got to have something more concrete than a stack of dead bodies.” He scowled down at Gweon. “You’ve convinced me; the ‘Mandarins’ have invested a hell of a lot more—including their own survival, probably—in the ‘the Manties are paranoid lunatics’ argument. They’d deny everything, even to themselves, and fire my arse the minute I told them anything of the sort. If I handled it just right and approached them gradually enough I might be able to convince Wodoslawski or Quartermain to listen. Abruzzi and MacArtney would never believe it though. I don’t know about Kolokoltsov. He actually might—but even if he would, it doesn’t sound to me like we can afford the time it’d take to get any of them to accept it.”

  Gaddis glanced at Okiku and saw his own relief in the colonel’s eyes. Discovering Kingsford was clean had been an enormous relief. The evidence that the CNO’s brain was beginning to function again was an even greater one.

  “Sir, I don’t know how much time we’ve got,” Gaddis said, turning back to Kingsford, “but we haven’t been able to come up with any ideas that would be much faster than that. The only approach we’ve been able to come up with is that with you in our corner and provided with the evidence we’ve turned up so far, it should be possible for you—and us—to begin quietly clearing people we know we can trust. We need to have a…a support structure in place before we go public or I approach Deputy AG Rorendaal and her people.”

  “Why?” From Kingsford’s narrowed eyes, he already knew the answer to his own question, but he asked it anyway, and Gaddis snorted harshly.

  “Because anybody else who’s even come close to these people is dead, Admiral,” he said, his expression grim. “None of us want to end up that way, and I doubt you do either. But there’s no point pretending it won’t happen if the Other Guys figure out what we’re doing. Believe me, we’ve lived with that for quite a while. And that’s why we need to clear as many people as we can. We need to build up a deep enough bench, enough people who have the same information we have, that an army of assassins couldn’t get us all before we go public and start dragging snakes out into the light and clubbing the sons of bitches to death.”

  He looked Kingsford straight in the eye.

  “Like I say, none of us want to die, but if that’s what it takes, then that’s what it takes. We know that. And we’re willing to take the chance. But if we do that, then we need to do it smart and we need to be sure the Other Guys don’t manage to sweep us under the rug along with all the other bodies before we get it done.”

  Kingsford looked at him for several seconds, then glanced down at Gweon’s corpse again. Then he looked back at Gaddis.

  “Sign me up, Brigadier,” he said.

  Sol System

  Solarian League

  The screaming alarm yanked Rear Admiral Bethany Ning-ju out of a deep sleep. She bolted upright in her bunk, reaching for the bedside com key before her eyes were fully open.

  “Battle stations! Battle stations!” the strident voice filled every compartment, melding with the alarm. “All hands, battle stations! This is not a drill! Battle stations! Battle sta—”

  An icicle went through Ning-ju, and the voice cut off—in her sleeping cabin, at least—as her hand came down on the com key and overrode the speakers.

  “Ning-ju,” she said, swinging her feet to the deck. “Talk to me!”

  “Commander Rangwala, Ma’am.” The voice on the other end was flat, as hard as an iron bar. If it hadn’t identified itself, Ning-ju would never have recognized Daiichi Rangwala, SLNS Andromeda’s executive officer. “We’re picking up a major hyper footprint, Ma’am. It’s right on top of us!”

  “Define ‘right on top’!” she snapped.

  “Under eight million kilometers, Ma’am!”

  Ning-ju went white. Eight million kilometers was less than twenty-seven light-seconds!

  “How big is it?” she demanded.

  “So far we’ve got over three hundred point sources, Ma’am!”

  Ning-ju’s mind froze. Three hundred point sources? That was…that was…that was insane. Her entire squadron consisted of only eight Mikasa-class heavy cruisers. But what in God’s name could—?

  Her heart seemed to stop. There was only one place that many ships could have come from. And they could be here for only one purpose.

  “Get on the com! Raise them now!”

  “Your Grace, we have what look like eight Solly heavy cruisers at seven-point-eight million kilometers,” Captain Rafe Cardones said. “Closing velocity about thirty-five thousand KPS. Not sure from their vectors what they’re doing out here, but we’re right on top of them. They’ve just brought up their sidewalls.”

  “I see them, Rafe,” Honor Alexander-Harrington replied.

  She gazed down into the tactical plot, never raising her eyes to look at Cardones on her command chair com display, and her flag captain bit his lip. He’d seen her like this—or almost like this—once before, the night before her duel with Pavel Young. But, no, he thought. She hadn’t been like this even then. She’d been focused, lethal, determined, prepared to pay the price of sacrificing her entire career to avenge the death of the man she’d loved, but she’d still been her. Still been Honor Harrington.

  Today, she was a stranger. A terrifying stranger.

  “Shall I challenge them, Ma’am?” Lieutenant Commander Brantley asked from Communications.

  “No,” she said flatly, and looked up from the plot at last. Eyes like frozen brown flint met Cardones’s on the display.

  “Take them out,” she said.

  Commander Gregoire Koenig exploded from the lift car onto Andromeda’s command deck. He hadn’t bothered with a skinsuit. In fact, he was shoeless and wore only trousers and a T-shirt, but Daiichi Rangwala leapt out of the command chair at the center of the bridge with enormous relief.

  “Captain on the bridge!” the quartermaster of the watch barked.

  “As you were—everyone!” Koenig snapped. He flung himself into the vacated command chair and spun it to face his tactical officer. “Status?”

  “Still more of them coming over the wall, Sir.” Lieutenant Commander Paulson’s voice quavered. “We’re up to almost five hundred now.”

  Koenig blanched. CruRon 572 was supposed to be conducting a simple training maneuver in the safest star system in the entire League. None of its units had ever imagined anything like this in their worst dreams!

  “The Admiral’s on the way to flag bridge, Sir,” Rangwala told him. “Should be there by now.”

  Koenig jerked a choppy nod. As soon as Ning-ju reached her station, they’d have to—

  “Missile launch!” Yvonne Paulson said suddenly. “Multiple missile launches!”

  An icy fist punched Gregoire Koenig in the center of his chest. His eyes sped to the master plot and every drop of blood drained out of his face as dozens of missile icons blazed suddenly upon it. The time-of-flight number flashed its crimson warning, and there was no time to even think about escaping them. Andromeda’s hyper generator was completely powered down, and at those missiles’ acceleration they would reach his ship in barely ninety seconds.

  “Launching counter-missiles!” Paulson said, and Andromeda quivered as her launchers spat a pitiful salvo of CMs at that torrent of destruction.

  “Get them on the com!” Koenig said. “Tell them we surrender!”

  “We’re trying to raise them, Sir!” his com officer said. “We haven’t gotten through yet!”

  “Ma’am,” Mercedes Brigham said very quietly in Honor’s ear, “they can’t hurt us.”

  Honor said nothing. She simply watched the missiles track across the plot, and Nimitz flattened his ears and bared his fangs from the back of her command chair.

  “Strike the wedge!” Bethany Ning-ju barked from Andromeda’s flag bridge. “All units—strike your wedges now!”

  Rafe Cardones drew a deep breath of relief as the Solly cruisers’ wedges disappeared in the universal FTL signal of surrender. His eyes darted back to his com.

  And Honor Alexander-Harrington didn’t say a word.

  “They’re still coming, Sir!” Lieutenant Commander Paulson said.

  “I see it, Yvonne,” Commander Koenig replied, and a strange sense of something very like calm seemed to flow through him. Not relief, just…acceptance. The knowledge that every man and woman of his crew was about to die and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

  They must be even more pissed off by Fabius than we’d thought, a corner of his mind reflected. But why? We only hit military targets. Sure, nobody on the ones we hit had time to evacuate, but it’s not like we violated the Eridani Edict the way they did in Mesa!

  “Your Grace, they’ve surrendered,” Mercedes Brigham said, and Honor looked at her. Her expression never changed, but there was something almost like…puzzlement in those flinty eyes, as if she wondered what that had to do with anything.

  “Your Grace, they’ve struck their wedges!”

  She said nothing, only looked at her chief of staff with those puzzled eyes, and Brigham reached out. She gripped her admiral’s shoulders, actually shook her in her command chair.

  “Ma’am—Honor—they’ve surrendered!”

  Their eyes locked, and then, suddenly, Honor shivered. She closed her eyes, her nostrils flared, and her hands tightened like talons on the armrests of her command chair.

  “Yes, they have, damn them.” The knife-edged words were so soft only Brigham could possibly have heard them. Then her eyes opened again.

  “Abort the engagement, Captain Cardones,” she said clearly, coldly, while Nimitz snarled protest behind her.

  The time-to-attack range readout flashed downward and every eye on Andromeda’s bridge was glued to it. Forty seconds. Thirty-five. Thirty…

  No one spoke. There was nothing to say, no further orders to give. The tide of destruction came in ludicrously slowly for a missile engagement, because the range was too short for it to reach anything like maximum velocity. Individual missiles—even Manticoran missiles—would be easy meat for the point defense clusters when they came into range. But there were over five hundred missiles in that salvo. If every single cluster CruRon 572 could bring to bear stopped two of them, four hundred would still get through. And without even sidewalls to protect them…

  Twenty seconds. Fifteen. Ten.

  Gregoire Koenig drew a deep breath—the last he would ever draw—and held it as his ship’s death roared down upon him.

  And then, suddenly, every single one of those missiles swerved away from its target, arced wide of the squadron, and vanished in a holocaust of self-destruct commands.

  Koenig wouldn’t have believed the silence on his bridge could grow even more intense.

  He would have been wrong.

  That silence lingered for ten crackling seconds. Then his com officer cleared his throat.

  “Sir, we have an incoming transmission.”

  “Put it up,” Koenig said.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The commander leaned back in his chair, vaguely aware his hands were trembling, and a woman in the black-and-gold of the Royal Manticoran Navy appeared on the master com display.

  “I am Admiral Harrington, Royal Manticoran Navy,” she said, and something deep inside Gregoire Koenig shrank from that soprano scalpel. “I accept your surrender in the name of the Grand Alliance. Be aware that any resistance to my boarding parties will be met with instant lethal force and that my acceptance of your surrender is contingent upon the surrender of your intact databases. If those databases are not intact, or if any resistance is offered to my boarding parties by any individual, I will regard all of your personnel as having violated the terms of your surrender and act accordingly.”

  She smiled, and somehow it was the most frightening smile Koenig had ever seen.

  “You won’t like it if that happens,” she said very, very softly, “but I will.”

  Naval Station Ganymede

  Sol System

  Solarian League

  “This is confirmed?” Admiral Maridors Haeckle asked.

  “Yes, Sir.” Rear Admiral Léonard Pataloeshti, Haeckle’s chief of staff, shook his head, his expression pale. “Captain Tsukatani’s the duty officer. He says System Watch Command picked up the initial hyper footprints sixteen minutes ago. They were right on top—I mean, right on top—of Admiral Ning-ju’s squadron, and the sensor platforms detected a massive missile launch. We don’t see any of the cruisers’ impeller signatures anymore. They’re just…gone.”

  “Shit,” Haeckle said flatly, then shook himself. “Well, I suppose that clears up any little ambiguity about whether or not they’re hostile.”

  Pataloeshti only nodded, and Haeckle sighed.

  “All right, Léonard, I guess we’d better get down to the command center. How many of them did you say we’re talking about?”

  “Tsukatani makes it a minimum of three hundred and fifty signatures at superdreadnought range, Sir, but he’s pretty sure that’s low. Total count for all types is about six hundred, plus fifty-five of what have to be freighters or transports in a separate echelon. Tsukatani estimates the transport group’s escort at another sixteen battlecruisers and a pair of superdreadnoughts.” It was his turn to sigh. “I don’t think this is just a raid, Sir.”