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# Chapter Twenty-Two

It wasn't the usual route for deploying to Silesia.

Under normal circumstances, a Manticoran task force making transit to the Confederacy would have gone out by way of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction's Gregor terminus. But Gregor was an Andermani star system located in the very heart of the Empire. The Star Kingdom might hold title to the terminus itself, along with the legally recognized right to fortify the area around it and to maintain a fleet base orbiting the system's secondary component, but it was the Empire who held sovereignty over the rest of it.

Which was why Honor had opted to travel the Triangle Route in reverse. Rather than making transit to Gregor, and from there to Silesia and home again by way of Basilisk, as most merchant skippers would have, she and the reinforcing units of Task Force Thirty-Four had moved "north" to Basilisk, and then "west" to Silesia. It wasn't the fastest possible way to get there, since it required her to effectively cross the entire breadth of the Confederacy to reach Marsh, but it was one way to avoid any possible . . . unpleasantness with the Andies before she even reached her new command area. She didn't really like tacking on the additional thirty-four light-years, but even in the zeta hyper-space band, that amounted to less than five days of travel time, and the additional delay was acceptable under the circumstances which actually applied.

Not that every one of her officers agreed with her about that.

"I still say that all of this pussyfooting around is ridiculous," Alistair McKeon grumbled.

He, Alice Truman, and their chiefs of staff had come aboard Werewolf by pinnace in response to one of Honor's dinner invitations. Her dinners were something of a legend in the Fleet, and everyone knew her guests were expected to bring their opinions and any problems they might be wrestling with along with them when they came. McKeon knew that even better than most, and she'd more than half-expected to hear from him—again—on this topic once the wine had been poured.

"It's not 'pussyfooting,' Alistair," she replied mildly, sipping her own cocoa while her guests nursed a particularly good Sphinxian burgundy. She knew it was a good one, although she personally didn't care for it particularly, because her father had selected it for her.

"I calls it as I sees it," he told her with a lopsided grin. "And pussyfooting is exactly what it feels like to me. No offense, Nimitz," he added with a nod to the treecat in the highchair beside Honor, who showed him bone-white fangs in a yawn of amusement.

"In a lot of ways, I have to agree with Alistair," Truman put in. "Not that Wraith and I can't find a lot of useful things to do with the additional time, of course."

She cocked her head at Captain (senior-grade) Craig Goodrick, her chief of staff. Goodrick, who'd earned the nickname "Wraith" for his work with the electronic warfare capabilities of the first Shrike-class LACs, was an unremarkable-looking officer. The brain hiding behind his unassuming façade, however, was one of the better ones in the RMN, at least when it could be pried away from contemplating a hand of spades. Now he shrugged.

"Actually, Ma'am, I don't mind the longer transit time at all. I'm not especially crazy about anything that looks like tiptoeing around the Andies' sensibilities when they're being such pains in the posterior, but given the realities where our LAC groups are concerned, I'll take all the exercise time I can get and be glad of it."

"Heresy!" McKeon proclaimed, but there was a twinkle in his eye, and Commander Roslee Orndorff, his own chief of staff, chuckled out loud. It was a very substantial chuckle from a very substantial woman, and the 'cat in the chair beside her bleeked a laugh of his own. Honor didn't know Orndorff very well, but the ash-blond commander was another of the handful of naval officers who had been adopted. Her Banshee didn't seem to mind that his human-style name was derived from a mythological female harbinger of death. He was a good bit younger than Nimitz, around Samantha's age, in fact, but it was obvious to Honor that he shared Nimitz's low sense of humor.

"You're outnumbered, Sir," Orndorff told McKeon now. "And it's not just the LAC jocks who need time to work up to full efficiency, is it?"

"We could take any batch of Andies I ever saw exactly like we are this minute," McKeon proclaimed.

"In your dreams, Alistair," Truman said dryly. McKeon looked at her, and she shook her head at him. "I make all due allowance for patriotism and esprit de corps, even parochialism, but you know better than that."

"Well, maybe," he conceded. "But the Andies aren't exactly four meters tall and covered with long, curly hair, either. And while I'm prepared to admit we have more than our fair share of rough edges, we also have a bunch of combat-experienced veterans, which is more than the Andies can say."

"That's fair enough," Honor acknowledged. "But you might want to think about the fact that before we and the Peeps started shooting at one another, they were the ones with all of the in-depth backlog of combat experience. We'd done our share of chasing down pirates and dealing with the occasional squadron of 'privateers,' but we didn't have any real, recent war-fighting experience to go with it. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty decent description of where the Andermani probably are right now."

"Maybe it is," McKeon agreed with a more serious expression, "but we're not exactly the Peeps. They might have had a lot of experience at knocking off single-star system opponents, but most of their 'wars' hadn't really amounted to all that much more than polishing off privateer squadrons of their own."

"Somehow I rather doubt President Ramirez would agree with your analysis where the San Martin navy was concerned," Truman pointed out in an even drier tone.

"Your ganging up on me," he complained plaintively.

"That's what happens when someone rushes in where angels fear to tread," Honor told him. "Besides, it's dangerous to draw too close an analogy between the prewar Peep navy and the one we actually wound up fighting. The officers who'd amassed all the experience tended to be Legislaturalists, and they disappeared in Pierre's purges without our having to face most of them in combat. The ones we did go up against, like Parnell—or Alfredo Yu, when he was still in Havenite service—certainly gave us a run for our money, even with our hardware edge."

"You're undermining your own argument," McKeon objected. "If we're supposed to be the overconfident Peeps and the Andies are supposed to be the underestimated but plucky underdogs, then pointing out how competent people like Parnell and Yu were sort of defeats your purpose, doesn't it?"

"Not really. Even Parnell clearly underestimated what we could do to him, and the fact that he was so good in so many ways only underscores how easy it is for it even a competent officer to get overconfident on the basis of his people's superior levels of experience. Which is what the lot of us are ever so gently suggesting to you that you might be doing, Alistair."

She smiled seraphically, and Truman snorted at his expression.

"Gotcha!" she announced.

"All right. All right!" McKeon surrendered. "I admit we can use the additional training time. But all joking aside, I really am more than a little . . . irked to see a Manticoran task force sneaking around through the backdoor route this way."

"I know," Honor acknowledged. "And I know you're not alone in feeling that way, either. But remember that our most recent reports on what's going on in Marsh were three weeks old before we even left Manticore. I don't want to appear any more provocative than we can help. If Emperor Gustav really is planning an aggressive move in Silesia, we don't need to go around providing any military pretexts he can capitalize on. And, by the same token, if there's a genuine probability of hostilities with the Empire, I don't want our task force to be caught deep in Imperial territory when the shuttle goes up."

"I understand entirely," McKeon said, and this time there was no humor at all in his expression or tone. "And I don't really disagree with you. That's the main reason I'm so irritated. We shouldn't have to be so worried about provocations that we go thirty-five light-years out of our way just to avoid the possibility. Much as I may complain about it, I understand exactly why no responsible station commander would be in a position to make any other routing decision. But understanding it doesn't mean I have to like the circumstances which make it the responsible thing to do."

"No," Honor agreed. "And on that level, I have to agree with you. But Alice and Wraith are right about how much we can use the additional time for training."

McKeon nodded, and she tasted the agreement behind the gesture. It was a bit grudging, but that wasn't because Alistair rejected her position. It was because he didn't like the reasons her ships' companies needed the additional drill time any more than he liked the reasons she felt no choice but to avoid actions which might be—or might be construed as—provocative.

And he's right, she reflected. It's absolutely ridiculous for the Queen's Navy to have gotten so . . . out of shape in barely four T-years. I suppose this is what Hamish meant when he started talking about "victory disease." But I know darned well that it never would have happened if Baroness Mourncreek were still First Lord and Sir Thomas were still First Space Lord.

But that was the real crux of the matter, when she came right down to it. Any military organization had a pronounced tendency to take its direction from the attitudes of its senior commanders, and the complacency and arrogance of the political admirals currently running the Admiralty were reflected among an unfortunately large and growing proportion of the Navy's officers. The manpower reductions mandated as part of the build down had been disproportionately concentrated among experienced personnel, particularly in the senior noncom and enlisted grades, which helped explain some of the problem, but it certainly didn't excuse it. Total numerical reductions in the regular officer corps had been lower than anywhere else, since the first priority had been to release reservist officers back to the merchant marine and civilian economy. That had actually increased the proportion of active-duty officers who were Academy graduates, but all too many of the better regulars had become so disgusted with the Janacek Admiralty that they had voluntarily gone on half-pay status and followed their reserve fellows into merchant service. The ones who remained were all too often the ones who found the current Admiralty attitude a comfortable fit. Which didn't say anything good about their own training and readiness attitudes.

It wasn't anything overt enough for the officers who hadn't been affected to effectively combat. It was just . . . sloppiness. It was the Navy's smugly comfortable belief in its own God-given superiority to anyone who might be foolish enough to cross swords with it. The belief that the inherent supremacy of the RMN would suffice to crush any opponent . . . which made the unrelenting drills and training exercises which had always been so much a part of the Royal Navy seem superfluous.

The inexperience of the LAC crews which had been assigned to Alice Truman's CLACs was one thing. The huge expansion in LACs which the Janacek Admiralty had undertaken as its low-cost answer to rear area security had spread the surviving combat-experienced LAC crews all too thin, and the LAC groups had taken their own losses of experienced personnel. The vast majority of her own LAC crews had been assigned to their present duties only after the truce had brought active operations to a close, which certainly explained their rough edges. Whether or not it justified them was another matter entirely. The people who'd trained them had had access to all of the after-action reports of the COLACs who'd actually led the Shrikes and Ferrets in combat. They'd also had Truman's original training syllabus and notes to draw upon. But no one would have guessed that from the initial performance of the LAC groups of green, inexperienced crews Honor had been assigned for Sidemore Station.

Yet however understandable her LACs deficiencies might be, her battle squadrons weren't a lot better, and with far less excuse. The same complacency and lack of attention to routine training had spread its subtle malaise through the ships of the wall, as well. Especially the older, pre-pod classes. Those ships were almost universally regarded as obsolescent, at best, and even the personnel assigned to them seemed to have come to regard them as secondary units. As little more than backup for the SD(P)s.

"To be completely honest," she told her guests, "I probably would have taken the long way around even if I hadn't been concerned about the Andies' sensibilities. God knows we needed the time to get the rust blown off." She shook her head. "I hate to admit it, but the whole time Earl White Haven and I have been fighting with Janacek and High Ridge over procurement policies, we managed to take our eyes off an even more important ball. We were so worried about the hardware that we forgot to worry about how well our people were trained to use the hardware they actually had."

"Even if you hadn't, how much could you realistically have expected to accomplish, Ma'am?" Mercedes Brigham's tone was respectful, but it was also firm, almost brisk. "There were only so many battles you could fight," she pointed out. "And if you'll forgive me for pointing it out again, there's no point for blaming yourself for the consequences of policies you opposed. And you did oppose the entire mindset that made this sort of mistake possible."

"Well, yes. But not because I saw this one coming. I think that's what actually bothers me most about it, to be honest. I like to think I'm smart enough to notice things like this sneaking up on me, and I hate finding out I wasn't."

"Everyone gets an egg in the face every so often," McKeon observed philosophically, then grinned. "Some of us get to savor the sensation more often than others, of course. Like your humble wall of battle commander."

"Or," Goodrick said in a darker voice, "the people who get into bed with people like Manpower."

The captain smiled thinly and very, very coldly. Of all the people in the dining compartment, Wraith Goodrick had the most intensely personal bone to pick with the Mesan slavers, because his mother had been genetically designed and sold like so much animate property. She'd been consigned to one of the notorious "pleasure resorts" whose whispered existence was an open secret, however well hidden they might be, and she'd escaped that fate only because she'd been loaded as cargo aboard a freighter which had enjoyed the unhappy experience of straying into the arms of an RMN light cruiser. Which was how she'd come to be emancipated in the Star Kingdom and why Goodrick had imbibed his searing hatred of all things Mesan literally at his mother's breast.

Which, in turn, explained his almost religious experience when Honor and Andrea Jaruwalski explained Operation Wilberforce to Task Force Thirty-Four's senior officers once they were en route to Marsh.

"We can certainly hope that will prove the case for some of them, at least," Honor told him, with no more doubt than anyone else in the compartment what he was referring to. "Not that we can absolutely count on it, of course," she added on a note of caution. "We are going to be operating in Silesia, not Manticoran space."

"Judging from the way the Manpower scandal worked out in the Star Kingdom, that may actually be an advantage where bigger fish are concerned, Your Grace," Orndorff pointed out.

"Maybe," Honor acknowledged. "On the other hand, I'm not entirely certain that whole affair has been as completely put to bed as it might appear just now. The circumstances which led to the . . . circumscribed nature of the investigation aren't going to obtain forever. And the information that was handed over to the Crown may not be all the information there is. Or that can still be turned up if someone looks in the right place."

"Well, someone certainly looked 'in the right place' for the Wilberforce information."

Alice Truman's observation came out in ever so slightly questioning a tone. Everyone in that dining compartment was consumed with curiosity about the source of Honor's private information on the network of Silesian system governors and Navy officers who'd reached highly profitable accommodations with Mesa. It was far too detailed and internally consistent for them to doubt its accuracy, but none of them could begin to imagine how she'd gotten her hands on it.

And she intended to keep it that way. She owed Anton Zilwicki that much for his trust in handing it over to her.

"That particular information does provide an example of what I'm talking about," she agreed with a slight smile which told Truman her fishing expedition was going to come up dry. "Not that any of it has any domestic Manticoran connections—or not direct ones, anyway. But I'll settle for progress anywhere, where genetic slavery is concerned. And given that we know which systems and which Silesian freight lines to watch, we may just make a little bit of a difference with Wilberforce, after all.

"None of which," she added, pulling the conversation back to its earlier thread, "has any particular bearing on whether or not the Opposition—and especially the Opposition's Navy types, like yours truly—should have realized how . . . flabby the Queen's Navy was getting. Or keeps me from wishing I'd paid enough attention to at least realize this particular mistake was being made in the first place!"

"Well," Goodrick said, accepting the change of subject for all of them, "we all realize it now, Your Grace. And since it's already been made, all we can do is dig in and undo as much of the damage as possible before we ever get to Sidemore."

"Agreed." McKeon nodded sharply, and leaned forward, his manner suddenly businesslike. "And all joking aside, Roslee and I have been thinking about a new series of joint exercises we can carry out in the simulators."

"I take it that the fact that you're bringing it up now means that you're not talking about exercises restricted solely to the wall?" Truman made the statement a question, and McKeon nodded again.

"We're already working on that side of it, Alice. What Roslee and I wanted to discuss is how we could best go about structuring our training schedule to exercise the wall and the LACs jointly, both in cooperation and against one another."

"That sounds like an excellent idea to me," Honor said firmly. In fact, that sort of discussion was precisely why she believed in inviting her officers to dine with her on a regular basis, and she looked over her shoulder at Andrew LaFollet.

"Andrew, would you please pass the word for Andrea to join us as soon as she finds it convenient?" she requested. Her personal armsman nodded in acknowledgment and reached for his com, and Honor turned back to her other guests and leaned forward in her own chair.

"I'm sure Andrea will be able to offer some extremely useful suggestions once we get her in on this," she said. "But in the meantime, we should be about it, so why don't all of you tell Mercedes and me exactly what it is you have in mind?"

* * *

"All units, this is Cockatrice One-Alpha. We'll go with Alpha Delta Niner-Six." Captain Scotty Tremaine listened to the voice in his earbug. "Werewolf Four, take the lead battlecruiser. Werewolf Five and Six, you're on Bandit Two. All Chimera squadrons, take your targets from Bandit Two along the targeting queue. Centaur and Cockatrice groups, decel to establish interval Baker Eight—you're on cleanup. Execute now!"

Tremaine watched his plot in Werewolf's Primary Flight Control carefully as the massed squadrons of TF 34's four CLACs began to flow outward in response to Commander Arthur Baker's orders. This was the third attack exercise of the day, and the first two had not been outstanding successes.

At least they were better than yesterday's, he reminded himself wryly. And, after all, that's what exercises are intended to do—find the problems so you can make things better.

He would have preferred to be leading the attack in person, for several reasons. One of the things he most treasured about his assignment as the task force's senior COLAC was that despite his lofty position in its command hierarchy, he still got to go out in space with his personnel rather than staying back aboard a flagship somewhere. It gave him a better chance of getting himself killed than a battle squadron or task group commander might have enjoyed, but it also meant he didn't have to send people out to do something he wasn't doing himself.

Besides, there wasn't much of an option about it. Even with grav-pulse FTL communications, LACs operated much too far away from their motherships to be controlled from there. As Jackie Harmon had established with the very first LAC group, any COLAC's proper place was out with his attack birds and their crews.

But at the moment, Commander Baker, HMS Cockatrice's COLAC, was subbing for him. After Werewolf herself, Cockatrice, Admiral Truman's flagship, was the next senior of the task force's CLACs, which meant that if anything happened to Tremaine, it would be up to Baker to take over. From what Tremaine had seen of him so far, the tall, black-haired commander had all the required skills and ability, but he was short on experience. He also still tended to think a bit too much like the destroyer skipper he'd been slated to become before he found himself transferred into the expanding LAC community. He was developing the proper "LAC jock" attitude, but he still had a few rough edges and he needed a bit more confidence.

Which was the reason he was the one running the squadrons through their paces while Tremaine and Chief Warrant Officer Sir Horace Harkness managed the training scenario.

Unlike the morning's two previous sessions, this was an all up exercise, with live hardware, not simply a simulation. The task force was currently transiting between two grav waves under impeller drive, which meant that ships without Warshawski sails—like LACs—could maneuver without being destroyed the instant they left their hanger bays. It also put a maximum limit on the time window for the exercise, since the hyper-capable ships would be entering the next grav wave in a tiny bit over three hours from now.

Now, as Tremaine watched, the battlecruiser squadron Admiral McKeon had detached from his screen to play the aggressor's role altered course to head directly towards the LACs which were obviously deploying to attack them. At the same time, the clear, clean icons which had represented them on PriFly's master plot disappeared into a mushy haze of jamming and decoys.

"Bet Commander Baker didn't much like that, Skipper," Harkness observed with a nasty grin, and Tremaine chuckled.

"I did warn him we'd arranged a few surprises," he pointed out.

"Yeah, but I bet he never figured you'd let Admiral Atwater's squadron turn Ghost Rider loose on him!"

"It's not my fault he wasn't around when Dame Alice did the same thing to us," Tremaine shot back. "And just because the Peeps don't have anything to match Ghost Rider doesn't mean the Andies haven't come up with something a lot closer to it than we'd like."

"No argument there, Skip," Harkness agreed in a much more serious tone. Although he was only a chief warrant officer, he was holding down a lieutenant commander's duty slot himself, as Werewolf's senior LAC flight engineer. That made him effectively the chief electronics technician and ordnance officer for the entire task force's carrier force. As such he had clearance for access to all of the official ONI briefings on the situation in Silesia, and to say he'd been less than impressed by their thoroughness would have been a masterpiece of understatement.

"Matter of fact," he went on after a moment, watching Baker's carefully orchestrated maneuver disintegrate into apparent mass confusion as he and his tac officers tried to compensate for the sudden loss of at least eighty-five percent of their sensor capabilities, "I picked up on something yesterday that I meant to mention to you, Sir."

"Like what?" Tremaine asked, never taking his eyes from the display's icons. The seeming confusion was settling down into a revised attack pattern with a speed and precision which surprised him pleasantly. It was obvious that the sudden increase in his targets' electronic warfare capabilities had come as a complete surprise to Baker, exactly as Tremaine had intended, but the commander hadn't panicked. He'd realized he still had time before he entered the battlecruisers' engagement envelope, and he was adopting a rather more defensive formation, with the missile-armed Ferrets moving up to screen the energy-heavy Shrikes with their own decoys and jammers. Obviously he'd reached the same conclusion Tremaine would have in his place; against such capable EW, he was going to have to get in close with the Shrikes' grasers rather than relying on a missile engagement, and the Ferrets' electronic warfare birds were his best chance to do that.

"I was reading through those reports Grayson Naval Intelligence copied to us," Harkness said, his own eyes watching approvingly as Baker adapted to the new parameters of his problem. "I know everyone knows the Graysons don't know squat compared to our own all-knowing intelligence pukes. But I gotta tell you, Skip, I didn't like what the GSN had to say about Andy 'tronics systems."

"What?" Tremaine turned to look at the CWO in surprise . . . and chagrin. "I must have missed that one, Chief."

"Well, there's a lot to wade through," Harkness told him. "And I have to admit the indexing system they used seems kinda skewed. This one was tucked away under an engineering head, not tactics, which is probably why I noticed it and you didn't."

"Thanks, but stop making excuses for me and tell me what it said," Tremaine commanded with a lopsided grin, and Harkness shrugged.

"Like everything else, it's all a matter of interpreting a mighty slim data sample, Skip. But the Graysons managed to 'acquire' access to a confidential report from the Confed Navy. Looks to me like they probably crossed a couple of palms with good old-fashioned dollars.

"Anyway, however they got it, it's a report from one of the Sillies' cruiser captains. Seems he happened along just as a 'privateer' the entire Confed Navy had been trying to catch up with for over six months sailed straight into an Andy ambush. This particular Confed skipper seems to me to've been a couple of cuts above the average for a Silly officer. He'd already IDed the pirate, and he was busy sneaking up on it, using his own stealth systems, when a pair of Andy destroyers and a heavy cruiser just 'suddenly appeared' and blew the raider into dust bunnies."

"'Suddenly appeared'?" Tremaine repeated, and Harkness nodded.

"His exact words, Skip. Now, I know the Sillies' sensors aren't worth a hell of a lot, and I know their sensor techs aren't usually up to our standards, or even the Peeps'. But from his report, this bird runs a mighty taut ship for a Silesian, and he was real careful to emphasize that none of his people got so much as a sniff of the Andies until all three dropped their stealth and opened fire."

"What was the range?" Tremaine asked intently.

"That's what bothered me the most," Harkness admitted. "It looked to the guy writing the report like the pirates never saw the Andies at all, but those bastards tend to be even slacker than most Confed navy crews, so that don't necessarily prove a thing. But the Silly cruiser was only about four light-minutes from the nearest Andy ship when she opened fire, and she hadn't seen a damned thing, either."

"Four light-minutes, huh?" Tremaine chewed his lower lip unhappily for a moment. "I can see why you didn't much care for that one, Chief," he said after a moment. "Go ahead and copy the same reports to my mail queue, would you?"

"No problem, Skip."

"I'll probably need to flag it to be sure the Old Lady and Admiral McKeon and Admiral Truman get a copy of it, too. If they've improved their EW as much as your cruiser captain seems to be suggesting . . ."

"Absolutely, Skip," Harkness agreed, and nodded at the display, where Commander Baker had gotten his revamped attack formation organized and was closing in on his prey. "Might just turn out that having our boys and girls working out against first-string EW is an even better damned idea then you thought," he said quietly.

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