Weber David. Echoes Of Honor

   "But if he pulls this off, we'll slather him with all the praise and positive publicity a man could want. That should help repair any past damage."
   "Maybe, and maybe not. But be that as it may, it's a chance I'm willing to take, especially with Pritchart keeping an eye on him. Actually, I'm more worried about Tourville than I am about Giscard."
   "Tourville?" Pierre sat back in his chair and tried very hard not to sigh.
   "Tourville," Saint-Just confirmed. "You and I both know Cordelia planned to have him purged when she got him back to Haven—probably for trying to protect Harrington from her."
   "We know we think she wanted him purged," Pierre corrected, and Saint-Just snorted a laugh.
   "Rob, let's be honest with each other here. I mean, Cordelia's gone—and a damned good thing, too—so we don't have to stroke her anymore. And you and I know better than anyone else that she took a personal pleasure out of eliminating anyone she thought was an enemy."
   "Yes. Yes, she did." Pierre sighed. And, he reflected, that was the big difference between her and you, wasn't it, Oscar? You're ruthless as hell, and completely willing to eliminate anyone you think is even a potential threat. I imagine you sleep a hell of a lot better than I do, too... but you don't actually enjoy the killing, do you?
   "Damn right she did," Saint-Just said, unaware of the Chairman's thoughts. "The only reason she would have dragged him all the way to Cerberus and then back here with her was to make a big, ugly, public show trial out of it, and you can bet your ass he knew it, too. That's the real reason I sat on him and his crew for so long."
   "I know that," Pierre said with a trace of patience he couldn't quite hide.
   "No, you don't." It was unusual for Saint-Just to correct him quite so flatly, and Pierre frowned. "I know I told you that I wanted him on ice until we publicly admitted Cordelia's death, but you thought my real reason was that I was being paranoid and trying to decide whether or not to have him eliminated, now didn't you?" the StateSec head asked.
   "Well... yes, I suppose I did," Pierre admitted.
   "Well, you were mostly right, but not entirely. Oh, it really was essential to keep his crew isolated until our version of Cordelia's glorious death hit the 'faxes, but neither of us anticipated initially how long that was going to take." He shook his head. "I never would have believed how useful she could be when we could use her reputation and status with the Mob but not have to put up with her tantrums!"
   Saint-Just actually chuckled for a moment, then shook his head.
   "But even though I know keeping him under virtual ship arrest has to have pissed him off even more than he was, I've never wanted to eliminate him, Rob; I've simply been afraid we had no choice. I realize what a tactical asset he is for the Navy, and I'd hate the thought of simply throwing that away when we need it so badly. But in a way, I regard him as a bigger danger than McQueen."
   "You do?" Pierre's forehead furrowed in surprise.
   "Yes. I've read his dossier and his commissioner's reports, and I've interviewed him myself at least a dozen times since Cerberus. There's a brain behind that cowboy exterior, Rob. He tries like hell to hide it, and he's been surprisingly successful with a lot of people, but he's sharp as a vibro blade. And Citizen Admiral Cowboy doesn't have a reputation for ambition like McQueen's. If he decides that his best long-term chance for survival lies in building some sort of cabal out of self-defense, his fellow officers are going to be a lot less wary of getting involved with him.
   "So what do I see when I look at him? A man who, right this minute, is being grateful as hell that he dodged a pulser dart while deep inside he has to be wondering if he really did... or if he just thinks he did. He's been under a microscope for nine T-months, and he's got to know that we know that he knows Cordelia was going to have him killed. That means he also knows that we're going to be watching him very, very carefully, even if we have decided to release his flagship and staff for the moment. If he steps out of line again, we'll have no choice but to eliminate him, and he knows that, too. All of which means that he has to have at least considered the possibility of joining up with someone like a McQueen out of sheer self-defense. Or setting up a cabal of his own."
   Pierre sat there for a moment, gazing at his security chief with a contemplative expression, then shook his head.
   "I'm glad I have you to run StateSec, Oscar. I'd start foaming at the mouth if I had to spend much time concentrating on that kind of triple-think. Are you honestly telling me that you think Lester Tourville is going to take his task force over to the Manties or something like that?"
   "Of course not," Saint-Just said with another of those unusual chuckles. "But it's my job, as you just pointed out, to think about the possibilities and then try to disaster-proof our position against them as much as possible. The odds are that Tourville is actually another Theisman. More extroverted and, um, colorful, but essentially nonpolitical and more concerned with getting the job done than he is with personal power. Mind you, I suspect he's even less fond of the Committee right now than I think Theisman is, and, frankly, with better reason. I'll want to keep a close eye on both of them, but we need them both against the Manties, and I know it."
   "Well that's a relief!" Pierre said.
   "I'm sure," Saint-Just agreed, but then he leaned back and gave the Chairman another sharp glance. "And now that I've aired my concerns about that, I want to ask you one more time if you're determined to carry through with the devaluation and the BLS cuts."
   "I am," Pierre said flatly. Saint-Just started to open his mouth, but the Chairman went on before he could. "I realize it's a risk, but we've got to put our economic house into some kind of order. That's every bit as important as straightening out the purely military side of the war—and, damn it, it's the reason I went after this stinking job in the first place!"
   Saint-Just blinked at the sudden passion in Pierre's voice. The SS chief knew, probably better than anyone else in the universe, how the inability to deal with the PRH's economic woes had eaten at Rob Pierre. And truth to tell, it was the probability of a Republic-wide financial collapse which had brought Saint-Just over to Pierre's side in the first place. As Oscar Saint-Just saw it, his real job was to preserve the power and stability of the state, as the source of authority which held the People's Republic together. In sober fact, he cared less about who exercised that authority than that it be exercised well, and the Legislaturalists had failed that critical test.
   Yet Pierre's determination to tackle the economy now worried him. Too many things would be happening at once, creating too many potential flare-ups of the spontaneous combustion variety. And that was the hardest kind of trouble for a security officer to prepare against, because by the very nature of things, he seldom saw it coming before the flames actually burst out.
   "I realize we have to deal with the fundamental problems eventually," he said now, his tone ever so slightly cautious. "I just have to wonder if this is the best time. We're already engaged in one experiment with McQueen and the War Office, after all."
   "McQueen is what's made this the best time," Pierre replied sharply. "When she took out the Levelers for us, she eliminated by far the most radical element of the Mob." And, he added mentally, you and I used the coup attempt as our pretext to remove some of the more troublesome "moderates" just in case, didn't we, Oscar? "In the process, she taught the other potential radicals what happens to people who try to overthrow the Committee. And she made it quite clear in the public mind that the military supports us." He smiled thinly. "Even if she's actually trying to build her own power base, the Mob doesn't know that, so it has to assume that if we tell her to go out and kill another million or so of them, she will. Not only that, but the moderate elements of Nouveau Paris' population have had a lesson in what a real insurrection costs everyone in the vicinity, even the innocent bystanders. They don't want to see another one, and the radicals sure as hell don't want 'Admiral Cluster Bomb' dropping by to pay them another visit. So if we're going to introduce a policy which risks public repercussions, this is the best possible time for us to do it."
   "I understand the reasoning, and I don't question the need to do something" Saint-Just said. "The timing does worry me, but that would probably be true whenever we decided to implement reforms. I guess part of it is the notion of deflating the currency and cutting the BLS simultaneously."
   "Better to put all the medicine down them in one nasty-tasting dose than to string it out," Pierre disagreed. "Inflation was bad enough under the old regime; it's gotten even worse in the last few years, and it's hurting what foreign trade we've been able to maintain in Silesia and with the Sollies. As I see it, we have two options: we can go whole hog and completely nationalize the economy on the old prespace totalitarian model, or we can begin gradually phasing a true free market back in, but this half-assed socialism-by-regulation is killing us."
   "No argument there," Saint-Just agreed when he paused.
   "Well, I think we've pretty much demonstrated that the bureaucrats are almost as bad at running the economy under us as they were under the Legislaturalists," Pierre pointed out. "Given their dismal track record, I'm not particularly enamored of the idea of giving them still more control. Which only leaves the free market route, and for that to work we've got to have a stable currency—with at least a passing relationship to its real purchasing power—and a work force motivated to get out there and actually work. Most of the out-planets are in better shape for that than Haven is—they never had the percentage of Dolists we had here to begin with—and even the Nouveau Paris Mob has been reacquiring the habit of work since the war started. If we deflate the currency and reduce the BLS, we'll drag more of them into the non-military labor force, as well. And, as I say, this is probably the best time to make the attempt. I know it's risky. I simply don't see how we can avoid this particular risk."
   "All right." Saint-Just sighed. "You're right. It's just that knowing how much of it is going to land on my plate if it goes sour makes me... anxious. We're playing with several different kinds of fire here, Rob. I only hope I've got enough firemen to deal with things if they get out of hand."
   "I realize how much I'm dumping on you," Pierre acknowledged, "and I wish I saw a way to avoid it. Unfortunately, I don't. But the good news is that my analysts' projections suggest that if we get through the next twelve to eighteen T-months more or less intact, we'll actually have turned the corner on the reforms. So if McQueen can just generate some good news on the military front, on the one hand, while the threat of turning her pinnaces loose on the Mob again helps scare the remaining radicals into good behavior and you keep an eye on everyone else, we may actually pull this off."
   "And if we don't?" Saint-Just asked very quietly.
   "If we don't, then we'll lose the war in the end, anyway," Pierre said just as quietly, his eyes suddenly distant, as if he looked at something Saint-Just couldn't see, "and that will probably be the end of you, me, and the Committee. But you know, Oscar, that might not be such a tragedy. And it certainly wouldn't be undeserved, now would it? Because if we can't manage reform that's even this basic, then we'll have failed ourselves and the Republic. Everything we've done—and all the people we've killed—since the Coup will have been for nothing. And if it was all for nothing, Oscar, then we'll deserve whatever happens to us."
   Saint-Just stared at the Chairman while an icy splash of shock went through him. He'd seen Pierre grow more and more brooding as the war dragged on, but this was the first time he'd ever heard him say something like that. Yet the shock wasn't as great as it should have been, he realized. Perhaps a part of him had seen this coming all along. And it wasn't as if he had a lot of choice, even if he hadn't seen it. For better or for worse, he had given his loyalty to Rob Pierre. Not the institutional loyalty he had sworn to the Legislaturalists and then betrayed, but his personal fealty. Pierre was his chieftain, because only Pierre had possessed the vision and the guts to try to save the Republic.
   It was time to remember that, Saint-Just told himself. Time to remember how mad most people would have thought Pierre before the Coup, how impossible it had seemed that they could come this far. If anyone in the galaxy could pull the rest of it off, then Rob Pierre was that man. And if he couldn't...
   Oscar Saint-Just decided not to think about that, and nodded to the man behind the desk.
   "If it's all the same to you, Rob, I'll just try to keep anything like that from happening," he said dryly.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

   "Signal from Salamis, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Lieutenant Frasier announced. "You and Citizen Commissioner Honeker are to report aboard her in twenty-five minutes. Citizen Admiral Giscard requests that you bring your chief of staff and operations officer, as well."
   "Thank you, Harrison." Citizen Vice Admiral Lester Tourville glanced at Everard Honeker, then reached inside his tunic to pull a cigar from his breast pocket. The wrapper crackled as he stripped it away, and he looked back at Frasier. "Pass the word to Citizen Captain Hewitt that Citizen Commissioner Honeker and I will be leaving the ship, please. Then inform my coxswain that I'll need my pinnace."
   "Aye, Citizen Admiral." Frasier began speaking into his hush mike, and Tourville moved his eyes to the chief of the watch.
   "Citizen Chief Hunley, please be good enough to pass the word for Citizen Captain Bogdanovich and Citizen Commander Foraker to join Citizen Commissioner Honeker and myself in Boat Bay Two at their earliest possible convenience."
   "Aye, Citizen Admiral."
   Tourville nodded dismissal to the petty officer, then took a moment to insert the cigar into his mouth, light it, and be certain it was drawing properly. He removed it to blow a perfect smoke ring at a ventilator air return, gave his fierce mustache a rub, and glanced back at Honeker.
   "Are you ready, Citizen Commissioner?" he asked politely.
   "I suppose so," Honeker replied, and the two of them walked towards PNS Count Tilly's, bridge lift side by side, trailing a banner of fragrant smoke.
   Tourville allowed Honeker to precede him into the lift, then punched the destination code and stood back against one bulkhead, drumming thoughtfully on his thigh with the fingers of his right hand.
   "I really wish you'd waited to light that thing until I was somewhere else," Honeker remarked after a moment, and Tourville grinned. The people's commissioner had been on his case about the cigars from the moment he first came aboard Tourville's last flagship. It had become something of a joke between them, a sort of game they played, but only when no one was watching. It would hardly have done to let the rest of the galaxy suspect that an admiral and a commissioner had actually become friends of a sort, after all. And especially not at any point in the last nine T-months or so.
   "I thought I'd just enjoy it on the way to the pinnace," Tourville told him cheerfully. In fact, he suspected Honeker had realized he rather regretted adopting the damned things as a part of his image. Modern medicine might have virtually stamped out the various ills to which tobacco had once contributed, but it hadn't made nicotine any less addictive, and the ash flecks on his uniform were more than mildly annoying.
   "I'm sure," Honeker snorted, and Tourville's grin softened with an edge of genuine affection he would have been very careful not to let anyone else see. Particularly not now. People who'd survived the head-on collision of two air cars didn't light matches to discover whether or not their hydrogen tanks were leaking.
   He snorted to himself at the thought. Actually, checking for hydrogen leaks with a match would probably have been considerably safer than what he'd actually done, and he still couldn't quite believe he'd tried it—much less survived the attempt! Defying a member of the Committee of Public Safety for any reason was unlikely to leave a man breathing. Unless, of course, the Committee member in question suffered a fatal accident before she could arrange for him to do the same.
   Despite himself, Tourville felt tiny pinpricks of sweat along his hairline as he remembered the way Cordelia Ransom had provoked him. The crazy bitch had actually wanted him to challenge her authority. He hadn't realized, then, just how much she hated and feared the Navy, but he'd come to realize that she'd wanted him to do something—anything—she could use as a reason to have him eliminated. It wasn't so much because of who he was as because of what he was... and because his effort to treat his enemies as human beings rather than vermin to be exterminated had convinced her he could not be trusted.
   Well, she'd succeeded in provoking him, but he was still around... and she wasn't. Her death hadn't been his doing, but he'd declined to shed any crocodile tears during his interminable "interviews" with StateSec. That would have been as stupid as it would have been insincere, and it would also have been dangerous. So far as he could tell, she'd never passed her specific plans for him on to anyone else, but people like Oscar Saint-Just had to have realized she hadn't ordered him to accompany her ship to Hades and then back to Haven just so she could give him a big, sloppy kiss. And since they had to know that, they would have recognized the falsity of any regret on his part. Worse, they might have wondered if he were displaying regret in an effort to keep them from wondering if perhaps he'd had a little something to do with her demise.
   Fortunately, there was plenty of evidence to support his innocence. In fact, he had insisted—with Honeker's strong support—on having a senior member of Hades' SS garrison return to Haven with him as a witness. Citizen Warden Tresca hadn't been happy about that, but he'd known better than to argue, particularly when he himself had downplayed Tourville's initial warnings that something must have gone very wrong aboard PNS Tepes. Tresca was going to be in sufficient hot water of his own; SS brigadier or not, he didn't need to borrow trouble by refusing the orders of a senior people's commissioner or looking like he was trying to obstruct the investigation.
   And so Tourville and Honeker had arrived at Haven with Citizen Major Garfield in tow. Garfield had brought along Camp Charon's scanner data on the entire episode, as well as a recording of the com traffic between Count Tilly and Charon that clearly demonstrated Tourville had been the first to sound the alarm and had done everything in his power to prevent the tragedy. In fact, Tourville and his people had come out looking considerably better than State Security had, and Everard Honeker's reports to Oscar Saint-Just had stressed their exemplary attention to duty.
   I wonder if that was part of the reason they held us incommunicado for so long? Tourville mused now. StateSec belongs to Saint-Just, after all, and it was his personal fiefdom we made look like asshole idiots. He snorted. Great, Lester! Now you've come up with another reason for the head of State Security, personally, to loathe your ass. Good going.
   Of course, Saint-Just didn't know the full story. Not even Honeker did, for only Tourville and Shannon Foraker had seen the recon drone data Tourville had erased. Camp Charon's sensors had been blinded by EMP at the time, which meant no one else could know what had happened, and Tourville had no intention of ever admitting what he'd seen. But that was one reason he'd insisted so adamantly on bringing along a StateSec witness to explain exactly what had happened... and why he'd started sweating bullets after the first five or six months of Count Tilly's confinement to her parking orbit.
   Sooner or later they're going to realize Lady Harrington—or some of her people, at least—got out alive. That could have been decidedly dicey if it happened while they still had us all under ship arrest... and safely incommunicado. But now, it's going to be StateSec's problem when it dawns on them, not mine. And my people and I aren't going to be anywhere they can quietly disappear us, either, he thought with a certain complacency. In fact, he was rather looking forward to watching the SS punish one of its own for such gross negligence, although if the truth were known, he'd really rather that they never caught up with the Manties at all.
   And if they do, they'll almost have to kill all of them this time, he thought much less cheerfully. After officially "executing" Lady Harrington just to avoid admitting what really happened, there's no way they'd let any witnesses that inconvenient live.
   He regretted that, but he'd done all he could for them. His conscience was as clear as anyone's could be in today's PRH, and he tucked those thoughts and memories away in a safe place while he considered his present situation.
   He supposed some people would consider his promotion to vice admiral a fitting reward for winning the PRH's most crushing victory of the war. Personally, Tourville suspected it was more of a bribe— a tacit payoff for having kept him on ice for so long—and he would much rather have remained a rear admiral. Vice admirals were too senior, too likely to catch the blame if things went wrong for the forces under their command, and for the last eight or nine years, officers who caught that sort of blame had also tended to catch firing squads. That was why he'd devoted so much effort to avoiding promotion, but it had caught up with him at last, and there was nothing he could do about it.
   Still, he reflected as the lift reached the boat bay and its doors slid silently open, with Esther McQueen as Secretary of War, the Committee's promise to halt the practice of shooting losing admirals might actually be worth believing. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was Esther McQueen who had chosen Tourville for his current assignment and personally bitched loudly enough at Oscar Saint-Just to get Tourville and Count Tilly sprung for the operation. So if she turned out to be up to something ambitious, the fact that he hardly even knew the woman would mean absolutely nothing to StateSec. Whether he liked it or not, he had just been publicly identified as a member of "her" faction... which might just turn his release from ship arrest into a case of out of the frying pan.
   Another set of lift doors opened, revealing his broad-shouldered chief of staff and his ops officer. Citizen Captain Bogdanovich nodded to Tourville and Honeker with something very like a normal smile, but Shannon Foraker's long, narrow face wore no expression whatsoever. Under normal circumstances, Foraker was rather attractive, in an understated sort of way, but now her features were an icily controlled mask, and Tourville felt a fresh stab of worry. Something inside Foraker had changed after Honor Harrington's capture, and especially during their long confinement, and he was no longer certain what was going on inside her head. She was the only other person who knew any of the Manties had escaped Tepes' destruction, and he was confident she would do nothing to jeopardize that secret, but her entire personality seemed to have shifted. She was no longer the cheerful, quintessential techno-nerd, all but oblivious to the interpersonal relationships about her or the political tides sweeping through the Navy. Now she watched everything that happened around her, choosing her words as carefully as she had ever laid out an operations plan and never, ever forgetting the proper modes of address.
   For anyone who knew Foraker, that last was far worse than merely ominous. It meant the first-class brain which had made her so dangerous to the Manties was now considering other threats and options... other enemies.
   It was unlikely a mere citizen commander could pose much threat to the Committee of Public Safety, but Shannon Foraker was no ordinary citizen commander. If she decided to do something about the way Cordelia Ransom and StateSec had treated Honor Harrington, the consequences were almost certain to be drastic. It was unlikely she herself would survive, but it was equally unlikely she would go down without inflicting some extreme damage of her own. Intellectually speaking, Lester Tourville no longer had any problem with any damage anyone managed to inflict on StateSec and the Committee. In fact, the more damage someone could do, the better. What he would object to would be the loss of Shannon Foraker, who was worth any hundred Committee members he could think of right off hand. And, of course, to the probability that other people in her vicinity—like one Lester Tourville, for example—would go down with her.
   All things considered, he mused as he tossed his cigar down a waste disposal slot and led the way towards the pinnace personnel tube, this assignment looks like being a lot more... interesting than I'd really prefer. Ah, well. It beats the alternative, I suppose.

* * *

   Tourville sat gazing out the armorplast port as the pinnace maneuvered towards rendezvous with Salamis. The view was certainly impressive, he admitted. He hadn't seen this much tonnage in one spot since before the war began. In fact, he wasn't certain he'd ever actually seen this heavy a weight of metal.
   It was unusual for someone to actually be able to see more than a handful of warships simultaneously with the naked eye. Men-of-war were big, especially ships of the wall, with impeller wedges whose width was measured in hundreds of kilometers. That imposed a certain dispersal upon them underway, and they tended to stay far enough apart to clear their impeller perimeters even in parking orbit. If they didn't, then they had to maneuver clear of one another on reaction thrusters before they could bring their wedges up, and that was costly in terms of both reaction mass and time.
   In point of fact, the ships he was seeing now were probably sufficiently dispersed to light off their drives; there were simply so many of them that it didn't look that way. The feeble light of the M2 star known as Secour-C reflected from their white hulls as the units of Twelfth Fleet drifted in orbit around a gas giant almost as massive as its star. A dark haze of upper atmosphere ice crystals provided a bleak, dim background for the assembled fleet, and it looked from here as if he could have walked around the planet by stepping from ship to ship.
   Thirty-six super dreadnoughts, sixteen dreadnoughts, eighty-one battleships, twenty-four battlecruisers, and forty heavy cruisers, he thought wonderingly, and no one even knows they're here.
   That was hard to wrap his mind around, even for a spacer as experienced as Tourville, for Secour was an inhabited system. Of course, everyone in it lived on or near Marienbad, the habitable planet which orbited Secour-A, the F9 star which was the trinary system's primary component. Secour-B was home to a small industrial presence, but Secour-C never approached to within less than thirty-six light-hours of Secour-A even at periastron, and there was nothing of sufficient value to bring anyone here. Which made it a logical place to assemble Javier Giscard's force without anyone's seeing a thing.
   And McQueen's done Giscard proud, he mused. The screen's light— only twenty-three destroyers and light cruisers, all told—but that's still over eight hundred million tons, and that doesn't even count the supply ships and tenders. Pile it all up in one heap, and it's got to come to more than a billion tons. In sheer tonnage terms, this has got to be the Navy's biggest concentration in fifteen or twenty years.
   He wondered—again—how McQueen had possibly talked her political masters into letting her assemble a force like this. It had needed doing for years, but she had to have stripped the majority of the PRH's rear area systems to the bone to scare up this much firepower. Even with the new construction beginning to come forward, she had concentrated ten percent of the PN's super-dreadnoughts, fifty percent of its new-build dreadnoughts, and over a third of its surviving battleships into a single fleet. And in doing so, she had created a potentially decisive offensive weapon for the first time since the Third Battle of Yeltsin.
   And she'd damned well better produce something with it. If she doesn't—or if this ends up like another Fourth Yeltsin—after Pierre let her take the risk of reducing rear area security, her head is certain to roll. And ours, of course... although in our case the Manties will probably make that a moot point if we screw up.
   He grinned at the thought, despite his tension. Perhaps there was a little more truth to his hard-charging public persona than he cared to admit, because damned if the challenge of helping to wield this much fighting power didn't appeal to him whatever the possible consequences.

* * *

   Javier Giscard looked up as Citizen Vice Admiral Tourville, Everard Honeker, and Tourville's chief of staff and ops officer entered the briefing room. He saw Tourville's dark eyes narrow as he noted the ice water carafes, glasses, coffee cups, and other paraphernalia of a formal staff meeting and hid a mental smile.
   "Please be seated," he invited his guests, and waited until they had taken the indicated chairs. Then he glanced at Pritchart, seated in the chair beside him, before he returned his attention to Tourville.
   "As I'm sure you've just realized, Citizen Admiral, we will shortly be joined by the Fleet's other squadron and division commanders. At that time, Citizen Captain Joubert and Citizen Commander Macintosh will present our general ops plan to all concerned. However, Citizen Commissioner Pritchart and I wanted to speak to you and your senior officers first, since your role in the coming campaign will be particularly critical."
   Giscard paused, head cocked slightly to one side, and Tourville fought an urge to squirm in his seat. He glanced at Pritchart, but her face was almost as expressionless as Foraker's, and he repressed a shudder. He'd heard stories about Pritchart. She was supposed to have ice water in her veins and a zealot's devotion to the Committee, and he was devoutly grateful that she wasn't his people's commissioner. Honeker had become even more human in the last endless months, but even at his worst he'd never radiated the sort of blank-faced menace which seemed to stream off of Pritchart like winter fog.
   "I see," the citizen vice admiral said at last, before the silence could stretch out too far, and Giscard smiled thinly.
   "I'm sure you do, Citizen Admiral," he said, with what might have been just an edge of gentle mockery, and then a star chart blinked into existence as he entered a command into his terminal.
   "Twelfth Fleet's operational area," he said simply, and Tourville felt Bogdanovich stiffen at his side. Honeker wasn't sufficiently familiar with star charts to realize what he was seeing quite as quickly as the chief of staff, but Shannon Foraker sat upright in her chair, blue eyes narrowing with the first sign of interest she'd shown.
   Tourville could understand that. Indeed, he felt his fingers twitch with the desire to reach for another cigar as his own eyes studied the glowing chips of light and read the names beside them. Seaforth Nine, Hancock, Zanzibar and Alizon, Suchien, Yalta, and Nuada. He knew them all... just as he recognized the bright scarlet icon of the Basilisk System.

Chapter Thirty

   The lift doors opened, and Citizen Captain Joanne Hall—known to friends and family as "Froggie" for reasons which remained a deep, dark secret from the officers and crew of PNS Schaumberg —strode briskly through them.
   "The Citizen Captain is on the bridge!" a petty officer announced, and Citizen Commander Oliver Diamato, who had the watch, looked up, then rose quickly. Hall gave him a level look, and he swallowed a mental curse. He should have seen her coming, or at least heard the lift door, before the citizen petty officer announced her presence, and he felt quite certain she would find some way to make that point to him in the very near future. She had a habit of doing things like that.
   "Good morning, Citizen Commander." Citizen Captain Hall's dark hair and dark complexion were the exact antithesis of Diamato's golden hair and fair complexion, and her dark eyes gazed levelly into his blue ones. Her coloration was perfectly suited to the severe persona she presented to the universe... and somehow the "citizen" hung on the front of Diamato's rank title seemed an afterthought the way she said it.
   "Good morning, Citizen Captain!" he replied. "I apologize for not noticing your arrival," he went on, taking the bull firmly by the horns. "I was reviewing the chips of yesterday's sims, and I got more immersed in them than I should have."
   "Um." She regarded him thoughtfully for several long seconds, then shrugged ever so slightly. "God hasn't gotten around to issuing eyes for the backs of our heads yet, Citizen Commander. Bearing that in mind, I suppose there's no harm done... this time."
   "Thank you, Citizen Captain. I'll try not to let it happen again," Diamato replied, and wondered if he was the only person on the bridge who found the entire exchange rather antique and unnatural. Not that he expected to hear anyone else say so, even if they did.
   Citizen Captain Hall sometimes seemed not to have heard that the old elitist officer corps and its traditions had been overtaken by events, and she was a stickler for what she referred to as "proper military discipline." Then-Citizen Lieutenant Commander Diamato had been less than delighted when he first discovered that fact upon his assignment to Schaumberg as the battleship's brand-new assistant tactical officer eleven T-months before. A product of the post-Coup promotions, he had risen from junior-grade lieutenant under the old regime to his present rank in barely eight T-years under the New Order. Much of that was the result of raw ability—he was one of the better tactical officers the PN had produced during the present war—but his political commitment had also been a major reason for his meteoric elevation. The Navy's insidious rot under the Legislaturalist officer corps' iron defense of privilege had inspired him with all the contempt for the old elitist order that any good people's commissioner could have desired, and he had been deeply suspicious of someone as old-fashioned (and probably reactionary) as Citizen Captain Hall.
   He had expected Citizen Commissioner Addison to share his reservations about his CO. The slender, sandy-blond people's commissioner was absolutely committed to the New Order, after all. Diamato only had to attend a single one of Addison's regular political awareness sessions to realize that, and his fierce egalitarianism ought to have made him and Hall natural enemies. Yet the commissioner had actually supported her, and as Diamato had watched her in action, her sheer competence had overcome even his doubts.
   Yes, she was old-fashioned, and he very much doubted she had the proper political opinions. But in large part, that seemed to stem from the fact that she didn't have any political opinions. She did her job exactly as she had under the old regime—far better than most—and let her political superiors worry about policy.
   It still struck Diamato as unnatural, but seven months ago she had demonstrated just how well doing things her way worked. Old Citizen Commander Young had been Schaumberg's tactical officer at the time, and Young was the sort of officer who forced Diamato to admit that even the New Order had its weak points. Young's political fervor and patrons had gotten him assigned to a position his ability (or lack of it) could never have earned, and Hall and Addison hadn't managed to get rid of him. Which was why the Citizen Captain had taken personal command of the ship and proceeded to give Citizen Lieutenant Commander Diamato a rather humbling lesson in just how good he himself truly was.
   Everyone knew battleships couldn't fight proper ships of the wall and that battlecruisers were even more outclassed by battleships than battleships were by superdreadnoughts. Fortunately, ships of the wall usually couldn't catch battleships, and battleships usually couldn't catch battlecruisers. Unfortunately for the Royal Manticoran Navy, that rule didn't always hold true. It especially didn't hold true when the battleship's captain had the nerve to take her own impellers off-line and just sit there like a hole in space until the Manties were actually in extreme missile range. Hall had that kind of nerve, and less than a month after Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville blew out the Adler System picket, she had neatly ambushed a trio of raiding Manty battlecruisers. They hadn't had the remotest suspicion she was even there until they'd built vectors which gave them no choice, even with their superior acceleration rates, but to come into her engagement range.
   RMN battlecruisers were tough customers, especially given the superiority of the Star Kingdom's EW and missiles. Many Republican officers would have hesitated to engage three of them at once, even if she did out-mass them by almost two-to-one. That, in fact, had been Citizen Commander Young's earnest recommendation. Hall hadn't taken it, however... and she'd blown two of her enemies right out of space. The third had gotten away, but with enough damage to keep her out of action for months, whereas Schaumberg's repairs had required only five weeks of yard time. It had been a small-scale action, but it had also been a very difficult assignment, and Diamato had been on the bridge when it all went down. Despite the Manties' numerical advantage—not to mention the two destroyers screening them—Hall had made it seem almost routine. The only people who'd appeared more confident than her of her ability to handle it had been her bridge crew (aside from Young), and as Diamato watched their crisp efficiency, he had realized something he'd never quite grasped before.
   A military organization was not the best laboratory for working out the proper forms of egalitarian social theory. The defense of a society which enshrined economic and political equality had to be undertaken by an authoritarian hierarchy with the clear, sharply defined sort of chain of command that put a single person ultimately in control, for combat operations were not a task which could be discharged by committee. The fact that, even after she won the battle by doing the exact opposite of what Young had recommended, it had still taken her and Addison another seven months to overcome the old tac officer's political influence in order to get rid of him had only made that even more obvious to Diamato.
   That thought had caused him a few anxious moments when he reflected upon the existence of the Committee of Public Safety, but he'd soon realized that it was a false comparison. Military operations were a specialized and limited sphere of human activity. The larger macrocosm of the entire People's Republic required a different approach, and the combination of centralized power and multiple viewpoints represented by the Committee of Public Safety was undoubtedly the best possible compromise.
   But Citizen Captain Hall's firm, demanding command style certainly had its place in the military. That, Diamato had come to realize, was the reason Addison supported her to the hilt. The people's commissioner didn't actually seem to like her very much, but he respected her, and the record of Schaumberg's accomplishments under her command was the reason Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet had chosen the battleship as Task Force 12.3's flagship.
   "Don't beat your apology to death, Citizen Commander," Citizen Captain Hall said now, with a slight smile that took most of the sting from the words. "You are my tac officer. I suppose it's not totally unreasonable for you to spend some time reviewing tactical problems... even when you have the watch."
   She stepped past him and seated herself in the command chair, and Diamato folded his hands behind his back while she ran her eyes over the readouts to catch herself up on the state of her command.
   "Did Engineering find out what was causing that harmonic in Beta Thirty?"
   "No, Citizen Captain." Diamato was glad he'd checked the status of the after impeller room with Citizen Lieutenant Commander Hopkins less than fifteen minutes ago. Letting the Citizen Captain catch one less than fully informed was a seriously unpleasant experience, and Citizen Commissioner Addison wouldn't do a thing to preserve one from the consequences. In fact, Diamato thought, he usually gets behind her and pushes when she comes down on someone.
   "Um," she repeated. Then she leaned over and tapped a command code into the touchpad on her chair's arm. Her tactical repeater came on-line, and she frowned pensively at the data codes moving across the display. Diamato glanced inconspicuously over her shoulder and realized she was rerunning the same sim he'd been reviewing when she arrived. She let the one-on-one duel play through on a six-to-one time compression, then looked up so quickly she caught him watching her. He tensed for an explosion, but she only smiled.
   "I see why you were so intent on this, Citizen Commander," she told him, and waved him over to stand beside her chair, then restarted the sim again.
   "I hadn't realized at the time quite how neatly you pulled off this maneuver here," she went on, freezing the display, and Diamato nodded cautiously. He'd been rather proud of the shot himself. It wasn't one that was likely to prove practical in a fleet action, of course. Walls of battle didn't take kindly to units which suddenly pitched up perpendicular to their original vectors while simultaneously rotating on their long axes and turning through a radical skew turn. Doing that usually caused Bad Things to happen when impeller wedges collided, but the sim had been a single-ship duel, not a fleet action, and the unorthodox maneuver had given him an up-the-kilt shot at his simulated opponent that had inflicted extremely heavy damage.
   "The question," Hall went on, leaning back and crossing her legs while she regarded him with an almost whimsical smile, "is whether you saw it coming or simply reacted on instinct." Diamato felt his expression try to congeal, but she shook her head. "Either possibility still puts you well ahead of the normal performance curve, Citizen Commander. I simply want to know which it was for future reference. So which was it?"
   "I'm... not certain, Citizen Captain," he admitted after a moment. "It all came together without my consciously considering it, and I suppose you might call that instinct. But it wasn't all automatic. I... Well, I saw the pattern coming and recognized the possibility, so I had the whole thing sort of waiting in the back of my mind in case it actually happened, and—"
   He shrugged helplessly, and she chuckled.
   "So you do have the eye, Citizen Commander! I rather thought you might. Good. That's very good, Oliver." Diamato managed not to blink. He'd been her second officer for just under a T-month now and her tactical officer for over three, yet this was the first time she had ever used his first name. In fact, it was the first time she'd ever indicated she even knew what his first name was. Yet what truly astounded him was how good it felt to hear her use it with approval.
   She cocked her head, watching him as if she were waiting for something, and his mind raced as he wondered what the hell he was supposed to say now.
   "I'm glad you approve, Citizen Captain," he said finally.
   "Ah, but you may not be for long, Oliver," she told him with something which looked unaccountably like an actual grin. "You see, now that you've demonstrated that you have it, you and Citizen Commander Hamer and I are going to be spending at least four extra hours a day developing it." Her grin grew broader at his expression, and she reached out and patted him on the elbow. "I'll have the Citizen Exec whip up half a dozen new problems for you in Simulator Seven," she promised. "I'll be interested to see your solutions to them by your next watch."