"I'll admit I'll miss them," Lindsey acknowledged, "but it's not like I won't see a lot of them, is it? And your mother has Jenny, not to mention their tutors and their armsmen, to help keep an eye on them. Even a pair of seven-year-olds is going to find it difficult to wear all of them down."
"If Mother is sure about this, I'm certainly not going to argue!"
"And if you'd been foolish enough to do so, Hamish and I would have hit you smartly over the head and confined you somewhere until you came to your senses," Emily said tranquilly.
"Spencer wouldn't have let you," Honor retorted.
"Spencer," Miranda said, settling into an unoccupied chair, "would have helped them. And if he hadn't, I would have."
Farragut leapt up into her lap with a bleek of satisfied agreement, and Honor laughed.
"All right. All right! I surrender."
"Good," Emily said. Then she looked at Hamish. "Was the carnage at Admiralty House very extreme when Honor failed to arrive on schedule?"
"Not really." Hamish swallowed more beer and laughed. "I just got off the com with Tom Caparelli. From what he had to say, Elizabeth was completely in agreement with Honor. She hadn't realized how late Honor was running, and she said something about star chambers, oubliettes, bread and water, and headsmen for anyone who dragged Honor away from Katherine before tomorrow morning."
"Not just from Katherine, I hope," Emily said with a lurking smile, and Hamish chuckled.
"Probably not," he agreed. "Probably not."
"Welcome back aboard, Admiral," Captain Houellebecq said quietly as RHNS Guerriere's side party dismissed behind Lester Tourville.
"Thank you, Celestine."
Tourville met Houellebecq's blue eyes levelly as he shook her hand. He was well aware of the questions behind his flag captain's attentive expression, but he was less certain he had the answers to them all.
Uncertainty and shock were two emotions he was unaccustomed to feeling, but they summed up his own initial reaction to the Octagon briefing handily. He'd known Lovat had been an unmitigated disaster, and the personal loss of so many friends-including Javier Giscard and the entire company of Sovereign of Space-had hit home with excruciating force. But his worst nightmares had fallen short of the new weapons capabilities the Manties had revealed. The reports on those had brought back other nightmares, of the days when he and Javier had watched Operation Buttercup rumbling down upon them as they waited to defend the same star system where Javier had just died.
And then, hard on the heels of that shattering news, had come Tom Theisman's proposed operation. If nothing else, it showed an impressive audacity, even if it was based on the logic of desperation. Still, if Theisman's assumptions about the availability of the new weapons was valid-and Op Research's conclusions matched those of the Secretary of War on that head-then this all or nothing throw of the dice might just work.
Of course, it might not, too. And although he'd regained his mental balance, questions about the proposed operation's mechanics and basic assumptions were still rattling around inside his own brain.
"Molly," Houellebecq said, reaching out to shake Captain DeLaney's hand in turn. "I see you managed to get the Admiral back home again, after all."
"It wasn't easy to drag him away from Nouveau Paris' nightlife," DeLaney replied, with a smile which looked almost natural, and Houellebecq returned it before switching her attention back to Tourville.
"Everyone's waiting in the briefing room, as you requested, Admiral."
"In that case," Tourville said heartily, "let's get down to it."
"Of course, Sir. After you." Houellebecq stepped back half a pace and waved one hand at the lifts.
"Be seated," Tourville said briskly before the assembled staffers and flag officers could climb more than halfway to their feet. They settled back obediently, and he strode to his own place at the head of the table. He seated himself, followed by Houellebecq and DeLaney, and gazed out over their assembled faces.
"Our next meeting is going to be just a bit larger than this one," he said after a moment. "We're going to be rather substantially reinforced over the next week or so."
"Reinforced, Sir?" Rear Admiral Janice Scarlotti asked.
Scarlotti was a short, sturdy, no-nonsense brunette, and Tourville felt the corners of his eyes crinkle in a smile. She'd obviously heard the same rumors as everyone else. Unlike his other officers, however, she'd never heard of tact, and she'd plainly been waiting to pounce.
"Yes, Janice," he said patiently. "Reinforced. As in additional ships assigned to our order of battle."
"I gathered that, Sir," Scarlotti replied, apparently completely oblivious to his irony. Personally, Tourville suspected she was fullyy aware of it. She was much too smart and competent to be as totally socially clueless as she chose to appear. Of course, there had been the old Shannon Foraker....
"What I was wondering," Scarlotti continued, "is exactly what sort of reinforcements we're going to receive?"
"According to the Octagon's latest numbers, we're going to be reinforced to a total strength of something over three hundred of the wall," Tourville said calmly.
More than one of the officers around the table sat back in his or her chair as the number hit them squarely between the eyes. Even Scarlotti blinked, and Tourville smiled thinly.
"I'm well aware of the sorts of rumors which have been circulating around the fleet," he said. "Some of them have been so wild as to be outright ridiculous. For example, the one that says we're going to launch a direct attack on the Manticoran home system in response to Lovat. The very idea is preposterous."
Several people nodded, and he smiled toothily under his brushy mustache as saw relief in a few of the expressions.
"I was completely confident of that when Admiral Theisman invited Captain DeLaney and me down to the Octagon to brief us on something called Operation Beatrice, of course," he continued. "It was a very interesting conversation. He and Admiral Marquette and Admiral Trenis laid Beatrice out with remarkable clarity.
"Now Captain DeLaney and I are going to brief you on it."
Chapter Sixty
"Well, that wasn't too bad, I hope?" Elizabeth Winton asked with a smile as she and Honor stepped into the Admiralty House conference room.
"Not too bad," Honor agreed.
"I did think about hanging some more medals on you," Elizabeth continued lightly as William Alexander and his older brother, Sir Thomas Caparelli, and Patricia Givens followed the two of them into the room. "I decided to settle for another Monarch's Thanks, instead. How many is that for you? A couple of dozen now?"
"Not quite," Honor said dryly.
Spencer Hawke, Tobias Stimson, and Colonel Shemais followed Givens. Hawke and Stimson positioned themselves behind their principals; Shemais took the place waiting for her at the conference table as Elizabeth's intelligence liaison.
It wasn't, Honor thought as the various treecats settled down in their people's laps or chair backs and the door closed, leaving Joshua Atkins, Clifford McGraw, and three troopers from the Queen's Own on guard in the hallway outside, as if there wasn't enough security in place without requiring the colonel's personal involvement.
The other participants in the meeting waited until Elizabeth and Honor were seated, then found their own seats.
"First," Caparelli said as they all turned their attention to him, "I'd like to add my own thanks-and that of everyone at Admiralty House-for a job very well done, Your Grace."
"We tried," Honor said.
"Quite successfully," Caparelli observed. "We're still analyzing your after-action report, but it's already obvious you hurt them much worse than they've hurt us anywhere since their opening offensive. The amount of damage you did, coupled with the demonstrated efficacy of Apollo and Mistletoe, has to have knocked them back on their heels."