"I don't know," he said finally. "It's all we've got."
"Where was the Navy?" Stacey demanded. "Why didn't they do something?"
"You know the answer to that," Hauptman returned. "They're 'stretched too thin meeting other commitments.' Hell, it was all I could do pry four Q-ships out of them!"
"Excuses! Those are just excuses, Daddy!"
"Maybe." Hauptman looked down at his hands again, then sighed once more. "No, let's be honest, Stace. It probably was the best they could do."
"Oh? Then why did they put Harrington in command? If they wanted to stop things like this, why didn't they send a competent officer to Silesia?"
Hauptman winced internally. Stacey had never met Honor Harrington. All she knew of her was what she'd read in the 'faxes and seen on HD ... or what her father had told her. And Hauptman was uncomfortably aware that he hadn't exactly gone out of his way to give his daughter an unbiased account of what had happened in Basilisk. In point of fact, he knew his sense of humiliation had painted Harrington's actions during their confrontation with even darker hues when he described them to Stacey later. He wasn't particularly proud of that, but neither was he about to go back and try to correct the record at this late date. Especially, he told himself fiercely, since Harrington really was a loose warhead!
Yet that also meant he couldn't tell her he was the one who'd pushed for Harringtons assignment. Not without making explanations he didn't care to make, at any rate.
"She may be a lunatic," he said instead, "but she's a first-rate combat commander. I don't like the woman, you know that, but she is good in a fight. I imagine that's why they chose her. And whatever they've done or not done, or their reasons for it," he went on more strongly, "the fact remains that we've lost Bonaventure."
"How much will it hurt us?" Stacey asked, reaching for a less personally painful topic.
"In and of itself, not that badly. She was insured, and I'm confident we'll recover from the insurers. But our rates will be going up, again, and unless Harrington actually does some good, we really may have to look closely at suspending operations in the Confederacy."
"If we pull out, everyone else will," Stacey warned.
"I know." Hauptman rose and jammed his hands into his pockets while he stared out over the pool. "I don't want to do it, Stace, and not just because I don't want to lose our revenues. I don't like what a general pull out from Silesia will do to the balance of trade. The Kingdom needs that shipping revenue and those markets, especially now. And that doesn't even consider what it might mean for public opinion. If raggedy-assed pirates chase us clear out of the Confederacy, people may see it as a sign that we're not holding our own against the Peeps any longer."
Stacey nodded behind him. Her father's long and stormy history with the Royal Navy stemmed in large part from his role as one of the Star Kingdom's major shipbuilders, which put him in constant conflict with the RMN's accountants, but she knew another part stemmed from the Navy's refusal to bend to his will. In addition, like her father, she was a shrewd political analyst, and she understood how that same rocky relationship, coupled with his wealth, made him so attractive to the Opposition. As one of the Opposition parties' major economic sponsors, he was careful to limit his public support for the war effort to "proper" statements in order to retain their support for his own ends, yet he was fully aware of the implications of the fight against the Peoples Republic... and of what he stood to lose if the Star Kingdom was defeated.
"How many of our people have we lost so far?" she asked.
"Counting Sukowski and his exec, we've got almost three hundred unaccounted for," Hauptman said bitterly, and she winced. Her own sphere of authority didn't bring her into direct contact with their shipping interests very often, and she hadn't realized the number was so high.
"Is there anything more we can do?" Her voice was very quiet, not pushing but dark with the sense of responsibility she'd inherited from her father, and he shrugged.
"I don't know." He stared out over the pool for another moment, then turned back to face her. "I don't know," he repeated, "but I'm thinking about going out there in person."
"Why?" she asked quickly, her tone sharp with sudden alarm. "What can you do from there that you can't do from here?"
"For one thing, I can cut something like three months off the communications lag," he said dryly. "For another, you know as well as I do that nothing can substitute for direct, firsthand observation of a problem."
"But if you poke around out mere, you could get captured, or killed!" she protested.
"Oh, I doubt that. If I went at all, I'd go in Artemis or Athena," he assured her, and she paused thoughtfully. Artemis and Athena were two of the Hauptman Lines' Atlas-class passenger liners. The Atlases had minimal cargo capacity, but they were equipped with military-grade compensators and impellers, and they were excellent at getting people from place to place quickly. Because Artemis and Athena had been expressly built for the Silesian run, they'd also been fitted with light missile armaments, and their high speed and ability to defend themselves against run-of-the-mill pirates made them extremely popular with travelers to the Confederacy.
"All right," Stacey said after a moment. "I guess you'd be safe enough. But if you go, then I'm going with you."
"What?" Hauptman blinked at her, then shook his head adamantly. "No way, Stace! One of us has to stay home to mind the store, and I don't want you traipsing around Silesia."
"First," she shot back, not giving a centimeter, "we've got highly paid, highly competent people for the express purpose of 'minding the store,' Daddy. Second, if it's safe enough for you, it's safe enough for me. And, third, we're talking about Captain Harry."
"Look," her father said persuasively, "I know how you feel about Captain Sukowski, but you can't do anything that I can't. Stay home, Stace. Please. Let me handle this."
"Daddy," steely brown eyes met blue, and Klaus Hauptman felt a sinking sensation, "I'm going. We can argue about this all you like, but in the end, I'm going."
Chapter SIXTEEN
Honor looked up from her book reader as her com chimed. MacGuiness poked his head into her day cabin and started towards the terminal, but then it chimed again, this time with the two-toned note of an urgent signal, and she thrust her reader aside.
"I'll take it, Mac," she said, standing quickly. Nimitz raised his head from his own position on his perch, and she felt his quick surge of interest, but she had little time to consider it as she punched the acceptance key. She opened her mouth, but Rafe Cardones started speaking with most unusual abruptness almost before his image stabilized.
"I think we've got our first customer, Ma'am. We've got a bogey tracking up from low and astern with an overtake of nine hundred KPS, and he's accelerating hard. Tactical calls it three hundred gees, and he's one-point-seven million klicks back. Assuming constant accelerations, John figures he'll intercept at zero range in about nineteen minutes."
"You just picked him up?"
"Yes, Ma'am." Cardones smiled like a shark. "We don't see any sign of ECM, either. Looks like he was lying doggo and just lit off his drive."