"I'd be delighted to," she heard herself say, and fresh surprise washed through her as she realized she meant it.
"Good!" His smile wreathed his eyes in laugh wrinkles, and Honor felt a strange, answering bubble of silent laughter deep within her. "May I expect you around eighteen hundred, then, Lady Harrington?"
"You may, Captain Tankersley." She gave him another smile, then stepped across to the parallel bars, scooped Nimitz up, and headed for the dressing rooms.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Admiral of the Green Sir Thomas Caparelli, First Space Lord of the Royal Manticoran Admiralty, was a barrel-chested man with a weight-lifter's torso grafted onto a sprinters legs. Although he was going just a bit to pot these days, the athlete whose bruising, physical style had run Hamish Alexander's soccer team into the mud of Hopewell Field—repeatedly—was still recognizable. Yet his face was taut, the unabashed swagger which had characterized him as both captain and junior flag officer in abeyance, for the First Space Lord was a worried man.
He and his fellow officers rose as Allen Summervale, Duke of Cromarty, leader of the Centrist Party and Prime Minister to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth III, entered the conference room. The PM was tall and slim, like all the Summervales, and, despite prolong, his hair was silver and his handsome face deeply lined. Cromarty had spent over fifty T-years in politics and headed Manticore's government for fifteen of the last twenty-two, and every one of those years had cut its weight into him.
The Prime Minister waved his uniformed subordinates back into their seats, and Caparelli's jaw tightened as he saw who'd walked into the room behind Cromarty. Lady Francine Maurier, Baroness Morncreek, had every right to be here as the civilian First Lord of Admiralty. So did Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord William Alexander, the Government's second ranking member. But Alexander's older brother didn't—officially, at least—and the First Space Lord tried not to glower as the Earl of White Haven found a chair of his own.
"Before we begin, Sir Thomas, I'd just like to mention that Earl White Haven is here at my request, not his." Cromarty's expressive, whiskey-smooth baritone had always been a potent political weapon, and his gentle announcement drew Caparelli's eyes to him. "As you know, he recently completed a survey of our frontier stations' readiness states for Admiral Webster. Under the circumstances, I felt his input might be of value."
"Of course, Your Grace." Caparelli knew he sounded grudging. It wasn't that he disliked the earl, he told himself. It was just that, athletics aside, Alexander—or White Haven, as he now was—had always had a knack for making him feel he was competing out of his class, and the earl's succession to his father's titles, coupled with the prestige of his year-old conquest of the Endicott System, only made it worse.
"Thank you for your understanding." Cromarty's smile was so winning Caparelli actually felt much of his resentment seep away. "And now, Sir Thomas, may I hear your conclusions?"
"Yes, Sir." Caparelli gestured at Second Space Lord Patricia Givens, head of the Bureau of Planning, under whose control the Office of Naval Intelligence fell. "With your permission, Your Grace, Admiral Givens will brief us on the high points."
"Certainly." Cromarty nodded and turned his attention to Admiral Givens as she stood and activated the holo wall behind her, bringing up an enormous star map of the frontier between the Manticoran Alliance and the Peoples Republic of Haven. She stood with her back to the display, facing the people around the table, and drew a light wand from her pocket.
"Your Grace, Lady Morncreek, Lord Alexander." She nodded courteously to each of the civilians and smiled briefly at White Haven, but she didn't greet him by name. They were old colleagues and friends, but Patricia Givens had a strong sense of loyalty. She was on Caparelli's team now, and, despite the Prime Minister's explanation, the earl was an interloper today.
"As you know, reports are coming in of incidents all up and down our frontier." She pressed the remote built into her light wand, and a sparkle of blood-red lights—a dangerous, irregular line of rubies that arced around Manticore in a complete half-circle—glittered in the display behind her.
"The first incident reported," Givens went on, turning and using her light wand to pick out a single red spark, "was the destruction of Convoy Mike-Golf-Nineteen, here at Yeltsin. It was not, however, the first incident to occur. We simply heard about it first because the transit time from Yeltsin to Manticore was shorter than for the others. The first known incursion into Alliance territory actually occurred here—" the light wand moved southeast from Yeltsin "—at Candor. Nineteen days ago, a light cruiser squadron, positively IDed by our sensors as Havenite despite its refusal to respond to our challenges in any way, violated the Candor System's territorial limit. Our local mobile forces were unable to generate an intercept vector, and the Peeps passed through the outer system, well within missile range of one of our perimeter com centers, without firing a shot, then departed, still without a word."
She cleared her throat and moved the wand again, first to the north, and then back to the southwest of Yeltsin.
"The same basic pattern was followed here, at Klein Station, and again here, in the Zuckerman System." The wand touched each star as it was named. The only substantive differences between any of these incursions was that the force employed at Zuckerman was much heavier than either of the others, and that it destroyed approximately ninety million dollars worth of remote sensor platforms as it came in—after which it, like the others, turned around and withdrew without saying a word.
"There have also been more serious incidents, on the same pattern as the attack on Mike-Golf-Nineteen," she continued into the intense quiet, "but in these cases we cannot definitely assert that the Peeps were responsible.
"In Yeltsin's case, for example, the Grayson cruiser Alvarez got readings on the raiders. They were surprisingly good, considering Alvarez's limited tracking time, and our analysts have studied them carefully."
She paused and gave a small, almost apologetic shrug.
"Unfortunately, we don't have anything we could take to a court of law. The impeller wedge signatures were definitely those of a light cruiser and two destroyers, and their drive's gravitic patterns match those of Haven-built units, but their other emissions do not match those of the Peoples Navy. My own belief, and that of a majority of ONIs analysts, is that they were, in fact, Peeps who had deliberately disguised their signatures, but there's no way to prove that, and the Peeps have 'sold' enough ships to various 'allies' to give us a whole crop of other potential suspects."
Givens paused again, hazel eyes hard, then tilted her head.
"The same is true of the incidents at Ramon, Clearaway, and Quentin. In each case, we or our allies lost shipping and lives to the 'raiders' without getting a close enough look to positively ID the responsible party. The timing of the raids, coupled with the intelligence work it must have taken to plan and execute them so smoothly while denying us any interceptions, certainly suggests Havenite involvement, but again, we can't prove it. Just as we can't prove the recent heavy losses among the Caliphate of Zanzibar's picket and patrol ships are not the work of the ZLF. For that matter, we can't prove there's any connection at all between these episodes—except, of course, for our confirmation of Havenite involvement at Candor, Klein Station, and Zuckerman.