Uncompromising honor, p.91
Uncompromising Honor, page 91
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
Abruzzi glared at him, fists clenched on the tabletop, but there really wasn’t much he could say in response. And MacArtney hadn’t even added that at her current range, Harrington was four light-minutes closer to Old Earth than she’d been to Ganymede when she fired on it. If she chose to unleash those “fucking long-range missiles” on the inner system, there was nothing she couldn’t destroy without ever crossing the limit. The only thing that could possibly stay her hand was the possibility of mega casualties among the Sol System’s civilians, and remembering the ice in those brown eyes…
Kolokoltsov’s own eyes strayed to the time display. Twelve hours. Naval Station Ganymede had surrendered twelve hours ago, and she had yet to say a single word to anyone on Old Earth. The long, drawn out wait clawed at his nerves, exactly as she undoubtedly meant for it to, and it was obvious she was in no hurry to break her silence.
He didn’t expect to like it when she finally did.
HMS Imperator
Sol System
The timer on her uni-link pinged and Honor Alexander-Harrington closed the book she’d been pretending to read. She glanced automatically at the bulkhead chrono, then inhaled and ran one gentle hand down the spine of the treecat huddled in her lap.
Nimitz looked up at her, then rose on his true-feet to wrap his arms around her neck and press his muzzle against the live nerves of her right cheek. He stayed that way for a long, still moment, clinging to her physically almost as tightly as they clung to one another’s mind-glows, and she closed her eyes as she hugged him back.
Then she stood, climbing out of the comfortable couch, and lifted him, swinging him around to his proper place upon her shoulder.
It was time, she thought. Grand Fleet had been in the Sol System for exactly thirty-six hours, and it was time.
The cabin’s smart wall was configured to show the master plot, and her eyes sought out the green icon which represented Naval Station Ganymede’s current status as a “friendly unit.” Haeckle had honored the terms of his surrender with scrupulous fidelity, and she wished—oh, how she wished—he hadn’t. The part of her which was still an admiral recognized the enormous prize he’d yielded to her intact. Recognized the stupendous victory she’d accomplished without losing a single man or woman. Knew the intelligence windfall from Ganymede, alone, would have made this operation utterly decisive even if she’d accomplished nothing else.
The admiral in her recognized that. The angel of death only resented it.
She closed her eyes, fighting to balance those two conflicting imperatives. Fighting to remember she wasn’t here for herself, or for Nimitz, but for her star nation. For the entire Grand Alliance.
And for Beowulf, the killer corner of her soul whispered. For Beowulf.
She looked across the cabin at her wedding picture once again. She walked across to it, reached out and laid a hand upon it. She stood there, lips quivering, then leaned her forehead against it as a single tear leaked down her cheek.
I’m sorry, she thought. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to keep you alive, Hamish. Or you, Samantha. And I’m so sorry I killed you telling you about it, Emily. Another tear crept down her cheek and she tasted its salt upon her lips. I’m sorry Nimitz and I will never see or hold or touch any of you ever again. I hope wherever you are you can forgive us for that. And I’m sorry I can’t even kill the people who killed you. God help me, I want the Sollies to give me a reason, give me an excuse, to punish someone—anyone—for it, and if they do—
She chopped that thought off. Made herself inhale deeply. Felt the sick hunger guttering along her nerves. If they gave her an excuse, she would take it. She would take it and the killer in her soul would drown itself in the fiery elixir of their blood and her vengeance. She knew that. And even in her present state, she knew it was the one thing she must not do. But some things were simply more—
She shook herself, leaned harder against the picture.
Even if they give me a reason, she thought drearily, it won’t be the ones who really killed you. They’ve taken even that away from us, because I’ll be killing the wrong people.
She straightened and caressed their faces—all three of those faces—and her own face hardened.
But if they didn’t plant those bombs, they damned well created the circumstances that let someone else do it, and there’s a price for that. Oh, yes. There’s a price, and if they give me an excuse to make that point crystal clear to them I will by God do it. Because one thing I promise all of you: I will collect every penny of that price if I have to burn this star system to the ground.
She stood a moment longer, looking at the faces of her murdered love, tasting the bitter iron of that promise. Then she drew a deep, deep breath and turned away.
The cabin hatch opened at her approach and Major Hawke came to attention as she stepped out into the passage. He’d known Tobias Stimson for a long time, personally selected him as Hamish’s armsman, and that made it personal for him, too, on so many levels. She tasted the same murderous determination radiating from him, knew there was no question what he wanted to happen next, and she nodded to him.
“Let’s be about it, Spencer,” she said.
Central Command Center
Admiralty Building
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
Winston Kingsford arrived in the dimness of Central Command less than five minutes after his office com pinged. Three of those minutes had been spent in the lift shafts, and he’d paused outside the CCC’s entrance to catch his breath. No one needed him arriving obviously out of breath.
Wouldn’t do to look like I was panicking, now would it?
“Willis,” he said as Admiral Jennings turned at his approach to face him.
“Sir,” Jennings acknowledged.
“So she’s begun to move, has she?”
“Yes, Sir.” The chief of staff waved at the enormous holo display. “She’s taking her time about it, too.”
Kingsford looked at the display and nodded.
Harrington’s enormous wall of battle was headed directly towards the hyper-limit at its closest approach to Old Earth. And, as Jennings had said, she was advancing at a leisurely three hundred gravities. At that rate, it would take over an hour and a half for her to actually cross it, assuming that was what she intended to do, and he felt confident that slow, deliberate approach was yet another silent message.
She wants us to see her coming. To know she doesn’t care if we see her coming.
Every surviving warship in the Sol System had been gathered in Earth orbit. He had over two hundred superdreadnoughts, backed by four hundred battlecruisers and the next best thing to a million pods of improved Cataphracts, and his sensor platforms had kept her under a microscope, twenty-four hours a day, waiting for exactly this moment. He had enough firepower to shatter planets, been given as much warning—as much time to prepare for an attack—as any system commander in history.
And he knew she’d given him that time on purpose.
HMS Imperator
Sol System
Honor watched her plot as her massive formation decelerated once again to rest relative to Old Earth and shoals of LACs erupted from her carriers to form up about her wall of battle. She was exactly one light-second inside the hyper-limit, 231,559,727 kilometers from the planet of humanity’s birth, and her eyes were as bleak as her soul.
“In position, Ma’am,” Andrea Jaruwalski said.
“Thank you, Andrea.”
Honor nodded, then turned her head, looked at Lieutenant Commander Brantley.
“Put me through, Harper.”
Central Command Center
Admiralty Building
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
“Incoming transmission, Sir,” Commander Pamela Furman, the com officer of the watch announced, and Kingsford turned to face her.
It was almost a relief to look away from the master plot. No, that wasn’t accurate. It wasn’t almost a relief to look away from that horde of crimson icons. Harrington remained outside his Cataphracts’ powered envelope, and he wondered how many of the light codes spreading out about her superdreadnoughts represented missile pods and how many of them were the infernally powerful LACs ONI had finally gotten around to reporting to him.
“I assume it’s Admiral Harrington?” he said, and Furman nodded.
“Yes, Sir. It is.”
“Then I suppose you’d better put her on the main display,” he said.
He felt Jennings stir beside him, and gave the chief of staff an ironic smile. Jennings might have a point. Perhaps this was the sort of message he ought to be taking in private, but he doubted it would make much difference in the end.
“Yes, Sir,” Furman said, but she also paused, and he frowned.
“Is there a problem, Commander?” he asked, a bit coldly, and she inhaled.
“Sir, Admiral Harrington’s contacting you through a com relay less than forty thousand kilometers out. It’s actually in a geosynchronous orbit above the Atlantic.”
Kingsford stiffened. Geosynchronous orbit?
“Should I assume we didn’t know it was there?”
“No, Sir. We didn’t.” Furman’s expression was as unhappy as any Kingsford had ever seen, but she met his eyes levelly.
“I see.”
Kingsford glanced at Jennings again, and the chief of staff’s expression was even less happy than Furman’s. And little wonder, the CNO thought. The fresh proof of the Manties’ remote platforms’ ability to penetrate their sensors at will was chilling. But perhaps he should be grateful to Harrington for making that point yet again. Anything that inspired sanity and…restraint on his part was probably a good thing.
“Go ahead and put her through, Commander,” he said levelly.
“Yes, Sir.”
Kingsford tucked his hands behind him and turned back to the main communications display as it came alive and a face he knew from hundreds of megabytes of intelligence analyses looked out of it.
“Good afternoon, Admiral Harrington,” he said.
“Good afternoon, Admiral Kingsford,” she replied twelve seconds later. He wasn’t really surprised. In fact, he’d expected it. Which made the demonstration of the Manties’ FTL bandwidth no less galling to someone whose faster-than-light data transmission was still at least a full T-year from anything more advanced than the dots and dashes of old-fashioned Morse code.
“I’ve been rather expecting to hear from you,” he said now.
“I imagine you have.” Her smile was cold, and so thin he could have shaved with it. “And since you have, I’ll get straight to the point. You have ninety-six hours to stand down your fleet, scuttle every warship in the star system, blow your missile pods in orbit, and evacuate your deep-space infrastructure. All your deep-space infrastructure.”
Someone behind Kingsford inhaled sharply, and he felt his own expression tighten, but Harrington’s frozen eyes never even flickered.
“And at the end of those ninety-six hours?” he heard himself ask.
“I think you know the answer to that question.” Her soprano was hard as battle steel. “You set the ground rules with Operation Buccaneer and Parthian Shot. The Grand Alliance is prepared to assume that since no one in the Solarian League has denounced Admiral Hajdu Győző or Admiral Gogunov’s actions at Hypatia, the League is equally prepared to receive the same treatment. Except for the minor difference that I’m giving you long enough you really can save your civilians’ lives.”
“And after we abandon our responsibility to protect Solarian lives and property?”
“Why, at that point, I destroy it,” she said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. “Unlike your actions at Cachalot and some other star systems I could mention”—for an instant, that icy control slipped and her eyes flashed with pure, murderous fire—“I’ll leave your orbital habitats, even the ones with some industrial capacity—not the ones which are primarily industrial, of course—intact. I’ll even leave old Earth’s and Mars’ orbital power collectors intact…which is more than you did in Buccaneer. But the rest of it goes, Admiral Kingsford. Every bit of it.”
Her eyes bored into him, and his hands fisted behind his back.
“You’re not serious,” he said.
“Oh, on the contrary, I’m deadly serious,” she replied, and her voice had turned soft, almost caressing. “And if you’re unwilling to destroy your warships yourself, I’ll take care of that for you, too. You can just leave them where they are, and I’ll take them out from here. Or you can come out to meet me. Unlike the Solarian League, the Grand Alliance has no interest in massacring millions of civilians. But you and your ships, Admiral Kingsford—the gallant personnel of the Solarian League Navy—are another matter entirely. So please leave orbit and come out to meet me. There’s nothing you could do that would make my people happier.”
Her eyes bored into him, daring him—begging him—to take up her challenge. To take his ships out where she could kill every one of them without endangering a single civilian life. He saw that challenge, understood it perfectly…and something shriveled inside him. Twenty brittle seconds stretched out. Then her nostrils flared, with what might have been contempt or might have been disappointment, when she recognized his refusal to take up that iron gauge.
“I allowed Admiral Haeckle to use his available warships to evacuate his people,” that soprano sword said then, “and I’m prepared to allow you to do the same…as long as every one of them is destroyed within ninety-six hours. Is that understood, Admiral Kingsford, or do I need to go over it again?”
Rage wrestled with fear deep within him, but he made himself stand very still. He drew a deep breath, faced the com display.
“I believe I understood you the first time, Admiral,” he said coldly.
“In that case, I’ll be in touch again ninety-six hours from now. Unless, of course, you haven’t complied with my requirements and destroyed your fleet within that window. In that case, Admiral Kingsford, you won’t hear a single thing from me.”
That final, liquid-helium promise went through him like a dagger. And then, before he could even think about a response, the display went blank.
He stood very still, looking at the huge featureless screen, then turned his head to look at Commander Furman.
“Contact Permanent Senior Undersecretary Kolokoltsov,” he told her. “I’ll be in my briefing room. As soon as you reach him, put him through to my com there.”
George Benton Tower
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
“What do you mean you won’t go out and fight?” Malachai Abruzzi barked.
He sat with the rest of the Mandarins in Innokentiy Kolokoltsov’s secure communications room, glaring at Winston Kingsford’s face on the main display. Kolokoltsov had delayed accepting Kingsford’s communications request until the others could join him. It hadn’t taken very long, since none of them had ventured far from their George Benton offices in the day and a half since Harrington had arrived. He’d wanted to avoid anyone’s thinking he’d cut some sort of private understanding with Kingsford. And, he admitted, he’d wanted to spread the responsibility for any decision he made as broadly as possible.
He was coming to the conclusion—rapidly—that that had been a mistake.
“I mean there are over one-point-three million men and women on my ships-of-the-wall, alone, Mister Permanent Senior Undersecretary, and that I have no intention of seeing them butchered for absolutely nothing,” Kingsford said now, his flat voice a cold and level contrast to Abruzzi’s quivering fury.
“Then why the hell do we even have a Navy?” Abruzzi spat.
“Why, you have a Navy to do all those dirty little jobs you need done in the Protectorates.” Nathan MacArtney’s face went as dark and congested, as outraged, as Abruzzi’s, but Kingsford wasn’t done. “You have a Navy you and your colleagues sent into a war it can’t win. You even have a Navy you can order to completely destroy the economies of completely neutral star nations. But you don’t have a Navy so I can murder the men and women under my command because you don’t have a frigging clue what else to do. Does that answer your question, Mister Permanent Senior Undersecretary?”
“Then we’ll fucking remove you from command and put someone with some guts into it!” Abruzzi snarled. “And then we’ll put you in front of a frigging court-martial and shoot your sorry arse for cowardice in the face of the enemy!”
“That’s your option,” Kingsford said. “And if that’s what you want to do, you go right ahead. But you’re not going to find another admiral who will do what you want. The Navy’s done dying just because the lot of you have been too damned stupid and too damned arrogant to listen to the people who have been trying to get you to stop this goddamned war you started—you, not them—since before it even began!”
They stared at him—all of them—in shock, and he looked back with a face like iron. The silence lingered for several seconds.
“I’ve already begun the evacuations,” he told them then. “And while I was waiting for you to get around to accepting my com request, I accepted Harrington’s offer to use the Navy to get everyone out…and promised to destroy every one of my ships within her time limit.”
He shrugged ever so slightly while they gaped at him.
“The first evacuees should be arriving dirtside within a half hour or so, and another thing I did while waiting for you to get around to answering me was to contact the Gendarmerie. Their people will assist my Marines in organizing the traffic flow and keeping it moving. I suggest you and the local civilian authorities organize transportation to move the evacuees to other destinations before the spaceports turn into total chaos. As for me, right now, overseeing that evacuation is rather more important than continuing this conversation. Good day, ladies and gentlemen.”
