Дэвид Вебер: Mission of Honor

With the sole exception of Honor Alexander-Harrington and Anton Zilwicki, every Manticoran in the cabin stiffened in shock, and Elizabeth Winton's eyes blazed. She opened her mouth quickly, angrily . . . then forced herself to close it and sat back.

"We weren't aware of what Giancola had done until Mr. Grosclaude was killed in a highly suspicious 'air car accident.' One which looked remarkably like a suicide . . . or"—Pritchart's eyes bored into Elizabeth's, then flicked sideways to Honor—"like someone who'd been compelled to kill himself by flying into a cliff wall. Almost, you might say, like someone who'd been adjusted ."

Elizabeth's eyes narrowed. She didn't have any idea where Pritchart was headed, but Ariel was still purring against her neck, and Honor's expression was still composed and calm, and so she made herself wait.

"Kevin, here," Pritchart nodded sideways at Usher, "has a nasty, suspicious mind which was already chewing the correspondence question over. When Grosclaude died so spectacularly, those suspicions of his started working overtime. It didn't take long for him to discover proof that the correspondence had been altered at our end. Unfortunately, the 'proof' had clearly been manufactured, apparently to implicate Giancola."

She smiled very thinly at Elizabeth's evident confusion.

"We came to the conclusion that Giancola had arranged it himself on the theory that if obviously forged evidence indicated he was the guilty party, it would be blindingly apparent to everyone that he'd been framed, and who would bother to frame a guilty man? In other words, he wanted us to bring that evidence forward publicly—or that was our theory, at least. And then," her expression hardened with remembered fury and frustration, " Giancola was killed in another air car accident, this time—as far as we've been able to determine—a real accident.

"So there we were. We had no real evidence, only documentation which had obviously been forged. The only two men we could be relatively certain knew what had happened were both dead. And, just to make matters worse, they'd both died in air car accidents . . . which just happened to have been State Security's favorite means for removing 'inconvenient' individuals. Given the strength of the war party in Congress, the fact that we couldn't prove any of it, and the enormous suspicion which was going to be produced throughout the entire Republic by the way in which Grosclaude and Giancola had died, we couldn't simply present our theory and expect Congress to go along with an admission that it was someone in the Republic— not the Republic itself, but a rogue element in the very highest levels of our administration—who'd manipulated our correspondence. Who'd manipulated us—manipulated me— into calling for a resumption of hostilities because we honestly believed the government of our adversaries was not simply using diplomacy for its own cynical ends but then lying about our diplomatic notes."

There was an edge of raw appeal in her quiet voice, and Elizabeth paused long enough to be sure she had control of her own voice.

"How long have you known—or suspected, at least?" she asked then.

"Giancola was killed in September 1920," Pritchart replied unflinchingly. "We already suspected what had happened, but as long as he was alive, it was an ongoing investigation. There was always the chance we might find the real evidence we needed."

"But you've known—known for almost two T-years —that we were telling the truth. That it was your man who'd falsified the correspondence! And you said nothing !"

Elizabeth glared at Pritchart, and some of the other Havenites stirred angrily as her accusatory anger flooded over them, but their president only nodded.

"In his much as we 'knew' anything, yes," she said. "And that, Your Majesty, was the reason I proposed the summit meeting between us. Because it was time, once it became evident we'd never be able to find proof of what had happened, to end the fighting however we had to do it, even if that meant admitting the truth to you—to you, personally, where you and your treecat could evaluate my truthfulness. We still couldn't have gone public with the information back home, any more than you could remove High Ridge before the war," her eyes hardened ever so slightly as she reminded Elizabeth of her own experience with the limitations political considerations could impose, "but I was willing to tell you— and to surrender considerable military advantages on our part—to achieve peace. And so, when your Captain Terekhov sailed off to Monica, I sent your cousin home to you to do just that. And we both remember what happened then."

She held Elizabeth's angry eyes steadily, and a cold shock went through the Manticoran queen as she remembered. Remembered her fury, her rejection of the summit— her decision to resume military operations instead of talking.

Silence fell, fragile and singing with its own tension, and Pritchart let it linger for several seconds before she spoke again.

"When you attacked Lovat," she said quietly, and Elizabeth's eyes flickered as she remembered who'd been killed there, "we knew your new targeting system gave you a decisive military advantage. Or that it would, assuming you could get it into general deployment. So we—Thomas and I—" she nodded in Theisman's direction, "mounted Operation Beatrice. Thomas planned it, but I asked for it. Neither of us expected it to be as bloody—on both sides—as it finally was, but I won't pretend we thought the cost in lives would be cheap. Yet since the summit had been killed, since you were pushing the offensive against us, and since your new combat advantage was going to be so overwhelming, we felt our only hope was to strike for outright military victory before you could get your new systems deployed throughout your navy. And from our own analysis of the Battle of Manticore, we almost succeeded."

She paused for just a moment, then shrugged.

"When we lost the Battle of Manticore, we lost the war, Your Majesty. We knew that. But then, to our surprise, you sent us Admiral Alexander-Harrington. You'll never know how tempted I was to tell her the truth then. Not at first, but after I'd come to know her. Yet I couldn't. Partly, that was because of more of those domestic political constraints. When an administration's been as badly damaged as mine was by the Battle of Manticore, managing the internal dynamics gets just as hard as fighting an external enemy, but that was only part of it. Maybe the rest of it was simply because we'd kept it secret for so long. Maybe I would have told her, if she hadn't been recalled so precipitously. I don't know. But when your home system was attacked, there were those on our side who saw it almost as an act of divine intervention. An opportunity to win after all—or, at least, to avoid losing."

She made the admission without flinching, and Elizabeth nodded slowly. Of course there had. If what had happened to the Star Empire had happened to the Republic, exactly the same thought would have occurred to any number of Manticorans.

Including me , she admitted to herself.

"Obviously," she heard her own voice say, "that wasn't the option you chose to pursue."

"No, it wasn't. In fact, it was the last thing I wanted to do, for a lot of reasons. Including the fact that, as Admiral Alexander-Harrington had pointed out to us, if there's ever going to be an end to the cycle of violence between Haven and Manticore, it has to be achieved on some sort of equitable basis, not because one of us simply pounds the other into such bloody ruin that she has to yield.

"But, what I never anticipated for a moment was what happened when Officer Cachat and Mr. Zilwicki turned up in Nouveau Paris last month."