Read Mission of Honor-ARC for Free Online

and then.
    "Have you looked at the technical material yet, Sir?" he asked.
    "Not yet." Rajampet shook his head. "I doubt very much that you'll find any clues as to secret Manticoran super weapons in it. Even if they've got them, I'm sure they'll have vacuumed the sensor data before they sent it on to us. And since Sigbee surrendered all of her ships, I'd imagine they did a pretty fair job of vacuuming her computers, too. So I don't think we're going to get a lot of insight into their hardware out of this even if they do oh-so-graciously return our property to us."
    "With your permission, Sir, I'll hand this over to Karl-Heinz and Hai-shwun, anyway."
    Admiral Karl-Heinz Thimár commanded the Solarian League Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, and Admiral Cheng Hai-shwun commanded the Office of Operational Analysis. OpAn was the biggest of ONI's divisions, which made Cheng Thimár's senior deputy . . . and also the person who should have seen this coming.
    "Of course," Rajampet agreed, waving one hand brusquely. Then his mouth tightened. "Don't hand it over until I've had a chance to talk to Karl-Heinz first, though. Someone's got to tell him about Karlotte, and I guess it's up to me."
    "Yes, Sir," Kingsford said quietly, and gave himself a mental kick for forgetting Rear Admiral Karlotte Thimár, Byng's chief of staff, was— had been—Karl-Heinz's first cousin.
    "Actually, getting them started on this is probably a damned good idea, even if we're not going to get much in the way of hard data out of it. I want the best evaluation OpAn can give me on these new missiles of theirs. I don't expect miracles, but see what you can get out of them."
    "Yes, Sir."
    "And while they're working on that, you and I are going to sit down and look at our deployment posture. I know the entire Manty navy's a fart in a wind storm compared to Battle Fleet, but I don't want us suffering any avoidable casualties because of overconfidence. Kolokoltsov has a point, damn him, about the difference in missile ranges. We're going to need a hammer they won't be able to stop when we go after their home system."
    " When we go after their home system?" Kingsford stressed the adverb, and Rajampet barked a grating laugh.
    "Those civilian idiots can talk about 'if' all they want to, Winston, but let's not you and I fool ourselves, all right? It's not 'if,' it's 'when,' and you know it as well as I do. Those Manticoran pricks are too arrogant to recognize what their real options are. They're not going to go for this ultimatum of Quartermain's, and in the end, that means we'll be going in. Besides—"
    He broke off rather abruptly, and Kingsford raised one eyebrow at him. But the CNO only shook his head, waving his hand in another brushing away gesture.
    "The point is," he continued, "that it's going to come to shooting in the end, no matter what sort of 'negotiations' anyone may try to set up. And when it does, the strategy's actually going to be pretty damned simple, since they've only got one really important star system. They don't have any choice, strategically. If we go after Manticore itself, they have to stand and fight. No matter how long-ranged their missiles may be, they can't just cut and run, so I want to be sure we've got enough counter-missiles and point defense to stand up to their missile fire while we drive straight for their planets. It may not be pretty, but it'll work."
    "Yes, Sir," Kingsford said yet again, and he knew his superior was right. After all, that concept lay at the bottom of virtually all of Battle Fleet's strategic doctrine. But however much he might agree with the CNO about that, his brain was still working on that aborted "Besides" of Rajampet's. Something about it bothered him, but what . . . ?
    Then he remembered.
    I wonder . . . Did he even mention Sandra Crandall and her task force to the others? And while I'm wondering, just how much did he have to do with getting her deployed to the Madras Sector in the first