Shadow of Victory Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Epilogue

  Wloclawek glossary

  SHADOW OF VICTORY

  DAVID WEBER

  Shadow of Victory

  David Weber

  The Mesan Alignment is revealed, and, for Honor Harrington and the Manticoran Star Kingdom, this means war!

  Unintended Consequences

  Sometimes things don’t work out exactly as planned.

  The Mesan Alignment has a plan—one it’s been working on for centuries. A plan to remake the galaxy and genetically improve the human race—its way.

  Until recently, things have gone pretty much as scheduled, but then the Alignment hit a minor bump in the road called the Star Empire of Manticore. So the Alignment engineered a war between the Solarian League, the biggest and most formidable interstellar power in human history. To help push things along, the Alignment launched a devastating sneak attack which destroyed the Royal Manticoran Navy’s industrial infrastructure.

  And in order to undercut Manticore’s galaxy-wide reputation as a star nation of its word, it launched Operation Janus—a false-flag covert operation to encourage rebellions it knows will fail by promisingManticoran support. The twin purposes are to harden Solarian determination to destroy the Star Empire once and for all, and to devastate the Star Empire’s reputation with the rest of the galaxy.

  But even the best laid plans can have unintended consequences, and one of those consequences in this case may just be a new dawn of freedom for oppressed star nations everywhere.

  Books of the Honorverse by David Weber

  HONOR HARRINGTON

  On Basilisk Station

  The Honor of the Queen

  The Short Victorious War

  Field of Dishonor

  Flag in Exile

  Honor Among Enemies

  In Enemy Hands

  Echoes of Honor

  Ashes of Victory

  War of Honor

  At All Costs

  Mission of Honor

  Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint)

  Torch of Freedom (with Eric Flint)

  The Shadow of Saganami

  Storm from the Shadows

  A Rising Thunder

  Shadow of Freedom

  Cauldron of Ghosts (with Eric Flint)

  EDITED BY DAVID WEBER

  More than Honor

  Worlds of Honor

  Changes of Worlds

  In the Service of the Sword

  In Fire Forged

  Beginnings

  MANTICORE ASCENDANT

  A Call to Duty (with Timothy Zahn)

  A Call to Arms (with Timothy Zahn & Tom Pope)

  A Call to Vengeance (with Timothy Zahn & Tom Pope) forthcoming

  THE STAR KINGDOM

  A Beautiful Friendship

  Fire Season (with Jane Lindskold)

  Treecat Wars (with Jane Lindskold)

  For a complete listing of Baen titles by David Weber,

  please go to www.baen.com

  SHADOW OF VICTORY

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Words of Weber, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-8182-2

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-546-5

  Cover art by David Mattingly

  First printing, November 2016

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Weber, David, 1952– author.

  Title: Shadow of victory / David Weber.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen , [2016] | Series: Honor Harrington ; 19

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016042002 | ISBN 9781476781822 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Harrington, Honor (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Space

  warfare—Fiction. | Science fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction /

  Military. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | FICTION / Science

  Fiction / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3573.E217 S545 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042002

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  FEBRUARY 1921 POST DIASPORA

  “I’m a very inventive fellow. With enough time, I can get to anyone.”

  —Captain Damien Harahap,

  Solarian League Gendarmerie

  Chapter One

  Brandon Grant had no idea how many people he’d killed.

  For that matter, he couldn’t recall how many planets he’d killed people on. It wasn’t the sort of thought that crossed his mind. Besides, he’d have needed a pretty sizable f
older just to store the data, assuming he’d ever been stupid enough to write it down in the first place.

  Still, this was about as far from home as he’d ever operated, and he wondered—vaguely—why these particular kills were so important. And why this one had to look like a common mugging gone wrong. The other one had been much more straightforward, and she’d been a far more prominent target to begin with, but the employer’s local agent hadn’t quibbled about the obvious ambush his second team had arranged for her. It was true that she was rather more visible than Grant’s current target, since she worked in uniform and operated openly out of Gendarmerie HQ here in Pine Mountain, whereas the man he was about to kill didn’t. If things worked right, any investigators would buy the announcement from the McIntosh Popular Front claiming responsibility for the first hit, although the MPF was going to be astounded to hear about it. So why not let the same “murderous terrorists” deal with this guy, as well? Maybe they just didn’t want two obvious assassinations taking off people who had a close professional link? But that struck him as pretty silly. If they died so close together—within less than two hours of each other, for God’s sake!—it was still going to ring alarm bells for anyone inclined to be suspicious in the first case. Or maybe this guy’s cover was so deep that no one else would know he was connected to the Gendarmerie at all, far less to his uniformed associate?

  He shrugged mentally at the thought. He was accustomed to making targeted murder look like something else whenever needed, and his employer’s reasons for wanting someone dead were none of his business. If this was the way the people paying the freight wanted it, this was how he’d do it, but it would have been so much simpler to simply walk up behind the target, shoot him in the back of the head, and keep right on walking. It was amazing how easy that was, even with all the modern surveillance and security systems in play, if one simply thought ahead a bit and kept his nerve. But, no. This one couldn’t be an obvious hit, for whatever reason. A scrap of an ancient poem wandered through his mind, and he snorted in amusement. It truly wasn’t his “to wonder why.” In point of fact, his employer paid him extraordinarily well not to wonder, but simply “to do or die.”

  Of course, in Grant’s case, he did the doing and someone else did the dying.

  He kept his eyes on his uni-link display’s current pornographic feature, smiling faintly as he recalled the distasteful looks that feature had drawn from the handful of passersby who’d happened to glance at it. He didn’t really blame them; it was as energetic—and loud—as it was in bad taste. That was why he’d chosen it and disabled the privacy function to make sure it could be seen and heard by anyone unfortunate enough to enter his orbit. Anyone dressed like him, leaning against a wall and watching that sort of “entertainment” might be many things, but he certainly wasn’t one of the best paid assassins of the explored galaxy.

  He did glance up—once—to check the positions of his team, although he was confident they were where they were supposed to be. He’d brought two of them—Markus Bochart and Franz Gillespie—from Old Earth when his employer deployed them to the Madras Sector. They’d worked with him several times before, and he knew he could count on their expertise. The other two were local recruits, but they’d worked out well so far. In fact, he rather regretted the fact that he’d have to eliminate them as one last housekeeping chore before he left the sector. Good help could be hard to find, yet he was unlikely to be operating out this way again anytime soon, and his employer, who liked loose ends even less than he did, had been very specific about that.

  All four of them were in position, dressed—like him—in cheap, gaudy clothes in the orange, black, and green colors of the Tremont Towers Dragons, one of Pine Mountain’s less fastidious street gangs. That was a minor risk, since the Dragons were less than popular with the local authorities for a host of good reasons, and it was always possible the five of them would draw the attention of the Pine Mountain Police. That was unlikely as long as they simply floated the street, however. Here in the sector capital officers had more important things to do than move along loiterers—even members of the TTD—unless those loiterers made a nuisance of themselves. Besides, it would actually help if some cop had made note of their presence and recalled it later. It would help steer any inquiries in the proper direction, and he hid a smile as he considered how energetically the Dragons were likely to find themselves interrogated if their target was truly important enough to justify all this elaborate deniability rigmarole.

  A soft chime sounded in his earbug.

  He kept his eyes on the uni-link for another ten seconds, then keyed it off, and shoved himself away from the wall he’d been so assiduously propping up for the last hour or so. He stretched, made deliberate—and obvious—eye contact with his henchmen, and then ambled away up the sidewalk. He smiled as Bochart pried himself away from the light standard he’d been holding up and paused to make a mock grab at a passing pedestrian’s shoulder bag, then laughed mockingly as she snatched it protectively away. It was a nice touch, one that the local surveillance cameras must have caught but obviously not a serious attempted robbery which might have prompted an immediate response. When the chip was examined later, though, it would show that the “Dragons” had been in a mood to make trouble before they encountered the unfortunate victim of the mugging-to-be.

  Ahead of him, the soon-to-be-dead-man came around the corner and started down the block, and Grant’s predator eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

  The most extraordinary thing about the man coming towards them was how outstandingly ordinary he looked. Medium height, medium build, medium complexion, medium brown hair…there was absolutely nothing about him to catch someone’s attention or attract anyone’s notice or cause even the most suspicious to file him away in memory. Indeed, he was even more ordinary looking than he’d seemed in the imagery Grant had studied when the assignment landed in his inbox. People didn’t get that ordinary without working at it—hard—as Brandon Grant knew better than most, and he’d warned his assistants against automatically accepting the inoffensive harmlessness the other man projected so skillfully.

  * * *

  Damien Harahap was an unhappy man.

  Partly that was because he disliked failure, no matter who might have employed him at the moment, and failures didn’t come much more spectacular than the ones he’d enjoyed on the planets of Montana and Kornati. He didn’t know—and might never know—exactly how the wheels had come off, but the news out of the Talbott Sector made it abundantly clear they had. Something had certainly inspired a Manticoran captain to take a scratch-built squadron to Monica and trash the entire system, despite the distinct possibility that his actions would provoke a shooting incident with the Solarian League Navy. Right off the top of his head, Harahap couldn’t think of many reasons for a sane human being to do anything of the sort. In fact, the one that came most readily to mind was the discovery that somebody had been providing the Monica System Navy with first-line Solarian warships at the same time somebody else had been fueling and feeding terrorist movements designed to destabilize local governments which were in the process of seeking admission to the Star Kingdom of Manticore in places like Montana and Split. Only a complete idiot would have assumed there was no connection between those two happenstances, and there were very few complete idiots in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The RMN wasn’t exactly noted for timidity, either, and Harahap could understand how a Manticoran officer might feel a tad…irked by something like that.

  The problem it posed for him was whether or not the Manties would be able to track his handiwork back to the Solarian League Gendarmerie. Not that the Gendarmerie had had anything to do with it…officially. Unfortunately, Dennis Harahap was a captain in the Gendarmerie, and Manticore might find it a bit difficult to believe he’d been operating independently. Especially since he hadn’t been, however carefully Ulrike Eichbauer had stressed the fact that he was being given “leave time” in order to assist his current private enterprise employer
s on his own centicredit.

  Which was another reason for his current unhappiness. Major Eichbauer understood plausible deniability as well as the next covert operator, but she was the one who’d sent him the coded request to meet her at Urrezko Koilara. He’d half expected the summons, knowing Eichbauer. She wasn’t the sort to leave one of her people twisting in the wind, but she was also unlikely to call him in for any sort of official meeting until she knew whether or not his recent activities were going to splatter all over the Gendarmerie. Urrezko Koilara was a small, out-of-the way restaurant specializing in Old Earth’s Iberian cuisine. It wasn’t going to be found on any gourmand’s guide to the galaxy, but the food was on the high side of decent and its owner had been one of Eichbauer’s best confidential informants before her promotion to major took her off the streets and into an office job. Which made it an ideal place for a quiet, off-the-books meet.

  But Eichbauer hadn’t been there. Worse, the owner hadn’t even glanced in Harahap’s direction when he arrived. Either no one had told her Eichbauer intended to meet one of her people in her restaurant, or else someone had paid her to pretend no one had. Given the faint frown of baffled memory the woman had bestowed upon him when he asked to speak to the manager and complimented her on the quality of the food, Harahap was inclined towards the former explanation. If the supposed meeting had been some sort of set up, she would have greeted him with bland innocence, not with the expression of someone trying to remember where she’d seen him before. He was accustomed to not being remembered, since it was one of his primary stocks in trade, but some trace of memory had obviously been working in there, and there wouldn’t have been if she’d been briefed in preparation for some kind of operation.