She met Illescue's hooded, basilisk gaze levelly.
"The truth of the matter is, though, Sir, that we may never be able to identify the individual responsible. As you say, it could have been a case of idle gossip. Or, of course, although I don't like to think any of our people would violate our trust that way, someone could have deliberately handed the information over. In either case, however, my personal feeling is that it was almost certainly done verbally, with no written or electronic record. Which doesn't leave us very much in the way of clues."
Illescue looked at her, eyes cold, his normal, reassuring physician's personality noticeably in abeyance. The fact that he knew she was right only made him still angrier.
"I want a list of every name of every member of our staff who had access to both Duchess Harrington and Countess White Haven's files," he said, after a moment. "Everyone-physicians, nurses, technicians, clerical staff. As a general rule, I don't much care for witch hunts, but I'm going to make an exception in this case." He looked around the conference room and showed his teeth in an expression no one would ever mistake for a smile. " To be perfectly honest, I'm looking forward to it."
"Jesus, Julia," Martijn Knippschd muttered softly as he walked down the hall beside her, "I've never seen him that mad!" He shook his head. "I mean, this is terrible, sure. I agree, and not just because of the way it violates Duchess Harrington's confidentiality. It leaves us covered with crap here at the Center, too. But, let's face it-this really isn't the first time we've had an information leak. And that talk of his about 'witch hunts'-!"
"It isn't just talk, Marty," Isher said, equally quietly. "He means it. And if he does find out who's responsible...."
She shrugged, her expression bleak, and Knippschd shook his head.
"I believe you. I just don't understand why."
Isher looked at him for a moment, clearly considering whether or not to say something more. Dr. Martijn Knippschd was, in many ways, her equivalent on the medical support side of Briarwood's operations. He wasn't one of the Center's partners, but he was directly responsible for overseeing the labs' physical operation and directing the technicians who worked in them. And unless something very unexpected happened, he would be Briarwood's newest junior partner within the next three T-years.
"It's... personal this time," she said finally. "Dr. Illescue has something of a history with the Harringtons."
"I had the impression he'd never met the Duchess before she became a patient," Knippschd objected.
"I didn't say he had a history with her, Marty. He has one with her parents, and it's personal, not professional. I'm not going to go into any details, but suffice it to say that if there are any two physicians in the entire Star Kingdom who he'd crawl across ground glass to avoid giving a reason to fault his professional conduct, it's Alfred and Allison Harrington. Worse, I think he's afraid they may believe he let the information out himself."
"That's preposterous!" Knippschd was genuinely angry. "He can be a royal pain, but I've never met a physician who takes his professional, ethical responsibilities more seriously than he does!"
"I agree," Isher said mildly. "And I didn't say I think the Harringtons are going to believe anything of the sort. What I said was that he's afraid they may. And that, Marty, is why I am delighted that I, for one, am not the person who actually did spill the beans to Solomon Hayes."
The two of them walked along in silence for another few moments, and then Isher chuckled humorlessly.
"What?" Knippschd asked.
"I was just thinking. He says he wants whoever it is broiled, right?" Knippschd nodded, and she shrugged. "Well, I wonder if he'd let me at least light the fire for him when the time comes?"
"We're coming up on her now, Your Grace," the pinnace pilot announced over the intercom. "She's at your ten o'clock, low."
Honor leaned close enough to the pinnace viewport that the tip of her nose almost touched the armorplast. She was on the starboard side of the small craft, seated just forward of the variable geometry wings, and she peered still further forward as the sleek, white spindle of a starship came into view.
A missile barge hung close beside it in orbit, which gave her a sense of perspective, something to relate the new ship's size to, and that perspective made her look just a bit odd to experienced eyes. She was obviously a battlecruiser, yet she was larger than any battlecruiser Honor had ever seen. The Agamemnons, like Michelle Henke's Achilles, massed almost 1.75 million tons, but this ship was more than a quarter-million tons heavier still. And where the Agamemnons were a pod-laying design, this one most definitely was not.
She stepped up the magnification of her artificial eye, zooming in on the hull number just aft of the forward impeller ring. BC-562, it said, and under that, the name: Nike.
She tasted the name in the depths of her mind, and her feelings were mixed as she gazed at the splendid new ship. This Nike's predecessor had been listed for disposal by the Janacek Admiralty in order to free the name for this new class's lead ship. The sudden eruption of renewed hostilities had saved BC-413 from the breakers, but the name had already been reassigned, so 413 had been renamed Hancock Station. If they'd had to rename her, Honor couldn't really fault the choice, but as that Nike's first captain, she would always think of the older ship as the rightful holder of that name.
And yet, despite her manifold disagreements with the late Edward Janacek and her bitter opposition to so many of his disastrous policies at Admiralty House, she had to admit that this time he might have gotten it right. Nike was the proudest ship name in the Royal Manticoran Navy. There was always a Nike, and she was always a battlecruiser. And when she was commissioned, she was always the newest, most powerful battlecruiser in the fleet.
Yet the old Nike-Hancock Station-was at best obsolescent, despite the fact that she was barely sixteen T-years old. She'd been worked hard during those sixteen years, but it was the changes in weapons and tactics, especially in missile warfare, not senility, which had relegated her to the second rank of effectiveness. In an age of multi-drive missiles, the traditional battlecruiser's niche had altered dramatically, and BC-413 was simply out of date.
Battlecruisers were designed to run down and destroy enemy cruisers, or to raid and run. The ideal commerce protectors, and, conversely, the ideal commerce destroyers. Traditionally, especially in Manticoran service, they weren't intended to stand in the wall of battle, because their relatively light armor and "cruiser style" construction could never stand the pounding superdreadnoughts were expected to endure. They were intended to run away from wallers-to be able to destroy anything lighter than them, and to outrun anything heavier.
Yet the sheer range of the MDM made staying out of effective range far more difficult than it had ever been before, and the emphasis on long-range missile combat required denser salvos and greater magazine space. For a time, it had seemed the battlecruiser had simply become obsolete, as the battleship had before it, and that it would vanish just as completely from the order of battle of first-class navies. But the type-or, at least, the role it filled-was just too valuable to be allowed to disappear, and improvements in compensator efficiency and other aspects of military technology had allowed a transformation.