Mission of Honor
David Weber
Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
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 © 2010 by David Weber
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
ISBN10: 1-4391-3361-1
ISBN13: 978-1-4391-3361-3
Cover art by David Mattingly
First printing, July 2010
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data t/k
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America
December, 1921, Post Diaspora
"To understand Solly foreign policy, we'd have to be Sollies
. . . and nothing would be worth that! "
—Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore
Chapter One
Any dictionary editor stymied for an illustration of the word "paralyzed" would have pounced on him in an instant.
In fact, a disinterested observer might have wondered if Innokentiy Arsenovich Kolokoltsov, the Solarian League's Permanent Senior Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, was even breathing as he stared at the images on his display. Shock was part of that paralysis, but only part. And so was disbelief, except that disbelief was far too pale a word for what he was feeling at that moment.