Mission of Honor

Mission of Honor is a science fiction novel by the American writer David Weber, published in 2010 and the twelfth book in the main Honor Harrington series.

The story opens in January 1922 of the series' calendar, with the Star Empire of Manticore still at war with the Republic of Haven and facing a second and far larger opponent in the Solarian League. Manticore's weapons and missile defences are better than anything the League can put in the field, but the League has more than ten thousand capital ships, and the consequences of the two powers blundering into each other are measured in billions of lives. Honor Alexander-Harrington, now a duchess and an admiral, argues that the Havenite war has to be settled before that happens, and travels to the Haven System in a civilian yacht, escorted by her own Eighth Fleet, to offer terms. What she cannot know is that the shadow government on Mesa has been working for years to keep Manticore and the League at each other's throats, and that it has already launched a strike against the Manticore home system that the Star Empire's sensors have not detected. Weber moves between the diplomatic negotiations, the politics of the Havenite republic and the battle preparation aboard ship, and the novel's tension comes from the reader knowing about at least one danger the characters do not.