Uncompromising Honor - eARC by David Weber
“But was it a Solly operation all the way?” Elizabeth demanded.
“Our people at ONI are split over that, Your Majesty.” Rear Admiral Joanna Saleta had been Patricia Givens’s deputy at ONI for the last five years. She didn’t look happy to be sitting in her chair at this table, but she met Elizabeth’s gaze levelly. “The majority is inclined to go along with Commander Lassaline’s view that ecen Sollies would have recognized the insanity of doing something like this. It’s not a very large majority, though, given the sorts of things we’ve seen them do already. And the one thing we do know is that it looks an awful lot like the Sollies, at least the ones who actually planned the op, knew about both Mycroft and that someone—and with the graser torpedoes involved, this has Alignment fingerprints all over it—would clear the way for them. We’ve analyzed their ‘attack run,’ and it’s obvious they never intended a serious strike on the Cassandra yards. They were just occupying our attention, giving us something to focus on so we wouldn’t notice the damned invisible missiles they’d fired at Ivaldi.
“That looks like careful coordination. They knew about Mycroft, they figured their friends could knock back the control stations, and they just miscalculated what Apollo could do even without Mycroft before they got clear. For that matter, if they’d started their breakaway move even fifteen minutes earlier, they would’ve gotten away clean. That’s how close it was.”
“My people don’t feel qualified to analyze the Sollies’ ops plan, Your Majesty,” O’Daley said. “Having said that, I can’t argue with anything Admiral Saleta’s just said. I would point out, however, that even if they were deliberately and knowingly cooperating with the Alignment, Commander Lassaline and Admiral Givens may very well have been right that they didn’t know about the charges aboard the habitats.” His face was drawn, his eyes dark. “I want to blame them for it. I want to have a target, and I want us to rip its heart out. But there are so many arguments against the Mandarins’ doing something like this, something that cuts so sharply against the moral case they’ve been trying to build against us ever since Mesa. Maybe they didn’t have a clue about the bombs. Maybe what this really is is Mesa trying to maneuver us again.”
“Maneuver us to do what, Charlie?” Kent McCoury asked. Two of Sir Anthony Langtry’s three senior deputies had died aboard Beowulf Alpha. McCoury had been left home to hold down the Foreign Office in their absence.
“Into overreacting,” Countess Maiden Hill said before O’Daley could reply. The minister of industry’s voice was cold and hard but a furnace burned in her eyes.
“Overreacting?” William Alexander demanded. “How the hell is it possible to ‘overreact’ to something like this, Charlotte?” The prime minister looked almost as dreadful as his sister-in-law, Elizabeth thought. “Someone’s just killed forty-three million civilians,” he continued, “and none of this would’ve happened if not for the frigging Mandarins! Whether or not they put actual bombs aboard those habitats doesn’t mean squat. If it wasn’t their finger on the button, they were still damned well the ones who made all of this—all of this—happen!”
“With the most profound respect, Countess Maiden Hill, I have to agree with Prime Minister Grantville,” Alfredo Yu said. The Havenite who’d become a Grayson sat in the chair his Protector’s younger brother should have occupied, and his eyes were agates. “We never brought this war to them; they brought it to us, and that makes them responsible for every single person who’s died since New Tuscany.”
“I agree with what you’ve just said, as well, Mr. Prime Minister,” O’Daley said. “But, like the Sollies’ ops plan, I’m not in the best position to evaluate the consequences of hammering the League for this. I think we do need to remember, though, that all our intelligence to date indicates the Alignment is playing a deep game, one it’s been playing for T-centuries, and that they’ve been manipulating entire star nations—including us—for a long, long time. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we need to be as sure as we can that they aren’t goading us into doing something we’ll all wish like hell we hadn’t done somewhere down the road.”
“Mister O’Daley has a point,” Thomas Theisman said heavily. “But there comes a time when you have to respond, whether it’s the smartest thing you could do from a carefully thought out strategic perspective or not.”
Elizabeth forced herself to sit back in her chair. Intellectually, she, too, knew O’Daley had a point. And she knew how valuable someone willing to argue against the consensus of her other advisors truly was. But she didn’t want him to have a point. It was the Cromarty assassination all over again, on a vastly greater scale. This time dozens of men and women who’d been not simply her most trusted advisors and allies for years but personal friends had been wiped away. Blotted out as if they’d never existed. And those personal friends put faces on all those millions of other unknown dead. They made that horrendous casualty count real in a way nothing else could have, however hard she might have tried to empathize with the survivors they’d left behind.
She looked around the table again, seeing the rage in Grantville’s eyes, the fury behind Alfredo Yu’s stony control. Saleta looked just as angry, and so did Theisman. But it was Honor who truly frightened her, because there was no emotion at all in her expression, and Nimitz was as barricaded from Ariel and the other ’cats as Honor herself.
What do I do now? the empress wondered bleakly. I know exactly what the bastards are trying to do, if O’Daley’s right and this was a manipulation. They want us to carry out reprisals against the Solarian League, to punish the League—the Sol System—by doing to it exactly what the League would’ve done to anyone else who violated the Eridani Edict. What it has done to other people who violated it. Because if we do—if we go storming into the Sol System itself, smash everything in sight, since that’s almost certainly where this attack originated—what the Sollies are feeling about us right now will turn infinitely uglier and set itself in ceramacrete. They’ll never forgive us if we kill millions of people in the entire human race’s home star system, whatever justification we might offer—might actually have. It won’t matter whether it takes ten years, or thirty, or a hundred, either. Sooner or later, they will exact their revenge…just as surely as we would in their place. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying so hard to avoid from the beginning! But Theisman’s right, too. We can’t not respond to this…unless we want the murderous bastards to do it again and again while the frigging Mandarins go right on enabling them every step of the way.
“It doesn’t matter,” Honor Alexander-Harrington said into the ringing silence. It was the first time she’d spoken, and Elizabeth could hear the ice crystals in that soprano, taste the searing rage under that frozen surface.
“None of it matters,” Honor said. “We’ve been patient. We’ve waited. We’ve tried to minimize the death toll, tried to be the voice of sanity. We’ve tried…and none of it matters one damned bit to those men and women in Old Chicago. They don’t care how much destruction there is. They don’t care who dies. And if that’s the way they want it, sobeit.” She looked around the conference room and Nimitz raised his head, his ears flat, his fangs half-bared. “I’m through taking the ‘long view.’ It doesn’t matter who did it. What matters is that it has to end, Elizabeth.” Those icy brown eyes locked with her monarch’s. “It has to end now.”
Harrington House
City of Landing
Planet of Manticore
Manticore Binary System System
“Well, I guess that’s everything.”
Honor Alexander-Harrington stood in the quiet library. Rain pounded the skylight overhead. It was barely midafternoon, but the overcast day was dark and murky, and somehow it felt cold, despite Landing’s warmth. She listened to the rain as she looked around her at all the familiar furnishings, the shelved books, the paintings, the subdued lighting. But she didn’t really see any of it, and she looked like a stranger standing in someone else’s house, unable to understand how she’d come there.
“If you’re sure,” her mother said.
Allison stood beside Honor with Katherine in her arms. Raoul was in the nursery. He burst into sobs anytime Honor was in the same room as him, clinging to her with desperate strength. She didn’t know exactly how it worked, but there was no question that he was able to taste her emotions, whether or not he could truly feel anyone else’s. She needed to cling to him as desperately as he needed to cling to her, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t inflict that on him, not now, not when he was only a baby and no one could possibly explain it to him. And so she’d handed him as gently as she could to Lindsey Phillips and walked out of that nursery, heart breaking at his sobbed “Mama! Want Mama!” from behind her. Now he lay exhausted in his crib, and the White Haven treecats huddled around him like guardian gargoyles, somehow blunting the worst of his sorrow and fear. Katherine was subdued, obviously aware something terrible had happened, yet at least she’d been spared the terrible weight of someone else’s grief, and Honor reached out to lay a gentle hand on the little girl’s head.
For a moment, something seemed alive behind the frozen flint of her eyes, but then she took her hand from Katherine’s head and whatever it had been disappeared once again into the ice.
“I have to get back to the ship. We’ve got a lot to do, and I don’t want to lose the time window.”
“If you’re sure,” Allison repeated with a very different emphasis and Honor looked at her.
Honor had raised every barrier she could against the emotions of those about her. Her ability to feel what others felt wasn’t something she could turn off or on. It simply was, an inescapable part of who she’d become over the years. She had learned to…adjust the volume, though, and she needed that now. Needed it because the loss and the pain, the fury and the sympathy pouring into her and Nimitz from everyone around them threatened to drag them under. That tide of emotion threatened to break her concentration. Threatened to divert her from the task before her, and nothing could be permitted to do that.
But her mother’s very special anguish could not be escaped. The grief over the death of her beloved twin brother. The knowledge of how Jacques’s death, especially like this, would hammer all of Alfred Harrington’s wounds from the Yawata Strike. The aching sense of loss for a son-in-law and, especially, a daughter-in-law she’d come to love dearly. The knowledge that dozens of other friends, family, must have died aboard the Beowulf habitats with Jacques and Hamish.
And fear. Fear for her daughter.
“I’m sure, Mother.” There was no emotion in Honor’s voice, but she managed a brief caricature of a smile. It vanished quickly, and her nostrils flared as she reached up to the silent, grieving treecat on her shoulder. “Like I told Elizabeth, this has to end. And I’m going to end it, once and for all.”
Allison shifted Katherine’s weight so she could lay one hand on Honor’s arm.
“I know you are, sweetheart.” Her voice was calm, almost serene, despite the tears glittering on her lashes, and she shook her head. “I know that, believe me. But you come back to me. Raoul and Katherine need you now, more than ever. And your father and I—We’ll always need you, Honor. So you come back to us.”
“Mother, I’ll be aboard the fleet flagship.” She managed another fleeting smile. “The Sollies don’t have a thing that could touch her in a standup fight. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we just didn’t make that clear enough.” A very different expression replaced the smile, and her frozen eyes filled with a chill, flickering fire. “That’s one of the oversights I intend to set right.”
She felt Allison’s concern spike higher, but she refused to allow it in, denied it access to the frozen helium of her purpose. She knew what Allison really meant. Knew what her mother really wanted to say was “Give me back my daughter and take away this stranger. Give me back the person who still knows how to love, how to care. Give me back my child and give back the mother my grandchildren need.”
But Honor didn’t know if she could do that.
She didn’t know if anyone could do that.
She reached out, touched her mother’s cheek very gently, and her thumb brushed away one of Allison’s tears.
“Take care of Daddy and the babies,” she said softly.
“Of course I will.”
“I know.”
She leaned close, kissed Katherine’s cheek, then leaned her forehead against her mother’s for a long, still moment.
And then Honor Alexander-Harrington, Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, turned and walked out of that foyer, into the driving Landing rain, down the steps to the waiting air car, without a backward glance.
HMS Imperator
In Hyper-Space
“Will there be anything else, Ma’am?”
Honor looked up from her plate at the quiet question. James MacGuiness stood at her shoulder, holding the carafe of cocoa, his gray eyes dark.
“No, Mac.” She shook her head. “No, that’s fine. I think we’re both done.”
“Are you sure?” He tried so hard to keep the anxiety out of his voice, but she tasted it anyway.
“Yes,” she said, as gently as she could. “I’m sure. Thank you.” She reached out to lay one hand gently on his forearm. “That’s from Nimitz, too.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” It came out husky and he set the cocoa on the dining cabin table, then ducked his head. “Just…just buzz if you change your mind.”
“I will.” She tried to smile at him. She failed. “I promise.”
He looked at her a moment longer, then nodded once and disappeared, and Honor looked back at the largely untouched food on her plate. The steak had been perfect, with the cool red center she loved. The salad, the baked potato, the stein of Old Tillman…all the components of one of her favorite meals.
And she’d eaten less than half of it.
She gazed at it for a few more seconds, then sighed and pushed back her chair.
She stood, gathering Nimitz into her arms, and crossed the deck. She stood in the hatch between the dining cabin and her day cabin and looked at the portrait on the bulkhead above her desk. Her mother had taken that picture in the White Haven family chapel. Honor stood between Hamish and Emily, holding Emily’s hand, her eyes glowing as Hamish faced Reverend Sullivan and recited his wedding vows. Nimitz rode her shoulder and Samantha perched on Hamish’s, and she tasted Nimitz’s pain as he, too, looked at the people they would never see again. Despite his thick coat, she thought she could feel his ribs, but that was probably imagination. Both of them were losing weight, but it had been less than three days since that last hideous afternoon at White Haven.
She knew why MacGuiness was worried. Just as she knew he, too, was grieving. She wished there was some way, any way, she could ease her steward’s—her friend’s—pain, but there wasn’t. She didn’t have it in her. She had nothing in her except a vast, singing emptiness where the people she’d loved should have been. Nothing except the single unwavering purpose left to her. The deadly determination, colder than the vacuum outside her flagship’s hull, more focused—and far more lethal—than any warhead or broadside graser.
She had no idea what would happen to her—and to Nimitz—when that purpose, that determination, had been discharged. She didn’t care. It was all she and Nimitz had, all the universe had left them. She didn’t know what the opposition would be, had less current information on her objective’s defenses than she’d had before any other operation in the last ten T-years. But she knew two things. She knew the Sollies couldn’t possibly expect her this soon, and she knew she would accomplish her purpose, her mission, even if Hell itself stood in her way.
What happened after that could take care of itself.
She stood another long, still moment, looking at that image of murdered love, cradling her beloved dead. Then she set Nimitz gently on the perch beside her desk, sat in her own chair, keyed her terminal, and punched up Grand Fleet’s order of battle.
BSDS Hawthorne
Beowulf Pl
anetary Orbit
Beowulf System
“Sorry, Skipper. I know you don’t want any coms that aren’t essential, but I think you’d better take this one.”
Captain John Neitz looked up from his cup of coffee and tried not to scowl at his executive officer. Commander Badilotti and he had been friends for years, and the XO’s eyes were as exhausted as his own. They were also apologetic.
“Why is that, David?” It came out testier than he’d intended it to, and he shook his head in a quick apology of his own. “Sorry.”
“No sweat, Skip,” Badilotti said. “But like I say, I think you’ll want to take this one. It’s Christina.”
Neitz set his cup in the holder on his command chair’s arm and inhaled.
“For once, I think you’re right about something,” he said with a weary smile, and Badilotti’s lips twitched in brief response. Then Neitz looked over his shoulder at the com officer. “Patch it through to my uni-link, please, Carla.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Neitz leaned back in his command chair. It was one of the most comfortable chairs in the known galaxy, but somehow it wasn’t quite capable of feeling that way for a body as tired as his was.
“John?” a beloved voice said in his ear, and he closed his eyes while he savored it.
“Hi, honey,” he responded.
“I hate to disturb you,” Christina Neitz said. “I know you’re all exhausted and going crazy up there.”
“There are disturbances, and then there are disturbances, sweetheart.” He shook his head, even though she couldn’t see it. “Trust me, this is one I don’t mind. In fact, it’s one I think I need.”
“It must be like visiting hell,” she said softly.
“You got that one right, babe,” he replied. “My God, you got that one right.”
She was silent for a moment, and Neitz could almost physically feel her reaching across the thousands of kilometers of vacuum between BSDS Hawthorne and Columbia. Christina was a senior attorney in the Directorate of Justice, and things must be almost as crazy in her office as they were up here, he thought. Her boss, Debra Ophir-Giacconi, the Board of Directors’ Solicitor, and her senior deputy had both been aboard Beowulf Alpha. He wasn’t sure who Ophir-Giacconi’s surviving senior deputy was now, but a hellacious workload had to be coming down on Christina, too.
“Our people at ONI are split over that, Your Majesty.” Rear Admiral Joanna Saleta had been Patricia Givens’s deputy at ONI for the last five years. She didn’t look happy to be sitting in her chair at this table, but she met Elizabeth’s gaze levelly. “The majority is inclined to go along with Commander Lassaline’s view that ecen Sollies would have recognized the insanity of doing something like this. It’s not a very large majority, though, given the sorts of things we’ve seen them do already. And the one thing we do know is that it looks an awful lot like the Sollies, at least the ones who actually planned the op, knew about both Mycroft and that someone—and with the graser torpedoes involved, this has Alignment fingerprints all over it—would clear the way for them. We’ve analyzed their ‘attack run,’ and it’s obvious they never intended a serious strike on the Cassandra yards. They were just occupying our attention, giving us something to focus on so we wouldn’t notice the damned invisible missiles they’d fired at Ivaldi.
“That looks like careful coordination. They knew about Mycroft, they figured their friends could knock back the control stations, and they just miscalculated what Apollo could do even without Mycroft before they got clear. For that matter, if they’d started their breakaway move even fifteen minutes earlier, they would’ve gotten away clean. That’s how close it was.”
“My people don’t feel qualified to analyze the Sollies’ ops plan, Your Majesty,” O’Daley said. “Having said that, I can’t argue with anything Admiral Saleta’s just said. I would point out, however, that even if they were deliberately and knowingly cooperating with the Alignment, Commander Lassaline and Admiral Givens may very well have been right that they didn’t know about the charges aboard the habitats.” His face was drawn, his eyes dark. “I want to blame them for it. I want to have a target, and I want us to rip its heart out. But there are so many arguments against the Mandarins’ doing something like this, something that cuts so sharply against the moral case they’ve been trying to build against us ever since Mesa. Maybe they didn’t have a clue about the bombs. Maybe what this really is is Mesa trying to maneuver us again.”
“Maneuver us to do what, Charlie?” Kent McCoury asked. Two of Sir Anthony Langtry’s three senior deputies had died aboard Beowulf Alpha. McCoury had been left home to hold down the Foreign Office in their absence.
“Into overreacting,” Countess Maiden Hill said before O’Daley could reply. The minister of industry’s voice was cold and hard but a furnace burned in her eyes.
“Overreacting?” William Alexander demanded. “How the hell is it possible to ‘overreact’ to something like this, Charlotte?” The prime minister looked almost as dreadful as his sister-in-law, Elizabeth thought. “Someone’s just killed forty-three million civilians,” he continued, “and none of this would’ve happened if not for the frigging Mandarins! Whether or not they put actual bombs aboard those habitats doesn’t mean squat. If it wasn’t their finger on the button, they were still damned well the ones who made all of this—all of this—happen!”
“With the most profound respect, Countess Maiden Hill, I have to agree with Prime Minister Grantville,” Alfredo Yu said. The Havenite who’d become a Grayson sat in the chair his Protector’s younger brother should have occupied, and his eyes were agates. “We never brought this war to them; they brought it to us, and that makes them responsible for every single person who’s died since New Tuscany.”
“I agree with what you’ve just said, as well, Mr. Prime Minister,” O’Daley said. “But, like the Sollies’ ops plan, I’m not in the best position to evaluate the consequences of hammering the League for this. I think we do need to remember, though, that all our intelligence to date indicates the Alignment is playing a deep game, one it’s been playing for T-centuries, and that they’ve been manipulating entire star nations—including us—for a long, long time. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we need to be as sure as we can that they aren’t goading us into doing something we’ll all wish like hell we hadn’t done somewhere down the road.”
“Mister O’Daley has a point,” Thomas Theisman said heavily. “But there comes a time when you have to respond, whether it’s the smartest thing you could do from a carefully thought out strategic perspective or not.”
Elizabeth forced herself to sit back in her chair. Intellectually, she, too, knew O’Daley had a point. And she knew how valuable someone willing to argue against the consensus of her other advisors truly was. But she didn’t want him to have a point. It was the Cromarty assassination all over again, on a vastly greater scale. This time dozens of men and women who’d been not simply her most trusted advisors and allies for years but personal friends had been wiped away. Blotted out as if they’d never existed. And those personal friends put faces on all those millions of other unknown dead. They made that horrendous casualty count real in a way nothing else could have, however hard she might have tried to empathize with the survivors they’d left behind.
She looked around the table again, seeing the rage in Grantville’s eyes, the fury behind Alfredo Yu’s stony control. Saleta looked just as angry, and so did Theisman. But it was Honor who truly frightened her, because there was no emotion at all in her expression, and Nimitz was as barricaded from Ariel and the other ’cats as Honor herself.
What do I do now? the empress wondered bleakly. I know exactly what the bastards are trying to do, if O’Daley’s right and this was a manipulation. They want us to carry out reprisals against the Solarian League, to punish the League—the Sol System—by doing to it exactly what the League would’ve done to anyone else who violated the Eridani Edict. What it has done to other people who violated it. Because if we do—if we go storming into the Sol System itself, smash everything in sight, since that’s almost certainly where this attack originated—what the Sollies are feeling about us right now will turn infinitely uglier and set itself in ceramacrete. They’ll never forgive us if we kill millions of people in the entire human race’s home star system, whatever justification we might offer—might actually have. It won’t matter whether it takes ten years, or thirty, or a hundred, either. Sooner or later, they will exact their revenge…just as surely as we would in their place. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying so hard to avoid from the beginning! But Theisman’s right, too. We can’t not respond to this…unless we want the murderous bastards to do it again and again while the frigging Mandarins go right on enabling them every step of the way.
“It doesn’t matter,” Honor Alexander-Harrington said into the ringing silence. It was the first time she’d spoken, and Elizabeth could hear the ice crystals in that soprano, taste the searing rage under that frozen surface.
“None of it matters,” Honor said. “We’ve been patient. We’ve waited. We’ve tried to minimize the death toll, tried to be the voice of sanity. We’ve tried…and none of it matters one damned bit to those men and women in Old Chicago. They don’t care how much destruction there is. They don’t care who dies. And if that’s the way they want it, sobeit.” She looked around the conference room and Nimitz raised his head, his ears flat, his fangs half-bared. “I’m through taking the ‘long view.’ It doesn’t matter who did it. What matters is that it has to end, Elizabeth.” Those icy brown eyes locked with her monarch’s. “It has to end now.”
Harrington House
City of Landing
Planet of Manticore
Manticore Binary System System
“Well, I guess that’s everything.”
Honor Alexander-Harrington stood in the quiet library. Rain pounded the skylight overhead. It was barely midafternoon, but the overcast day was dark and murky, and somehow it felt cold, despite Landing’s warmth. She listened to the rain as she looked around her at all the familiar furnishings, the shelved books, the paintings, the subdued lighting. But she didn’t really see any of it, and she looked like a stranger standing in someone else’s house, unable to understand how she’d come there.
“If you’re sure,” her mother said.
Allison stood beside Honor with Katherine in her arms. Raoul was in the nursery. He burst into sobs anytime Honor was in the same room as him, clinging to her with desperate strength. She didn’t know exactly how it worked, but there was no question that he was able to taste her emotions, whether or not he could truly feel anyone else’s. She needed to cling to him as desperately as he needed to cling to her, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t inflict that on him, not now, not when he was only a baby and no one could possibly explain it to him. And so she’d handed him as gently as she could to Lindsey Phillips and walked out of that nursery, heart breaking at his sobbed “Mama! Want Mama!” from behind her. Now he lay exhausted in his crib, and the White Haven treecats huddled around him like guardian gargoyles, somehow blunting the worst of his sorrow and fear. Katherine was subdued, obviously aware something terrible had happened, yet at least she’d been spared the terrible weight of someone else’s grief, and Honor reached out to lay a gentle hand on the little girl’s head.
For a moment, something seemed alive behind the frozen flint of her eyes, but then she took her hand from Katherine’s head and whatever it had been disappeared once again into the ice.
“I have to get back to the ship. We’ve got a lot to do, and I don’t want to lose the time window.”
“If you’re sure,” Allison repeated with a very different emphasis and Honor looked at her.
Honor had raised every barrier she could against the emotions of those about her. Her ability to feel what others felt wasn’t something she could turn off or on. It simply was, an inescapable part of who she’d become over the years. She had learned to…adjust the volume, though, and she needed that now. Needed it because the loss and the pain, the fury and the sympathy pouring into her and Nimitz from everyone around them threatened to drag them under. That tide of emotion threatened to break her concentration. Threatened to divert her from the task before her, and nothing could be permitted to do that.
But her mother’s very special anguish could not be escaped. The grief over the death of her beloved twin brother. The knowledge of how Jacques’s death, especially like this, would hammer all of Alfred Harrington’s wounds from the Yawata Strike. The aching sense of loss for a son-in-law and, especially, a daughter-in-law she’d come to love dearly. The knowledge that dozens of other friends, family, must have died aboard the Beowulf habitats with Jacques and Hamish.
And fear. Fear for her daughter.
“I’m sure, Mother.” There was no emotion in Honor’s voice, but she managed a brief caricature of a smile. It vanished quickly, and her nostrils flared as she reached up to the silent, grieving treecat on her shoulder. “Like I told Elizabeth, this has to end. And I’m going to end it, once and for all.”
Allison shifted Katherine’s weight so she could lay one hand on Honor’s arm.
“I know you are, sweetheart.” Her voice was calm, almost serene, despite the tears glittering on her lashes, and she shook her head. “I know that, believe me. But you come back to me. Raoul and Katherine need you now, more than ever. And your father and I—We’ll always need you, Honor. So you come back to us.”
“Mother, I’ll be aboard the fleet flagship.” She managed another fleeting smile. “The Sollies don’t have a thing that could touch her in a standup fight. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we just didn’t make that clear enough.” A very different expression replaced the smile, and her frozen eyes filled with a chill, flickering fire. “That’s one of the oversights I intend to set right.”
She felt Allison’s concern spike higher, but she refused to allow it in, denied it access to the frozen helium of her purpose. She knew what Allison really meant. Knew what her mother really wanted to say was “Give me back my daughter and take away this stranger. Give me back the person who still knows how to love, how to care. Give me back my child and give back the mother my grandchildren need.”
But Honor didn’t know if she could do that.
She didn’t know if anyone could do that.
She reached out, touched her mother’s cheek very gently, and her thumb brushed away one of Allison’s tears.
“Take care of Daddy and the babies,” she said softly.
“Of course I will.”
“I know.”
She leaned close, kissed Katherine’s cheek, then leaned her forehead against her mother’s for a long, still moment.
And then Honor Alexander-Harrington, Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, turned and walked out of that foyer, into the driving Landing rain, down the steps to the waiting air car, without a backward glance.
HMS Imperator
In Hyper-Space
“Will there be anything else, Ma’am?”
Honor looked up from her plate at the quiet question. James MacGuiness stood at her shoulder, holding the carafe of cocoa, his gray eyes dark.
“No, Mac.” She shook her head. “No, that’s fine. I think we’re both done.”
“Are you sure?” He tried so hard to keep the anxiety out of his voice, but she tasted it anyway.
“Yes,” she said, as gently as she could. “I’m sure. Thank you.” She reached out to lay one hand gently on his forearm. “That’s from Nimitz, too.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” It came out husky and he set the cocoa on the dining cabin table, then ducked his head. “Just…just buzz if you change your mind.”
“I will.” She tried to smile at him. She failed. “I promise.”
He looked at her a moment longer, then nodded once and disappeared, and Honor looked back at the largely untouched food on her plate. The steak had been perfect, with the cool red center she loved. The salad, the baked potato, the stein of Old Tillman…all the components of one of her favorite meals.
And she’d eaten less than half of it.
She gazed at it for a few more seconds, then sighed and pushed back her chair.
She stood, gathering Nimitz into her arms, and crossed the deck. She stood in the hatch between the dining cabin and her day cabin and looked at the portrait on the bulkhead above her desk. Her mother had taken that picture in the White Haven family chapel. Honor stood between Hamish and Emily, holding Emily’s hand, her eyes glowing as Hamish faced Reverend Sullivan and recited his wedding vows. Nimitz rode her shoulder and Samantha perched on Hamish’s, and she tasted Nimitz’s pain as he, too, looked at the people they would never see again. Despite his thick coat, she thought she could feel his ribs, but that was probably imagination. Both of them were losing weight, but it had been less than three days since that last hideous afternoon at White Haven.
She knew why MacGuiness was worried. Just as she knew he, too, was grieving. She wished there was some way, any way, she could ease her steward’s—her friend’s—pain, but there wasn’t. She didn’t have it in her. She had nothing in her except a vast, singing emptiness where the people she’d loved should have been. Nothing except the single unwavering purpose left to her. The deadly determination, colder than the vacuum outside her flagship’s hull, more focused—and far more lethal—than any warhead or broadside graser.
She had no idea what would happen to her—and to Nimitz—when that purpose, that determination, had been discharged. She didn’t care. It was all she and Nimitz had, all the universe had left them. She didn’t know what the opposition would be, had less current information on her objective’s defenses than she’d had before any other operation in the last ten T-years. But she knew two things. She knew the Sollies couldn’t possibly expect her this soon, and she knew she would accomplish her purpose, her mission, even if Hell itself stood in her way.
What happened after that could take care of itself.
She stood another long, still moment, looking at that image of murdered love, cradling her beloved dead. Then she set Nimitz gently on the perch beside her desk, sat in her own chair, keyed her terminal, and punched up Grand Fleet’s order of battle.
BSDS Hawthorne
Beowulf Pl
Beowulf System
“Sorry, Skipper. I know you don’t want any coms that aren’t essential, but I think you’d better take this one.”
Captain John Neitz looked up from his cup of coffee and tried not to scowl at his executive officer. Commander Badilotti and he had been friends for years, and the XO’s eyes were as exhausted as his own. They were also apologetic.
“Why is that, David?” It came out testier than he’d intended it to, and he shook his head in a quick apology of his own. “Sorry.”
“No sweat, Skip,” Badilotti said. “But like I say, I think you’ll want to take this one. It’s Christina.”
Neitz set his cup in the holder on his command chair’s arm and inhaled.
“For once, I think you’re right about something,” he said with a weary smile, and Badilotti’s lips twitched in brief response. Then Neitz looked over his shoulder at the com officer. “Patch it through to my uni-link, please, Carla.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Neitz leaned back in his command chair. It was one of the most comfortable chairs in the known galaxy, but somehow it wasn’t quite capable of feeling that way for a body as tired as his was.
“John?” a beloved voice said in his ear, and he closed his eyes while he savored it.
“Hi, honey,” he responded.
“I hate to disturb you,” Christina Neitz said. “I know you’re all exhausted and going crazy up there.”
“There are disturbances, and then there are disturbances, sweetheart.” He shook his head, even though she couldn’t see it. “Trust me, this is one I don’t mind. In fact, it’s one I think I need.”
“It must be like visiting hell,” she said softly.
“You got that one right, babe,” he replied. “My God, you got that one right.”
She was silent for a moment, and Neitz could almost physically feel her reaching across the thousands of kilometers of vacuum between BSDS Hawthorne and Columbia. Christina was a senior attorney in the Directorate of Justice, and things must be almost as crazy in her office as they were up here, he thought. Her boss, Debra Ophir-Giacconi, the Board of Directors’ Solicitor, and her senior deputy had both been aboard Beowulf Alpha. He wasn’t sure who Ophir-Giacconi’s surviving senior deputy was now, but a hellacious workload had to be coming down on Christina, too.