Uncompromising honor, p.85
Uncompromising Honor, page 85
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
“It’s just—” Sandra Thurston began, then paused and looked across at Sergeant McClure. Emily’s personal armsman looked back at her, and Thurston drew a deep breath. “All right, Milady,” she said just a bit sternly. “You won’t hear any more ‘fussing’ out of me, but only if you discuss it with Her Grace.”
Emily’s smile disappeared and her eyes flashed, but Thurston held her ground.
“You need to discuss it with her, Milady,” she said more gently. “You know you do.”
“Honor has enough on her mind,” Emily retorted.
“I agree. But you still need to tell her.” Thurston shook her head. “I’m not making any horrible predictions!” she added quickly. “But, by the same token, you can’t let this blindside her, Milady. I know you too well to think you want to do that.”
Emily glowered at her for a moment, but then she drew a deep breath.
“You’re probably right,” she conceded. “And it’s not like there won’t be plenty of good news to go with it.”
“No, Milady,” Thurston agreed, reaching down to rest one hand lightly on her charge’s frail shoulder. “No, Milady, it’s not like there won’t be plenty of good news.”
“Well, in that case,” Emily said, resuming her progress across the White Haven landing pad towards the front door, where Nico Havenhurst awaited them, “I think the first thing you and I need to do is to take another look at the nursery.” She smiled as Sun Heart and Bark Master came bounding across the lawn. “I’m thinking Raoul and Katherine are old enough for toddler beds, and that means—”
She paused, then stopped her chair and turned it to the east, looking back the way they’d come, and her eyebrows rose.
“Jefferson? Were we expecting anyone else this afternoon?”
“No, My Lady.” Sergeant McClure had already turned in the same direction and his eyes narrowed as he squinted upward. “We’re not.”
He pressed the fingers of his left hand lightly to his earbug, never lowering his searching gaze from the incoming thunderclouds, while his right hand drifted towards his holstered pulser.
“Central, McClure,” he said, calling in to the Steadholder’s Guard command center. “Do we have an ID on the incoming?”
He listened for a moment, then smiled broadly and took his hand away from the pulser butt.
“It’s all right, My Lady. It’s cleared with Central. In fact, it’s the Steadholder.”
“Honor!” Emily’s weariness disappeared, and she sent her life-support chair drifting back towards the pad. Sun Heart leapt lightly into her lap, hitting the moving target with the casual ease of long practice, and Emily chuckled. She ran her good hand lightly down the treecat’s back, and Sun Heart buzzed with pleasure.
The distant turbine whine resolved itself into grumbling thunder and Emily’s eyes widened in surprise as its source emerged from the clouds. It wasn’t an air car. It wasn’t even a shuttle. It was a Condor II, an all-up Navy pinnace, and she saw HMS Imperator’s hull number blazoned just in front of its forward hatch as it flared and settled on its counter-grav.
That hatch opened, the landing stairs deployed, and a tall figure in black and gold came down them. Three more figures—these in the green-on-green of the Harrington Guard—came down the steps at her heels, and she paused as she caught sight of Emily, Thurston, and McClure. She stood still for a moment, then squared her shoulders and started toward them, and Sun Heart raised her head and stopped purring.
“Honor! Welcome home!” Emily called.
Honor Alexander-Harrington felt her expression tighten. She wanted to stop. She wanted to turn around, re-board the pinnace. She wanted to—
What she did was draw a deep breath and keep walking while Nimitz sat still and silent on her shoulder. Her pinnace’s flight crew had violated at least a dozen flight regulations to get her here in time, before the news leaked to the public boards. Before Emily could hear it from anyone else. And she could tell from her wife’s happy greeting that she’d made it.
And, oh God, how a part of her wished she hadn’t.
“It’s good to see you,” Emily said as she drew closer, and Honor tasted her mind-glow, tasted the ever present edge of sorrow, the weariness that went deeper than the merely physical. There was a bubble of joy and anticipation in it this time, though.
“We just got back from Briarwood,” Emily continued. “Dr. Illescue says the fertilization went perfectly! And as soon as we can work it into your schedule, he thinks we should—”
The happy voice broke off as Honor’s expression registered. Emily’s hand stilled on Sun Heart’s coat, and the treecat reached up, her green eyes dark and still, and patted her wrist with a gentle true-hand. Emily’s gaze flitted to Nimitz, and her mouth tightened. The ’cat sat hunched on his person’s shoulder, the normal mischief in his green eyes quenched, his tail hanging.
“Honor?”
Honor went to her knees beside the life-support chair. She reached out and caught Emily’s live hand, leaned forward, pressed her cheek against Emily’s shoulder.
“Honor?” Emily repeated, her voice a bit sharper, her hand tightening on Honor’s.
“I’m sorry, Emily.” Honor closed her eyes. “The Sollies attacked Beowulf. We just heard. Imperator’s in Manticore orbit. We receipted the report even before Mount Royal.” Her voice seemed to waver for a moment and she cleared her throat. “I don’t have the numbers yet,” she husked, “and I’m not sure yet how they got past Mycroft. It may be a while before we figure that out. But…but they hit the habitats, Emily. Gamma…Beta—”
Her voice broke, and her shoulders began to shake. Emily tugged her hand out of hers and cupped the back of her head.
“And Alpha,” Emily Alexander-Harrington finished very, very softly, tears fogging her own voice, and Honor nodded convulsively, unable to speak.
She felt Emily’s hand tighten on the back of her head, felt Emily’s grief rising with her own, but then she sensed something else under it, as well. A sudden stab of pain that was more than just emotional, more than just spiritual agony.
“Emily?” She pulled back, tear-soaked eyes wide, sudden tension burring her voice.
“I’m sorry, Honor.” Emily sounded hoarse, breathless. “I’m so sorry.”
“Emily!” Honor felt Emily’s mind-glow rising up, wrapped in grief and yet incredibly powerful, filled with bottomless sorrow…and blazing with boundless love.
“Forgive me, sweetheart.” Emily’s voice was a whisper, fading even as she spoke. “I didn’t want it to be like this. I wanted you and Hamish to have each other when—”
“Emily!” The cry ripped out of Honor Alexander-Harrington. She wrapped her arms around the frail body, crushing it in her desperate embrace, even as her mind fought to hold onto that blazing mind-glow. “Emily, no! No!”
“I love you,” the three words were soft, barely a sigh, heard more with heart than with ears, and then that glorious mind-glow went out forever.
Mount Royal Palace
City of Landing
Manticore
Manticore Binary System
Star Empire of Manticore
Empress Elizabeth III looked at the men and women around the gleaming ferran wood table and thought about the other men and women she would never see again.
What was already being called the Beowulf Strike was less than eighteen hours old, and it was unlikely they’d know the final death toll for several days yet. Probably weeks.
And possibly, she told herself drearily, and most probably of all, we’ll never know it.
Frantic search and rescue operations were underway, although the odds of recovering more than a handful alive were minute. No one would be calling them off anytime soon, though. If anyone understood how that worked, it was a Manticoran who’d survived the Yawata Strike.
But one thing they did know: the Beowulf Strike’s confirmed death toll was already over forty-three million.
Forty-three million, including Sir Thomas Caparelli, Patricia Givens, Lucien Cortez, Anthony Langtry, Tyler Abercrombie, Francine Maurier, Barton Salgado, Gabriel Caddell-Markham, Jukka Longacre, Joshua Pinder-Swun, Judah Yanakov, Michael Mayhew, and—
Elizabeth’s eyes strayed to the stonefaced woman at the far end of the table and the cream-and-gray treecat huddled on the back of her chair. She’d never seen Honor Alexander-Harrington look that way. Never seen those dark eyes so frozen, colder than interstellar space itself. Never seen such dreadful, elemental purpose. Such focus.
“We’ll be a while confirming anything, I’m afraid, Your Majesty,” Charles O’Daley said somberly. The man who would almost certainly be confirmed as Barton Salgado’s successor at SIS let his eyes circle the table, and his aristocratic drawl was nowhere to be heard. “What we have confirmed is that the explosions were definitely internal, from devices they somehow placed aboard the habitats. And the timing was a message. It was precise to the second: five minutes between the first and the second detonations; ten between the second and the third. I suppose we’re lucky they were able to get only three of the damned things into position.” He seemed to settle deeper into his chair, his nostrils flaring. “At the moment, though, it’s a little hard to feel grateful for anything.”
“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 even 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, Mister 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.”
“Mr. 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 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, so be it.” She looked around the conference room and Nimitz raised his head, his ears flat, his fangs half-bared. “We’ve always known something might change our strategic calculus. That was always part of our thinking…and now it damned well has. 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
“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 dreadful 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.
