Honor frowned and rubbed the tip of her nose, considering how best to explain the apparent incongruity. Beowulf led the explored galaxy in the life sciences and boasted its most advanced genetic engineering facilities, especially in applied eugenics. The rest of humanity had virtually abandoned the entire field for over seven hundred T-years late in the tenth century of the Diaspora, after the specialized combat constructs, bio weapons, and "super soldiers" of Old Earth's Final War had wreaked unbelievable carnage on the mother world. Some historians insisted that only the Warshawski sail and the relief expeditions mounted by other members of the recently formed Solarian League had saved the planet at all, and the Sol System had needed almost five T-centuries of recovery before it regained its preeminent place in the galaxy.
Yet when the rest of humanity recoiled in horror from what it had unleashed, Beowulf did nothing of the sort. Probably, Honor thought, because Beowulfans had never gone as overboard with the concept of "improving the breed" from the beginning. The oldest of Old Earth's daughter colonies, Beowulf had evolved its own bio-sciences code well before the Final War, and that code had prohibited most of the excesses other worlds had embraced. Nor had there been as much pressure on the Beowulfan medical establishment to join the general retreat as one might have expected, for it had been researchers from Beowulf who'd tackled and defeated, one by one, the hideous diseases and genetic damage the Final War had inflicted on Old Earth's survivors.
Yet even today, almost a thousand T-years later, Beowulf maintained its code. Perhaps it was even more rigorous than it had been then, in fact. The Star Kingdom of Manticore, like most planets with decent medical science, made no legal or ethical distinction between "natural born" children and embryos brought to term in vitro. There were compelling arguments in favor of tubing, as the process was still known, not least because of the way the fetus could be monitored and the relative ease with which defects could be corrected. And, of course, it had immense appeal for career women, especially for servicewomen like Honor herself. But Beowulf rejected the practice.
Beowulf medicine, medical ethics and 'tubing' technology.
"Personally, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they maintained their eugenics programs when everyone else rejected them. It was . . . oh, a sort of gesture to reassure the rest of the galaxy that they weren't going to do any wild tinkering with human genotypes. And they don't, you know. They've always favored a gradualist approach. They'll work right up to the natural limits of the available genetic material, but they won't go a millimeter beyond that in humans. I suppose you might argue that they crossed the line when they came up with the prolong process, but they didn't really change anything in the process. They only convinced a couple of gene groups to work a bit differently for two or three centuries. On the other hand, their insistence on natural childbearing is more than just a gesture to the rest of us, too. Mother says the official reason is a desire to avoid 'reproductive techno dependency,' but she smiles a lot when she says it, and once or twice she's admitted there's more to it."
Why Beowulf doesn't use tubing tech except in cases of medical necessity.
"Oh, don't worry about that! Uncle Henri thought it was going to turn into some sort of expensive toy, too. Until Marketing got wind of it, that is." Honor looked surprised, and Paul grinned. "You're not the only person with a treecat, Dame Honor. We supply about a third of the modules people buy for them, and the people who sell the other two-thirds are going to be very unhappy when we start marketing skinsuits for them! You have no idea how flattering it is to be considered a prodigy after all these disappointing years."
Tankersley and family (who design and sell skinsuits and life support modules like Nimitz has) come up with a treecat skinsuit.
He saw the iron-faced admiral once more, his eyes shouting out the disgust his regulation expression hid, as he read the court-martial's sentence aloud. He saw the watching ranks of black and gold while the snouts of HD cameras peered pitilessly down from vantage points and hovering air cars. He saw the junior-grade lieutenant marching forward, the brisk, impersonal movement of his gloved hands belied by the contempt in his eyes as they ripped the golden planets of a senior-grade captain from the collar of his mess dress uniform. The braid on his cuffs followed. It had been specially prepared for the event, tacked to his sleeves with a few fragile stitches that popped and tore with dreadful clarity in the silence. Then it was the medal ribbons on his chest, his shoulder boards, the unit patch with his last ship's name, the gold and scarlet Navy flash from his right shoulder.
He'd wanted to scream at them all. To spit upon their stupid concept of honor and reject their right to judge. But he couldn't. The shock and shame had cut too deep, the numbed horror of it had frozen him, and so he'd stood rigidly at attention, unable to do anything else, as the lieutenant removed the beret from his head. The white beret of a starship's commander, badged with the Kingdom's arms. Gloved fingers ripped the badge from it and returned it to his head, replacing it with contemptuous dismissal, as if he were a child unable even to dress himself, and still he stood at attention.
But then it was his sword, and he swayed ever so slightly. His eyes closed, unable to watch, as the lieutenant braced the needle-sharp point against the ground, holding it at a forty-five-degree angle, and raised a booted foot. He couldn't see it, but he heard that foot fall, heard the terrible, brittle snap of breaking steel.
He stood before them, no longer a Queen's officer. He stood in a ridiculous black suit, stripped of its finery, its badges of honor, and the breeze picked at the scraps of gold and ribbon which had meant so much more than he'd known before he lost them. The wind rolled them over the manicured grass while the broken halves of his shattered sword glittered at his feet in the brilliant sunlight.
"About face!" The admiral's voice had snapped the command, but it no longer applied to him. His eyes had opened again, against his will. It was as if some outside force were determined to make him watch his final shame as those solid ranks turned their backs upon him in perfect unison.
"Forward, march!" the admiral snapped, and the officers who had not been found wanting obeyed. They marched away from him, with a precision Marines could not have bettered, timed by the slow, measured beat of a single drum, and left him alone and abandoned on the field of his dishonor. . . .
Young's formal discharge, doesn't seem all that traumatic to me, but then it's really all about the ervice dismissing you as beneath contempt.
"It does." North Hollow smiled thinly. "But the Peeps are going to attack us again as soon as they get organized whether we declare war or not. Should they do that while the party still opposes a war vote, it'll only validate the policy Cromarty and his cronies have been advocating all along. And, of course, invalidate the Opposition's."
He paused, watching Osmond's face, and the aide nodded slowly.
"I don't expect the Government to embrace me—not, at least, until the . . . public relations situation dies down. Nor do I expect to play any overt role in the actual tactics of arranging the accommodation. But opening the door by advocating a partnership with the Government despite what it's done to me will be an investment in political capital. Hell, half the Association already realizes we're backing an untenable position. If I give them a way out—especially one that lets whatever deal they strike look like a patriotic gesture—they'll kneel down in line to kiss my ass."
"And the Government will owe you, too, whether it wants to admit it or not," Sakristos murmured.
Young is planning his first address to the House of Lords, in which he plans to argue strongly
for a formal declaration of war with Haven, on the grounds that war is coming whether the politicos like it or not and he'd much rather be in a position to say I told you so later. Aside from ingratiating him to the Government, making a reputation as a statesman willing to rise above the vendetta the Navy pursued against him etc.
"My pleasure, My Lady," he got out, and she managed not to chuckle at the near-awe in his tone. Not that she'd been particularly amused when she first encountered the reverence in which Brentworth's crew held her. They watched her almost worshipfully, with a deference they normally would have offered only to the Protector himself. It had annoyed her immensely—not least because she hadn't had a clue how she should react. But there was nothing sycophantic about it, so she'd settled for just being herself, however they cared to treat her, and it seemed to have been the right tack. Awe had turned into something much more like respect, and they no longer looked as if they wanted to genuflect whenever they met her in a passage.
Funny, you'd think she delivered their entire world from nuclear devastation or someth- oh. But yes, while a lot of the younger Graysons hold her in awe, contact with Honor seems to remind them she's human.
A surprising percentage of their orbital constructs were fortifications, small, perhaps, but heavily refitted now that they had modern technology to work with. And newer, bigger forts were under construction to augment the ones left over from the long Grayson-Masada cold war. She hadn't seen any schematics or blueprints, but she was willing to bet their designs were impressively innovative, too. The Graysons hadn't simply bought off-the-shelf Manticoran designs. They still required advice and technical assistance, but they'd studied their defensive requirements and made their own decisions with formidable self-confidence, just as they had with Alvarez herself. The heavy cruiser mounted barely half as many energy weapons as a Manticoran cruiser would have, yet those she did mount were far heavier, easily a match for most battlecruisers' beams. She couldn't hit as many targets, but the ones she did hit were going to know they'd been nudged. It was a radical departure in warship design, yet it made uncompromising sense, given the increased power of modern energy weapons. And now that she'd seen it, Honor wondered how many other aspects of Manticore's own building policies had been shaped by an unconscious acceptance of outdated conventionality.
There's the line I was looking for about Grayson energy weapons. So they'll take all the technical assistance and advice from Manticore they can get, but still use their own designs and concepts. Good for them.
And the sheer scale of the Graysons' efforts was even more astonishing than their sense of innovation. The planet's entire population was barely two billion, only a quarter of it male, and she doubted that even a tiny fraction of its women had yet been integrated into its workforce, yet they'd already put in—with a great deal of Manticoran assistance, to be sure—not one, or even two, but three modern orbital shipyards. The smallest was easily eight kilometers across, and it was growing steadily . . . all of that despite the fact that they were simultaneously building a modern navy from the keel out.
Everyone say it with me. "Brave KERBAL GRAYSONS racing to the stars over the vacuum-desiccated bodies of their forebears, how bright they burn, what wonders they make!" Seriously though, we're still substantially less than two years after Honor of the Queen, Grayson industry is amazing. Oh, population figures too, 2 billion, as established 75% are women.
She shook her head, marveling silently, as the visual display showed her a quartet of orbiting battlecruisers. They were units of the new Courvosier class, and tears prickled as she watched them. The Grayson Navy had chosen its own way to acknowledge its debt to Admiral Courvosier and the other Manticorans who'd fallen in its home world's defense. Somehow, she thought, the admiral would have found it a fitting tribute . . . once he stopped laughing. But—
The GSN has 4 home-built BCs at this time, named Courvosiers, for the admiral.
When Admiral White Haven ambushed the powerful Havenite fleet that had attacked Yeltsin, eleven of its superdreadnoughts had been forced to surrender intact. Not undamaged, by any means, but in repairable condition, and White Haven and Admiral D'Orville, his immediate Manticoran subordinate, had handed them directly over to Grayson.
-snip-
"We're going to rename that one Manticore's Gift," Brentworth said quietly, and shrugged as Honor looked up at him. "It seemed appropriate, My Lady. I don't know what they've decided to call the others, and they won't be true sisters when we're done with them. We're upgrading their electronics to Manticoran standards and putting the new inertial compensators into each of them, but we're also retaining any weapons that survived. I imagine we'll refit all of them to the same standard once we have time; for right now, we're concentrating on simply getting them back into service as quickly as possible."
And to help Grayson reach true Star Nation status with a serious fleet, Hamish and the Queen let Grayson keep the 11 SDs that surrendered at 3rd Yeltsin. They're still getting upgraded to Manticore/Grayson tech-levels with the EW and the compensators.
"But, tell me, are you recruiting mixed crews?"
"Yes, My Lady, we are." Brentworth shrugged again. "There was some opposition, but those SDs made too big a hole in our personnel. We'd managed to keep up with our own construction, barely, and some of our more conservative types wanted to do the same with them—until they saw the numbers. I'm afraid we're still restricting 'our' female personnel to the capital ships, though."
"Really? Why?"
"Because," Brentworth replied with a slight blush, "the Office of Shipbuilding insisted on separate accommodations for them, and only ships of the wall have the mass for that." Honor blinked in astonishment, and his blush darkened. "I know it sounds silly, My Lady, and High Admiral Matthews argued himself blue over it, but the whole concept is still too new to us. I'm afraid it's going to be a while before we stop doing silly things."
"Don't sweat it, Mark," Honor said after a moment. "Nothing says there's any reason for Grayson to mirror-image Manticoran practice. And one thing you don't want to do is destabilize yourself making changes too quickly."
Woman serving on spaceships, just SDs right now, because they have room for separate facilities. Still, that's a massive leap forward for Grayson.
The bar and its adjoining restaurant were the gathering place of choice for virtually all off-duty personnel for many reasons. One was familiarity. Dempsey's Restaurants, Inc., had been the original flagship corporation of the Dempsey Cartel, second only to the Hauptman Cartel in wealth and power, and virtually every city in the Kingdom boasted at least one Dempsey's of its own. They were everywhere, and everyone knew them, and if the chain couldn't match the eminence of one-of-a-kind establishments like Cosmo's, or emulate the frenetic activity of "cutting edge" night spots, that was fine with its managers, because they didn't want those things. What they did want was visibility and familiarity coupled with a level of service, comfort, and quality guaranteed to attract and hold the loyalty of their patrons (even at Dempsey's prices), and that was precisely what they had achieved.
Dempsey's a ubiquitous Manticoran restaurant chain, that even has a location on Hephaestus. I mention it only because a lot of plot-important things happen here. Always kind of wondered how Honor felt about the place afterwards.
"Young—or North Hollow, now—is, indeed, a peer of the realm," he continued. "Unless he'd been attainted for treason—which he would have been, had he been convicted of cowardice in the face of the enemy—he's legally his father's heir. But the Constitution gives the Lords the right to refuse to seat someone, peer or no, as unfit for membership. It hasn't been done in something like a hundred T-years, but the right to exclude is still there, and not even the Queen can override it if a two-thirds majority of the Lords chooses to exercise it. That's what Burgundy was after when he introduced his motion to consider North Hollow's 'demonstrated lack of character.' "
The Lords can exclude a member by supermajority, like Cathy Montainge. The Duchess of Burgundy, aligned and fancying herself the Lords' conscience, tried to raise a vote to exclude Young.
"Odd." Ramirez rubbed an eyebrow, frowning down into his drink, and made a mental note to report Summervale's presence to Marine Intelligence. They liked to keep track of their own bad apples, even after they were officially "theirs" no longer. "It's probably just a coincidence," he went on thoughtfully, "but I wonder what a paid duelist, who has to know how any Marine who recognizes him is going to react, is doing aboard Hephaestus?"
Sadly, we know. Marines seem to have their own intelligence organ, which among other things keeps track of their former members. The bad ones, at least.
"Honor Stephanie Harrington," Mayhew said quietly, "are you prepared, in the presence of the assembled Steadholders of Grayson, to swear fealty to the Protector and People of Grayson under the eyes of God and His Holy Church?"
"I am, Your Grace, yet I may do so only with two reservations." Honor withdrew her hands from the sword hilt, but there was no refusal in her clear soprano, and Mayhew nodded. He knew what was coming, of course. There'd been quite a bit of discussion over ways to deal with this point.
"It is your ancient and lawful right to state reservations to your oath," he said. "Yet it is also the right of this Conclave to reject those reservations and deny your place, should it find them offensive to it. Do you acknowledge that right?"
-snip
"As Your Grace knows, I am also a subject of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, a member of its peerage, and an officer in the Queen's Navy. As such, I am under obligations I cannot honorably disregard. Nor may I abandon the nation to which I was born or my oaths to my Queen to accept even a steadholder's high office, or swear fealty to Grayson without reserving to myself the right and responsibility to meet and perform my duties to her."
Mayhew nodded once more, then looked over her head at the Conclave.
"My Lords, this seems to me a right and honorable declaration, but the judgment in such matters must be yours. Does any man here dispute this woman's right to hold steading on Grayson with this limitation?"
Silence answered, and the Protector turned back to Honor.
-snip-
"Your Grace, this woman is not of our Faith, yet she has so declared before us all, making no effort to pretend otherwise. More, she stands proven a good and godly woman, one who hazarded her own life and suffered grievous wounds to protect not only our Church but our world when we had no claim upon her. I say to you, and to the Conclave," he turned to face the steadholders, and his resonant voice rose higher and stronger, "that God knows His own. The Church accepts this woman as its champion and defender, whatever the faith through which she may serve God's will in her own life."
Honor formally states her reservations before taking her Steadholders oath, her issues are heard and promptly dealt with.
The Church had learned by horrible example to stay out of politics, but Grayson remained an essentially theocratic world. The Act of Toleration legalizing other faiths was barely a century old, and no steadholder not of the Church had ever held office.
I could be wrong, but I believe that predates contact with the wider galaxy by almost twenty years, in which case I am both surprised and impressed by the Graysons.
That, too, was unprecedented. The Steading of Harrington was the newest on Grayson; as such, she would normally have retired to the horseshoe's far end and uppermost tier after giving her oath, as befitted her steading's lack of seniority. But she also wore the Star of Grayson, and that, though she hadn't known it when the medal was presented, made her Protector's Champion.
She held the sword carefully, praying Nimitz's clawless restraint would last, and walked to the carved wooden desk beside the throne. It bore both her Grayson coat of arms and the crossed swords of the Protector's Champion, and she sighed in relief as Nimitz leapt lightly down onto it..
By virtue of her medal, she is the Protector's Champion. By virtue of that, she sits at the Protector's right hand and not in the nosebleed row on the far side of the room with the rest of the new Steadholders. Also, it was mentioned briefly earlier that Honor's heraldry is a book-and-key beneath an old-school space helmet.
"I mean, you're right about the outcome, of course. And she did save the repair base and its personnel. Including
you."
"What exactly are you implying?" Paul snapped. He felt a wave of stillness rippling out from them, lapping at Dempsey's other patrons. He could hardly believe the effortless speed with which the confrontation had sprung up, the ease and skill with which the other man had provoked him. It couldn't have been an accident. He knew that, but he no longer cared.
"Why, only that her feelings for you—well known feelings, I might add, for anyone who can read a 'fax—may have influenced her." The stranger's voice was an ice-cold sneer. "No doubt it was all dreadfully romantic, but, still, one can't help wondering if the willingness to sacrifice several thousand lives simply to save someone she cared about is really a desirable quality in a military officer. Do you think it is, Captain?"
Paul Tankersley went white. He rose from his barstool with the slow, over-controlled movements of a man hovering on the brink of violence. The stranger was taller than he was, and he looked fit, despite his slim, wiry build, but Paul never doubted he could smash the other into pulp, and he wanted nothing more than to do just that. But the alarm bells were louder and more insistent, even through the red haze of his fury. It had happened too quickly, come at him with too little warning, for him to think clearly, yet not too quickly for him to realize it was deliberate. He had no idea why this man had set out to provoke him, but he sensed the danger in allowing him to succeed.
He drew a deep breath, longing to erase the smiling sneer from that handsome face and leave it far less handsome in the process. He stood for one tense moment, and then, deliberately, turned his back to walk away. But the stranger wasn't done yet. He only stood himself, laughing at Paul's back, and his raised voice carried clearly through the hushed bar.
"Tell me, Captain Tankersley—are you really that good a fuck? Are you so good she was willing to throw away her entire command to save you? Or was it just that she was that desperate to have someone—anyone—between her legs?"
The sudden crudity was too much. It snapped Paul's control, and he whipped back around with death in his face. The other man's sneer slipped for just an instant, and two iron-hard fists caught him before he could even move.
-snip-
He spat a broken tooth onto the floor in a gob of blood and phlegm, then dragged the back of his hand across his gory chin, and his eyes, no longer polished and mocking, glittered with madness.
"You struck me." His voice was thick, slurred with the pain of his smashed mouth and choked with hatred. "You struck me!"
Paul took a half-step towards him, eyes hot, before he could stop himself, but the other man never even flinched. He only stared up from his knees, his face a mask of blood and hate that bordered on outright insanity.
"How dare you lay hands on me?!" he breathed. Paul snarled in contempt and turned away, but that thick, hating voice wasn't finished.
"No one lays hands on me, Tankersley! You'll meet me for this—I demand satisfaction!"
How Paul Tankersley got mousetrapped into a duel with Young's professional duelist. Bonus points in that the duelist is Denver Summervale, cousin to the PM and the guy running that Medusan drug lab back in the first book. You know, the disposable one. He killed an awful lot of NPA agents.
She looked to her left, narrowing her eyes against the brilliant morning sun spilling in through the windows as the door closed behind her latest visitor. Her steadholder's mansion was overly luxurious for her tastes, especially in a new steading with a strained budget, but her own quarters occupied only a tiny portion of Harrington House's total space. The rest was given up to bureaucratic offices, electronic and hardcopy files, communications centers, and all the other paraphernalia of government.
Honor has a Steadholder's Mansion, though it really is mostly the administrative offices for running her Steading properly.
"I'm not blind to the privileged position I held, My Lady, but I don't think that necessarily invalidates my judgment, nor do I see any reason why every world in the galaxy has to ape social patterns which may or may not suit it. And, to be perfectly frank, I don't think Grayson women are ready for the demands the Protector is placing upon them. Leaving aside the question of innate capability—which, I'm surprised to say, is easier to do since I began working with you than I once expected it to be—they don't have the training for it. I suspect many of them will be desperately unhappy trying to adjust to the changes. I shudder whenever I think about the consequences for our traditional family life, and it's not easy for the Church to make the transition, either. Besides, deep down inside I can't put aside an entire lifetime of thinking one way and start thinking another way just because someone tells me to."
Honor nodded slowly. The first time she'd met Howard Clinkscales, she'd thought he was a dinosaur, and perhaps he was. But there was nothing apologetic or even particularly defensive in his tone or manner. He didn't like the changes about him, yet he hadn't responded to them as the unthinking reactionary she'd once thought him, either.
"But whether or not I agree with everything Protector Benjamin does, he is my Protector," Clinkscales went on, "and a majority of the steadholders support him, as well." He shrugged. "Perhaps my doubts will prove unfounded if the new system works. Perhaps they'll even make it work better, by making me a little more aware of the sensibilities we're treading upon—cushioning the blows, as it were. Either way, I have a responsibility to do the best I can. If I can preserve worthwhile parts of our tradition along the way, I will, but I take my oath to Protector Benjamin—and to you, My Lady—seriously."
Howard Clinkscales, former head of planetary security (he was the one who had several Masadan spies tortured off-screen in HotQ) and Honor's Regent while she's on Manticore. One of the most stubbornly conservative men on Grayson, but he takes his oaths to Benjamin and Honor seriously.
"Before you took your seat in the Conclave, some of your people were worried about what would happen with 'that foreign woman' holding steading over them. Now that they're getting to know you, they're rather proud of your, um, eccentricities. This steading's been attracting people who were more eager than most for change from the beginning, My Lady; now a lot of them seem to hope some of your attitudes will rub off on them."
Will be important next book, but Harrington Steading is attracting the more liberal/progressive/reformist/cosmopolitan elements of Grayson society, people who don't mind answering to an offworld woman, as long as she's Honor Harrington, anyway. Not that surprising when you really think about it.
Crystoplast wasn't really all that new, though it might be to a Grayson engineer. The armorplast routinely used in spacecraft was far more advanced; in fact, it had relegated the cheaper crystoplast almost exclusively to civilian industry, where design tolerances could be traded off against cost savings, and it took her a moment to fix the differences between the two of them in her mind.
"All right, Mr. Gerrick," she said. "I'm with you. May I assume this project of yours employs crystoplast?"
"Yes, My Lady." Gerrick leaned forward, the last of his nervousness fading as eagerness took over. "We've never had anything with that much tensile strength—not on Grayson. It offers a whole new range of possibilities for enviro engineering. Why, we could dome whole towns and cities with it!"
Honor nodded in sudden understanding. Grayson's heavy metal concentrations made simple atmospheric dust an all too real danger. Provision for internal over-pressure and filtration systems were as routine in Grayson building codes as roofs were on other planets, and public structures—like Protector's Palace, or her own steadholder's mansion—were built under climate-controlled domes as a matter of course.
Individual buildings are frequently domed for protection on Grayson, but Manticoran engineering can dome hundreds of hectares of land, making surface farming a lot more feasible, to say nothing of doming whole towns.
"Ten million austins, My Lady," the engineer said in a small voice.
Honor nodded. Given the current exchange rate, Gerrick was talking about a seven-and-a-half-million-Manticoran-dollar price tag. That was a bit steeper than she'd thought, but—
Exchange rate between the Grayson Austin and the Manticoran Dollar.
"We're close to our credit limits already, My Lady. A private commercial investment would work, but until we pay down some of our start-up costs, our public borrowing capacity is limited. Much as I would like to see Adam's project tried, I can't advocate further public sector borrowing. We have to maintain some reserve against emergencies."
"I see." Honor drew invisible circles on her blotter with her forefinger, feeling Gerrick's eyes on her while she frowned in thought. Clinkscales was right about their fiscal position. Grayson was a poor planet, and the costs of establishing a new steading were enormous. If she'd known about Gerrick's idea, she would cheerfully have waived the construction of Harrington House, despite Clinkscales' argument that it had been an unavoidable necessity, if only as the steading's administrative center. As it was, Harrington Steading was in the black, barely, for the first time in the two local years since its founding, and that wasn't going to last.
A lot of money has to be borrowed to start a Steading, before they have people to tax. Grayson seems to have slightly short years.
"Mr. Gerrick is about to submit a letter of resignation to the steading. At the same time you accept it—with regrets, of course—I want you to draw up a permit for a privately held corporation called, um, Grayson Sky Domes, Ltd. Mr. Gerrick will go on salary as chief engineer and development officer, with a suitable salary and a thirty percent interest. I'll be chairman of the board, and you'll be our CEO, with another twenty percent interest. My agent on Manticore will be our chief financial officer, and I'll have him cut a check immediately for a few million austins for start-up costs."
Unable to find public funds for the doming projects, Honor invests some of her personal fortune in starting a corporation to dome-over Grayson. It's not like she'll terribly miss seven or eight million dollars now.
Honor stiffened. Agni here? The Manticoran element might explain why Mac was making the call instead of Colonel Hill, but why hadn't Mike written to warn her she was headed for Yeltsin's Star? For that matter, why come down in a pinnace instead of screening her from orbit? If Agni was in small craft range of Grayson, she could have sent a message on ahead hours ago.
-snip-
"What is it, Mike?" She forced her voice to remain level and gentle. "Why didn't you screen me?"
"Because—" Henke drew a deep breath. "Because I had to tell you in person." Each word seemed to cost her physical agony, and she ignored Honor's hands to grip her shoulders.
"Tell me what?" Honor wasn't frightened yet. There hadn't been time, and she was too concerned for her friend.
"Honor, it's—" Henke drew another breath, then pulled her close, hugging her fiercely. "Paul was challenged to a duel," she whispered into Honor's shoulder. "He— Oh, God, Honor! He's dead!"
Honor gets the news about Paul, technically so does the audience but we sort of figured that was coming.
"The caller," Corell continued carefully, "informed me that she would neither answer questions nor repeat herself. That, as I'm sure she intended, assured my full attention. There wasn't time to get a recorder on it, and I can't repeat her exact words, but there wasn't much room for confusion in them.
"According to my caller, Denver Summervale was, indeed, hired to kill Captain Tankersley." Air hissed between teeth around the table. None of them were surprised, but the confirmation still struck like a fist. "In addition," Corell went on very levelly, "he's been retained to kill Dame Honor, as well."
Alistair McKeon's chair fell to the deck as he rose with a murderous snarl, but Corell didn't even flinch. She only nodded, and he made himself bend down to set the chair upright once more, then forced himself to sit back down on it.
"As you all know, Captain Tankersley wounded Summervale," Corell said. "It wasn't a very serious wound, unfortunately, and he used his need for medical attention as an excuse to leave the field, then disappeared on the way to the hospital. For your unofficial information, Marine Intelligence is working on the assumption that he was paid for the job, though neither they nor the Landing Police have been able as yet to turn up any evidence to that effect. In light of that, I had assumed, as the authorities also did, that he intended to remain out of sight, avoiding official scrutiny until the public furor died down, or even that he'd left the system. According to my caller, however, he's simply lying low until Dame Honor returns. He and whoever hired him assume she'll challenge him on sight, at which time he's to kill her, too."
-snip-
"At this moment, according to my caller, he's in hiding in a hunting chalet on Gryphon. I've checked. There is a chalet where she said it was, and the entire facility's been chartered by someone who's provided his own staff for his stay. Its coordinates are listed here, along with the number of fellow 'guests' and 'staff' acting as his bodyguards. Most of them, I suspect, are Organization professionals."
Young's personal habits come back to bite him. He blackmails his security chief (granted, the old man had blackmailed her into the job) into performing humiliating sexual acts with him, proving once and for all that Pavel Young is too stupid to live. She calls Sarnow's chief of staff anonymously and tells them where to find Denver Summervale.
"Then issue me an automatic," she said. "Ten millimeter."
The sergeant looked over Honor's shoulder at his captain. He was a man who'd spent a lifetime with weapons, and the thought of putting one into the hands of a woman who spoke like that frightened him. It frightened Henke, too, but she bit her lip and nodded.
-snip-
"Don't worry, Mike." There was no life, no expression, in Honor's voice, but her mouth moved in a cold, dead travesty of a smile. "Nimitz won't let me do that. Besides," the first trace of feeling touched her face—an ugly, hungry twist of her lips, more sensed than seen and somehow more frightening than anything she'd done or said yet, "I have something more important to do."
On hearing the news of Paul's death, Honor makes immediate arrangements to return home, ignoring everyone's discussions that don't involve that. Then while they wait two days taking on reactor mass (a real need, good) she is in her room nearly catatonic before getting up and going to the range. It's sort of implied that Nimitz is the one reason why she won't suicide or lay down and die, well, Nimitz and revenge. Yeah, this is the book where Honor Harrington becomes the Terminator.
He vanished into the weapons storage, and Henke stepped up to Honor's side. She watched the long fingers tapping memo keys with slow, painful precision, and her own face was troubled. The Star Kingdom's military hadn't used chemical-powered firearms in over three T-centuries, for no firearm ever made could match the single-hit lethality of the hyper-velocity darts of a pulser or pulse rifle. A man hit in the hand by a pulser dart might—if he was very, very lucky—survive with the mere loss of his arm, and that made auto-loading pistols antiques, yet every Manticoran warship carried a few of them, precisely because their wounds were survivable. They were always available, and always in the traditional ten-millimeter caliber, yet never issued for duty use; they had only one function, and as long as duels were legal they were carried for those who wished to practice with them.
Dueling pistols, antiquated 20th century tech, 10 mm with a 10-round clip, automatic. Infinitely more lethal than any weapon real pistol duels were fought with.
Also, a word on the lethality of pulsers, they tend to turn people into a fine red mist.
Colonel Tomas Ramirez and Major Susan Hibson had been shocked by their latest readiness tests. While no one could fault the willingness of HMS Nike's Marine detachment, the entire battalion was sadly out of training. The influx of replacements and corresponding transfer out of experienced personnel had only made bad worse, and Colonel Ramirez and his able exec had concluded that Something Had To Be Done, whether Nike was operational or not. After all, Royal Manticoran Marines shouldn't stand around and lose their edge just because the sissies who ran the Navy broke one of their ships!
A quick memo up the chain of command earned the endorsement of no less a personage than General Dame Erica Vonderhoff, Commanding Officer, Fleet Marine Force. Of course, COFMF couldn't issue orders to the Navy; the best she could do was authorize Ramirez to request troop lift support on an "as available" basis with her blessings.
-snip-
It had seemed Colonel Ramirez would have to settle for Camp Justin after all, but Fate works in mysterious ways. He mentioned his problem to Captain McKeon over a round of drinks one evening, and the captain saw an opportunity to help improve interservice relations. He and Commander Venizelos of HMS Apollo were due to participate in a defensive exercise in Manticore-B, and, with a little crowding, their ships could lift Nike's full Marine detachment plus its pinnaces to Gryphon with just a short hop through hyper.
All very scrupulously clean and aboveboard. Nothing suspicious here, move along.
"Yes, Ma'am. But I'm worried about his nav systems." He met Hibson's gaze with total innocence. "Chief Harkness and I have run a complete diagnostic series without managing to isolate a fault, but I'm pretty sure there is one."
"Oh?" Hibson leaned back and popped her gum thoughtfully. Lieutenant Tremaine hadn't been briefed for the operation, but that didn't seem to have kept him from figuring things out. "Is it bad enough to downcheck the boat?"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that, Ma'am. It's just that the Chief and I would feel better if we were along to ride herd on the systems. And, of course, if something did happen to go wrong, he and I would be on the spot to make repairs . . . and verify the fault for the record."
Yep, clean hands and innocent looks all around. They've even thought ahead to their alibi.
Navy skinsuits were designed primarily for vacuum, with an eye to allowing their wearers to engage in delicate repair work and similarly intricate activities over what could be very lengthy periods indeed. Marine skinnies, on the other hand, while undeniably more comfortable than powered battle armor, were heavier, bulkier, and generally far more of a pain in the ass than Navy gear, because they incorporated light but highly effective body armor and were intended for hostile planetary environments as well as vacuum. As long as the wearer's efficiency wasn't impaired, comfort ran a poor second to toughness under the Marine design philosophy, but even the Corps' most accomplished bitchers had to admit that the worst a Gryphon—or even a Sphinx—winter could offer would do little more than inconvenience a skinsuited Marine. Which, given the mission brief's weather reports, was probably a very good thing.
Differences between Navy and Marine skinsuits. tl;dr Navy skinsuits are meant to survive vacuum and be comfortable to sit in and you can type in them. Marine suits are much more heavily armored, good for a wide variety or environments, but lack comfort.
"Sar'major Babcock, would you mind telling me just what the hell you think you're doing here?" His tone was more resigned than his words might have suggested, and Iris Babcock snapped to attention.
"Sir! The Sergeant-Major respectfully reports that she seems to have become confused, Sir! I was under the impression this was one of Prince Adrian's pinnaces, Colonel."
Ramirez shook his head again. "Won't wash, Gunny. Prince Adrian doesn't even have the Mark Thirty yet."
"Sir, I—"
"Hold it right there." The colonel turned to glare at Francois Ivashko, his own battalion sergeant-major. "I don't suppose you happened to log Sar'major Babcock as an observer supernumerary, did you, Gunny?"
"Uh, no, Sir," Ivashko said. "But—"
"Well, in that case, get her logged now. I'm surprised at you, Gunny! You know how important the proper paperwork is. Now I'm going to have to clear this retroactively with Major Yestachenko and Captain McKeon!"
...
Glad we got that cleared up.
Oh look, that one pinnace with the headquarters platoon had a dodgy nav computer. I guess they'll just have to set down in the middle of the wilderness, maybe seek shelter nearby.
Colonel Ramirez's official ops plan had called for his HQ platoon to play the role of a local quick-reaction defensive force against the rest of his Marines, and, just to make things interesting for the "raiders," he'd armed all the HQ types with stunners instead of the laser-tag rifles and sidearms their fellows carried.
The entire outside security force was down and unconscious before it even realized it was under attack.
Stunners, not used often.
"Who paid you to kill Captain Tankersley, Summervale?"
"Go to—hell, you—son-of-a-bitch!" Summervale gasped.
"That's not nice," Ramirez chided again. "I'm going to have to insist you tell me."
"Why—the fuck—should I?" Summervale actually managed a strangled laugh. "You'll just—kill me—when I do—so fuck you!"
"Mr. Summervale, Mr. Summervale!" Ramirez sighed. "The Captain would have my ass if I killed you, so just answer the question."
"Like hell!" Summervale panted.
"I think you should reconsider," Ramirez said softly, and Scotty Tremaine turned away, his face white, at the sound of his voice. "I only said I wouldn't kill you, Mr. Summervale," the colonel whispered almost lovingly. "I never said I wouldn't hurt you."
This is actually the second time Honor is going to get priceless information from torture, though her hands remain totally clean in both cases. Kind of getting mixed messages there.
"Very good." Henke leaned back in her chair and watched the ugly, comforting bulk of HMSS Hephaestus filling the forward visual display. Agni was well inside the safety perimeter of her own impeller wedge; she'd been on conventional thrusters for the last twenty minutes, but Hephaestus' tractors had her now, drawing her hammerhead bow steadily into the waiting docking bay. All Henke's ship had to do was insure the correctness of her final docking attitude, which required a finicky degree of precision the space station's tractors simply couldn't provide.
Apparently docking is a trifle more complicated and cooperative than I'd assumed, with the ship's thrusters correcting for altitude as the tractors reel them in.
"Thank you." Honor's lips formed a smile that never touched her eyes. Those dark, ice-cored eyes that never warmed, never seemed to blink even on Agni's range. Henke had no idea how many rounds Honor had fired, but she knew she'd spent at least four hours a day there, every day, and her absolute lack of expression as she punched bullet after bullet through the hearts and heads of human holo targets had terrified Henke. She'd moved like a machine, with a dreadful, economic precision that denied any human feeling, as if her very soul had frozen within her.
There's a line I can't seem to find again where Honor compares herself to a glacier, freezing away the pain until she can let it destroy her, implacable and going to destroy both her enemies and herself. We also know she spent the entire week's flight home from Grayson practicing a minimum of four hours a day on the firing range.
"Twelve, then. Are all twelve of you ready to spend that long off Grayson when the Corps is prepared to guarantee Lady Harrington's safety?"
"She won't be aboard ship for that entire time, Sir. Whenever she leaves it, she leaves her Marine sentry behind. And in answer to your question, we aren't off Grayson as long as we're with our Steadholder." Ramirez couldn't quite stop his eyes from rolling upward, and LaFollet allowed himself a small smile. "Nonetheless, Sir, I take your point, and the answer is yes. We're prepared to spend however long we have to off Grayson."
A dozen of Honor's personal armsmen, making up both her bodyguard and the police force of her Steading, follow her home. Led by Major Andrew LaFollet.
"Certainly, Sir. I was assigned to Palace Security prior to the Maccabeus coup attempt. So was my older brother, as a member of Protector Benjamin's personal guard. He was killed, and Lady Harrington not only took over his duty to guard the Protector but killed his murderer with her bare hands—before she went out to protect my entire planet." He met Ramirez's gaze very steadily. "Grayson owes her its freedom; my family owes her life debt for completing the task my brother couldn't and avenging his death. I volunteered for the Harrington Steadholder's Guard the day its formation was announced."
Ramirez leaned further back, his eyes probing. "I see. Forgive me for asking this, Major, but I know from my own reading of the 'faxes that not all Graysons are pleased to have a woman as a steadholder. Given that, are you confident all your men share your feelings?"
"They all volunteered for this specific assignment, Colonel." An edge of frost crept into LaFollet's voice for the first time. "As for their personal motivations, Armsman Candless' father died aboard Covington at the Battle of Blackbird. Corporal Mattingly's older brother died aboard Saul in the same battle. Armsman Yard lost a cousin and an uncle in First Yeltsin; another cousin survived Blackbird only because Lady Harrington insisted that every Grayson life pod be picked up, despite the risk that Saladin would return before they were found. His transponder was damaged, and our sensors couldn't find him; Fearless's could . . . and did. There isn't a man in my detachment—or the entire Guard, for that matter—who didn't join because he owes Lady Harrington a personal debt, but that's only part of it. She's . . . special, Sir. I don't know exactly how to explain it, but—"
All of Honor's personal armsmen owe her a personal debt of some kind for her actions in the second book.
"The second reason I screened," he continued, "was to inform you that, during your absence, Parliament finally voted out the declaration of war. We resumed active operations against Haven as of zero-one-hundred hours last Wednesday." Honor nodded, and he went on. "Since we're attached to Home Fleet, our own operational posture won't be materially affected, at least in the short term, but it's more important than ever to expedite your repairs."
And after all that, that's all the attention the actual declaration of war gets. Well, we'll hear a little from the front at the very end of the book.
She hadn't realized until this morning that her Grayson armsmen had become a permanent fixture in her life. Which, given her recent mental state, probably wasn't surprising but still bothered her. She ought to have been paying more attention, and, if she had been, she might have been able to nip it in the bud.
Now it was too late, and she suspected adjusting to their presence wasn't going to be the easiest thing she'd ever done. Not that she seemed to have a vote. It was clear LaFollet had been briefed on her, because he'd been ready not only to cite chapter and verse from the relevant Grayson law codes but to trade shamelessly on her own sense of duty. She'd detected Howard Clinkscales' hand behind the major's shrewd choice of tactics, and the discovery that LaFollet was ex-Palace Security only reinforced her suspicions.
Be that as it may, her chief armsman had politely demolished—or ignored as unworthy of demolition—every argument she'd advanced against his presence, and she hadn't even been able to fall back on Manticoran law. A special writ from the Queen's Bench had arrived in the morning mail, granting a Foreign Office request that Steadholder Harrington (who just happened to live in the same body as Captain Harrington) be authorized a permanent armed security detachment—with diplomatic immunity, no less! The fact that Tomas Ramirez had obviously signed on to the conspiracy, coupled with MacGuiness' patent approval, had given LaFollet an unfair advantage, and her last resistance had crumpled when Nimitz insisted on tapping into the major's emotions and relaying his deep concern for and devotion to her.
Honor gets special dispensation to have armed guards aboard her ship, and as a foreign noble, her guards enjoy a degree of diplomatic immunity. I'm amused that they bothered to plan and rehearse for her objections when she realized they weren't going anywhere.
He washed down his pretzel with a sip of beer and sneered inwardly. Some members of Parliament had tried for decades to outlaw the Ellington Protocol; perhaps they might even succeed some day, yet it was legal enough for now. Society frowned upon it, and the alternate Dreyfus Protocol was much more acceptable, but it would be child's play to manipulate a bereaved lover into using language intemperate enough to justify his insistence upon it. The Dreyfus Protocol limited the duelists to a total of five rounds each and allowed only the exchange of single shots. Perhaps even more importantly, the Master of the Field was charged with convincing both parties that honor had been satisfied after each exchange . . . and any duel ended with first blood.
Dueling stupidity, let's get this out of the way. There are two protocols or forms of dueling.
In the Dreyfuss Protocol. you start back-to-back like a traditional pistol duel, count out thirty paces and stop. On the referee's command, turn and fire one shot. Assuming no one is dead or too wounded to continue, or wounded at all, it's first blood, the ref will ask again if honor isn't satisfied and you cannot be reconciled, by taking fire once your honor is good if you decide to bow out now. Otherwise advance one pace towards opponent, and fire one shot on the judge's command. Repeat until someone is wounded, dead, or willing to quit. Or you run out of ammo, the Dreyfuss Protocol only gives you five rounds.
The Ellington Protocol is for people who like Westerns. You stand in two circles, forty meters (130 feet) apart with your pistol pointed straight down, fully loaded. On the referee's command, blast away until someone dies or drops their gun in surrender, or your gun clicks empty.
In either case, the referee has a very modern pulser and will turn a rulebreaker into a find red mist. Sometimes they'll give a warning first, but as deadly as modern weapons are....
