Cauldron of Ghosts (eARC)
Page 67
Now, as she coped with the hurricane of worry, tension, and fear behind the impassive façade of Zilwicki’s disguise, she was sinkingly certain her disquiet had been amply justified.
“Your Grace.” Zilwicki’s deep, rumbling voice was flattened around a burr of tension someone without her sensitivity might have missed as he took her proffered hand. “Thank you for seeing me under these…conditions.” His free hand gestured at his physical appearance, and despite that stormfront of emotions, his lips quirked in a wry smile. “I’m afraid I’m not quite myself at the moment.”
“So I see.”
She released his hand, waving him towards one of the chairs on the other side of her desk, then sank back into her own chair. Nimitz hopped from her desk into her lap, and she wrapped her arms around him, bending her neck just enough to rest her chin on top of his head while both of them regarded Zilwicki with matching intensity.
She considered buzzing James MacGuiness, but the last thing Zilwicki needed at this moment was something to drink. Instead, she looked up at Tümmel and Hawke.
“I think the Captain and I need a few moments alone, Waldemar. Spencer, I’ll buzz if I need you.”
Tümmel, despite his own raging curiosity, simply nodded and started for the hatch. Hawke hesitated, his expression rebellious as professional paranoia warred with deeply ingrained obedience…and his trust in his steadholder. Honor held his gaze firmly.
“I’ll buzz if I need you.” There was just a hint of steel in her tone as she repeated the words, and Hawke braced briefly to attention.
“Of course, My Lady.”
He withdrew…not without one last darkling glance at the transformed Zilwicki. The hatch closed behind him and Tümmel, and Honor returned her gaze to her visitor.
“Tell me,” she said quietly.
“I know you didn’t expect to see me this soon, if at all, Your Grace.” Zilwicki’s tone was clipped, calm but burnished with a patina of the fear bottled up inside him. It wasn’t for himself, that fear, Honor realized, yet the iron control he’d fastened on it only made it even more intense. “The real reason I came straight to you,” he continued, “is that you’re probably the only person who knows—or would believe—who I am and also has the clout I need. The problem is—”
The words spilled out of him—still clipped, still calm—as he laid out his report with all the clarity and organization Honor had come to associate with him. She listened intently, not just to his words but to the emotions behind them, and she felt Nimitz listening with her, felt the sub-audible vibration of his purr as Zilwicki’s emotions poured through him, as well.
“—so even after Victor explained who we were to Dusek, and even after Dusek agreed to fortify Neue Rostock, we knew we wouldn’t be able to hold out indefinitely. That was when—”
“When you all decided someone had to go for help,” Honor interrupted, straightening in her chair. “And that the best person to send for it was you. And that because I’ve met all of you and I’m Grand Fleet’s CO, I was the logical person for you to approach here in Manticore.”
“Exactly.” Zilwicki nodded hard, his relief at her comprehension obvious, then frowned as she shook her head with one of her slightly off center smiles. That was the last reaction he’d anticipated out of her!
“I apologize, Captain,” she said as she tasted his consternation. “I really do understand the tension you’ve been under, and I’m not trying to make light of it. However, there’s something you should see.”
Consternation gave way to simple confusion as his mind tried to catch up with what she might mean, but she only gave him another smile, then reached out a long right arm, still cradling Nimitz with the left, and punched a complex password into her desktop terminal.
“This is a message Queen Elizabeth recently received,” she said. “So far, only seventeen other people in Manticore have seen it. You’ll be number eighteen.”
Zilwicki’s eyes narrowed, but before he could ask for any additional clarification, Honor tapped one final key and the com display on her desk came to life with the face of an ebon-skinned woman in the uniform of a Manticoran admiral. She had the unmistakable features of the House of Winton, and Zilwicki recognized her instantly.
“By the time you view this, Beth,” Admiral Gloria Michelle Samantha Evelyn Henke, Countess Gold Peak and commanding officer, Tenth Fleet, said from the display, “I’m sure at least some of my professional colleagues are going to have cast a certain degree of doubt upon my alleged mental processes. In this instance, they may even have a point. But I think this is important—well, obviously I think that, or I wouldn’t be doing it.” She shook her head with a slight smile. “Trust me, I’m aware of the risks involved. I’m also aware that when you’ve already got a shooting war with the League on your hands, having someone dash off on her own and open yet another front may not be incredibly high on the list of your priorities. On the other hand—”
He watched it all the way through, and when it ended Anton Zilwicki’s eyes were wet. He wasn’t actually weeping, but he hovered on the edge, and Honor tasted those tears as clearly as he did. It wouldn’t have required her empathic sensitivity to know that this was a man who more or less defined the term stoic, but under that stoicism was a man. A very warm, caring man who felt far more deeply than anyone without her sensitivity might ever have believed.
“Only Her Majesty and her closest advisers have seen this before you, Captain,” she said quietly.
She didn’t bother with any admonitions binding the captain to solemn vows of secrecy. With Zilwicki, there was no need to.
He pinched his eyes with his thumb and middle finger, stemming the tears. When he spoke, his voice was soft and husky. “I once had to watch, completely helpless, when my wife Helen went to her death.”
Honor nodded. She knew the story. Every officer in the Manticoran navy knew the story of Helen Zilwicki’s defense of Convoy MGX-1403. Ambushed at minimum range inside a hyper-space gravity wave by five Scimitar-class heavy cruisers, her two light cruisers and three destroyers had fought to their own destruction in the finest traditions of Edward Saganami’s navy. None of them—and none of the men and women aboard them—had survived, but the damage they’d inflicted before they died saved the entire convoy…including the transport Carnarvon, in which her husband and four-year-old daughter had been embarked.
Helen Zilwicki had been awarded the Parliamentary Medal of Valor for her actions. Posthumously, as was so often true with that decoration. And Anton Zilwicki had watched on the transport’s main display, with his sobbing daughter sitting on his lap, as she earned that medal with her life.
“I thought—the whole way here from Mesa—that I was on another death watch,” he said now, and Honor drew a deep breath.
Whatever had happened in Mendel was already over, of course, and nothing she or Zilwicki could do would change that. But if Thandi Palane had put up the kind of fight Honor was certain she had, and if Mike Henke had met her own schedule…
“You may have been anyway, Captain,” she said now, her voice gentle, and he looked at her mutely. “You may have been,” she repeated, and her tone had hardened. “But from what I know of General Palane, I don’t think you were. And either way, Captain Zilwicki—Anton—” she met his eyes very levelly, “from what I know of Admiral Gold Peak, by this time, I guarantee you those people on Mesa have a much better understanding of the phrase the wrath of God is upon you.”