by David Weber
"Not a thing," she said, crossing the porch to stand the collapsed glider in the corner.
"As it happens, I did try to com you, Ma'am," MacGuiness said after a moment, his voice more serious. "A letter from the Admiralty arrived this afternoon."
Honor froze for just one moment, then adjusted the glider's position with careful precision. The Admiralty used electronic mail for most purposes; official letters were sent only under very special circumstances, and she schooled her face into calm and made herself fight down a sudden surge of excitement before she turned and raised an eyebrow.
"Where is it?"
"Beside your plate, Ma'am." MacGuiness glanced pointedly at his chrono. "Your supper's waiting," he added, and Honor's mouth quirked in another smile.
"I see," she murmured. "Well, let me get washed up and I'll deal with both of them, Mac."
"At your convenience, Ma'am," MacGuiness said without a trace of triumph.
* * *
Honor forced herself to move without haste as she walked into the dining room and felt the quiet old house about her like a shield. She was an only child, and her parents had an apartment near their medical offices in Duvalier City, almost five hundred kilometers to the north. They were seldom "home" except on weekends, and her birthplace always seemed a bit empty without them. It was odd. Somehow she always pictured them here whenever she was away, as if they and the house were a single, inseparable entity, like a protecting shadow of her childhood.
MacGuiness was waiting, napkin neatly folded over one forearm, as she slid into her chair. One of the perks for a captain of the list was a permanently assigned steward, though Honor still wasn't entirely positive how MacGuiness had chosen himself for that duty. It was just one of those inevitable things, and he watched over her like a mother hawk, but he had his own ironclad rules. They included the notion that nothing short of pitched battle should be allowed to interfere with his captain's meals, and he cleared his throat as she reached for the anachronistic, heavily embossed envelope. She looked up, and he whisked the cover from a serving dish with pointed emphasis.
"Not this time, Mac," she murmured, breaking the seal, and he sighed and replaced the cover. Nimitz contemplated their human antics with a small, amused "bleek" from his place at the far end of the table, and the steward replied with a repressive frown.
Honor opened the envelope and slid out two sheets of equally archaic parchment. They crackled crisply, and her eyes—organic and cybernetic alike—opened wide as they flicked over the formal printed words on the first page. MacGuiness stiffened at her shoulder as she inhaled sharply, and she read it a second time, then glanced at the second sheet and looked up to meet his gaze.
"I think," she said slowly, "that it's time to open the good stuff, Mac. How about a bottle of the Delacourt '27?"
"The Delacourt, Ma'am?"
"I don't think Dad will mind . . . under the circumstances."
"I see. May I assume, then, that it's good news, Ma'am?"
"You may, indeed." She cleared her throat and stroked the parchment almost reverently. "It seems, Mac, that BuMed in its infinite wisdom has decided I'm fit for duty again, and Admiral Cortez has found a ship for me." She looked up from the orders with a sudden, blinding smile. "In fact, he's giving me Nike!"
The normally unflappable MacGuiness stared back at her, and his jaw dropped. HMS Nike wasn't just a battlecruiser. She was the battlecruiser, the fiercely sought after, most prestigious prize any captain could covet. There was always a Nike, with a list of battle honors reaching clear back to Edward Saganami, the founder of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and the current Nike was the newest, most powerful battlecruiser in the Fleet.
Honor laughed out loud and tapped the second sheet of parchment.
"According to this, we go aboard Wednesday," she said. "Ready for a little space duty again, Mac?"
MacGuiness' eyes met hers, and then he shook himself, and a huge, matching smile lit his own face.
"Yes, Ma'am. I think I can stand that—and this certainly is a night for the Delacourt!"
CHAPTER TWO
The intra-system shuttle settled into the docking buffers of Her Majesty's Space Station Hephaestus, and Honor tapped the save key on her memo pad and rose from her seat just inside the hatch.
Her face gave no hint of her inner excitement as she drew the white beret of a starship's commander from under her left epaulet. She grimaced mentally as she adjusted it, for she hadn't worn it in over a T-year, and she hadn't allowed for the way her hair had grown. It was considered bad luck for an RMN officer to replace her first white beret, which meant she either had to get her hair clipped or the beret re-sized, she thought, and held out her arms to Nimitz.
The 'cat swarmed up onto her padded shoulder and settled his weight with a soft bleek, then patted the soft, white beret with a proprietary air. Honor hid a grin that would never have suited the probity of a senior grade captain, and Nimitz snorted in amused tolerance. He knew how much that symbol meant to her, and he saw absolutely no reason she shouldn't show it.
For that matter, Honor had to admit there was no real need to assume her "captain's face" so soon, since, aside from MacGuiness, no one on the shuttle knew who she was or why she was here. But she needed the practice. Even the shuttle felt strange after so long off a command deck, and few things were more important than starting a new command off on the right foot. Besides—
She brought her mental babbling to a stern halt and admitted the truth. She didn't feel just "strange"; she felt worried, and under her joy at getting back into space, butterflies mated in her midsection. She'd put in all the simulation hours she'd been allowed between bouts of surgery and therapy, but that wasn't as many as she would have liked. Unfortunately, it was hard to argue with your physician when he was also your father, and even if Doctor Harrington had allowed all the sim time she wanted, simulators weren't the same as reality. Besides, Nike would be her biggest, most powerful ship yet—eight hundred and eighty thousand tons, with a crew of over two thousand—which was enough to make anyone nervous after so long dirt-side, simulators or no.
Yet she knew her long medical leave wasn't the only reason for her anxiety. Being picked for Nike was an enormous professional compliment, especially for a captain who'd never before held battlecruiser command. Among other things, it was an implicit approval of her performance in her last command, whatever her own mixed feelings, and a clear indication the Admiralty was grooming her for flag rank. But there was another side to the coin, as well. With opportunity came responsibility . . . and the chance to fail.
She inhaled deeply, squaring her shoulders, then touched the three gold stars embroidered on her tunic, and deep down inside something laughed at her own reactions. Each of those stars represented a previous hyper-capable command, and she'd been through almost exactly the same internal cycle with each of them. Oh, there were differences this time, but there were always differences, and the underlying truth never changed. There was nothing in the universe she wanted more than command . . . and nothing that scared her worse than the thought of failing once she had it.
Nimitz bleeked again, softly, in her ear. The sound was comforting yet scolding, and she glanced over at him. A delicate yawn showed needle-sharp white fangs in the lazy, confident grin of a predator, and humor narrowed her eyes as she rubbed his ears and started for the hatch with MacGuiness at her heels.
* * *
The personnel tube deposited them at a slip on the extreme rim of Hephaestus' hull. The space station seemed larger every time Honor saw it . . . probably because it was. Hephaestus was the Royal Manticoran Navy's premiere shipyard, and the Navy's steadily accelerating building programs were mirrored by an equally steady growth in the station's size. It was over forty kilometers long, now—a lumpy, ungainly, immensely productive amalgamation of building and repair slips, fabrication shops, deep-space foundries, and living quarters for thousands of workers that never stopped growing.
She glanced through
the armorplast wall of the space-dock gallery as she and MacGuiness headed for the docking tube, and it took all her will power not to gawk like a middy on her first deployment, for the sleek, powerful shape floating in the building slip's mooring tractors cried out for her to stop dead and stare hungrily through the armorplast.
HMS Nike was all but completed. Yard dogs and their remotes floated about her and crawled over her like tiny, furiously laboring ants, and the double-ended, flattened spindle of her battle steel hull looked mottled as it awaited its final coating of skin-fused pigment. But the hollow throats of missile tubes and the ominous snouts of lasers and grasers crouched in her opened weapon bays, and mechs were already closing up the plating around her last drive nodes. Another two weeks, Honor thought, three at the most, till the acceptance trials. Only twenty T-years ago, the process would have been far more extended, with builder's tests followed by pre-acceptance trials before she was turned over for the Navy's own evaluation, but there was no time for that now. The tempo of construction was almost scary, and the reason for the endless hurry was enough to frighten anyone.
She turned a bend in the gallery and the Marines manning the outboard end of Nike's docking tube stiffened and snapped to attention as she crossed to them with a measured stride. She returned their salutes and handed her ID to the sergeant in charge, who scrutinized it briefly but closely before he returned it with another salute.
"Thank you, Milady," he said crisply, and Honor's upper lip quivered. She was still getting used to being a peer of the realm—although, in truth, that wasn't exactly what she was—but she suppressed the temptation to smile and accepted her ID folio with a grave nod.
"Thank you, Sergeant," she said and started to step into the tube, then paused as she saw one hand twitch towards his communicator. He stiffened into immobility, and this time she did let herself smile. "It's all right, Sergeant. Go ahead."
"Uh, yes, Milady." The sergeant blushed, then relaxed and responded with a slight smile of his own. Some captains preferred to catch their new crews by surprise, but Honor had always thought it was rather pointless—and foolish. Unless an executive officer had managed to completely alienate her crew, they were going to flash a warning to her as soon as the new captain's back was out of sight anyway. And there was no way a crew would leave Nike's exec in the dark.
She grinned at that thought as she crossed the scarlet zero-gee warning stripe and launched herself into a graceful free-fall glide.
* * *
A full side party waited in the entry port. The side boys came to attention, electronic bosun's pipes twittered in archaic ritual, and the spotlessly uniformed commander at the head of Nike's assembled senior officers snapped a salute that would have done Saganami Island proud.
Honor returned it with equal formality and felt Nimitz sitting perfectly still on her shoulder. She'd worked hard at impressing the need for proper decorum upon him, and she was a bit relieved to find her efforts paying off. He was choosy about familiarity, but he was also demonstrative about greeting those he admitted to the select circle of his friends.
"Permission to come aboard, Ma'am?" Honor asked very formally as she lowered her hand from the salute.
"Permission granted, Milady," the commander replied in a soft, furry contralto, and stepped back to clear the entry port.
It was an oddly gracious gesture on a subordinate's part. Not consciously so, but on an almost instinctive level, and Honor hid another smile. She stood a good fourteen centimeters taller than the other woman, but she'd never had the same presence, the same easy ability to dominate the space about her, and she doubted she ever would.
The Manticore Colony, Ltd., had drawn its original settlers primarily from Old Earth's western hemisphere, and five hundred T-years had gone far towards pureeing the original colonists' genetic heritages. There were exceptions—such as Honor herself, whose emigrant mother was of almost pure Old Earth Asian extraction by way of the ancient colony world of Beowulf—but by and large it was difficult to estimate anyone's ancestry at a glance.
Her new exec was an exception, however. Through whatever trick of genetics, Commander The Honorable Michelle Henke was a throwback to her first Manticoran ancestor's genotype. Her skin was barely a shade lighter than her space-black uniform, her hair was even curlier than Honor's . . . and there was no mistaking the clean-cut, distinctive features of the House of Winton.
Commander Henke said nothing as she escorted Honor up-ship to the bridge. Her face was admirably grave, but a twinkle lurked in her eyes, and Honor was relieved to see it. The last time they'd seen one another had been over six T-years ago, and Henke had been senior to her at the time; now she was not only two full ranks Honor's junior but her executive officer and immediate subordinate, as well, and Honor hadn't quite been able to rule out the possibility of resentment over the change.
They reached the bridge, and Honor looked around appreciatively. Her last ship had been just as new as Nike when she assumed command, and she knew how lucky she'd been, even in the expanding Manticoran Navy, to win two brand new ships in a row. Yet marvelous as the heavy cruiser Fearless had been, her bridge paled beside Nike's, and the hugely expanded tactical section made her mouth water. Battlecruisers were Manticore's ship of choice, ideally suited to the fast, slashing tactics the Navy had embraced for over four T-centuries, and she could practically feel her new command's lethality quivering about her.
She shook off the moment of almost sensual enjoyment and crossed to the captain's chair. She started to shoo Nimitz off her shoulder to the chair's back, then stopped herself. This was his moment, as well as hers, and she decided to let him be as she reached out and touched a stud on the chair arm.
The clear, sharp chimes of an all-hands announcement sounded from every speaker on the ship, and com screens blinked alive with her face as she reached into her tunic and withdrew the stiff parchment. She looked straight into the pickup, forcing herself not to clear her throat and wondering, with a corner of her mind, why she felt so nervous. It wasn't as if she'd never done this before!
She pushed the thought aside and unfolded her orders, the sound of the paper loud in the stillness, and began to read in a calm, clear voice.
" 'From Admiral Sir Lucien Cortez, Fifth Space Lord, Royal Manticoran Navy, to Captain Dame Honor Harrington, Countess Harrington, KCR, MC, SG, DSO, CGM, Royal Manticoran Navy, Twenty-First Day, Sixth Month, Year Two Hundred and Eighty-Two After Landing. Madam: You are hereby directed and required to proceed aboard Her Majesty's Starship Nike, BC-Four-One-Three, there to take upon yourself the duties and responsibilities of commanding officer in the service of the Crown. Fail not in this charge at your peril. By order of Lady Francine Maurier, Baroness Morncreek, First Lord of Admiralty, Royal Manticoran Navy, for Her Majesty the Queen.' "
She refolded the document slowly and carefully, feeling once more the thrill of the moment, then looked at Commander Henke.
"Madam Exec, I assume command," she said.
"Captain," Henke replied formally, "you have command."
"Thank you," Honor said, and looked back at the pickup that connected her to her so-far anonymous crew. "This is a proud moment for me," she said, and her quiet sincerity deprived her words of the trite formality she feared infused them. "Very few captains have the honor of commanding a ship with this one's battle record. Even fewer are privileged to assume command straight from the builder's hands, and none of them ever have the opportunity to do both of those things more than once. As keel plate owners, we have a great deal to live up to as we build on the tradition entrusted to our keeping, but I know that when the time comes for me to pass this ship into another captain's keeping, he or she will have even more to live up to than we do now."
She paused, her eyes very level, then smiled almost impishly.
"You're going to feel overworked and underappreciated while we work up, people, but try to remember that it's all in a good cause. I'm sure I can rely on all of you to give me your very best. I promi
se you'll get my best in return." She nodded at the pickup. "Carry on," she said, and killed the circuit and turned back to Henke.
"Welcome aboard, Captain." The commander extended her hand in the traditional welcoming handclasp, and Honor gripped it hard.
"Thank you, Mike. It's good to be here."
"May I present your senior officers?" Henke asked, and then waved the waiting officers forward at Honor's nod.
"Commander Ravicz, Ma'am, our engineer."
"Mr. Ravicz," Honor murmured. The engineer's deep-set eyes were frankly curious as he nodded courteously to her, and she shook his hand before glancing back at Henke.
"Commander Chandler, our tac officer," her exec said.
"Ms. Chandler." The diminutive tactical officer's flaming red head didn't reach even to Honor's shoulder, but she had a tough, no-nonsense look to her, and her blue eyes were as firm as her handshake.
"I believe you know Surgeon Commander Montoya, our doctor," Henke said, and Honor smiled hugely as she took Montoya's hand in both of hers.
"Indeed I do! It's good to see you again, Fritz."
"And you, Skipper." Montoya studied the left side of her face for a moment, then nodded. "Especially to see you looking so good," he added.
"I had a good doctor—two of them, in fact," Honor said, and gave his hand another squeeze before she turned to the next officer on Henke's list.
"Lieutenant Colonel Klein, commanding our Marine detachment," Henke said.
"Colonel." The Marine bobbed a sharp, respectful nod as he took Honor's hand. His was the sort of face that revealed very little, but the ribbons on his black tunic were impressive. Which they ought to be. Nike carried a full battalion of Marines, and the Admiralty wouldn't have picked their commander's name out of a hat.
