by David Weber
The light codes were far sparser in the tactical display than they had been in Manticore, she noted. There were no fortifications at all, only a cluster of navigation buoys and the small (relatively speaking) bulk of Basilisk Traffic Control, almost lost in the clutter of merchantmen awaiting transit.
"Com, notify Basilisk Control of our arrival and request instructions."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Webster replied, and Honor leaned back and laid her forearms along the command chair's armrests. They were here. They'd hit rock bottom, for no less appealing assignment could have been devised, but perhaps she could turn that into an asset. Surely they had nowhere to go but up! And for all its indignity, Basilisk Station should give them time to put the disastrous maneuvers behind and settle down into the sort of ship's company she'd envisioned from the start.
She felt Nimitz's tail steal around her throat and hoped she wasn't just whistling in the dark.
"Message from Basilisk Control, Captain."
Honor twitched herself up out of her thoughts and gestured for Webster to continue.
"We are instructed to proceed to Medusa orbit to rendezvous with the picket's senior officer aboard HMS Warlock, Ma'am."
"Thank you." Honor managed to keep any trace of derision out of her response, but Fearless had held her initial parking position two light-seconds from the terminus for almost forty minutes. In total, she'd been in Basilisk space for over fifty-three minutes, which seemed to indicate some pretty sloppy message traffic management aboard Basilisk Control. Fearless's routing instructions must have been transmitted to Control well before her arrival, given the current ten-hour-plus transmission lag between the terminus and Medusa, Basilisk's single habitable planet. The fact that Control had required the next best thing to an hour just to find them did not, she thought, augur well for its efficiency in other matters.
"Thank them for the information," she went on after a moment, and turned her chair to face Lieutenant Stromboli. "Do you have a course for Medusa, Lieutenant?"
"Uh, no, Ma'am." The beefy lieutenant flushed under her steady regard, then became very busy plugging figures into his console.
She waited patiently, though he should have worked up the heading for Medusa almost by reflex, as that was obviously their most probable destination. An on the bounce astrogator tried to anticipate his captain's needs without prompting, and Stromboli's flush showed his own awareness of that. He bit his lip as he concentrated on his panel, and his eyes refused to meet hers while he worked, as if he expected her to bite his head off at any moment.
She didn't. If one of her officers needed reprimanding, she would attend to it in private, just as she made it a point to deliver praise in public. Surely they ought to be figuring that much out by now! She bit off another sigh and refrained from tapping her toe on the deck.
"Course is zero-eight-seven by zero-one-one at four hundred gravities, with turnover in one-five-point-zero-seven hours, Ma'am," Stromboli announced finally.
"Thank you, Lieutenant," Honor said gravely, and he flushed more darkly yet. No need for a reprimand there, she decided. Stromboli was unlikely to embarrass himself that way a second time. She glanced at Killian.
"Make it so, Helm."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Coming to zero-eight-seven zero-one-one. Acceleration four-zero-zero gravities," Killian replied in a deadpan voice, and Fearless swung onto her new heading and began accelerating. The silence on her bridge was uncomfortable, like that of school children caught out on a pop quiz by a new teacher.
"Punch up Warlock, please, Tactical. Let's find out who our senior officer is," Honor said, more to break the uneasy quiet than for any other reason—though, now that she thought about it, Basilisk Control should have passed that information along already. More sloppiness. Maybe it was a side effect of being banished here, but she certainly intended to see that it wasn't allowed to infect her ship, as well.
She was reaching for the insulated cup of cocoa in her armrest beverage holder when Venizelos reported.
"Here it is, Ma'am. HMS Warlock, CA Two-Seven-Seven. Three hundred k-tons. She's a Star Knight—class. Captain Lord Pavel Young, commanding."
Honor's hand froze three centimeters from her cup, then continued its progress. It was a tiny hesitation, no more than a second in length, but Commander McKeon looked up sharply, and his eyes narrowed at her expression.
It was a subtle thing, more sensed than seen, an infinitesimal tightening of her lips. The ridges of her sharply-defined cheekbones stood out for just an instant, and her nostrils flared. That was all—but the treecat on the back of her chair rose to his full height, ears flat, lip curled back to bare needle-tipped fangs, and his hand-paws tensed to show half a centimeter of curved, white claw.
"Thank you, Lieutenant." Harrington's voice was as courteous and level as ever, but there was something in it—an uneasiness, a cold bitterness at odds with his maddeningly self-possessed captain.
He watched her sip her cocoa and replace the cup neatly, and his mind raced as he tried to recall if he'd ever heard of Lord Pavel Young. Nothing came to him, and he bit the inside of his lip.
Was there something between her and Young? Something which would affect Fearless? Her flash of immobility, coupled with the treecat's powerful reaction, certainly seemed to suggest there was, and with any other captain, he would have found some excuse to ask her in private. Not out of morbid curiosity, but because it was his job to know about such things, to protect his ship and his commanding officer from anything that would hamper their efficiency.
Yet the barriers sealing him off from Harrington had grown too thick for that. He felt them rising into place, holding him in his chair, and then Harrington stood. She rose without haste, but he seemed to sense a jerkiness to her movement, a hidden urgency.
"Commander McKeon, you have the watch. I'll be in my quarters."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. I have the watch," he acknowledged automatically. She nodded, dark eyes looking right through him with a curious, dangerous hardness, then scooped up her treecat and strode into the bridge lift. The door closed behind her.
McKeon rose and crossed to the command chair, settling into it and feeling the warmth her body had left behind. He made himself look away from the bland lift door and leaned back against the contoured cushions, wondering what fresh disaster was headed Fearless's way.
CHAPTER SIX
The planet Medusa gleamed like a dull ball bearing far below as Fearless slid into her assigned parking orbit for rendezvous with Warlock. It wasn't much of a planet, Honor thought, watching it on the visual display. She was well-aware her concentration on Medusa stemmed from a need to think about anything but the upcoming interview with her senior officer, but her mood had little to do with her conclusion that Medusa had to be the most boring-looking world she'd ever seen.
It was gray-green, relieved only by weather patterns and the glaring white of massive polar ice caps. Even its deep, narrow seas were a barely lighter shade of the omnipresent gray-green—a soupy sludge of plankton and larger plant forms that thrived in a brew the environmental control people would have condemned in a heartbeat back on Sphinx. Medusa's axial tilt was extreme, over forty degrees, which, coupled with its cool primary, produced a climate more brutal even than Manticore-B's Gryphon. The planetary flora was well-adapted to its severe environment, but it showed an appalling lack of variation, for Medusa was covered in moss. Thousands—millions—of varieties of moss. Short, fuzzy moss in place of grass. Higher-growing, brushy moss in place of bushes. Even, God help us all, great, big, floppy mounds of moss in place of trees. She'd heard about it, even seen holos, but this was the first time she'd seen it with her own eyes, and it wasn't the same at all.
She gave a wry grimace of distaste and turned her eyes resolutely to the sight she'd been avoiding. HMS Warlock floated in the same orbit, barely a hundred kilometers clear, and she swallowed a bitter-tasting envy mixed with old hatred as she gazed at her.
The Star Knight class were the RMN's late
st heavy cruisers, three and a half times more massive than Fearless and with almost six times her firepower, even before Hephaestus and Horrible Hemphill had butchered her. The big, sleek ship hung there, taunting Honor's elderly command with its mere presence, and knowing who commanded that beautiful vessel made it far, far worse. She'd thought she'd hit bottom when they assigned her to Basilisk Station; now she knew she had.
The duty helmsman brought Fearless to rest relative to Warlock, and she drew a deep breath, wondering if any of her crew guessed why she'd left Nimitz in her quarters. Not that she intended to tell them.
"Call away my cutter, please," she requested. "Mr. Venizelos, you have the watch."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Venizelos replied, and watched curiously as his captain stepped into the lift and headed for the boat bay.
Honor sat silently, arms folded, as her cutter crept across the emptiness between Fearless and Warlock. She'd been tempted, in a way, to use one of her pinnaces, but she knew why—just as she knew that that particular bit of ostentation would have been one too many. So she'd taken her cutter, despite the fact that it moved far more slowly than a pinnace would have. Even the most efficient thrusters gave a much weaker acceleration than impellers, and a cutter was too small to mount an impeller drive. It was also too small for the inertial compensator needed to offset an impeller's brutal power, though its gravity generator could compensate for the lower gee-force of its thrusters. Yet despite Honor's own impatience and need to get this over, the trip was short, even at the cutter's relatively slow speed. Too short. She'd spent the last thirty-one hours dreading this moment.
Her pilot completed his final approach, and the cutter shivered as Warlock's tractors captured it. It rolled on its gyros, aligning itself with the heavy cruiser's internal gravity as the brilliantly-lit cavern of Warlock's boat bay engulfed them, then settled into the docking cradle. Alloy clanged gently as hatch collars mated, and the green pressure light glowed.
She was alone, and she allowed herself a sigh as she stood and tucked her beret under her epaulet. Then she tugged the skirt of her tunic down, squared her shoulders, and walked briskly through the opening hatch and down the tube into the twitter of bosun's calls and the salutes of the side party.
Young hadn't come down to welcome her in person, she saw. She supposed it was a calculated insult—it was the petty sort of gesture at which he excelled—but she was relieved by his absence. It gave her a chance to settle herself and get her inner defenses in place before the inevitable confrontation.
She stopped in front of the short, squared-off commander heading the side party and saluted.
"Permission to come aboard, Sir?" she asked.
"Permission granted, Commander Harrington." He returned her salute, then extended his hand. "Paul Tankersley, Warlock's exec." His voice was deep and resonant, his clasp firm, but there was an edge of curiosity in his sharp eyes. Honor wondered if he'd heard rumors about her and Young.
"If you'll accompany me, Commander," Tankersley went on after a brief pause, "the Captain is waiting in Briefing One."
"Lead on." She made a tiny gesture for him to precede her, and the two of them walked through the side party to the waiting lift.
There was no small talk on the way, which, Honor reflected, probably did indicate that Tankersley knew at least a little about her. After all, he could hardly begin a conversation with, "Do you and the Captain still hate each other's guts, Commander?" Nor could he ask for her side of it without seeming disloyal to his own CO. Under the circumstances, a prudent silence was undoubtedly his wisest course, and she felt her lips twitch with acid amusement as the lift slid to a halt.
"This way, Commander," Tankersley said, and she followed him down a short passage to the briefing room hatch. He came to a halt, pressed the admittance button, and stood aside as the panel slid open. She thought she saw just a touch of sympathy in his expression as she walked past him.
Captain Lord Young was seated behind the conference table, perusing a sheet of hardcopy. He didn't look up as she entered, and she gritted her teeth, amazed that such a trivial insult could make her so angry. She crossed to the table and stood silently, determined to wait him out.
He was the same flashy, handsome man he'd always been, she noted. Putting on a little weight, perhaps, but the short beard hid his incipient double chin quite well, and his tailoring was excellent. It always had been, even at the Academy, where everyone was supposed to wear the same Navy-issue uniform. But, then, the rules never had applied to him. Pavel Young was the eldest son and heir of the Earl of North Hollow—a point he had no intention of allowing anyone to forget.
Honor had no idea what he'd done to get himself banished to Basilisk Station. Probably, she thought bitterly, he'd simply been himself. Patronage could advance an officer's career—witness the fact that Young, who'd graduated only one form before her, had made list five years ago. Once an officer's name was on the captain's list, his eventual flag rank was guaranteed. Unless he did something so drastic the Fleet cashiered him, he only had to live long enough for simple seniority to see to that.
But rank, as many a Manticoran officer had discovered, was no guarantee of employment. An incompetent usually found himself on half-pay, still carried on the active-duty list but without a command. Half-pay was supposed to provide a reserve of experienced officers against future need by retaining those surplus to the service's current requirements; in practice, it was used to put fumble-fingered idiots too important to dismiss from the Queen's service where they could do no harm. Obviously Young hadn't gotten himself into that category—yet—but the fact that he'd been senior officer in Basilisk for almost a T-year now seemed a pretty clear hint someone at the Admiralty was less than thrilled with his performance.
Which, no doubt, was only going to make him more poisonous than ever to deal with.
He finished pretending to read his hardcopy and replaced it fastidiously on the tabletop, then raised his eyes.
"Commander." The tenor voice was smooth, draping his enmity like velvet wrapped about a dagger's blade.
"Captain," she returned in the same emotionless tone, and his mouth twitched a brief almost-smile. He did not invite her to sit.
"I'm relieved to see your ship. We've been even more shorthanded than usual since Implacable left."
Honor contented herself with a silent nod, and he tipped his chair back.
"As you know, Basilisk Station is chronically understrength," he went on, "and I'm afraid Warlock is sadly overdue for refit. In fact, this—" he tapped the hardcopy "—is a list of our most urgently required repairs." He smiled. "That's why I'm so pleased to see you, Commander. Your presence will permit me to return Warlock to Manticore for the yard attention she needs so badly."
He watched her face, and Honor bit the inside of her lip and fought to keep her dismay from showing. If Young was dispatching his own ship to Manticore, he undoubtedly intended to shift to Fearless. The mere thought of sharing her bridge with him was enough to turn her stomach, but she managed, somehow, to stand in attentive silence with no sign of her thoughts.
"Under the circumstances," he continued after a moment, "and in view of the extensive nature of our needs, I feel it would be inadvisable to ask Commander Tankersley to assume responsibility for Warlock's refit." He extended a data chip and smiled as she took it without touching his hand.
"Therefore, Commander Harrington, I will be accompanying Warlock back to Manticore to supervise her refit in person." This time her surprise was too great to hide completely. He was the station's senior officer! Did he mean he intended to abandon his responsibility for the system?! "I will, of course, return as quickly as possible. I realize my absence will be ... inconvenient for you, and I will make every effort to keep it as brief as possible, but I estimate that the necessary maintenance and repairs will consume at least two months. More probably—" he smiled again "—three. During that time, you will be senior officer here in Basilisk. Your orders are on the chip."
/> He let his chair slip back upright and picked up his hard copy once more.
"That will be all, Commander. Dismissed."
Honor found herself back in the passage outside the briefing room without any clear memory of how she'd gotten there. The data chip cut into her palm with the pressure of her grip, and she made herself relax her hand one muscle at a time.
"Commander?"
She looked up, and Commander Tankersley recoiled. Her dark eyes smoked like heated steel, a slight tic quivered at the corner of her tight mouth, and for just an instant her expression touched him with fear. But she asserted control quickly and forced a smile as she saw the concern on his face. He started to say something else, but her half-raised hand stopped him, and he retreated once more into his safe neutrality.
Honor inhaled deeply, and then deliberately drew the white beret from her shoulder. She settled it precisely on her head without looking at Tankersley, but she felt the weight of his eyes. Courtesy forbade a visiting captain to wear the white beret when a guest upon another's ship, and that made the gesture a calculated insult to the man she'd just left behind.
She turned back to her guide, beret on her head, and those dark, hard eyes challenged him to react. It was a challenge Tankersley declined, content to maintain his isolation as he escorted her silently back toward the lift.
Honor was grateful for his silence, for her brain was trying to grapple with too many thoughts at once. Memories of the Academy dominated them, especially of the terrible scene in the commandant's office as Mr. Midshipman Lord Young, broken ribs and collarbone still immobilized, split lips still puffed and distended, one blackened eye swollen almost shut, was required to apologize to Ms. Midshipman Harrington for his "inappropriate language and actions" before the official reprimand for "conduct unbecoming" went into his file.
