by David Weber
"She wouldn't dare come after me," North Hollow protested. "Not after the way she shot Pavel. Public opinion would crucify her!"
"That didn't stop her in Pavel's case. What in the world makes you think it would stop her now? The only two reasons she hasn't gone after you already are that her political allies, like William Alexander, have been restraining her from going after anyone at all and that she doesn't know—not for certain—that you were the one who suggested this particular line of attack to High Ridge. If she were certain of that, I'm not at all certain even Alexander or the Queen herself could stop her, given all the history between her and your family. So be afraid of her, Stefan. Be very afraid, because you're never going to meet a more dangerous person in your life."
"If she's so dangerous, why's she been so meek and mild? There are ways she could have counterattacked without resorting to violence, Georgia! So why hasn't she come out swinging and used all that power you say she's got somehow?" Stefan demanded, but the questions came out petulantly, not challengingly.
"Because we hit her with the kind of attack she's most vulnerable to," the countess told him patiently. "She doesn't have the experience to respond in kind to this sort of assault. She's been mostly on the defensive from the outset, because it's not her sort of battlefield. That's precisely why they went out and recruited Emily Alexander to serve as her general. But if you push her too hard, or make the mistake of coming into the open and hurting someone she cares about when she knows who did it, she won't waste any more time even trying to fight your kind of battle, Stefan. She'll come after you directly, her way, and hang the consequences. Your family should know that better than anyone else."
"Well, we're just going to have to come up with something else, then, aren't we? If Plan A isn't going to put her down for the count after all, what do we suggest to High Ridge for Plan B? Now that Emily Alexander's busted our columnists' balls for daring to suggest that her husband and her 'dear friend' Harrington could be humping each other, how the hell do we get the two of them off our backs? You know they're going to be harder to handle than ever now that we've pissed them off!"
"There's probably something to that," Georgia agreed. "And I'm not sure what to propose as Plan B—not just yet, anyway. I'm confident something will suggest itself to me as the situation clarifies. But whatever it is, Stefan, it's not going to be anything she can trace directly back to you or to me. You may not care if she decides to rip your lungs out, but I like mine just fine where they are, thank you."
"I got the message, Georgia," North Hollow half-snapped. His expression was surlier than ever, but there was fear behind the surliness, and Georgia was relieved to see it. On the other hand . . .
Fear might keep him from doing something outstandingly stupid, but she'd used enough stick for one night, she decided. It was time for the carrot, and she touched the neck of her robe.
It floated down to puddle about her ankles, and suddenly Honor Harrington was the last thing on Stefan's mind.
* * *
Honor stood beside the lectern, hands clasped behind her, and gazed up at the huge lecture hall's tiers of seats as they filled.
The Tactical Department's D'Orville Hall home boasted every modern electronic teaching aid known to man. Its simulators could re-create anything from the flight deck of a pinnace to the combat information center of a superdreadnought task force flagship, and reproduce all of the sights and sounds of the most horrific combat. The online teaching interfaces could put an instructor face to face with a single student, a group of two or three, or a class literally of hundreds. Those same interfaces made reference works, histories, lecture notes, syllabuses, official after action reports, analyses of past campaigns, and class schedules instantly available to students, as well as delivering student course work and exams equally instantly to instructors.
Saganami Island made full and efficient use of all those capabilities. Yet the Royal Manticoran Navy was a great believer in tradition, as well, and at least once per week, lecture courses met physically in their assigned lecture halls. Honor was perfectly willing to admit that the tradition was scarcely the most modern possible way to transmit knowledge, but that was fine with her. As she herself had discovered as a child, too great a reliance on the electronic classroom could deprive a student of the social interaction which was also a part of the educational process. The electronic format could serve as a shield, a barricade behind which a student could hide or even pretend to be someone else entirely . . . sometimes even to herself. That might not constitute a serious drawback in the education of civilians, but Navy and Marine officers couldn't afford walls of self-deception about who and what they were any more than they could afford to leave their social skills underdeveloped. Their professional responsibilities required them not only to interact with others in a corporate, hierarchical service, but to exude confidence and competence when exercising command in situations in which their ability to lead quite literally might make the difference between life and death. Or, even more importantly sometimes, between success or failure. That was the major reason Saganami Island relentlessly stressed traditions and procedures which forced midshipmen and midshipwomen to deal with one another, and with their superiors and instructors, face to face, in the flesh.
Besides, she admitted from behind the serenity of her expression, she enjoyed the opportunity to see the massed faces of her students. The joy of teaching and challenging young minds while simultaneously building the Navy's future was an unalloyed pleasure, the one thing she had unreservedly treasured about her almost five-T-year stay here on the Star Kingdom's capital planet. She even allowed herself to believe that she'd finally made a substantial down payment on the debt she'd owed to her own Saganami Island instructors, and especially to Raoul Courvoisier. And it was at moments like this, when she actually saw one of her classes assembled, all in one place at the same time, that the sense of continuity of past and future and of her own place in that endless chain came to her most strongly.
And at this particular moment, she needed that sense.
Nimitz stirred uneasily on her shoulder, and she tasted his unhappiness, but there wasn't a great deal she could do about that, and they both knew it. Besides, he wasn't unhappy with her; he was—as she herself—unhappy at the situation.
A fresh spasm of pain flickered through her, concealed from her assembling students by the calm mask of her face, and she cursed her own inner weakness.
She ought to have been one of the happiest women in the Star Kingdom, she told herself yet again. Emily Alexander's counterattack had rolled up the High Ridge machine's campaign of slander like a rug, especially when the Queen got behind it and pushed. One or two of the most bitterly partisan 'faxes and commentators continued the attack, but the vast majority had dropped it like a hot rock once Emily's intervention reversed the poll numbers virtually overnight. The abrupt simultaneity with which the campaign had been terminated by almost all participants should have been a flare-lit tipoff to any unbiased observer that it had been carefully coordinated from the beginning, too. Only a command from above could have shut down so many strident voices so instantly. And only people whose deep, principled concern over the "fundamental questions" being beaten to death had been completely artificial from the outset would have abandoned those principles with such alacrity when they became inconvenient.
But if the attack had been beaten back, it hadn't been defeated without leaving scars. The Grayson public, for example, remained furious that it had ever been mounted in the first place. That would have bothered Honor under any circumstances, but the opposition Keys in the Conclave of Steadholders had seized upon it as an additional weapon in their struggle to roll back Benjamin IX's political power. Their persistent attacks on the Manticoran Alliance—or, rather, on the wisdom of Grayson's remaining bound to that Alliance—had been sufficiently unremitting before the allegations of infidelity ever saw the light of day. That opposition to the Alliance had survived even the execution for treas
on of Steadholder Mueller, who'd first put it forward, and the inexcusable and stupid arrogance with which the High Ridge Government had treated its allies had lent it a dangerous strength since. Now those same steadholders saw the attacks on Honor as yet another weapon with which to bolster their argument, and the fact that so many of them hated her as the symbol of the "Mayhew Restoration" which they loathed with all their hearts only gave them a sense of bitter, ironic satisfaction when they reached for it.
That was bad enough. Benjamin's letters might argue that the furor would die down with time, but Honor knew him too well. He might actually believe it, but he was nowhere near as confident of it as he tried to make himself appear in his messages to her. And whether he believed it or not, she didn't. She'd told herself again and again that her judgment was never at its best when she confronted the possibility of seeing herself used against friends or things she believed in. She'd reminded herself how often Benjamin's analyses of political and social dynamics had proved superior to her own. She'd even spent hours researching past political crises and scandals, some dating back even to Ante Diaspora Earth, and attempting to dissect their long-term consequences and find the parallels to her own situation. And none of it had changed what really mattered. Whatever Benjamin might believe, whatever might actually be true in the long run, in the short run his enemies had done enormous damage to his ability to preserve the Alliance and keep Grayson in it. And it didn't matter how Grayson public opinion might view these events fifteen T-years from now if the planet was split away from the Alliance and its relationship with the Star Kingdom this year, or the next.
But dreadful as that potential disaster was, one almost as dreadful loomed in her personal life, because Emily had been right. Honor's long-standing relationship with Hamish had been a fatal casualty of the attack. The caution—or cowardice—which had kept either of them from ever admitting his or her feelings to the other had been stripped away. Now both of them knew precisely what the other felt, and the pretense that they didn't was becoming more threadbare and fragile by the day.
It was stupid . . . and very human, she supposed, although the observation offered absolutely no comfort. They were both mature, adult human beings. More than that, she knew that however imperfect they often seemed to themselves, both of them possessed a devotion to duty and their own personal honor codes which was stronger than most. They ought to have been able to admit what they felt and to accept that nothing could ever come of it. Perhaps they couldn't simply have walked away from it completely unscathed, but surely they ought to be able to keep it from destroying their lives!
And they couldn't.
She wanted desperately to believe that her own weakness was the direct consequence of her ability to taste Hamish's emotions. There might even be some validity to that. How could anyone expect her to feel the love and desire flooding out from him, however hard he tried to hide it, and not respond to it? For the first time, Honor Harrington truly understood what drew a moth closer and closer to the all-consuming power of a candle flame. Or perhaps what had drawn treecats to bond to humans before prolong, when they knew that to do so would cut their own life spans in half. Perhaps she could have walked away from what she felt for Hamish, but it was literally impossible for her to walk away from what he felt for her.
Then there was Samantha.
The Sphinx Forestry Service had checked its files at Honor's request, and the SFS report confirmed what she'd suspected. There wasn't a single recorded instance of a mated pair of 'cats who had both adopted humans . . . before Nimitz and Samantha. There'd been mated pairs in which one 'cat had adopted and the other hadn't, although even that had been vanishingly rare, but in those cases, at least only one human had been involved. There'd been no need to choose between two-legs who were not or could not be together, and so there'd been no reason for them to face the possibility of permanent separation from either mate or person. The fact that the situation was unique meant there was no precedent to guide any of them, yet in this, as in so much else, Nimitz and Samantha had set their own precedents, with no regard at all for history or tradition.
She wondered sometimes what might have happened if Harold Tschu hadn't been killed in Silesia before Hamish's awareness of her had shifted so radically. Would she and Harry have been drawn inexorably together? It was certainly possible, but even so, she doubted that it would have happened. He'd been a fine man, and she'd respected him, but he'd also been one of her subordinates. Theirs had been a professional relationship, and so far as Honor could tell, the bonds between each of them and their 'cats hadn't carried over to their attitudes toward one another in any way. Certainly the thought that he might ever have been anything more than a friend, the human partner of Nimitz's wife and the human "uncle" of any of the 'cats' children, had never so much as crossed her mind before his death had erased any possibility of it.
Which had absolutely no bearing on her present intolerable position. As Emily had pointed out, she and Hamish had no choice but to continue to work together, cooperating as closely and as . . . intimately as before the attack. And just as political considerations made it impossible for her to avoid Hamish, so did the personal consideration that Nimitz's mate was bonded to him. There was no way she could possibly separate her beloved friend from his wife, yet the very intensity of their bond with one another only made Honor even more exquisitely sensitive to all of the points of resonance between her and Hamish.
No wonder empaths thought it was insane for anyone to attempt to deny what she truly felt!
The lecture hall's seats were almost full, and she glanced at the time display on the wall. Another ninety seconds. Just long enough for one last self-indulgent wallow in her self-pitying misery, she told herself bitingly.
Yet self-pity or not, there was no escape from the grim reality behind it. Emily had bought her a reprieve, nothing more. Friends and allies could defend her from external attack, but they couldn't protect her from her own inner weakness and vulnerability. No one could defend her from that. The only possible answer she could see was to find some way to separate herself from the source of her pain. She might not be able to do that permanently, but perhaps she could do it long enough to at least learn to cope with it better than she could now. And even if she couldn't learn how to do that, she desperately needed some respite, some break in the pressure to let her pause, catch her breath, and regather her strength.
But recognizing that answer did her no good at all when there was no way she could separate herself from Hamish and the Star Kingdom's political fray. Not without convincing everyone, friend and foe alike, that she was running away. Perhaps they wouldn't know all of the reasons for her flight, but that wouldn't really matter. The damage would be done, especially on Grayson.
So how, she wondered despairingly, did she find the sheltered haven she needed so desperately without looking as if she had allowed herself to be hounded out of town?
Her wrist chrono beeped softly, and she drew a deep breath and reached forward to rest her hands on the traditional polished wood of the lectern while she gazed out at her respectfully assembled students.
"Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen." Lady Dame Honor Harrington's soprano voice was calm and clear, carrying effortlessly to every listening ear. "This is the last lecture of the term, and before we begin our review for the course final, I want to take this opportunity to tell you all how much I've enjoyed teaching this class. It's been a privilege and a pleasure, as well as a high honor, and the way in which you've responded, the fashion in which you've risen to every challenge, only reaffirms the strength and integrity of our Service and its future. You are that future, Ladies and Gentlemen, and it gives me enormous satisfaction to see what good hands the Queen's Navy and all of our allied navies are in."
Silence hovered behind her words, deep and profound, and the wounded corners of her soul relaxed ever so slightly as the answering emotions of her students rolled back through her like an ocean tide. She clung to that sensatio
n from the depths of her battered exhaustion, with the greedy longing of a frozen, starveling waif crouching outside the window of a warm and welcoming kitchen, but no sign of that crossed her serene expression as she gazed back out at them.
"And now," she went on more briskly, "we have a great deal to review and only two hours to review it in. So let's be about it, Ladies and Gentlemen."
* * *
"She's like some damned vampire!" Baron High Ridge growled as he slapped the hardcopy of the latest poll numbers down on his blotter.
"Who?" Elaine Descroix asked with an irritatingly winsome little-girl smile. "Emily Alexander or Harrington?"
"Both—either!" the Prime Minister snarled. "Damn it! I thought we'd finally put Harrington and White Haven out of our misery, and then along comes White Haven's wife—his wife, of all people!—and resurrects both of them. What do we have to do? Cut off their heads and drive stakes through their hearts?"
"Maybe that's exactly what we have to do," Sir Edward Janacek muttered, and Descroix chuckled. Despite her smile, it was not a pleasant sound.
"It might not be a bad idea to wash them both down with holy water and bury them by moonlight, as well," she said, and High Ridge snorted harshly. Then he looked at the other two people present.
"Your suggestion worked even better than I'd hoped it would . . . in the short term," he told Georgia Young, abandoning any pretense that the idea had ever been her husband's. "It took Harrington and White Haven completely out of the equation while we fought through the new budget. But it's beginning to look as if our short term victory is going to prove a long term defeat. Unless you've managed to come up with some answer to the rebound in their popularity with the proles, that is."