by David Weber
"It's not the end of the world, kiddo," he offered after a moment. "We're here for ten days, you know, and you're a fast learner. They'll let you off the beginner slopes a lot sooner than you may think right now."
"Yeah. Right," Susan snorted, then stabbed him with a sharp-edged green gaze. "And just what skill level did they assign you?"
"Advanced-intermediate," he replied without thinking, and then swore at himself mentally as something flickered behind her expression. Susan might complain bitterly when she was held back from something she wanted to do, and she was capable of arguing her points with unendurable tenacity and earnestness, but one thing she did not do was sulk or go hunting for sympathy. Which didn't mean Ranjit hadn't learned to recognize the times when a part of her wanted to do those things. He'd seen that same flicker in her eyes before, often enough to know it for a sure sign of her refusal to whine, and he reached out to lay a hand on her shoulder.
"Hey, just because they said I could go advanced-intermediate if I wanted to doesn't mean I do want to," he told her. "I almost busted my butt twice on the sim run for that difficulty level. It wouldn't hurt me a bit to start out on the beginner slopes myself when it's for real—at least until I'm sure I've got myself sorted out. For that matter, it'd probably hurt a lot less to do it there, now that I think about it!"
"You don't have to do that just to keep me company," Susan muttered. "I'm not a baby, Ranjit."
"Didn't say you were," he said, and gave her shoulder a squeeze. "A pain in the butt, and the neck, and several other places I can think of, yeah. That you are. But a baby?" He shook his head, and her lips twitched as she fought not to grin up at him. "But you're my kid sister, too, and I'm serious about wanting to ease back into things myself, so why not kill two birds with one stone? I'll keep you company on the beginners' slopes, for the first day or so, anyway, until I'm fairly sure I won't break something I'll need later. By that time, they may've cleared you for something a little tougher on your own. And even if they haven't, you'll probably have made a bunch of new friends amongst the other `retards,' right?"
"Do you really want to do that?" she demanded, eying him suspiciously, and he shrugged.
"Heck, no! That's why I only suggested it after you stuck a pulser in my ribs!" She laughed, and he grinned, then went on more seriously. "I'm not saying I'd want to spend the whole trip stuck there, of course. But I can spare a day or two to keep my sister company in her exile without wrecking my entire social calendar, you know. And that part of it I do want to do. Okay?"
"Okay," she said almost shyly, then dropped her gaze to the snow at her feet for a long moment. "And . . . thanks, Ranjit," she added after a moment in a gruff little voice, and gave him a fierce, rare hug before she went scampering off.
" . . . so the weather looks like it's thinkin' about bein' more than a little `iffy,' " Commander Anthony Agursky, Fourteenth Baron of Novaya Tyumen, drawled, and let his eyes sweep around the officers in the briefing room aboard Broadsword. The commander had been pulled out of his comfortable office at the Bureau of Ships and sent out to take charge of the Skyhawk evaluation program, and the brand new heavy cruiser was the senior ship of the small squadron the Navy and Marines had assembled for that purpose. She also had the most room for extra personnel and the biggest (and most comfortable) briefing rooms . . . and visiting officer's quarters. Those qualities would have made Broadsword the inevitable choice for someone like Novaya Tyumen, even if Captain Tammerlane hadn't been the impromptu squadron's senior officer. After all, he was an Agursky of Novaya Tyumen. In fact, one might say he was the Agursky of Novaya Tyumen—a point he rarely chose to allow anyone to forget—and that made the newest and best ship available no more than his just due.
The commander was a man of average height and build, but with coal-black hair and a complexion that was intensely pale, almost pallid. He also had a particularly pronounced version of the exaggerated drawl some segments of the more recent generations of the Star Kingdom's aristocracy had begun affecting. Coupled with a certain supercilious air and a taste for dandyism when it came to the tailoring of his uniforms, that drawl had inspired many an unwary soul to mark him down as some sort of over-bred, self-absorbed, slow-witted drone who'd gotten this far solely on the basis of his prominent family's undoubted political influence.
Which, Honor Harrington reminded herself, could be a very unfortunate mistake for someone to make, because one thing he isn'tis "slow-witted." On the other hand, she allowed herself a mental grimace, though no sign of it showed on her face, three out of four isn't all that bad.
"Yes?" Novaya Tyumen asked now, as a hand rose.
"You said `iffy,' Sir," Lieutenant Hedges said. "Does that mean we may drop below approved minimums?"
"If we dropped below approved minimums, then the weather would scarcely be `iffy' any longer, now would it, Lieutenant?" Novaya Tyumen observed in that irritating drawl. "In that case, conditions would be definitely unacceptable, and the mission would be scrubbed, no?"
"Ah, yes, Sir." Hedges glanced at his own superior from the corner of one eye, but Honor simply sat there, her expression one of composed attentiveness. She and Novaya Tyumen had enjoyed two or three icy exchanges already. She liked Hedges, and she didn't intend to leave him twisting in the wind if what she expected happened, but she did intend to choose her ground with care. She might be Broadsword's executive officer, but she was also junior to Novaya Tyumen, and BuShips and BuPlan had placed him in command of the evaluation exercise. That made for a somewhat convoluted chain of command, and she'd already discovered that Novaya Tyumen was one of those officers who always pushed the outer limit of his current authority to the max.
Hedges wasn't aware of everything that was happening between her and Novaya Tyumen, but he'd obviously figured out there was something more than showed on the surface. Now he glanced at her again, as if seeking some sort of sign, then cleared his throat.
"What I meant to inquire, Sir, was whether or not we should plan for the possibility that we might have to scrub if weather conditions do worsen even further."
"I see." Novaya Tyumen tipped back in his chair and regarded the lieutenant for several seconds, then swiveled his eyes to Honor. She gazed back at him calmly, but the treecat perched on the back of her chair lashed the very tip of his tail back and forth.
Hedges doubted Novaya Tyumen could see that tail from where he sat, yet there was something ominous about his outwardly neutral expression as he gazed at Hedges' immediate superior. Some sort of unspoken hostility seemed to lie between him and Harrington, like dark, black swamp water over a bog of quicksand. As far as Hedges could tell, it came primarily from Novaya Tyumen's side, although it was hard to be sure. The very qualities of self-possession and poise which served Harrington so well in other ways made her emotions damnably hard to read when she chose to conceal them.
"I should hope, Lieutenant," the baron said after a moment, projecting his voice to the entire briefing room yet never taking his eyes from Honor's face, "that every officer in this compartment always plans for the possibility of havin' a mission scrubbed. Or revised. Or any one of the other thousand-and-one things that can change between a final briefin' and an operation's actual execution. Is there some special reason you or your ship might find this a little more difficult than the rest of us?"
Hedges inhaled sharply, and the temperature in the compartment seemed to drop several degrees. He felt other officers stiffen in their chairs at the unexpected, contemptuous bite in the commander's drawl, and fought down a sudden, dangerous desire to tell this aristocratic ass just what he truly thought of him. But Novaya Tyumen was not only his superior officer; he was also the son of one of the clique of nobles who ran the Conservative Association in the House of Lords. Someday he would pass his barony on to his own heir and replace it with his father's earldom, and everyone in the compartment knew it. Worse, the baron struck Hedges as precisely the sort of person who would delight in using the enormous political pull his birth g
ave him to swat an irritating junior, and his tone suggested that any answer to his question would be the wrong one.
Hedges started to answer it anyway, if with rather more circumspection than he truly wanted to exert, but another voice spoke before he could.
"I believe that what Lieutenant Hedges intended, Sir," Honor said coolly, her crisp Sphinx accent cutting across Novaya Tyumen's drawl like a chill alpine wind, "was to ask you, as the primary mission coordinator, to share your own contingency planning with us all. Since you've had the weather information longer than any of the rest of us, your thoughts on the subject are undoubtedly more . . . complete than our own." She smiled slightly, but her eyes were dangerous and she heard a soft popping sound as Nimitz's extended claws penetrated the fabric of her chair back. "I'm sure we'd all find them a most useful starting point for our own thinking," she added.
There was nothing overtly challenging in her tone or choice of words, but no one missed the implication, and Hedges suddenly found himself wishing he had never opened his mouth. Novaya Tyumen's dark eyes flashed angrily in his pale face, his lips tightened, and his right hand—the only one visible, since the left was in his lap—clenched into a fist on the briefing room conference table as those eyes locked with Harrington's.
"I see," he said after a moment, and his drawl was in total (if transitory) abeyance. Then he twitched his shoulders and smiled. It wasn't a very convincing smile, more of a grimace that bared his teeth at Honor, but his voice sounded closer to normal when he spoke again. "In that case, Commander Harrington, I suggest we continue with the briefin'. Perhaps his questions will be answered in passin'. And if they aren't, there should be plenty of time to discuss them afterward, don't you agree?"
"I feel confident of it, Sir," Honor replied. Her level soprano was unruffled, but once again Hedges seemed to sense the clash of bared steel between his superiors, and he wondered just what the devil he had stumbled into the middle of.
"Very good. In that case, I'll ask Ensign Haverty to give us the full weather brief," Novaya Tyumen said, "and we'll follow that up with the mission parameters. Ensign Haverty?"
He nodded to the ensign, then leaned back in his chair, his expression outwardly affable, but his hard, dark eyes never wavered from Honor Harrington's face.
Huge clouds swirled across the surface of the planet Gryphon. From orbit, an observer could clearly see the storm front's ominous cloud wrack flowing up the long, deep trough of the Olympus Valley like some dangerous river, probing for openings in the mighty rampart of the Attica Mountains, and Ensign Yolanda Haverty, RMN Bureau of Ships, watched it with wary respect. Gryphon's axial tilt of almost twenty-seven degrees always made for . . . interesting weather patterns, but this one promised to be unusually lively even for Gryphon, and it was Haverty's job to keep an eye on it for Commander Novaya Tyumen.
She grimaced at the thought, for she didn't much care for the baron. She would far rather have served under someone like Lieutenant Commander Harrington, although, to be fair, Harrington was daunting enough in her own way. She didn't seem the sort to indulge in the sort of sharp-tongued goading which appeared to amuse Novaya Tyumen, but she clearly demanded the very best of her people, and there was something detached about her. Not as if she didn't care about her people, for she obviously did, but more of a sense of . . . watchfulness. An impression that there was something poised and cat-like behind her eyes, observing every single thing that happened but reserving judgment and eternally considering options and alternatives and responsibilities.
But how much of that is real and how much of it comes from the fact that I know she's got a treecat? Haverty mused. The six-limbed, empathic 'cats were very rare off their native planet of Sphinx. Indeed, Harrington was the only person Haverty had ever actually met who had been adopted by one of them, and the ensign wondered if the 'cat's presence had somehow shaped her own perception of the lieutenant commander's personality.
I don't think so, though, she reflected after a moment. And even if the 'cat does make me see her a bit differently, it doesn't change the fact that she leadsher people instead of kicking them from behind!
Standards. That was the word for it. Harrington set the standards which she required of herself at levels which were considerably higher than anyone else would have demanded of her . . . then went right ahead and met them. That was what made her daunting. Not because she would jump down someone's throat for failing to hold themselves to the same rigorous measure, but because she challenged them to meet it without fanfare or goading, and that made it unthinkable to disappoint her in the first place.
Novaya Tyumen wasn't like that, unfortunately. His attitudes might seem almost perfunctory to the casual observer, especially covered by the drawling pretense of boredom which he projected so well, but the truth was very different. He, too, watched everyone about him, but he was more spider than cat. Rather than challenge people to meet the standards he demanded of himself, he watched and waited until someone failed to meet the standards he demanded of them and then turned himself into the worst nightmare that person had ever had. That languid, aristocratic accent could cut like a razor, and he used it with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. It wasn't so much the words he chose as it was the ineffable contempt with which he infused them, his obvious belief that only an imbecile could possibly have misunderstood any instructions that he gave, and that any failure in executing them could only be the consequence of abject stupidity or willful negligence. Worse, he obviously relished the opportunity to slice and dice anyone unfortunate enough to give him the chance. He enjoyed slamming people who couldn't slam back, and he would never have dreamed of risking the ire of one of his own superiors to defend or protect one of his juniors the way Harrington had deflected him from Hedges.
That clearly apparent contempt for anyone he considered his inferior was the worse of the only two real failings Ensign Haverty had so far detected in him. (Professional failings, that was; the list of things she detested in him on a personal level grew longer with each passing day.) The other was a tendency to ignore the unlikely in his planning and depend on his natural intelligence and ability—both of which were considerable, she admitted—to wiggle out of trouble if it persisted in happening anyway. He wouldn't tolerate that sort of approach in anyone else, and Haverty was a recent enough product of the Academy to feel outraged by his willingness to adopt it for himself, but she had to admit that so far it seemed to have always worked for him.
And however much she might dislike that trait, it was far less disruptive and demoralizing than the contemptuous (and public) verbal flayings he was in the habit of handing out. Like the way he'd started in on Lieutenant Hedges. It wasn't that Novaya Tyumen wasn't good at his job, for in many ways he performed at a high level of competence. Indeed, Haverty had already realized that there were very few officers who could have taught her more about the inner workings of their joint BuShips specialization than he could. It was just that he could be so . . . so nasty about the lessons he chose to impart and how he taught them.
The ensign grimaced wryly at the weather front, then frowned. It was already a rough night down there, and from the look of things, it was going to get rougher. She really ought to bring it to Novaya Tyumen's attention, but she hated the very thought of that. He was undoubtedly sound asleep at the moment, which meant he would start out by tearing a strip off of her for disturbing him. And it would be even worse if he thought the fact that the weather was, indeed, headed for the wrong side of "iffy" might make him seem less than on top of things after the morning's discussion. He would undoubtedly take that out on her, as well, and after that, he'd make everyone else on his field test staff totally miserable by dragging them all in and demanding that they produce the contingency plans (which, Haverty knew, didn't actually exist, whatever he might have implied) for canceling or modifying the drop. And they'd have to put them all together within the next five or six hours so that he could casually (and triumphantly) produce them for people like Har
rington and Hedges.
She checked the readouts again. Still within parameters so far, she noted, comparing them to the notes Novaya Tyumen had jotted down for her. Of course, it's going to come an awful lot closer to exceeding them before the night is over, but I don't think it's actually going to bust the outside limit he set. Even if it does, he specifically told me not to bother him until conditions did just that. He'll probably say something really ugly if I bug him early and then they don'texceed the mission parameters after all, and if they do . . .
She frowned again. Maybe if her boss had been Harrington instead of Novaya Tyumen she would have gone ahead and made the call now. But she didn't work for Harrington. She worked for Novaya Tyumen, and she was covered by his logged instructions not to wake him until the storm did reach unacceptable levels. And if executing his own orders makes him look bad, well, that's hardly myfault, now is it? the ensign thought. She hesitated for one more moment, then smiled a remarkably nasty smile for someone of her tender years and meticulously logged the wind velocities and snowfall, noted that both were still within acceptable bounds as stipulated in her orders, and went on about her other duties.
HMS Broadsword swung in her orbit around Gryphon, tranquil and still in the peaceful vacuum of space, while far, far below her, the late-season blizzard howled up the Olympus Valley and hurled itself upon the Athinai Resort with seventy-five-kilometer winds.