Worlds of Honor woh-2

by David Weber

  "Ohhh, look at it!" Susan Hibson exulted as she and Ranjit joined the flow of people towards the grav lifts that served the slopes. "Isn't it gorgeous?"

  Ranjit laughed out loud, and she looked up at him with dancing eyes. Susan rarely gushed, but she'd found the storm which had moaned and howled about the resort last night exciting. Well, Ranjit had, too, he supposed. A belter habitat didn't offer its inhabitants any genuine weather at all, much less a shrieking blizzard, and he'd felt the wild power of the wind singing in his own blood.

  He'd tried not to let it show, but Susan hadn't shared his own determination to avoid looking like some bumpkin kid from the back of beyond. She'd roamed around the main lodge, staring out the double-paned windows at the wind-tortured snow in wide-eyed delight and chattering to anyone unwary enough to pause within her range. Some of that still simmered within her, and made her even more appreciative of a winterscape unlike anything she had ever seen on warmer, sunnier Manticore, far less Unicorn Eleven. The tracks and paths which had marred the snow around the resort's buildings had disappeared magically, swept away by over a meter of fresh white. Huge drifts of even deeper white had been piled wherever an obstruction broke the wind, and the resort staff had told them that the slopes had been given an average of better than eighty centimeters of fresh powder. Although Ranjit fully intended to spend the next day or so with Susan on the beginners' slopes, he was looking forward to what all that fresh snow meant for the more difficult runs, as well. Yet right this moment, all of that was secondary to the sheer beauty of the crystal-clear morning and the almost painful perfection of the white mantle which covered everything in sight.

  "Well it is gorgeous!" Susan told him firmly as he chuckled, and he nodded.

  "Yes, it is," he agreed, and draped his left arm around her while he balanced two sets of skis on his right shoulder. "This should be fun," he added, and she nodded eagerly.

  High above the Olympus Valley's floor, uncountable tons of fresh snow lay smooth and white under the brilliant sun, and the only sound was the faint sigh of the wind that swept swirling snow devils across the pristine peaks. The snow pack was always deep in the Atticas, but it was deeper than usual this year, although the sun had been unseasonably warm for the last few weeks. The overburden of fresh snow lay on a base which had been weakened and softened ever so slightly by that warmth, and no one knew it at all.

  Honor settled into the copilot's couch aboard Broadsword's Number Three Pinnace and checked her safety harness. She really ought to be staying aboard, but Captain Tammerlane had only smiled indulgently when she told him she intended to accompany the drop. She was certain the Captain thought it was just her way of sneaking off to get in a few extra flight hours—he and Admiral Courvosier, Honor's old Academy mentor, were friends, and Tammerlane had let drop his awareness of her reputation as a hot pilot—but that wasn't her real motive at all.

  She grimaced as she admitted that to herself, and a soft almost-scold sounded gently in her ear. She turned her head, and her normal dispassionate on-duty expression softened into an urchin-like grin as Nimitz cocked his head at her from the back of her couch. The treecat waited until he was certain he had her attention, then reached out one deceptively delicate-looking true-hand and brushed it lightly over her cheek.

  "It's all right, Stinker," she told him. They were alone on the flight deck for the moment while they awaited the pinnace's assigned coxswain, and she raised her hand to return the caress.

  The 'cat made a chittering sound and shook his head in an unmistakable gesture of disagreement with her statement, and her grin turned wry. She never had been able to fool Nimitz. The two of them had been together for over twenty T-years, and she relied upon the empathic 'cat's reactions to others as a barometer and evaluation system most people never even realized she had, but there were times when their adoption bond could be a drawback. Or, no, not a drawback. Never that! But there were times when it could have . . . inconvenient consequences, and this was one of them, for Nimitz knew precisely how she felt about Anthony Agursky. Unfortunately, the 'cat also knew why she felt that way . . . and why Baron Novaya Tyumen hated her, as well.

  Nimitz made another sound, softer this time, with a dangerous edge of darkness. Honor had never been certain exactly how deep into her own emotions he could see. She suspected that his sensitivity went deeper than even most " 'cat experts" believed, just as she felt stubbornly certain that there were times when she hovered on the very brink of sensing his emotions in return. She never had, of course. No human had ever been able to duplicate a treecat's empathy, not even those fortunate few who, like Honor, had been bonded to and adopted by one of them. On the other hand, some people could at least feel the existence of the empathic bond, and Honor was one of them. She had no word for the sensation—not surprisingly, she supposed, since it used none of the senses humans had ever assigned names to—but she could always point unerringly to wherever Nimitz was, whether she could see him or not. She might be wrong about the distance between them; she was never wrong about the bearing.

  Then again, she wasn't exactly typical, even among adoptees. Childhood adoptions like hers were extremely rare, just for starters. More than that, her family's association with the 'cats went back literally to the very first adoption. Indeed, Honor's middle name memorialized the first Harrington adoptee, who had also been the first human being even to suspect the 'cats existence. Not content with that, she'd gone on to reorganize the Forestry Commission from the ground up and write (literally; Honor had seen her handwritten first draft) the Ninth Amendment to the Star Kingdom's Constitution, which recognized the treecats as Sphinx's indigenous sentient species and guaranteed their corporate claim to just over a third of Sphinx's surface in perpetuity. She'd campaigned long, hard, and victoriously to get the amendment enacted, and then spent the rest of her lengthy life enforcing it, and the extensive Harrington clan which had followed her probably boasted the highest percentage of adoptees of any single family on Sphinx.

  An awful lot of those adoptees had been compulsive journal-keepers, and Honor had viewed every scrap of information any of her ancestors had ever recorded about their relationships with their 'cats. She was also an only child, and that meant she and Nimitz had been allowed an extraordinary amount of time to themselves when she was a girl. Not even her parents knew everything the two of them had gotten into, just as they didn't know that she had accompanied Nimitz home to meet the rest of his clan on more than one occasion. All of which meant that, despite her relative youth, she probably knew more about treecats, on a practical level, at least, than almost anyone else in the Star Kingdom. But for all that, she could no more have explained how the 'cats' empathy worked, or precisely how and why they bonded with humans—or why with one particular group of humans and not another, or just exactly what Nimitz did to help her cope with stress and anxiety—than she could have flown.

  Yet she didn't have to be able to explain those things to understand the 'cat's hatred for Novaya Tyumen. Treecats were direct, uncomplicated souls, so she supposed she should count the fact that she'd at least convinced Nimitz not to hiss and bare his fangs at the commander as a victory, especially since she was well aware that what he really wanted to do was reduce that pale, supercilious face to slashed ruins. If she were honest about it, that was what she really wanted him to do, as well, but that was probably a little excessive of her. After all, she and Novaya Tyumen had never even met until they wound up assigned to the Skyhawk evaluation exercise.

  Perhaps not, but their first, brief conversation on the day he came aboard Broadsword had been enough to tell her he was another of Pavel Young's allies. She'd run into several of them over the years, and she'd never enjoyed the experience. Young would never forgive her for beating him bloody in the Academy showers that dreadful night, just as she would never forgive him for trying to rape her in the first place. Unfortunately, Young was the eldest son and heir of the powerful Earl of North Hollow. The very thought that anyone with that much
influence behind him might face any meaningful consequences for his actions had been laughable, and Honor had known it. Any effort to see him punished would only have created a scandal the Academy didn't need, and she'd told herself that the beating she'd administered had been punishment enough. Even at the time, she'd wondered if she were trying to convince herself of something which wasn't really true because she'd known she would never tell a soul what had actually happened. She hadn't known the answer to that question even then, and she hadn't come any closer to finding it since, but it was certainly true that he'd walked away with no additional punishment other than a sizable dose of humiliation. She'd expected no more, and she'd even managed to accept it—after a fashion—as one of those horrible, unfair things people simply had to put up with in an imperfect universe. But it hadn't ended there for either of them. Young's later actions had made it abundantly clear that he intended to use his own and his family's connections both within and without the Service to cripple Honor's career in any way he could . . . and he and Anthony Agursky were second cousins.

  Novaya Tyumen couldn't have cared less how the bad blood between Honor and his cousin had begun. Like the Youngs, the Agurskys belonged to that fortunately minority portion of the aristocracy which used power and influence with ruthless arrogance to get whatever it wanted, regardless of the consequences for anyone else. The two families had also intermarried for generations, to the point that it was sometimes difficult for an outsider to keep who belonged to which of them straight, and Novaya Tyumen had clearly signed on to help crush the upstart commoner who had dared to frustrate his cousin's desires.

  It was small, petty, and disgusting, but Honor had learned to cope with it. She shouldn't have had to, and she hadn't enjoyed her frequently painful lessons in just how low Young and his allies would stoop, but she'd had eight Manticoran years—almost fourteen T-years—in which to digest those lessons and armor herself internally against her enemies. What filled her with fury, and what she had not learned to accept, were the instances in which Young or his cronies tried to use other people to get at her. Like Novaya Tyumen's caustic response to John Hedges' perfectly appropriate question of the day before. She'd seen entirely too much of that, and she suspected that she'd see more of it before this evaluation program was over.

  And that was the real reason she would be flying co-pilot for Chief Zariello today. The bad weather of the night before had put them over four hours behind schedule, and Novaya Tyumen had been like a hexapuma with a toothache over the delay. The fact that everyone in Broadsword had known he'd been caught totally unprepared for it had only made it worse, of course. His harried, furious efforts to reorganize on the fly had made him look like an imbecile after his exchange with her the day before, and knowing that had only made him even more furious.

  Given his personality, Honor had no doubt at all that he was looking for anyone upon whom he might vent some of his self-inflicted spleen, nor did she doubt that that venting would be even more satisfactory to him if he could somehow use it to take a few cheap shots at her. So she intended to be right there, on the spot, throughout the day's entire ops schedule, because if a piece of aristocratic trash like Novaya Tyumen thought he could get away with victimizing her pinnace pilots, or her Marines, or any of her subordinates, as part of a quarrel with her, then he had another thought coming. She was confident Captain Tammerlane's backing would be there if she needed it, but she also planned to have every detail of today's operations at her fingertips from first-hand experience, and the first time Novaya Tyumen opened his mouth or even looked like he intended to unfairly criticize one of her people, she meant to cut him off at the knees.

  And I'll enjoyit, too, she admitted unrepentantly, and heard Nimitz's soft bleek of agreement in her ear.

  Ranjit eased the skis on his shoulder and pushed back his new souvenir knit cap, with the resort's Old Earth owl logo, to wipe his forehead. It was late in the ski season, and the crowds was unusually dense, even for a resort with Athinai's reputation. That meant long lines and slow movement, especially at the access points for the lift towers, and the early morning had gotten away while he and Susan shuffled their way slowly along the lengthy line. Despite all the fresh snow, the current outdoor temperature had actually risen above freezing as the sun shone down from the cloudless sky, and it was downright hot here in the covered concourse at the base of the lift. His one-piece ski suit's thermo-reactive fabric maintained most of his body at a comfortable twenty-two degrees, but it didn't keep the bright sun shining through the crystoplast roof from making the top of his head hot.

  The lift tower rose above them like a squat, massive cylinder of bright alloy. He was a little surprised that the resort's owners hadn't gone for something more "traditional" looking, in keeping with the high-peaked roofs of the chalet architecture they'd favored for the rest of its buildings. Maybe they'd simply decided there was no way to make a forty-meter wide sphere set atop a cylinder sixty meters tall and fifteen in diameter look like anything but an old pre-space water tank and decided to spare themselves the effort, he thought with a grin. Or maybe they'd deliberately chosen to go for the sharpest contrast they could get.

  Either way, the lift—one of four serving the Athinai Resort's slopes—was the focal point of several converging lines of skiers, each proceeding down its own crystoplast-roofed concourse. The lift cars settled atop the tower two at a time, then each pair slid down the guides to the tower's base, accepted their own loads of passengers, and lifted effortlessly into the sky once more to deliver them to the designated slopes. The drifting bubbles of alloy and crystoplast glittered and glistened like magic jewels as they caught the sun, and he wondered if that, too, was deliberate. It certainly turned them into eye-catching attractions, and their stately movement—like the measures of some huge, elaborate dance—probably helped distract people from how long they had to wait in line for them during peak demand periods.

  He watched the most recent pair of cars lift away, following the invisible aerial pathways the ground-based counter-grav/presser plates within the lift tower laid down for them, and then tugged his cap back down. The first car of the next pair was scheduled for the beginner-level slopes, and he and Susan should make it aboard easily.

  "You're sure you don't need me to tag along?"

  He glanced over his shoulder, and Csilla Berczi smiled and quirked an eyebrow at him. The history teacher was a tallish, slender woman with short-cut auburn hair and gray eyes, and he'd never gotten used to how quietly she moved. Especially since he knew she was one of the people regen didn't work for and that one of her legs—the right, he thought, but he wasn't certain—had been replaced with a prosthetic after the accident that retired her from the Marines. It wasn't that she was sneaky or anything; she just moved like a hunting cat all the time. But that didn't keep him from liking her a lot, and he shook his head as he gave her an answering smile.

  "Sooze and I'll be just fine, Ma'am," he assured her. "I promise we'll report in to the instructor as soon as we get up top."

  "I wasn't thinking about you, young man," Ms. Berczi informed him with a twinkle. "Or not directly, at any rate. I was wondering whether or not Susan might like me to come along to help ride herd on you!"

  "Oh, I think I can manage him," Susan said. "He's actually pretty easily led, once you figure out the right buttons to push."

  "Oh, thank you!" Ranjit muttered, and she giggled.

  "In that case, I think I really will leave the two of you to your own devices," Ms. Berczi said much more seriously. "Mr. Fleurieu drew the Krepson twins and Donny Tergesen in his group." She rolled her eyes. "Even with Monica to help out, he's going to need all the zoo-keepers he can get with that crowd. You two have fun—and be careful!"

  She waved a finger at them with a sternness only slightly marred by the gleam in her eyes, then turned and marched away, and Ranjit and Susan exchanged eloquent looks. The Krepson twins all by themselves would have been enough to keep three adults fully occupied, and Don
ny Tergesen's classmates had voted him the boy most likely to validate Darwin by opening an airlock without checking his helmet seal. Ranjit didn't envy Mr. Fleurieu or Ms. Berczi one little bit, and he was moderately flattered by the implicit compliment Ms. Berczi had just paid him—and his sister—by deciding to trust them on their own.

  Which, now that he thought about it, was actually a pretty sneaky way of making sure that they were trustworthy. It was much harder to disappoint someone who expected good things out of you than it was to confirm the expectations of someone who figured you'd screw up anyway.

  He chuckled at the thought, and then stepped forward eagerly as the lift car settled and the doors slid open.

  * * *

  "Bravo Leader, this is Broadsword Control. You are cleared to begin insertion."

  "Broadsword Control, Bravo Leader copies cleared for insertion. I am beginning my run now."

  Honor listened to the crisp voices in her earbug and gave a mental nod of approval. Hedges was back aboard Broadsword, coordinating the shuttles from all three cruisers for the troop insertion while Novaya Tyumen watched over his shoulder. Officially, that was to free the baron from detail concerns while he watched and evaluated the exercise. Actually, she suspected, it was because Novaya Tyumen preferred not to get up off his lazy backside and exert himself when it could be avoided . . . not to mention the pleasure he undoubtedly took from looming ominously over Hedges' shoulder. On the other hand, she knew her intense dislike for the man could be affecting her judgment. Despite his irritating mannerisms and current foul temper, he did have a reputation as an officer who got things done, and there was a limit to how much the Service would allow even someone with his exalted connections to get away with depending on his subordinates to carry the load for him.

  But whatever Novaya Tyumen was thinking, Hedges seemed to have things well in hand. He'd waited a few minutes longer than Honor would have to release the pinnaces for their runs, but that was a pure judgment call and, at the moment, he had access to much better tracking data on the other ships' pinnaces than she did. Now she watched her heads-up display, hands resting loosely on her chair arms but poised to go for the controls in an instant if Chief Zariello needed her. Lieutenant Freemantle, flying Bravo Leader for the exercise, led the ship's pinnaces, slashing down into atmosphere at the head of the drop force, and Honor looked up past her HUD as the Attica Mountains and the axe-sharp cleft of the Olympus Valley swelled rapidly through the cockpit canopy.