by David Weber
Gunfire thundered across the dining room, bullets crisscrossing with the solid-sound fists of disrupter bolts. Bodies went down on both sides, and aside from the disrupters, there was no way Honor could tell who was friend and who was foe.
But Nimitz was unhampered by any confusion. The high-pitched snarl of his battle cry wailed in her ears as he hurled himself into the face of another assassin like a furry, six-limbed buzz saw. His victim went down shrieking, and the man beside him swung his weapon towards the treecat, but Honor flew across the carpet towards him. Her right leg snapped straight, her boot crunched into his shoulder, breaking it instantly, and a hammer blow crushed his larynx as she came down on top of him.
All the Mayhews' guards were down now, but so were many of the assassins, and Honor and Nimitz were in among the others. She knew there were too many of them, yet she and Nimitz were all that was left, and they had to keep them bottled up in the entry alcove, away from the Protector and his family, as long as they could.
The killers had known she'd be here, but she was "only" a woman. They were totally unprepared for her size and strength—and training—or the mad whirl of violence that wasn't a bit like it was on HD. Real martial arts aren't like that. The first accurate strike to get through unblocked almost always ends in either death or disablement, and when Honor Harrington hit a man, that man went down.
More feet pounded down the hallway and fresh gunfire crackled and whined as Palace Security reacted to the violence, but the remaining assassins were between Honor and the reinforcements. She tucked and rolled, taking the legs out from under two more men, then vaulted to her feet and drove a back-kick squarely into an unguarded face. A disrupter bolt whizzed past her, and iron-hard knuckles crashed into the firer's throat. Nimitz howled behind her as he took down another victim, and she smashed a man's knee into a splintered, backward bow with a side-kick. He fired wildly as he went down, killing one of his own companions, and her boot pulped his gun hand as she turned on yet another. She snaked an arm around his neck, pivoted around her own center of balance, and bent explosively, and the crack of snapping vertebrae was like another gunshot as he flew away from her.
Shouts and screams and more shots echoed from the hallway, and the assassins turned on Honor with panicky fury while their rearmost ranks wheeled to confront the reinforcements. Someone thrust a disrupter frantically in her direction, but she took out his gun arm with one chopping hand, cupped the other behind his head, and jerked his face down to meet her driving kneecap. Bone crunched and splintered, blood soaked the knee of her trousers, and she twisted towards a fresh enemy as the real Security people broke through the doorway at last.
A sledgehammer smashed into her face. She heard Nimitz's shriek of fury and anguish as it hurled her aside, twisting her in midair like a doll, but all she could feel was the pain the pain the pain, and then she crashed down on the side of her face and bounced limply onto her back.
The pain was gone. Only numbness and its memory remained, but her left eye was blind, and her right stared up helplessly as the man who'd shot her raised his disrupter with a snarl. She watched the weapon rise in dreadful slow motion, lining up for the pointblank final shot—and then her killer's chest exploded.
He fell across her, drenching her in steaming blood, and she turned her head weakly, hovering on the edge of the blackness. The last thing she saw was Benjamin Mayhew and Captain Fox's autopistol smoking in his hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
"Captain? Can you hear me, Ma'am?"
The voice trickled through her head, and she opened her eyes. Or, rather, an eye. She forced it to focus and blinked dizzily at the face above her.
A familiar, triangular jaw pressed into her right shoulder, and she turned her head to look into Nimitz's anxious green eyes. The 'cat lay beside her, not curled up on her in his preferred position, and he was purring so hard the bed vibrated. Her hand felt unnaturally heavy, but she raised it to his ears, and the anxious power of his purr eased slightly. She stroked him again, then looked back up at a soft sound. Andreas Venizelos stood beside Surgeon Commander Montoya, and her dapper exec looked almost as worried as Nimitz had.
"How am I?" she tried to ask, but the words came out slurred and indistinct, for only the right side of her lips had moved.
"You could be a lot better, Ma'am." Montoya's eyes sparked with anger. "Those bastards damned near killed you, Skipper."
"How bad is it?" She took her time, laboring to shape each individual sound, but it didn't seem to help a great deal.
"Not as bad as it might have been. You were lucky, Ma'am. You only caught the fringe of his shot, but if he'd been a few centimeters to the right, or a little higher-" The doctor paused and cleared his throat. "Your left cheek took the brunt of it, Skipper. The muscle damage isn't as bad as I was afraid, but the soft tissue damage is severe. It also broke the zygomatic arch—the cheekbone just below your eye—and you broke your nose when you went down. More seriously, there's near total nerve mortality from your eye to your chin and reaching around to a point about a centimeter in front of your ear. It missed your ear structure and aural nerves, luckily, and you should still have at least partial control of your jaw muscles on that side."
Montoya's was a doctor's face; it told his patients precisely what he told it to, but Venizelos' was easier to read, and his definition of "lucky" clearly didn't match Montoya's. Honor swallowed, and her left hand rose. She felt her skin against her fingers, but it was like touching someone else, for her face felt nothing at all, not even numbness or a sense of pressure.
"In the long-run, I think you'll be okay, Ma'am," Montoya said quickly. "It's going to take some extensive nerve grafting, but the damage is localized enough the repairs themselves should be fairly routine. It's going to take time, and I wouldn't care to try it, but someone like your father could handle it no sweat. In the meantime, I can take care of the broken bones and tissue damage with quick heal."
"An' m' eye?"
"Not good, Skipper," the surgeon said unflinchingly. "There are an awful lot of blood vessels in the eye. Most of them ruptured, and with muscle control gone, your eye couldn't close when you hit the carpet. Your cornea is badly lacerated, and you put some debris—broken glass and china—through it and into the eyeball itself." She stared at him through her good eye, and he looked back levelly.
"I don't think it can be repaired, Ma'am. Not enough to let you do much more than distinguish between light and dark, anyway. It's going to take a transplant, regeneration, or a prosthesis."
"I don' regen'." She clenched her fists, hating the slurred sound of her voice. "M' mom check' m' profile years 'go."
"Well, there's still transplants, Skipper," Montoya said, and she made herself nod. Most of the human race could take advantage of the relatively new regeneration techniques; Honor was one of the thirty percent who could not.
"How's th' rest 'f m' face look?" she asked.
"Awful," Montoya told her frankly. "The right side's fine, but the left one's a mess, and you're still getting some blood loss. I've drained the major edemas, and the coagulants should stop that in a little while, but frankly, Skipper, you're lucky you can't feel anything."
She nodded again, knowing he was right, then shoved herself into a sitting position. Montoya and Venizelos glanced at one another, and the surgeon looked as if he might protest for a moment. Then he shrugged and stood back to let her look into the mirror on the bulkhead behind him.
What she saw shocked her, despite his warning. Her pale complexion and the startlingly white dressing over her wounded eye made the livid blue, black, and scarlet damage even more appalling. She looked as if she'd been beaten with a club—which, in a sense, was exactly what had happened—but what filled her with dismay was the utter, dead immobility of the entire left side of her face. Her broken nose ached with a dull, low-key throb, and her right cheek felt tight with a sympathetic reaction; to the left, the pain just stopped. It didn't taper off—it just stopped, and the co
rner of her mouth hung slightly open. She tried to close it, tried to clench her cheek muscles, and nothing happened at all.
She looked into the mirror, making herself accept it, telling herself Montoya was right—that it could be fixed, whatever it looked like—but all of her selfassurances were a frail shield against her revulsion at what she saw.
" 'V look' be'er," she said, and watched in numb horror as the untouched right side of her mouth and face moved normally. She drew a deep breath and tried again, very slowly. "I've looked better," she got out, and if it still sounded strange and hesitant, at least it sounded more like her.
"Yes, Ma'am, you have," Montoya agreed.
"Well." She wrenched her eye from the mirror and looked up at Venizelos. "Might as well get up, I guess."
The words came out almost clearly. Perhaps if she remembered the need to concentrate on speaking slowly and deliberately it wouldn't be too bad.
"I'm not sure that's a good i-" Montoya began.
"Skipper, I can handle things un-" Venizelos started simultaneously, but they both broke off as she swung her legs over the side of the bed. She put her feet on the deck, and Montoya reached out as if to stop her.
"Captain, you may not be able to feel it, but you've taken one hell of a beating! Commander Venizelos has things under control here, and Commander Truman's doing just fine with the squadron. They can manage a while longer."
"The doc's right, Ma'am," Venizelos weighed in. "We've got everything covered." His voice sharpened as Honor ignored them both and heaved herself to her feet. "Oh, for God's sake, Skipper! Go back to bed!"
"No." She gripped the bed for balance as the deck curtsied under her. "As you say, Doctor, I can't feel it," she said carefully. "I might as well take advantage of that. Where's my uniform?"
"You don't need one, because you're getting right back into bed!"
"I had one when I came in." Her eye lit on a locker. She started towards it, and if her course wavered just a bit, she ignored that.
"It's not in there," Montoya said quickly. She paused. "Your steward took it away. He said he'd try to get the blood out of it," he added pointedly.
"Then get me another one."
"Captain-" he began in even stronger tones, and she swung to face him. The right corner of her mouth quirked in an ironic smile that only made the hideous deadness of the left side of her face more grotesque, but there was something almost like a twinkle in her remaining eye.
"Fritz, you can get me a uniform or watch me walk out of here in this ridiculous gown," she told him. "Now which is it going to be?"
* * *
Andreas Venizelos rose as Commander Truman stepped through the hatch. Honor didn't. She'd carried Nimitz here in her arms instead of on her shoulder because she still felt too unsteady to offer him his usual perch, and she had no intention of displaying her knees' irritating weakness any more than she could help.
She looked up at her second in command and braced herself for Truman's reaction. She'd already seen MacGuiness' shocked anger when he brought her the demanded uniform and saw her face, and Venizelos wasn't making any effort to hide his opinion that she was pushing herself too hard, so she wasn't too surprised when Truman rocked back on her heels.
"My God, Honor! What are you doing out of sickbay?!" Truman's green eyes clung to her wounded face for just a moment, then moved deliberately away, focusing on her single uncovered eye. "I've got most of the fires under control, and I'd have been perfectly happy coming down there to see you."
"I know." Honor waved to a chair and watched her subordinate sit. "But I'm not dead yet," she went on, hating the slowness of her own speech, "and I'm not going to lie around."
Truman glared at Venizelos, and the Exec shrugged.
"Fritz and I tried, Commander. It didn't seem to do much good."
"No, it didn't." Honor agreed. "So don't try anymore. Just tell me what's going on."
"Are you sure you're up to this? You— I'm sorry, Honor, but you have to know you look like hell, and you don't sound too good, either."
"I know. Mostly it's just my lips, though," she half-lied. She touched the left side of her mouth and wished she could feel it. "You talk. I'll listen. Start with the Protector. Is he alive?"
"Well, if you're sure." Truman sounded doubtful, but Honor nodded firmly and the commander shrugged. "All right—and, yes, he and his family are all unhurt. It's been-" she checked her chrono "—about twenty minutes since my last update, and only about five hours since the assassination attempt, so I can't give you any hard and firm details. As far as I can make out, though, you wound up square in the middle of a coup attempt."
"Clinkscales?" she asked, but Truman shook her head.
"No, that was my first thought, too, when we thought it was Security people, but they weren't real Security men, after all. They were members of something called 'The Brotherhood of Maccabeus,' some kind of fundamentalist underground no one even suspected existed." Truman paused and frowned. "I'm not too sure I'm entirely ready to accept that they didn't know anything about it."
"I believe it, Ma'am." Venizelos turned to Honor. "I've been monitoring the planetary news nets a bit more closely than Commander Truman's had time for, Skipper. Aside from some pretty graphic video," he looked at her a bit oddly, "it's all conjecture with a hefty dose of hysteria, but one thing seems pretty clear. Nobody down there ever heard of the 'Maccabeans,' and no one's sure what they were trying to accomplish, either."
Honor nodded. She wasn't surprised the Graysons were in an uproar. Indeed, it would have amazed her if they hadn't been. But if Protector Benjamin was unhurt there was still a government, and at the moment, that was all she really had time to concern herself with.
"The evacuation?" she asked Truman.
"Underway," the commander assured her. "The freighters pulled out an hour ago, and I sent Troubadour along as far as the hyper limit to be on the safe side. Her sensors should give them plenty of warning to evade any bogeys they meet before translating."
"Good." Honor rubbed the right side of her face. The muscles on that side ached from having to do almost the whole job of moving her jaw by themselves, and the thought of trying to chew appalled her.
"Any movement out of the Masadans?" she asked after a moment.
"None. We know they know we're here, and I'd have expected them to try something by now, but there's not a sign of them."
"Command Central?"
"Not a peep out of them, Ma'am," Venizelos said. "Your Commander Brentworth is still aboard, but even he can't get much out of them right now."
"I wouldn't be too surprised by that, Honor," Truman cautioned. "If these crazies really did blind-side Grayson Security, they have to be worrying about moles in the military, at least until they get some kind of fix on how extensive the plot really was. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some idiot's already come up with the theory that what happened to their navy was part of some Machiavellian 'betrayal by the high command' to set up the assassination."
"So we're all there is for now," Honor said even more slowly than her damaged mouth required. "What's the status on Troubadour's alpha node?"
"The Grayson yard people confirm Alistair's original estimate," Truman replied. "It's completely gone, and they can't repair it. Their Warshawski technology's even cruder than I thought, and their components simply won't mate with ours, but their standard impellers are a lot closer to our levels, and Lieutenant Anthony got with their chief shipwright before I sent Troubadour off with the freighters. By the time she gets back, the Graysons should have run up jury-rigged beta nodes to replace the damaged beta and alpha nodes. She still won't have Warshawski capability, but she'll be back up to five-twenty gees for max acceleration."
"Time to change over?"
"Anthony estimates twenty hours; the Graysons say fifteen. In this case, the Graysons are probably closer to right. I think Anthony's less than impressed by their technical support and underestimates its capabilities."
Hon
or nodded, then snatched her hand away before it could begin massaging her face again.
"All right. If we can stand her down long enough, then-"
Her terminal beeped, and she pressed the answer key. "Yes?"
"Captain, I've got a personal signal for you from Grayson," Lieutenant Metzinger's voice said. "From Protector Benjamin."
Honor looked at her subordinates, then straightened in her chair.
"Switch him through," she said.
Her terminal screen blinked instantly to life, and a drawn and weary Benjamin Mayhew looked out of it. His eyes widened, then darkened with distress as he saw her face and covered eye.
"Captain Harrington, I-" His voice was husky, and he had to stop and cough, then blinked hard and cleared his throat noisily.
"Thank you," he said finally. "You saved my family's lives, and my own. I am eternally in your debt."
The live side of Honor's face heated, and she shook her head.
"Sir, you saved my life in the end. And I was only protecting myself, as well."
"Of course." Mayhew managed a tired smile. "That's why you and your treecat-" His eyes cut suddenly to her unoccupied shoulder. "He is all right, isn't he? I understood-"
"He's fine, Sir." She kicked herself for speaking too quickly in her haste to reassure him, for the words had come out so slurred they were almost incomprehensible. Rather than embarrass herself by repeating them, she scooped Nimitz up and exhibited him to the com pickup, and Mayhew relaxed bit.
"Thank God for that! Elaine was almost as worried over him as we've all been over you, Captain."
"We're tough, Sir," she said slowly and distinctly. "We'll be all right."
He looked doubtfully at her crippled face and tried to hide his dismay. He knew Manticoran medical science was better than anything available on Grayson, but he'd seen the bloody wreckage of her eye as the RMN medics—and grim-faced Royal Manticoran Marines in full battle dress—whisked her away. The rest of the damage looked even worse now, and her slurred speech and paralyzed muscles were only too evident . . . and hideous. The swollen, frozen deadness of a face which had been so mobile and expressive was a desecration, and despite any off-world sophistication, he was a Grayson. Nothing could completely eradicate the belief that women were supposed to be protected, and the fact that she'd suffered her injuries protecting him only made it worse.