Uncompromising Honor - eARC

by David Weber

  All that was true, yet without Firebrand—without the “Mesan Alignment’s” cold-blooded, cynical intervention—there would have been no rebellion when McCready died. Or, if there had been, it would have been short and very, very ugly for the rebels.

  So what do I hope happens to him? Indy asked himself, abandoning the pretense that he could simply brush any thought of the traitor who’d been one of his closest friends—or who he’d thought was one of his closest friends—out of his mind. The one thing I can count on is that if anybody can land on his feet, it’ll be Firebrand! And he’s got to have some really valuable intelligence to trade. But from what Abigail was saying, they want his hide for a lot more than just “Operation Janus.” And do I want them to collect it because of what he intended to do in Seraphim, or do I try to plead his case with them because of what he actually did do in Seraphim? For that matter—

  His brand-new Manticoran uni-link beeped, and he shook himself. He’d used up his time cushion standing here staring at the pretty scenery and worrying. If he didn’t get a move on, he was going to be late, and that would be a Bad Thing.

  He snorted at the thought, squared his shoulders, and headed for the nearest lift shaft, grateful for the discrete signage pointing him toward it and hoping he didn’t look too much like a country rube with manure still on his shoes.

  * * *

  “Incoming at four o’clock, My Lady,” Lieutenant Gutierrez said quietly.

  Abigail Hearns twitched ever so slightly, then glanced up at her towering personal armsman with a quick grin. His answering smile was slight but deeply amused, and she shook her head reprovingly at him.

  “Teasing isn’t nice, Mateo,” she said.

  “Teasing, My Lady?” Gutierrez’s tone was bland innocence itself, but his eyes twinkled at her—for a moment—before they resumed their unending threat search, sweeping the atrium about them. “Wouldn’t know anything about ‘teasing,’” he added.

  Abigail snorted and punched him affectionately in the chest. It was rather like punching a boulder—or a nearoak—and it was probably as well none of her father’s steaders were present to see. A steadholder’s daughter wasn’t supposed to show affection for her armsman openly, and she certainly wasn’t supposed to have physical contact—in public—with a man who was neither married to nor related to her! Fortunately, they weren’t on Grayson and there were no steaders.

  Besides, if I could scandalize them just by punching Mateo, think of how many of them would drop dead out of pure apoplexy at the thought of Miss Owens—heir, however distantly, to Owens Steading—actually meeting a man without any chaperones at all!

  The thought gave her considerable pleasure. In fact, few days went by when she didn’t do something that would have scandalized those conservatives. The mere fact that she was a serving naval officer would have been enough for most of them without her doing a single thing. The amount of time she spent interacting with male officers would have made that still worse. The way she went gallivanting around foreign planets with only Mateo to keep her out of danger—and, of course, to protect her virtue—would have been intolerable. But to actually arrange to have lunch with a man she’d known for less than a T-month in a public venue without a single female companion—!

  Oh, the heart attacks would have come thick and fast! And if they’d known what she was thinking about the man in question…

  I can only hope the tale gets home to Owens, suitably embellished, she thought wistfully, and turned to look in the direction Gutierrez had indicated.

  The young man walking towards them, his eyes scanning the atrium, no longer seemed quite as overwhelmed as he had immediately after they’d reached Landing. She was glad. And despite any uncertainty he’d felt at the time, she’d been confident he’d find his feet quickly. He was a lot tougher and more resilient than he realized.

  She raised one hand and the movement drew his searching gaze. He looked in her direction, raised his own hand in acknowledgment, and walked quickly across to them.

  “Hi,” he said. “You didn’t warn me how big this blasted tower is!”

  “Trust me, if you think it’s big, you should’ve seen my first reaction to it!” She rolled her eyes. “The tallest building in Owens Steading when I was growing up was sixteen floors.”

  “Really?” He looked at her, obviously wondering if she was pulling his leg, and she glanced up over her shoulder.

  “Mateo?”

  “Her Ladyship’s right, Mister Graham,” the armsman said. “Surprised me a bit when I first reported for duty with the Guard, to be honest. Hadn’t realized how…close to the ground they built on Grayson.”

  “To be honest, we generally tended to build down, not up,” Abigail said. “Before Skydomes started doming entire cities it only made sense. Everything above ground was exposed to wind and weather. It needed lots of maintenance, even minor breaches could be dangerous, and we needed complete environmental systems, anyway. So we tended to dig deep, instead. Before the alliance with Manticore, major buildings on Grayson usually had more subfloors than aboveground structure.”

  “I think I’m just as happy I never lived someplace where the planet itself tried to kill me,” Indy said after a moment. “It must create an…interesting perspective on wide open spaces. Like the view from the landing platform,” he added with a certain feeling.

  “Oh, you have no idea!” Abigail laughed. “And swimming!” She shook her head. “No Grayson would even think about swimming as a form of exercise or relaxation. Before the Alliance, it was way too hard to purify enough water just for agriculture and drinking. No one was going to waste any of it just splashing around in it.”

  “I imagine so.” He shook his head with a chuckle, then looked around the crowded atrium again.

  “Which way now?” he asked.

  “Mateo will now demonstrate one of the shameless advantages of having a personal armsman whose family is from Trevor’s Star,” Abigail told him, reaching out and tucking her right arm through his left. “If you would, Mateo.”

  She waggled the fingers of her left hand in an airy lead-the-way sort of gesture, and Lieutenant Gutierrez snorted. But he also started forging across the atrium.

  The press of people parted before him with a certain inevitability. It wasn’t so much that any of them seemed to think about it consciously. They just did it, which probably wasn’t too surprising when they glanced up and saw two meters or so of armed, uniformed, heavy-grav bodyguard coming their way.

  * * *

  It wasn’t a long walk, despite the atrium’s enormous size. In fact, Indy wished it had been longer when the holo-sign came into sight. It turned out he and Abigail were very nearly exactly the same height, and he smelled the faint scent of what was either very nice perfume or equally nice shampoo as they walked arm-in-arm. He was also very conscious of her slender warmth at his side and of how gracefully she carried herself.

  He wondered how much of the way she moved was a product of her rearing.

  Another thing he hadn’t realized until they reached Manticore and he’d had the chance for a little research was exactly what it meant to be a steadholder’s daughter. No doubt someone like that was taught how to move, how to comport herself in public. Couldn’t have clumsiness reflecting poorly upon a royal family, now could they?

  He’d gathered from the very beginning that it meant wealth, privilege, and power, but he’d had no idea how much of each it represented. Mostly, he thought, that was Abigail’s fault. No one in Tristram’s company had treated her as anything other than a naval officer. Aside from Lieutenant Gutierrez’s presence whenever she left the ship, there was nothing to single her out as otherwise important in any way. And he defied anyone—especially anyone from a world like Seraphim—to spend five minutes in her presence and file her away as a daughter of power and wealth.

  In fact, she was the wealthiest person he’d ever met. She was “only” a daughter—and until he’d researched Grayson, he hadn’t been aware of a
ll of the implications of that, either—but that didn’t change the fact that she could have personally financed the Seraphim Independence Movement—all of it—out of her own credit account.

  Discovering those minor facts had almost sent him running. What did he know about people from her background? How to talk to them? How to act around them? Which fork to use when they ate? The proper way to address them, even? What could he possibly have to say to Abigail Hearns, Miss Owens, one of the most nobly born citizens of her homeworld, outside the purely tactical things they’d discussed aboard ship on the way here? And what would anyone who saw a hardscrabble street hand from Cherubim hanging around her say? They’d know why he was there, wouldn’t they? Of course they would! For that matter, he probably would have thought exactly the same things in their place. And that was the reason he should have run for cover the instant he realized the incredible gulf that yawned between them.

  But he hadn’t. He couldn’t. Well, maybe he could have…if she hadn’t screened him. She’d said she’d look him up if she got dirt-side, but he hadn’t really expected her to, especially after he’d done that research. He’d filed it away as the sort of polite commonplace someone said to a casual acquaintance on parting.

  Only she’d meant it. She had screened, and he wasn’t certain, looking back, which of them had suggested meeting for lunch. He did remember suggesting that since she knew Landing and he didn’t she should pick the restaurant, but he couldn’t remember whose idea it had been to pick a restaurant in the first place. Now he recognized the sign—“Dempsey’s Bar”—and wished she’d picked one farther from the atrium’s entrance.

  * * *

  “Lieutenant Hearns!” The hostess behind the small stand in the restaurant lobby greeted Abigail with a broad smile. “It’s been too long! How long will you be in-system?”

  “It has been a while, Lucy,” Abigail agreed. Unlike the hostess, whose discreet earbug had undoubtedly identified her from the restaurant chain’s database as soon as she walked in the door, Abigail plucked the woman’s name from memory. “And I’m not sure how long I’ll be in Manticore this time. I don’t suppose anybody can be too confident about something like that right now.”

  “No, you’re right about that.” The hostess’s eyes darkened for a moment. Then she visibly squared her shoulders. “But you’re here right now! I don’t see a reservation for you, though. Are you meeting someone?”

  “No, it’s just me and Mister Graham, here. And Mateo, of course.” She rolled her eyes and Lucy chuckled.

  “I see. Well, we have an open table fronting the fountains, or I can put you in one of the privacy booths. Which would you prefer?”

  “Indy?” Abigail raised one eyebrow at him.

  “The table sounds great,” Indy said, mentally kicking himself for not holding out for the privacy booth. On the other hand, she’d never said anything about wanting to be that alone with him…damn it. If that was what she wanted, though, she could always make a counter suggestion and—

  “The table it is, then,” she said with a crisp nod.

  “Excellent!” The hostess beamed. “If you’ll come this way?”

  Indy decided he’d never been in a restaurant remotely as upscale as this one. The sign might call it a “bar,” but it was a far cry from anything to which he would have attached that noun. The soft background music, the low murmur of voices from the diners, the gleam of flatware and crystal, and the delicious scents seductively caressing his nostrils all shouted that this was not The Soup Spoon back in cherubim.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t here to plot a rebellion, either.

  The louder music of living water rose across the background as Lucy escorted them to the promised table, and Indy remembered to pull back Abigail’s chair and see her seated before sitting down himself. They’d passed several other unoccupied tables on their way here, and as he sat, he realized why they had.

  Their table didn’t “front” the fountains; it occupied the end of a sort of promontory, extending well out into something far grander than he’d anticipated when the hostess mentioned “fountains.” In effect, they were seated inside the fountain—one of the fountains; there were three separate clusters of jets—on a crystoplast floor. The streams of water were carefully shaped and directed, splashing back into the catcher basins in a continuous liquid song. He could sense the moisture in the air about them, feel the cool, slightly damp breeze blowing gently across them, yet somehow that had all been arranged without their actually being “rained on” at all.

  And it just happened—purely by coincidence, no doubt—that there was another table at the point where the crystoplast under their table reached out into the fountain. One where their hostess seated Lieutenant Gutierrez, perfectly positioned to protect their privacy and with an excellent view of almost the entire restaurant.

  Lucy beamed at them.

  “Please consult the menus,” she said, waving one hand at the displays in the table’s smart top. “May I go ahead and tell the kitchen what beverages you’d prefer?”

  “I’ll have an Old Tillman, I think,” Abigail said. “In the bottle, please, not a stein.”

  “Of course. And you, Sir?” she looked at Indy, and he shrugged.

  “Still learning my way around,” he said. “Should I take it ‘Old Tillman’ is a beer?”

  “Oh, yes, Sir. A product of Sphinx,” the hostess said. “It’s a hoppy oatmeal stout with just a touch of honey.” She held up her right hand thumb and index finger perhaps two millimeters apart. “I’ve been told the genetic mods oats and hops required to adjust to Sphinx are what give it a hint of almond. It’s quite good, really.”

  “Then by all means let’s try it.” Indy smiled. “Should I assume the real aficionado holds out for the bottled variety?”

  “Only the true beer snobs,” Abigail assured him, elevating her nose.

  “Well, in that case…”

  “Two Old Tillmans, in the bottle,” Lucy said with a smile, and waved at the menu displays again. “Just signal when you’ve made your selections, or Jonathan, your server, will be happy to take them in person when he delivers your beers.”

  She swept them a slight bow and headed back to her station in the lobby, and Indy sat back in his chair, looking around the restaurant.

  “This is nice,” he said. “Very nice. Is the food as good as it smells?”

  “Better,” Abigail replied. “The Dempsey cartel runs the best restaurants in the entire Old Star Kingdom. The ‘Dempsey Bars’ are its flagship chain, named for the very first restaurant the original Dempsey opened here in Landing almost three hundred T-years ago.” She smiled, waving her hand around the dimly lit, elegantly furnished restaurant as brightly colored native Manticoran fish with too many long, trailing fins swam gracefully below the crystoplast under their chairs, and shook her head. “This isn’t exactly what I thought of the first time someone invited me to a ‘bar,’ either.”

  “That obvious, was it?” Indy smiled back at her.

  “Only because I’d had the same reaction the first time. I got over it, though. In fact, I remember the maître d’ teasing me about it the second time I ate there. He said he’d seen a lot of—”

  She broke off suddenly. Indy had been admiring a holo-sculpture against the restaurant’s back wall, but her abrupt silence jerked his gaze back to her, and his eyes widened as he saw the tears.

  “Abigail?” His voice was soft, concerned, and she shook her head sharply. Then she picked up her napkin and wiped quickly, almost angrily, at her eyes.

  “Sorry.” The word came out husky, and she stopped and cleared her throat. “Sorry,” she repeated more naturally. “I was just thinking about that first visit. And how well I got to know Michael, the maître d’, and the rest of the wait staff. It was the Dempsey’s on Hephaestus.”

  Indy frowned, perplexed. Why would—?

  Then he understood. Hephaestus. That was something else he hadn’t known about before his arrival in Manticore: t
he Yawata Strike.

  He started to say “I’m sorry,” but stopped himself before the words were out of his mouth. They would have been too automatic, too dismissive. Or, no, not dismissive, perhaps, but too…banal in the face of her pain.

  “I can’t imagine what that must be like,” he said instead, softly, and realized he’d reached out across the table.

  “I know it was terrible for the people who were actually here when it happened.” Her voice was equally soft, and she took his hand almost absently, her eyes focused on something else far, far away. “But I think it may’ve been even worse, in a way, for those of us who weren’t. We left everything—and everyone—alive and well and we hypered out, expecting we were the ones who might be called to action. We were the ones who might die. And then we found out. First that the attack had happened. Then, a day or so later, that losses had been heavy.” She snorted a mirthless laugh. “‘Heavy!’ I suppose that’s one way to put it. We didn’t find out how heavy for a long time, though. I remember when we found out about the Kitty.”

  Her grip tightened almost painfully, her eyes filled with tears again, and her free hand brushed them away as quickly as their predecessors. Then she blinked, her eyes refocused on Indy, and fell to the two hands on the table as she realized how tightly hers was squeezing his.

  “Sorry,” she said again. She began to withdraw her hand, but his turned and caught hers in a firm clasp before she could.

  “I understand,” he said. “Not the scale of it, not how many people you must’ve lost, not even its unexpectedness. But I understand the pain of it, Abigail. I know what it it’s like to lose someone you care about. What it’s like to feel helpless while you watch someone you love being taken away from you and there’s not one damned thing you can do about it. And I know how the memory can…ambush you when you don’t expect it. Never apologize for grief. For honoring the memory of people you’ve lost by admitting how much they meant to you when you had them.”

  She looked at him for a long, still moment, lower lip quivering ever so slightly. Then she nodded, drew a deep breath, and gave his hand one more squeeze before she gently withdrew her own and leaned back in her chair.