by David Weber
“I imagine you have.” Her smile was cold, and so thin he could have shaved with it. “And since you have, I’ll get straight to the point. You have ninety-six hours to stand down your fleet, scuttle every warship in the star system, blow your missile pods in orbit, and evacuate your deep-space infrastructure. All your deep-space infrastructure.”
Someone behind Kingsford inhaled sharply, and he felt his own expression tighten, but Harrington’s frozen eyes never even flickered.
“And at the end of those ninety-six hours?” he heard himself ask.
“I think you know the answer to that question.” Her soprano was hard as battle steel. “You set the ground rules with Operation Buccaneer and Parthian Shot. The Grand Alliance is prepared to assume that since no one in the Solarian League has denounced Admiral Hajdu or Admiral Gogunov’s actions at Hypatia, the League is equally prepared to receive the same treatment. Except for the minor difference that I’m giving you long enough you really can save your civilians’ lives.”
“And after we abandon our responsibility to protect Solarian lives and property?
“Why, at that point, I destroy it,” she said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. “Unlike your actions at Cachalot and some other star systems I could mention—” For an instant, that icy control slipped and her eyes flashed with pure, murderous fire. “—I’ll leave your orbital habitats, even the ones with some industrial capacity—not the ones which are primarily industrial, of course—intact. I’ll even leave old Earth’s and Mars’ orbital power collectors intact…which is more than you did in Buccaneer. But the rest of it goes, Admiral Kingsford. Every bit of it.”
Her eyes bored into him, and his hands fisted behind his back.
“You’re not serious,” he said.
“Oh, on the contrary, I’m deadly serious,” she replied, and her voice had turned soft, almost caressing. “And if you’re unwilling to destroy your warships yourself, I’ll take care of that for you, too. You can just leave them where they are, and I’ll take them out from here. Or you can come out to meet me. Unlike the Solarian League, the Grand Alliance has no interest in massacring millions of civilians. But you and your ships, Admiral Kingsford—the gallant personnel of the Solarian League Navy—are another matter entirely. So please leave orbit and come out to meet me. There’s nothing you could do that would make my people happier.”
Her eyes bored into him, daring him—begging him—to take up her challenge. To take his ships out where she could kill every one of them without endangering a single civilian life. He saw that challenge, understood it perfectly…and something shriveled inside him. Twenty brittle seconds stretched out. Then her nostrils flared, with what might have been contempt or might have been disappointment, when she recognized his refusal to take up that iron gauge.
“I allowed Admiral Haeckle to use his available warships to evacuate his people,” that soprano sword said then, “and I’m prepared to allow you to do the same…as long as every one of them is destroyed within ninety-six hours. Is that understood, Admiral Kingsford, or do I need to go over it again?”
Rage wrestled with fear deep within him, but he made himself stand very still. He drew a deep breath, faced the com display.
“I believe I understood you the first time, Admiral,” he said coldly.
“In that case, I’ll be in touch again ninety-six hours from now. Unless, of course, you haven’t complied with my requirements and destroyed your fleet within that window. In that case, Admiral Kingsford, you won’t hear a single thing from me.”
That final, liquid-helium promise went through him like a dagger. And then, before he could even think about a response, the display went blank.
He stood very still, looking at the huge featureless screen, then turned his head to look at Commander Furman.
“Contact Permanent Senior Undersecretary Kolokoltsov,” he told her. “I’ll be in my briefing room. As soon as you reach him, put him through to my com there.”
George Benton Tower
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
“What do you mean you won’t go out and fight?!” Malachai Abruzzi barked.
He sat with the rest of the Mandarins in Innokentiy Kolokoltsov’s secure communications room, glaring at Winston Kingsford face on the main display. Kolokoltsov had delayed accepting Kingsford’s communications request until the others could join him. It hadn’t taken very long, since none of them had ventured far from their George Benton offices in the day and a half since Harrington had arrived. He’d wanted to avoid anyone’s thinking he’d cut some sort of private understanding with Kingsford. And, he admitted, he’d wanted to spread the responsibility for any decision he made as broadly as possible.
He was coming to the conclusion—rapidly—that that had been a mistake.
“I mean there are over one-point-three million men and women on my ships-of-the-wall, alone, Mister Permanent Senior Undersecretary, and that I have no intention of seeing them butchered for absolutely nothing,” Kingsford said now, his flat voice a cold and level contrast to Abruzzi’s quivering fury.
“Then why the hell do we even have a Navy?” Abruzzi spat.
“Why, you have a Navy to do all those dirty little jobs you need done in the Protectorates.” Nathan MacArtney’s face went as dark and congested, as outraged, as Abruzzi’s, but Kingsford wasn’t done. “You have a Navy you and your colleagues sent into a war it can’t win. You even have a Navy you can order to completely destroy the economies of completely neutral star nations. But you don’t have a Navy so I can murder the men and women under my command because you don’t have a frigging clue what else to do. Does that answer your question, Mister Permanent Senior Undersecretary.”
“Then we’ll fucking remove you from command and put someone with some guts into it!” Abruzzi snarled. “And then we’ll put you in front of a frigging court-martial and shoot your sorry arse for cowardice in the face of the enemy!”
“That’s your option,” Kingsford said. “And if that’s what you want to do, you go right ahead. But you’re not going to find another admiral who will do what you want. The Navy’s done dying just because the lot of you have been too damned stupid and too damned arrogant to listen to the people who have been trying to get you to stop this goddamned war you started—you, not them—since before it even began!”
They stared at him—all of them—in shock, and he looked back with a face like iron. The silence lingered for several seconds.
“I’ve already begun the evacuations,” he told them then. “And while I was waiting for you to get around to accepting my com request, I accepted Harrington’s offer to use the Navy to get everyone out…and promised to destroy every one of my ships within her time limit.”
He shrugged ever so slightly while they gaped at him.
“The first evacuees should be arriving dirtside within a half hour or so, and another thing I did while waiting for you to get around to answering me was to contact the Gendarmerie. Their people will assist my Marines in organizing the traffic flow and keeping it moving. I suggest you and the local civilian authorities organize transportation to move the evacuees to other destinations before the spaceports turn into total chaos. As for me, right now, overseeing that evacuation is rather more important than continuing this conversation. Good day, Ladies and Gentlemen.”
The display went blank.
The Mandarins sat staring at one another in silence.
HMS Imperator
Sol System
It was almost time.
Honor sat quietly in her observation dome on Imperator’s spine, watching the time display in the corner of her artificial eye’s field of vision tick steadily downward.
Winston Kingsford had complied with her demands. All of them. Quite a few of the civilians evacuated from the deep-space infrastructure of the most heavily industrialized star system in the galaxy had found temporary homes aboard the orbital habitats. No doubt th
ey were straining the reserve life-support capacity, but that was fine. One thing habitats had was plenty of redundant life-support. And the fact that Kingsford had used those habitats as emergency staging points said quite a lot about whether or not he trusted her to keep her word.
Of course, it also said he hadn’t had much choice about it. Not given the millions upon millions of people he had to move. In fact, she’d granted a twelve-hour extension.
She should have felt elated, victorious; what she actually felt was dead inside. She sat there with the ghosts of her dead, felt them there, knew they were glad she hadn’t given in to the darkness. She knew that…and she still felt dead, empty…drained.
She wondered if she would feel that way for the rest of her life.
She would complete her mission, do her job, despite that inner deadness, because it was her job. Her mission. All she had left. But what would she do afterward? How could she find the strength to heal, to be the mother Raoul and Katherine needed? How would Nimitz find the strength to go on without Samantha? And how could she go on if she lost him, too, to his grief?
The two of them sat there, with Nimitz in her lap, her hands moving slowly and steadily, automatically, on his silken coat while he buried his muzzle against her. She could feel him willing himself towards dissolution, on one hand, even as he clung to her on the other. He was balanced on a knife-edge, waiting—like her—to complete their final mission. But what about after that? She was afraid—so afraid—he would choose to die and leave her even more alone. The thought terrified what was left of her soul, yet she loved him too much to fight his decision, because unlike any other human, she knew how deep his pain was. How wounded he’d been.
And because part of her wanted to do exactly the same thing.
And she might. That was what truly ground her soul to dust. She might choose to die herself, even knowing how that would add to her parents’ pain, abandon Raoul and Katherine. After all, Allison and Alfred would have the children, and the children would have them. Why shouldn’t she lay down the hateful burden her own life had become?
She’d given the orders. Grand Fleet would begin Operation Nemesis in two hours. Nuclear charges—multiple charges, in many cases—had been planted on every major platform outside Mars orbit, and most of Kingsford’s ships had already been blown up. Two dozen superdreadnoughts still plied back and forth between Mars orbit’s industrial platforms and the surfaces of Mars and Old Earth, but they would complete their missions and scuttle within the next ninety minutes or so.
Even as she sat here, additional charges were being planted on the inner-system platforms which had been evacuated. Shoals of LACs had been deployed to deal with any dangerous piece of de-orbiting wreckage. Others had been deployed to take care of platforms which weren’t being fitted with charges. According to Andrea Jaruwalski’s ops plan, everything would be ready within the next thirty minutes. And then, one hour and thirty minutes after that, Honor would order the simultaneous, synchronized demolition of the entire system’s industrial infrastructure. She would order the greatest single act of destruction in human history, turn the entire star system of humanity’s birth into a funeral pyre for Hamish and Emily. For Samantha. For her Uncle Jacques. And for Pat Givens, Michael Mayhew, Judah Yanakov, Lucien Cortez…all her dead.
And it wouldn’t bring a single one of them back to life.
Nimitz pressed harder against her as the tears flowed down her cheeks at last. She felt him fighting to reach beyond his own bleak despair, trying to be there for her, and the greatest military triumph in human history was ashes in her mouth as they faced the dark void of their future. It was—
The com pinged.
She twitched, jerked up out of her thoughts, and it pinged again. Her mouth tightened into a thin, furious line and she reached out, stabbed the acceptance key viciously.
“What?” she snapped.
“I know you left orders not to disturb you, Your Grace,” Mercedes Brigham said. “But I’m afraid there’s been…a status change.”
“Is it Kingsford? Is he trying to ask for more time?” Honor’s voice was tight and harsh with anger. “Because, if it is—”
“No, Your Grace,” Brigham interrupted. “It’s not from the Sollies. The Duke of Cromarty just made her alpha translation about a light-minute out from the limit.”
A fresh spasm of pain went through Honor as she remembered teasing Hamish about using the Duke for transportation to Beowulf. But even more than the pain, she wondered what could possibly have brought Duke of Cromarty here. What was Queen Elizabeth’s personal yacht doing in the heart of the Sol System, when her skipper couldn’t have known before he arrived what he’d find waiting when he did?
Of course, the Duke wasn’t like most “yachts,” was she? She was an Agamemnon-class BC(P), fitted with Keyhole-Two and cutting-edge defensive and electronic warfare systems. For all intents and purposes, the Navy had taken a front-line battlecruiser, turned a quarter of its magazine space into luxurious accommodations for the Empress and up to a hundred and fifty or so guests, provided it with a picked crew of combat veterans, and called it a “yacht.”
But for all the potency of her armament, she wasn’t really a warship, so what was she doing here now, of all times?
She looked back out at the stars, and debated telling Mercedes to handle whatever it was that Duke of Cromarty thought was so desperately important. But she couldn’t.
“A light-minute out?” she repeated.
“Yes, Your Grace. But it was a crash translation; she’s still carrying a velocity of over sixteen thousand KPS.”
Honor winced. For Duke of Cromarty to reenter n-space with that much velocity she must have hit her downward alpha translation at maximum velocity. Honor had done the same thing herself, upon occasion, and so she knew what that must have done to the stomachs of every man and woman aboard her.
“Captain Firestine hit it almost perfectly,” Brigham continued. “She’s decelerating straight for us at five and a half kilometers per second. She’ll rendezvous with us in just over fifty-one minutes, and Captain Firestine requests permission to come aboard with urgent dispatches as soon as she does.”
Honor frowned. Firestine wanted to hand-deliver a dispatch? Why? It made no sense. Then again, nothing else made sense, did it? And—she checked the time again—Firestine would reach Imperator fifty-seven minutes before she had to execute Nemesis. No doubt she could deal with whatever brought him here before the deadline. And perhaps she could use the diversion. Maybe it was even a good thing.
Unless Firestine’s “dispatch” had been sent because Elizabeth and Willie had changed their minds.
Her mouth tightened dangerously as she considered that possibility. But then she shrugged again. It was unlikely Elizabeth Winton, of all people, could have changed her mind. And if she had—
Cross that bridge when you get to it, she told herself.
“All right, Mercedes,” she finally sighed. “Please meet Captain Firestine when he comes aboard. Escort him to my observation done.” She smiled wanly. “Tell him I apologize for not meeting him personally.”
“Of course, Your Grace. I’m sure he’ll understand.”
“In that case, I’ll see you—both of you—then,” Honor said.
She killed the connection, gathered Nimitz back into her arms, and sat gazing out at the stars once more.
* * *
The admittance signal chimed, and Honor stood, Nimitz cradled in her arms, and turned to face the hatch as she waited for Spencer Hawke to escort her visitor in. But when the hatch opened, it wasn’t Hawke who stepped through it, and she froze.
He was as tall as she was, although he leaned heavily on a cane at the moment. His right leg seemed thick and swollen under his uniform trousers. Because it was in a cast or a splint, a corner of her brain realized. His hair was dark, dramatically silver at the temples, and his face was lined with fatigue, pain, worry, and grief. His eyes were bluer than a Sphinx sky, a treecat rode h
is shoulder…and he couldn’t be there.
He couldn’t.
She stared at him, heart thundering, unable to speak—unable to breathe. Not a muscle moved, but then her mouth quivered suddenly, and Nimitz reared upright in her arms, green eyes blazing, his mind-glow a forest fire as he, too, tasted their mindglows. Tasted the fire neither of them had ever expected to taste again, drawing them up, up, out of the dark valley where the two of them had been so cold and alone so long. So focused on one another that they’d never even sensed it coming down the passage towards them.
“Honor,” the newcomer said softly, so softly.
She tried to reply. She tried, and she couldn’t. She just…couldn’t.
The silence stretched out as he stood there, braced on the cane, staring at her. And then—
She never remembered moving, but suddenly she was in his arms, her vision spangled by tears, her face buried against the side of his neck, feeling the firmness of him, tasting the glory of the mind-glow she’d known she would never taste again, and the wonder, and the disbelief, and the sheer, searing joy of it smashed over her like the sea.
* * *
“But…but how?” she asked a lifetime later.
They sat on one of the observation dome’s couches, arms still about one another. Nimitz and Samantha were curled so tightly together across their laps that it was impossible to know where one ’cat began and the other one ended. But perhaps that was actually the point, because there wasn’t a spot where one of them began and the other one ended…any more than there was a spot where Hamish began and she ended.
“We were lucky,” he said softly. “We never actually made it to the conference. When the Sollies turned up, traffic control diverted us to the nearest docking point, way the hell and gone out in the boonies. Jacques figured it would take us forty-five minutes or an hour just to get to the hub, but then we hit a freight shaft that was down. So we were stuck in a supervisor’s module on one of the industrial booms.”