by David Weber
His eyes darkened in memory…and with the awareness of what would have happened if that freight shaft hadn’t gone down.
“We had some warning after Gamma blew,” he continued. “Fortunately, Jacques was a lot more familiar than me with Beowulfan platform design and SOP. He found the emergency suit locker even before Beta went up, and they were gumbies.”
Honored nodded against his shoulder. No one knew where the term “gumby suit” had come from, but it had been applied since pre-diaspora times to the loosely fitting emergency vacsuits designed to accommodate the broadest possible range of human shapes and sizes. They were uncomfortable, and it was far harder to move in a gumby than in a skinsuit, but they weren’t designed to be comfortable. They were designed to keep someone alive, at least long enough for someone to rescue her. But—
“They were loose enough we could fit Sam and BCB inside with us—especially Jacques and BCB. The two of them had a lot of room.” Hamish twitched a brief smile. “It wasn’t comfortable, especially for the ’cats, but it worked, and we managed to suit up before the big one.”
His smile vanished and his blue eyes went dark and haunted.
“We knew what it was, of course. According to Captain Neitz, whose people pulled us out, we were less than five hundred meters beyond the total destruction zone. The truth is, we shouldn’t have made it, Honor. We really shouldn’t have.”
Her arms tightened fiercely, and he made himself smile as he hugged her back.
“A gumby only has about twelve hours of endurance,” he said, “and all of us got banged up pretty badly by the concussion. Jacques and BCB got hurt worse than Sam and me, but I came out of it with a broken leg. You don’t want to know about the bruises on my back, either, but at least I took the impact with the bulkhead there, which protected Sam.
“We were all out for a while. I came to first, which was probably a good thing. Jacques’s suit had micro tears in three places, and it took me a while to find the repair kit and seal them. By then, he’d lost half his air, but he’d also come round, and he was the one who steered me to the access point for the liquid oxygen storage system.”
He paused and shook his head, then actually smiled crookedly.
“We umbilicaled to the LOX and the emergency power reserve. That gave us plenty of oxygen and enough juice to keep the suits up, but we wouldn’t have made it anyway, without Neitz and CPO Lochen. And it was even worse for the ’cats, in a lot of ways. They didn’t have helmets or any way to see a damned thing, and by the time all four of us had been suited up for six damned days, things got pretty…fragrant. Gumbies aren’t set up for recycling the way skinsuits are, so waste disposal was a problem and all of us were badly dehydrated by the time they finally found us. Jacques’s gumby was out of painkillers by then, too, so it was probably a good thing he was only semiconscious. They’ve got him in a hospital in Columbia right now and BCB’s with him. Both of them will be there for a while, Honor, but they made it and they’re going to be fine.
“In the meantime, I…really wanted to see you as soon as I could, so I grabbed the Duke and headed after you.”
You mean you wanted to catch me, let me know you were alive, before I committed my very own Eridani violation, she thought, tasting his mind-glow, knowing how well he knew her. That’s what you were afraid of. And you were right, love. So right! But if you’d known the rest, If you knew what I’ve already done…
“I’m glad you did,” she half-whispered. “So glad. But, Hamish, Emily—”
“Shhhhh.” He held her close. “I know. They told me.”
“But what they didn’t tell you,” she said drearily, “is that I killed her. I killed her, Hamish. I went to tell her you were gone, and I killed her. She died in my arms, and I’m the reason she did.”
The tears broke loose as she admitted it. As she said the words to someone else. She felt the sudden, instant rejection in his mind-glow, but he didn’t know. He hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen it happen. He—
“That’s enough of that!” he snapped so suddenly, his voice so hard, she tried to jerk away from him. But he wouldn’t let her do that. He held her, and she slumped back, hiding her face against his shoulder.
“Honor,” he said far more softly, and she heard the pain in his voice, tasted its reality in his emotions, “you didn’t kill her. She was already dying. I knew that. She knew that. She just…she just hadn’t wanted to tell you.”
She stiffened, and he stroked her hair.
“Honor—love—Emily was on borrowed time from the day of that air car crash. We always knew that. Without her life-support chair, she would’ve—”
His voice broke and he had to stop, inhale deeply.
“We always knew it could happen any time,” he said finally. “We always knew. And then there was you. Sweetheart, you never knew her before. I don’t think you could have any possible idea what a difference you made over the last couple of years. You brought her so much joy, and Raoul, and you and your mother brought her Katherine. You know how much she loved the kids. You know that better than anyone else in the universe, and without you we—she—would never have had them. Without you—”
His voice broke again. Then he drew another of those deep, shuddery breaths.
“You went to tell her yourself, before she heard it from anyone else, and that’s exactly what I would have expected you to do. To be there for her instead of letting her hear it over a newscast, see it on one of the boards. To be there with her when she found out. I wasn’t there, but I didn’t have to be. You say she died in your arms? Then you gave her the greatest gift of all, and I know it hurt, and I know it will always hurt, but I envy you because you were there when she needed you most, and I can never thank you enough for me, not just for her. So don’t you ever tell me you killed her! Whoever planted those bombs killed her, just as surely as they killed Tom Caparelli, Pat, Francine and Tony, and Michael Mayhew and all the others.”
She trembled, still unable—or perhaps unwilling—to relinquish her guilt, yet deep inside, she knew he was right. She had been there, and she remembered the incredible power, the final splendor, of Emily’s mind-glow. And as she remembered, she admitted to herself at last that the pain in that mind-glow had been grief—Emily’s awareness that she was leaving Honor alone—not fear of death.
Never fear. Not in that dauntless, blazing mind-glow of the woman she’d loved.
And even as she thought that, she realized Hamish was right about who’d really killed her.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, withdrawing from his embrace, rising to her feet while Nimitz and Samantha moved to Hamish’s lap. She looked down at the three people she loved most in all the universe and she nodded.
“Maybe you’re right,” she repeated. “And whether or not you are, we have a message to deliver.”
“I know.” He met her eyes, and his were almost as cold, almost as focused, as hers as he saw the Salamander looking back at him. “I know,” he said. “So I suppose there’s only one thing left to say.” She arched an eyebrow, and he gave her a treecat’s smile.
“Let’s be about it, Admiral Harrington,” he said softly.
HMS Imperator
Sol System
Honor stood once again on Imperator’s flag deck, but it was very different from the last time she’d stood there. Now Hamish stood beside her, Samantha on his shoulder, and she savored the mind-glows of her staff and the flag bridge crew. She tasted the lingering echoes of disbelief, and their bright, transcendent joy. Not for themselves; for her.
Her eyes burned as that tide of emotion washed through her, but in an odd way, it only refined and purified her cold, focused purpose. There was still hate deep inside her—and in the emotions about her. The fact that Hamish and Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou, Bark Chewer’s Bane and Samantha, had been returned to them could not miraculously restore the millions of other dead to life. Perhaps the intensely personal corrosiveness of her own hatred had been dulled. Perhaps she�
��d been returned to that point where her duty was duty, not an excuse for mass slaughter. But Operation Nemesis was still there, still waiting, and she was just as grimly determined to complete it as she’d ever been.
The master display had been configured to show a panoramic view of the space around Old Terra. She gazed into it, waiting, feeling the anticipation thrum in her nerves. Only another few minutes, and—
“Coming up on the mark, Your Grace,” Andrea Jaruwalski said, and she nodded. Then she glanced over her shoulder at Hamish, and her lips quirked ever so slightly.
“In that case, Andrea,” she said, never looking away from her husband, “let’s be about it.”
He returned her smile and she turned back to the display, and this time her voice came out flat and cold.
“Execute,” she said.
“Aye, aye, Your Grace.” Jaruwalski’s voice was harder than steel. “Executing now.”
She pressed the button…and the visual display erupted with twice a dozen tiny suns. They raced through old Earth’s industrial zone, each of them the death beacon of a major fabrication platform. A sphere of fire blazed about the mother world, filling night skies ever so briefly with a spiteful, devastating dawn. A matching sphere, even denser, blazed around Mars, crowned Venus in flame, and answering pyres glared deep in the asteroid belt, rode Jupiter’s orbit, rose like beacons of vengeance throughout the length and breadth and depth of the Sol System. And in other places, where no charges had been planted, LAC grasers shredded scores—hundreds—of minor platforms. The habitats of individual asteroid miners, the bunk room habitats of hydrogen refinery crews, communications arrays, observation platforms, monitoring stations, freight platforms, shipyards, servicing facilities, navigation and traffic control stations…every single artificial structure in the entire Solar System—two thousand T-years of building and construction and dreams, everything within a sphere eleven light hours across—vanished in that single, dreadful, perfectly coordinated cataclysm.
Everything except the major orbital habitats and the power satellites.
Honor watched those intolerable pinpricks spall the visual display. She listened to the reports from CIC as the tide of destruction rolled through the birth system of the humanity and knew she had just become the most hated woman in Solarian history.
And she didn’t care.
She waited ten minutes by the clock, then nodded to Harper Brantley.
“Put me through,” she said and looked back to her com pickup.
“Aye, aye, Your Grace,” he said. He punched in a command, then nodded back to her. “Live mike, Your Grace,” he told her.
She waited another moment, letting her face, her expression, register on the eyes at the other end of the FTL link and the eight Hermes buoys riding in geosynchronous orbit about Earth and Mars. The buoys whose signals cut simultaneously into the feeds of every major news channel in the entire star system.
“I am Admiral Harrington, of the Royal Manticoran Navy,” she told the ten or twelve billion human beings watching her at that moment. “I am speaking to you on behalf of my Empress, the President of the Republic of Haven, the Protector of Grayson, and all of our allied star systems.
“For the last T-year, my Empress and her allies have called upon the corrupt bureaucrats running the Solarian League as their personal fiefdom to stop their unprovoked attacks and aggression against our star nations. We have persistently warned against further escalations of the conflict. We and our friends within the League attempted to be the voice of reason. For their effort, my Empress and her allies were called warmongers, imperialists, war criminals, and those within the League who attempted to be the voice of sanity were reviled as traitors and threatened with military action, including an operations plan specifically designed to violate the League’s own constitutional prohibition against deliberate mass-casualty events. Indeed, only the gallantry of a single squadron of Manticoran cruisers who sacrificed themselves engaging two hundred Solarian battlecruisers prevented the Solarian League Navy from murdering six million civilians in the Hypatia System, alone. Ninety percent of that cruiser squadron’s personnel paid with their lives to prevent that act of mass murder.
“During the past year, the Solarian League Navy has suffered literally millions of casualties against our Allied navies. In that time, the SLN has not won a single major engagement. Admiral Crandall’s fleet was annihilated or captured to the last ship in the Talbott Quadrant. Admiral Filareta’s fleet suffered the same fate in Manticore itself. Naval Station Ganymede, right here in the Sol System, was surrendered without inflicting a single casualty on the forces under my command. Every mobile unit of the SLN, every fleet base, every maintenance platform, every tanker in the Sol System has been destroyed or is occupied by my personnel. And I have just completed the destruction of every deep-space industrial facility in the star system. They are gone, as if they had never existed.”
She paused to let that sink in, then smiled thinly and coldly.
“I realize many of you believe our allegations about the existence of the ‘Mesan Alignment’ are either a fabrication to justify our own criminal, imperialist expansion or else the product of the deranged paranoia only to be expected from people who support the abolitionist movement. From people who believe there is actually something evil and depraved in manufacturing human beings as property and then trading and selling them. I know that. My Empress and her allies know that. But we really don’t care whether or not you believe us. Not anymore. Except in one way.
“Your corrupt rulers, the Mandarins, have aided and enabled the Alignment from the beginning. Perhaps that wasn’t their intention. Perhaps they genuinely didn’t believe what we told them. But whether it was their intention or not, the consequence is the same. And whether it was their intention or not, their actions remain equally vile and contemptible, a rank violation of interstellar law and solemn interstellar conventions the Solarian League itself sponsored and guaranteed over the centuries. They dispatched fleets—not squadrons, not taskforces, but fleets, containing hundreds of superdreadnoughts—to attack our star systems and our people without even seeking a formal declaration of war. Without provocation. When every shot that we had fired was in self-defense.
“The Yawata Strike, carried out—we believe—by the Alignment, killed eight million people, including the total population of the city of Yawata, where ninety percent of my own family lived. The SLN was prepared to murder six million more in Hypatia. And two weeks ago, the SLN attacked Beowulf—the oldest extrasolar colony in the galaxy, the star system which led the fight to save this star system’s population from extinction after old Earth’s Final War, the star system which sponsored the Solarian League’s Constitution. And in the course of that attack, over forty-three million civilian citizens of Beowulf were killed.”
She paused once more, and the flag bridge was as still and silent about her as the vacuum beyond Imperator’s hull.
“We have tried from the beginning to minimize casualties and loss of life,” she said then, her voice like hammered copper. “Until today, until I arrived in the Sol System with my fleet, we had not initiated a single conflict with the Solarian League Navy or any of the League’s armed forces. We have stood our ground, we have defended our friends and allies, but we have not attempted to take the war to the League as we have just conclusively demonstrated we might have done at any time.
“The Manticore Binary System was attacked in a blatant Eridani violation, and the Mandarins’ only response—the sole response of the star nation whose constitution enshrines a specific obligation to punish Eridani violations—was to capitalize upon it. Instead of seeking out whoever had committed it, instead of even so much as verbally condemning it, they dispatched Admiral Filareta to complete the Star Empire’s destruction.
“Since that time, half a dozen neutral star systems have been attacked, their economies totally destroyed, by the Solarian League Navy. Beowulf has suffered millions upon millions of deaths as a conseq
uence of the aggression of the Solarian League. And in all that time, we have not killed a single civilian in a single League system. Even today, we have not killed a single civilian. We have attempted to use diplomacy. We have attempted to use economic pressure. We have done everything we possibly could to bring this conflict to an end without mass destruction, without mass murders. And our reward has been to have our civilians, our families, murdered in their millions instead.”
“This ends today.”
Her eyes glittered, Nimitz rose high and proud on her shoulder, baring his fangs, and her nostrils flared.
“These are the demands of the Grand Alliance, the conditions upon which this travesty will end.
“First, the unelected bureaucrats who created and drove this conflict will be arrested by the League and surrendered to us to be tried for crimes against humanity on a scale the galaxy has not seen in over a thousand years.
“Second, every unit of the Solarian League Navy outside a member system of the Solarian League will be withdrawn immediately. Any unit of the SLN found outside a member system of the League within one month of this moment will be regarded as a piratic vessel, not a legitimate ship of war protected by the Deneb Accords, which the Solarian League Navy has already demonstrated its willingness to ignore. As such, it will be summarily destroyed and will not be permitted to surrender.”
She paused a heartbeat for that to sink in.
“Third, the Legislative Assembly of the Solarian League will immediately summon a constitutional convention to meet here, in the Sol System, to write a new constitution for the Solarian League. You will not attempt to repair or amend the abortion which permitted the Mandarins to cause so many millions of deaths. You will write a constitution which places authority—and responsibility—in the hands of elected officials, not unelected bureaucrats governing by fiat and regulation. The Alliance does not care what form that government takes—republic, constitutional monarchy, or any other form is perfectly acceptable to us, so long as it precludes the resurgence of the corrupt, venal, unaccountable oligarchy which plunged the galaxy into this bloodbath.