Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington stood in the gallery of
ENS Farnese's boat bay and tried not to reel as the silent
emotional hurricane thundered about her.
She gazed through the armorplast of the gallery bulkhead
into the brilliantly lit, perfect clarity of the bay
itself, and tried to use its sterile serenity as a sort of
mental shield against the tempest. It didn't help a great
deal, but at least she didn't have to face it alone, and
she felt the living side of her mouth quirk in a wry smile
as the six-limbed treecat in the carrier on her back
shifted uneasily, ears half-flattened as the same vortex
battered at him. Like the rest of his empathic species, he
remained far more sensitive to others' emotions than she,
and he seemed torn between a frantic need to escape the
sheer intensity of the moment and a sort of euphoric high
driven by an excess of everyone else's endorphins.
At least the two of them had had plenty of practice, she
reminded herself. The stunned moment when her people
realized their scratch-built, jury-rigged, half-derisively
self proclaimed "Elysian Space Navy" had destroyed an
entire Peep task force and captured the shipping to take
every prisoner who wanted to leave the prison planet of
Hades to safety lay over three standard weeks behind them.
She'd thought, then, that nothing could ever equal the
explosion of triumph which had swept her ex-Peep flagship
at that instant, but in its own way, the emotional storm
seething about her now was even stronger. It had had
longer to build on the voyage from the prison the entire
People's Republic of Haven had regarded as the most escape-
proof facility in human history to freedom, and
anticipation had fanned its strength. For some of the
escapees, like Captain Harriet Benson, the CO of ENS
Kutuzov, over sixty T-years had passed since they'd
breathed the air of a free planet. Those people could
never return to the lives they'd left behind, but their
need to begin building new ones blazed within them. Nor
were they alone in their impatience. Even those who'd
spent the least time in the custody of the Office of State
Security longed to see loved ones once more, and unlike
the escapees who'd spent decades on the planet inmates
called "Hell," they could pick up the threads of the lives
they'd feared they would never see again.
Yet that hunger to begin anew was tempered by a matching
emotion which might almost have been called regret. An
awareness that somehow they had become part of a tale
which would be told and retold, and, undoubtedly, grow
still greater in the tellings...and that all tales end.
They knew the impossible odds they had surmounted to reach
this moment, in this boat bay gallery, in this star
system. And because they did, they also knew that all the
embellishments with which the tale would be improved upon
over the years -- by themselves, as likely as not -- would
be unnecessary, peripheral and unimportant to the reality.
And that was what they regretted: the fact that when they
left Farnese, they would also leave behind the companions
with whom they had built that tale's reality. The unvoiced
awareness that it was not given to human beings to touch
such moments, save fleetingly. The memory of who they'd
been and what they'd done would be with them always, yet
it would be only memory, never again reality. And as the
heart-stopping fear and terror faded, the reality would
become even more precious and unattainable to them.
That was what truly gave the emotions whirling about her
their strength…and focused that strength upon her, for she
was their leader, and that made her the symbol of their
joy and bittersweet regret alike.
It was also horribly embarrassing, and the fact that none
of them knew she could sense their emotions only made it
worse. It was as if she stood outside their windows,
listening to whispered conversations they'd never meant to
share with her, and the fact that she had no choice --
that she could no longer not sense the feelings of those
about her--only made her feel perversely guilty when she
did.
Yet what bothered her most was that she could never return
what they had given her. They thought she was the one
who'd achieved so much, but they were wrong. They were the
ones who'd done it by doing all and more than all she'd
asked of them. They'd come from the military forces of
dozens of star nations, emerging from what the Peeps had
contemptuously believed was the dustbin of history to hand
their tormentors what might well prove the worst defeat in
the history of the People's Republic. Not in tonnage
destroyed, or star systems conquered, but in something far
more precious because it was intangible, for they had
delivered a potential deathblow to the terror of
omnipotence which was so much a part of State Security's
repressive arsenal.
And they'd done it for her. She'd tried to express even a
fraction of the gratitude she felt, but she knew she'd
failed. They lacked the sense she'd developed, the ability
to feel the reality behind the clumsy interface of human
language, and all her efforts had made not a dent in the
storm of devotion pouring back at her.
If only --
A clear, musical chime -- not loud, but penetrating --
broke into her thoughts and she drew a deep breath as the
first pinnace began its final approach. There were other
small craft behind it, including dozens of pinnaces from
the three squadrons of the wall which had come to meet
Farnese and more than a dozen heavy-lift personnel
shuttles from the planet San Martin. They queued up behind
the lead pinnace, waiting their turns, and she tried not
to let her relief show as she thought about them. She and
Warner Caslet, Farnese's exec, had packed the
battlecruiser, like all the other ships of the ESN, to the
deckheads to get all of the escapees aboard. The massive
redundancy designed into warship life-support systems had
let them carry the overload (barely), but it had done
nothing about the physical crowding, and the systems
themselves were in serious need of maintenance after so
long under such heavy demand. The personnel shuttles
outside the boat bay were but the first wave of craft
which would transport her people from the packed-sardine
environment of their battlecruiser to the mountainous
surface of San Martin. The planet's heavy gravity scarcely
qualified it as a vacation resort, but at least it had
plenty of room. And after twenty-four T-days crammed into
Farnese's overcrowded berthing spaces, a little thing like
weighing twice one's proper weight would be a minor price
for the glorious luxury of room in which to stretch
without putting a thumb into someone else's eye.
But even as she felt her crew eagerly anticipating the end
of its confinement, her own attention was locked upon the
lead pinnace, for she knew whose it was. Over two T-years
had passed since she'd last faced the officer to whom it
belonged, and she'd thought she'd put her treacherously
ambiguous feelings about that officer aside. Now she knew
she'd been wrong, for her own emotions were even more
confused and turbulent than those of the people about her
as she waited to greet him once again.
* * *
Admiral of the Green Hamish Alexander, Earl of White Haven
and Commanding Officer, Eighth Fleet, forced his face to
remain immobile as GNS Benjamin the Great's pinnace
approached rendezvous with the battlecruiser his flagship
had come to meet. ENS Farnese -- and just what the hell is
an "ENS?" he wondered. That's something else I should have
asked her -- was a Warlord-class unit. The big ship
floated against the needle-sharp stars, well out from San
Martin, where no unauthorized eye might see her and note
her Peep origin. The time to acknowledge her presence
would come, but not yet, he thought, gazing through the
view port at the ship logic said could not be there. No,
not yet.
Farnese retained the lean, arrogant grace of her
battlecruiser breed, despite the fact that she was even
larger than the Royal Manticoran Navy's Reliant-class.
Small compared to his superdreadnought flagship, of
course, but still a big, powerful unit. He'd heard about
the Warlords, read the ONI analyses and appreciations of
the class, even seen them destroyed in combat with units
under his own command. But this was the first time he'd
ever come close enough to see one with the unaided human
eye. To be honest, it was closer than he'd ever
anticipated he might come, except perhaps in that
unimaginable time somewhere in the distant reaches of a
future in which peace had come once more to this section
of the galaxy.
Which isn't going to happen any time soon, he reminded
himself grimly from behind the fortress of his face. And
if I'd ever had any happy illusions in that respect, just
looking at Farnese would disabuse me of them in a hurry.
His jaw set as his pilot, obedient to his earlier orders,
swept down the big ship's starboard side and he studied
her damage. Her heavy, multilayered armor was actually
buckled. The boundary layers of antikinetic armor seemed
to have slagged and run; the inner, ablative layers
sandwiched between them were bubbled and charred looking;
and the sensors and antimissile laser clusters which once
had guarded Farnese's flank were gutted. White Haven would
have been surprised if half her starboard weapons remained
functional, and her starboard sidewall generators couldn't
possibly have generated any realistic defense against
hostile fire.
Just like her, he thought moodily, almost angrily. Why in
Christ's name can the woman never bring a ship back
intact? What the hell is it that makes her --
He chopped the thought off again, and this time he felt
his mouth twist in sardonic amusement. His was not, he
reflected, the proper mood for an officer of his seniority
at a moment like this. Up until--he glanced at his chrono--
seven hours and twenty-three minutes earlier, he, like all
the rest of the Manticoran Alliance, had known Honor
Harrington was dead. Like everyone else, he'd seen the
grisly HD of her execution, and even now he shuddered as
he recalled the ghastly moment when the gallows trapdoor
sprang and her body --
He shied away from that image and closed his eyes,
nostrils flaring while he concentrated on another image,
this one on his own com less than eight hours earlier. A
strong, gracefully carved, half-paralyzed face, framed in
a short mop of half-tamed curls. A face he had never
imagined he would see again.
He blinked and inhaled deeply once again. A billion
questions teemed in his brain, put there by the raw
impossibility of Honor Harrington's survival, and he knew
he was not alone in that. When word of this broke, every
newsie in Alliance space -- and half of those in Solly
space, no doubt, he thought -- would descend upon whatever
hiding places Honor or any of the people with her might
have found. They would ask, plead, bully, bribe, probably
even threaten in their efforts to winnow out every detail
of their quarry's incredible story. But even though those
same questions burned in his own mind, they were
secondary, almost immaterial, compared to the simple fact
of her survival.
And not, he admitted, simply because she was one of the
most outstanding naval officers of her generation and a
priceless military asset which had been returned to the
Alliance literally from beyond the grave.
His pinnace arced down under the turn of Farnese's flank
to approach the boat bay, and as he felt the gentle
shudder when the tractors captured the tiny craft, Hamish
Alexander took himself firmly in hand. He'd screwed up
somehow once before, let slip some hint of his sudden
awareness that the woman who'd been his protégée for over
a decade had become something far more to him than a
brilliant junior officer and an asset of the Royal
Manticoran Navy. He still had no idea how he'd given
himself away, but he knew he had. He'd felt the
awkwardness between them and known she'd returned to
active duty early in an effort to escape that awkwardness.
And for two years, he'd lived with the knowledge that her
early return to duty was what had sent her into the Peep
ambush in which she had been captured...and sentenced to
death.
It had burned like acid, that knowledge, and he'd watched
the Peep broadcast of her execution as an act of self-
punishing penance. In an odd way, her death had freed him
to face his feelings for her...which only made things
immeasurably worse now that he knew she wasn't dead, of
course. He had no business loving someone little more than
half his age, who'd never shown the least romantic
interest in him. Especially not while he was married to
another woman whom he still loved deeply and passionately,
despite the injuries which had confined her to a life-
support chair for almost fifty T-years. No honorable man
would have let that happen, yet he had, and he'd been too
self-honest to deny it once his face had been rubbed
sufficiently in it.
Or I like to think I'm too "self-honest" to lie to myself,
he thought mordantly as the tractors urged the pinnace
from the outer darkness into the illuminated boat bay. Of
course, I had to wait until she was safely dead before I
got around to that sudden burst of honesty. But I did get
there in the end...damn it.
The pinnace rolled on thrusters and gyros, settling
towards the docking buffers, and he made himself a silent
promise. Whatever he might feel, Honor Harrington was a
woman of honor. He might not be able to help his own
emotions, but he could damned well see to it that she
never knew about them, and he would. That much he could
still do.
The pinnace touched down, the docking arms and umbilical
locked, and Hamish Alexander pushed himself up out of his
comfortable seat. He looked at his reflection in the view
port's armorplast and studied his expression as he smiled.
Amazing how natural that smile looked, he thought, and
nodded to his reflection, then squared his shoulders and
turned towards the hatch.
* * *
A green light glowed above the docking tube, indicating a
good seal and pressure, and Honor tucked her hand behind
her as the gallery-side hatch slid back. It was amazing
how awkward it was to decide what to do with a single hand
when it had no mate to meet it halfway, but she brushed
that thought aside and nodded to Major Chezno. The senior
officer of Farnese's Marine detachment nodded back, then
turned on his heel to face the honor guard drawn up behind
the side party.
"Honor guard, attennnnnn-hut!" he barked, and hands
slapped the butts of ex-Peep pulse rifles as the ex-
prisoners snapped to parade-ground attention. Honor
watched them with a proprietary air and wasn't even
tempted to smile. No doubt some people would have found it
absurd for men and women packed into their ship like
emergency rations in a tin to waste time polishing and
perfecting their ceremonial drill, especially when they
all knew they would be broken up again once they reached
their destination. But it hadn't been absurd to Farnese's
ship's company ... or to Honor Harrington.
I suppose it's our way of declaring who and what we are.
We're not simply escaped prisoners, huddled together like
sheep while we run from the wolves. We are the "wolves" of
this piece, and we, by God, want the universe to know it!
She snorted in amusement, not at her Marines and their
drill, but at herself, and shook her head. I think I may
be just a wee bit guilty of hubris where these people are
concerned.
The Navy side party snapped to attention as the first
passenger floated down the tube, and Honor drew another
deep breath and braced herself. The Royal Manticoran
Navy's tradition was that the senior passenger was last to
board and first to exit a small craft, and she knew who
she would see well before the tall, broad-shouldered man
in the impeccable black-and-gold of an RMN admiral caught
the grab bar and swung himself from the tube's
weightlessness into the gallery's one standard gravity.
Bosun's pipes twittered -- the old-fashioned, lung-powered
kind, out of deference to the traditionalists among the
Elysian Space Navy's personnel -- and the admiral came to
attention and saluted Farnese's executive officer,
standing at the head of the side party. Despite sixty
years of naval service, the admiral was unable to conceal
his surprise, and Honor could hardly blame him. Indeed,
she felt an urchinlike grin threatening the disciplined
facade of her own expression at the sight. She'd
deliberately failed to mention her exec's identity during
the com exchanges which had established her ships' bona
fides for the Trevor's Star defensive forces. The Earl of
White Haven deserved some surprises, after all, and the
last thing he could possibly have expected to see aboard
this ship was a side party headed by a man in the dress
uniform of the People's Navy.
* * *
Hamish Alexander made his expression blank once more as
the side party's senior officer returned his salute. A
Peep? Here? He knew he'd given away his astonishment, but
he doubted anyone could have faulted him for it. Not under
the circumstances.
His eyes swept the rainbow confusion of the ranks beyond
the Peep as the bosun's pipes continued to squeal, and
another surprise flickered through him. That visual
cacophony had never been designed for color coordination,
and for just an instant, the assault on his optic nerve
kept him from understanding what he was seeing. But
realization dawned almost instantly, and he felt himself
mentally nodding in approval. Whatever else Hades might
have lacked, it had obviously possessed fabric extruders,
and someone had made good use of them. The people in that
bay gallery wore the uniforms of the militaries in which
they had served before the Peeps dumped them in the
PRH's "inescapable" prison, and if the confusion of colors
and braid and headgear was more visually chaotic than the
neatly ordered military mind might have preferred, so
what? Many of the navies and planetary combat forces those
uniforms belonged to hadn't existed in well over half a T-
century. They had gone down to bitter defeat -- often
clawing and defiant to the end, but still defeat -- before
the juggernaut of the People's Republic, and again, so
what? The people wearing them had won the right to
resurrect them, and Hamish Alexander rather suspected that
it would be ... unwise for anyone to question their
tailoring.
The pipes died at last, and he lowered his hand from the
band of his beret.
"Permission to come aboard, Sir?" he asked formally, and
the Peep nodded.
"Permission granted, Admiral White Haven," he replied, and
stepped back with a courteous welcoming gesture.
"Thank you, Commander." White Haven's tone was equally
courteous, and no one could have been blamed for failing
to realize it was an absent courtesy. But then, no one
else could have guessed at the emotions raging behind his
calm, ice-blue eyes as he glanced past the Peep to the
tall, one-armed woman waiting just beyond the side party.
They clung to her, those eyes, but again, no one could
reasonably have faulted that. No doubt people had stared
at Lazarus, too.
She looks like hell…and she looks wonderful, he thought,
taking in the blue-on-blue Grayson admiral's uniform she
wore instead of her Manticoran rank. He was glad to see it
for at least one intensely personal reason. In the Grayson
Space Navy, her rank actually exceeded his own, for she
was the second ranking officer of that explosively growing
service, and that was good. It meant that at least he
would not have to address her from the towering seniority
of a full admiral to a mere commodore. And the uniform
looked good on her, too, he thought, giving her unknown
tailor high marks.
But good as she looked, he could not pull his eyes away
from the missing left arm, or the paralyzed left side of
her face. Her artificial eye clearly wasn't tracking as it
was supposed to, either, and he felt a fresh, lavalike
burn of fury. The Peeps might not actually have executed
her, but it seemed they'd come close to killing her.
Again.
She has got to stop doing this kind of thing, he thought,
and his mental voice was almost conversational. There are
limits in all things...including how many times she can
dance on the edge of a razor and survive.
Not that she would pay him any attention if he said as
much. Not any more than he would have paid if their roles
had been reversed. Yet even as he admitted that, he knew
it wasn't the same. He'd commanded squadrons, task forces,
and fleets in action, in an almost unbroken series of
victories. He'd seen ships blown apart, felt his own
flagship shudder and buck as fire blasted through its
defenses. At least twice, he'd come within meters of
death. Yet in all that time, he'd never once been wounded
in action, and not once had he ever actually faced an
enemy. Not hand-to-hand. His battles had been fought
across light-seconds, with grasers and lasers and nuclear
warheads, and for all that he knew his personnel respected
and trusted him, they did not idolize him.
Not the way Honor Harrington's people idolized her. For
once, the newsies had gotten something exactly right when
they dubbed her "the Salamander" from her habit of always
being where the fire was hottest. She'd fought White
Haven's sort of battle all too often for someone of her
comparative youth, and she had the touch, the personal
magic, that made her crews walk unflinchingly into the
furnace beside her. But unlike the earl, she had also
faced people trying to kill her from so close she could
see their eyes, smell their sweat, and God only knew what
she'd been doing when she lost her arm. No doubt he'd find
out soon enough, and, equally no doubt, it would be one
more thing for him to worry that she might be crazy enough
to repeat in the future. Which was irrational of him. It
wasn't as if she actually went out looking for ways to get
herself killed, no matter how it sometimes seemed to those
watching her. It was just --
He realized he'd been motionless just a moment too long.
He could feel the curiosity behind the countless eyes
watching him, wondering what he was thinking, and he
forced a smile. The one thing he couldn't have any of them
do was to actually figure out what had been going through
his mind, and he held out his hand to her.
"Welcome home, Lady Harrington," he said, and felt her
long, slender fingers tighten about his with the careful
strength of a native heavy-worlder.
* * *
"Welcome home, Lady Harrington."
She heard the words, but they seemed tiny and far away, at
the other end of a shaky com link, as she gripped his
extended hand. His deep, resonant voice was just the way
she'd remembered it -- remembered, in fact, with rather
more fidelity than she might have desired -- yet it was
also completely new, as if she'd never heard it before.
And that was because she was hearing him on so many
levels. Her sensitivity to others' emotions had increased
yet again. She'd suspected that it had; now she knew it.
Either that, or there was something special about her
sensitivity to his emotions, and that was an even more
disturbing possibility. But whatever the cause, she heard
not simply his words, or even the messages communicated by
the smile in the blue eyes. No, she heard all the things
he didn't say. All the things he fought so hard, and with
such formidable self-control, against allowing himself
even to hint that he might want to say.
All the things he might as well have shouted at the top of
his lungs yet didn't even guess he was giving away.
For a fleeting moment of pure self-indulgence she let the
emotions hidden behind his face sweep her up in a dizzying
whirl. She couldn't help it as his joyous surprise at her
survival swept over her. His soaring welcome came on its
heels...and his desire to sweep her into his arms. Not a
trace of those things showed on his face, or in his
manner, but he couldn't possibly hide them from her, and
the sheer lightning-strike intensity of the moment burned
through her like an explosion.
And on its heels came the knowledge that none of the
things he longed to do could ever happen.
It was even worse than she'd feared. The thought rolled
through her, more dismal still for the moment of joy she
had allowed herself to feel. She'd known he'd stuck in her
mind and heart. Now she knew that she had stuck in his, as
well, and that he would never, ever admit it to her.
Everything in the universe demanded its own price...and
the greater a gift, the higher the price it carried. Deep
inside, in the secret places where logic seldom treads,
Honor Harrington had always believed that, and she'd
realized over the last two years that this was the price
she must pay for her bond with Nimitz. No other 'cat-human
bonding had ever been so close, ever spilled across to the
actual communication of emotions, and the depth of her
fusion with her beloved companion was worth any price.
Even this one, she told herself. Even the knowledge that
Hamish Alexander loved her and of what might have been had
the universe been a different place. Yet just as he would
never tell her, she would never tell him...and was she
blessed or cursed by the fact that, unlike him, she would
always know what he had never said?
"Thank you, My Lord," Lady Dame Honor Harrington said, and
her soprano was cool and clear as spring water, shadowed
only by the slight slurring imposed by the crippled side
of her lips. "It's good to be home."