The fluffy ball of fur in Honor Harrington's lap stirred
and put forth a round, prick-eared head as the steady
pulse of the shuttle's thrusters died. A delicate mouth of
needle-sharp fangs yawned, and then the treecat turned its
head to regard her with wide, grass-green eyes.
"Bleek?" it asked, and Honor chuckled softly.
"'Bleek' yourself," she said, rubbing the ridge of its
muzzle. The green eyes blinked, and four of the treecat's
six limbs reached out to grip her wrist in feather-gentle
hand-paws. She chuckled again, pulling back to initiate a
playful tussle, and the treecat uncoiled to its full sixty-
five centimeters (discounting its tail) and buried its
true-feet in her midriff with the deep, buzzing hum of its
purr. The hand-paws tightened their grip, but the
murderous claws-a full centimeter of curved, knife-sharp
ivory-were sheathed. Honor had once seen similar claws
used to rip apart the face of a human foolish enough to
threaten a treecat's companion, but she felt no concern.
Except in self-defense (or Honor's defense) Nimitz would
no more hurt a human being than turn vegetarian, and
treecats never made mistakes in that respect.
She extricated herself from Nimitz's grasp and lifted the
long, sinuous creature to her shoulder, a move he greeted
with even more enthusiastic purrs. Nimitz was an old hand
at space travel and understood shoulders were out of
bounds aboard small craft under power, but he also knew
treecats belonged on their companions' shoulders. That was
where they'd ridden since the first 'cat adopted its first
human five Terran centuries before, and Nimitz was a
traditionalist.
A flat, furry jaw pressed against the top of her head as
Nimitz sank his four lower sets of claws into the
specially padded shoulder of her uniform tunic. Despite
his long, narrow body, he was a hefty weight-almost nine
kilos-even under the shuttle's single gravity, but Honor
was used to it, and Nimitz had learned to move his center
of balance in from the point of her shoulder. Now he clung
effortlessly to his perch while she collected her
briefcase from the empty seat beside her. Honor was the
half-filled shuttle's senior passenger, which had given
her the seat just inside the hatch. It was a practical as
well as a courteous tradition, since the senior officer
was always last to board and first to exit.
The shuttle quivered gently as its tractors reached out to
the seventy-kilometer bulk of Her Majesty's Space Station
Hephaestus, the Royal Manticoran Navy's premiere shipyard,
and Nimitz sighed his relief into Honor's short-cropped
mass of feathery, dark brown hair. She smothered another
grin and rose from her bucket seat to twitch her tunic
straight. The shoulder seam had dipped under Nimitz's
weight, and it took her a moment to get the red-and-gold
navy shoulder flash with its roaring, lion-headed, bat-
winged manticore, spiked tail poised to strike, back where
it belonged. Then she plucked the beret from under her
left epaulet. It was the special beret, the white one
she'd bought when they gave her Hawkwing, and she chivied
Nimitz's jaw gently aside and settled it on her head. The
treecat put up with her until she had it adjusted just so,
then shoved his chin back into its soft warmth, and she
felt her face crease in a huge grin as she turned to the
hatch.
That grin was a violation of her normally
severe "professional expression," but she was entitled.
Indeed, she felt more than mildly virtuous for holding
herself to a grin when what she really wanted to do was
spin on her toes, fling her arms wide, and carol her
delight to her no-doubt shocked fellow passengers. But she
was almost twenty-four years old-over forty Terran
standard years-and it would never, never have done for a
commander of the Royal Manticoran Navy to be so
undignified, even if she was about to assume command of
her first cruiser.
She smothered another chuckle, luxuriating in the unusual
sense of complete and simple joy, and pressed a hand to
the front of her tunic. The folded sheaf of archaic paper
crackled at her touch-a curiously sensual, exciting sound-
and she closed her eyes to savor it even as she savored
the moment she'd worked so hard to reach.
Fifteen years-twenty-five T-years-since that first
exciting, terrifying day on the Saganami campus. Two and a
half years of Academy classes and running till she
dropped. Four years working her way without patronage or
court interest from ensign to lieutenant. Eleven months as
sailing master aboard the frigate Osprey, and then her
first command, a dinky little intrasystem LAC. It had
massed barely ten thousand tons, with only a hull number
and not even the dignity of a name, but God how she'd
loved that tiny ship! Then more time as executive officer,
a turn as tactical officer on a massive superdreadnought.
And then-finally!-the coveted commanding officer's course
after eleven grueling years. She'd thought she'd died and
gone to heaven when they gave her Hawkwing, for the middle-
aged destroyer had been her very first hyper-capable
command, and the thirty-three months she'd spent in
command had been pure, unalloyed joy, capped by the
coveted Fleet "E" award for tactics in last year's war
games. But this-!
The deck shuddered beneath her feet, and the light above
the hatch blinked amber as the shuttle settled into
Hephaestus's docking buffers, then burned a steady green
as pressure equalized in the boarding tube. The panel slid
aside, and Honor stepped briskly through it.
The shipyard tech manning the hatch at the far end of the
tube saw the white beret of a starship's captain and the
three gold stripes of a full commander on a space-black
sleeve and came to attention, but his snappy response was
flawed by a tiny hesitation as he caught sight of Nimitz.
He flushed and twitched his eyes away, but Honor was used
to that reaction. The treecats native to her home world of
Sphinx were picky about which humans they adopted.
Relatively few were seen off-world, but they refused to be
parted from their humans even if those humans chose space-
going careers, and the Lords of Admiralty had caved in on
that point almost a hundred and fifty Manticoran years
before. 'Cats rated a point-eight-three on the sentience
scale, slightly above Beowulf's gremlins or Old Earth's
dolphins, and they were empaths. Even now, no one had the
least idea how their empathic links worked, but separating
one from its chosen companion caused it intense pain, and
it had been established early on that those favored by
a 'cat were measurably more stable than those without.
Besides, Crown Princess Adrienne had been adopted by
a 'cat on a state visit to Sphinx. When Queen Adrienne of
Manticore expressed her displeasure twelve years later at
efforts to separate officers in her navy from their
companions, the Admiralty found itself with no option but
to grant a special exemption from its draconian "no pets"
policy.
Honor was glad of it, though she'd been afraid it would be
impossible to find time to spend with Nimitz when she
entered the Academy. She'd known going in that those forty-
five endless months on Saganami Island were deliberately
planned to leave even midshipmen without 'cats too few
hours to do everything they had to do. But while Academy
instructors might suck their teeth and grumble when a
plebe turned up with one of the rare 'cats, they
recognized natural forces for which allowances must be
made when they saw one. Besides, even the
most "domesticated" 'cat retained the independence (and
indestructibility) of his cousins in the wild, and Nimitz
had seemed perfectly aware of the pressure she faced. All
he needed was a little grooming, an occasional wrestling
bout, a perch on her shoulder or lap while she pored over
the book chips and to sleep curled neatly up on her
pillow, and he was happy. Not that he'd been above looking
mournful and pitiful to extort tidbits and petting from
any unfortunate who crossed his path. Even Chief
MacDougal, the terror of the first-form middies, had
succumbed, carrying a suitable stash of the celery stalks
the otherwise carnivorous treecats craved and sneaking
them to Nimitz when he thought no one was looking. And,
Honor reflected wryly, running Ms. Midshipman Harrington
ragged to compensate for his weakness.
Her thoughts had carried her through the arrival gate to
the concourse, and she looked about until she found the
color-coded guide strip to the personnel tubes. She
followed it, unburdened by any baggage, for she had none.
All her meager personal possessions had been freighted up
this morning, whisked away by stewards at the Advanced
Tactical Course facility almost before she'd had time to
pack.
She frowned a bit at that thought while she punched up a
tube capsule. All the scramble to get her here seemed out
of character for a navy that preferred to do things in an
orderly fashion. When she'd been given Hawkwing, she'd
known two months in advance; this time, she'd been
literally snatched out of the ATC graduation ceremonies
and hustled off to Admiral Courvosier's office with no
warning at all.
The capsule arrived, and she stepped into it, still
frowning and rubbing gently at the tip of her nose. Nimitz
roused to lift his chin from the top of her beret and
nipped her ear with the scolding tug he saved for the
unfortunately frequent moments when his companion worried.
Honor clicked her teeth gently at him and reached up to
scratch his chest, but she didn't stop worrying, and he
sighed in exasperation.
Now why, she wondered, was she so certain Courvosier had
deliberately bustled her out of his office and off to her
new assignment? The admiral was a bland-faced, cherubic
little gnome of a man with a bent for creating demonic tac
problems, and she'd known him for years. He'd been her
Fourth Form Tactics instructor at the Academy, the one
who'd recognized an inborn instinct and honed it into
something she could command at will, not something that
came and went. He'd spent hours working with her in
private when other instructors worried about her basic
math scores and, in a very real sense, had saved her
career before it had actually begun, yet this time there'd
been something almost evasive about him. She knew his
congratulations and satisfied pride in her had been real,
but she couldn't shake the impression that there'd been
something else, as well. Ostensibly, the rush was all
because of the need to get her to Hephaestus to shepherd
her new ship through its refit in time for the upcoming
Fleet exercise, yet HMS Fearless was only a single light
cruiser, when all was said. It seemed unlikely her absence
would critically shift the balance in maneuvers planned to
exercise the entire Home Fleet!
No, something was definitely up, and she wished fervently
that she'd had time for a full download before catching
the shuttle. But at least all the rush had kept her from
worrying herself into a swivet the way she had before
taking Hawkwing over, and Lieutenant Commander McKeon, her
new exec, had served on Fearless for almost two years,
first as tactical officer and then as exec. He should be
able to bring her up to speed on the refit Courvosier had
been so oddly reluctant to discuss.
She shrugged and punched her destination into the
capsule's routing panel, then set down her briefcase and
resigned herself as it flashed away down the counter-grav
tubeway. Despite a peak speed of well over seven hundred
kilometers per hour, the capsule trip would take over
fifteen minutes-assuming she was lucky enough not to hit
too many stops en route.
The deck shivered gently underfoot. Few would have
detected the tiny bobble as one quadrant of Hephaestus's
gravity generators handed the tube off to another, but
Honor noticed it. Not consciously, perhaps, but that
minute quiver was part of a world which had become more
real to her than the deep blue skies and chill winds of
her childhood. It was like her own heartbeat, one of the
tiny, uncountable stimuli that told her-instantly and
completely-what was happening around her.
She watched the tube map display, shaking off thoughts of
evasive admirals and other puzzles as her eyes tracked the
blinking cursor of her capsule across it. Her hand rose to
press the crispness of her orders once more, and she
paused, almost surprised as she looked away from the map
and glimpsed her reflection in the capsule's polished
wall.
The face that gazed back should have looked different,
reflecting the monumental change in her status, and it
didn't. It was still all sharply defined planes and angles
dominated by a straight, patrician nose (which, in her
opinion, was the only remotely patrician thing about her)
and devoid of the least trace of cosmetics. Honor had been
told (once) that her face had "a severe elegance." She
didn't know about that, but the idea was certainly better
than the dread, "My, isn't she, um, healthy looking!" Not
that "healthy" wasn't accurate, however depressing it
might sound. She looked trim and fit in the RMN's black
and gold, courtesy of her 1.35-gravity homeworld and a
rigorous exercise regimen, and that, she thought,
critically, was about the best she had to say about
herself.
Most of the Navy's female officers had chosen to adopt the
current planet-side fashion of long hair, often
elaborately dressed and arranged, but Honor had decided
long ago there was no point trying to make herself
something she was not. Her hair-style was practical, with
no pretensions to glamour. It was clipped short to
accommodate vac helmets and bouts of zero-gee, and if its
two-centimeter strands had a stubborn tendency to curl, it
was neither blond, nor red, nor even black, just a highly
practical, completely unspectacular dark brown. Her eyes
were even darker, and she'd always thought their hint of
an almond shape, inherited from her mother, made them look
out of place in her strong-boned face, almost as if they'd
been added as an afterthought. Their darkness made her
pale complexion seem still paler, and her chin was too
strong below her firm-lipped mouth. No, she decided once
more, with a familiar shade of regret, it was a
serviceable enough face, but there was no use pretending
anyone would ever accuse it of radiant beauty... darn it.
She grinned again, feeling the bubble of delight pushing
her worries aside, and her reflection grinned back. It
made her look like an urchin gloating over a hidden bag of
candy, and she took herself firmly to task for the
remainder of the trip, concentrating on a new CO's
responsibility to look cool and collected, but it was
hard.