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HMS Prince Adrian

Madras System

June 9, 1907 PD


“and i hope they’re not making a horrible mistake,” Honor Harrington said from Alastair McKeon’s display. “I have to admit, I had my own doubts.” She looked straight out of the display, as if she were looking directly into his eyes. “I’ve been in a . . . really bad place since the duel, Alistair. I think for a while there I didn’t really even want to come back from it.”

McKeon’s eyes prickled. He knew how few people in the universe Honor Harrington would ever have made that admission to, and the fact that she’d made it to him filled him with almost as much pride as pain. He didn’t blame her for not wanting to “come back from it.” How else could she have felt after everything an uncaring universe and the vilest specimens of humanity in it had done to her?

But she had come back. And he’d always known she would. No matter how badly wounded she might have been, she simply didn’t know how to quit. The universe could kill her. If it didn’t, then no matter what it did do to her, she would crawl up off her knees and tear out that universe’s throat with her bare hands.

Now she sat back from her pickup, letting him see the treecat sprawled across the back of her chair and the enormous, luxuriously furnished flag cabin in which she sat. And the blue uniform of a Grayson admiral she wore.

“I’d always hoped to make flag in the Manticoran Navy,” she said now. “These days, I’m not sure there’s much chance of that. But High Admiral Matthews was right. They need my experience, Alastair, so I couldn’t tell him no. Although”—her firm mouth twitched slightly—“I never expected to find myself with Alfredo Yu as my very first flag captain! Trust me, that one’s taking some getting used to. But both Mercedes and Nimitz insist that he’s the right man for the job, so I’m trying to convince myself.”

Nimitz raised his head, looking over her shoulder, and yawned complacently at the mention of his name. Honor glanced back at him, then turned back to the camera. She twitched another smile, but it faded quickly.

“I have to say that some of the news we’re getting here in Yeltsin doesn’t exactly enthrall me. We’ve heard about Nightingale.” Her eyes darkened. “Thanks to my newfound elevation, I get to see a lot more of the intel than even in Hancock. So I know how wicked it was. I don’t need to tell you how relieved I was that Prince Adrian didn’t get caught in the gears.

“I was especially struck by what ONI had to say about Esther McQueen, though.” She shook her head. “I’d never heard of her before the coup, but everything ONI’s heard since is bad news. I don’t think she’s Earl White Haven’s equal, but she may be the closest to it the Peeps have, so you people watch your backsides out there.”

Her nostrils flared, and she ran graceful fingers across braided brown hair that was longer than McKeon had ever before seen on her.

“I’ve got to wrap this up, because if I don’t, I’ll miss the mail packet, and I still owe Mom and Dad at least a brief note. But before I do go, I just want you to know how much you mean to me. You’ve been one of my rocks ever since Basilisk, Alastair, and never more than you and Tomas were after Paul’s death. Whenever I think about a Pavel Young or the carrion eaters like him, I remember you. I remember integrity. I remember duty. I remember the man who’s become my friend. So you take care of yourself. And you take care of the other people out there who mean so much to me. Scotty, Harkness, Babcock—all of them. You’re not God. You can’t promise me you’ll all come home again. If anyone in the entire galaxy knows that, I do! But the universe has taken away enough people I care about, so you do your darndest to not be another of them, got it?”

She flashed him a brief smile. It still wasn’t the smile he remembered, but that one was hidden in there somewhere. He knew it. He saw the humor, the affection . . . the lingering pain. But she was back on her feet, he thought. Back on balance, ready to do the things only she could do and eager to be back about it.

“Goodbye, Alastair,” she said. “Be safe, my friend.”

The display blanked, and McKeon drew a deep, deep breath. He sat gazing at its blankness for several moments, then climbed out of his chair, crossed his own day cabin, and turned that gaze out the armorplast viewport at Chembrambakam, the Madras System’s inhabited planet. Technically, that viewport was a chink in Prince Adrian’s armor, but McKeon was just fine with that. It was a very, very small target, and it was above the cruiser’s side armor, well outside the core hull. If anything managed to get through Prince Adrian’s sidewalls and target a viewport that was less than a meter wide, then “chinks in her armor” would probably be the least of his ship’s problems. And the view could sometimes be spectacular.

At the moment, Prince Adrian rode in one of the outermost parking orbits, and Sixth Fleet’s wallers were sharply silhouetted against the planet’s blue-and-white marble. They looked impressive, and they were, but it was difficult to avoid bitterness as he thought about how much more impressive they might have looked without the losses at Nightingale. The lingering logjam of the Star Kingdom’s logistics.

He thought about what Honor had said, and especially about Esther McQueen. Honor probably did have far better intel access these days than the commander of a mere division of heavy cruisers, but he’d heard the name before. McQueen was a rising star amongst the Peeps, and he wished to hell that she didn’t so amply deserve the reputation she was building.

If ONI was right—and Commander O’Hanlon and Captain Hunter were pretty sure it was—then McQueen had commanded Bogey One in Nightingale. It was a pity they hadn’t managed to kill her, but he had to wonder how she felt about Citizen Vice Admiral Jorgensen. She’d done her part, holding her course with an iron determination McKeon could only admire, even in a Peep. And if Jorgensen hadn’t jumped the gun—and if Earl White Haven hadn’t had the reflexes of a treecat—it would’ve worked.

Even with Jorgensen’s premature movement, McQueen had ripped hell out of Sixth Fleet’s wall. He didn’t want to think about what she could accomplish with a few more months of prep time!

ONI was far from sure—intelligence was always more of a guessing game than anyone wanted to admit, especially in wartime—but according to their analysts, McQueen was probably the one who’d come up with the Nightingale defensive plan. And there were some indications she might be taking over the Trevor’s Star command shortly. He hoped not. At the moment, he would far rather have her off doing something—anything—else.

He thought about that for another few moments, then squared his shoulders, turned and marched resolutely back toward his desk terminal and the waiting megabytes of paperwork.

A part of him would rather have faced incoming Peep missiles.


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