The Honor of the Queen

CHAPTER TWO

Honor released the hanging rings and whipped through a flashing, somersault dismount. She was far from a professional-quality gymnast, but she landed almost perfectly and bowed with extravagant grace to her audience—who regarded her with a tolerant eye from his comfortable perch on the parallel bars. She inhaled deeply, using her hands to strip sweat from her dripping, two-centimeter hair, then scrubbed her face vigorously with her towel before she draped it around her neck and gave him a severe look.

"A little workout wouldn't hurt you, either," she panted.

Nimitz responded with an airy flirt of his fluffy, prehensile tail, then sighed in relief as she padded across to the wall-mounted grav controls. She reset the gym to the regulation one-gee maintained aboard all RMN ships, and the 'cat swarmed down from the bars. He'd never been able to understand why she insisted on cranking the gym's gravity clear up to the 1.35-gees she'd been born to. It wasn't that Nimitz was lazy, but in his uncomplicated view exertion was something to be endured, not chased after. He regarded the lower standard shipboard gravity as the greatest invention since celery, and if she had to exercise, she might as well do something he enjoyed, as well.

He scampered into the dressing room, and Honor heard her locker door rattle. Then he reappeared with a happy "Bleek!" and her hand shot up just in time to snatch a hurtling plastic disk out of the air in front of her face.

"Why, you little creep!" she laughed, and he chittered in delight, dancing from side to side on his mid and rearmost limbs while he spread his true-hands wide.

She laughed again and tossed the ancient frisbee back. There was too little space for the kinds of intricate flight paths she could manage on a planet, but Nimitz buzzed with gusto. He'd been a frisbee freak ever since the day he'd seen a much younger Honor's father playing the same game with his golden retriever, and, unlike a dog, he had hands.

Honor caught a sizzling return and grinned, then feinted a high, looping curve and sent the actual toss streaking out at knee-level ... which brought it right to chin height on Nimitz. He snagged it adroitly and skittered around in a circle, using both true-feet and his hand-paws to build momentum like a discus-thrower before he released it.

Honor's palms stung with the force of the catch, and she shook her head as she tossed it back. After all these years, she'd still never managed to fool him. No one knew precisely how treecats' empathic senses worked, but the little devil always knew when she was trying to put something over on him.

Which was more than she could say about him. His next throw carried wicked terminal English and came curving in like a boomerang. She missed her catch, ducking barely in time as it hissed past her head and bounced across the decksole, and Nimitz dashed over to it. He leapt into the air and landed directly on top of the frisbee, bleeking his triumph as he executed an impromptu victory dance.

Honor straightened and shook her head, then laughed.

"All right, you won," she told him, propping her hands on her hips. "I suppose you want your usual forfeit?" Nimitz nodded complacently, and she sighed. "All right—two celery sticks with lunch tomorrow. But only two!"

The treecat considered for a moment, then flipped the tip of his tail in agreement and rose to his full sixty-centimeters on his true-feet, hugging her knee with his mid-limb hand-paws and patting her thigh with his true-hands. Nimitz was incapable of speech, despite an intelligence humans were sadly prone to underestimate, but she knew what he wanted. He patted again, harder, and she grinned down at him as she plucked her sweat-soaked unitard away from her breasts with one hand and fanned her cheeks with the other.

"Oh, no, you don't, Stinker! I'm not about to trust your claws when I'm wearing something this thin."

He sniffed, managing to look simultaneously disdainful, trustworthy, pitiful, and neglected, then broke into a loud, buzzing purr as she relented and gathered him in her arms. She knew better than to lift him to his normal position on her shoulder, but he twisted onto his back, waving his two rear sets of limbs in the air (his true-hands clutched his frisbee, instead) as she cuddled him.

"Lord, but you are one spoiled beastie," she told him, nuzzling her nose into his cream-colored belly fur, and he bleeked in cheerful agreement as she headed for the showers.

Honor had the gym to herself, for it was late in Fearless's official night, and most of the cruiser's off-watch crew were snug in their beds. She ought to be there herself, but she was spending too much time behind a desk, and there never seemed to be enough hours for her to steal exercise time during the "day." Besides, working out late let her reset the grav field without inconveniencing anyone else, though her present heavy breathing and a slight muscle quiver of overexertion told her she hadn't been putting in enough hours here at night, either.

She stepped into the dressing room, set Nimitz down, and made a mental note to make more gym time as she peeled off her unitard. The treecat tucked his frisbee neatly back into her locker and gave her a disgusted look as she dropped the sweaty garment untidily on the deck and stepped into the showers.

The hot water sluiced deliciously over her, and she turned her face up to the spray as she reached for the soap dispenser. Yes, she definitely needed to get in more gym time. And, while she was thinking about it, it was past time she found another sparring partner, too. Lieutenant Wisner had been pretty good, but he'd been transferred out as part of the routine personnel rotation during Fearless's refit, and Honor knew she'd been putting off finding a replacement on the score that she had no time for it.

She frowned up into the shower, working up a lather in her short, curly hair. Sergeant Major Babcock, the Marine detachment's senior noncom, might be a good bet. Maybe too good. It had been a long, long time since Honor was on the Academy unarmed combat team, and judging from her personnel jacket, Iris Babcock could probably tie her up in knots without breaking a sweat. Which embarrassing fate, Honor reflected as she gave herself one last rinse and turned off the shower, would no doubt inspire her to recover the top of her own form quickly.

She dripped her way back into the dressing room and reached for a fresh towel. Nimitz curled up on a bench and waited patiently while she dried herself, climbed back into her uniform, and settled the white beret of a starship commander on her still-damp hair, but he was more than ready to hop up onto the specially padded shoulder of her tunic once she was dressed.

She lifted him into place and headed for her quarters. She really ought to turn in, but there were still a few items of paperwork to deal with, so she turned into her day cabin, instead.

She palmed the lights up and crossed to her desk, resolutely refusing to let the knee-to-ceiling view port distract her until she finished her chores. She did allow herself to pause and check the treecat-sized life-support module clamped to the bulkhead beside her desk. It was the latest model, with all sorts of whistles and bells, increased endurance, and added safety features, yet it was also new. She'd made regular checks on its readouts a part of her daily routine, but until she felt completely familiar with all its features, she intended to check it every time she passed it, as well.

Nimitz made a soft sound of agreement on her shoulder. He knew what—and who—that module was for, and personal experience made him a firm supporter of her conscientiousness. She grinned at his sound, then straightened a heat-warped golden wall plaque minutely and seated herself behind her desk.

She'd barely brought her terminal alive when MacGuiness appeared with a steaming mug, and she wondered yet again if he had a power meter on her computer circuits. He always seemed to appear, as if by magic, the instant she booted the system, and this late at night he could be counted upon to ply her with the rich, sweet cocoa she loved while she worked.

"Thank you, Mac," she said as she took the cup.

"You're welcome, Ma'am." MacGuiness completed the ritual with a smile. The chief steward had followed her from her last command, and they'd settled into a comfortable routine over the past twenty-seven months. He was a bit too inclined to fuss over her, but Honor had discovered (somewhat guiltily) that she had no particular objection to being spoiled.

He vanished back into his pantry, and Honor returned to her screen. Officially, she wasn't here expressly to support Admiral Courvosier's mission. Instead, she was senior officer of the escort assigned to a convoy whose ultimate goal was the Casca System, twenty-two light-years beyond Yeltsin's Star. Neither Yeltsin nor Casca were in a particularly good galactic neighborhood, for the single-star policies out here tended to be hardscrabble propositions. Many had bitter personal experience of piratical raids, and there'd always been a temptation to better their lots with a little piracy of their own against the passing commerce of wealthier star systems. The situation had gotten far worse of late, and Honor (and the Office of Naval Intelligence) more than suspected that Haven's interest in the region helped account for that—a suspicion which, in turn, explained why the Admiralty had provided the convoy with an escort of two cruisers and a pair of destroyers.

Honor nodded as status reports scrolled across her screen. They looked good—as she'd expected. This was her first opportunity to command what was, for all intents and purposes, her own squadron, but if every captain in the Navy were as good as her COs, squadron command would be a breeze.

She finished the last report and leaned back, sipping her cocoa while Nimitz curled on his bulkhead-mounted perch. She wasn't particularly impressed with one or two members of Admiral Courvosier's staff of Foreign Office experts, but so far she had nothing to complain about where her own duties were concerned, aside from the chunks of time her new job was eating up. And that, she told herself yet again, was her own fault. Andreas was perfectly capable of running the ship without her, and she felt fairly certain she was spending too much time worrying over the convoy's day-to-day operations. Delegating had always been the hardest thing for her to do, yet she knew there was another factor this time. Keeping her hands off while Andreas managed Fearless and freed her to worry about the rest of the squadron was precisely what she ought to be doing, and she didn't want to. Not because she distrusted his competence, but because she was afraid of losing the thing every Navy captain most craved—the active exercise of her authority and responsibility as mistress after God in one of Her Majesty's starships.

She snorted tiredly at herself and finished the cocoa. MacGuiness knew exactly how to make it, and its rich, smooth calories were another reason to put in more gym time, she thought with a grin. Then she rose and crossed to the view port to stare out into the weird, shifting splendor of hyper space.

That view port was one of the things Honor most treasured about her ship. Her quarters aboard her last ship, the elderly light cruiser which had bequeathed her name and battle honors to the present Fearless, hadn't had one, and it gave Honor an ever-renewed sense of the vastness of the universe. It offered both relaxing contemplation and a sense of perspective—an awareness of how small any human being truly was against the enormity of creation—that was almost a challenge, and she stretched her long body out on the padded couch beneath it with a sigh.

Fearless and the ships of her convoy rode the twisted currents of a grav wave which had never attained the dignity of a name, only a catalog number. Honor's cabin was barely a hundred meters forward of Fearless's after impeller nodes, and the immaterial, three-hundred-kilometer disk of the cruiser's after Warshawski sail flickered and flashed like frozen heat lightning, dominating the view port with its soft glory as it harnessed the grav wave's power. Its grab factor was adjusted to a tiny, almost immeasurable fraction of its full efficiency, providing a minuscule acceleration which was exactly offset by the forward sail's deceleration to hold Fearless at fifty percent of light-speed. The cruiser could have sustained a velocity twenty percent higher, but the hyper bands' heavier particle densities would have overcome the freighters' weaker radiation shielding long before that.

Honor's brown eyes were rapt as she watched the sail, fascinated as always by its flowing-ice beauty. She could have shut down her ship's sails and let momentum take its course, but those sails balanced Fearless delicately between them like exquisitely counterpoised fulcrums that lent the cruiser an instant responsiveness. Their current grav wave was barely a half light-month deep and a light-month wide, a mere rivulet beside titans like the Roaring Deeps, yet its power was enough to send her ship leaping to an effective five thousand gravities' acceleration in less than two seconds. And should Fearless's gravity detectors pick up unexpected wave turbulence ahead of her, she might have to do just that.

Honor shook herself and let her eyes rove further out. The sail cut off all view of anything astern of Fearless, but the bottomless sweep of hyper space stretched out ahead and abeam. The nearest freighter was a thousand kilometers away, giving both vessels' sails ample clearance from one another, and even a five-megaton freighter was an invisible mote to unaided vision at that distance. But Honor's trained eye picked out the glittering disks of the ship's Warshawski sails, like flaws of strange, focused permanence against the gorgeous chaos of hyper space, and astern of her was the gleam of yet another stupendous merchantman.

Her merchantmen, she told herself. Her charges—slow, fat, clumsy, the smallest of them six times more massive than Fearless's three hundred thousand tons but totally defenseless, and stuffed with cargoes whose combined value was literally beyond comprehension. Over a hundred and fifty billion Manticoran dollars' worth of it headed for Yeltsin's Star alone. Medical equipment, teaching materials, heavy machinery, precision tools, and molycirc computers and software to update and modernize the Graysons' out-of-date industrial base—every penny of it paid for by Crown "loans" which amounted to outright gifts. It was a sobering indication of how high Queen Elizabeth's government was willing to bid for the alliance Admiral Courvosier sought, and it was Honor's responsibility to see it safely delivered.

She leaned further back into the cushioned couch, reclining to savor the melting muscular relaxation in the wake of her exercise, and her brown eyes were heavy. No Navy skipper enjoyed convoy duty. Freighters lacked warships' powerful Warshawski sails and inertial compensators, and without them they dared not venture much above the delta bands of hyper space, whereas warships ranged as high as the eta or even theta bands. At the moment, for example, Honor's convoy was cruising along in the mid-delta bands, which translated their .5 C true velocity into an effective velocity of just over a thousand times light-speed. At that rate, the thirty-one light-year voyage to Yeltsin's Star would require ten days—just under nine, by their shipboard clocks. Left to herself, Fearless could have made the same crossing in less than four.

But that was all right, Honor thought drowsily as Nimitz hopped up onto her chest with his soft, buzzing purr. He curled down and rested his chin between her breasts, and she stroked his ears gently. Four days or ten, it didn't matter. She didn't need to set any records. She did need to deliver her charges safely, and commerce protection was one of the purposes for which cruisers were specifically designed and built.

She yawned, sliding still further down on the couch, and considered getting up and taking herself off to bed, but her sleepy gaze clung to the wavering gray and black and pulsing purple and green of hyper space. It glowed and throbbed, beckoning to her, starless and shifting and infinitely, beautifully variable, and her eyes slipped shut and Nimitz's purr was a soft, affectionate lullaby in the background of her brain.

Captain Honor Harrington didn't even twitch when Chief Steward MacGuiness tiptoed into her cabin and tucked a blanket over her. He stood a moment, smiling down at her, then left as quietly as he had come, and the cabin lights dimmed into darkness behind him.